From: Thomas Voegtlin <thomasv@electrum•org>
To: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] proposal: extend WIF format for segwit
Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2017 10:10:17 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <0dc0336b-d590-ffe9-8689-6ae06e98a39d@electrum.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAPg+sBgukwdRvfFcgdusrXoo8RiXm8OEL-WvHzjpiD8_HU5KmQ@mail.gmail.com>
On 17.09.2017 04:29, Pieter Wuille wrote:
>
> This has been a low-priority thing for me, though, and the computation work
> to find a good checksum is significant.
>
Thanks for the info. I guess this means that a bech32 format for private
keys is not going to happen soon. Even if such a format was available,
the issue would remain for segwit-in-p2sh addresses, which use base58.
The ambiguity of the WIF format is currently holding me from releasing a
segwit-capable version of Electrum. I believe it is not acceptable to
use the current WIF format with segwit scripts; that would just create
technological debt, forcing wallets to try all possible scripts. There
is a good reason why WIF adds a 0x01 byte for compressed pubkeys; it
makes it unambiguous.
I see only two options:
1. Disable private keys export in Electrum Segwit wallets, until a
common WIF extension has been agreed on.
2. Define my own WIF extension for Electrum, and go ahead with it.
Defining my own format does make sense for the xpub/xprv format, because
Electrum users need to share master public keys across Electrum wallets.
It makes much less sense for WIF, though, because WIF is mostly used to
import/sweep keys from other wallets.
I would love to know what other wallet developers are going to do,
especially Core. Are you going to export private keys used in segwit
scripts in the current WIF format?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-09-17 8:10 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-09-15 8:55 Thomas Voegtlin
2017-09-17 2:29 ` Pieter Wuille
2017-09-17 8:10 ` Thomas Voegtlin [this message]
2017-09-17 14:42 ` AJ West
2017-09-17 15:36 ` Mark Friedenbach
2018-04-04 6:06 ` Karl Johan Alm
2018-04-10 2:54 ` Karl-Johan Alm
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