The system splits files into chunks and encrypts these using the chunk's hash as password, so only someone who already knows the exact file contents (or is told the hash) can access the data. There are several whitepapers and a Google Tech Talk explaining how the system works. It's quite ingenious and contains a number of fascinating (to me) innovations.

The only way for them to look at your files is to steal your password in the client. In the long run, they plan to eventually open the source up for inspection to show that they're not doing that, IIRC.

Personally I entrust most of my data to Wuala, but apply another layer of encryption on top for sensitive files such as financial information.

Not really. If you're worried, you can always run your very own server.


Nothing. Unless you happen to use one of those supernodes, which you don't have to, because you can run your own supernode. Or use a trusted one, much like people trust Google with their E-Mail.


It isn't easier to implement? I'd like to see some proof here.

Counterexample: The totally distributed E-Mail system developed at Rice University is a hell of a lot more complex than running a (network of) semi-centralized mail server(s).


Um. That's exactly what a supernode server would do.

The client stores your own transaction history. The network-wide transaction history is available for some time, before it is garbage-collected. So you would need to store the transaction history separately if you need it in perpetuity.

There's also Wuala, which is P2P-based and allows you to trade local storage for encrypted storage in the cloud. You get 1 GiB free.

I'd guess that that's the secondary wave of interest that trails a slashdotting: slashdot shunts a lot of visitors your way, and then some of these people go and blog about it, add it on Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, etc. This will result in a second, smaller influx of people who thus hear about Bitcoin second-hand.

Why? E-Mail and Jabber work the same way. Everyone can run their own server, and many do, but most users prefer to use someone else's server(s).

Edit: Even more closely related: Kazaa and Gnutella work the same way, too. You connect to a supernode that then searches for files on your behalf.

Feh, Darknets. Brightnets are way shinier. 

Not that I'm using either, but being a smartass, I just had to comment. 

That command makes Bitcoin run via TOR if that is availabe. TOR makes it impossible to trace a transaction to your IP address, since communication travels through a chain of 3 proxy servers. If TOR is not running on the same computer, it doesn't work, as you have observed.

Yeah. The overall sentiment doesn't seem to be all that positive though.

However, the story is being picked up around the internet; for example, here's a discussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/cofeg/bitcoin_is_a_peertopeer_networkbased_digital/.

Heh, now I'm curious. What happens when you specify a smaller/larger value before the colon? What happens if you just don't call CHECKSIG in the transaction? 

I like the first two sentences, although I'd replace 'server' with 'bank'. I'd also modify or take out the part about the inflation risk -- it is a little confusing for someone not familiar with banking and how the limited circulation helps with inflation risk. The "no transaction fees" aspect of bitcoin should also be mentioned, since IMHO it is a unique selling point for bitcoin when compared to, say, Pecunix.

Satoshi? Sourceforge?

Sounds kinda ridiculous, I know, but I don't have much faith in the legal system anymore, so I think it _could_ happen...

I was just thinking of the trouble Mozilla had with 'Firebird'. Or take Google: They can't call Gmail Gmail in Germany, because a single, tiny company registered the name. Granted, that's a little different from an Open Source project, but still...

You can get StartCom SSL certificates for free. AFAIK they are accepted without a warning dialog by everyone except Opera users.

Tutorial: http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2009/12/how-to-get-set-with-a-secure-sertificate-for-free.ars

I agree with lachesis and NLS. Version 1.0 is better for publicity, and is commonly taken to mean "we're out of beta now, but don't expect everything to be perfect."

That looks interesting indeed, gavin. Requires a trusted, central bank though, and I'm not sure yet if one can get rid of it in that scheme. Then again, Bitcoin itself is about getting rid of the central bank.

I've looked at several distributed reputation schemes in the past, and the best one I found was Havelaar (pdf). The big downside is that it assumes a lot of transactions per peer, plus the availability of a network store (i.e. DHT).   Edit: Misremembered that. The downsides were for a different aspect of the Kangaroo application mentioned in the paper. Havelaar only really requires somewhat persistent peer IDs that can be contacted within one round (week) because reputation is propagated to specific peers to make attacks more difficult. It's also a little slow to propagate the reputation.

 

Hm. Morality by majority vote? I don't think I like where this is going. What if you get a bad reputation just for being, say, an atheist? There's also the problem of extortion: "Pay up, or me and my 100 buddies will give you a really bad reputation." (This actually happened in a MMORPG, but I can't seem to find the news article right now).

Runs fine under WINE. *rhymes*

It automatically switched the language to German, too. Now that I can see the translation in the client itself, I noticed a few things to improve, and will post a new .po file within the next two or so days.

Sirius, Can you update the German translation of the frontpage to the last version I posted? It contains the fixes proposed by SmokeTooMuch, foremost for the screwup with the – HTML entity. I'll attach it to this post again, for your convenience.

I think the way eMule handles bootstrapping for its KAD-network is pretty close to optimal:

The list of known peers is stored in a file (nodes.dat), and every client maintains a list of known nodes in that file (sorted by longest uptime, I think -- that's an intrinsic property of Kademlia, but still a good idea). The released client should be accompanied by such a file that contains the addresses of a few reliable peers on static IP addresses, from which a new client can then get more addresses to connect to (and hence store in its own file).

If the "seed list" gets out of date, or the server is shut down or something, you can just ask *anyone* in the network to publish his nodes-file (on rapidshare, say), and voila, you've got a fresh list of IPs you can connect to.

Looks like someone is promoting Bitcoin independently, mostly in German. Doing a fair job, too.

There's also http://twitter.com/bitcoin (http://bitcoin.com), which is apparently entirely unrelated to this project. I wonder whether "BitCoin Ltd." could cause trouble with the name Bitcoin later on, because they registered a business under that name...