Satoshi ↔ Gavin Andresen Correspondence

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 10:55 AM, mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote:

Quote from: Martti Malmi on December 20, 2010, 3:55:04 PM UTC

ShadowOfHarbringer described a way of mirroring the bitcoin.org website and forum here: http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=2026.msg30043#msg30043

Should we go by it and trust the database along with its password hashes to some reliable community members who have servers?

That seems like asking for trouble, and I think it would violate the implicit trust of everybody who’s registered for the forums.

Another option is to encrypt the backups with pgp and store them in multiple places.

That seems wiser. Daily backups copied … somewhere … seems like the right thing to do. If they’re reasonably small (less than a gigabyte), I’d be happy to pay for Amazon S3 storage/bandwidth for them.

I’d be happy to talk to Rainey; Satoshi, I assume you don’t want to deal with press/PR/interviews ?

We could decline to talk to the press— Satoshi, I know you’ve expressed concern about bitcoin growing too big too fast, and being unable to keep up with traffic/attacks/feature requests/etc. But I don’t think ignoring the press will make them go away; they’ll just talk to somebody else. I think it is better to give a realistic impression of bitcoin (it is cutting-edge, beta software that is still being developed, it is not poised to replace PayPal or the Euro anytime soon, etc) rather than let somebody over-enthusiastic become “the unofficial bitcoin spokesperson.”

You must’ve read the Forbes article… yeah, I’m not happy with the ‘wacky pirate money’ tone, either.

More credit for the rest of the contributors is a very good idea.

RE: forwarding the key/code: fricking fracking… now I’ve gotta figure out a couple of people who I can trust to keep them safe…

On a completely different subject: I did something that I hope turns out to be smart, but might be stupid.

I was contacted by http://www.iqt.org/ – they’re a US-govt-funded ‘strategic investment’ company, and part of what they do is holding an annual conference on emerging technologies for US intelligence agencies. This year the theme is “Mobility of Money”.

They asked if I’d be willing to talk about Bitcoin, and I committed to giving a 50-minute presentation and participating in a panel discussion.

I hope that by talking directly to “them” and, more importantly, listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do– as a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money. Not as an all-powerful black-market tool that will be used by anarchists to overthrow The System.

It might be really stupid if it just raises Bitcoin’s visibility on their radar, but I think it is way too late for that; Bitcoin is already on their radar.

I plan on posting about this on the forums soon, because “Gavin secretly visits the CIA” would spin all sorts of conspiracy theories. “Gavin openly visits the CIA” will create enough conspiracy theories as it is.

I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.

I’ve moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable.

Here’s the CAlert key and broadcast code in case you need it. You should probably give it to at least one or two other people. There are a few long time users who are always around all the time.