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1  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Security of multisig vs regular wallet on: September 29, 2020, 03:20:59 PM
I am just trying to see if I am thinking about this correctly - it seems to me that all other things being equal (physical security and such), a multisig wallet is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more secure than a regular wallet.

It seems vastly superior just about from any angle.

Here are my thoughts on this:

1. Obviously, if you use M of N multisig wallet where M < N (2 of 3 , 3 of 4, 4 of 6) you automatically get a failsafe in case you lose one of your keys (or master seed if you used a separate HD wallet based on new master seed derivation). With a regular wallet - if you lose the master private key and seed - you are sunk, that's it, there is no recourse. It's a single point of failure.

2. If you use different devices / sources of entropy to derive master seed phrase -such as hardware device, rolling die, software construction via strong CSPRNG library (say Electrum) - that further lowers your chances of someone brute-forcing your seed to due accidental weak source of randomness in one particular setup. 1 out of 2^256 is nearly 0 anyway, but chances of brute forcing two or three of those are even more ridiculous. The same logic in terms of lowering your risk of using a single compromised device - if you use multiple physically independent devices to generate your keys, it seems you dramatically lower your chances of being pwned.

3. If you have a 2 of 4 setup for instance - you can spend several times from the same address by using different key combinations to sign the transaction - without giving away any privacy, unlike a regular address where every new signature to spend from that address could potentially be used to brute force the private key for that address.

4. The fact that there is a threshold of keys needed to withdraw funds makes multisig more amenable to being stored relatively safely in the cloud. Someone could use Shamir's secret-sharing algorithm to split each master seed, even encrypting it, for additional peace of mind, and storing it on multiple providers' file storage - GDrive, Dropbox, self-hosting, across physical devices. In a 3 of 5 setup, you could store up to 2 seeds in such fashion - and be quite safe in knowing that even if the parties were to collude, break your encryption and assemble 2 of your master keys, that would still not be enough to steal your funds.

5.Does multisig offer more in the way of being resistant to quantum computing cryptanalysis?

What am I missing? Are there any good counterarguments to using multisig vs just a regular [hardware] wallet?

I guess for now multisig transactions are slightly larger (for the spending tx ) but that will hopefully be soon mitigated with Schnorr/Taproot, right?
2  Bitcoin / Mining speculation / The time horizon of mining capital investment on: June 02, 2020, 02:38:36 AM
Looking at the hash rate chart on https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate you can see a huge drop right after this year's halvening - similar in % move to the drop which followed the nearly 50% price decline in March. While the March price drop was an unforeseen event, the halvening had been a known quantity for years in advance - and yet we still saw a huge drop in hashrate a few days after the reward switched to BTC 6.25. How does this make sense in the context of the supposed long-term horizon of most large-scale miners which (again presumably) try to utilize economies of scale - both in terms of equipment and time.

Are these sharp declines that follow a very predictable event revealing that the mining market is in fact dominated by lots of smaller players which are operating on the edge of insolvency? Or is mining mostly an investment gig with a ~4 year time horizon until the next halvening?

Just thinking out loud but would love to hear what the rest of you think...
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