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August 29, 2014, 12:48:24 PM |
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Deterministic wallets have a very good backup feature: They only require you to backup a single piece of data - the seed (Electrum) or the root key (Armory). All present and future keys are created from it. It's a very comforting idea to know that regardless of what I do to my computer - as long as I have the seed stored somewhere safe - nothing can happen to my funds.
But now what happens if I use multisigs? They use P2SH scripts which basically moves the responsibility of remembering the participant public keys to the redeemer. It's easy to fund a lockbox, it's just an address. If I create a lockbox for a trust fund, it may take years before someone wants to redeem it. By then, if no one has a copy of the lockbox definition, the fund is lost. Essentially, when using multisigs I am back to having to maintain individual backups for every multisig address - less I risk a permanent loss. It's much more work than the deterministic wallet case, don't you think?
Am I missing something?
Thanks
PS: As a workaround, I considered sending a small transaction to the participants when the lockbox is created in order to store its definition in the blockchain.
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