The 'Vault' Is Back: Coder Revives Plan to Shield Bitcoin Wallets from Theft

The idea has been around for a few years now, and for good reason, it's believed it could make it much harder for bad actors to steal funds from bitcoin users.

Basically, someone holding bitcoin primarily as a store of value could put it in cold storage, or hold it offline, with code that says it can be spent, but not immediately.

Malte Möser, Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gün Sirer proposed this feature, known as "Vaults," as a way to better secure bitcoin in 2016, but their proposal required a fork of the protocol codebase.

Bitcoin Core contributor and crypto consultant Bryan Bishop sent out a design to developers to accomplish the same thing using existing code.

"Vaults are particularly interesting as a bitcoin cold storage security mechanism because they enable a publicly observable delay period during which time a user could be alerted by a"watchtower" that a thief might be in the process of stealing their coins.

If the proper owner had initiated the transaction, he or she would do nothing because they actually did want to move the bitcoin to a less-secure "Hot" wallet for use.

If it was a malicious transaction, the rightful owner could use another pre-determined transaction to force the bitcoin back into the cold wallet, under the same time delay.

It relies on existing time lock functions that are already built into bitcoin code.

When the prior proposal came up in 2016, one developer noted that such a proposal gives a bitcoin user more pieces of data that they have to secure.

Once it is ready the developer said he will make it freely available to any bitcoin holder who wants to use it.