Here are a few ideas for using these holes.  I love this bitcoin stuff!

1) escrow
2) speeding up txns

Escrow:

Make the address and put the money in the hole.  The other person can see its in the hole by looking at the block explorer.  A new escrow tool could be made to allow for creating and sending to the hole and allow peeking into the hole.  So the Seller can see its in the hole but can't take it.  Maybe they could each contribute half of a key (or use two keys) to allow making a safe hole which neither can empty.  They have to cooperate to finish the txn and release the money to the correct recipient, so its not perfect.  Maybe a few more clever idea would fix that.


Speeding up txns:

Put a chunk of money in the hole and wait for it to be confirmed.  Then the txn can proceed with the speed of delivering the keys.  Instead of sending bitcoins you would send the keys and that's fast.  If there is too much money in the hole, the extra can be reclaimed by the buyer before he ships the keys without waiting for confirmations.  Something like that maybe. 

I see on your github only a small subset of the things discussed in this thread.  How is this going?  Have you put it up somewhere?  I want to see it!

Where's the distributed timestamp server in bash?  I want to see that.  And you should add it to the effort of the guys that are doing bitcoin cli tools:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=2461.0

Thanks guys

I talked at a hacker group here in Mountain View last night.  They were very interesting.  They have a few questions that I couldn't answer:

* Who gets the txn fees that are put on small txns?  I sent a small txn to another wallet of my own, and was charged a small fee.  Who got that fee?  I did not get it, and nobody else took part in the txn!  Where did that money go?  Who got that money?

* How is balance within a coin tracked? - The transaction list is a clear concept as I presented it, but I present it as if the bitcoin were an atom which is not true.  How is subdivision of a bitcoin handled?  The balance and the ownership of each fraction will need to be tracked and checked for each txn and if there are many small ones they would be scattered all along the block chain which would make validating a single txn inefficient.

* selfish blocks - A node could pretend to receive no other txns except its own txn 0, and simply focus on hashing.  This would be an unfair an advantage, though a small one. Sounds feasible but not scary.

* Takeover the irc server and direct all new peers to a darknet of their own controlled nodes so they can establish their own dominant block chain. 

About the talk: It was a South Bay hacker group called DC650 at the Hacker Dojo.  I was referred to them by the folks from the SF hacker group where I spoke on Sunday.  I did a speech for over an hour, and then we did questions for another hour.  It all went very well.

Is anybody actually working on this?  Let's talk.  I want to get in on this too.

Yes I think that's right.

Thanks guys

Kind of funny how badly this is going.

I was invited and I'm a good speaker and there's evidence.  Talked for about an hour and a half today for the Bay Area Hacker's Association at Noisebridge in SF.    It went very well, but its getting expensive.

I'm doing two speeches this weekend and two more later this week.  Yesterday's cost me about $80, and that's in addition to ongoing advocacy costs.  Please donate folks!  I'm not getting rich here, I've got no donations yet.  I'll report on what I get in donations.

1CmXCL5c6Za34yChL8wNMH5BY9JR5dPnmB

There are a bunch of folks working on this problem right now:

http://www.seasteading.org/

The sea is the next frontier.  Floating cities - its the only way to find some free land of your own nowadays. 

I want to hear your talk.  Is it on youtube or some other thing?

I'm doing a bitcoin speech at an unconference this weekend. 

I'll be doing a bitcoin talk to the folks at a floating Seasteading festival next Saturday:

http://www.unephemerisle.org/wiki/NotEphemerisle

Its something like a Burning Man out on the water, and it will be awesome.  Its orientation is ultimately towards building better societies out on the high seas:

http://seasteading.org

A new society will certainly need a new currency unit!

This will be interesting!

Folks - help me find info on sneakernets for yachting.  The agorist guy had that in a podcast recently.  I need to find some data on that.  Please help me get some leads on researching that.

Brian

Signup guys!  And help me choose a location.   I want something near the startups in downtown.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011 at 7:00 PM

http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Meetup-Group/

Send me some bitcoins to help cover the cost of these things:

1AvWtjFXhCR5Fafh25yMrKmPVJhdTbPB1Y


B

Resize it and republish it.  It sounds like it would be very good to have around.

I want you to try again.  I can't follow this either.

I read in the technical paper that new blocks have an empty transaction reserved for the block creator, and that empty transaction is the start of a new coin.  If we get 50 coins for creating the new block, where are they (a coin being a chain of transactions)?  Are there actually 50 new empty transactions in the new block?

I thought the 50 was 50 accumulated wins.  I am surprised to hear that one winning block is 50.  I will go read that again.

So I can see there is no progress, but its still a crapshoot.  Mine could win on the first hash, but it takes longer because the odds are slim and it takes mine so much longer to generate a hash to see if it wins.  Isn't that right? 

Is there a way to determine how many of the 50 coins the wallet has generated?  They must be recorded someplace.  I want to see that, and its obviously a good new feature for the wallet too.  In addition to the word "Generating", it should show how far along it is - how many out of 50 has it generated.  Get me started on where to find that info and I'll code it myself.

How is the wallet handling those generated coins?  Generating a coin is a crap shoot, I'm sure its winning sometimes.

Sounds good.  Make it happen!