Author: Alan Reiner 2012-04-03 20:51:18
Published on: 2012-04-03T20:51:18+00:00
In an email from Gavin Andresen on March 4th, 2012, he suggests extending existing standards instead of reinventing the wheel. Specifically, he questions whether signature blocks or BIP-10 transactions could be encoded using S/MIME or a more appropriate "sign a message" standard. Although details such as character encoding are necessary to consider, Andresen wants to leverage the work already done by the IETF in order to come up with an efficient solution that can be interoperable between Armory and the Satoshi client. Andresen's primary motivation for his ideas of BIP 0010 and signature blocks is versatility. While he likes the visual compactness of PGP ASCII-armored text blocks, he finds them too opaque. Andresen prefers the human-readable components of his signature blocks, which allow users to visually identify missing signatures or if they signed with the wrong address without having to load an external program. However, he acknowledges that existing systems would suffice if it sidesteps a lot of problems and has an easy interface. Nonetheless, Andresen does not want to end up with 10x more capability than needed, paying for it with 10x the complexity. Thus, he has made "simplicity" one of his goals in Armory. Finally, Andresen suggests changing the discussion to a requirements discussion first to figure out what is needed to address multi-signature collection. Then, competing ideas can be evaluated based on their qualities relative to the requirements.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T03:52:59.520390+00:00