Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP for SNICKER

From: SomberNight <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:04:59 +0000

> The SNICKER recovery process is, of course, only required for wallet
recovery and not normal wallet use, so I don't think a small amount of
round-trip communication between the hot wallet and the cold wallet is
too much to ask---especially since anyone using SNICKER with a
watching-only wallet must be regularly interacting with their cold
wallet anyway to sign the coinjoins.

What you described only considers the "initial setup" of a watch-only wallet. There are many usecases for watch-only wallets. There doesn't even necessarily need to be any offline-signing involved. For example, consider a user who has a hot wallet on their laptop with xprv; and wants to watch their addresses using an xpub from their mobile. Or consider giving an xpub to an accountant. Or giving an xpub to your Electrum Personal Server (which is how it works).

Note that all these usecases require "on-going" discovery of addresses, and so they would break.

ghost43

(ps: Apologies Dave for the double-email; forgot to cc list originally)