[tor-talk] Gmail and Bitcoin? [OT]

[Brandon Wiley]

It's true that you don't really need a nym authority of the normal kind
(like a certificate authority). All the nym authority really needs to do is
accept payment and then redistribute the payments randomly and in a
dispersed fashion, for instance to miners as you prefer. The record in the
bitcoin blockchain of the payment to the nym authority's address serves as
standalone, third-party verifiable proof that the appropriate fee was paid.
Having the nym payment authority sign something would just be a shorcut for
verifying the nym without having to download the blockchain and verify the
payment the long way.

There are still two missing parts to this bitcoins-for-nyms scheme. The
first is eliminating double spending of payment receipts on multiple nyms.
And the second is verifying that it was the requester of the nym that made
the payment and not someone else. All easy stuff to include in the
protocol, depending on how active you want the nym payment authority to be
and how complicated you want to make things for the actual nym providers.

This seems like a fun project. I think the tricky part would be getting nym
providers on board.


On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Mike Hearn <hearn at google.com> wrote:

> > I like the idea of using transaction fees as proof of sacrifice because
> > they are randomly assigned to miners. The nym authority could just watch
> > the transactions and would have no economic stake.
>
> I don't think you even need a nym authority. All the proof of
> sacrifice you need can be represented in a single data structure, like
> a file. Think of the proof as a certificate. Then you could come up
> with a simple set of HTTP extensions so browsers can sign a nonce
> using the same keys used to sign the all-fee transactions.
>
> > Here is another variant on this idea. You have a non-profit nym authority
> > that takes payments and then redistributes these payments. Redistribution
> > could be (certifiably) random, to the bitcoin addresses of known
> > non-profits, or you could burn the bitcoins by sending them to an address
> > with (certifiably) no private key.
>
> Sending to non profits raises the question of which non-profits are
> "good". Miners are politically neutral and virtually guaranteed to
> spread the money out uniformly. Burning coins, please don't. It
> reduces the resolution of the system for everyone else. I think
> sending coins to miners is the simplest approach - it doesn't have any
> messy political issues around who gets the coins, the coins are
> guaranteed to be received by interested parties, and it doesn't hurt
> the Bitcoin system. Actually it helps.
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