Re: New Work Item Proposal: Data Integrity BIP340 Cryptosuite

čt 31. 7. 2025 v 18:13 odesílatel Will Abramson <wip.abramson@gmail.com>
napsal:

> Hello CCG community,
>
> Digital Contract Design in collaboration with Legendary Requirements and
> Danube Tech are proposing a new CCG Work Item for adoption:
> https://dcdpr.github.io/data-integrity-schnorr-secp256k1/
>
> See the proposal issue here:
> https://github.com/w3c-ccg/community/issues/254
>
> We feel this is important as there are currently no up to date Data
> Integrity cryptosuites available for the secp256k1 curve, which has wide
> adoption throughout multiple blockchain ecosystems.
>

-1

Thanks for the proposal. I’ve long advocated for secp256k1 and BIP340
support, and I appreciate the work being done here.

That said, I have a strong concern: the current specification mandates
Multibase encoding for keys, which breaks compatibility with millions of
deployed identifiers in the Bitcoin and Nostr ecosystems. These ecosystems
overwhelmingly use lowercase hex as the canonical key representation, not
Multibase or Multikey.

Introducing Multibase as a hard requirement creates an unnecessary and
incompatible fork in identity representations. If the goal is adoption
across real-world BIP340 deployments, the spec needs to offer flexibility
in encoding, specifically, native support for raw hex.

If there’s a path to accommodate this (e.g., via a publicKeyHex field or
alternate verification method type), I’d be happy to support and
contribute. But pushing existing infrastructure to adopt a new encoding
format unilaterally, especially without a clear migration strategy, feels
like a misstep.

So in its current form, this is a -1 from me.


>
> Thanks,
> All the best,
> Will Abramson
>