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So use multi-signature transactions right? Great! Now ask yourself, why isn't multi-sig more prevalent? Because its usability is still awful. It's still beyond the average user to set up, maintain, and spend from multi-sig addresses. Various online tools exist that can help, but running to a hosted website for each new spend or multi-sig address shouldn't be the end-all solution for bitcoin users. Instead, it should be possible to design a locally run wallet with a simple user interface that can easily split up the control over multiple devices. I'm posting it here for comment and critique because I just want to know if this idea sounds feasible. Feel free to poke holes in it and call out what doesn't make sense. If executed properly, we'll end up with a dynamic program that can create a variety of customized, secure, and persistent multi-sig setups. 2-of-2 setup  2-of-3 setup.  |
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I had an idea to increase the security of the bitcoin-qt wallet so that it's protected by more than a single passphrase. it has a few advantages beyond multi-sig. Comments and critique are welcome.  |
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Disclaimer: I want to clarify that I myself do not support this idea of a techno-centric religion, but I know that there will be some people who eventually attempt this, and I'm curious about how it will end for themIts an idea that raises eyebrows, but I was inspired to ponder on this topic given recent posts and images. As government bodies increasingly look to tax/ban/regulate it, perhaps some groups would claim the "Church of Satoshi" as their religion in order to gain protection.  https://www.facebook.com/inmathwetrusthttp://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1z0p4u/time_to_start_a_bitcoin_religion_with_satoshi_as/Consider that the church already has 1.) A god (cryptography) 2.) A mystical prophet (Satoshi) 3.) Holy texts (The Whitepaper, Blockchain) 4.) Apostles (Miners and Traders) 5.) Priests and Scribes (Devs) 6.) Devotees (hoarders) 7.) Music (bitlisten.com) 8.) Prophecy (halving days) Religious interpretation of the events since 2008 is easy: In the beginning there were no inputs (Newly Generated Coins).
The peer to peer electronic network was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the banking world, but the spirit of Satoshi was hovering over the chaos.
Then Satoshi said "Let there be a whitepaper," and his followers saw that it was good. And he separated the trust from the acceptance of payment.
Thusly through his efforts the genesis block was born.
He was rewarded with the BTC from the great blockchain, first paid immutably and eternally to 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa, to which we still pay homage with signed transaction today. Many of these people will happily evangelize the commandments of bitcoin: (Thou shalt retain ownership of thy own private keys, Thou shalt not lend fractions of thy reserves and claim to hold satoshis that thou dost not, etc) Tithing is the act of donating fiat to the church in exchange for cryptographic power in the network. Mining is the energy sacrificed to do the same. Developing/programming is the act of contributing to the core source code in an effort to divine the one true agreed upon method to obtain cryptographic freedom and individual control over things considered to be valuable by all participants. Already, the "Church" has had many schisms between adherents that claim to know the true path, and forks and alt-chains have been created. It's not really a matter of if but when. I have no doubt that if the idea of bitcoin itself grows, eventually some people will simply start claiming it as their own church. But does this afford them any protection?
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This is for complete novelty purposes. In order to claim the bounty you must 1) Create a working fork of the bitcoin network that is functionally identical to bitcoin in every way, it simply reverts back to block 219200 (February 2nd, 2013) 2) Call it "CtrlZCoin" 3) Post it open source on Github, example: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoinDo this and I will send you 15 ZCoin on said network  You might also be surprised at the number of people interested in running and mining it. |
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Here we consider the idea of a so-called "Annihilation Market," named after the process of complete destruction that occurs in the combination of matter and antimatter. With bitcoin, this type of exchange allows a single person to buy or sell BTC by either lending it or accepting it at a market determined value. After lending or accepting, later, a user can close their position for a bitcoin gain or loss depending on the relative forces that cause more lending (selling) or committing (buying). A lender would hope the price goes down so they can receive more bitcoin upon withdrawal. A committer would hope that the price goes up so that they can repay their commitment with a smaller amount of bitcoin, earning more than what they started with. The end result is an unspoofable price seeking engine driven entirely by bitcoin, and user are able to obtain more bitcoin whether the market is increasing or decreasing in value. A fully functional exchange of this type would have a number of perks in the crypto world: - It can be open source and run in a decentralized manner, with rules based on cryptographic contracts only
- Without a central operator, it does not charge/accept fees.
