lianabitcoin on Nostr: Great question: Let's say you have a cold storage wallet with the above setup (1 ...
Great question:
Let's say you have a cold storage wallet with the above setup (1 primary key, 1 recovery key)
Whenever you receive a coin in this wallet, the relative timelock starts for that specific coin.
So if you receive a coin in March and then you receive a new coin in June, they will have different dates at which the recovery key could spend them.
The only way to refresh the timelock on a particular UTXO is to send it to a new address in your wallet (either use it to pay someone and send the change back to your wallet, or self-send the whole UTXO to a new address in your wallet). If you self-send (refresh) the first UTXO and not the second, you only reset the timer on the first.
So the wallet needs to refresh every UTXO it owns before timelock expiry if it wants to keep the recovery key from being able to spend any of the coins.
It adds a new element to thinking about UTXO consolidation (easier and cheaper to do this refresh if you have fewer UTXOs, but privacy concerns about consolidation are valid).
The relative timelock uses the nSequence field in a tx, and because of the length of this field, it cannot be longer than ~15 months.
But it also gives you a reason to test out your cold storage setup at least once a year and make sure everything is still functioning well.
Let's say you have a cold storage wallet with the above setup (1 primary key, 1 recovery key)
Whenever you receive a coin in this wallet, the relative timelock starts for that specific coin.
So if you receive a coin in March and then you receive a new coin in June, they will have different dates at which the recovery key could spend them.
The only way to refresh the timelock on a particular UTXO is to send it to a new address in your wallet (either use it to pay someone and send the change back to your wallet, or self-send the whole UTXO to a new address in your wallet). If you self-send (refresh) the first UTXO and not the second, you only reset the timer on the first.
So the wallet needs to refresh every UTXO it owns before timelock expiry if it wants to keep the recovery key from being able to spend any of the coins.
It adds a new element to thinking about UTXO consolidation (easier and cheaper to do this refresh if you have fewer UTXOs, but privacy concerns about consolidation are valid).
The relative timelock uses the nSequence field in a tx, and because of the length of this field, it cannot be longer than ~15 months.
But it also gives you a reason to test out your cold storage setup at least once a year and make sure everything is still functioning well.