Use hierarchical deterministic multi-sig wallets

[fresheneesz]

This protocol generates raw private keys, which make using the funds unnecessarily difficult. If HD wallets are created, you don't have to reuse the same address, which increases privacy.

[bitcoinhodler]

This is a long-term goal of mine but there is a lot of groundwork needed first. And this project is effectively abandoned by its maintainers.

Here's some earlier discussion on HD wallets.

[bitcoinhodler]

And I've written a bit about the future of Glacier.

[fresheneesz]

Ah ok, good to know. I didn't realize this was basically an abandoned project. It looks like there's still active code being merged in. When you say its abandoned by its maintainers, what do you mean exactly?

I'm trying to write some wallet protocols that are a little bit more user friendly than the glacier protocol, but using the glacier protocol as inspiration (eg the way it organizes the information). I'm doing this at https://github.com/fresheneesz/TordlWalletProtocols, but it isn't quite ready to be used yet.

I'm curious if you'd be interested in collaborating on that - perhaps moving it into a jointly owned organization account. It seems like reliable wallet methods are a really important missing piece in the bitcoin community. I'm trying to correct that by taking a modular approach - putting together wallet methods from multiple parameterizable pieces. Your 'future of Glacier' write up seems to have some of that modular philosophy underpinning the process descriptions. I'd love to add the glacier protocol as one of those methods, and extract the major pieces of the glacier protocol into modular methods of their own, if I had help. Doing it this way would make it far easier to create multiple variants of the glacier protocol with different tradeoffs around difficulty vs security.

Is that something you'd be interested in?

[bitcoinhodler]

Ah ok, good to know. I didn't realize this was basically an abandoned project. It looks like there's still active code being merged in. When you say its abandoned by its maintainers, what do you mean exactly?

The official maintainer Diogo shows up every 6-8 months for a day and then disappears again. The other official maintainer Nathan, well I can't recall him ever doing a thing. About two months ago, right after the Casa CEO bragged on Stephan Livera's podcast that Casa was contributing to the open-source Glacier project, Jameson Lopp of Casa joined the project, was active for a week, got my hopes up, but then hasn't been seen since. I've had a pull request open since February, and seven more backed up behind that one. Some of this code I wrote in early 2018 and it still hasn't been merged.

I'll take a look at your project, but I'm a little skeptical because "user friendly" is not one of my goals. That implies a lot more work, both in development and maintenance, than an "expert-only" system like I'd personally be interested in using. And it would not be the kind of work I'd enjoy.

One of the reasons that Glacier is relatively high-maintenance is because in attempting to be user-friendly, it spells out every little step in excruciating detail. And those kind of details change much more rapidly than the bigger principles change. I want to build a system based on the bigger principles, and not specify every little detail, leaving that up to the user to figure out.

[fresheneesz]

Responded here since this conversation is getting off topic for this repo: fresheneesz/TordlWalletProtocols#1