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This has become one of my favorite theads. So nice and peaceful. I am sorry that we have gone somewhat off the main topic of the MinAddress proposal and web site but on the bright side we are keeping this MinAddress thread active and well bumped.
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Again the "fungibility" issue doesn't really come into it unless we start talking about *choose your favourite colour* lists.
I hadn't noticed Luke's proposal before and maybe it isn't a bad idea - but you don't think something like "stealth" is actually a *better solution* all around?
Yes, I think that stealth addresses are a huge part of the solution and should fix the whole static address for charities, billboards, and even tipping addresses in your signature here on bitcointalk.org issues. We need full and widespread adoption of stealth addresses as soon as is safely possible. BTW Peter is one of my favorite people in the whole world. Not only for his work on stealth addresses but because of this post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563925.0where he (hopefully) singled handedly wiped out all past, current and future shit/crap/junk/scam/pump-and-dump alt coins that do not implement his (or a similar) method of initial alt coin distribution. His proposal will hopefully clean up the cesspool of alt coins once and for all. I am not holding my breath but I am cautiously optimistic. |
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Here is the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334316.0;allLuke made a modest proposal: in order to gently move everyone away from address reuse lets make it a bit more costly (in time not BTC). In other words you can reuse addresses but your transaction confirmations will take a bit longer. As far as the opinions of the "general Bitcoin public" on this issue check out the poll in this thread. My first response in this thread: Knee Jerk Reaction.
One of my later responses shows my change of heart and will give you some good posts to read: And yes, this entire Luke Jr thread is a gold mine for seeing my change of heart, good posts on the issue, and good links to other threads on the same subject. One final note on blockchain.info: On the one hand they are by far the single worst source of address reuse in the Bitcoin system given that their wallet encourages address reuse and they have so many customers. On the other hand they were the first to implement the coinjoin protocol proposed by gmaxwell and offer this service very cheaply (0.0005 BTC per mixing round) to their customers. I applaud their efforts to help rectify the privacy dilution they helped to create. And an ad: bitmixer.io is the best mixing service I have found so far. They can handle mixing amounts up to 2K BTC. I tried to invest but they are not taking investors at this time. |
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is there any chance(although it is really low) that there is a coincidence of two addreses with this method?
I don't think so. I think the method is sound and will produce a one to one correspondence between MinAddress and full Bitcoin addresses. |
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I once had a vanity address that I used for everything, thought I was so cool. I will dig up the thread and even the specific posts by Greg Maxwell and Death & Taxes that convinced me that this privacy/fungibility issue is as important as I say.
In a nutshell the crux of the entire Bitcoin experiment is can we create and maintain a trustless decentralized currency? Decentralization meaning no central authority of any type. Dollars are fungible, diamonds are not. If someone pays you in dollars you can just accept them because a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. However if someone pays you in diamonds you do not know how much they are worth without appealing to a grading authority. Do you see where this is going? I suggest we have commandeered this thread long enough and we should move to another thread on the topic of how address reuse will enable and lead to the eventual destruction of the fungible, decentralized and trustless aspects of Bitcoin.
I will post a link to the thread later today when I find it again.
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Address reuse is the single largest internal threat to the long term viability of Bitcoin. It is the single largest threat that we can do something about within the Bitcoin community. ...
I wish the protocol enforced these rules. If it were possible to make this change it is the only change to the protocol I personally would support at this time.
This seems like hyperbole. Can you really link my reuse of a vanity address to a concrete threat on the longterm viability of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community? You can read one of my many rants on this subject, which is very dear to my heart as you may have noticed, just check out my signature. Post #58 in this very thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=774741.msg8758673#msg8758673 |
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How would a central bank print magic bitcoins? thats what central banks do.
To the extent that people accept Bitcoin substitute instruments to be as good as the real thing (Bitcoin paper, checks, notes, deposits, etc.) the Bitcoin Central Bank could inflate the money supply with these pseudo Bitcoins. People "in the know" like you and me will accept no substitutes and demand payment in the real thing. So it all depends on how gullible the general public is. In other words without a lot of education we are doomed to repeat history. However on the bright side, everyone I have taught about Bitcoin has "got it" and does understand, once explained, the difference between holding your own cash/value/Bitcoins and accepting a depository IOUs for them. |
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How would Fractional Reserve Bitcoin Lending work in practice? How would the Blockchain recognise any of the made up Bitcoins?
Wouldn't that be like trying to double-spend the same Bitcoin?
This sounds like it just wouldn't work to me.
