Bitcoin Forum

Imagine that I wat to buy an account, someone makes a signed message, to prove it is his account, how do i prove if he sells, thatbI bought it? Because the address he signed with is still his.

You ask them to sign a message that the account was sold to you and belongs to you now.
Then make sure you stake an address you own for the account.

The signed message is the proof, it should say the account now belongs to some other address that you own.

I imagine that a honest seller would move his coins out and give you access to that address too. However, you have to trust the seller he will not use that address again (especially to sign again messages...).

you can add your address under "other contact info" and sign it , at the same time you leave his address as evidence of the former owner

or you can simply quote his signing and remove his address afterward and add your signed address

This can be difficult as that address might be part of an account/wallet. If you export that one private key for the buyer in order to give him/her the key you are placing your whole wallet at risk.

Best is to ask the buyer for an address, then sign a message with your address [the one linked to the account] and state that account was sold and the new address tied to account is xyz. Buyer must then just go stake his address.

Why do you need to buy an account dude? You're a senior member, keep posting & you'll be a hero member in no time. It's much more satisfying if you do it by yourself. Don't be a sell out buddy.

He can still prove that the account at least used to belong to him if the addresses are still posted. You could remove the posted addresses or get the private key from them then at least you can sign messages from it but accounts can usually be restored to their original owner so this is something you should be aware of when buying accounts.

First you need to check, is this buying of an account against TOS or not!!?

Most people don't want to know that the account is bought. Your recipe has a good chance to give that account a negative feedback.


This is true, but if somebody makes accounts for sale, can think ahead and have a "simple" address for it. Else he will have, indeed, to "invalidate" the whole wallet.

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Since OP is Sr Member, I don't expect that he wants to buy an account, I expect that he wants to do his homework for selling it in the future. But it's just a hunch...

first at all, buy an account is a bad idea, and i will nto recommend it, but you are free to do watever you want ofc :)

second, is so simply, just build a new message and sign it, so you can probe that the owner of that account have been changed.

It is allowed, but somebody who has proven account ownership to the buyer today, he may be able to prove account ownership tomorrow to another buyer.
It's just another deal some play nice and some can scam.

buying an account is not a bad idea. It depends on your intention
buying an account because there is a +ve trust, that's questionable

back to the topic, just sign your BTC address somewhere and your good to go. You will be asked to sign a message when you are trading here (buy, sell, provide service), but if you are just posting and reading. I don't think you will be asked to sign a message unless you are being suspected that you hacked the account, then you need to sign a message

Lets go through this again with an example.

Alice (A) wants to sell the account Alice_123 to Bob (B). In order to proof ownership Alice can sign a message and present it to B. B verifies that the signed message is valid and is from an old and unedited post. Now they agree on a price as part of the deal B gets a signed message:


This is Alice from bitcointalk.org and today is 2015.08.18.
Today I sold my account Alice_123 with the ID: 123456 to Bob
for 0.17 BTC. TX ID: <ID here>


or something similar. Bob changes the mail address and the password and now owns the account. Should the account ever be contested, Bob can proof with the signature that Alice is no longer the proper owner of the account and with one of the addresses from TX ID (or an address that is directly part of the signed message) can sign a message themself. Bob does not need to make this public unless the account is contested.

Your recipe is wonderful, but, as I already in this thread, this means to admit the account is bought. And next day somebody will jump with a negative feedback: bought account.

The 'joust' account used to belong to megamine.com and the OP bought it, it's unclear if it was bought from the rightfull seller so this may be related to proving that it was legit  ???

No, it is not related to that, if I want to buy an account in the future, I wanna know how to do it the right way. I didnt buy it from the original owner, i bought it from a buyer from the real owner.

How so? I export one-off private keys regularly..... not all the time, but certainly I have had occasion to. How exactly does this place my whole wallet at risk? All I'm doing is dumping the private key to one address. Seems pretty harmless to me....