An interesting aspect of information market is that it is, as far as I know, the only market where both transfers are, thanks to bitcoins, irrevocables and decentralized.

I mean : when you buy a piece of information, say a 32Ko block, you exchange pure information against bitcoin.  Both transfer doesn't imply the use of a trust party in any way, at least if you don't require compensation.  It's really a pure exchange model, from a technical point of view.

Therefore I think implementing a P2P information market software can be an interesting experimentation.

If I were to suggest a technique to do so, I would say that a P2P decentralized adjudication and compensation system would be installed, inspired from the bitcoin model.  Each bid and ask for a given hash would be broadcasted globally on the network, and a node would be allowed to perform both adjudication/compensation automatically after some proof of work of increasing difficulty.  The unpredictable location of this node would ensure honnesty of adjudication/compensation.  At least as long as the honnests nodes are majoritary, like in the bitcoin model.

Let me give an example.

Say Alice is a node in the network, and wants to buy the 32Ko block whose hash is HHH.  She lets every nodes in the network know what she wants (she broadcasts a bid).   Bob has HHH, and in response, he broadcast a ask for this block.  After some time, all nodes will have their own copies of a global orders book stored in their memory.  According to the protocol, nothing happens until a node, say the one that belongs to Claire, performs a certain proof-of-work on this book order.  Then Claire does the adjudication of the book order, and publishes her results, resulting in the possibility of the exchange between Alice and Bob.  Alice then send bitcoins to Claire, and Bob sends the block to Claire.  Claire, then, sends block to Alice, and bitcoins to Bob, thus performing compensation.

Anyway, I think the information market problem is a interesting one, from a theoretical point of view.

There would be many ways to implement it, imo.  Only one would be perfect, and we should keep looking for it.  For instance, the above proposal would suffer several problems.  One is that nothing is done to prevent dumb nodes to have the whole network waste time.  Indeed, a node might very well *try* to steal some bitcoins by pretending it has pretty much all hashes, although it actually has nothing.  The network would realize the scam and avoid it only at compensation level, thus wasting a lot of resource and time.  It could halt the whole network.  Thus, a trust system should be implemented, in order to avoid nodes that try to publish rubbish.  The economics algorithm of GNUnet would do the job, I guess.

An other idea :  in a "do one thing, but do it well" philosophy, adjudication and compensation should be separated.  In our example, this would mean that Claire would only be in charge of adjudication.  She would process the order book and produce a "request for compensation".  Such a request would then be broadcasted in the network, and an other proof-of-work would be required on it before the compensation could be performed by an other node, say Daniel.

Both Claire and Daniel, seen respectively as a Adjudicator and a compensator, would be judged in the trust GNUnet model by Alice and Bob for their respectives roles, so that they can be avoided later if they don't do their job properly.

Section 11 of their Terms of Service :

 11.1. Issuer reserves the right to assess and collect the following fees from
 Users account the following fees: (i) Monthly Fee; collected by Issuer
 monthly from Users account; (ii) Transfer Fee, deducted by Issuer in USD from
 the recipient account of a Transfer, these fees are available in Issuers web
 page in the Fees page; (iii) Administrative Fees, collected by Issuer for
 providing support to User when User contacts Issuer and Issuer is not
 at fault.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think very few people here are interested in LR.

As far as I'm concerned, when I learned about bitcoins, I immediately tried to find a way to buy some efficiently and to do so at some point I thought LR was a solution.

But when I saw their Terms Agreements, I red that there are some monthly fees, so I just forgot about it.  Just no way.

done.  I've sent a link to this thread on freenode #gnunet.

Indeed.  I'm a poor programmer anyway, so I couldn't be of much help if someone wanted to implement this.  But I guess it wouldn't be very difficult since there is already a bitcoin JSON API.

I still think, however, that GNUnet is the only appropriate network.  Because as long as you pay someone to get something, there is the risk he doesn't give it to you.  This implies the need for an economics algorithm in the network, and such an algorithm is already implemented in GNUnet.

I'm not sure it would be that easy.  I doubt current P2P protocols distribute files in a tree hash form.  A tree hash form is necessary in order to make sure you don't buy rubbish.

Maybe the GNUnet protocol would be compatible.

Well, my guess is porn industry will be one of the first to do something like that.

Apart from this, I realize that the base-128 designation system is not necessary.

Customers first buy the root hash block, then each of hashes it is made of, and so on, until what they get is identified to be in the expected format (avi for instance).

Also, seller should estimate the number of potential buyers in order to chose an appropriate block size (and thus the correct number of blocks).   This is necessary to adapt the price of each block.

Here are some of my thoughts concerning the problem of selling information at distance.

As you know, selling information is a hot topic nowadays.  Since the popular rise of worldwide P2P filesharing networks, major audiovisual entertainment companies have suffered from a dramatic loss of profit.  Thanks to intense lobying towards politics, they're slowly managing to have some laws voted in order to protect the so-called "intellectual property", mainly via internet control and regulation of ISPs.

