Bitcoin Forum

Hi there!

As I'm a newbie, and have to make a substantial post, I could as well introduce myself  ;D

I'm a traveling, coding, happily unemployed free spirit  ;D
I'm especially interested in international transactions and micropayment for the unbanked 3rd world. My ideas evolve around M-Pesa, but based on Bitcoin/crypto-currency. Those days i'm spending 24/7 building a sms/email wallet.

I know, I know, there is already http://coinapult.com/, https://coinbase.com/, and hosted wallets are not secure, I'm well aware  :P.

But as most people on earth don't have internet or the knowledge (yet) to run their own wallet, something needs to be done for them too. My idea is it to make sms a utility for early adopters to teach others.

....You know, usually you start talking about Bitcoin, and people are interested, but if you don't create them a wallet, they will forget about it again. And then you force them to pull out their smartphone, and install an app, just to be able to send them some of your money, in hope the generous gift will make them love you and Bitcoin. But it's not easy, they forgot their App/Playstore password, there is no network, or they don't even have a smartphone  :-\ I guess a lot of us are feeling like that when preaching Bitcoin. At least I know that Roger Ver does feel so, because that's how I got blockchain.info onto my phone  8)

Using an sms wallet you would go "send 0.00x phonenumber", and voila, you forced Bitcoin on them, if they want or not  ::)

So far I've basically hooked up a bitcoind with http://sms.envaya.org/. I want to have people run their own sms gateways in different countries, and earn money of it from the transaction fees. The more people they get to use their gateway, the more they can earn from it. (hopefully enough first of all to pay for the sms the gateway is sending) I'm adding 2-factor authentication though a voice-call pin system. Dreaming to integrate multi-sig transactions for escrow.

Eventually I would to tap into the remittance market, but not on a for-profit top-down way, merely enabling it.

I'm excited about your comments and opinions! (and got my pants on, I know this forum is rough!)

Kind of a cool idea. Welcome!  :)

Sounds good. Not easy to do.

Sounds like an interesting idea and a way to bring bitcoin to more people. Definitely not easy, but if you can pull it off, that would be great.

I'm sure people in the tech and dev discussion would be interested once you are allowed to post outside of here.

Welcome

Very interesting idea, but I have no idea how it could work

I am not sure I understand the concept...

My first line of thought is that when you send bitcoins, the sender sends the private key to a wallet to the receiver. But then both the sender and the receiver has the private key. And you still need to calculate the address from the private key and this is computationally expensive, at least for a primitive phone, I would guess.

my initial thoughts are that you would need some kind of server on which to calculate the addresses and public keys. To calculate these things, you need ECDSA, ripeMD160 and SHA256. I cannot imagine that these things can be calculated on the primitive phones on which you seek to use your idea. I have a hard time seeing how this would work without some kind of 3rd party tryst but there are a lot of smart people in here, maybe they can come up with something.

Would it work like this?

You send a private key, an amount and a phone number to some sms service hooked up to a server. It then sends a new private key along with the balance of this wallet to the recipient and this sms now proves that the new owner has these bitcoins. The server then deletes (or encrypts somehow) the private key, thus removing the risk of lost bitcoins if the server is hacked.

@Sword Smith: I see where you are coming from, and where I haven't been clear enough.

I'm not implementing something like a bitcoin node on a feature phone. Even if I could, most of the 10$ phones don't support "apps". you would need to flash the rom or something.

check out this screenshot of the coinbase wallet http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/15/coinbase-adds-sms-commands-so-you-can-send-btc-via-qr-on-the-q-t/ to get a good idea of it.

• the server keeps all the private keys (it hurts to write that)
• the gateways relay messages into/from the mobile networks
• the user has to trust the service, should only use it for small transactions, and not as a value store.

The idea is to bring bitcoins to people gradually. Show them advantages through a hosted wallets first. Once on the service, tell them they could do it even cheaper if they can afford internet/smartphone.

Cool idea! I hope you reach you goal!

I didn't mean a bitcoin node. I understand the need for a server. I agree with that. But you could just as well send the private key along with the sms. It would add flexibility to the system (I could import it into a desktop client, into mtgox, or into my blockchain.info wallet). Just add it in the end of the sms. This might require a whole other server solution than the one you had in mind though...

I think that's a bad idea. Once private key are exposed they are useless. The sms gateway, or the mobile provider will both we able to read the private key in transmission. At least I can try to keep the keys secure on my server. The keys are protected by two factors as long as they are on the server:
1st Factor: something you own, your phone
2nd Factor: Voice call PIN system, something you know.

Once I expose the private keys I've reduced security to only the first Factor (even worse, because the user doesn't control the network)

Edit: thx for sharing thoughts. I appreciate it very much! Sry for the rough rejection, as running a hosted wallet is actually something contradicting the Bitcoin philosophy, I'm worried about security a lot.

Edit2: why would you want to export import the private key, instead of just sending the coins to an address you created/control/can be sure about? The command in the wallet is like that: "send <amount> <phone-number/email/btc-address> [comment]"

Seem there are some risk

interesting idea
+1
good luck

Awesome idea!
Go for gold!

This is a very solid idea. It might help spreading Bitcoin to poor regions where people have no computers but do have cheap prepay phones. :)

I think there is a iPhone app called glyph that does this...

I wasn't aware of https://gli.ph/, thx for pointing out.

It's a messaging app though, it doesn't actually work with text messages (SMS). My point is reaching corners of the world that don't have smartphones/internet yet.

Welcome to the forums!

Welcome fellow peer. You have some neat ideas! Thanks for your contribution to the community.