It seems to me the fastest path to very secure, very-hard-to-lose bitcoin wallets is multi-signature transactions.
To organize this discussion: first, does everybody agree? ByteCoin pointed to a research paper that gives a scheme for splitting a private key between two people, neither of which every knows the full key, but, together, both can DSA-sign transactions. That's very cool, but it involves high-end cutting-edge crypto like zero-knowledge proofs that I know very little about (are implementations available? are they patented? have they been thoroughly vetted/tested? etc). So I'm assuming that is NOT the fastest way to solving the problem. If anybody has some open-source, patent-free, thoroughly-tested code that already does DSA-key-splitting, speak up please. I've been trying to get consensus on low-level 'standard' transactions for transactions that must be signed by 2 or 3 keys; current draft proposal is here: https://gist.github.com/39158239e36f6af69d6f and discussion on the forums here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38928.0 ... and there is a pull request that is relevant here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/319 I still think it is a good idea to enable a set of new 'standard' multisignature transactions, so they get relayed and included into blocks. I don't want to let "the perfect become the enemy of the good" -- does anybody disagree? The arguments against are that if the proposed standard transactions are accepted, then the next step is to define a new kind of bitcoin address that lets coins be deposited into a multisignature-protected wallet. And those new as-yet-undefined bitcoin addresses will have to be 2 or 3 times as big as current bitcoin addresses, and will be incompatible with old clients. So, if we are going to have new releases that are incompatible with old clients why not do things right in the first place, implement or enable opcodes so the new bitcoin addresses can be small, and schedule a block chain split for N months from now. My biggest worry is we'll say "Sure, it'll only take a couple days to agree on how to do it right" and six months from now there is still no consensus on exactly which digest function should be used, or whether or not there should be a new opcode for arbitrary boolean expressions involving keypairs. And people's wallets continue to get lost or stolen. -- -- Gavin Andresen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
