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BIP352: PSBT support

BIP352: PSBT support

Original Postby andrewtoth

Posted on: June 18, 2024 15:50 UTC

In the realm of cryptocurrency transactions, particularly those involving Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 174 standards for Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions (PSBT), there's an emerging discussion on handling silent payments.

Silent payments are a method to enhance privacy by disguising the payment's destination. The discourse highlights a crucial requirement for signers aware of silent payments to avoid using ALL | ACP signature hash types when silent payment outputs are present. This stipulation ensures that if a transaction includes silent payment outputs, the signer must not use ACP at all, thereby maintaining transaction integrity and adhering to privacy protocols.

Further elaboration on this topic reveals that for transactions without silent payment outputs, signers have the freedom to use any sighash type they prefer. This flexibility is crucial for maintaining the functionality of PSBTs while integrating silent payment features. Additionally, the roles of Constructor and Updater within the BIP174 framework are examined, with a conclusion that these roles do not require modifications to accommodate silent payment checks. This is because the responsibility to verify the absence of ACP in inputs, especially when silent payments are involved, falls squarely on the Signer.

The conversation also touches on a proposed modification to the PSBT global fields, specifically suggesting the addition of a flag to monitor the state of silent payments within transactions. Such an addition aims at ensuring Constructors and Updaters adhere to the guidelines regarding the inclusion of ACP signatures and silent payment outputs, enhancing compatibility and security.

Moreover, a notable suggestion is made to streamline the efficiency of verifying silent payments. By allowing the duplication of proof for inputs belonging to the same signer and proposing the addition of shares and proofs as global attributes within a PSBT, alongside organizing key data by scan keys followed by input outpoints rather than indexes, the process could become more efficient. This restructuring would potentially reduce the verifier's workload, as it minimizes the number of proofs to be verified, thus simplifying the verification process for transactions involving silent payments. This adjustment underscores a significant shift towards optimizing the transaction verification process while maintaining or enhancing privacy measures and transactional integrity within the Bitcoin ecosystem.