Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Bait for reusable addresses

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 00:15:56 +0100

I've thought about [ab]using Tor as a STUN replacement before, but the
issue is a lot of people don't have computers that are switched on all the
time anymore except for their smartphones, which are too weak to calculate
the UTXO set. The trend has been for a while towards laptops, phones and
tablets, all of which are relatively weak.

I think there might be a market for a one-click "bring up an amazon VPS,
sync a full node and make it accessible only to me" type service though!

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 10:58 PM, Jeremy Spilman <[email-masked]> wrote:

> >
> >
> >
> > I think we need to provide users with better options than that.
> >
>
> Perfect privacy without extraordinary computational overhead today means
> downloading everything. But we could provide better tools to *shift*
> bandwidth requirements rather than try to reduce them.
>
> I've been thinking about a setup where user runs a UTXO only, and maybe
> even outbound-connect only (like bitcoinj), full node at home. Then using
> Tor, mostly for tunneling, they host a hidden service they can connect back
> to from their smartphone to see balances, manage receive addresses, send
> funds, etc.
>
> The smartphone is not doing SPV, it's like a web client for the wallet
> running at home. The initial connection between the smartphone and home
> wallet has the phone learn two codes, one is the hidden service name,
> another is an access token which is revocable. You may require further
> authentication from that point.
>
> With fast bootstrapping / checkpointing of the UTXO I think usability
> could be as good as SPV, and you would get push-notification of relevant
> transactions with zero privacy trade-off.
>
> I wonder if people would want to run such an app, if they would run it on
> their desktop, a dedicated machine, or an old smartphone or other cheap ARM
> device.
>