Bitcoin is an amazing form of money and the technology Satoshi created has incredible potential. However, most people don’t realize that the blockchain not only allows for a great medium of exchange, but it also provides the means for creating notarized proofs. The following walkthrough aims to show anyone how to prove they own a bitcoin cash address using Melis wallet (provided that you own your private keys and Melis leaves private keys in users’ hands).
The decentralized cryptocurrency bitcoin cash (BCH) not only provides people with the means of permissionless exchange with extremely low fees, but it also can help verify the owner of a specific BCH address. It also means that notarized proofs can be managed on the BCH blockchain, but today for simplicity sake we’re just going to deal with proving ownership of a specific BCH address.
With a private key, an owner can create a message like “I own this address,” show the public address, and provide a valid signature which essentially proves ownership of the address. In order to get started and test a public address, download the latest version of Melis. The client is a reliable BCH wallet that comes with a tool that allows you to sign messages and prove address ownership.
After downloading Melis, open it on your desktop and create a new BCH account (singlesig and without server sign). Following the new creation of a BCH account, navigate to the “gear icon” that represents the settings of specific accounts ash showed in the image below.
At this point, click on the “Addresses” icon, the one circled in the image below.
From the list of addresses (you can have as many as you want) choose the one you want to sign.
From here simply press sign and the wallet will provide a long alphanumeric string and you can copy and paste this signature. Melis will ask you PIN code before signing, so the software will prompt you to enter it before signing the message. Now the combination of these three things will allow you to verify the message and the signature. Another person cannot sign with the address unless they hold the private key and if its password protected it’s even harder to steal.
Verify the Integrity of the Digital Signature
Close the pop-up window (“Dismiss”) after you have copied the message, address, and the alphanumeric string (signature). Go back in your BCH list of addresses and in the upper right corner of the screen you see a button named “Verify”. Click it.
Enter the same exact text (message — public address — signature) into the three sections. You can then press verify and if all the information is correct, the wallet software will validate the integrity of the message and ownership of the address.
Moreover, other people can verify the integrity of the message and signature as well with different types of wallets and alternative software. So after you’ve created a unique message, you can give it to friends, family or to anyone in the world and show them the notarized proof. Remember, all the person needs to provide a notarized message proving ownership of a specific BCH address is:
The Message
The BCH address
The Signature — (a long alphanumeric string much longer than an address), a signature tied to an address cannot be completed without private key ownership.
This method of proving ownership can come in handy for many reasons because only the person with a private key associated with the signature can prove they own the BCH address. Proof of ownership helps bolster things like proving existence with a message and notarizing certain data and making it impossible to forge. Back in 2017, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange used a message on the BTC chain to prove existence and that he was still alive.
In fact, the person behind the Satoshi Nakamoto monicker could prove he/she is Bitcoin’s creator by providing a legitimate message and signature tied to one of Nakamoto’s known addresses. The private key associated with the signature makes it so no one can create a signed message with your address on your behalf without that key. Learning to sign and verify with a bitcoin cash address using Melis is easy and only takes a few minutes to understand the basics.