Author: James MacWhyte 2016-08-12 18:39:07
Published on: 2016-08-12T18:39:07+00:00
The email thread between Erik Aronesty and Gregory Maxwell discusses the possibility of creating a "publishable seed" for Bitcoin addresses. The idea is that someone could derive a random Bitcoin address from it and receive funds, but the possible derived address space would be large enough to make generating all possible addresses a barrier. The receiver, knowing the private key, could easily scan the blockchain fairly efficiently and determine which addresses they have the keys to, while another interested party cannot easily do so. The use of homomorphic encryption may need to be involved, although others have pointed out that this idea is not plausible. Gregory Maxwell notes that computing all 2^31 possible public child addresses would take a quad-core laptop about 8 hours with competent software.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:29:15.696992+00:00