12 ms·

BitCoin is a public ledger

89 points by mazsa 13y ago

hosh 13y ago
There are more of these kind of transaction types discussed at: http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bitcoin/ http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bit... But yes. I'm glad this is getting a lot more press. The discussion on the apparent value or its function as a currency are secondary. With any new technology, you are not just looking at its current functionality, but also the the functionality it can do that the old technology cannot. As an aside: I can easily see this as a great compromise for DRM technologies. Both IP owner, licensee, and end-user give up a little power and control and vest that in a decentralized "public ledger". I expect we'll see more discussions around over the next year or so as more people wake up to this possibility.
- nazgulnarsil 13y ago
  Yes, the concept of a distributed unforgeable public ledger is brand new in human history. The monetary use is interesting in that it obviously made bootstrapping possible, but the long term impact is probably bigger than just trading bitcoins.
  - hosh 13y ago
    One of the more subtle changes with this is, as people use the blockchain more, people's sense of authority shifts from traditional, centralized structures (institutions, governments) and more into a peer-to-peer accountability. I've been on the sidelines watching a group of people try to hash out trust networks. Those really have not taken off. And I think they have not because the tokens used for trading trust don't have purchasing power for material goods the way Bitcoins does. I'm guessing that, while we may be tempted to just use the blockchain without the monetary use, the monetary use also makes each transaction like this matter a lot more. It might be possible that the very inefficiency is what allows the public ledger system to work at all. In any case, I see much farther down the road where ... the big issue is not whether a nation-state actor's ability to issue currency is undermined by bitcoin, or even its ability to regulate it, but more that many other functions of government could eventually be expressed with Bitcoin or its technological successor. Patents are interesting. What about real estate? Closing and transferring real estate takes a lot of paperwork, with mortgages enforced by powers of eviction and repossession. I talked with a lawyer buddy of mine's about this subject a while ago. He tells me, the court system will be the last to convert over electronically. Legal papers have a gravitas associated with authority and control that is difficult to convert into electronic form. Ultimately (and maybe not in this generation), wide-spread use of the public ledger will undermine deep-seated social conventions, emotional attachments, and notions we have about 'authority' and 'institutions.' Or maybe it'll be like the Millennials. All the folk who grew up in a time before wide-spread public ledgers die off; notions of central authorities becoming a quaint chapter in human history.
meowface 13y ago
This is a really cool concept. You could easily implement a similar "proof of [work/submission/event]" with a few lines of code, but there'd still be central points of failure: whatever server is storing these hashes. While for Bitcoin, you can have a great degree of confidence that the blockchain up until now is legitimate. I suppose theoretically a >50% could take place, but even then, everything before that event could still be preserved and checked against.
bluetooth 13y ago
This is a pretty clever use of the blockchain. However, instead of destroying the bitcoins you have (wasting coins is bad, no matter how small) you can simply send bitcoins to yourself and store data in the `coinbase` field. The resulting transaction will appear in the blockchain permanently, and can always be referred back to. There already exists a service to prove the existence of a document before a certain date (much like the one in the blog post): http://www.proofofexistence.com/ http://www.proofofexistence.com/ Their implementation details are lacking but it should still be clear enough to get an overview. (Edit: I seem to have missed this link in the blogpost) Besides hosting checksums, other types of data have been found in the blockchain, such as some Wikileaks content (http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/04/25mb-of-wikileaks-cables-embedded-in.html http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/04/25mb-of-wikileaks-ca...) and even links to child porn (http://www.btcpedia.com/ped0-links-in-bitcoin-blockchain/ http://www.btcpedia.com/ped0-links-in-bitcoin-blockchain/).
- smithzvk 13y ago
  You could also encode the information in the size of a transaction sent to yourself. Then any money lost would go back to the miners as transaction fees.
- zwily 13y ago
  It's my understanding that there is only one coinbase in each block, and it's set by the miner verifying the block. That would make using it for this purpose very difficult.
lukifer 13y ago
I've seen this "public timestamping" use case before, which is a very interesting exploitation of BitCoin's mechanic. It is curious, though, that it bears a micro-cost, even at a thousandth of a penny. I've often heard it said that BitCoin is unique as a currency in that the total quantity is inherently fixed; but in fact, it's destined to ever-so-slowly dwindle over time, whether due to public ledger uses, or the loss/destruction of private keys. One-off transactions won't register as a blip, it's possible that some future use case might run at such a staggering scale (stock market micro-transactions?) that it leads to a financial tragedy of the commons and deflation runs rampant. Not being doom-and-gloom, just an interesting thing to think about. Just as we now marvel at the naiveté of thinking that 4 billion IP addresses or 64K of RAM would be more than enough, I wonder if someday we'll look back the same way on the minimum transaction of 0.0000001 BTC.
- ewillbefull 13y ago
  > I've seen this "public timestamping" use case before, which is a very interesting exploitation of BitCoin's mechanic. Not really an exploitation, even Bitcoin's original whitepaper describes its blockchain as a "peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server".
  - lukifer 13y ago
    I knew I shouldn't have used that term. :) It wasn't meant pejoratively.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Don't worry, if it ever comes to that point I'm sure the central bitcoin authority will be able to introduce new bitcoins to the market.
  - drostie 13y ago
