Author: Andreas Schildbach 2017-09-05 22:13:12
Published on: 2017-09-05T22:13:12+00:00
A proposal to develop a new standard based on Bech32 is suggested for including the key birthdate or wallet birthdate. The Core is said to mix different types of addresses on the same HD chain which could cause confusion about prefix selection. In a recent discussion, Thomas Voegtlin proposed using additional version bytes to indicate the type of output script used with the public keys. He recommended that this change should be visible to users because they are exposed to master public keys and proposed some prefixes to indicate the script type. These prefixes include xpub/xprv for P2PKH or P2SH, ypub/yprv for (P2WPKH or P2WSH) nested in P2SH, and zpub/zprv for P2WPKH or P2WSH. It was argued that xpub/xprv serialization should not be used to encode how these keys are used but the existence of version bytes used to signal whether keys will be used on testnet or mainnet goes against this argument. Without signaling the script type in the version bytes, developers might use dirtier tricks such as the bip32 child number field in combination with bip43/bip44/bip49.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T18:04:03.845680+00:00