Key Rotation, Faster Wallets and Fairer Mining Payouts

This release has three main changes:

1. Key rotation: you can now replace your master key with a new key.
2. Faster wallets: wallets with many keys load and pay much faster.
3. Fairer mining payouts: each block pays its miners with a clear rule, and the payment can no longer fail for everybody.

This post explains each change. At the end, it lists some smaller changes.

Key rotation

Your master key is the key that signs in to your account and controls your EBX. Before this change, an account had one master key for its full life. If somebody else got a copy of your key, you could not stop that key from working.

Now you can rotate it. Rotation creates a new master key and makes it your current key.

• New payments and mining payouts go to the new key.
• Your old keys stay in your account. Their funds and their Pay notes stay available in this browser.
• Old keys can no longer sign in. If a key leaks, rotation stops it from working.
• Your other browsers are signed out.

How to rotate

1. Set a password, if you do not have one. Open the menu under your avatar and select Password. Rotation needs a password, because your password protects your old keys on the server.
2. Open the Keys page and select Rotate.
3. Follow the steps. When the rotation is done, the page shows the private key of your new master key.
4. Copy the new private key and save it as your backup key now. Your old backup key no longer signs in.

An account can have up to 100 keys. The Rotate page shows how many your account has.

Use your keys in another browser

After a rotation, your other browsers are signed out. When you sign in again in another browser, open Keys, then Master Keys. There you can see all your master keys, and you can load, save and restore them. Restore your old keys with your password, so that this browser can spend their funds and read their notes.

The new Keys page

The Keys page now shows your current master key and links to three pages:

• Master Keys: all your master keys, with load, save and restore.
• Rotate: replace your current master key with a new key.
• Derived Keys: the keys that receive your payments.

Security

We tested rotation carefully before this release, and we fixed the problems that we found:

• A rotation signs out all your other browsers, so a browser with an old key cannot keep using your account.
• Only your current key can sign in. An old key still finds your account, but the sign-in is refused.
• A session is valid only while its key is your current key. If somebody signs in with an old key at the same moment as your rotation, that session gets no access.

Faster wallets

Wallets with many keys were slow. Each query of a wallet looked at each key separately, so a wallet with many keys made many slow queries. Key rotation gives every account more keys, so this problem would only get worse.

Now each part of a wallet is stored together with its account, so the database reads one account in one step, for any number of keys.

• Finding the amounts to spend in a consolidation took 4.6 seconds for a typical query in production. Now it takes about 9 milliseconds.
• Your balance is now saved for each account and updated as new blocks arrive. The Script page of a wallet with many keys now loads fast.

Fairer mining payouts

When the pool mines a block, it pays 5% of the block reward to the miners who did the work, in proportion to their shares. One payment transaction pays all of them.

A transaction can have at most 400 outputs. One output is the pool’s change, so one payment can pay at most 399 miners. Before this change, the pool did not check this limit. With 400 or more miners in one block, the payment would fail, and nobody in that block would be paid.

Now each block pays the 399 miners with the most unpaid shares. The payment always fits, so it always works. The shares of all other miners are not lost at that block. They wait for a later block, and they count again together with the new shares. A miner is paid when their unpaid shares are in the top 399.

Unpaid shares expire after one day. If your shares do not reach the top 399 within one day, they are deleted, and they are not paid. This affects only miners with very few shares. The Mine page states this rule.

If you mine a lot, nothing changes for you. To make each of your shares count ten times, read Get Verified for 10x Mining Advantage.

Other changes

• Limits on transaction size: every EarthBucks transaction now has 1 to 100 inputs and 1 to 400 outputs, the same rule as EarthBucks 2.0. The server refuses a transaction outside these limits before it saves anything. This does not change normal use: a payment from the app always fits, and if a payment needs more than 100 inputs, the app consolidates your wallet first.
• Every form field in the app now has the same background color.
• Mining payouts and verification payments now go to the EarthBucks revenue account by its name. Revenue follows a rotation of that account too.

Try it

Open the Keys page to see your current master key. If you think that somebody else has a copy of your key, rotate it now, and save the new backup key.