TREZORs and Forks got you Worried? Here's a Spoon Full of Relief


avatar Quebex Fintech Inc.
Mar 26, 2017

The blog at trezor.io detailed what would happen to coins on a TREZOR should bitcoin fork into two (or more) separate currencies.

In case you haven't read it, the highlight is that no action is required from you & your coins remain safe.

Spending the BTU may require that you use a "TREZOR-compatible third party wallet that supports Bitcoin Unlimited coins".

Though the blog doesn't mention how, there is a statement that protection against replay attacks is being worked on so that even if BTU and BTC don't offer two way replay replication, your TREZOR could potentially fill that void.

One technique the Quebex development team can envision, though slightly inconvenient to the user, might rely on the coins on current wallets being transferred to an "anti replay wallet".

In this way, any transactions that might be replayed will simply transfer coins from you back to you, and so any harm is mitigated.

Then, there would be a transaction from the "anti replay wallet" broadcast simultaneously to the BTC and BTU chains with different destinations. When those transactions confirm, you will have BTU in a BTU only wallet, and BTC in a BTC only wallet.

From there, they can be spent independently.

Since spending coins requires BOTH the address AND the transaction they appear in to be specified, if someone were to send coins to the pre-"anti replay wallet" address, they couldn't be affected in a replay attack (barring a third fork that forks in the past, but that risk exists even when there's only one Bitcoin currency).

The drawback, of course, is that there will be a one-time delay of several hours when the funds stored in old addresses/transactions are transferred to their new replay-protected counterparts. After that accounting is transparently taken care of, it would be business as usual.

If you didn't already feel like your crypto currency investment was being competently protected by your TREZOR and TREZOR's development team, we hope that you've received some relief.

Whereas some companies accept or send bitcoin, and use canned solutions, companies like Quebex and TREZOR have developers that intimately understand the technology. This is what enables us to respond quickly and competently to the ever evolving cutting edge technology we know as Bitcoin.