BitShares Forum

Main => Technical Support => Topic started by: monsterer on March 03, 2015, 02:51:22 pm

Title: Emulating the bitshares account master key in bitcoin - wise idea?
Post by: monsterer on March 03, 2015, 02:51:22 pm

If I were to seed a good quality random number generator (something like xorshift128) with a sufficiently random seed, I could then use the sequence of random numbers generated as bitcoin private keys (after some wrangling). This would allow me to back up an entire bitcoin wallet* using only the initial seed and the number of generated keys. As I understand it, this is similar in operation to bitshares' account master key.

Using this technique in bitcoin form - can anyone weigh in on the potential implications of using this technique as a back up policy?

*) obviously this only works for private keys/addresses generated using this method.

Title: Re: Emulating the bitshares account master key in bitcoin - wise idea?
Post by: xeroc on March 03, 2015, 04:53:45 pm

It's even more interesting ... for usual accounts you have an owner key which controls the account name and active key(s) which holds the funds as a master key for TITAN transactions ..

The selling point here would be that BitShares has a HD wallet integrated (Hierarchical and Deterministic) plus some kind of account control ..

backing up the owner key is sufficient to regenerate all required keys to access funds, subaccounts and market transactions ..
backing up the active keys (included in a backup of the owner key) is sufficient to regain access to transactions made to your account while that particular active key was 'active' (you can change your active key if you want ... even on a regular basis .. which might be a good idea .. not sure)

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=14344.new#new

Title: Re: Emulating the bitshares account master key in bitcoin - wise idea?
Post by: vikram on March 03, 2015, 06:22:40 pm

I don't see why this wouldn't work but probably you need to be absolutely sure that your method of generating the keys is proven safe or at the very least has no known weaknesses.

Title: Re: Emulating the bitshares account master key in bitcoin - wise idea?
Post by: monsterer on March 03, 2015, 06:27:23 pm

Quote from: vikram on March 03, 2015, 06:22:40 pm

I don't see why this wouldn't work but probably you need to be absolutely sure that your method of generating the keys is proven safe or at the very least has no known weaknesses.

What RNG does bitshares use? Are the other factors to consider?

Title: Re: Emulating the bitshares account master key in bitcoin - wise idea?
Post by: vikram on March 03, 2015, 06:54:18 pm

We just use OpenSSL to generate a new private key, and we use Bitcoin BIP32 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki) to generate deterministic child keys.

Actually I think some Bitcoin wallets already do what you are describing. Doesn't Electrum only require backing up a single seed?

Title: Re: Emulating the bitshares account master key in bitcoin - wise idea?
Post by: xeroc on March 03, 2015, 08:07:31 pm

Yes electrum has a single root seed ..