Will China ever ban email?

[remotemass]

I think this could be an interesting topic with interesting implications to bitcoin.
What do you think: will China ever think of banning email?

[payb.tc]

why not, they already banned clean air.

[CIYAM]

I very much doubt it as the PRC government aren't really that concerned about "private discussion" between individuals (and mass emailing is generally fairly easy to identify) and also there is so much business that *depends* upon email (after all it's not as though they could turn to Facebook or Twitter).

[remotemass]

What I was thinking is that someone living in a country that doesn't allow bitcoin (doing deep packet inspection or something) could travel to a country where it is allowed and issue loads of addresses with small amounts of bitcoin, and then come back and use email to send the coins, sending a list of private keys that would make the total amount in the correspondent bitcoin addresses, the desired value to send.
To receive coins, ask the payer to send them also in "bitcoin quanta", let's call it like that, using email and PGP, sending for that matter a list of private keys that would sum to the total value of that payment.
Am I making sense?
Is that sending the private key to an address with a lot of money is risky. And having them 'quantized' makes it less risky; and seems to work well for sending and receiving the coins with email and PGP.

[jl2012]

What I was thinking is that someone living in a country that doesn't allow bitcoin (doing deep packet inspection or something) could travel to a country where it is allowed and issue loads of addresses with small amounts of bitcoin, and then come back and use email to send the coins, sending a list of private keys that would make the total amount in the correspondent bitcoin addresses, the desired value to send.
To receive coins, ask the payer to send them also in "bitcoin quanta", let's call it like that, using email and PGP, sending for that matter a list of private keys that would sum to the total value of that payment.
Am I making sense?
Is that sending the private key to an address with a lot of money is risky. And having them 'quantized' makes it less risky; and seems to work well for sending and receiving the coins with email and PGP.

Just use Armory. Receiver holds the watch-only copy and construct unsigned transaction, and send the unsigned transaction to the payer through email. The payer will sign and return it to the receiver by email, and the receiver will broadcast it.

[jl2012]

I think this could be an interesting topic with interesting implications to bitcoin.
What do you think: will China ever think of banning email?

It's easier for them to completely shutdown the internet

[remotemass]

To put it simpler:
you would have all your 'satoshis' in separate addresses and send the private keys by email/PGP as needed.

[CIYAM]

Sure - sending private keys via email (to be swept) or signing raw tx's offline (which does not require Armory of course) would work, however, I would probably go a little further to "obscure" the information like using say stego with one or more attached pics (if you are worried about the emails being "identified" as payments).

[payb.tc]

To put it simpler:
you would have all your 'satoshis' in separate addresses and send the private keys by email/PGP as needed.

one problem with this is that the person who decides to combine them at some point will pay huge fees.

just like it's inconvenient to accept/handle thousands of physical 1c coins, it'd be inconvenient to accept/handle millions of 1-satoshi keys.

maybe instead create some like this:

1 btc
0.5
0.2
0.1
0.05
0.02
0.01
0.005
etc.

[BkkCoins]

It would make more sense to run a email based bitcoin client proxy. Basically you could do Electrum via email protocol instead of Stratum protocol.

For minimal work this could be written as a layer on top of an Electrum Server, maybe with some obfuscation in the email to make filtering less easy.

Electrum already supports proxies so you could make a email proxy that would take the json calls and wrap them as email. Or something more generic could be written as a email client plugin that provides a wallet interface but communicates via email. I don't think that would even be very difficult - more a case of wanting to do it.

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

It would make more sense to run a email based bitcoin client proxy. Basically you could do Electrum via email protocol instead of Stratum protocol.

For minimal work this could be written as a layer on top of an Electrum Server, maybe with some obfuscation in the email to make filtering less easy.

Electrum already supports proxies so you could make a email proxy that would take the json calls and wrap them as email. Or something more generic could be written as a email client plugin that provides a wallet interface but communicates via email. I don't think that would even be very difficult - more a case of wanting to do it.

Interesting idea, harkens back to the early 90s, a golden era in terms of attempting to shoehorn all manner of protocols into email/smtp interfaces due to unreliable connectivity and lack of bandwidth.  At one point both Lotus and Microsoft had products doing fullblown database synchronization & replication over email transports, so it's not beyond imagination to conceive of Bitcoin clients even heavier than Electrum someday piggybacking on SMTP to get around nasty censorship conditions.

[greyhawk]

It would make more sense to run a email based bitcoin client proxy. Basically you could do Electrum via email protocol instead of Stratum protocol.

For minimal work this could be written as a layer on top of an Electrum Server, maybe with some obfuscation in the email to make filtering less easy.

Electrum already supports proxies so you could make a email proxy that would take the json calls and wrap them as email. Or something more generic could be written as a email client plugin that provides a wallet interface but communicates via email. I don't think that would even be very difficult - more a case of wanting to do it.

Interesting idea, harkens back to the early 90s, a golden era in terms of attempting to shoehorn all manner of protocols into email/smtp interfaces due to unreliable connectivity and lack of bandwidth.  At one point both Lotus and Microsoft had products doing fullblown database synchronization & replication over email transports, so it's not beyond imagination to conceive of Bitcoin clients even heavier than Electrum someday piggybacking on SMTP to get around nasty censorship conditions.

I've still got Notes DBs running on that tech. Works without fail.

[MPOE-PR]

why not, they already banned clean air.

Lol!

[finway]

I believe Chinese people will have more freedom than Americans, in 2 or 3 decades.

[CIYAM]

I believe Chinese people will have more freedom than Americans, in 2 or 3 decades.

Am not sure how things are done in America in regards to buying prepaid SIMs but in China you have no need to show ID (and they are very cheap) and you can also buy mobile phone frequency "blockers" openly from the markets here.

[payb.tc]

buying prepaid SIMs but in China you have no need to show ID (and they are very cheap)

SIMs are cheap, or IDs are cheap? (or both?)

[CIYAM]

SIMs are cheap, or IDs are cheap? (or both?)

Probably both (haven't bought the latter though).

You can also openly buy things like "mosquito rackets" (electrified mozzie zappers that look like a tennis racket) which are *banned* in many western countries.

[Dabs]

Everything is made in China.

[payb.tc]

Everything is made in China.

including melamine

[CIYAM]

including melamine

Indeed - food is something you need to be a little careful about in China (something that all those "rules" and "regulations" does help with in western countries).