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Title: Forcing people to choose the private key of new address in Bitcoin-Qt Post by: remotemass on March 05, 2014, 02:30:09 PM I think Bitcoin-Qt should force choosing the 256 bits of the private key to generate a new address with very graphical radiobutton-like toggle buttons.
Who will I need to convince? Gavin, _sipa_, ...? Who do you think would consider this an important feature ?? Title: Re: Forcing people to choose the private key of new address in Bitcoin-Qt Post by: hello_good_sir on March 05, 2014, 02:35:16 PM People cannot reliably generate random numbers without the assistance of mechanical aids. Thus, by making this change, most of the randomness of the system would be removed. It would be very likely that people would sometimes discover someone else's private key. This would kill bitcoin.
Title: Re: Forcing people to choose the private key of new address in Bitcoin-Qt Post by: wumpus on March 05, 2014, 02:45:38 PM Why would that be useful?
You don't trust random number generators? Well drawing a bitmap on a 16x16 grid (which would essentially be what you propose) wouldn't provide a lot of entropy either. There's just too much commonality in human-drawn patterns. We could add something that would force you to roll a dice 100 times instead for every new key ;D Title: Re: Forcing people to choose the private key of new address in Bitcoin-Qt Post by: remotemass on March 05, 2014, 02:47:49 PM This would make people understand bitcoin much better. And you could still have a button to pick a random combination. But then the user would have complete freedom to change any individual bit/bits if he wanted to. This way, people would undertsand paper-wallets in one day instead of taking 4 or 5 five months, or more, to understand it. Also you should be able to print straight away the paper wallet without fear of using more dodgy software or web apps instead.
You could also add an alert window. "Picking a custom key is highly risky. Are you sure you want a custom one? Why not pick a random one?". But the important thing is that people would finally understand this important milestone in learning about bitcoin much quicker. Title: Re: Forcing people to choose the private key of new address in Bitcoin-Qt Post by: Draino on March 05, 2014, 02:51:52 PM no.
when we think things are random, they're not even close when things are random, we think we see patterns this is a bad idea at every level. there's a reason you don't even have the option to display private keys (without dropping to a console), and it's probably because of people just like you. Title: Re: Forcing people to choose the private key of new address in Bitcoin-Qt Post by: remotemass on March 05, 2014, 03:03:50 PM No, the reason is quite stupid. Because this way people will not understand it, which is much worse than doing something wrong intentionally.
Your logic is the same of that of Windows 8, which I definitely don't like. |