Topic: Million dollar idea or noob question (Read 1098 times)

Great replies DannyHamilton.

However I disagree on this point.

Willingness to self educate oneself is certainly a virtue, but such statements are usually coming from people with strong math, crypto, computer background.

If something is to have widest possible adoption it has to be usable by 74-year old computer illiterate granny.

Look at Europe. Half of the population is over 50 and they spent most of their lives without even a computer. How easy it is for someone in that group to understand Armory? Nevermind the will which is certainly not there, the ABILITY to understand is also not there.

You simply have to build user-friendly solutions if you count on adoption by wide audience. You can't rely on 18-25 year old computer/crypto geeks with extra time and libertarian agenda to be your only target group.

I could tell you 10 billion dollar ideas, I just cannot come up with solutions.

In a nutshell, exchange sites like Mt Gox need to hold the private keys to your bitcoin on their server.  That is how they are able to send them to someone when you want to spend them.  If you don't feel comfortable with someone else holding your money, transfer it to a local private encrypted wallet that you control yourself.

Thanks for all the replies(especially DannyH), I had a feeling i would get my post's ass handed back to me, good to learn something

It seems to me then that the main problem is perception then (and possibly some accessibility issues), while I don't base any of my BTC knowledge or perceptions from the mainstream media, many others do, including some big investors who have the power to push BTC permanently into their mainstream in a positive way.

I see a lot of bad mouthing of BTC on bloomberg, and CNBC - even just in the last minutes Warren Buffett on CNBC said BTC is a mirage, no intrinsic value, stay away, its just an efficient digital cheque book basically. I think the BTC community needs to address this in serious way, by playing 'their' game,and security is the biggest tangiable negative point IMO.

As you say DannyH, wallets are already providing the BTC 'lock' security that could prevent hackers moving coins. If one of the bigtime mainstream investors bought some advertising space and time with WSJ/CNBC etc to say, 'hey everyone, we've 'now solved' the security issue with BTC: put your coins in this wallet and hackers cant move your coins'. Its not a new thing, but mainstream marketing techniques require a highly visible 'break through', not an education program. Education takes effort, and many are simply not interested in investing that time and effort (both learning and transmitting). If someone like me (a casual BTC person who pays less attention to mainstream than to BTC sources) has such a misunderstanding then I'm sure it's even worse with the old world players.

Additionally though, I think the wallet process does require some further simplification too in order to really convince the mainstream: an easy installation and a couple of clicks here and there and the coins are locked/unlocked. I havent tried all the wallets mentioned, but my experience was that I was installing some 'dodgy' software and it wasnt so straight forward so I was pretty discouraged and still had lack of confidence in it... maybe some wallets are already simple and easy, so again its prob my lack of experience.But if I saw a strong marketing campaign showing a nice shiny clean simple wallet that gave me confidence in security I would give it a try and move my coins there.

But,in my humble opinion, the main problem* blocking further adoption into mainstream really is perception right now,along with some dumbing down with wallet accessibility, rather than  . The banks et al can object and create a fuss for businesses, but if there were strong positive perception behind BTC right now in the media via marketing, the banks would be in a much weaker position to stop it, and its a good time to push this because many places have no legislation, and if the positive perception comes after legislation and regulation, it will be even harder to convince everyone to adopt it. Lets not forget how much markets and currencies move in value based purely on perception,as someone who dabbles in this stuff, its really amazing (just look at yesterday's dive in the markets, it came after positive data was published - but because someone 'said something negative',perceptions changed and the markets still dropped hard - despite the good data.


*maybe others disagree and they'd say there is no problem, but Im assuming most people want BTC to get bigger and find its place amongst mainstream everyday world, in order to do that there needs to be a positive marketing break-through along with some advertising capital to get there - sorry thats the capitalistic world at the moment sadly. So if any powerful investors are reading, please hire the biggest marketing firm out there and get behind the best wallet system there is and start pushing this to the public before the law makes it harder to convince people to get on board!!!! thanks again

This is what the private key does.  Signs transactions for money you are willing to spend.  Without the private key the coins go nowhere. 

The problem is if you give your coins to someone else (such as the Mt Gox or Bitstamp) you lose control of them (i.e. their private key can move this coins not yours).  Then you have to trust them and their systems.  Many of these have 2 factor authentication which should protect you from most password attacks.  But that doesn't help if the problem is the exchange itself like it was with MtGox. 

every million dollar idea already exists!

+1

This!

Thank you for your well-written piece.

That sounds like a great source for false information and misunderstanding.  Please don't base your knowledge about bitcoins from sources like this.


It doesn't. That is a complete misunderstanding of how bitcoin works. There is no "unique id" that represents any portion of a bitcoin at all.  If you think that's confusing, it will really blow your mind when you learn that there is no such thing as "a bitcoin". The concept of "a bitcoin" is an abstraction that we humans use to make it easier to talk about the concept of transfering control of value.


