General Reflections on the #electrum #multisig Wallet

Image from here

In our recent weekly meeting one of the rubs that we had been coming up against within our second experiment: BTC pay experiment - week 2018-03-19 was the lack of transparency with payments which had been made from the multi-sig wallets. Electrum shows all participants of the multisig wallet the holdings, payments in, payments out but there is no conception of which signatories (in our case 2 out of 6) cooperated to release funds.

@Kieran and I have speculated that this is perhaps another indicator of a strong tendency within Bitcoin (as well as many other blockchain related projects) towards Libertarian individualism. We speculate that the intended audience of the multi-sig interface is an individual practicing stronger compartmentalised security as outlined here and here

From that second link:

Casa, a six-month-old startup that helps consumers securely store cryptocurrencies, has launched its first product and raised $2.1 million in new investment. Venture capital firms Lerer Hippeau, Compound and Boost VC participated in the financing round.

Founder and CEO Jeremy Welch says Casa is “premium hodl software,” using the crypto community’s preferred term for buy-and-hold investing. Targeted at people who own from $400,000 to $10 million in crypto assets, Casa is a digital wallet that requires users to electronically sign three different devices to move assets. Welch’s goal is to create an easier way for customers to manage their own private keys, the sets of numbers and letters that let you transfer cryptocurrencies. At launch, bitcoin will be the only crypto asset supported. Casa plans to add ether, the currency of the second-largest crypto network, Ethereum, in the second quarter of 2018.

The point here is that within these interfaces and design considerations there is no conception of a social layer. It is all about the individual.

And this is really what distinguishes projects such as #mmt and socialwalletapi the assumption of community, collective, organisation is baked in.

The gambit we are (collectively) making is that it is possible to wrap strongly libetarian technologies in a social layer (or API - bravo socialwallet-api - brilliant, brilliant name) and transmute these underlying individualistic, atomised assumptions into a collective #commons.

There are of course strong critics of this position. The logical home of these critics are the #moneylab crew... if you check out their publications or mailing list you'll get a deeper dive into some of those critical voices.

#socialwalletapi #swapi

Interesting stuff @peg

From my end what we're zooming in and out on are processes we need to do what we are doing. After some more research with various #savingspools we may also try to see what processes that formation would need.

Although we are using #electrum right now, it may be the case that it is not fit for our purposes. It's worth noting that these wallet softwares are just exposing functionality of the underlying #bitcoin #blockchain as a GUI. Once we have more clearly scoped which processes and functions we're using and needing it will be possible to wireframe these.

With this in mind then, it's super useful to scope the existing tools we are using such as electrum whilst also finding their restrictions and limitations...

Haven't actually noticed this in the electrum wallet before as I have never done multisig in a group context. But this proves my point I think

Your transaction was sent to the cosigning pool. Open your cosigner wallet to retrieve it.