Lightweight wallets

Question

I need to have many more users than nodes, adopting a model that’s similar in this respect to the ‘Consumer-facing rewards scheme’ example outlined in the MultiChain white paper.

This would require the ability to create wallets and addresses on an ad-hoc basis that are potentially never ‘seen’ by the network. As far as I understand, this is possible with Bitcoin – I could create a valid address ‘offline’ and make it the recipient of a transaction.

When I attempt this with MultiChain I get 'invalid address’ responses. Is there something that I've misunderstood? Does MultiChain share this provision for lightweight wallets?

Answer 1

First, MultiChain addresses are not directly compatible with bitcoin addresses, because we have several additional bytes of random 'version' information in the middle (see the 'address-pubkeyhash-version' item in the params.dat file for each chain). This protects the same address from being used accidentally on different MultiChain blockchains. We will provide more documentation on how to build a MultiChain address as soon as possible.

Second, if you want to allow ad-hoc addressing, you would need to set anyone-can-send (and presumably anyone-can-receive) to true in your blockchain's params.dat parameters, before starting the chain. Otherwise an address that has not been approved cannot be used.

With these two caveats in mind, yes, it is possible to do what you're suggesting.