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

[Chris Beams <chris@beams.io>]

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Matt, could you expand on use cases for which you see Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme as the best tool for the job? In particular, when do you see that it would be superior to simply going with multisig in the first place? Perhaps you see these as complimentary approaches, toward defense-in-depth? In any case, the Motivation and Rationale sections of the BIP in its current form are silent on these questions.

On Mar 29, 2014, at 9:05 AM, Matt Whitlock <bip@mattwhitlock.name> wrote:

> Abstract: A method is described for dividing a Bitcoin private key into shares in a manner such that the key can be reconstituted from any sufficiently large subset of the shares but such that individually the shares do not reveal any information about the key. This method is commonly known as Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. Additionally, an encoding methodology is proposed to standardize transmission and storage of shares.
> 
> Complete BIP: https://github.com/whitslack/btctool/blob/bip/bip-xxxx.mediawiki
> 
> I am looking to have this BIP assigned a number and added to the bitcoin/bips repository. I invite any comments, questions, or suggestions.
> 
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