For local filesystem encryption I use ecryptfs which is free software (Truecrypt is open source but not free software).  It's pretty cool.  It can encrypt a whole partition or just make a virtual filesystem on a ~/Private directory.

It will certainly happen, but to do so the initiator will have to gather miners around him, otherwise his block chain will remain very weak compared to bitcoin's.

This has been discussed several times in the forum.  Most of us think that there's nothing wrong with competing currencies, whether they are cryptographic or not is not the issue.  Competing currencies are good for the economy.

Thanks but unfortunately I can't use Perl, Python or any of this kind of advanced scripting language on my web server.  I have to stick to shell scripting.

I'm slowly working my way through though.  I will definitely use GnuPG and not RSA finally, for GnuPG is much more known.  I'll just have to read the manual page many times.

I don't understand much but it seems to be a nice project.  I also like the idea that your protocol could be implemented with a script language (you're talking about using wget and tcpdump, which is cool).

So I'll give you 1 BTC.

This explains a lot.

I didn't know this one.  It looks pretty good.

PS.  Just donated a few BTC to this.

unixtime2date() {  date -d "1970-01-01 $1 sec" ; }

I am currently programming a bitcoin asset exchange plateform, and during this process I came up with an idea which is, in my opnion, pretty good.

I needed some way to identify the owner.  He should be able to prove he is the owner of the asset, and he should be able to transfer his ownership to someone else.

Using passwords is the quick-and-dirty way to do so.  But there are many drawbacks to this method.  I won't discuss them here.

At some point I wanted to use ECDSA signing capabilities of bitcoin address.  But it's not easy, and the bitcoin client doesn't provide any tool for that.  And I was convinced that it should not.

Using GnuPG would be nice, but I realised that it's a pain in the ass to program with.  It realy doesn't seem to me that it is suitable for scripting.

So I decided to use RSA keys, using the openssl command.  It was much easier than I thought, and particularly easier than GnuPG.

Anyway, here is the idea I came up with.

At some point I have to associate a bitcoin address (where future dividends are to be paid) to a public RSA key.  Keeping a database of these relations is necessary, but not sufficient.  Basically it would give exactly the same problems as with passwords.  Anybody who would access to the database could modify it and then claim ownership of the assets.

So the idea is to timestamp the relations into the bitcoin block chain.

Here is an exemple.

I want to associate this bitcoin address :

1Hy9dexzNzjvQYkYy6zKRVZMU8k2j5vuPt

to this RSA public key :

-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEA67nZtqz41rGFdUsVMC/E
HsvhfyG7dreTeIfOO+tA1fUuyooiodsYw73qM4qKZFJduBdtrMqAiQhGkfUjhqbf
aIlc/5yR+0ZUHI6eiCcPtDi95MdpmDtlXg/9YkQ36ACZX2ccCIiUIaHVK4lc2MzT
6Io9FaXCejkoZiEsAK+XqUxc3X5B0VFVxyq4i/S7qOQKABfEDaF56OhtW3URGX7V
LTOxMmSccL/tVeN3cwUfNOHsoVF7g1bqPGYvdEGOzEklzJ3i2IYMah7d4So3BlXr
OMI6HCZTfCd+J64c5h6dh2ciQr27XDUKBVQhm3s5gwQl0WRcQhQ4LRG3ur+Rud5q
2QIDAQAB
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----


All I have to do is to use a timestamping function like this one :

timestamp() {
    wget -O - -q http://blockexplorer.com/q/hashtoaddress/$(openssl dgst -rmd160)
}

this way :

{ echo 1Hy9dexzNzjvQYkYy6zKRVZMU8k2j5vuPt ; echo "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEA67nZtqz41rGFdUsVMC/E
HsvhfyG7dreTeIfOO+tA1fUuyooiodsYw73qM4qKZFJduBdtrMqAiQhGkfUjhqbf
aIlc/5yR+0ZUHI6eiCcPtDi95MdpmDtlXg/9YkQ36ACZX2ccCIiUIaHVK4lc2MzT
6Io9FaXCejkoZiEsAK+XqUxc3X5B0VFVxyq4i/S7qOQKABfEDaF56OhtW3URGX7V
LTOxMmSccL/tVeN3cwUfNOHsoVF7g1bqPGYvdEGOzEklzJ3i2IYMah7d4So3BlXr
OMI6HCZTfCd+J64c5h6dh2ciQr27XDUKBVQhm3s5gwQl0WRcQhQ4LRG3ur+Rud5q
2QIDAQAB
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----"
} | timestamp

And I get a bitcoin address :

13CWM9MmeyP1MA6SgAiqAq7cGxXaLWhnTG

Now, the owner of the RSA just have to send a small amount to this address, so that no-one could claim ownership of this bitcoin address.  Why would anyone claim ownership of someone else's bitcoin address ?  Only because this could give him the right to transfer it to an other bitcoin address, one that he actually owns.

