If a journalist does not depend on the initiation of violence to get their information, I don't care how private their sources are.

With governments it's different, because they claim to be acting on our behalf, and are using money obtained by taxation. At the very least, we are entitled to know that they're doing on our behalf with our money.

You're assuming that government leaders behave better in secret than they do in public. I don't think there's much evidence for that.

Very insightful. I went to University in the late 70s when very generous government grants were available, and I chose not to take them, on principle. But I think I should have done so, for the reasons you explained.

Before we go too far down the track, can we agree on a project name? I'm uneasy about BitDNS, because we aren't writing a Domain Name Server. How about BitDomains, or DomainChain?

I mean that cash is anonymous but not exempt from government regulations (such as taxation). Similarly, bitcoin can be anonymous but not exempt from government regulations.

For me, the essential difference between cash and bitcoin isn't anything to do with regulations, it's that the government can't inflate the number of bitcoins.

And that would be false advertising.

The traders at my local market only sell for cash, but the taxman knows how to get at least some tax out of them all.

Of course fivegrinder uses mtgox as a payment processor, if you just need to confirm that it can work.

You could give a gift from one phone to another, using nothing more than Bluetooth file transfer.

Evil deeds are evil whether or not they are being done in the name of a religion, and regardless of which country is doing them.

Evil deeds always boil down to "the initiation of violence", and it is that which should be stopped. This defuses the situation a little by taking religion out of the equation.

Kiba is wise.

So you would prefer that voters elect their governments based on what the voters think the governments are doing, rather than based on what the governments are actually doing?

I think this schedule may be possible:

1. Two weeks: Prepare, agree and release three documents: an overview in non-technical language, a FAQ, and a technical but informal white paper which expounds the motivation and the design principles.

2. Three months: Demonstrate a "proof of concept" on a test network.

3. Six months: Release a basic but usable version 0.1.

(4. Generate some names while the difficulty is low.
5. Profit!)


I will start on the documents. I would rather be programming too, but as kiba says: time is of the essence. This is an idea whose time has come. We can't get this done with just RHorning, kiba and me. We have to build a team. And a set of basic documents serves two important purposes: it attracts newcomers to the team, and it helps to keep the whole team working towards the same goal.

Here are some early tasks that fall on the "non-documentation" side, in case you or anyone else is interested.

* Set up the development environment. Are we going to use SourceForge? GitHub?
* Choose a project name. We've been using "BitDNS", but it's not really an accurate name because we're not reimplementing DNS, just domain name registration. Then register the ".org" domain.
* Set up a build process so that we can distribute for Windows, Linux and OS/X.
* Read, learn and understand the Bitcoin source code and its underlying principles.

The bounty is never going to compensate fully for the work, which might end up being thousands of hours in total. But the bounty shows whether people are serious about wanting something, and the bounty might just make the difference if someone is deciding bitween BitDNS and some other project.

That would solve the problem for people who use a bitcoin client. But it doesn't address the problem for people who are using a bitcoin "bank" as their bitcoin wallet. I suppose they will have to open another account with another bitcoin "bank" to be able to receive their funds.

Relax, guys. Bytemaster showed up once before to reassure us. And he didn't force people to let him look after the bounty; no-one else volunteered.

Not everyone visits every forum every day. And until there's a claim on the bounty, it's hypothetical anyway, so there's still time for him to show up again.

They are responding to a problem caused by a central authority by enacting ... another central authority. But I don't think it's because "they sucks". I think it's because they haven't been exposed to such a beautiful decentralised design as bitcoin.


Adapting the bitcoin source code is probably the only practical way for us to get this running. But first I would like to see us produce a brief white paper setting out the design principles, and a non-technical FAQ.

Then I think what you seek is impossible.

If you want to do away with trust, you need a distributed solution like ... bitcoin. Not a bitcoin bank. You have to trust your bank.

Far out, I just generated twice in the last 24 hours!

So I will increase my pledge to 100 Bitcoins.

You mean a site like MyBitcoin or MtGox?

Hourly backups, encrypted. One half of the decryption key is encrypted with Satoshi's public key, one half with Theymos' public key. Hope that Theymos and Satoshi don't go bad.

The EFF might be quite startled to see that others have access to their account balance.