    People are down-voting this (presumably for containing the words "central authority") but it's actually pretty realistic. What we need is a log-linear graph of a few things. The BitCoin production rate is ramping down exponentially, and everybody who gets interested in BitCoin makes BitCoin more interesting, so there is probably an exponential increase in both the value of BitCoin and the number of miners of BitCoin. Finally, the cost of the ASICs needed to mine BitCoin effectively are diminishing by Moore's law at an exponential rate. Probably when you add these effects on a log-linear plot together, they add up to a straight line going slightly upwards; it's still worthwhile to join the network. But if you just think about it for a second, all of these could change. Moore's law can break down, interest can level off, miners' ambitions could skyrocket. It is quite plausible that the line would shift downward and new people would stop coming in, and eventually the smaller groups would stop running their own BitCoin miners. The larger miners might even buy them up. When that happens one can certainly imagine that an oligopoly of more than 50% of the computational resources of the network emerges, which turns BitCoin into a centrally regulated currency.
mehrdad 13y ago
"As another example, let’s say that you have a great idea for a patent, but it’s not quite ready. Well, write it up into a file, then add the file’s signature to the block chain. Years from now, if somebody beats you to the patent filing, you can prove that you had the idea ahead of time." Go file a provisional patent! the patent regulations have changed since March 2013 from first-to-invent to first-to-file!:D
- cjg 13y ago
  It would allow you to establish prior art for ideas that you didn't want to go to the expense of patenting.
trotsky 13y ago
Public key encryption invents the notary public, now with 10,000% more energy use?
- msg 13y ago
  And 100% less human being? We haven't hit the scaling limits of computation and are unlikely to for some time. But the scaling limit of a human is fixed at sixty minutes per hour.
- hosh 13y ago
  That brings up an interesting thought. Is the energy (cost) being expended actually going somewhere? I think perhaps, the fact that people put some sort of value onto teach of the transaction, no matter how minimal, accurately (though maybe not precisely) models the "stake". You wouldn't think much on using RSA keys as a public ledger, but as soon as you are tracking something that has some nominal, perceived value, people treat it with more respect and accountability. (Now, is this inherently true? I don't know.)
- fizx 13y ago
  Back of the envelope math: Assume that the notary public needs a 70watt light bulb to function (ignoring food costs, paper, etc). 8 hour day, so about a half kwh. That electricity with a new asic miner would get you about a half bitcoin, which would let you send 1000 messages of up to 1kb each, given the transaction fees. I'm ignoring some things, but at the moment it seems to be quite the net-win.
  - oleganza 13y ago
    Don't forget the costs of relying on authority. First, trust can be broken. Second, if notary is offline or asleep you cannot register your data. Also: even if you fully trust your notary, it's no guarantee some random people in Japan, Australia or South America will trust him too. Anyone anywhere can verify blockchain, though.
    - philjohn 13y ago
jasonjei 13y ago
In theory, couldn't BitCoin be redesigned for an electronic voting system? I would probably avoid using any system that is electronic, but a public ledger of votes that could reasonably protect the franchised (and its privacy) through a public ledger? (RSA founders still state their mistrust of an electronic voting system)
- betterunix 13y ago
  Why would we use something with no well-defined security model and a known polynomial-time attack when we have provably security distributed voting systems? As with digital cash, cryptographers have devoted a lot of time to researching secure voting protocols.
- DennisP 13y ago
  Given that bitcoin is a public ledger, and you can't let people just create their own addresses and vote with them, you'd need some authority to hand out verified but anonymized addresses. If they're doing that, they could make fake addresses which cast votes the way they like. However, you may be interested in these simple secure voting methods invented by cryptographers. (Google cache, site's down.) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://rangevoting.org/RivSmiPRshort.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
stevehawk 13y ago
Just FYI - the article mentions dating your proof of concept / idea / whatever in case you are late to file a patent. To my knowledge there isn't any major government left that recognizes 'first to invent' anymore, only 'first to file'. So you probably haven't saved yourself anything.
- vog 13y ago
  Yes, it's "first to file", but there is also the concept of "prior art". You cannot patent something that has been published before you filed that patent. Although this other person won't get your patent, you won't get it either.
vog 13y ago
It's nice to see that this idea becomes more widespread. Some time ago I started a small JavaScript tool "Bitcoinproof" which performs the necessary calculations automatically for you: http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/ http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/ Unfortunately, it didn't receive much interest from the HN community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501077
known 13y ago
Bitcoin is NOT immune to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump
vog 13y ago
The article recommends to split your SHA256 hash into two pieces. However, one transaction to one address is sufficient. You just have to create the address in the same way in which Bicoin generates an address for a public key: Base58(RIPEMD160(SHA256(public key))) So there's nothing wrong with doing it the same way for your data: Base58(RIPEMD160(SHA256(data))) (That's what I'm also using in Bitcoinproof http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/ http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/) Using this hash is not any "less secure" than the plain SHA256 hash, because the RIPEMD160+SHA256 combination is used by the Bitcoin network itself. So if this one is broken, the Bitcoin network itself is broken, and your timestamps would be no longer trustable anyway.
vog 13y ago
There's also an App named "Satoshi Proof" which performs that kind of notary service for you: https://github.com/ligi/SatoshiProof#readme https://github.com/ligi/SatoshiProof#readme
meunier 13y ago
I'd be curious as to the consequences of illegal numbers working their way into the block chain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
- jebeng 13y ago
  There is child pornography in the block chain already unfortunately.
devindotcom 13y ago
A cool idea, but it seems like a strange tangent for a system that was intended for storage of transaction information. Surely a lookalike system built around permanent and crowd-affirmed data would be better?

