Maybe on an island...

You can use the "trading across chains" scheme.

What I described is a lot like having a separate chain with merged mining, but without the mining. So you can do most of the fancy things that Bitcoin-based chains can do.

(Maybe this kind of trading is also possible with your design, but I intuitively don't like tying assets to BTC, since BTC is meant to be split and combined, and assets are not.)

It's pretty easy.

Create a separate message system with messages that handle asset creation, voting, transfer of assets, etc. These messages will contain all of the public-key crypto. A centralized message distribution server instead of a P2P protocol would be OK, since the server doesn't have all that much power.

To prevent double-spending during asset transfer, some of the messages need to be timestamped by including a hash in the Bitcoin block chain. You wouldn't even need to modify Bitcoin to do timestamping: just send some BTC to an address that is not real and actually consists of message data. (Modifying Bitcoin would allow you to do this without destroying any BTC.)

Bitcoin Block Explorer has offered RSS feeds for a long time. Like this:
http://blockexplorer.com/rssa/1Cvvr8AsCfbbVQ2xoWiFD1Gb2VRbGsEf28.xml

There are several RSS-to-email services you can use if you want an email instead.

For market data, it would be pretty easy to set up an RSS interface to the Bitcoin Charts Markets API. I'd write one (but not host it) for 50 BTC.

Ah, cool! Hard to believe the forum's been around two years already.

I wrote a script that knows my weekly schedule and beeps the internal speaker of my computer at various frequencies. It could also be used for things like this.

Next auction: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52529.0


Posts in the auction section can't be edited.

In order to collect more money for the creation of good forum software, the forum is selling ad space in the area beneath the first post of every topic page.

Your visible ad text (ignoring link URLs, etc.) must be less than 150 characters in length, and it can only contain links: no other style. It will be prefixed with "Advertisement:". Ad text may not contain lies, misrepresentation, or inappropriate language. Ads may be rejected for other reasons.

There are 10 total ad slots which are randomly rotated. So one ad slot has a one in ten chance of appearing. Eight of the slots are for sale here. (One of the remaining slots has random factoids, and one links to the current ad auction.)

The ad lasts 7 days starting from when I put it up.

Stats: On the 20^th of November, 2011, there were about 120,000 views of topics. So one slot would have appeared around 12,000 times per day. The ad doesn't appear on topic pages with only one post, though, and it only appears for people using the default theme. Views per day on other days:
- 18^th: 130739
- 19^th: 148084

Info about the current ad slots:
https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adinfo

Auction rules

Post your bids in this thread. Prices must be stated in BTC per slot. You must state the max number of slots you want. When the auction ends, the highest bidders will have their slots filled until all eight slots are filled.

So if someone bids for 8 slots @ 5 BTC and this is the highest bid, then he'll get all 8 slots. If the two highest bids are 8 slots @ 4 BTC and 1 slot @ 5 BTC, then the first person will get 7 slots and the second person will get 1 slot.

- When you bid, all of your previous bids are automatically canceled.
- All bid prices must be divisible by 0.5.
- The bidding starts at 0.5.
- The auction end time is 03:00:00 on November 30, UTC. Countdown. (The end time may be extended -- see below.)
- If two people bid at the same price, the person who bid first will have his slots filled first.
- Bids are considered invalid and will be ignored if they do not specify both a price and a max quantity, or if they could not possibly win any slots

If any valid bids occur less than 30 minutes before the auction end time, then the auction will be extended by 30 minutes. If any valid bids occur less than 30 minutes before the new end time, then the auction will be extended again, etc. The time will not extend beyond 6 hours total.

You must pay for your slots within 24 hours of receiving the payment address. Otherwise your slot may be sold to someone else.

It is over. I just wasn't here to announce the end.

Hmm... Sounds like bad news. I've seen Qt programs that integrated perfectly with Windows, so I was hoping that this UI would be OK, but I guess not.

It seems that everyone loves to mess up UIs nowadays. Firefox, Vuze, Windows Media Player, Windows itself, etc. I had to install 5 extensions and a theme just to get Firefox to look somewhat decent.

Looks like I'll be using 0.3.x for another year.

I can't allow people to move bids downward like this. It changes the game. Your bid is canceled, but I won't accept bids from you.

Current state:
10 1 Goat
7 7 Jonathan Ryan Owens

They would end up on a different network if they accepted this. The network doesn't recognize OP_SUBSTR anymore, and OP_EVAL isn't implemented yet (though it is planned).

The script I gave is inferior in every way that I can think of to just including an AES-encrypted private key with a standard transaction. I just wanted to illustrate the concept. Possibly there are better ways of doing transaction proof-of-works, though. Maybe you could do it by making public only parts of public keys, signatures, or private keys. It could certainly be better than AES encryption if there was a script op that output a hash of the non-Script parts of transactions: then you wouldn't have to use OP_CHECKSIG at all.

My script could be improved by leaving out the private key and having everyone use the same known keypair. Then it's only a little bigger than the encrypted-private-key method.

You could also hash the end block hash a few quadrillion times to make it impossible for miners to predict the result in a reasonable timeframe.

Like this (using some disabled/not-yet-implemented Script features):

({} denotes that something is in a string, not part of the script proper.)

With this, you need to do some "mining" after changing the transaction to make it valid.

Here's the code that Bitcoin Block Explorer uses for JSON-RPC communication:
http://pastebin.com/YCYb0nPv

You need to wrap each kind of use in a function like this that tests the output:

I use Tor, though this is not decentralized in the same way as Bitcoin because it relies on central directory servers.

I used to use Freenet and Frost/FMS a lot, but I eventually decided that the discussions aren't good enough to warrant running the extremely heavy software all the time.

I really like the design of GNUnet's network, but I've never been able to get the software to work.

I'd guess the OP_DROP data is salt for the password.

Spends of these transactions could be intercepted and hijacked by miners. It would be better to do a regular public key transaction and attach the private key as AES-encrypted OP_DROP data. Another way might be to add a proof-of-work to the script so that miners don't have time to hijack the transaction before someone else includes it.

If this is actually safe and possible, then someone should make a business where you stay at a "hotel" for a week or two and people help you through the induction phase. I'd pay for that.

I tried that a couple of times. Each time, I lasted about 3 days, but when I lost the ability to read I became bored and quickly fell asleep. If it's possible at all, I think you'd need a team of people to help keep you awake and active during the whole thing.

I got my first coins by mining when the difficulty was around 12. Took me less than a day.