Author: Andrew Chow 2019-11-16 04:54:49
Published on: 2019-11-16T04:54:49+00:00
In a recent discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Ian Kroozbi raised the question of the rationale behind including version bytes in the xpub in the GLOBAL_XPUB field. While Stepan had briefly touched upon this earlier, it was not fully addressed. Andrew, another member of the list, replied that the xpubs were already a predefined standard with many software having serialization code for it, making it simpler to reuse existing standards. However, he believed that the version bytes did not matter and should be ignored. In the proposed implementation to Bitcoin Core, the version bytes would indeed be ignored. Ian further argued that version bytes seemed to be superfluous data considering the transaction format and the rest of the PSBT key-values are network agnostic. He suggested that if network data needed to be attached to the PSBT, using a new key would be a better option. Additionally, there is a potential issue of conflicting versions on different xpubs in the PSBT, which can be eliminated by removing the version bytes. However, he remained undecided about whether or not other data outside of the public key and chain code should be included, but hoped for a discussion on the rationale for either including or omitting it.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T21:07:57.472310+00:00