I'd like all emails sent to me to be PGP encrypted. Asking people to PGP encrypt emails seems to have no effect. One idea I had was to set up a mail server so that unencrypted mails bounce back to the sender and only encrypted mails filter through to me. My attempts to set this up were unsuccessful. So now I'm thinking of a simple manual version. Here's the idea:

I need a "mail assistant." There will be an email account that both the mail assistant and I have access to. The mail assistant should log in once a day to check for mail. For each unencrypted mail, the mail assistant should send a canned reply (I'll supply the text) indicating that only PGP encrypted messages filter through to me. For each encrypted mail, the mail assistant should forward it to me. I suppose if a mail is only partially encrypted, it should be forwarded to me with the unencrypted parts removed. I could use my access to the email account to occasionally audit and make sure that the mail assistant is doing what I expect.

This seems like something that would only take a few minutes once a day. (Someone with the proper skills might be able to automate it.) I'd be willing to pay $5/week in btc for a mail assistant to do this for me. It makes sense to do this on a weekly basis in case one of us decides to "cancel" at some point. PM me if you're interested, especially if you're willing to do it for less.

[Edit (Sep 10 2015)]

As of the last week or so people can use CLAMspeech to put messages on my website, https://mathgate.info. I'm scanning blocks as they come in to look for transactions sending clams to xMGxkY1RLX69eDrEJCPTEhhSxChraZYjrV. The CLAMspeech part of those transactions are displayed on the pages of the website.

There are 8 message slots and the order is determined by "points". The number of points initially equal the amount of clams sent to my address. The points decay at a rate of exponentially with a half life of 60 days. about 1 point per month. Currently the message in the lowest position has negative points, so that it could be replaced by anyone who sends any amount of clams to my address.

More details are here: https://mathgate.info/clamspeech.php

For people who don't know about clams, the main thread is here. Clams were distributed to bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin addresses with nondust amounts in May 2014. If you have one of these addresses and haven't yet "dug" your clams, the clams at your address are currently worth about $16.50.

Edit (Sep 10 2015): There's low enough demand for this that most of the ad slots were reaching negative points. I decided to change the way points decay from linear to exponential so that negative points will be impossible. The post above has been edited to reflect this change.

[Edit: Never mind.]

I need the private key for an address in my wallet. I unlocked the wallet, used dumpprivkey and it gave me something of the form

Kzb...

My understanding is that this is the WIF for a "compressed" private key and is base58 for

x80 (prefix byte) [32 bytes (actual private key)] x01 [4 bytes (checksum)]

However, when I extract those 32 bytes as a big-endian 256-bit number and compute the public key and address from it, I do not get the address I started with.

Am I misunderstanding the format of the private key? If not, maybe I'll generate a fresh empty wallet and post full details with an unused address and the result of dumpprivkey.

I'm using bitcoin-qt 0.9.3 on linux (Tails).
---------------------
Edit: Never mind. I get the right public key. I was computing an "uncompressed address" from it though. I need to compute a "compressed address."

This request will probably sound bizarre, but it's nothing shady.

I know someone who needs to send someone an email, but without the usual metadata being associated with him. I offered to send it for him, but he would prefer that it's sent by someone he doesn't know. You will be able to read the email and it will be clear that it is benign.

He uses bitmessage and can be contacted at BM-2DBQzrbTASC82EaN4AzhuEJWL6z43pPbs8
He will pay 1 mbit to someone if they will simply email the message for him to the address he gives. It is meant to be one-way and the email will start with:

Note: Please do not reply to this email.
The sender of this email did not create the content (by design).
Replies will not be sent to the creator of the content (by design).

I know 1mbit is small, but it's close to the price of a stamp, so it seems reasonable. Feel free to negotiate the price over bitmessage.

I've been using the Tails OS for over a year now and am happy with them. They've been asking for bitcoin donations recently to support the project. I sent them some mbits.

I think Tails is a project far more worthy of bitcoins than, say, Wikipedia.

https://tails.boum.org/contribute/how/donate/index.en.html

Before playing with your bitcoins outside, always put on a clean pair of socks.

Code:

-proxy=127.0.0.1:9050

The question recently came up as to whether bitcoin supporters are "neoliberals." To support the idea that there is such a thing as "neoliberalism" someone cited the book "A Brief Histroy of Neoliberalism" by David Harvey. David Harvey is a Marxist geographer.

I've started reading the book and just came across an interesting quote I'd like to share. Harvey describes a "neoliberal coup" of New York City by "financial institutions" in the 1970s, after which "corporate welfare substituted for people welfare." As a consequence, Harvey says the following:

  Redistribution through criminal violence became one of the few serious
  options for the poor, and the authorities responded by criminalizing
  whole communities of impoverished and marginalized populations. The
  victims were blamed, and Giuliani was to claim fame by taking revenge
  on behalf of an increasingly affluent Manhattan bourgeoisie tired of
  having to confront the effects of such devastation on their own
  doorsteps.

I'm particularly interested in the phrase "redistribution through criminal violence" and Harvey's description of the perpetrators of "criminal violence" as the "victims".