89 points by mazsa 13y ago

hosh 13y ago

There are more of these kind of transaction types discussed at: http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bitcoin/ http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bit... But yes. I'm glad this is getting a lot more press. The discussion on the apparent value or its function as a currency are secondary. With any new technology, you are not just looking at its current functionality, but also the the functionality it can do that the old technology cannot. As an aside: I can easily see this as a great compromise for DRM technologies. Both IP owner, licensee, and end-user give up a little power and control and vest that in a decentralized "public ledger". I expect we'll see more discussions around over the next year or so as more people wake up to this possibility.

nazgulnarsil 13y ago
Yes, the concept of a distributed unforgeable public ledger is brand new in human history. The monetary use is interesting in that it obviously made bootstrapping possible, but the long term impact is probably bigger than just trading bitcoins.
- hosh 13y ago
  One of the more subtle changes with this is, as people use the blockchain more, people's sense of authority shifts from traditional, centralized structures (institutions, governments) and more into a peer-to-peer accountability. I've been on the sidelines watching a group of people try to hash out trust networks. Those really have not taken off. And I think they have not because the tokens used for trading trust don't have purchasing power for material goods the way Bitcoins does. I'm guessing that, while we may be tempted to just use the blockchain without the monetary use, the monetary use also makes each transaction like this matter a lot more. It might be possible that the very inefficiency is what allows the public ledger system to work at all. In any case, I see much farther down the road where ... the big issue is not whether a nation-state actor's ability to issue currency is undermined by bitcoin, or even its ability to regulate it, but more that many other functions of government could eventually be expressed with Bitcoin or its technological successor. Patents are interesting. What about real estate? Closing and transferring real estate takes a lot of paperwork, with mortgages enforced by powers of eviction and repossession. I talked with a lawyer buddy of mine's about this subject a while ago. He tells me, the court system will be the last to convert over electronically. Legal papers have a gravitas associated with authority and control that is difficult to convert into electronic form. Ultimately (and maybe not in this generation), wide-spread use of the public ledger will undermine deep-seated social conventions, emotional attachments, and notions we have about 'authority' and 'institutions.' Or maybe it'll be like the Millennials. All the folk who grew up in a time before wide-spread public ledgers die off; notions of central authorities becoming a quaint chapter in human history.