Any reasonably designed bitcoin wallet (such as Armory, Bitcoin-Qt, Electrum, MultiBit, blockchain.info, BitcoinWallet, and Mycellium) all already do this.  If you transfer your bitcoins to any such bitcoin wallet, they are "locked" until someone with access to the specific 256 bit password that locked the bitcoins (called a "private key" in cryptography) creates a digital signature authorizing the bitcoins to move again.  This is the actual purpose of wallet software.  Unfortunately, many people choose to give their bitcoins to someone else and hope that the person/company they give them to will honor their promise to secure and return the bitcoins in the future.


Almost cetainly.


A phone call or email are far to easy to fake.  I prefer the security of industry leading cryptography that requires an electronic message with a cryptographically secure digital signature.  That way it is impossible to pretend to be me unless you can get your hands on my 256 bit password.


Yep.


Nah.  With well written software that can instantly create digital signatures at the request of the user, the specific value of bitcoins that the user desires to spend could be released from the "lock" in an instant while all the other bitcoins remain securely locked.  Furthermore, any bitcoins received could be automatically locked even if the software wasn't running.  This is the power of well executed cryptography (and is the design of bitcoin).


So, what you're saying is that bitcoin really needs more education.  Well, I think everyone would agree with that, but how to educate new users who don't bother to try to learn anything, while providing convenience that won't stifle interest?


Since Satoshi is the one that implemented your million dollar idea, you'll have to hit him up for the donation (if you can find him).


Technically it does work.  It works really well. Unfortunately, it can't work for those users that choose to give their bitcoins to someone incompetent.


They don't.


They can.  MtGox was just lazy and incompetent, and yet users chose to leave their bitcoins there anyhow.


Agreed.  Hopefully more companies that hold deposit accounts will implement better security protocols soon.  In the mean time, we can vote with our bitcoins. Don't send your bitcoins to a company that doesn't provide you with a secure way to link your identity to your withdrawls.


It doesn't.  Computers are very fast, and well written software can generate a digital signature with a click (and perhaps a quick 2-factor authorization).


The media doesn't bother paying attention to the details.  They need to sell advertizing, which means they need to attract viewers.  The easiest way to do that is to create sensationalist stories with little focus on facts and details. (most of the viewing public finds facts and details boring)

I think what you're talking about are "watch only" wallets. A wallet, that will shoe you the balance of your Bitcoin addresses but will not allow you to spend them.

This is quite easy to achieve:

(A) generate paper wallets
(B) create a blockchain wallet, watching the addresses in the paper wallet
(D) done!

Ugh.  What exactly do you think bitcoin is doing?

Your coins are "locked" to your account until you unlock them by spending.

The private key "locks" your coins to you better than anything that can be social engineered. People were using Gox as a bank account and consequently only were an entry in gox's books saying they were owed a certain number of bitcoins. Encrypting any wallet on your computer is a plus, as is offline cold storage with something like bip38.

Remember, you only own bitcoin if you have the private key, if not, someone just owes them to you and you have counterparty risk. 

:-)

This already exists. It's called using the bitcoin-qt wallet and encrypting it.

Once the wallet is encrypted, no-one else can access the funds without the private key you created.

So I was watching a BTC piece on Bloomberg West show today which polled the audience in regard to their trust in BTC after the gox collapse, which was an overall pretty negative piece. This has pushed me to finally ask, you, the experts:

since each coin has a 'unique id' of sorts, why isnt there an app/extension of wallet software that 'locks' coins to an account or wallet (ie. locks them ultimately to an end user) which means they are not transferable until the account holder unlocks them.

Basically, my idea is that a BTC holder who is scared of losing BTC from hacks or Mtgox style losses (which seems to be the majority of bloomberg viewers), why cant they lock their specific coins to their account so that they cannot be transmitted to another account with out the user unlocking them (ie the blockchain system would simply reject the particular coins attempted to being processed until they became unlocked from their account - maybe i misunderstood how blockchain works exactly?)... the lock could be opened with a phone call/escrow like human to human system with verbal passwords (or whatever 2/3 factor level security desired by the user or that the company is prepared to offer), but the crux is that the coins are essentially untransferable from the holders account, even with the usual account username/pw access (be it wallet or exchange etc). They need to be unchained from the user account to actually be used.

Obviously this would only be appealing to hoaders/savers or people simply nervous about security who dont spend their BTC too fast or very often (for this type of user they could unlock one coin at a time as they need it, or have low level lock on them - say simple email verification unlock).

It could be the shot in the arm the BTC world needs to get more mainstream support as it would really show how much safer it could be compared to fiat.

If this is a million dollar idea and you steal it to get rich, please send me some donations:)
1LCpoQBWJNaM6MhuVvnAnJcUUcZkSNY3xp

Or if its just a noob rant then can someone explain to me why it doesnt work - technically speaking i mean, since the coins have unique ids and user accounts have unique ids why cant they just be locked together...?
Marketing wise, i think its a winning service that BTC holding companies (wallets, exchanges...) should offer, even though it somewhat undermines BTC improvements over fiat for transmission processing speed etc, i think it would get a lot of mainstream attention.

feedback please, thanks!