- It does not store bitcoin
- It does not require users to know anything about one another, or trust one another, or provide documentation to prove who they are
- it enables a price-seeking market based on the lending and accepting of a single commodity only (bitcoin), without the necessity to transfer-in or hold fiat
- The market is a zero-sum system, and does not create or destroy bitcoin.
- It does not require users to deposit funds that they are not interested in trading, or keep a balance, unless they have an active order on the network
- Upon closing an order, the bitcoin funds can be immediately sent back to the owners' wallets
- Positions are not "all or nothing." Limit and stop-loss orders can allow users adjust their risk levels.
- It is possible to increase bitcoin holdings regardless of the market's direction.
Importantly, this concept is still experimental and will need a great deal of input/testing to get running. Here is an example of how the orderbook is built:  As a trader, you can choose to either offer a position (similar to placing a limit order) or accept a position (just like placing a market order) with your bitcoin. These actions (and the amount of bitcoin involved) can directly affect how much the market perceives bitcoin is worth and how much others are willing to buy and sell it for.  Important Notes:"credit" is not an alt currency, and it cannot be withdrawn from the decentralized exchange. It is a representation of how much bitcoin a user is entitled to upon withdrawal. While credit stays the same, the amount of bitcoin that credit is worth fluctuates with the market. Example: As a buyer (committer,) you must reserve some of your own bitcoin as collateral before accepting BTC in a buy position. 1) Say I want to buy 1 BTC worth $500 in the market. 2) I have 1 BTC of my own, and choose to use that much as collateral 3) Waiting for the appropriate market rate, I finally accept the best lender's offer, committing myself to pay back $500 worth of Bitcoin in the market before I'm able to withdraw. At the exact same time, the lender receives $500 worth of credit to spend on BTC at a time of their choosing. 4) Now I effectively own 2 BTC, but I MUST set a stop loss order that will prevent me from owing more than 2 BTC to the market. At the most, I could set my stop to sell 2 BTC at $250, but this would result in a total loss, something I see as undesirable. I move to put a stop loss at $400, meaning if my bitcoin loses value to become worth only $400 USD/BTC, I've decided to take a loss at that point and sell back 1.2 BTC into the system, keeping my 0.8 BTC for myself 5) If my bitcoin gains value, I can sell it back to the market at any time. Suppose that the market is so competitive that it drives up the price to $600 BTC/USD, I can choose to withdraw my bitcoin back out of the system. Doing so requires me to pay back $500 worth of bitcoin, which is 0.83333333 BTC. Now I have 1.16666667 BTC (worth $700) outside of the exchange for myself. More details to come. Just gauging interest for now. |
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It's curious that even with a dust limit of 5430 satoshi's, the network is still getting spammed to no end. https://blockchain.info/address/1SochiWwFFySPjQoi2biVftXn8NRPCSQCNodes that receive these transactions will happily send out "inv" messages and relay them to other nodes, who respond with "getdata," also confirm the transactions as valid, and broadcast the transactions to everyone else. What if nodes had further logic to understand when these types of transactions are being created? Since they are essentially never going to confirm and are zero cost, it doesn't make sense for every node to be forced to broadcast them to begin with. The solution won't necessarily be straightforward. A simple check such as [(sum of inputs)/(number of inputs) >5430 = true then send] might sound promising, but in practice it doesn't cut it because a spammer could just include one or several much larger outputs back to themselves as part of the overall transaction. Additionally, talking about any kind of limitation on the types of transactions that can be sent out strays into dangerous territory: no one wants to cripple the network. But is it possible to nip this type of spam in the bud or are we stuck with it for all eternity? I'm imagining a future where dozens of unconfirmed transactions arrive into my account by the minute.  |
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Suppose you held funds in a bitcoin exchange. If the exchange is mismanaged and ends up closing without giving you the opportunity to withdraw, you'd understandably be pissed. You'd probably seek every possible means and every legal avenue in order to recover your funds, especially if it were for a significant amount.
