Work in progress (quite obviously)
Feel free to comment with educational material I could use in the OP as well as services using multi-sig.
Well a little background information on what it does might be nice
Simply put its where it takes more than one signature to confirm a transaction this can be 2/3 with each party buyer seller and provider having one and transactions only succeeding when a user has 2/3 of them. 3/3 where they need all of them or any mix that requires more than one signature for a transaction to be processed.
As a note bit-x also uses multisig you can tell because all ID's start with a 3 instead of the traditional 1
Since you missed that one, unless your threshold requirements are a bit more restricted than sites that use multisig in any form or function.
Article:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/19528/threshold-signatures-new-standard-wallet-security/As for that discussion it is a step forward at least not the true solution though as the article points out
Multi-signature (multisig) wallets offer a solution. A multisig transaction, for example a 2-of-3 transaction, requires the agreement of the required number of authorized signatories, in this case two out of three. However, the paper shows that multisig transactions present significant usability problems, and serious anonymity and confidentiality drawbacks.
“Bitcoin currently lacks support for the sophisticated internal control systems deployed by modern businesses to deter fraud,” say the authors of the paper. “To address this problem, we present the first threshold signature scheme compatible with Bitcoin’s ECDSA signatures and show how distributed Bitcoin wallets can be built using this primitive.”
In a threshold signature scheme, the ability to construct a signature is distributed among different devices (for example a computer and a smartphone), and each device receives a share of the private signing key. For individuals, threshold signatures allow for two-factor security, or splitting the ability to sign between two devices so that a single compromised device won’t put the money at risk. For businesses, threshold signatures allow for the realization of access control policies that prevent both insiders and outsiders from stealing corporate funds.
The researchers built a prototype implementation of a two-factor secure wallet, a desktop client and an Android app, and released open source code on Github. A video shows how the system works: a user initiates a transaction on the computer, and the computer then begins the threshold signing protocol with the phone. The phone will show the user the transaction details and will proceed with the transaction only with the user’s explicit approval. The computer and phone use QR codes to initially pair, and for all subsequent sessions they communicate over the local Wifi network.
If threshold signature schemes become common, private bitcoin wallets will support the same multi-factor authentication offered by major wallet providers, while continuing to offer a high degree of anonymity.
