Author: Gregory Maxwell 2018-05-30 14:08:08
Published on: 2018-05-30T14:08:08+00:00
In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev forum, a proposal was made to add a birthdate and gap limit to keys in order to address problems users face. However, this suggestion has been met with some concerns. One issue raised is that adding a birthday to keys would break the property of visually comparing two keys to find if they are the same. Another concern is that different wallet software could set different birthday/gap limits, creating different xpub/xprv for the same set of mathematically derived individual keys, which removes the decoupling between key and wallet metadata.The idea that any key format can make private keying material strongly compatible between wallets is also questioned. At best, it is hoped that there will be a mostly compatible kind of recovery handling. While signaling the lookahead amount may not mean the other side can obey the signal, it wouldn't render the signal completely useless.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T16:32:00.337130+00:00