Subject: [bitcoin-dev] Miniscript support in hardware wallets/signing devices

From: Michael Folkson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 11:24:30 +0000

Hi

Assessing what should be sent to this mailing list is difficult. We don't want to be bombarded with full on company promotional materials obviously but then at the same time only focusing on contentious consensus changes at the expense of everything else just gives a warped view to readers of this list of what is happening in the community and what 99 percent of Bitcoin devs are working on.

One example of many is Miniscript. In this excellent blog post [1] by Salvatore Ingala he explains the work he is doing to get Miniscript support in the Ledger hardware wallet (or "signing device" [2], hat tip nvk). Miniscript has been in the works for a number of years now and the first of multiple Miniscript related pull requests was recently merged into the Bitcoin Core wallet [3]. This wasn't included in the recent Bitcoin Core 23.0 release [4] but one would expect it to be included in the next major release (24.0).

Salvatore explains that to start enabling Miniscript support in Ledger only requires ~20 lines of code but there is additional complexity that isn't covered by the included code snippet. And of course the Policy to Miniscript compiler(s) don't (yet) support Taproot trees of scripts so we are talking primarily Bitcoin scripts pre-Taproot. He also includes a short video of what the Policy/Miniscript user experience might look like on a Ledger Nano.

For those who are interested in learning more about Miniscript stickies-v is hosting a Bitcoin Core PR review club on Miniscript on May 18th [5].

Disclaimer: I have personal views on hardware wallets/signing devices as anyone does but I do not receive funding from any particular company or product in the space.

[1]: https://blog.ledger.com/miniscript-is-coming/
[2]: https://signingdevice.com/
[3]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/24147
[4]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-April/020321.html
[5]: https://bitcoincore.reviews/24148

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Michael Folkson
Email: michaelfolkson at [protonmail.com](http://protonmail.com/)
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