All implementations I've seen had a privacy downside. The server knows everything that goes in and out of your wallet.

I'm thinking, that could be avoided though.

Some steps that could be implemented so that the server cannot see the transactions of its clients:

• First of all, the server must not have access neither to the private, nor to the public keys of its clients.
• At each new block, the server sends it to the client, so that it can verify if it received anything.
• Alternatively, to decrease bandwidth usage, if the block has a large number of outputs (> 500?), the server can send only the output list of each block. If the client has an address on such list, it requests the entire block. The server will not be able to infer which addresses belong to the client if the list is large enough, and if people don't reuse their addresses much

It still possible to the server to log the outgoing transactions though. Maybe that could be avoided by requesting a list of bitcoin nodes to the server, and sending the transaction to these nodes directly instead of routing it through the server. But then these nodes could see the client's IP, if it doesn't use Tor or something else.

I wonder... is this the way blockchain.info Alerts Disabled mode works?

You don't need to give away your private keys. But the transaction history will be known by the server, unless you use their Alerts Disabled mode, but then I don't know how would your local software know how much money you've got.


Sure? I thought it was BitconJS, the javascript implementation.

Bounty time?

I'm a Java developer, perhaps besides pledging I may also help with some little stuff that doesn't require deep knowledge of the code to be done quickly. I don't have much free time though, unfortunately.

BitcoinJ doesn't need a server. For Chinese people in particular, I guess not having all their transaction log stored in a particular place is a must.

This is great!

For Android tablets, the BitcoinJ based application is probably the way to go. It doesn't store the entire blockchain, only what concerns its own wallet. Eventually the protocol could be evolved so that it doesn't even need to download entire blocks, only the chunks which contain the transactions it needs to know about.
Private keys are stored locally, no server needed.

But I guess some security features should be implemented before. Last time I've checked, I couldn't even access the wallet file in my android phone to back it up. Backups and encrypted wallets at least are a must. And even that is still vulnerable to malware, unfortunately. Maybe they should also consider making an agreement with some backup service and ship the table with their app included, like Wuala for example, which encrypts everything locally before sending the files to their servers.

We should probably organize bounties to the development of such needed features.

J'ai deux billets pour le concert de Metallica à ce weekend au stade de France.
À cause des raisons personnelles je ne pourrais pas y être, donc je met ces billets à vente.

16 BTC ou 65€ chaque. C'est moins cher que ce que j'ai payé. Les billets sont pour la catégorie 3: http://partenaires.ticketnet.fr/assets/ctx/ticketnet-1/static/images/plans/m_251259.gif

Les billets se trouvent à Paris, avec un ami à moi qui y habite et qui va au concert. Je vous met en contact si vous l’achetez.

Si vous êtes intéressé, contactez-moi vite, vu que le concert est ce samedi!

Merci,
Tiago.

But he does. I remember seeing a video of RP saying something as "you're stealing from the poor and the middle class".

Just one thing though: money printing is not "inherently" unfair. It's not unfair if it's voluntary, like gold and bitcoin mining. The actual unfairness is money monopoly.

The reference implementation (Satoshi client) should definitively not link to any centralized source of information, specially for an unnecessary future.

And even the suggestion above of letting the user specify the exchange source, I don't know... IMHO, the developers of the main client should focus on bitcoind and the protocol itself, i.e., "core development". User-features like that would be better left for the developers of fancy clients like Armory or Multibit...
Maybe even the development of the QT GUI should be completely decorrelated from the reference implementation (bitcoind), and become a client of its own... the "Satoshi client" would be only bitcoind, no GUI, so to avoid the development of one thing to interfere with the development of the other.

+1

I would only call scammer someone that deliberately tries to defraud someone else. Tradehill got screwed by Dwolla and the state/banks. He didn't defraud anyone.
He has done a good service to the bitcoin community AFAIK. The simple fact that he's trying to honor his debts also show he's an honest person.
I understand it's not nice at all to have your money stuck somewhere, but compared to what Jared lost, this "time lost" of yours is not that significant, IMHO.

As the subsidy halves each ~4 years, for your assumption to hold the price of one bitcoin would have to double every 4 years. I would love it, but I don't believe we can expect it to happen "forever".

I think he means "lawyer"... or maybe not.

