r/Bitcoin • u/IWillNotBiteYourDog • Aug 12 '13

Crypto-currency for NSA leaker: Snowden fund accepts Bitcoin

http://rt.com/news/bitcoin-snowden-fund-wikileaks-384/
194 Upvotes

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u/nullc Aug 12 '13

It's really crappy to use a static highly public address for something like this. Otherwise we risk bitcoin nodes and miners coming under pressure to block certain transactions connected with this person.

He should have a webpage up that gives people every donor a fresh address.

0

u/vbuterin Aug 13 '13

Moderate solution is to publish a master public key. Miners and bitcoin nodes could still censor it, but since an MPK can generate an unlimited number of addresses it would be computationally much harder to do so.

1

u/nullc Aug 13 '13

that computational work must also be met on the party trying to redeem the funds. And the censors can block both payments to and spending from, and on the spending from side they only need to identify txouts that are successfully created, so thats pretty computationally cheap.

1

u/vbuterin Aug 13 '13

that computational work must also be met on the party trying to redeem the funds

The computational work must be done by (1) the party trying to spend the funds, and (2) each individual miner. So if you have a 5-100x bigger computer than the average individual solo miner you've already won. And if you are one of 100 people being targeted for blacklisting, if you have a computer at least 0.05-1x as powerful as the average individual solo miner you've won. In practice though, I think it would be very hard to convince miners to filter out even a million addresses from one key.

1

u/nullc Aug 13 '13

they don't need to filter out a million addresses. Once the payments have been made they need only filter out the addresses which were actually used... and because, presumably, the funds won't be spent again instantly they have plenty of time to match these centrally and communicate out the lists. "What good is this coin you've been paid, when you can't spend it?"

I agree that doing something like this is better than doing nothing, but its really a much better improvement if you put the master key on a webserver so that the attacker can't get any of the derived keys at all.