The whole point of all this is that with such a method ownership of assets can be identified by bitcoin addresses, providing that these addresses are timestamped with a RSA public key.


PS.  Hum... as I write this, I realise that this method might make the use of GnuPG easier than I thought.  Maybe finally easier than RSA.

I just want to tell you that I am currently building something similar and it's gonna kick ass !

It will be a bash CGI script and it will just use RSA keys to identify owners of shares.  I'll use the excellent "openssl" command that I've recently learned.

The US governments could not do that alone, because it can control only its own territory.

Do you think it can convince other countries to track their citizens and prevent them to run the bitcoin client ?

I doubt so.  USA's influence is not that strong.

It's very much possible that some of Keiser's watchers convert part of their gold into bitcoins, as I do.

OMG it's true :

<< Max and Stacy talk about stock market riots, p2p currencies and the banking solvency crisis. In the second half, Max talks to Mike Maloney of goldsilver.com about currency crises, China's gold and the silver market. >>

I love this guy.  I haven't been following him for a long time but I'm glad he's one of the first to talk about P2P currencies.

PS.    Just listened to Stacy Herbert talking about bitcoin.  That's great !  Stacy Herbert and Max Keiser are, with others such as Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, some of the guys I was listening to every day during the crisis.  I'm glad they get interested in bitcoin !

lol aucune chance de trouver un tel site.  Comme tu l'as compris, le bitcoin est encore ultra-confidentiel en France.  Par contre c'est pas une raison pour ne pas poster ton annonce sur leboncoin.  Après tout ça coute rien et si il y a un début à tout.  Comme ça tu pourras dire à tes petits enfants :  et bien moi j'ai été le premier à vendre des trucs en bitcoins sur leboncoin.  Note que la consonnance des deux mots est amusante aussi (boncoin...bitcoin).

Bref vas-y, poste ton annonce, t'as pas grand chose à perdre.

Gold might rise in the next few days too.  Wait and see.

J'ai malheureusement passé l'âge de faire du patin à roulette, donc je ne pourrai pas t'acheter ces trucs, désolé.

Par contre ça me fait penser qu'on devrait inciter les gens à publier ce genre d'annonce sur leboncoin.fr.  Non seulement c'est gratuit mais ça peut être bon aussi pour la promo de notre cryptodevise préférée.

En effet si quelqu'un tombe par hasard sur une annonce affichant "475 BTC" comme prix, il a toutes les chances d'être intrigué.

I think this could be nice but it needs some thinking.

So the idea is that the robot would supervise an auction on IRC.

The seller tells the robot (Bot) to open an auction for an item (Item) until a deadline (Dl).

Bot opens a channel #auction-[short name for Item]
It also sets the topic as something like "Auction for [full description of Item] until Dl.  No starting price."

To place a bid, a user just enters his amount in one of these format:

123.456 BTC : plain explicit bid (unit may also be bc, kBTC,...)
123.456 : bid with no monetary unit (assuming BTC)
+1 : relative bid (1 BTC more than last bid)
'35: implicit format.  For instance after several bids of value close to 34000, '35 would actually mean 35000.
Or after several bids such as 10.29, 10.32, 10.33,  '35 would mean 10.35

The main rule for the robot would be to take the value closest to the previous bid, keeping it beyond a 110% increase.  For instance, after a bid of 1000 (with no decimal), then '20 would mean 1020, and not 20000.  If no interpretation can fit the 110%, then the robot takes the closest and ask for confirmation.

At then end the robot adjudicates the auction by declaring the winner.  He then sends a log of the whole auction to the seller.


Here is an exemple of how such an auction would look like.


and so on until :


I know there is biddingpound.com but I just don't like websites.

throttle or block ?  If it's just throttle, I doubt it would have a major impact, since bitcoin doesn't use much bandwith.

Also, there is always the possibilities of bypassing restrictions, such as VPN, I2P, Tor etc.

If some people created a bitcoin-dedicated ASIC, I'd be amazed.  It would be a strong indicator about how involved are some people into the bitcoin project.

1000 blocks to go.

brocktice leads at 1270 BTC

anyone at 1280 ?

After an epic IRC battle one block before the end, Kiba wins the auction with 13 BTC.  Congratulations to him.

Thanks everyone.

Please notice I have an other auction for a gold coin that is currently running until block 100,000 :
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2209.0