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Yeah, but lets say you make a website and want to accept donations using bitcoins. What you generally do is put "donations welcome at <bitcoin address>!" (I see

by OskarS 9y ago

Yeah, but lets say you make a website and want to accept donations using bitcoins. What you generally do is put "donations welcome at <bitcoin address>!" (I see this all over the place). Are you saying that webmasters should write a script that generates these public/private keys on every page hit, and then somehow stores all of those millions of private keys... somewhere? On your server? Or do you have to build an entire infrastructure of key exchanges to some safe place just so you can accept bitcoin donations privately?

magnat 9y ago
> webmasters should write a script that generates these public/private keys on every page hit Not on every page hit, but on every donation or every few days depending on how many transactions you've received. It doesn't have to be completely new set of keys - you can use deterministic wallet to generate as many as you want from a single master secret.
dwild 9y ago
Why would it have to be "donations welcome at <bitcoin address>!"? There's plenty of ways to ask for donations and it doesn't always require to have a single address shown. You can have a "Donate" button that when clicked, ask for a generated wallet (all from the same private key but that would be a different wallet still) and show it with a QR code in bonus.
- OskarS 9y ago
  Look, I'm not making this up. Lots of people and projects do exactly this. Tails, the super-secure privacy-focused version of Linux asks for donations in exactly this way [1] (and if you go to blockchain.info you can see a full wonderful list of all the bitcoin addresses who have donated to them [2]). It's a totally reasonable way to set up bitcoin donations (hell, it's even recommended by the bitcoin wiki! [3]) and it's a significant weakness of bitcoin that these transactions are not private. It is absurd defense of bitcoin to say "well, it COULD just be as private as these other things, if you only jump through ten more technical hoops and not use bitcoin as intended". Clearly, these other cryptocurrencies offer something that bitcoin doesn't. [1]: https://tails.boum.org/donate/?r=contribute https://tails.boum.org/donate/?r=contribute [2]: https://blockchain.info/address/1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2 https://blockchain.info/address/1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7x... [3]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Receiving_donations_with_bitcoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Receiving_donations_with_bitcoin
CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>Are you saying that webmasters should write a script that generates these public/private keys on every page hit, and then somehow stores all of those millions of private keys... somewhere? On your server? There's actually a solution called stealth addresses that let you publicize a single static donation address and yet receive every donation at its own unique address: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/what-is-a-stealth-address https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/what-is-a-... This is an off-chain construct so can be utilized with any blockchain.

by OskarS 9y ago

magnat 9y ago

> webmasters should write a script that generates these public/private keys on every page hit Not on every page hit, but on every donation or every few days depending on how many transactions you've received. It doesn't have to be completely new set of keys - you can use deterministic wallet to generate as many as you want from a single master secret.

dwild 9y ago

Why would it have to be "donations welcome at <bitcoin address>!"? There's plenty of ways to ask for donations and it doesn't always require to have a single address shown. You can have a "Donate" button that when clicked, ask for a generated wallet (all from the same private key but that would be a different wallet still) and show it with a QR code in bonus.

OskarS 9y ago
Look, I'm not making this up. Lots of people and projects do exactly this. Tails, the super-secure privacy-focused version of Linux asks for donations in exactly this way [1] (and if you go to blockchain.info you can see a full wonderful list of all the bitcoin addresses who have donated to them [2]). It's a totally reasonable way to set up bitcoin donations (hell, it's even recommended by the bitcoin wiki! [3]) and it's a significant weakness of bitcoin that these transactions are not private. It is absurd defense of bitcoin to say "well, it COULD just be as private as these other things, if you only jump through ten more technical hoops and not use bitcoin as intended". Clearly, these other cryptocurrencies offer something that bitcoin doesn't. [1]: https://tails.boum.org/donate/?r=contribute https://tails.boum.org/donate/?r=contribute [2]: https://blockchain.info/address/1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2 https://blockchain.info/address/1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7x... [3]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Receiving_donations_with_bitcoin https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Receiving_donations_with_bitcoin

CryptoPunk 9y ago

>>Are you saying that webmasters should write a script that generates these public/private keys on every page hit, and then somehow stores all of those millions of private keys... somewhere? On your server? There's actually a solution called stealth addresses that let you publicize a single static donation address and yet receive every donation at its own unique address: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/what-is-a-stealth-address https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/what-is-a-... This is an off-chain construct so can be utilized with any blockchain.