The question is simple, if you're part of a lawsuit and making a claim, is it better to have been a person holding bitcoin? Or is it better to have been a person who had fiat at the exchange?
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https://www.bihang.com/How on earth did they open up in a time like this? Curious to know if any users can deposit there.
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Ideally it would be something that looks smartly executed, and immediately recognizable as a quality site. (Something a new user could look at to get a better idea of what's going on under the hood of bitcoin) Any suggestions are welcome! I'd especially like to see some kind of representation of the power and payout involved in mining. These are a small sampling of some of the known data visualizers so far, but we need to go deeper :-) http://www.bitcoinmonitor.com/http://www.bitlisten.com/http://www.needanumbrella.com/http://fiatleak.com/ |
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Here's one of my addresses and its private key:
Public: 14941RiJVBLRJNBxbdo2WjUeRwB7REApyu
Private: 6PfT1TzGCoFmB1wCLjfPA1vtQfKuy4RiYoF8QZQ43dxuMkF8ydgurrmyhR
I'm perfectly comfortable with sharing it, as it starts with a numeral '6' designating the BIP 0038 protection. But I wonder if this simple but powerful security scheme could be even more useful.
Imagine a wallet that's much more resistant to theft because it doesn't know it's own private keys to spend the coins, it only knows the BIP 0038 version of the private key. It can receive coins anytime by sending to an address there, but when creating a transaction to spend funds it doesn't actually communicate with the blockchain yet. It requires your regular password1 input, and a sort of precursor transaction is created that gets broadcast "somewhere else."
What's that somewhere else? It's a repository for the precursor transactions to hang out before being manually approved. The 2nd half of the wallet, which ideally exists entirely on another device, can be used to enter password2 and truly forward the transaction to be broadcast to the bitcoin blockchain upon input. The second wallet is also completely incapable of generating precursor transactions for itself, requiring input from the first wallet to begin with.
How is this possibly useful as an anti-theft measure?
1) One of the biggest points is that a spend attempt generates a precursor first. This is a very vocal way of declaring intention without actually finalizing a transfer of BTC. The extra checkpoint creates a 2nd layer of security to prevent bitcoins from being stolen.
2) Each half of the wallet represents a necessary but singularly insufficient means to spend bitcoin. If one is compromised, the other is still needed. Great care would have to be taken to ensure this. A benchmark test would be to allow an attacker complete control of password1 or 2 and they should still be unable to successfully spend the coins.
If set up correctly, it would mean a hot wallet that's much harder to steal from and can still spend coins quickly, just with a single extra hurdle to broadcast the transaction. Please note this is not a method to do chargebacks, no one can or should accept a precursor transaction itself as payment.
Last note, I realize this is similar but slightly different to m-of-n transactions. They key here is that I think it's useful to know if a transaction is being started but is not yet finalized. This is invaluable knowledge for the victim of potential theft.
Curious to know your thoughts.
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Sooner or later, I strongly believe that BTC users will be independently wealthy enough to band together and form their own free state.
Bitcoin itself is just a tool, but there may be those who rally around it due to similar ideological, ethical, or tax reasons.
Be it a micronation, a sea-steading flotilla, or a purchased territory, I'm interested in what the first tepid steps toward sovereignty would look like. The difference is that bitcoin cannot and should not be centralized, but this upstart country would be able to directly benefit from the existing BTC infrastructure and help foster it's free exchange, legitimacy, and economic functions.
I'm interested in what you think:
1.) Is it likely that BTC users could purchase a small amount of land from a country crippled in debt?
2.) What would be the prime locations?
3.) How would issues such as taxation work?
