Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Password-protected private key export format
by
jmarquess
on 15/08/2011, 20:45:26 UTC
It's great to see that someone is trying to establish standards in bitcoin community. A while ago I was doing a bit of research regarding the private key export and came to a conclusion that OpenPGP message format would suit this use case perfectly. I encourage you to take look into RFC 4880 if you haven't already, quite a brilliant piece of work. What I advocate is to use the existing, vast system that OpenPGP is and try fitting bitcoin into it.

Advantages to taking this approach are numerous.
  • OpenPGP is a well known and tested standard
  • Security is built in
  • There is room for growth and modifications
  • It's very robust and covers almost all use cases
  • Possible use of existing OpenPGP compliant architecture

There is one great disadvantage, though. With robustness comes complexity - it's not a quick and easy fix to the problem of key sharing but rather a lengthy process of integrating bitcoin into OpenPGP ecosystem.