Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Transcript: Sydney Socratic on FROST w/ Jesse Posner

From: Michael Folkson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 12:09:19 +0000

Hi

I thought this transcript might be of interest to the mailing list.

https://btctranscripts.com/sydney-bitcoin-meetup/2022-03-29-socratic-seminar/

Jesse Posner joined the online Sydney Socratic [1] last month to discuss his work on FROST. There is a video [2] too. As Jesse states [3] "With the introduction of Taproot, we can begin to bridge this divide between a "hot" and "cold" key by leveraging distributed key generation and threshold signing."

During the Socratic he discussed how with FROST you can simulate a threshold signature arrangement (k-of-n, k<n or indeed n-of-n) with only one signature going onchain when making a transaction. There are lots of upsides, you can swap participants in and out without needing an onchain transaction and even change the arrangement from say a 3-of-5 to a 4-of-5 without needing an onchain transaction. There are challenges too of course and it was discussed how the various participants might swap nonces and keep track of which nonce they should be using when signing, how hardware wallets might support FROST and to what extent accountability can be achieved if malicious parties are included in the threshold arrangement.

Thanks to Lloyd Fournier for organizing it and thanks to Adam Jonas for maintaining the btctranscripts.com site. The Sydney Socratic is online, open to all and Lloyd has a number of ideas for future topics.

[1]: https://github.com/bitcoin-sydney/socratic
[2]: https://rumble.com/vz3i3u-frost-the-future-of-schnorr-multisignatures-on-bitcoin.html
[3]: https://brink.dev/blog/2021/04/15/frost/

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Michael Folkson
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