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Before sending someone a large sum of money on the internet via a irreversible transaction you better make sure you are sending the funds to the right address. There are a few ways to go about doing this and depending on who you are sending funds to, how accessible their keys are and what the capabilities and behavior of their wallet software is you may need to choose different solutions.
If we assume the recipient has the key associated with the target wallet online aka not in cold storage and that that the software they use for that wallet supports message signing with wallet keys this can be a viable option. Unfortunately there is not currently a standard for the format of signatures using bitcoin keys with that said thankfully there appear to only be two common formats in-use today.
The first format being in-essence no formatting; client simply present you the three values you will need to verify a message and you do with them as you see fit, for example:. This format leaves a little be desired. For one you have to pass these values independently and then you also have issues around introduction of white-space which can invalidate signatures.
There is another increasingly common format that leverages ASCII armor and some codified rules to address these issues. What this means is that depending on the implementation of the wallet software the recipient uses you may not be able to validate the signature they produce without some manipulation of the text.
With that said when you have managed to successfully verify a message like this you know that whoever produced the message owns the key associated with the wallet associated with it. To address the risk of a message substitution the sender would need to communicate a challenge out of band to the recipient.
My inclusion of this message presumably exchanged out of band helps assure the sender that it was me who signed the message. The simplest way to verify an address is to simply send a small amount of money to that address and verify out of band with the recipient that they confirm seeing it in their balance.
Once the transaction has been sent and you use a tool like blockchain. If they keys are offline in cold storage the only viable option is to carefully validate each character of the address via an out of bound secure channel, I would personally not rely on this approach for large sums but if both parties are careful it can work. By doing the check twice you reduce the chance of human error but mistakes can happen and in this case they can not be undone so use this approach with caution.
None of these solutions are perfect and moving forward I expect we will see services like OneName. Your email address will not be published. Have the recipient sign a message using their wallet key If we assume the recipient has the key associated with the target wallet online aka not in cold storage and that that the software they use for that wallet supports message signing with wallet keys this can be a viable option.
The first format being in-essence no formatting; client simply present you the three values you will need to verify a message and you do with them as you see fit, for example: As for what this format looks like, its fairly straight forward: Do a micro-transaction The simplest way to verify an address is to simply send a small amount of money to that address and verify out of band with the recipient that they confirm seeing it in their balance. There are a few things to keep in mind if you go this way, specifically: Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.