Hi everyone,
I have an idea and I wanted to ask you if it makes sense… it’s a bit like a proof of ownership or proof of reserve for individuals/companies.
My vision is that “simply” owning Bitcoin will “soon” be an advantage and you will be able to obtain things without having to spend them. As an example, in France, when you apply for a loan to invest in a house, crypto-assets are not taken into account in your wealth… To help bitcoin owners getting advantage of their assets ownership, I was thinking of creating a platform where a user could declare its bitcoin address, the platform challenges the user to verify its claim and edit a certificate that could be “trusted” by third parties like banks.
This platform would allow any bitcoin users to “prove” to anyone that he actually owns some bitcoin. Of course, I know you can ask anyone to sign messages with keys and all but it’s not easy to understand/do for someone who is not into Bitcoin (especially banks).
Please, feel free to tell me my idea is stupid but try to explain to me why.
I might have a better idea (although I am generally not a big fan of any sort of technology that involves revealing your bitcoin assets to the public):
Using the master public key, you can theoretically create an ECDSA or Schnorr (doesn't really matter which) signed message for your entire wallet.
Obviously, it will take into account BIP44 derivation schemes, so that only receiving and change address paths are checked.
The item that's going to be signed is the master public key, as well as the number of receiving and change addresses.
For verification, an address is given, and using the master public key in the signature, attempt to BIP32-derive a receiving or change address that matches the input address up to the given limit.
If the address is found to be a part of the wallet, then this is verification that the user providing it does in fact own the wallet associated with all those addresses, as well as
any additional addresses that are past the limits without having to explicitly specify them.
It does destroy all user privacy though, so I'm not sure how this is ever going to be a useful thing. It would also depend on BIP322 getting finalized. It's moving at a snail's pace so far.