I now invite others to post their own verification statements on this thread. If I can get at least a few others doing this regularly, then I will start a git repository with timestamped signed attestations of my own observations of what was posted by what account, and push it to Github. That way, everybody will be able to pull all of the substantive data from this thread (including a collection of PGP keys) conveniently, without tedious and error-prone copying and pasting from a forum thread.
Please refer to my
2020-04-28 statement for a reference on how this should be done. Expressed in pseudocode,
v0.0.1-alpha of the required format is:
"Bitcoin Forum name:\t[your name]\n"
"Bitcoin Forum userid:\t[your userid]\n"
"PGP primary key:\t[your PGP fingerprint]\n"
"\n"
"# Ten most-recent Bitcoin block hashes:\n"
"\n"
"[height]\t[ISO date]\t[hex hash]\n"
[...]
That is human-readable; and I think that it should be not
too horrible to wrangle with /bin/sh and standard shell tools.
DO NOT include the date, which is contained in the
Signature Creation Time subpacket of your PGP signature. DO NOT include any other extraneous data that may confuse scripts.
Include a complete OTS file, base64ed in a separate <code> block. Posts without a timestamp file will be deleted.
For your first post on this thread, and any time that your PGP is updated, please include your PGP key in a separate <code> block. If desired, you may also include links to archival evidence that you have previously claimed the same PGP primary key with the same forum account; if you do, keep any descriptions concise and factual.
I plan to invite third parties to attest which accounts they see posting what; however, that will need to wait for me to develop a reasonable format for it. DO NOT quote other people’s posts here; quote-posts will be silently deleted.
DO NOT post claims to have verified others’ signatures and timestamps! Such claims encourage newbies to believe Gavin-style fake “verifiations”. I will delete all such claims from this thread.
Anybody may post properly formatted verification statements, timestamps, and PGP keys on this thread. However,
all discussion is off-topic; posts containing any kind of chit-chat will be deleted without comment. If you wish to engage in expert-level technical discussion of a better way to do this, please take it up on my
relevant thread in Development & Technical Discussion. Otherwise, please wait for that better way to be developed.
Original post text, with updated list of links to statements:
Much have I complained about the
ad hoc security measures in the various “stake” threads. Well, I should offer a better solution. Here it is—at least, the
start of something better. I intend to do this semi-regularly—at least once per month, unless I am “sleeping”.
If my forum account has posted recently, and significantly more than a month has passed since this thread was refreshed with a new PGP-signed, OTS-timestamped message containing verifiably recent information, then you should demand a fresh statement consistent in its evidentiary strength with the statements that I have previously provided. Be very suspicious if the demand is refused or ignored.
I intend to refine my way of doing this, based on future experience. If or when I work out a standard format that is relatively easy for others to fully verify, then I may open a new “stake” thread where quoting is prohibited as spam, and
trustless, cryptographically verifiable evidence is required in a standardized, easy-to-verify format.
Verification statements (listed in reverse chronological order):
Local rules: Only the following are on-topic in this thread. Anything else will be silently deleted as off-topic.
New signed and timestamped statements from me.Smart questions stated with at least ordinary social courtesy.Competent technical questions, comments, suggestions, or critiques. I welcome competent technical discussion! However, I am currently out of patience with people who make repeated incorrect assertions out of ignorance, even when I provide something tantamount to a free tutorial.
Do not publicly say that you have verified a statement. This gives a false sense of security, and tends to inculcate in the public
a habit of relying others to “verify”, instead of verifying for themselves. This is crypto! It is supposed to be trustless. Discussion of how to verify these things is welcome—claims that you have verified something are not.
If you want to post a similar statement yourself, please e-mail or PM me first to discuss it. The way that I am doing this is admittedly a bit rough; and I don’t want to start a trend before improving that, perhaps with your suggestions. Thanks.
