[Bitcoin-development] New standard transaction types: time to schedule a blockchain split?

[Rick Wesson]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 8:45 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Gavin Andresen
> <gavinandresen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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?
>
> It's a good tool which we should have in our tool-belt.
>
> Though it's a bit of when you are a hammer all problems are nails.
> This issue can also be addressed by things like external private key
> protectors.  But someone would have to build one.
>
> Someone might be more inclined to build such a thing if the software
> had good support for tracking public keys without private keys, and
> generating unsigned transactions for export to the device for signing.
>
> > ByteCoin pointed to a research paper that gives a scheme for splitting
> > a private key between two people, neither of which every knows the
> [snip]
> > So I'm assuming that is NOT the fastest way to solving the problem.
>
> Regardless, it might be useful to contact the authors.
>
> > 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?
>
> I agree.
>
> > 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.
>
> One way of doing this would be to have an address which hashes an
> ordered concatenation of many addresses (perhaps plus a length
> argument). To redeem you provide the public keys which are signing,
> plus the addresses which aren't signing, and the receiver validates.
>
> If it can be done, then yes, I agree it would be worth forking the chain.
>
> This _feels_ like something which could and should be done with the
> existing (but disabled opcodes).
>
>
> It's not exclusive, however, with a long N-address address type for
> multisig destinations.  We could support that _now_ and defer the
> 'compressed version' until after people have experience with this
> usage.  The only cost would be supporting this address type forever,
> which isn't that bad.
>
> It's also important to note that incompatibility wouldn't be complete:
> The only limit is that old clients couldn't send funds to escrow
> addresses— which is an issue no matter how you encode the information.
>
>
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