Author: Troy Benjegerdes 2014-03-27 05:34:46
Published on: 2014-03-27T05:34:46+00:00
In March 2014, Mike Hearn along with Thomas V and Marek decided to make sure that their BIP32 wallet structures would be compatible. As only Hearn was planning to use the default structure, they brainstormed and came up with a new structure which is acceptable to everyone. The new structure is "/m/cointype/reserved'/account'/change/n". Cointype is zero for Bitcoin and critical for supporting alt coins based off the same root seed. They discussed whether altcoins should use the same keys as Bitcoin or not. Using the same keys across different altcoins seems like an exceedingly bad opsec practice. Cointype is critical as well as having a predictable and deterministic mapping of altcoins to Cointype. It may help avoid confusion if altcoins don't use the same keys as Bitcoin. Someone asked what they should be using for Catcoin, for instance, the CAT symbol all the exchanges use, or do they set up a 'registry,' or some other mechanism? The writer argued that the altcoin market is or soon will be larger in US dollar value trade volume than Bitcoin, so *some* of them are quite bothered by the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurs on this list at mere thought of such heresy.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T16:14:21.399376+00:00