It ultimately may be too early to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this idea gain traction in the decades to come.
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Cold storage and hardware wallets are fine, I am not here to knock them. I am looking to improve hot wallet security. It occurred to me the other day that if I had some way of enforcing a "spend delay" on my bitcoins, they could never be stolen from my hot wallet during that delay. I would need the ability to store bitcoins with the following rules: - Specify a delay time: X
- If the last spend attempt is greater than X time ago, send the transaction.
- If not, or if no previous attempt, create a new spend attempt.
These simple but powerful rules (if enforced) would mean I could spend my coins as I please anytime, simply suffering a small delay before they actually start getting sent out. If a thief accessed my private key and tried to spend my BTC they too would suffer the same delay. Yet, as long as I was watching (or had some program to watch for me) I'd be able to redirect the transaction back to a destination of my choice! In order to avoid a game of endlessly redirecting transactions between myself and a thief, the wallet could also include instructions for a fail-safe address. But how on earth could these rules be enforced to the most absolute degree possible? It's not good enough to simply design a wallet with these constraints, because a thief could design another wallet to simply bypass these rules. How could I make sure that everyone absolutely had to follow them? Imagine a special wallet program that contributes to and communicates with another kind of blockchain. It does not replace the bitcoin blockchain, but it moves in parallel to it. It would be a peer to peer decentralized network that stores transaction attempts, private keys, and the specific delays made by their owners. It could ultimately forward to the bitcoin network to create transactions, but only after the specified waiting conditions are satisfied. Creating an address in a Vault Wallet creates a 2-of-2 multisignature address that requires both private keys to spend. Within minutes it is confirmed and your rules are eternally bound to this address. You hold one private key in your wallet, encrypted by a password (similar to the bitcoin-qt). The other private key is held by the vault chain itself, encrypted until its conditions are satisfied. These are the rules you created at the beginning, and once logged in the vault chain they are buried by consensus blocks and forever granted primacy so no one can supersede or overwrite your instructions. When you go to spend your coins, your private key is only the first half of the spend equation. The coins go into limbo in the vault chain as a spend attempt is registered. They must wait there until your X delay is over. If the destination of the coins changes with another spend attempt then the waiting time reset and overwrite the first attempt. Once the timer is up and enough confirmation blocks have been created, the Vault chain decrypts the other necessary private key and immediately creates a transaction to spend in the bitcoin blockchain. A receiving address would see zero activity until this process is completed, so this is not a way to chargeback or revoke payment, only delay the spending of the coins on your end for security purposes. Once actually sent in the bitcoin blockchain, the transaction is irreversible. Since the keys are split up and one of them isn't even on my computer, there is no point in trying to hack my password. Since the vault-chain is trust-less and decentralized and requires consensus in order to spend the transaction, there is no point in trying to run a rogue client with its own rules that attempts to ignore the delays. Try to spend my coins and I'd know about it right away, and I can stop you. I'd fail-safe them right into a paper wallet. Think about that for a second. Imagine being alerted that your coins are being stolen before they're gone for good, and imagine being able to do something about it! And how is it all supported? With tiny extra transaction fees for those that want the security. There are blocks to be found, transaction attempts to be logged, bitcoins to be earned, and miners to be paid. ASIC miners can contribute to both chains simultaneously, and their power would continue to find blocks in each chain and secure both of these networks. What I'm imagining requires quite a bit of creative thinking to implement properly, but it results in rules that are very hard to circumvent and a hot wallet with very hard to steal bitcoins. I want to give people the power to put a delayed-fuse on their coins. All of these changes would be user-initiated, optional, and would require zero changes to the bitcoin protocol itself. A Vault wallet is simply software, no extra hardware or paper required. Please poke holes in this idea, I'd love to heard your feedback. (I am also aware of Oracles, but they are not quite trust-less enough in my opinion) I am willing to add a 5BTC bounty to this idea if it can be successfully implemented and a Core-Dev confirms it performs as described.
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