Topic: Allowing 24/7 auditing of bitcoin services (Read 1058 times)
To prove you have a certain amount of money you could send ALL the money to yourself. Because all your money is in one wallet it doesn't really matter what actual address it's from. Say you always use address "blah123". Then, every so often to prove you have the money sent your balance to yourself at blah123. Since you always use the same address people can see that you actually have access to that much to move around. (you'd probably have to alternate between addresses so your sending to an empty account)
That doesn't necessarily prove the addresses actually belong to you. I guess if your website says "Send money to: " and the "Our money is at:" are the same addresses it's probably safe to say they are yours. Unless... you add a fake address with lot's of coins just so you appear to have more than you do. But by doing that, you'd be losing some payments from your users to that other party.
That's an intersting point, so as new addresses are doled out to users to deposit, they are also published. But I also see that yes, you could have some address (that say belongs to the site owner and not the site) that has a lot of btc in it.
That doesn't necessarily prove the addresses actually belong to you. I guess if your website says "Send money to: " and the "Our money is at:" are the same addresses it's probably safe to say they are yours. Unless... you add a fake address with lot's of coins just so you appear to have more than you do. But by doing that, you'd be losing some payments from your users to that other party.
I've been thinking of the best method to allow a bitcoin service to allow their bitcoin reserves to be auditable. So that you can verify my service has as many bitcoins (in total) as I say it does.
Would it be correct that this can be achieved by publishing all the addresses that receive bitcoin?
This way we can tabulate the total the service has and will also know when bitcoin is sent from these addresses. The result being a service that is auditable (at least for it's bitcoin reserves) 24/7 right?
Would it be correct that this can be achieved by publishing all the addresses that receive bitcoin?
This way we can tabulate the total the service has and will also know when bitcoin is sent from these addresses. The result being a service that is auditable (at least for it's bitcoin reserves) 24/7 right?
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