Re: [Bitcoin-development] Simple contacts exchange (was: Social network integration (brainstorm))

[Wendell <w@grabhive.com>]

Thanks Mike.

I definitely took all your comments to heart, but we're looking to road-test something quickly for the sake of user experience in our own wallet. I wouldn't mind us contributing to a BIP once we have a better grip on the payment protocol itself, but (for example) I'm still not sure that I understand _why_ signed certificates are even required. Isn't that likely be an obstacle to adoption for use cases like this?

-wendell

grabhive.com | twitter.com/grabhive | gpg: 6C0C9411

On Sep 17, 2013, at 12:03 PM, Mike Hearn wrote:

> You can prove ownership of a private key by signing a challenger-generated nonce with the public part and giving the signature back to the challenger - same as with any asymmetric crypto system.
> 
> As I already noted, the payment protocol is designed to solve that problem. You could design a BIP that extended the payment protocol to include information about the person who generated it.
> 
>> On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Wendell <w@grabhive.com> wrote:
>> Couple of things I just thought about:
>> 
>> 1- Presume server should only sweep with two (or more, see below) revocation certificates being present
>> 2- Need to insert something in the flow so that Alice can verify that the uploaded key is actually Bob's (and perhaps vise-versa, given an extremely dedicated attacker with a fast connection?).
>> 
>> Is there a way to do #2 without creating yet another transaction? Admittedly I am still really puzzled about the accessibility of public keys in Bitcoin!
>> 
>> Please remember that the idea is to have two wallets securely exchange a packet of metadata about a transaction beyond the scope of Bitcoin itself (a name, perhaps a small photo, etc) in order to increase usability. This will be my last post here on the topic except to reply in case anyone else contributes.
>> 
>> -wendell
>> 
>> grabhive.com | twitter.com/grabhive | gpg: 6C0C9411