Building A New Digital World: Threshold Signing and Key Distribution Generation

We live in an old legacy digital world. Many of the methods and protocols we use were created in a time when security was not really an issue. And thus we have a sticking-plaster approach to fixing things. But there’s a new world, and rather than using Ethernet, IP and TCP as its foundation, it uses digital signing to verify the trustworthiness of transactions. A new world is now being built and with new tools. All of the legacy … I think … will be swept aside with a more trustworthy world.

And so our existing digital signature methods are based on a single signing of a message. For this, we have ECDSA and EdDSA. But these are not really scalable, and where we have one signing key (the private) and one verification key (the public key). What if we had a digital world where there could be multiple signers of a message, and where we then just have one verification key? Well, we can, and at the foundation of this is the Schnorr signature method, and which allows us to simply add our public keys together to create a verification key. It is all so simple, compared with ECDSA and EdDSA. And, even better, we can apply a threshold signature scheme to split the keys up, and then allow any t (the threshold) from n signers to sign a message. This allows up to be Byzantine fault-tolerant (and where one of our signers…