If they really intended to make something as anonymous as cash, they could have used a blinded signature algorithm like what's done in Open Transactions. Actually, they could become an Open Transaction issuer and server. That would be more anonymous than Bitcoin.

I'm not sure what they want, exactly.

How would that scale? I suppose these chips have very limited memory, they can't keep such a record.

The system described by Death&Taxes really need a way to detect double-spends (done by someone who manage to access the private key of a chip), or it risks failing hard. And if this is tied to the CAD as I understand, potential hyperinflation of the Canadian currency could follow. I suppose they would "shut down MintChip" before such thing happens, but I can't see how you do it without damaging all legitimate owners of MintChips.

The Royal Canadian Mint better know what they are doing.... so far, to me, it seems they are taking a huge risk.

A wiki contém informações muito mais "fundamentadas e concretas" do que qualquer site de notícias. Quem escreve na bitcoin.it entende muito mais sobre bitcoins do que quem escreve na The Economist. Essa rejeição a user a wiki como fonte é bobagem. Você sempre pode datar suas referências se tem receio de que a página mude no futuro e não corresponda mais ao que você usou como base (toda wiki preserva seu histórico).

Há também alguns papers científicos que citam bitcoins, mas normalmente tratando de outros assuntos. Citar papers científicos numa monografia é sempre uma boa.

E, claro, como já disseram, você não pode deixar de citar o paper original do Satoshi (e desencana, você não vai ter resposta dele, ele sumiu).

<off-topic>

There have been historical examples of decentralized law and justice, and there are modern authors who write about how it could apply to nowadays societies.
</off-topic>


OP, great initiative. I wish you success, and hope you create an example for other institutions of the same kind worldwide.

I'm sincerely impressed by your good behavior here. Congratulations.

Can't you try to sue Linode or something? This is mainly their fault. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the attacker is a rogue employee of theirs.

It's up to the miners*. But, afaik, the software provided by bitcoin.org enforces an arbitrary fee policy in order to counter spam, instead of raising spam flags based on data transfer rate - I guess it was easier to implement this way and nobody volunteered to improve it yet. As most miners use the software provided by bitcoin.org, they end up following this fee policy too. So, if you don't respect it, there's a high chance you won't get your transaction included.

*Obviously, it's up to them if transactions are valid. A block containing an invalid transaction is not accepted by the network. Example of invalid tx are double-spends, wrong signatures etc

Paying VAT for every bitcoin transaction is a show stopper. I hope you manage to find good workarounds to this.

This sounds really ambitious.

Why are you focused only on cargo transportation? Can't the same technology eventually transport passengers? If you are able to build truck-sized "trains", can't you make the equivalent of buses as well?

I wonder how smaller can you get... it would be awesome if one day our ordinary family cars were able to hop on some rails and run on super-speeds. (btw, google tells me 350mph ~ 563kph... that's fucking fast! I don't think there's any commercial train in the world running at such speed, is there?)

Wait...
So, according to you, being the victim of a crime depends on whether you were engaging in business? If my personal car gets stolen, I'm a victim, but if it's my function car while I'm working, I'm responsible for being robbed? If a woman is raped, she's a victim, unless it was a prostitute during her business, then she's responsible for being raped?

Please. Of course people would better be prudent and protect themselves from criminals, but your notion of ethics is completely twisted if you really believe "business are not victims". Being the victim or the responsible of a crime has absolutely nothing to do with whether you were engaging in business, pleasure or whatever.


It's not "my website". But it is a good example. Why should they even care about spending money on a high schooler to have a decent site? All they want is to deliver sandwiches and meals. The only reason they've probably done a site at all was because they work in a "geek area", and have many clients that prefer ordering by clicking instead of using the phone.
They don't really care about having a good, secure site, and it's fine enough for them, as long as they keep delivering good meals at an affordable price.
But that's only because they don't accept bitcoin (or any other digital means of payment, for that matter). If they ever consider the possibility, their site will be completely rapped by the crooks OP talks about. So, summarizing, OP has a point. The high level of "cyberviolence" we are submitted to (and also the fact we can't even try to punish these hackers as we may do with meatspace criminals) makes life harder for honest people, unfortunately.

But maybe a better comparison would be to compare the level of security needed to safely maintain a bitcoin wallet in a site, and the level of security needed to safely store credit card numbers. I have no idea which kind of site is more attacked.