Author: jl2012 2015-12-21 05:14:12
Published on: 2015-12-21T05:14:12+00:00
On the -dev IRC, the speaker asked whether there should be a new payment address format for native segregated witness (SW). This would involve defining a native SW address format in addition to the existing payment protocol and witness program hidden in a P2SH address options. The advantages of having a native SW address include promoting the use of native SW over less efficient SW in P2SH, allowing lower fees, being easy for wallets to implement, and being the last address format to define since SW is flexible. However, there are some disadvantages such as old wallets not being able to pay to a new address and the length of the witness program potentially doubling the address length. Native SW and SW in P2SH are equally good as a tx malleability fix, but the latter has slightly better privacy by obscuration and allows payment from any Bitcoin reference client since version 0.6.0. On the other hand, SW in P2SH requires an additional push in scriptSig, which is not prunable in transmission and is counted as part of the core block size. It also requires an additional HASH160 operation than native SW, provides 160-bit security compared to native SW's 256-bit, and is less efficient, resulting in a likely higher tx fee than native SW but still lower than non-SW tx.The speaker proposes two solutions: Proposal 1 involves defining a native SW address format while still allowing people to use payment protocol or SW in P2SH if they prefer. Proposal 2 involves no new address format being defined and requiring people to use payment protocol if they want to pay the lowest fee possible, or else use SW in P2SH. To gather input on this topic that is relevant to user experience, the speaker plans to consult merchants, exchanges, wallet devs, and users for their preferences.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:43:03.244002+00:00