Hello, I should have brought up this suggestion before, as there seems to be relevant other work.
I'd like to propose encoding keys data (whatever type) with a birth timestamp as: * <serialized key>@<unix timestamp in decimal> The reason for not incorporating this inside the key serialization (for example BIP32), is because birth timestamps are more generally a property of an address, rather than the key it is derived from. For one, it is useful for non-extended standard serialized private keys, but for P2SH addresses, the "private key" is really the actual scriptPubKey, but birth data is equally useful for this. Reason for choosing the '@' character: it's not present in the base58, hex, or base64 encodings that are typically used for key/script data. One downside is that this means no checksum-protection for the timestamp, but the advantage is increased genericity. It's also longer than using a binary encoding, but this is an optional part anyway, and I think "human typing" is already fairly hard anyway. -- Pieter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
