Suggestion: Allow short messages to be sent together with bitcoins ?

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Bitcoin is great, but it misses one thing that usual bank transfers have: payment title.

Perhaps it should be possible to include short (<=512 bytes) message for each transaction.
The message could be encrypted with public/private keys so only the receiver can see its contents.

What do You think ?

PS.
I might be wrong, but the messages could also be used to increase randomness of hashing process by the way, couldn't they ? If not, never mind.

[1714892477]

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[grondilu]

Bitcoin is great, but it misses one thing that usual bank transfers have: payment title.

Perhaps it should be possible to include short (<=512 bytes) message for each transaction.
The message could be encrypted with public/private keys so only the receiver can see its contents.

What do You think ?

I red somewhere that the kind of keys used in the software supports signature, but not encryption.

Since it is very easy to create a new bitcoin address for each transaction, a paiement label is not necessary.  Just use the bitcoin address as a reference for your message, and transmit it via email or any other way of communication.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

a paiement label is not necessary.

Sure it is "not necessary" but still would be useful for people.

Perhaps some people would like to keep one BTC address for some reasons.
Also bigger financial institutions won't really like the idea of different account number for each transation.

[grondilu]

a paiement label is not necessary.

Sure it is "not necessary" but still would be useful for people.

Perhaps some people would like to keep one BTC address for some reasons.
Also bigger financial institutions won't really like the idea of different account number for each transation.

I don't think the keys should really be thought of as an account number per transaction. That logic I think is misleading. You can have millions of keys associated to one wallet / account.

What about the increase of the block size, then ?

Even if 512o per transaction is small, it might represent a significative amount since all has to be stored in the block chain.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

What about the increase of the block size, then ?
Even if 512o per transaction is small, it might represent a significative amount since all has to be stored in the block chain.

I will tell You what have i just done.
I clicked "quote", copied the message and pasted it in a text file.

Then, i have truncated the file to 512 bytes, and EDIT: GZIPPED  it. It now takes 329 bytes.
Next, i have bzipped it. Now it takes 288 bytes.

Of course, there is no need for such a long message. Let's try 384 bytes. I used lorem ipsum generator from here: http://lipsum.com/
Results:

Code:

-rw-r--r--  1 user user  384 2010-10-23 19:09 ipsum.txt (uncompressed)
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  274 2010-10-23 19:08 ipsum.txt.bz2 (bzip2)
-rw-r--r--  1 user user  268 2010-10-23 19:10 ipsum.txt.gz (gzip)

I think that maximum ~260-280 bytes per transaction is not bad.

[theymos]

Like grondilu said, encryption isn't possible.

It's possible to modify Bitcoin to send messages. Just create transactions that start with something like this:

Code:

BTCMESSAGEv1--This is a message OP_DROP 

The network will accept these, but I don't think your recipient will recognize them unless he is also using your modified Bitcoin.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

I found something interesting.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1138345/best-compression-algorithm-for-short-text-strings

There is a small OS project on github, which does good compression of short text strings.
http://github.com/antirez/smaz

'This is a small string' compressed by 50%
'foobar' compressed by 34%
'the end' compressed by 58%
'not-a-g00d-Exampl333' enlarged by 15%
'Smaz is a simple compression library' compressed by 39%
'Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide' compressed by 49%
'this is an example of what works very well with smaz' compressed by 49%
'1000 numbers 2000 will 10 20 30 compress very little' compressed by 10%

In general, lowercase English will work very well. It will suck with a lot
of numbers inside the strings. Other languages are compressed pretty well too,
the following is Italian, not very similar to English but still compressible
by smaz:

'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai in una selva oscura' compressed by 33%
'Mi illumino di immenso' compressed by 37%
'L'autore di questa libreria vive in Sicilia' compressed by 28%

It can compress URLS pretty well:

'http://google.com' compressed by 59%
'http://programming.reddit.com' compressed by 52%
'http://github.com/antirez/smaz/tree/master' compressed by 46%

So we could further get the 384 bytes down to <200 or <175 bytes.

[grondilu]

I also wonder if the message has to be taken into account for the hash computation.  Not doing so would allow to delete it later.

I very much don't like this idea of a message.  Since it is not necessary to the protocol, I'm not sure if it would be easy to find a place where it really fits.  I'm not a programmer though.  I'd be curious to have Satoshi's thought on this.

Edit.  I have a funny idea.  Imagine that numeric precision is increased way beyond 8 decimals, say 128 decimals for instance.

What about using those decimals to code your message ?  Somehow you would have a "natural fee" for this service, and we won't have to modify anything from the protocol.

