> It seems to me the fastest path to very secure, very-hard-to-lose > bitcoin wallets is multi-signature transactions.
Agreed. That said I'm not sure it makes sense for payers to care about the details of how somebody is protecting their wallets (which is what new address types means). It's possible for a users software to notice inbound payments to a regular Bitcoin address and then immediately respend them to multi-signed outputs. This way key management can be simpler as you don't need to integrate it with your shopping cart software or anything like that - you can just do the usual thing of pre-generating a few hundred thousand addresses, fill up your cart implementation and go. When a payment is received, your wallet software can keep an eye on how much unlocked balance it has and start locking value once it goes over a pre-set amount, or use any other policy the user might have. This fits with my belief that we'll eventually move away from senders attaching tx fees, instead receivers will respend the fee-less transaction adding whatever fee they believe is appropriate (eg, maybe it's very low in the case of a buyer with good reputation, or higher for unknown buyers). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for buyers to have to attach more fees just because the merchant is using complex wallet policies. Whitelisting the basic CHECKMULTISIG form (assuming it can be made to work) seems uncontroversial, why not do it today? The forms designed to make fancier addresses be embeddable inside QRcodes, can come later if people feel it's necessary. I'm still not convinced it is. Once malware can't just email wallets to the attacker, or steal the keys when the user decrypts due to a second factor, the next easiest attack is to that malware can rewrite addresses on-screen as it sees fit, forwarding small payments so the user doesn't notice then stealing a big one. To solve that, Bitcoin addresses need to contain not only a pubkey[hash] but some kind of endpoint the second factor can use to verify ownership of the key. It can be discussed later, I don't think there are many possible designs here so it shouldn't be too controversial. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
