Author: William Swanson 2015-04-08 16:41:00
Published on: 2015-04-08T16:41:00+00:00
In an email thread, a proposal for Multi-Currency Hierarchy for use in Multisignature Deterministic Wallets was presented. It was suggested that to make the proposal more visible to people, it should be placed at the top of the page. The idea behind public derivation is that cosigners need to know only one of each other's public keys rather than distribute public keys for each coin. Meanwhile, BIP44 has a coin level but it's a private derived level which means cosigners would not be able to generate multiple crypto-currencies of each others' without giving each other n xpubs where n is the number of currencies shared. This new proposal sticks coin type on the public derivation side of things so that one could generate litecoin or darkcoin multisigs without permission. One respondent believed that this proposal is a good fit for multi-currency wallets based on multisig. However, they did not believe this was a BIP thing because it is improving altcoin usability. Another respondent shared the same sentiment and added that there is nothing in the spec that addresses the multisignature use-case. In contrast, another respondent suggested that the existing BIP 44 hierarchy should be used instead, adding the convention that "wallet/account N" is the same wallet in each supported currency. The fields are in a different order, but that doesn't affect the algorithm in any way. They also noted that the BIP 45 spec does a lot of extra work to make multisignature work smoothly. The proposal author stated that their idea is to continue iterating over the different wallet indices as long as you are finding funds in *any* currency. They also requested discussion on the proposal and assignment of a BIP number.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:02:56.171781+00:00