With the recent trend of physically robbing people for bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies), I thought it would be beneficial to introduce a standard for locking up a portion of your bitcoin in a simple 'gotta-wait-awhile' system.
The idea is to simply create a transaction spending a set of UTXOs to a P2SH address with an OP_CSV attached to it, and then throw away the private keys. To spend the bitcoin, you would have to broadcast the transaction and wait the given amount of time, then use the new txout. There are several ways to shoot yourself in the foot trying to do this manually, but e.g. Bitcoin Core could handle this in a fairly straightforward manner by introducing two new commands, which I call freeze and unfreeze: bitcoin-cli freeze [amount OR array of txid+vout objects] [days, default 1] E.g. bitcoin-cli freeze 10 5 E.g. bitcoin-cli freeze ["abc123:1", "def346:0"] 3 The unfreeze command would by default list all freezes: bitcoin-cli unfreeze txid days status bcd123 5 frozen dca999 3 frozen including the txid would broadcast the unfreeze and status would become 'thawing' until the amount becomes available: bitcoin-cli unfreeze bcd123 bitcoin-cli unfreeze txid days status bcd123 5 thawing dca999 3 frozen The benefit of this is that it becomes physically impossible for you to spend the coins until you thaw them, and if this becomes standard enough, it should disincentivize potential robbers as it would be expected that you keep most of your assets locked up. They could of course hold you hostage until the period is over, which may be worse, but I think that kind of operation would be substantially more difficult than a simply rob-and-run. The drawback is that you have to broadcast a transaction in order to spend the content, and you cannot bump the fee so the transaction could get stuck in a high-fee situation. -Kalle. _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
