Initial support for multisignature transactions #541

pull gavinandresen wants to merge 2 commits into bitcoin:master from gavinandresen:multisig changing 3 files +434 −75

gavinandresen commented at 2:46 PM on September 29, 2011: contributor

This adds initial support for three new types of transactions: (a and b) (a or b) (a and b) or c

... where a/b/c are keys. These new transaction types will enable better wallet security and backup in future versions of bitcoin.

I've taken a conservative approach with this initial pull; the new transaction types will be relayed and included in blocks, but are ignored by the wallet code, so will not affect the balance and will never be considered available to spend. I'm going to start a discussion on bitcoin-dev to do a bit of a brain-dump on what NOT to do with multi-signature transactions (there are several potential attacks that we'll need to be careful to avoid).

I'll be creating a multisig_testing branch in the gavinandresen github fork that WILL add multisig transactions to the balance, will have a new RPC call to create multisig transactions, and will be able to spend the multisig transactions; that will be for testing this PULL only for now.
Collapse no-op ExtractAddress/ExtractAddressInner 2499f59a67

Support 3 new multisignature IsStandard transactions

Initial support for (a and b), (a or b), ((a and b) or c)
transactions (where a, b, and c are keys). These will be
relayed and included in blocks, but, for this release,
will be ignored by the wallet (even if keys a/b/c are
in the wallet).

9f461095c5

gavinandresen commented at 2:50 PM on September 30, 2011: contributor
multisig_testing tree is up: https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoin-git/tree/multisig_testing

It adds a "sendmultisig" RPC command to generate multisignature transactions. And adds public key information to the output of the "validateaddress" RPC command, so you can get the full public key for addresses in your wallet.

Good tests for THIS pull would be:
- Setup a testnet-in-a-box testing environment
- Compile two bitcoind's : one with this pull request and one with the multisig_testing pull request
- Get three full public keys from a testnet wallet by running the multisig_testing bitcoind against that wallet. Then shutdown that bitcoind, and run bitcoind with THIS pull request against that wallet.
Then:

Running the multisig_testing bitcoind against another testnet wallet, send multisig transactions to the first wallet. EXPECT: balance in the first wallet does not change, transactions are ignored. EXPECT: eventually the transactions are confirmed and included in blocks and shown in the testnet block explorer (testnet allows non-standard transactions)

Syntax for the sendmultisig RPC command is:

bitcoind sendmultisig "" and_or '["...key1...","...key2...","...key3..."]' 11.11

... where "" is the account you're sending from and 11.11 is the amount.

I am NOT submitting a pull request for sendmultisig, and you shouldn't spend time testing it right now. I may submit a separate pull request for the validateaddress extension.
gavinandresen commented at 2:41 PM on October 4, 2011: contributor

The OP_EVAL idea/discussion is making me re-evalute this. Closing for now.
gavinandresen closed this on Oct 4, 2011
ptschip referenced this in commit 359fcd9c69 on May 10, 2017
ptschip referenced this in commit 0969d1c1ad on May 10, 2017
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