Just like it does today. 1) People deposit their BTC into the bank for the same reasons they do today: security/insurance and earnings/interest 2) These people have accepted an IOU for their Bitcoins, the bank can now lend out some but not all of them - just in case someone wants some of them back. This is called their reserve. They can also, in order to stabilize a portion of their resserve, sell certificates of deposit that will cause people to deposit the BTC with them for an agreed to extended time frame, etc. All the same things they do today.3) The bank lends out let's say 50% of the coins on deposit and keeps 50% in their Trezor ( yes, banks will use Trezor hardware wallets  ) 4) Assume the people that borrow the Bitcoins spend them all out into the economy 5) Some of the people who get the spent loaned out Bitcoins, let's say 50% of them, deposit the Bitcoins into the same bank 6) The bank now has more Bitcoins on deposit so it can lend out half of them again (!) 7) Rinse, repeat. Every time the loaned out Bitcoins come back as deposits into the bank they get to loan 1/2 of them out again. Cool, eh? Profitable? Probably. Inevitable? Yes. Inherently evil? I do not think so but some here do. To a certain extent what is causing our monetary issues is the fact that the banks don't have to wait for the customer deposits in order to make loans. The can borrow money from the central bank, keep some of it and loan out the rest. Central banking evil? Probably. At least some of the founding fathers of the US thought so. |
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What is the opinion on this product, does it work?
It is a great product, it works and I suggest you get one. If you just read back a few pages you will see there is a general consensus that the product works. |
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... in order to adhere to an abstract principle that not everyone agrees with or thinks about. Where the abstract principle you are talking about is address reuse. I don't consider this an "abstract" issue. Address reuse is the single largest internal threat to the long term viability of Bitcoin. It is the single largest threat that we can do something about within the Bitcoin community. Address reuse should be discouraged by any and all means possible. Companies, individuals, charities, etc. who continue to reuse addresses should be boycotted until they change their ways. Deterministic key pair generation should be used for all periodic payments, all donation addresses, all mining pool payouts, and all other times when multiple payments are made from one entity to another entity. Ideally all addresses would be used only once and contain only two transactions: a single funding transaction followed by an eventual single spending transaction. All change should go to a fresh address every time. I wish the protocol enforced these rules. If it were possible to make this change it is the only change to the protocol I personally would support at this time. |
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You can sit here and discuss the evils of FRB all you want but the fact is that it will happen if profitable, and I see no reason that it would not be profitable - perhaps you can prove it would not be? So once it does happen what are you going to do?
Would not they need to create a legal framework for FRB or otherwise it would be treated under fraud laws as it should be? I don't think it is fraud to borrow and lend BTC. Why would that be fraud? Are you going to pass a law to make it illegal to borrow or lend BTC? If a Bitcoin bank tells you up front that they will accept your BTC on deposit and that they will keep 50% of all BTC on deposit as reserve and they weekly publish their liabilities and assets, proving their reserve and you accept this contract to loan them your BTC - where is the fraud? You call me ignorant (or someone did) yet you have not one iota of an idea about the principals of fractional reserve lending. Yes you can have loans without fractional reserve lending. It's called loaning money that is actually yours. Why don't you explain to me the necessity of why we need people to lend money that does not exist vs. making loans with money they actually possess? And stop calling it a "libertarian idea" that most oppose it. It is out of a humanitarian concern for all individuals and the value of the money they earn that I oppose it. I am not going to argue for or against the necessity of FRB. I am only arguing that it will happen and it will be up to you to decide if you want to participate in it or not. |
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You can sit here and discuss the evils of FRB all you want but the fact is that it will happen if profitable, and I see no reason that it would not be profitable - perhaps you can prove it would not be? So once it does happen what are you going to do?
Would not they need to create a legal framework for FRB or otherwise it would be treated under fraud laws as it should be? I don't think it is fraud to borrow and lend BTC. Why would that be fraud? Are you going to pass a law to make it illegal to borrow or lend BTC? If a Bitcoin bank tells you up front that they will accept your BTC on deposit and that they will keep 50% of all BTC on deposit as reserve and they weekly publish their liabilities and assets, proving their reserve and you accept this contract to loan them your BTC - where is the fraud? |
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You can sit here and discuss the evils of FRB all you want but the fact is that it will happen if profitable, and I see no reason that it would not be profitable - perhaps you can prove it would not be? So once it does happen what are you going to do?
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Quit your belly aching about evil loaning, banking and fractional reserve. These things cannot be stopped so deal with it. Make personal choices that make sense to you. Bitcoin lending will happen (already does). If Bitcoin goes mainstream then Bitcoin banks will happen. No amount of cussing and discussing this in a forum in the backwaters of the internet is going to stop it. No amount of calling it stupid is going to stop it because if someone can make money doing it - they will. So, when the time comes it will be up to you to personally decide if lending your precious BTC to a bank is worth the risk or not by looking at the various factors: How much interest are they paying me? Is the interest in BTC or fiat? How is their insurance in case of theft or bank failure? What is their reserves? Do they periodically prove their reserves. How much of my BTC do I want to risk and how much do I want to keep as cash, right here in my trusty Trezor? Etc. Also, when the time comes it will be up to you to decide if you are going to accept a Bitcoin susbstitute for payment or not. Will you accept a check from a buddy's Bitcoin account that you can deposit in your Bitcoin account or cash in for actual real live Bitcoins at his bank? If you do then you are participating in the fractional reserve system and accepting a Bitcoin substitute until you claim the real Bitcoins and during that time you have personally inflated the Bitcoin money supply - you. What about the place you work? Would you accept a Bitcoin check from them for your salary? Or will you insist they pay you in "cash", that is actual Bitcoins from their wallet? Assume you know the IOU is good. Does it hurt to accept an IOU until you get to their bank and have the bank put the BTC into your wallet? Again, for that time you have made a personal decision to inflate the Bitcoin money supply. You bastardo! Fractional reserve banking of BTC cannot be stopped but you can choose how much you want to participate in it. |
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You want to buy a house or a car, but you don't have the bitcoins so you need to borrow them. Where are you going to borrow them from if there are no banks? 1) There should be enough free capital floating around the ecosystem that you can crowdfund any money that you need. BTC should be only one of dozens of competing currencies. 2) Once the centralized banking system gets shut down, along with the MIC and govs... the three forces that drain 90 per cent of human capital will be gone, so we'll have trillions more in the planetary economy. It might take decades, but this is where it's going. 90 per cent of our wealth goes to exotic weapons, Cayman bank accounts, overpriced pharmaceuticals and outdated oil technology. Where's the bank? I'M THE BANK. And so is anyone else with more than a 1/4 BTC. Peace on Earth Oh good, I've been looking all over for the bank. I need you to loan me $500,000 so I can buy a new house. Do you have a branch office where can I fill out the application? I still haven't been answered. Which one of you geniuses is loaning me a half million dollars in btc? The capability may not exist now, but it will exist in the future. P2P lending is growing. Just go to BTCjam and post a loan request for the $500,000. Good luck! |
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Yes, it's a bad idea to re-use address, but it is an absolutely stupid idea to discard a private key.
