rich1.0Peter Todd [ARCHIVE] (npub1m2…a2np2)https://yabu.me/npub1m230cem2yh3mtdzkg32qhj73uytgkyg5ylxsu083n3tpjnajxx4qqa2np2njumphttps://yabu.me📅 Original date posted:2023-08-04 🗒️ 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. 📝 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 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 833 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20230804/70c37a09/attachment.sig>