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EFF blog post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/eff-and-bitcoin
RE: refunding donations by proving you own one of the private keys that donated: interesting idea! Anybody willing to write code to do that? Could be a fun project... (find all the transactions that donated to EFF, dig out the public keys, come up with a way to sign/verify a message with private key proving you own a public key, then keep track of which donation transactions have already been refunded)
RE: refunding donations by proving you own one of the private keys that donated: interesting idea! Anybody willing to write code to do that? Could be a fun project... (find all the transactions that donated to EFF, dig out the public keys, come up with a way to sign/verify a message with private key proving you own a public key, then keep track of which donation transactions have already been refunded)
I made a sizeable donation to the EFF when they first announced their acceptance of bitcoin donations so I would offer a 10 bitcoin bounty on this project if someone could develop a way to refund the bitcoins easily so Gavin doesn't have to manually go through them. This code would be handy for other initiatives or startups that get discontinued and the original investors can recoup some of their investment.
i don't think this will work the way people intend. if i'm understanding correctly, the reason the EFF doesn't simply want to refund payments to the addresses from which the payments came is that those payment addresses could be controlled by intermediaries or otherwise can't be tied to the equitable owner of the donated funds. if that's the problem, allowing people to claim addresses by proving that they own them doesn't seem to solve much: the intermediary (e.g., mybitcoin) could still claim the addresses, perhaps through a proxy or 'beard' so that they wouldn't appear associated, and the EFF would be none the wiser.
to say that more simply, what problem would signing solve here? presumably we can assume that someone who sent money from an address owns that address (except in the rare event the private key was lost or stolen).
There is no good answer I can think of for people that who donated using an intermediary, unless the intermediary would be willing to refund the bitcoins back to the address that was sent to them. At least for those that donated directly they can get the refund by returning the bitcoins to the address the donation was received from.
As someone who did donate to the EFF I am disappointed they made this decision but I understand it as well. I would appreciate a refund of the bitcoins I sent so I could send them to other projects that could help with gathering mainstream usage of bitcoin or serve the community rather than a freebie handout to whoever has the biggest botnet.
