Author: Clark Moody 2018-04-25 14:35:57
Published on: 2018-04-25T14:35:57+00:00
Paul Brown has proposed a new BIP that combines BIP44 and BIP45, and adds a self-describing structure in the derivation path for multiple multi-sig combinations within a single wallet. The proposal includes an extended public key export file format for public key distribution between parties, which can be particularly useful for multiple Lightning Network 2of2 accounts for different payment channels. However, there are some issues with BIP44 and BIP45 regarding portability, such as what address format is expected when discovering balances and creating transactions, whether the master seed represents a single-sig or multi-sig wallet, how many cosigners are involved, and how to prevent collisions on the same address index in a wallet that is occasionally connected. While BIP45 solves the issue of collision in multi-sig groups, it drops the multi-coin support that BIP44 has. In response to Paul's proposal, Clark pointed out that his solution does not solve the first bullet point mentioned above, since the xpub encoding looks no different than any other xpub (BIP 44, 45, 49, etc). He suggested proposing new version bytes to change the "xpub" in the encoding to some other string, or using the xpub serialization format described in SLIP-0032, which includes the derivation path within the xpub itself and uses Bech32 for encoding. This solves the bootstrapping problem and avoids the UX nightmare of users being required to know to which BIP number the xpub conforms.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T01:34:10.055430+00:00