Standard for private keys with birth timestamp
2 messages, 22 Jul 2013. Started by Pieter Wuille.
Pieter Wuille, Melvin Carvalho
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.
On 22 July 2013 16:44, Pieter Wuille <pieter.wuille@gmail•com> wrote:
Quoted text (28 lines)
> 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.
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