The other advancement was message signatures.
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In other words, lets figure out how to do this the right way.” The blockchain note system was soon converted into a proprietary feature of ’s wallet. And there are even better ways of associating messages with transactions, so only people involved with the transaction can read the message (if that’s desired). There are more prunable ways of embedding messages into transactions. Gavin Andresen wrote :”Yes, please don’t create lots of unspendable scriptPubKeys.
However, this approach met with strong opposition from Bitcoin developers for polluting the blockchain. If interpreted as a script, the message is impossible to fulfill, so that output will simply sit there in the blockchain, never to be spent. Instead, in the output field of the transaction is the message itself. One of the outputs sends a very small amount of money to the receiver, while the other does not go to anyone at all. The sender sends a non-standard transaction with two outputs. The first is ’s concept of blockchain notes. However, this ad-hoc messaging system is clumsy and inefficient, and the concept of Bitcoin messaging has seen two iterations since then. If it is already known that you control a given address, then clearly you must have sent the transactions as well.
Beyond the fact that this message will remain in the blockchain forever, an advantage of this technique is that the message is also authenticated since sending a message in this way requires you to control the address that the transactions are sent from. As early as 2011, people were using the lower digits of Bitcoin transactions as a way of encoding messages in the blockchain one of the Bitcoinica thieves famously used the mechanism to distribute the message “ expect mass leak soon“. Although we tend to think of Bitcoin as a system designed specifically to send financial transactions, recent developments have shown that much more can be done with its cryptographic primitives. If encrypted email was popular enough in the world at large, the average person would have an incentive to set up a public key, but the fact that it is currently a niche technology means that they will not, perpetuating a catch-22 situation which requires a large portion of society to somehow coordinate to escape.Įnter Bitcoin. However, by and large, this is not the case. There are isolated communities in which encryption is used, whether out of ideology or out of necessity – Bitcoin itself has a considerable number of pseudonymous businessmen and developers who rely on PGP to maintain their online identities. For the encryption to be worth anything, your friend would need to have a decryption key under his control, whether that’s a public key or a symmetric key that the two of you had agreed upon earlier, and convincing other people who are not as technologically inclined to use such keys can be a challenge. If you were to create an encrypted email right now with PGP and send it to a friend, they would have a difficult time figuring out what to do with it. Some argue that the reason why encryption has not been implemented into email protocols is profit, as Google would have no way to earn advertising revenue from their service if they could not scan users’ emails for keywords, and others cite general apathy, quoting Mark Zuckerberg’s famous comment that privacy is no longer a “social norm”, but there is also a more fundamental issue at play: network effects.
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