Yeah, I think flexibility is a virtue here. This is exactly the idea of bitcoin's scripts. So you'd have an operator that pushes the initiator's value determination to the stack, and you'd have an operator that pushes the last price to the stack. The script logic itself is up to the sender of the transaction. Another cool operator would be a random number operation. That would allow trivial p2p lotteries and other games of chance. I was thinking you could base that on the nonce, because that would be hard to game for the miner.
Bitcoin proper will never allow you to natively reference outside data in a script. It took me a while to understand why but suffice to say there is a reason you can't even get a bocknumber or timestamp pushed on the stack. However, Mike's "oracle" transaction script opens up a world of possibilities. http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ContractsBy chaining together many simple oracle's you can come up with any derivative transaction you like. The details of what is being "bet" on are completely opaque to the miner. To use the cowboys/redskins example you would just need an oracle that spit out signed event results. The trustability of the oracle could be verified in the bitcoin blockchain by each party wanting to participate but without involving the miners. However, maybe you only want to bet if its raining during the game. We each trust a certain weather oracle and know its format so we can generate a transaction chaining the two conditions together but taking opposite sides of the bet. The possibilities are endless: Timestamps, lotteries, sports, private games, politics, stock market, etc. |
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A simple fix for this problem has been suggested a few times: retarget should occur either after 2016 blocks or after 14 days, whichever happens first.
Without having all of the network synced to the same clock doesn't this have the potential to fork the block chain? If my 14 days is just slightly different then your 14 days and a block comes out in that gap of time it may be valid to me but not to you. |
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Yes, the raw stuff.
I ask because I believe writing against blockexplorer like implementations will be more common than writing against bitcoin itself... especially for ecommerce when you are generally only on the receiving side.
Not that theymos's isn't trustworthy but I wouldn't want to count on it being around if I was relying on it to run my software. Its also not fair to him.
Even for sending I think it will be a lost easier to have a small program decrypt an offline wallet, query your addresses, gather inputs for transaction creation, send, then shutdown.
It relies on having a trusted (and most likely private) db to query against so I think an open source version is very important.
Since it seems like blockexplorer won't be open sourced I'm glad to see someone is taking this on.
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Very nice!
Do you plan on implementing the json return option for queries?
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I don't have a great solution for this but maybe just some food for thought:
Key protection is a hard subject that people have been trying to solve for a long time.
There are a ton of solutions that someone might choose based on their comfort and circumstance.
If you guys get hung up on key protection schemes you could make a full time job of implementing them and the core development might suffer. There are a couple of projects out there right now that would be more easily adaptable to cranking out a multitude of different key protection schemes. Bitcoinj comes to mind.
Encryption of the wallet was a huge advance. Solving the key logger issue, etc, seems to be beyond the scope of what you need to solve. Let the OS developers take care of that.
Perhaps instead just add the ability to more easily import transactions generated by other programs.
If you added the option to monitor a folder for txt files and relay transactions contained in it I think you would see a plethora of key protection software develop without having to worry about it becoming the bulk of the bitcoin developers' time.
As an added benefit the relaying installation could have no knowledge of what keys you possessed period, thus having the ability to completely remove key management responsibility from the core client. I can't think of a more secure mode to operate under... assuming the client validated transactions before relaying them.
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Something I haven't seen the answer to:
Does lastpass do any verification before it lets you pull as user's database?
If everything is local they really have no idea whether I'm pulling my own blob or someone else's.
I can enter your email address and download your blob.
I realize its as safe as your master password is strong but if there's no verification at all it just doesn't sit right with me.
I've used lastpass on and off but I've never really seen the answer to that question.
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The next step is a better functioning community. As garzik has said all this forum spamming, political hoity-toity, whining, begging, witch hunting has driven most of the business types away from here and here is where they get there info.
This. Its almost impossible to have a conversation around here any more. Its like if there was only one message board for the dollar or euro and everyone tried to project their personal agenda onto it. The best way forward is multiple clients IMO. Right now its pretty monolithic and there is no true API. A portable library in all the major languages that didn't require you to run the monolithic client would be a boon to the community. Its going to be extremely hard though. Mike laid out why this is somewhere I'm too lazy to track down. |
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Very interesting double spend attack.
To get more miners involved you could keep building very profitable transactions off of the last block.
First you would spend 25,000.
Then double spend but only 1k at a time: 1k in fees and 24k back to you.
If a miner takes the bait turn right around and do it again off of the new block: 1k in fees and 23k back to you.
Like dangling a carrot in front of a donkey you could slowly build that other side of the chain getting more and more miners involved each time.
This would require more active management on part of the miners but its very interesting.
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Mine was transferred within an hour or so when I was testing the system a few days ago.
TradeHill has been great for me so far.
Wish I could say the same. I did a dwolla deposit the week they opened and that went ok. Then I tried a bank transfer and I'm still waiting a week after my bank released the funds. Not exactly snappy on the support inquiries either. |
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Very nice!
Its hard to judge slides because its just the bullets without context.
Two things I noticed which you may already be addressing in the talk:
"Apart from securing Bitcoin, the energy is wasted"
Is there another way to phrase that?
Also, in the part about scalability you don't mentioned the simple mode clients using just 4.5 MB a year.
Then it says bitcoin doesn't scale with the number of transactions.
Not exactly sure what that means but if it makes sense in context its all good.
Looks like its going to be a great presentation!
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OMG Bruce, if this is true then my hat is off to you.
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I bet that's part of the virus.
Do you think the virus is so sophisticated that it can extract all of my saved passwords from Firefox for example?
Assume it is. You need to wipe that machine and check anything else on your network. |
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I had a feeling this was a virus, but just out of sheer curiosity I first scanned it with MSE and then opened it. No antivirus detects it as a virus, so how can I clean myself?
I haven't started mining yet and have no coins in the wallet, but how would I make sure my machine is clean before I do?
Wow. It won't detect as a virus because its brand new. You are infected. Maybe someone will reverse engineer it and you figure out how to clean it up at a later date. Until then your machine is compromised and possibly every account you have accessed from it. Scrap the machine. Change the password to all your accounts. |
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WARNING, IF THEY TOLD YOU IN EMAIL, THE EMAIL IS FAKE, DO NOT CLICK ON LINKS!
This is just a phishing attempt using your email address.
Its not in links, its after you directly log in to the site. |
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Same thing here.
However, I extracted just my user info from the db and I'm running john the ripper on it.
It hasn't cracked it so my guess is someone is just going directly after the email accounts.
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I'm not really old guard... but there are plenty of us that love bitcoin for what it is. Nothing like it has existed in the history of mankind.
For me all the talk of price, legality, and politics is completely irrelevant. I'm fascinated by what a beautiful machine it is.
Frankly it would be nice if everyone who only saw it only as an investment, a conspiracy theory, or the antidote to a conspiracy theory would go away.
I'd keep writing bitcoin related software even if the price was negative.
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I have a recurring fantasy that I enable "Generate Coins" for five seconds and win a block.
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Your kwhcoin is just a rephrased version of Enron's energy trading business plan. |
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What you are currently doing is concocting a very specific countermeasure against a very narrow implementation of a certain attack vector.
It is futile.
With a reasonable password it completely solves the issue of someone gaining access to a copy of your wallet without access to your machine. I'd say thats excellent progress. |
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