Now, I won't discuss here about intellectual property and why it should or not be protected using public force.  Instead, I'd like to suggest a way to sell information from a purely technical basis, without any need of juridical intervention or coercion.

Selling information is tricky.  This is old news.  Several professions have to deal with this problem on a daily basis.  Journalists, for instance, must be very carefull not to divulgate their *scoops* before it is printed and available for sell on main street.  This illustrates the very point about information :  it is yours as long as it is a secret.  As soon as you communicate it to just one person, it is not yours anymore.  To sell information, you must sell divulgation, not diffusion.

Therefore, the main idea about selling information is to sell it once, not to try to sell several copies of it.  Of course, this means that you have to sell it to a very high price, at least as high as your production cost, more if you want to make profit.   Selling such an expensive product is almost impossible if you want to sell it to the general public.  A solution is to sell your information by parts.  One byte at a time.

Such a decomposition of selling would require an easy an efficient micropaiement solution, for which I think Bitcoin is an excellent candidate.

There are several ways to imagine how such a selling could occur.  I'd like to introduce one, which would be based on a hash tree decomposition of the information.

Say I want to sell a 1Go file called foobar.avi.

First I create a sha-256 tree of this file, with 32Ko sized blocks.  Then, I make sure I have a way to designate each of thes hashes in the tree in a unique way.  The root hash is just a other name for the file "foobar.avi".  It is a hash of a 32Ko file containing 32Ko/256= 128 other hashes.  Each of them also are hashes of 128 other hashes.  Thus, I can easily identify each hash using a big integer in a 128-base notation, for instance :

109.77.56

Since a 1Go file contains at most 32768 32ko files, then the number will have at most 3 digits (in a 128-base notation, though).

So if we add the root hash as a prefix, we have a precise way to designate any hash of the hash tree :

faebc3c13a28521ab38d2482bae4e27e7c754f665f03cebdf7917f34864676bf:109.77.56

where faeb... is the root hash.

Now customers can contact me and ask for a 32Ko block whose hash-256 is referenced as above.  I'll sell it to them, at a price that will be about 32768 less than the total earnings I expect to get from foobar.avi.  Customers can not view foobar.avi with only one block, but at least they can be asured that they bought a part of the hash tree (provided that they already own "upper" blocks).

Customers then share their blocks on a P2P network, or any other way, it's not my problem.  But they
will only be able to watch foobar.avi once allblocks will be sold, and my money raised.

Maybe we could have the main page of bitcoin.com be in chineese instead of english ?

Well, to buy stuff with bitcoins, you first have to own some bitcoins, right ?

I don't have any powerful hardware, but I have some cash, so I buy bitcoins until I find something that I'd like to buy with them.

I understand what you mean.

I guess you're right.

Non issue, imo.

Those guys are just working for us.  I'll just buy their bitcoins.  It will probably be cheaper than buying expensive hardware and running it 24/24.

By selling bitcoins those might think they screw us.  I think they're just wrong.

If bitcoin is to gain any popularity in the future, at some point some T-shirts will be designed to help promote the concept.

I'm condidering making some of them myself, but it's bit early I think.

Anyway,  here are some ideas of what could be written on those T-shirts :


Front:
This T-shirt was bought for 1000\\
\Huge{Bitcoins}
Back:
www.bitcoin.org


Front:
\Huge{Bitcoin}\\
\small{the crypto-currency}

Front:
Bitcoin
Back:
Block number :  90000\\
and still counting...



Front:
After the barbarous relic,\\
here comes the cyperpunk money :
\Huge{Bitcoin}
Back:
www.bitcoin.org

Front:
10MHsh/s
Back:
www.bitcoin.org

Well, if that's true this is going to change.

I recently wrote an article about bitcoins on a famous french linux website : http://linuxfr.org/2010/09/30/27430.html

As you can see, this article brought about 800 clicks on the bitcoin website.

If you worry about popularity of bitcoins, Google trends can help :  http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin

I'm fine with a split of the channel.

The topic for #bitcoin-dev might be something like :

"This is the *logged* channel about bitcoin developpement.  For relaxed non-logged chat about bitcoin, join #bicoin-..."

Ok, thks.  I'm looking forward to see this pretty much automated, though.

Is there a clean, complete HOWTO about this subject (How to backup)  ?

AFAIC I just made backup.sh script in my .bitcoin folder :


I wonder if I should or not keep a backup history or something (backup.dat.1.gpg, backup.dat.2.gpg, etc.).

What do you think ?

Well, at least this game is usefull since it reveals the weaknesses, if there are any, of the bitcoin software during intensive small transactions.  Maybe you should report all incidents to the dev-team ?

Well I'd be sorry to have to resort to that.  IRC was a nice place where people could chat without Google recording everything.  Now people want to log every single chat room...  pff.

You know what ?

I don't give a sh.t if Bitcoin can be used for money laundering !