Before you read, check out our market announcement for Absolem!
TL;DR
- Sign up on Absolem (absolem6indyslug.onion)
- Find a public key from your bitcoin client. Instructions for Electrum are given below. (You literally just right-click on any address in 'Addresses' and click 'Public keys')
- Paste your public key into your account setting on Absolem
- Never get scammed by a market ever again
Estimated time to read: 5 min
What you get for reading: Never have your bitcoins stolen again. Never wait for market confirmations again.
Estimated time saved: 30min * number of transactions
About Our Multi-Sig
First, any of you who have glanced at or even studied and practiced the multisig tutorial on the sidebar, forget about it. Multisig at Havana and Absolem markets is way simpler than that. To get all the protection of a secure multisig implementation at these markets all you have to do is one setup step before the first time you purchase with multisig. After that it's set it and forget it. From that point on multisig at Havana will feel just the same as central escrow at other markets, with one huge, immensely important difference. At Absolem and Havana you don't have to trust a faceless, nameless darknetmarket admin to be honest and do the right thing.
Multisig First Time One Time Only Setup
Go to your settings page. The link to the settings page is under the My Account drop down at the top right of every page at Havana and Absolem. Look for a box right above the Save button at the bottom of the page that says Multisig Public Key.
If you want to know more about bitcoin public and private key pairs and signing transactions, there is a simplified explanation of how it all works together at the end of this tutorial. For now we're going to assume you don't care how it works. You just want to get it done.
There are several different ways you can get the key you need for that space on the settings page. We're going to describe what is probably the easiest and safest way. But if you' know what you're doing feel free to use another method to get the key. The key that you're getting is the public key part of the private/public keypair from an ordinary bitcoin address that you control..
Getting Multisig Public Key Using Electrum Wallet 2.0+
We recommend using this procedure to get the public key you need for the settings page. Since Havana and Absolem markets don't have market-controlled wallets, you'll need a wallet to be able to receive any refunds from vendors for orders that aren't accepted, or for refunds from resolutions. Never use market controlled wallets to store your bitcoins. It's a very unsafe and unnecessary practice.
These instructions are based on the assumption that you've never used Electrum wallet before, and you're going to download and install the latest version. If you have an older version of Electrum wallet and don't want to upgrade, there is a section below this that tells you how to get the key in older versions of Electrum.
Download the latest version of Electrum for your operating system from here: https://electrum.org/#download You'll need to enable javascript in your browser to be able to download the application from the Electrum web site. After you've finished downloading, remember to disable javascript again for maximum safety. Install Electrum per the instructions on the web site. When you start Electrum for the first time you will be prompted to create a new wallet. Make sure and create an ordinary bitcoin wallet at this step. Do NOT create a multisig wallet. It's important to save the seed you are given during the wallet creation process. Having this seed somewhere safe offline is important and can protect you in case your computer is stolen or your hard drive fails. With the seed you can always recover your wallet and any funds in the wallet. It is recommended that you password encrypt your wallet during the new wallet setup process.
Once your wallet is created and Electrum has started:
Click on the Addresses tab. You should see a bunch of empty bitcoin addresses. Find any address that shows 0 transactions and 0 balance in the address and click on the address to select it.
Right click and select freeze from the context menu.
Right click again and select Edit Label. Label the address multisig or something similar so you can identify it later if you need to.
Right click again and select Public Keys from the menu. A dialogue box will pop up with the public key for that address. Copy it to your clipboard, paste it into the Multisig Public key space on the settings page in Absolem or Havana.
It would be a good idea while you have Electrum open to copy one or more bitcoin addresses from the Addresses tab in Electrum to the Bitcoin Addresses box on the settings page, immediately to the right of the multisig public key box.
It is recommended to only use bitcoin addresses one. You'll have to make sure you have addresses in this box at all times to get refunds or dispute settlements. You can also choose to reuse a single address if you prefer.
Click save to save the changes you made to the settings page. If you saved a PGP public key to the page you will be asked to decrypt an encrypted message for verification purposes.
That's it. Now you're ready to use multisig escrow on Havana and Absolem. You shouldn't need to change any of these settings unless you need to replenish your bitcoin addresses for refunds. You can safely use the same multisig public key for all your purchases on the markets. Set it and forget it.
Getting Multisig Public Key with Electrum Versions Older than 2.0
Replace step 4 in the above procedure with the following:
- Right click again and select copy address. Select the Console tab in Electrum. On the command line type:
getpubkeys("ADDRESS YOU COPIED")
The address should be enclosed in parentheses and quotes as shown. Then, hit enter. Electrum should return the public key enclosed in quotes. Copy the key without the quotes to the settings page on Havana or Absolem and paste it into the multisig public key space.
If This All Sounds Like Too Much Work...
While we strongly recommend that buyers use multisig escrow for every transaction, you can skip creating the multisig public key and just make a purchase as you would on any market. You will be given the option to proceed with and FE transaction. FE is always and only at buyer's option on Havana and Absolem. Vendor cannot require FE.
Bitcoin Public/Private Keypairs and How Transactions Work
This is probably the source of the most confusion for people about multisig but it's really simple. First we're going to start by explaining how public private key pairs are used in typical single signature bitcoin transactions. Every bitcoin address has a public/private key pair associated with the address. If you're just using regular bitcoins transactions, your wallet hides that part of bitcoin from you most of the time. But anytime you send bitcoins to someone, what's really happening under the hood is your wallet software is writing an encoded message describing the transaction you want to do (Bob sends 1 BTC to Paul). Then your wallet uses your private key to digitally sign the encoded message and sends the signed transaction, including your public key, to the bitcoin network. The miners on the bitcoin network can tell by looking at the digital signature whether or not the signature was created using the private key corresponding to the public key that was included with the transaction. If the miners determine that the transaction was properly signed by the owner of the coins, the transaction is accepted by the bitcoin network and confirmed.
How does this work in multisig addresses and multisig escrow? Each party involved in a multisig escrow transaction provides a bitcoin public key. Those three keys are used to create a multisig address and "redeem script" associated with that address. The redeem script is an encoded block of text that describes the structure of the multisig address (how many parties, how many have to sign to allow coins to be spent). With the redeem script and the multisig address, miners are able to check a multisig spending transaction to determine if the right number of signatures created by the correct private keys are included with the transaction. If everything checks out, the spending transaction is confirmed.
huh?
wont this tie all your purchases together on the blockchain?
Even with mutlsig vendor is taking risk with price fluctuations, are you planning on offering hedging or would you not want vendors to offer discounts for FE?