Re: Bitcoin

Oh crap, I got your sourceforge usernames mixed up, sorry about that. I clicked on the wrong e-mail when I was looking for your username. You now have access.

Your FAQ looks good so far!

You can create whatever you want on bitcoin.sourceforge.net. Something to get new users up to speed on what Bitcoin is and how to use it and why, and clean and professional looking would help make it look well established. The site at bitcoin.org was designed in a more professorial style when I was presenting the design paper on the Cryptography list, but we’re moving on from that phase.

You should probably change the part about “distribute them under several keys”. When the paper says that it means for the software to do it, and it does. For privacy reasons, the software already uses a different key for every transaction, so every piece of money in your wallet is already on a different key. The exception is when using a bitcoin address, everything sent to the same bitcoin address is on the same key, which is a privacy risk if you’re trying to be anonymous. The EC-DSA key size is very strong (sized for the future), we don’t practically have to worry about a key getting broken, but if we did there’s the advantage that someone expending the massive computing resources would only break one single transaction’s worth of money, not someone’s whole account. The details about how to backup your wallet files is in the Q&A dump and also it’s explained in readme.txt and definitely belongs in the FAQ.

Oh I see, you’re trying to address byronm’s concern on freedomainradio. I see what you mean about the password feature being useful to address that argument. Banks let anyone who has your name and account number drain your account, and you’re not going to get it back from Nigeria. If someone installs a keylogger on your computer, they could just as easily get your bank password and transfer money out of your account. Once we password encrypt the wallet, we’ll be able to make a clearer case that we’re much more secure than banks. We use strong encryption, while banks still let anyone who has your account info draw money from your account.

Original Source

https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/
Published on GitHub in February 2024 as part of Martti Malmi's testimony in the COPA v. Wright trial. Original Sent: Mon, 04 May 2009 16:51:00 +0100 (= 15:51:00 UTC).

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