Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] New standard transaction types: time to schedule a blockchain split?

From: Douglas Huff <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:05:02 -0500

On Aug 24, 2011 10:12 AM, "Gavin Andresen" <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> If anybody has some open-source, patent-free, thoroughly-tested code
> that already does DSA-key-splitting, speak up please.
>

If the caveat of a trusted third party is acceptable and, as greg mentioned,
if there was a way to export unsigned transactions and then import/broadcast
after signing this becomes fairly trivial.

Shamir's + 3rd party to combine and sign means no protocol level changes.

Process could work something like this:

Parties agree to endpoint destination address and provide it to third party.
Third party generates key and provides shares to each party in the txn and
the resulting address to both as well.
Third party destroys (preferably, never stores) private key.
Sender sends to address.
Both parties after confirmation of reciept of goods or what have you provide
shares back to third party who uses the privkey to xfer inputs to the
previously agreed upon destination subtracting their fee.

This resembles more traditional escrow setups and relies on the trust of a
third party, which is not ideal, but would be fairly simple to implement
until the other proposals could be better investigated and implemented.