[Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Emin Gün Sirer]

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Hi everyone,

Given the recent discussions on projects that use the Bitcoin blockchain to
record factoids, people on this list might be interested in the Virtual
Notary project. Virtual Notary is essentially an online witness (aka
attestor) to online factoids. It can provide:

  * proof of Bitcoin funds (without revealing public addresses or fund
location on the blockchain)

  * proof of Bitcoin address ownership

  * proof of Tweet

  * proof of real estate value

  * proof of DNS ownership

  * proof of existence

  * proof of web page contents

  * proof of weather conditions

The factoids can be recorded on the blockchain (if you pay for the
transaction with Bitcoin or PayPal), or they can be part of a free
attestation chain that we maintain. The website provides a permanent URL to
the factoids it generates; it also provides an X.509 certificate that you
can download and keep safe in perpetuity, independent of the website.

The link to the website is here:
  http://virtual-notary.org

The link to the writeup describing the various factoids and their use cases
is here:
  http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/06/20/virtual-notary-intro/

We are actively looking for people who are interested in developing the
service further. Specifically, if you have suggestions for how to extend
the service, for new proof/factoid types, or for how to build a business
case around the core idea, please let us know.

Best,
- egs

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Jeff Garzik]

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On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 3:25 AM, Emin Gün Sirer <el33th4x0r@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Given the recent discussions on projects that use the Bitcoin blockchain
> to record factoids, people on this list might be interested in the Virtual
> Notary project. Virtual Notary is essentially an online witness (aka
> attestor) to online factoids. It can provide:
>
>   * proof of Bitcoin funds (without revealing public addresses or fund
> location on the blockchain)
>
>   * proof of Bitcoin address ownership
>
>   * proof of Tweet
>


For what it's worth, a subsidiary of Dunvegan Space Systems is pursuing
exactly this as a business.

EMail JGarzik@DSS.co if you want to know more.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Mike Hearn]

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Very nice Emin! This could be very useful as a building block for oracle
based services. If only there were opcodes for working with X.509 ;)

I'd suggest at least documenting in the FAQ how to extract the data from
the certificate:

openssl pkcs12 -in virtual-notary-cert-stocks-16070.p12 -nodes -passin
pass:"" | openssl x509 -text|less

That's good enough to get started, but I note two issues:


   1. X.509 is kind of annoying to work with: example code in popular
   languages/frameworks to extract the statement would be useful.

   2. The stock price plugin, at least, embeds the data as text inside the
   X.509 certificate. That's also not terribly developer friendly and risks
   parsing errors undermining security schemes built on it.

   The way I'd solve this is to embed either a protocol buffer or DER
   encoded structure inside the extension, so developers can extract the
   notarised data directly, without needing to do any additional parsing.

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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Ben Vulpes]

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I cannot let http://www.deedbot.org go unmentioned on this thread.

On Friday, May 22, 2015, Jonas Schnelli <dev@jonasschnelli.ch> wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> > * proof of Bitcoin funds (without revealing public addresses or
> > fund location on the blockchain)
> >
> > * proof of Bitcoin address ownership
> >
> > * proof of Tweet
> >
> > * proof of real estate value
> >
> > * proof of DNS ownership
> >
> > * proof of existence
> >
> > * proof of web page contents
> >
> > * proof of weather conditions
> >
> > The factoids can be recorded on the blockchain (if you pay for the
> > transaction with Bitcoin or PayPal), or they can be part of a free
> > attestation chain that we maintain. The website provides a
> > permanent URL to the factoids it generates; it also provides an
> > X.509 certificate that you can download and keep safe in
> > perpetuity, independent of the website.
>
>
> Hi Emin
>
> This is going into the right direction. Well done!
> The certificates (X.509/p12) are far more enduser-friendly than just a
> normal PoE hash.
>
> Your site needs some UX love and i just tried to OR_RETURN a
> Email-Address-Verification. But after creating a 0.0001 tx and waiting
> for two confirmations it still said that the payment has not yet been
> received. There is probably something broken regarding the bitcoin
> payment verification.
>
> The weather and real estate notarization definitively needs a „US
> only“ badge somewhere.
>
> Two ideas:
> - - Maybe adding a way of decentralize your notary service log via a
> opensource p2p daemon (obviously sensitive data should be somehow
> encrypted)?
> - - Adding a opensource UI app to examine certs (maybe offline capable
> with p2p daemon chain as mentioned above). This could prove
> independence from your website/service.
>
> </jonas>
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>
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Re: [Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Jonas Schnelli]

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Hash: SHA1

> * proof of Bitcoin funds (without revealing public addresses or 
> fund location on the blockchain)
> 
> * proof of Bitcoin address ownership
> 
> * proof of Tweet
> 
> * proof of real estate value
> 
> * proof of DNS ownership
> 
> * proof of existence
> 
> * proof of web page contents
> 
> * proof of weather conditions
> 
> The factoids can be recorded on the blockchain (if you pay for the 
> transaction with Bitcoin or PayPal), or they can be part of a free 
> attestation chain that we maintain. The website provides a 
> permanent URL to the factoids it generates; it also provides an 
> X.509 certificate that you can download and keep safe in 
> perpetuity, independent of the website.


Hi Emin

This is going into the right direction. Well done!
The certificates (X.509/p12) are far more enduser-friendly than just a
normal PoE hash.

Your site needs some UX love and i just tried to OR_RETURN a
Email-Address-Verification. But after creating a 0.0001 tx and waiting
for two confirmations it still said that the payment has not yet been
received. There is probably something broken regarding the bitcoin
payment verification.

The weather and real estate notarization definitively needs a „US
only“ badge somewhere.

Two ideas:
- - Maybe adding a way of decentralize your notary service log via a
opensource p2p daemon (obviously sensitive data should be somehow
encrypted)?
- - Adding a opensource UI app to examine certs (maybe offline capable
with p2p daemon chain as mentioned above). This could prove
independence from your website/service.

</jonas>
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