Bitcoin Forum

I think this could be an interesting topic with interesting implications to bitcoin.
What do you think: will China ever think of banning email?

why not, they already banned clean air.

I very much doubt it as the PRC government aren't really that concerned about "private discussion" between individuals (and mass emailing is generally fairly easy to identify) and also there is so much business that *depends* upon email (after all it's not as though they could turn to Facebook or Twitter).

What I was thinking is that someone living in a country that doesn't allow bitcoin (doing deep packet inspection or something) could travel to a country where it is allowed and issue loads of addresses with small amounts of bitcoin, and then come back and use email to send the coins, sending a list of private keys that would make the total amount in the correspondent bitcoin addresses, the desired value to send.
To receive coins, ask the payer to send them also in "bitcoin quanta", let's call it like that, using email and PGP, sending for that matter a list of private keys that would sum to the total value of that payment.
Am I making sense?
Is that sending the private key to an address with a lot of money is risky. And having them 'quantized' makes it less risky; and seems to work well for sending and receiving the coins with email and PGP.

Just use Armory. Receiver holds the watch-only copy and construct unsigned transaction, and send the unsigned transaction to the payer through email. The payer will sign and return it to the receiver by email, and the receiver will broadcast it.

It's easier for them to completely shutdown the internet

To put it simpler:
you would have all your 'satoshis' in separate addresses and send the private keys by email/PGP as needed.

Sure - sending private keys via email (to be swept) or signing raw tx's offline (which does not require Armory of course) would work, however, I would probably go a little further to "obscure" the information like using say stego with one or more attached pics (if you are worried about the emails being "identified" as payments).

one problem with this is that the person who decides to combine them at some point will pay huge fees.

just like it's inconvenient to accept/handle thousands of physical 1c coins, it'd be inconvenient to accept/handle millions of 1-satoshi keys.

maybe instead create some like this:

1 btc
0.5
0.2
0.1
0.05
0.02
0.01
0.005
etc.

It would make more sense to run a email based bitcoin client proxy. Basically you could do Electrum via email protocol instead of Stratum protocol.

For minimal work this could be written as a layer on top of an Electrum Server, maybe with some obfuscation in the email to make filtering less easy.

Electrum already supports proxies so you could make a email proxy that would take the json calls and wrap them as email. Or something more generic could be written as a email client plugin that provides a wallet interface but communicates via email. I don't think that would even be very difficult - more a case of wanting to do it.

Interesting idea, harkens back to the early 90s, a golden era in terms of attempting to shoehorn all manner of protocols into email/smtp interfaces due to unreliable connectivity and lack of bandwidth.  At one point both Lotus and Microsoft had products doing fullblown database synchronization & replication over email transports, so it's not beyond imagination to conceive of Bitcoin clients even heavier than Electrum someday piggybacking on SMTP to get around nasty censorship conditions.

I've still got Notes DBs running on that tech. Works without fail.

Lol!

I believe Chinese people will have more freedom than Americans, in 2 or 3 decades.

Am not sure how things are done in America in regards to buying prepaid SIMs but in China you have no need to show ID (and they are very cheap) and you can also buy mobile phone frequency "blockers" openly from the markets here. :)

SIMs are cheap, or IDs are cheap? (or both?)

Probably both (haven't bought the latter though). :D

You can also openly buy things like "mosquito rackets" (electrified mozzie zappers that look like a tennis racket) which are *banned* in many western countries.

Everything is made in China.

including melamine

Indeed - food is something you need to be a little careful about in China (something that all those "rules" and "regulations" does help with in western countries).

i once bought some cheap peanut butter that i (after i'd used it a couple of times), discovered was made in china . the rest went straight in the bin... not worth the risk.

unfortunately for australians, the kiwis seem to be less stringent about letting in chinese vegetables, and then half of them end up being sent here and passed off as "product of new zealand".

i can only imagine what kind of chemicals are in those frozen peas.

By the same token I would never eat any of those "huge" western chickens that have been fed hormones to make them so big (and interestingly you don't see those for sale in most of the supermarkets in China).

I didn't know these were banned - reasoning? We've always had a couple of them around the house here (in Thailand). Sounds like many things are the same here. Sim cards easy to get without ID anywhere, even 7-11, and food - you never know where it came from but luckily most of what we eat is local from village neighbours.

They certainly are in Australia (got two of them confiscated in customs) and being battery operated ones (using I think 4 D cells) I find it hard to believe that they could hurt anything much bigger than a mozzie.

:)

Certainly, but not through any merit of their own.

Chinese people all hate government and socialist, but Americans love them, so they elected Obama :) again

No.

Those in China are pseudo-socialists.

related article in the herald today:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/cheap-meth-cheap-guns-click-here-20130103-2c6v3.html

talks about tight chinese laws but no enforcement.

AS YOU SAY
 I was thinking is that someone living in a country that doesn't allow bitcoin (doing deep packet inspection or something) could travel to a country where it is allowed and issue loads of addresses with small amounts of bitcoin, and then come back and use email to send the coins, sending a list of private keys that would make the total amount in the correspondent bitcoin addresses, the desired value to send.

That's really interesting. Thanks for the note...

They would never ban email.

E-mail is trivially easy to gather for surveillance. State will never step against it because more secure and hidden means of internet communication will replace it.

It is legal in Italy  :D

I wouldnt be surprised if the Chinese have surveillance systems of chinese mail after all they are communists and have every right to.

I did not know that americans and europeans are communists too! In USA and EU e-mail is monitored as well and it is perfectly legal to do and required by law.

i can buy them in canada, from a dollar store, just fine

Hi there, payb.tc.

How are things going with Your Pirate Pass Through Scam (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83904.0)?

Oh? You've stopped responding to your scam thread and changed your handle?

How much money did you steal? How much money do you owe? What do you know about pirate?

Oooh..  I love my mozzie bat!  The handle unscrews and I plug it into the wall to recharge.  A friend of the family was importing them here into Australia - I had no idea they were banned. 
It gives a nice little nip when you push your finger into it. Enough to scare .. but hard to see how it could be dangerous.

I expect the ban comes under the same law that restricts tazers and any tazer like device. They probably think people will modify them and beef them up into weapons.

No, I seriously think they are banned because it is cruelty against animals lol