February 2019
Beginner to intermediate
319 pages
6h 56m
English
Content preview from Programming Bitcoin
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 8. Pay-to-Script Hash
Up to this point in the book, we’ve been doing single-key transactions, or transactions with only a single private key per input. What if we wanted something a little more complicated? A company that has $100 million in bitcoin might not want the funds locked to a single private key: if that single key were lost or stolen, all funds would then be lost. What can we do to reduce the risk of this single point of failure?
The solution is multisig, or multiple signatures. This was built into Bitcoin from the beginning, but was clunky at first and so wasn’t used. As we’ll discover later in this chapter, Satoshi probably didn’t test multisig, as it has an off-by-one error (see OP_CHECKMULTISIG Off-by-One Bug). The bug has had to stay in the protocol because fixing it would require a hard fork.
Multiple Private Keys to a Single Aggregated Public Key
It is possible to “split” a single private key into multiple private keys and use an interactive method to aggregate signatures without ever reconstructing the private key, but this is not a common practice. Schnorr signatures will make aggregating signatures easier and perhaps more common in the future.
Bare Multisig
Bare multisig was the first attempt at creating transaction outputs that require signatures from multiple parties.
The idea is to change from a single point of failure to something a little more resilient to hacks.
To understand bare multisig, one must first understand the OP_CHECKMULTISIG opcode. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.