This does seem to be in stark contrast to what I read from bitcoin supporters. Bitcoin supporters are often against redistribution, against all forms of welfare (corporate or otherwise), and would not describe those who commit violence in order to take someone else's money as being "victims". In fact, an argument sometimes offered in favor of "dark" marketplaces on the internet is that it removes violence from the transaction. I think it's fair for me to conclude most bitcoin supporters do not agree with this particular Marxist geographer.

What about bitcoin critics? Do they agree with this Marxist geographer on this issue?

I'm trying to run bitcoind in Tails. I am able to run bitcoin-qt without a problem by doing this:

Code:

cp /media/myusb/bitcoin-0.9.3-linux.tar.gz .
tar xzvf bitcoin-0.9.3-linux.tar.gz
./bitcoin-0.9.3-linux/bin/32/bitcoin-qt -datadir=/media/myusb/.bitcoin/ -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 &

I can instead start bitcoind the same way:

Code:

./bitcoin-0.9.3-linux/bin/32/bitcoind -datadir=/media/myusb/.bitcoin/ -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 &

However, when I then try to use it I get the following:

Code:

./bitcoin-0.9.3-linux/bin/32/bitcoind -datadir=/media/myusb/.bitcoin/ -proxy=127.0.0.1:9050 getinfo
error: couldn't connect to server

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Thanks.

I've been running bitcoind on a VPS for a few months. A few days ago it crashed. Since then every time I restart it it runs out of memory within a minute or two. The VPS has 1GB of RAM and I'm not running anything else. Here is exactly what it says:

Code:

************************
EXCEPTION: St9bad_alloc       
std::bad_alloc       
bitcoin in AppInit()       

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::bad_alloc'
  what():  std::bad_alloc

The last time I was successfully running it I had version 0.9.1. When it wouldn't restart I upgraded to 0.9.2.1, but the same thing happens.

Can anyone help? Thanks!

[Update (Oct/Nov 2014):]

Update (Oct/Nov 2014): My github account was deleted for some reason, so the code below is no longer available there.
I found someone to host it for me and the links in the message have been updated.
I recommend people stop using github. They cannot be trusted not to delete your repo.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I recently thought of a way to publish a sequence of "metablocks" containing arbitrary data which is secured by the Bitcoin block chain. It only requires very small Bitcoin transactions so it doesn't bloat the block chain. It also does not create unspendable transaction outputs: it does not destroy bitcoins and does not increase the number of unspent txouts.

The idea is to use a public key and the hash of the metablock to compute a modified public key and then address. By spending to this address, one certifies the metablock. The transaction certifying the metablock is included in the successor metablock.

I think there are many ways this could be used. One example would be by someone running a notary service like the one at proofofexistence.com.

A detailed written description is available here:

https://github.com/kronarev/bip0032sbcl/blob/master/propmetablockchains.pdf
https://mathgate.info/bip0032sbcl/propmetablockchains.pdf

I extended my implementation of BIP0032 to include commands for certifying and verifying metablocks. It is not fully automated at the moment, but could be by integrating it with bitcoind. The implementation is here:

https://github.com/kronarev/bip0032sbcl/
https://mathgate.info/bip0032sbcl/bip0032sbcl.tgz

As an example, I created three "metablocks" which are available at the github repository above as the files MetaBlock1, MetaBlock2 and MetaBlock3. More information is in the README.md file.

To get a sense of the bitcoin transactions used to certify metablocks, you can view the ones certifying the three metablocks above here:

https://blockchain.info/tx/4b5066707134d715f7b9d2efe3d9f7e0d320689787611ed7cbe1d5cbf98c5768
https://blockchain.info/tx/97e023eddaf5bb867c5caf25bfd5b02fc1ce2588a2077cb22bc9a440d5f0e0f2
https://blockchain.info/tx/f2fb9b6481ed928aedef27279f7ad3d8db657c81407eee20d5f3a21daf15a28d

The address of output 0 of each of these transactions can be computed from the corresponding metablock.  The transaction spending output 0 of the transaction certifies the successor metablock.

Feedback is appreciated. It's possible, of course, that someone has done something like this before and I'm not aware of it. If so, please let me know.

Edit: I decided it might facilitate discussion to give the idea a name, so I'll refer to it as Promechard.

[Update (Oct/Nov 2014):]

Update (Oct/Nov 2014): My github account was deleted for some reason, so the code below is no longer available there.
I found an alternative host for the code.
This is a good reminder that github.com is a third party site and there is no reason to believe they will not delete your repo.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I've written a basic implementation of BIP0032 (HD Wallets) in Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) and published it on github for anyone interested:

https://github.com/kronarev/bip0032sbcl
https://mathgate.info/bip0032sbcl/bip0032sbcl.tgz

There's no real user interface, but the basic functions are there (e.g., for private and public child key derivations). A file unittests.lisp demonstrates how to call the function using the test vectors given with BIP0032.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0032_TestVectors

It is only intended to work under Unix-based operating systems as the hash functions are performed by openssl, sha256sum and sha512sum.

I wrote this mostly to help me understand some of the technical details underlying bitcoin. I did it in Lisp because I like Lisp and because Lisp uses arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

It might be useful for people who want to generate more unit tests for HD Wallets.

In addition to computing addresses and WIF private keys for BTC, there is also code for computing addresses and WIF private keys for LTC and FTC.

I welcome feedback, even if (especially if?) it's to point out a mistake I've made in the implementation.