Author: Alan Reiner 2012-06-14 14:25:07
Published on: 2012-06-14T14:25:07+00:00
In an email thread from 2012, Gavin Andresen discussed the BIP 0010 transaction format and why it is not handled by signrawtx. He explained that while he considered parsing/writing BIP 10 format for raw transactions, he ultimately decided that reading/writing BIP 10 format should happen at a higher level and not in the low-level RPC calls. Instead, 'raw transactions' are hex-encoded into JSON strings. Andresen also reflected on the development of BIP 10, which he created for offline and multi-sig transactions. However, there was no reception to it because no one was using offline or multi-sig transactions at the time except for Armory (which only currently implements offline transactions). While BIP 10 has served its purpose well for Andresen, he thinks it could be expanded and improved before there is wider adoption of it. He identified three elements of BIP 10 that he would like to keep: human-readability, compactness, and inclusion of all previous transactions so the device can verify transaction inputs without the blockchain. Additionally, he suggested several things that could be added to improve BIP 10, such as a BIP16 script entry, comment lines, version number, base58/64 encoding, rigorous formatting spec, binary representation, and a better name than "Tx Distribution Proposal". Andresen planned to release the Beta version of Armory soon and after that, he would think about a multi-signature support interface. At that time, he would tie in a better version of BIP 10 that is compatible with other clients implementing the same thing.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T05:11:33.973867+00:00