Electrum is going to use Hierarchical Deterministic wallet (bip32)
In order to preserve the capability to restore a wallet from its seed, it is now necessary to adopt a convention concerning address allocation.
For the moment I think it would be a bit overkill to restore an entire tree using a tree exploration algorithm, although this might be the case in the future.
I just want to use a simple convention for enumerating accounts derived from a seed.
Here is how I plan to do it:
m/0'/n'/ : normal accounts, where n is an integer.
m/1'/n/ & m/2'/n/ : "multisig 2of2" accounts.
m/3'/n/ & m/4'/n/ & m/5'/n/ : "multisig 2of3" accounts
In this scheme, each account has a sequence of receiving and change addresses.
example:
m/0'/n'/0/k -> receive addresses
m/0'/n'/1/k -> change addresses
As per bip32 conventions, the prime symbole (') refers to private (type1) derivation, while "no prime" means public (type2) derivation.
Note that normal account creations use private derivation, so the user will need to enter their password in order to generate a new account.
m/0'/ is sufficient to generate normal accounts, so that "m/" (the master key) can be thrown away.
Multisig accounts may be only partially seeded. (for example, we keep m/1'/ and throw away m/ and m/2'/)
Multisig accounts use a private derivation at level 1, and a public derivation at level 2; this is to avoid having to receive master public keys from an external wallet or service when an account is created.
Let me know if you think I missed something.
I am very interested in Hierarchical Deterministic wallets.
I have a few questions, please forgive me if I am misunderstanding something here.
1) In adding what is essentially a type layer of multisig type, isn't that adding a hierarchical layer that isn't in the BIP? I understand how the math makes that possible I'm just concerned about interoperability with other solutions.
2) Is there any reason that n has to be an integer? For example, I was thinking it would be cool to be able to create accounts with ascii names. Of course for recovery the user would have to know their seed and the names of their accounts in order to rediscover the tree. Actually, this sounds like a really bad idea. I think the coolest, most important feature of Electrum is the ability to recover from one human readable string.
3) Will someone be able to create an account, lets says m/0'/7' and then load up an electrum client with just that, without any visibility or awareness of the other chains in the tree?
4) Will the equivalent of the master public key for such an account work with existing electrum address generators like (
https://github.com/prusnak/addrgen)?5) Who can I bribe/bounty/pay for this work to be done? I would try to help but python is certainly not my strong suit and my EC knowledge is very low. I'd be willing to pony up 25 BTC if it would help.
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