Domain keepalive key ??

[AliceWonder]

Is it possible to authorize a private key to renew but not change domain details?

Use case:

Jaywalking is illegal in the United States.
I want to put up a web site about Jaywalking.

I have friend I trust in Australia.

Friend in Australia has actual private key that can make changes to jaywalking.bit even though he doesn't ever jaywalk or run the site.
Friend signs a key I have that allows me to keep the domain from expiring.

That way if feds bust me, they can't force me to give up private key because I don't have it. Australia is outside their jurisdiction so they can't force friend to give up key, and friend has done nothing illegal in Australia so feds can't get Australia to force friend to give up private key.

Scenario requires trust between me and foreign friend but since technically he owns the key, not me, I can't be jailed on contempt when key is not divulged because it is not my domain, I only have authority to renew it exactly as is, authority easily revoked by friend.

Is that possible?

[foglight]

to renew the name (and associated info), you just do a name_update tx. If you do not change anything, it keeps the info in the value field the same as the previous entry. and of course, your friend can store the wallet.dat file and click the buttons.

[domob]

It is not possible, but there have been ideas floating around for some time to implement exactly this - as you point out, it can be very useful from a security point of view. (Not just in the scenario you describe, but also to keep the "real" keys in cold storage.) You can probably emulate this somewhat by preparing some updates as raw transactions. Then broadcast them whenever you want to renew the domain.

[biolizard89]

As domob says, there is some work going on in this area. ryan-c, Luke-Jr, Pitbull, and I have been discussing exactly how this would be implemented. It appears that implementing a new script opcode would probably be sufficient; this would only be a softfork.

[ryanc]

You can implement this today by pre-generating a series of signed renewal transactions with nlocktime, but there's not a good tool to do this.