meowface 13y ago

This is a really cool concept. You could easily implement a similar "proof of [work/submission/event]" with a few lines of code, but there'd still be central points of failure: whatever server is storing these hashes. While for Bitcoin, you can have a great degree of confidence that the blockchain up until now is legitimate. I suppose theoretically a >50% could take place, but even then, everything before that event could still be preserved and checked against.

bluetooth 13y ago

This is a pretty clever use of the blockchain. However, instead of destroying the bitcoins you have (wasting coins is bad, no matter how small) you can simply send bitcoins to yourself and store data in the `coinbase` field. The resulting transaction will appear in the blockchain permanently, and can always be referred back to. There already exists a service to prove the existence of a document before a certain date (much like the one in the blog post): http://www.proofofexistence.com/ http://www.proofofexistence.com/ Their implementation details are lacking but it should still be clear enough to get an overview. (Edit: I seem to have missed this link in the blogpost) Besides hosting checksums, other types of data have been found in the blockchain, such as some Wikileaks content (http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/04/25mb-of-wikileaks-cables-embedded-in.html http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2013/04/25mb-of-wikileaks-ca...) and even links to child porn (http://www.btcpedia.com/ped0-links-in-bitcoin-blockchain/ http://www.btcpedia.com/ped0-links-in-bitcoin-blockchain/).

smithzvk 13y ago
You could also encode the information in the size of a transaction sent to yourself. Then any money lost would go back to the miners as transaction fees.
zwily 13y ago
It's my understanding that there is only one coinbase in each block, and it's set by the miner verifying the block. That would make using it for this purpose very difficult.

lukifer 13y ago

I've seen this "public timestamping" use case before, which is a very interesting exploitation of BitCoin's mechanic. It is curious, though, that it bears a micro-cost, even at a thousandth of a penny. I've often heard it said that BitCoin is unique as a currency in that the total quantity is inherently fixed; but in fact, it's destined to ever-so-slowly dwindle over time, whether due to public ledger uses, or the loss/destruction of private keys. One-off transactions won't register as a blip, it's possible that some future use case might run at such a staggering scale (stock market micro-transactions?) that it leads to a financial tragedy of the commons and deflation runs rampant. Not being doom-and-gloom, just an interesting thing to think about. Just as we now marvel at the naiveté of thinking that 4 billion IP addresses or 64K of RAM would be more than enough, I wonder if someday we'll look back the same way on the minimum transaction of 0.0000001 BTC.

ewillbefull 13y ago
> I've seen this "public timestamping" use case before, which is a very interesting exploitation of BitCoin's mechanic. Not really an exploitation, even Bitcoin's original whitepaper describes its blockchain as a "peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server".
- lukifer 13y ago
  I knew I shouldn't have used that term. :) It wasn't meant pejoratively.
sliverstorm 13y ago
Don't worry, if it ever comes to that point I'm sure the central bitcoin authority will be able to introduce new bitcoins to the market.
- drostie 13y ago
  People are down-voting this (presumably for containing the words "central authority") but it's actually pretty realistic. What we need is a log-linear graph of a few things. The BitCoin production rate is ramping down exponentially, and everybody who gets interested in BitCoin makes BitCoin more interesting, so there is probably an exponential increase in both the value of BitCoin and the number of miners of BitCoin. Finally, the cost of the ASICs needed to mine BitCoin effectively are diminishing by Moore's law at an exponential rate. Probably when you add these effects on a log-linear plot together, they add up to a straight line going slightly upwards; it's still worthwhile to join the network. But if you just think about it for a second, all of these could change. Moore's law can break down, interest can level off, miners' ambitions could skyrocket. It is quite plausible that the line would shift downward and new people would stop coming in, and eventually the smaller groups would stop running their own BitCoin miners. The larger miners might even buy them up. When that happens one can certainly imagine that an oligopoly of more than 50% of the computational resources of the network emerges, which turns BitCoin into a centrally regulated currency.

mehrdad 13y ago

"As another example, let’s say that you have a great idea for a patent, but it’s not quite ready. Well, write it up into a file, then add the file’s signature to the block chain. Years from now, if somebody beats you to the patent filing, you can prove that you had the idea ahead of time." Go file a provisional patent! the patent regulations have changed since March 2013 from first-to-invent to first-to-file!:D

cjg 13y ago
It would allow you to establish prior art for ideas that you didn't want to go to the expense of patenting.

