How does the new BLS change affect Chia?

Development
1

There are lot of discussions regarding latest BLS change.

  1. How does it affect Chia in general, e.g., keys, plots, farming, and so on?
  2. How does it affect Chia being listed on more exchanges?
  3. Will this change affect the future hardware wallet support?

Oh look at that, the BLS standard which we were assured was final before we deployed it was updated afterwards. By changing a fixed salt… – @bramcohen

We follow the v2 spec. The v4 spec has some “optional” changes. We could support both, but that would add complexity of supporting two keygen algos, and we already must support the old one for all farmers. – mariano54

The “hard fork” here would invalidate every. single. plot. – @hoffmang

1 Like
2

  1. This is not new. This issue pops up about every three months since it was first noticed in late 2020.

  2. We will be sticking with our existing seed method so as to keep existing paper wallets fully supported and not ambiguous. Note that the Chia implementation is still compliant with v4 of the spec (last one at this writing 2022-02-17.)

  3. No serious impact. It’s ultimately going to be a flag for the HSM or hardware vendor. Many HSMs will not care as they don’t need nor want to support existing Chia paper wallets (24 words mnemonics.) Some end user hardware providers will want to make it so that you can import existing Chia paper wallets.

  4. See 2.

A detailed explanation is in this issue and particularly this comment.

7 Likes