I’m currently reading through your paper. At the timestamp server section you mention newspapers and usenet, so I thought you might be interested in this if you have not seen it already:
http://www.publictimestamp.org/
Thanks, I hadn’t seen that yet. It looks very well presented. There was an older one that’s been running for a long time that publishes its hashes to Usenet. I’m surprised this one isn’t using Usenet, although it is kind of difficult to get access to post to Usenet in an automated way these days. If they can get a magazine or newspaper to publish their hashes, it would work a lot easier in court for their purposes. Bitcoin and all timestamp servers share the basic functionality of periodically collecting things into blocks and hashing them into a chain.
By the way, I’m also currently running the alpha code on one of my workstations. So far it has two “Generated” messages, however the “Credit” field for those is 0.00 and the balance hasn’t changed. Is this due to the age/maturity requirement for a coin to be valid?
Right, the credit field stays 0.00 until it matures, then it’ll be 50.00. Do you think it would be clearer if I left the credit field blank until it matures? I should put some text in the transaction details (when you double click on it) explaining how it works. (was it obvious you can doubleclick on a line for details?)
Be sure to upgrade to v0.1.3 if you haven’t already. This version has really stabilized things.
Satoshi