From: Alan Reiner <etotheipi@gmail•com>
To: Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen@gmail•com>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Signature Blocks and URI Sign Requests
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:51:18 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4F7B62C6.6010007@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABsx9T3MQzJ5gN5xTZ9y5d-og11=mB86cM3ZP4S-fhjs1U+20g@mail.gmail.com>
On 04/03/2012 02:46 PM, Gavin Andresen wrote:
> RE: signature blocks and BIP 10:
>
> We should avoid reinventing the wheel, if we can. I think we should
> extend existing standards whenever possible.
>
> So: could we encode signature blocks or BIP-10 transactions using
> S/MIME ? Or is there a more appropriate "sign a message" standard we
> could/should use?
>
> You're glossing over little details like what character encoding is
> used for the message, but I'd rather leverage all the work already
> done by the IETF to nail down all those little details rather then
> re-discover them and come up with our own solutions.
>
I'm glossing over details because I actually have no experience dealing
with character encodings, or the implementation specifics of existing
solutions (PGP or S/MIME). That's why I'm emailing this list: I want
to figure this stuff out, and at the same time try to converge on
something that is efficient and can be interoperable between Armory and
the Satoshi client (wallets, signature collection, sig blocks).
I don't go into these things solely to reinvent stuff. My primary
motivation for both ideas I have pitched so far (BIP 0010 and the sig
blocks) is the versatility. I like the encoding-independent, visual
compactness of PGP ASCII-armored text blocks, but I don't like their
opaqueness. PGP vs my signature blocks basically look the same to a
casual user, but even a moderately-knowledgeable user can appreciate the
human-readable components of it. You can visually identify if
signatures are missing from sig-collection packet, or see that you
signed with the wrong address without having to load an external program.
But that isn't a critical requirement, it's just my personal
preference. I'm fine with existing systems if it sidesteps a lot of
problems and there's easy interface to it. But, I don't want to have
another BSDDB-wallet situation where we end up with 10x more capability
than we need, and pay for it with 10x the complexity (at least in this
case, using PGP is an existing crypto/security-sensitive technology). I
have made "simplicity" one of my goals in Armory.
Alternatively, we could change the discussion to a requirements
discussion, to first figure out what we need in order to address
multi-signature collection, etc. Then evaluate competing ideas based on
their qualities relative to the requirements.
prev parent reply other threads:[~2012-04-03 20:51 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2012-04-02 20:55 Alan Reiner
2012-04-03 0:44 ` Luke-Jr
2012-04-03 18:46 ` Gavin Andresen
2012-04-03 18:55 ` Luke-Jr
2012-04-03 19:42 ` Wladimir
2012-04-03 20:04 ` Peter Vessenes
2012-04-03 21:12 ` Alan Reiner
2012-04-03 23:37 ` Mike Koss
2012-04-04 0:01 ` Alan Reiner
2012-04-04 6:23 ` Wladimir
2012-04-04 8:35 ` Michael Grønager
2012-04-03 20:51 ` Alan Reiner [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=4F7B62C6.6010007@gmail.com \
--to=etotheipi@gmail$(echo .)com \
--cc=bitcoin-development@lists$(echo .)sourceforge.net \
--cc=gavinandresen@gmail$(echo .)com \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox