The ‘Vault’ Is Back: Coder Revives Plan to Shield Bitcoin Wallets from Theft

What if there were a mechanism that placed a time delay whenever someone spent bitcoin?

The idea has been around for a few years now, and for good reason, it’s believed it could make it much harder for bad actors to steal funds from bitcoin users.

Basically, someone holding bitcoin primarily as a store of value could put it in cold storage, or hold it offline, with code that says it can be spent, but not immediately. The owner could set some pre-determined time delay on any attempt to move the coins. The fact that it has a built-in delay would give a true owner time to reverse a transaction if their private information had been compromised and someone tried to steal their crypto.

Malte Möser, Ittay Eyal, and Emin Gün Sirer proposed this feature, known as “vaults,” as a way to better secure bitcoin in 2016, but their proposal required a fork of the protocol codebase. That fork never happened.

But on Wednesday, Bitcoin Core contributor and crypto consultant Bryan…