Author: Chris Beams 2014-03-29 09:08:47
Published on: 2014-03-29T09:08:47+00:00
In a 2014 email to the Bitcoin development mailing list, Matt Whitlock proposed a method for dividing a Bitcoin private key into shares using Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. This method allows the key to be reconstituted from any sufficiently large subset of the shares, without revealing any information about the key on an individual basis. The proposal also includes an encoding methodology for standardizing transmission and storage of shares. It is not clear from the proposal when Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme would be superior to multisig, but it may be seen as a complimentary approach towards defense-in-depth. The Motivation and Rationale sections of the BIP are silent on this question. Whitlock invited any comments, questions, or suggestions and requested that the BIP be assigned a number and added to the bitcoin/bips repository.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:08:57.046418+00:00