Bitcoin Forum

A few months ago, maybe a year, I remember reading a research article about embedding messages into the blockchain. The method was not simply sending ASCII binary transactions (e.g. 0.01101101BTC). As I remember, the process involved something like:

1. Alice sends a transaction to some carefully sculpted keypair, and notifies Bob of that address. Alice redeems the coins so the public key is visible.
2. Bob performs some operations on the public key and derives an additional keypair, and sends coins there. Alice, knowing which operations Bob would be doing, watches the blockchain until she identifies Bob's transaction.
3. Somehow, with this info, Alice and Bob can communicate securely, but maybe also anonymously.

I've scoured the forum, and I've repeatedly asked google, but no dice. Can anyone remember the article? At the time, it was presented as a real problem because, while the ASCII transaction above could be detected and maybe discouraged, this method was completely undetectable.

Thanks.

Did you look at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Research?

Thanks for the link. Good to return back to unsaved / unbookmarked docs.

I haven't read the report but CommitCoin perhaps might lead toward the answer:

 - http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~clark/projects/commitcoin/

Thanks for the link - didn't know about it. Unfortunately it's not there.

No, it's not commitcoin. It's more an article about using the blockchain to send personal messages. Commitcoin is very awesome but, unless I misunderstand, it's not about messaging. Cheers.

These aren't exactly like you had specified, but here are some services I have looked at in the past couple of days:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47283.0

and

http://btcmsg.staticloud.com/

These are viewable by anyone though.

I would imagine it would not be hard to come up with a communication algorithm that only you and whoever it was you were wanting to communicate with would know and be a little more secure though.  It would just depend on how you decided to cypher the text and transmit it.

No, it's something different. There was something special about this communication method that made it notable. If I could remember that I'm sure I or someone here would find the article. Thanks.