[vijayboyapati]

The most powerful part of multi-sig is not that you can have arbitrarily many M of N, but that you can outsource complex policy in a trusted way. E.g., create policy that lower level employees can control a small percentage of a company's holdings, while higher level employees can control a higher percent. It allows you to implement flexibility that exists in the credit system, without giving up the trust/control that comes from the blockchain system. This is a very valuable upgrade to Coinbase's feature set. Great work guys!

[IkmoIkmo]

Yeah it's pretty cool. At some point we'll see more enterprise software to take on some of the responsibilities to manage bitcoin funds like that. I think one or two such companies have already been VC funded.

The idea is that you can say create a fund with say 3 keys. One is given to the middle-manager, one is given to a senior manager, and one is given to a computer. The middle manager can go on and use up to 80% of the budget. He simply creates a transaction, signs it with his key, then sends it off. The computer sees it, and then does various fraud-type checks. It checks if the receiving address is a whitelisted partner address (e.g. a supplier) and if the amount falls within reason given payment history for example, and if the transaction doesn't use up more than 80% of the budget. It then co-signs it and the bitcoin is released.

For anything more, the computer simply won't sign it according to its programming. So the middle manager must go to the senior one to request permission to release earmarked funds.

It's just a simple example but you could move lots of the finance to a completely digital system, do immediate software-based accounting and program governance rules into the software, and spit out periodic transparency reports. Will be interesting to see when something like this gets integrated into existing ERP packages someday.

[andrewljohnson]

I don't get why you need BitCoin/multisig for this. As long as you are "giving a key" to a computer, this is no different than programming a computer to oversee the middle-manager's spending from a bank account.

I get that multi-sig and bitcoin can be good, but as long as you already have the decision-making and power setup of a corporation, this is a marginal benefit. I would see this technology being more useful for trust-type situations where you might want to give a lawyer, a beneficiary, and a guardian a key. Or any sort of situation where power is actually split between multiple entities - seems like the boss still has all the power in the situation described.