Re: [Bitcoin-development] Presenting a BIP for Shamir's Secret Sharing of Bitcoin private keys

[Roy Badami <roy@gnomon.org.uk>]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 01:42:01PM -0400, Matt Whitlock wrote:
> On Saturday, 29 March 2014, at 5:28 pm, Roy Badami wrote:
> > Right now there are also people simply taking base58-encoded private
> > keys and running them through ssss-split.
> > 
> > It has a lot going for it, since it can easily be reassembled on any
> > Linux machine without special software (B Poettering's Linux command
> > line SSSS implementation[1] seems to be included in most Linux distros).
> > 
> > roy
> > 
> > [1] http://point-at-infinity.org/ssss/
> 
> Respectfully, it's also possible to take a base58-encoded private key and run it through GPG, which is included in most Linux distros. But yet we have BIP38.

And yet, how many wallets can import BIP38 keys?  If someone gave me
one I would have no idea what software (if any) can understand it (nor
would I have any idea how to generate one in the first place).

Anyway, I'm not arguing against standardising these things - if people
are going to implement this then of course it's beneficial that they
implement it compatibly.  It was just a simple observation - make of
it what you will.

roy