Edit #2.  Gosh I LOVE this idea

Edit #3.  We don't need 128 decimals.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but with 32 decimals you can code a 17 characters-longed uncompressed message in a 64 characters set.  (32*log(10)/log(64)  = 7.717)

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

I very much don't like this idea of a message.  Since it is not necessary to the protocol, I'm not sure if it would be easy to find a place where it really fits.  I'm not a programmer though.  I'd be curious to have Satoshi's thought on this.

Yeah, I'm curious of that too.

[satoshi]

ECDSA can't encrypt messages, only sign signatures.

It would be unwise to have permanently recorded plaintext messages for everyone to see.  It would be an accident waiting to happen.

If there's going to be a message system, it should be a separate system parallel to the bitcoin network.  Messages should not be recorded in the block chain.  The messages could be signed with the bitcoin address keypairs to prove who they're from.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

ECDSA can't encrypt messages, only sign signatures.

It would be unwise to have permanently recorded plaintext messages for everyone to see.  It would be an accident waiting to happen.

If there's going to be a message system, it should be a separate system parallel to the bitcoin network.  Messages should not be recorded in the block chain.  The messages could be signed with the bitcoin address keypairs to prove who they're from.

I think I didn't exactly understand how the system works. So if the messages would be sent together with bitcoin, they will also be permamently stored in the block chain for ages.

It seems you're right, satoshi.

[MoonShadow]

Bitcoin is great, but it misses one thing that usual bank transfers have: payment title.

Perhaps it should be possible to include short (<=512 bytes) message for each transaction.
The message could be encrypted with public/private keys so only the receiver can see its contents.

What do You think ?

PS.
I might be wrong, but the messages could also be used to increase randomness of hashing process by the way, couldn't they ? If not, never mind.

This could be done externally via encrypted jabber, email or any number of other methods.  All that would need to be done to permit a message to be sent that could be associated to a particular transaction is create a summation number of the transaction to be pasted into the short message, followed by the short message either cleartext or by some agreed upon encryption method such as public key encryption and then signed by the same bitcoin key used to sign the transaction.  This message could be sent to the receiver by any method, never to be included inside a block, but can be verified as well as definatively associated with a particular transaction regardless of how the transaction comes to the receiver.

[FreeMoney]

a paiement label is not necessary.

Sure it is "not necessary" but still would be useful for people.

Perhaps some people would like to keep one BTC address for some reasons.
Also bigger financial institutions won't really like the idea of different account number for each transation.

Call it a transaction number and they'll insist that it be different each time.

[asdf]

As bitcoin scales to millions of transactions, the bandwidth requirements of running a generator are going to get quite large. I believe that keeping the transaction size as small as possible is the highest priority.

The more competing generators of bitcoin, the better for it's stability, i guess. Bandwidth is going to be the greatest barrier to running a node.

[grondilu]

As bitcoin scales to millions of transactions, the bandwidth requirements of running a generator are going to get quite large. I believe that keeping the transaction size as small as possible is the highest priority.

The more competing generators of bitcoin, the better for it's stability, i guess. Bandwidth is going to be the greatest barrier to running a node.

+1

Also, I'd like to point at that bitcoin should adhere to the KISS philosophy.

It's common nerd knowledge that many software were great at beginning, but tend to become ugly fat cats as users wanted to add many features to it.  Additionnal features that are not required for the protocol, should be part of a separate project.

[Anonymous]

A better idea would be an encrypted email service for bitcoin users using gpg and pgp encryption.
Then we would have a secure private communication channel.

[grondilu]

A better idea would be an encrypted email service for bitcoin users using gpg and pgp encryption.
Then we would have a secure private communication channel.

What do you mean ??

You don't need anything to use GPG, apart from the GPG software.

[Anonymous]

A better idea would be an encrypted email service for bitcoin users using gpg and pgp encryption.
Then we would have a secure private communication channel.

What do you mean ??

You don't need anything to use GPG, apart from the GPG software.

I mean a service like mailvault. You can hide your bitcoin inside an encrypted message

[grondilu]

I mean a service like mailvault. You can hide your bitcoin inside an encrypted message

I didn't know about mailvault.  I don't get it :  what's the point of using GPG if you don't own your private key ?  Well, I guess some people just don't like the idea of installing software on their computer...

Anyway, on their "about" page, they mention their distributed offshore servers :  http://www.metropipe.net/

This website accepts an impressive number of methods for paiements, including pecunix for instance.   I guess they might accept bitcoins.

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Also, I'd like to point at that bitcoin should adhere to the KISS philosophy.

+50 to that.

KISS philosophy is what makes Linux so great.