I would not call it stupid. I would call it very dedicated. He is dedicated to forcing people to stop reusing addresses, at least when dealing with him. If everyone did this there would be no address reuse. Sure some BTC might get lost along the way but pain is a very effective teacher. People would learn through the pain of losing BTC when they reused an address that reusing addresses is bad and wrong and they would stop doing it. |
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Hmmmmmm. No. Without the block number it will be firstbits or it won't work. For example without the block number find "1bu". Where is it?
Well , we can start with the first block and check if 1bu uniquely identifies an address in that block, if yes we take full address and move to next step, if no we move to the next block and so on till we find a full address or reach the latest block. Once we get full address we compare if the block where we found the full address is the first block where the address occurs in the blockchain, if true we have our final full address otherwise we goto first step. Only thing is that the cost of calculation is very high unless some kind of database is used to speedup the process. UPDATE: The encoding process will also required to be changed and instead of finding the min characters to make address unique in a block we will be required to find the min characters to make it unique among all receive addresses having 1st block upto the 1st block of the address in question. So similar to firstbits but smaller. Thinking this through: Let's say that the firstbits of a specific Bitcoin address is "1burtw", actual address is 1BurtW.... You propose that without specifying the block number you might be able to shorten it and still find the original address. OK, by the definition of firstbits there will exist within blocks before the very first occurance of the 1BurtW... Bitcoin address other addresses that start with 1burt because if there are no other addresses starting with 1burt then 1burt would be the firstbits by definition. All of these other addresses will match 1burt<x> where <x> is not the letter W or w. The question is: is there any case where we can use 1burt to find the proper 1burtw address? Well if there is a single unique occurance of 1burt<x> where <x> is not W or w then we cannot use 1burt because your algorithm will find the previous unique 1burt address. In fact the only time your algorithm can be used to shorten 1burtw to 1burt is if every single block which contains a 1burt<x> pattern in the blockchain before the first occurrence of 1burtw has two different 1burt<x> patterns. Since <x> in our case here is all of the following characters: 123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUV WXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuv wxyz I think the probability that every 1burt<x> occurrence will occur in a block with two different 1burt<x> patterns to be not worth the extra computational effort above the standard firstbits computational effort. To summarize: you will almost always be able to find a block that contains a single 1burt<x> pattern so the algorithm will almost always result in the firstbits. |
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but the mtgox bitcoins they did have, are still on the blockchain, however mt gox lost the private keys or the private keys got stolen.
Can the private keys not be traced though? If someone spends the private keys wont it show on the blockchain where they went? If they were stolen then they have been mixed and are not traceable. |
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Hmmmmmm. No. Without the block number it will be firstbits or it won't work. For example without the block number find "1bu". Where is it?
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Daily bump.
dooglus's 18e98-1c is the MinAddress to beat.
To answer a question I got by PM: I will probably close out this contest at the end of this month unless there is a lot of activity but I expect activity will die off pretty rapidly as we go farther back into the blockchain.
Any "older timers" want to claim your 0.1 BTC?
I'm unclear about the required 0.1 BTC balance on the address. Does it need to stay on the address, or just be there when you check the address? I don't really understand why you ask for it to have a non-dust balance at all, since you also require proof of ownership anyway. Because people (one specifically) cheated by claiming an old address where someone had posted the private key online after using it. They claimed the address as their own and proved it (they did have the private key). However they would not be foolish enough to send BTC to an address where it would probably be swept within seconds. The reason the address must have and maintain 0.1 BTC until I pay them is that someone could go ahead and send a small amount to an old publicly available private key, it gets swept, but they still make a profit on the scam. So, the rule was changed. The winning address must have 0.1 (or more) BTC. I have also now decided on how to end this thing: X consecutive days with no change in the winning address. I am open to suggestions on what X should be. |
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