I just posted this in the Bitcoin Development area of the forum. I think it would also be appropriate to post it here.
I learned about bitcoin in May 2011. I was working on a paper titled "Sound Money Without Commodities" and wanted to check on the current state of digital currencies. I stumbled upon bitcoin and thought it was a really neat project. I posted about it in the forum on my Arimaa game web site:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=other;action=display;num=1305495730I am very enthuiastic about the future of bitcoin and have started accepting bitcoins for Arimaa game sets on my arimaa.com site. However, there are some thing about bitcoin which I believe can be improved to make it more appealing to a larger user base. I know there has been much discussion around future improvements to bitcoin on this forum. I'm sorry that I have not caught up on everything that has been said in the forum. But from what I have read, it seems that most of the proposals are based on modifications to the current bitcoin client/node software. I actually think that the current bitcoin software does not need to be changed and that separate software components need to be developed to provide additional features. After thinking through some ideas over the last few months I have tried to write up some specs for a bitcoin gateway that can provide these features while maintaining the decentralized goal of bitcoin. I hope this paper will motivate the bitcoin community to consider implementing the bitcoin gateway.
If I had thousands of bitcoins I would surely spend some of it to motivate development of the bitcoin gateway. As it is, I was a bit late to the mining party I do have some bitcoins now thanks to a few bitcoin enthusiasts who have bought Arimaa game sets. But bitcoin has come along so far due to the contributions of time and effort made by many different people. So I view this paper as my contribution towards the continued success of bitcoin.
Hope you enjoy reading the paper:
http://arimaa.com/bitcoin/
