š
Original date posted:2023-08-04
šļø Summary of this message: Silent Payment addresses, which allow for multiple payments without privacy concerns, should have an expiration date to prevent funds from being lost forever. Adding a 3-byte field to encode the expiration date is a simple solution. Wallets should have a default expiration date and attempts to pay an expired address should fail.
š Original message:
tl;dr: Wallets don't last forever. They are often compromised or lost. When
this happens, the addresses generated from those wallets become a form of toxic
data: funds sent to those addresses can be easily lost forever.
All Bitcoin addresses have this problem. But at least existing Bitcoin
addresses aren't supposed to be reused. Silent Payments are: the whole point is
to have a single address that you can safely pay to multiple times, without
privacy concerns. Failing to make Silent Payment addresses eventually expire in
a reasonable amount of time is thus a particularly harmful mistake.
Fixing this is easy: add a 3 byte field to silent payments addresses, encoding
the expiration date in terms of days after some epoch. 2^24 days is 45,000
years, more than enough. Indeed, 2 bytes is probably fine too: 2^16 days is 180
years. We'll be lucky if Bitcoin still exists in 180 years.
Wallets should pick a reasonable default, eg 1 year, for newly created
addresses. Attempts to pay an expired address should just fail with a simple
"address expired". Lightning invoices are a good example here: while invoices
does not require expiration from a technical point of view, they do expire for
similar UX reasons as applies to silent payments.
--
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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Peter Todd [ARCHIVE] /
npub1m2ā¦a2np2
2023-08-04 20:19:32
in reply to nevent1qā¦85na
Author Public Key
npub1m230cem2yh3mtdzkg32qhj73uytgkyg5ylxsu083n3tpjnajxx4qqa2np2Seen on
wss://nos.lolPublished at
2023-08-04 20:19:32Event JSON
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Original date posted:2023-08-04\nšļø Summary of this message: Silent Payment addresses, which allow for multiple payments without privacy concerns, should have an expiration date to prevent funds from being lost forever. Adding a 3-byte field to encode the expiration date is a simple solution. Wallets should have a default expiration date and attempts to pay an expired address should fail.\nš Original message:\ntl;dr: Wallets don't last forever. They are often compromised or lost. When\nthis happens, the addresses generated from those wallets become a form of toxic\ndata: funds sent to those addresses can be easily lost forever.\n\nAll Bitcoin addresses have this problem. But at least existing Bitcoin\naddresses aren't supposed to be reused. Silent Payments are: the whole point is\nto have a single address that you can safely pay to multiple times, without\nprivacy concerns. Failing to make Silent Payment addresses eventually expire in\na reasonable amount of time is thus a particularly harmful mistake.\n\nFixing this is easy: add a 3 byte field to silent payments addresses, encoding\nthe expiration date in terms of days after some epoch. 2^24 days is 45,000\nyears, more than enough. Indeed, 2 bytes is probably fine too: 2^16 days is 180\nyears. We'll be lucky if Bitcoin still exists in 180 years.\n\nWallets should pick a reasonable default, eg 1 year, for newly created\naddresses. Attempts to pay an expired address should just fail with a simple\n\"address expired\". Lightning invoices are a good example here: while invoices\ndoes not require expiration from a technical point of view, they do expire for\nsimilar UX reasons as applies to silent payments.\n\n-- \nhttps://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org\n-------------- next part --------------\nA non-text attachment was scrubbed...\nName: signature.asc\nType: application/pgp-signature\nSize: 833 bytes\nDesc: not available\nURL: \u003chttp://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20230804/70c37a09/attachment.sig\u003e",
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