{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","title":"Peter Todd [ARCHIVE] wrote","author_name":"Peter Todd [ARCHIVE] (npub1m2…a2np2)","author_url":"https://yabu.me/npub1m230cem2yh3mtdzkg32qhj73uytgkyg5ylxsu083n3tpjnajxx4qqa2np2","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://yabu.me","html":"📅 Original date posted:2023-08-04\n🗒️ 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.\n📝 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"}