Bitcoin Forum

Economy => Marketplace => Topic started by: casascius on January 03, 2011, 10:40:05 PM



Title: $197 airline credit - 500 BTC
Post by: casascius on January 03, 2011, 10:40:05 PM
EDIT: offer closed


Title: Re: $197 on Southwest Airlines - 500 BTC
Post by: casascius on January 04, 2011, 04:13:18 AM
I have one other thing that I can offer - mainly out of curiosity to see if anyone would actually care about this.

If someone is interested, then I would be willing to produce a digitally signed offer, which basically says, "I agree to provide (described goods) in exchange for 500 BTC paid to (address) by (date-time) UTC".

By digitally signed, I mean a PDF file with an embedded "Adobe CDS" digital signature recognizable by all recent versions of Adobe Acrobat (i.e. it has a valid trust chain to Adobe's root certificate, it's associated with my real life identity and could well be considered a valid contract).  It would be a contract whose existence and performance could easily and positively be ascertained by a third party.

I had to pay for that certificate - a lot in fact - though it costs me nothing to sign files now that I have it.  This also leaves me lingering with a random thought.  Of all the ideas people have circulated (like "Bit DNS")... someone could do well to invent one that might do well as a block-chained peer-to-peer network... an anonymous reputational system.  Sorta like eBay feedback - but where all the participants are not named but merely defined by who possesses their private keys and what business they have done in the past with those keys.  Where if 1ABCxyz wanted to do business, he issued his trading partner a digitally signed invitation to leave feedback.  Where later, address 1ABCxyz could be looked up in the block chain, and one might find 208 positive feedback, totalling 50kBTC over 2 years, plus perhaps comments from anyone who gave negative feedback etc. just like on eBay.  Where the system could give a score which assigned more weight to established and diverse transactors.  (Clarification: this is not a suggestion to pollute the bitcoin block chain - it's an idea that would merit its own chain).