Re: [Bitcoin-development] Virtual Notary.

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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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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