Author: Mike Hearn 2014-03-29 13:36:07
Published on: 2014-03-29T13:36:07+00:00
The discussion revolves around the use of Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme and CHECKMULTISIG for securing private keys. The original post suggests that the BIP about the board of directors is misleading as splitting a private key requires someone to get the full private key back, which can then be used to undo the system. However, with CHECKMULTISIG, this issue can be avoided. While splitting a wallet seed may have occasional uses in high-security cold wallets, it may not be suitable for ongoing shared accounts like corporate ones.Jeff Garzik points out that multi-signature transactions offer fine-grained specificity of what a key holder may approve, while Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme is more coarse-grained. With Shamir, you reconstitute a private key, which may then be used to control anything that the key controls. Therefore, policies such as "no key reuse" must be implemented along with Shamir. Jeff believes that Shamir has a higher DIY factor and a larger surface of things-that-could-go-wrong. He still acknowledges the value of an informational BIP.Chris Beams asks Matt Whitlock to expand on the use cases for which Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme is the best tool for the job and how it compares to multisig. In response, Matt adds two new sections to the BIP to address these questions.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:09:41.564065+00:00