Just an aside, but sometimes you need to prove you are the *only* owner of the priv key, which is tricky.
I assume you mean from a Joe Avg user perspective? Fairly trivial, cryptographically. (Nontrivial to invent, but trivial for me to understand).
Is it possible to prove that (a) there is only one copy of a particular private key and (b) you control it?
This would be great for auditing purposes.
I haven't spent any time on it and I'm not aware of any present effort, but yes, it could be done. It would have to be built atop the protocol, and would therefore be opt-in. No way around that (nor would it be good if there were).
Why is it bad that it's U.S. centric. Bitcoin started in the U.S., most of the really big criminals of Bitcoin are from the U.S., the lead dev is from the U.S. and the major businesses that use Bitcoin are too. It's natural that the only major organization supporting Bitcoin would focus on the Unraveling States of Americunt.
It's not inherently bad, just inherently risky. The probability of undesired outcomes is high, should Bitcoin become heavily centralized. It won't, and already things are happening that negates any threat that could emerge.
The risk is derived from the same mechanisms that can corrupt any centralized system which is otherwise intended to behave democratically. When it involves lobbyists, politicians, regulators, etc the result is a revolving-door phenomenon. Thus, the fear is the Bitcoin equivalent of what is termed "regulatory capture."
And then we all move to Litecoin or fork Bitcoin. That's the good news about cryptocurrency, the people determine what it is and what it isn't. We will play in their sandbox only as long as it suits us.
Yep. I think, taken in the context of my other posts, it would be clear that this is what I mean. Thus, it's not really "bad" that the Foundation becomes US-centric, at least not for long. There may be outcomes, and those may affect things, and the probability of those outcomes being less than optimal is high with a US-centric foundation, and if they managed to significantly skew the functionality of the majority of the network by influencing the reference client, perhaps even Bitcoin is damaged... but
cryptocurrency lives on, regardless of the name. And, to reiterate, the existence of a viable alternative to bitcoind -- btcd -- already makes the odds of a significant non-optimal outcome for Bitcoin itself, far less.