trotsky 13y ago

Public key encryption invents the notary public, now with 10,000% more energy use?

msg 13y ago
And 100% less human being? We haven't hit the scaling limits of computation and are unlikely to for some time. But the scaling limit of a human is fixed at sixty minutes per hour.
hosh 13y ago
That brings up an interesting thought. Is the energy (cost) being expended actually going somewhere? I think perhaps, the fact that people put some sort of value onto teach of the transaction, no matter how minimal, accurately (though maybe not precisely) models the "stake". You wouldn't think much on using RSA keys as a public ledger, but as soon as you are tracking something that has some nominal, perceived value, people treat it with more respect and accountability. (Now, is this inherently true? I don't know.)
fizx 13y ago
Back of the envelope math: Assume that the notary public needs a 70watt light bulb to function (ignoring food costs, paper, etc). 8 hour day, so about a half kwh. That electricity with a new asic miner would get you about a half bitcoin, which would let you send 1000 messages of up to 1kb each, given the transaction fees. I'm ignoring some things, but at the moment it seems to be quite the net-win.
- oleganza 13y ago
  Don't forget the costs of relying on authority. First, trust can be broken. Second, if notary is offline or asleep you cannot register your data. Also: even if you fully trust your notary, it's no guarantee some random people in Japan, Australia or South America will trust him too. Anyone anywhere can verify blockchain, though.
  - philjohn 13y ago

jasonjei 13y ago

In theory, couldn't BitCoin be redesigned for an electronic voting system? I would probably avoid using any system that is electronic, but a public ledger of votes that could reasonably protect the franchised (and its privacy) through a public ledger? (RSA founders still state their mistrust of an electronic voting system)

betterunix 13y ago
Why would we use something with no well-defined security model and a known polynomial-time attack when we have provably security distributed voting systems? As with digital cash, cryptographers have devoted a lot of time to researching secure voting protocols.
DennisP 13y ago
Given that bitcoin is a public ledger, and you can't let people just create their own addresses and vote with them, you'd need some authority to hand out verified but anonymized addresses. If they're doing that, they could make fake addresses which cast votes the way they like. However, you may be interested in these simple secure voting methods invented by cryptographers. (Google cache, site's down.) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://rangevoting.org/RivSmiPRshort.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

stevehawk 13y ago

Just FYI - the article mentions dating your proof of concept / idea / whatever in case you are late to file a patent. To my knowledge there isn't any major government left that recognizes 'first to invent' anymore, only 'first to file'. So you probably haven't saved yourself anything.

vog 13y ago
Yes, it's "first to file", but there is also the concept of "prior art". You cannot patent something that has been published before you filed that patent. Although this other person won't get your patent, you won't get it either.

vog 13y ago

It's nice to see that this idea becomes more widespread. Some time ago I started a small JavaScript tool "Bitcoinproof" which performs the necessary calculations automatically for you: http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/ http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/ Unfortunately, it didn't receive much interest from the HN community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5501077

known 13y ago

Bitcoin is NOT immune to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

vog 13y ago

The article recommends to split your SHA256 hash into two pieces. However, one transaction to one address is sufficient. You just have to create the address in the same way in which Bicoin generates an address for a public key: Base58(RIPEMD160(SHA256(public key))) So there's nothing wrong with doing it the same way for your data: Base58(RIPEMD160(SHA256(data))) (That's what I'm also using in Bitcoinproof http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/ http://vog.github.io/bitcoinproof/) Using this hash is not any "less secure" than the plain SHA256 hash, because the RIPEMD160+SHA256 combination is used by the Bitcoin network itself. So if this one is broken, the Bitcoin network itself is broken, and your timestamps would be no longer trustable anyway.

vog 13y ago

There's also an App named "Satoshi Proof" which performs that kind of notary service for you: https://github.com/ligi/SatoshiProof#readme https://github.com/ligi/SatoshiProof#readme

meunier 13y ago

I'd be curious as to the consequences of illegal numbers working their way into the block chain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

jebeng 13y ago
There is child pornography in the block chain already unfortunately.

devindotcom 13y ago

A cool idea, but it seems like a strange tangent for a system that was intended for storage of transaction information. Surely a lookalike system built around permanent and crowd-affirmed data would be better?