Author: Scott Morgan 2016-01-13 23:47:50
Published on: 2016-01-13T23:47:50+00:00
Scott Morgan proposed a BIP to lock and unlock wallets in Bitcoin. He suggests users could 'lock' their wallet with an unlock period, which would get added to the blocks and confirmed like other transactions. During transaction creation and mining, the top blocks would be checked to see if the wallet is locked, and locked wallet transactions would not be confirmed. Users would eventually 'unlock' their wallet by putting an unlocking as of date time in the blocks to specify a wallet is unlocking. Eventually, the wallet would not have any lock or unlocking entries in the blocks. The users would wait for the unlock period (i.e. 15 days) and then spend their coins. The proposal is different from bip-0065, which adds a lock time to a transaction that the recipient user must wait before they can spend the coins. Many wallet addresses are in each block at the transaction level, so it is technically feasible to lock entire wallet addresses indefinitely with a specified unlock period. However, this would have huge implications for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem and would probably need a start date at least a year in the future after it was developed. The proposed BIP could help reduce theft by adding a method to lock and unlock wallets. Locking a wallet might incur a fee, and it could also slow transaction creation and mining a fair amount. Anyone could check the transactions to locked wallets to see how many BTC are being held or are being unlocked soon, which could affect the price of BTC in fiat as supply would change similar to the way mining changes it. Scott Morgan does not plan to work on the main bitcoin core as he is a Privacy and Java evangelist. He has been doing a little mining to attempt to help fund his company's open source Java projects Tests4j and Fabricate and hopefully in the future Taxi, Sanctum and Intelligence4j. Donations are always welcome.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T03:06:26.278429+00:00