Quote from: jmarquess on August 15, 2011, 08:45:26 PM

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.

This sounds very interesting. I can see simple use cases like using one EC key both as a bitcoin account and for signing PGP messages. Possibly using a bitcoin-disclosed public key to encrypt messages, if this is safe. How else would integration be possible?

Another factor, GnuPG has yet to produce a stable release with support for EC keys.