Author: Bryan Bishop 2019-08-13 02:09:43
Published on: 2019-08-13T02:09:43+00:00
The email conversation between Peter Todd and Bryan Bishop explores different techniques for securing Bitcoin transactions. In the first part of the conversation, they discuss the idea of a "prepare to spend" transaction, which could limit losses to a certain percentage if an attacker steals one of the outputs. However, without an opcode-style covenant, the only way to know if a stale hot key is stolen is to observe an unexpected spend or signature. In the second part of the conversation, they talk about alternative ways to destroy coins and deal with alternative fee rates. They explore the technique of "delete-the-key", where the private key is pre-signed and then deleted to lock in that course of action. However, this doesn't work well for multisig scenarios because nobody would trust that anyone else in the scheme has actually deleted the secret. They also discuss the possibility of each party deleting a separate private key that's used in an m-of-n fashion, requiring 1/n honest deletes.Finally, they touch on the idea of multisig gated by ECDSA pubkey recovery for provably-unknown keys. This involves agreeing on a blockheight and selecting the blockhash as the signature, and then recovering the public key from the signature using ECDSA pubkey recovery. The blockhash is chosen as an entropy source, as it is not advisable to trust the first party to provide a good sequence of bytes.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T20:50:19.199243+00:00