Author: Thomas Kerin 2015-02-12 21:42:23
Published on: 2015-02-12T21:42:23+00:00
A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) has been drafted to enable deterministic pay-to-script-hash multi-signature addresses through public key sorting. The BIP proposes a standard method to generate multi-signature transaction scripts and defines how the public keys must be encoded and sorted to ensure that the redeem script and corresponding P2SH address are always the same for a given set of keys and number of required signatures. This will simplify the derivation of scripts and their addresses by all parties and enable services to declare themselves as BIP compliant, working towards interoperability of services.The adoption of a sorting and encoding standard will ensure that compliant wallets produce the same P2SH address for the same given set of keys and required signature count, which is particularly beneficial for multisignature hierarchical-deterministic wallets as less state is required to set up multi-signature accounts. The proposed method requires that public keys be received in compressed form, sorted lexicographically according to their binary representation, and used in a standard multisig redeem script before being hashed according to BIP-0016 to get the P2SH address.Although the BIP is compatible with compressed keys only, it will enable implementations that adopt this standard to be cross-compatible when choosing multisig addresses. However, a group of users that are not entirely compliant could result in one participant deriving an address that the others will not recognize.In addition to the BIP, the context also includes a PGP signature for cryptographic authentication, an HTML attachment that has been scrubbed, meaning it has been cleaned or deleted for some reason, and two non-text attachments in the form of PGP keys and signatures. The purpose or content of the message is not clear from the available information, but it appears to be related to secure communication and authentication using PGP encryption and signatures.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T17:14:26.915721+00:00