Dustin Trammell to Satoshi: proof-hashes group and upgrade plan (January 12, 2009)

On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 02:33 +0800, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:

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.

It actually posts the hash blocks to a Google Group called ‘proof-hashes’, so similar result as if it were posting to Usenet.

http://groups.google.com/group/proof-hashes

Since I run that group, and it’s sole purpose is to archive proof-of-work hashes, feel free to join an account to have your system post there as well if you like.

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?)

No, I think having $0.00 there is more appropriate than being blank. The entries in my BitCoin software (4 of them now) all say ‘unconfirmed’ however, so I’m not sure what that means, but I did grok that the coins were generated and just not ‘mature’ yet, but I had also read your whitepaper so I may have understood that concept from there. When the coins mature, will that generate a new ‘credit’ transaction, or will the existing generation transaction line’s credit field be updated?

No, I was unaware that you could double-click a transaction line for further details… I just did that and it currently just has the same information there that is in the transaction line. Putting more information there would definitely be useful.

Be sure to upgrade to v0.1.3 if you haven’t already. This version has really stabilized things.

I was running 0.1.1… I will update now. Perhaps a new version notification or auto-update feature is in order? (:

Electronic currency and cryptography are two things that I am very interested in so as you would assume I was drawn to this project immediately when I saw it posted to the Cryptography email list. Feel free to ping me for feedback or to test out new features, I’ll be happy to help out.

Cheers,

— Dustin D. Trammell dtrammell@dustintrammell.com http://www.dustintrammell.com