[Bitcoin-development] [RFC] Standard for private keys with birth timestamp

[Bitcoin-development] [RFC] Standard for private keys with birth timestamp

[Pieter Wuille]

Hello,

I should have brought up this suggestion before, as there seems to be relevant other work.

I'd like to propose encoding keys data (whatever type) with a birth timestamp as:
 * <serialized key>@<unix timestamp in decimal>

The reason for not incorporating this inside the key serialization (for example BIP32), is because
birth timestamps are more generally a property of an address, rather than the key it is derived from.
For one, it is useful for non-extended standard serialized private keys, but for P2SH addresses,
the "private key" is really the actual scriptPubKey, but birth data is equally useful for this.

Reason for choosing the '@' character: it's not present in the base58, hex, or base64 encodings that
are typically used for key/script data.

One downside is that this means no checksum-protection for the timestamp, but the advantage is
increased genericity. It's also longer than using a binary encoding, but this is an optional
part anyway, and I think "human typing" is already fairly hard anyway.

-- 
Pieter

Re: [Bitcoin-development] [RFC] Standard for private keys with birth timestamp

[Melvin Carvalho]

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On 22 July 2013 16:44, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I should have brought up this suggestion before, as there seems to be
> relevant other work.
>
> I'd like to propose encoding keys data (whatever type) with a birth
> timestamp as:
>  * <serialized key>@<unix timestamp in decimal>
>
> The reason for not incorporating this inside the key serialization (for
> example BIP32), is because
> birth timestamps are more generally a property of an address, rather than
> the key it is derived from.
> For one, it is useful for non-extended standard serialized private keys,
> but for P2SH addresses,
> the "private key" is really the actual scriptPubKey, but birth data is
> equally useful for this.
>
> Reason for choosing the '@' character: it's not present in the base58,
> hex, or base64 encodings that
> are typically used for key/script data.
>
> One downside is that this means no checksum-protection for the timestamp,
> but the advantage is
> increased genericity. It's also longer than using a binary encoding, but
> this is an optional
> part anyway, and I think "human typing" is already fairly hard anyway.
>

Is there a BIP for this?

@ is normally used in conjunction with things other than a time stamp ...

You may want to look at RFC 4151

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4151.txt

They had an idea on adding time stamps to identifiers.

First impression is that the sacrifice in opacity does not seem to justify
the utility.


>
> --
> Pieter
>
>
>
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