And those are beautiful ramifications. Flaws anyone?
That's just weird. Like putting horses reins on an early automobile, or putting a hopper in the front of the car to pour oats into.
"Bitcoin, in the sense of the digital currency, is not used at all"
I had to LOL at this. BTC is popular enough to try to piggyback completely unrelated things using the term as a lure. I've lived thru the "turbo" era, the "e-" and "i-" era and now we're entering the BTC era, where we can soon expect shampoos and hamburgers to be "BTC shampoo" and "BTC hamburgers" as a marketing gimmick.
So this is a competitor of coinbase? Oh you mean its a miner. Oh no wait OK its like paypal but for BTC.
So... they copied some general source code concepts? Thats it? What a scam. Thats not real bitcoin support at all.
Its like saying a new game is internet compatible, in that if you install it on an internet connected computer its not incompatible with the OS. I actually saw this kind of thing during the early years of mass adoption of the internet. And now we'll see it in BTC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-to-text_encoding
With very modest client software modification, you could MIME encode any arbitrary binary file then squirt out one line of base64 per "post". Or the venerable uuencoded format.
What would prevent abuse would be some manner of throttling in the protocol to stop both this technique of blockchain abuse or arbitrary file length abuse.
I'm not thinking of apps like distributing cracked bluerays which would be fairly ridiculous, but much smaller binary files like a GPG key or SSH or whatever. Yeah yeah cut and paste whatever, why not automate it if you can. Click this menu option to send an extremely small file as a binary rather than screwing around with cut and paste.
The IP address you use to access twister is not recorded on any server. Your online presence is not announced.
Can you really make that claim with a distributed protocol? Your IP address is visible to whoever you send data to, they could easily keep logs (heck my router does by default).
Similarly, a Sybil attack can probabilistically figure out the originator, simply be seeing which peer first relayed the communication.
There may be some technical overlap and functionality overlap, but I think they are more different than similar. It's like saying Gmail is the same as Twitter, since you can also broadcast messages with Gmail, and you can also send private messages with Twitter. But the two really aren't the same.
What I want to know is this: What does Bitcoin have to do with this? You can have peer to peer, anonymous, encrypted messaging without any of the nonsense that Bitcoin entails.
Also, don't ask this question so soon, it takes time to review code, and even more time to find vulnerabilities and come up with working exploits.
Second also, P2P system inner working are much more complex, and can be vulnerable to some other types of attacks which are specific to P2P protocols.
Having decent P2P security is not really easy. P2P is really exciting, and the advantages are great, but I don't know the specifics of P2P security.
Bittorrent and bitcoin can seem simple compared to a P2P messaging program.
TLDR: It's the future, but it's not exactly there yet. I'd still use it with those vulnerabilities though.
The reason something like namecoin is to allow people to update their identity in the event the first identity was compromised/blocked.
Finally this was posted yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6987396
Furthermore, not all clients need to store and reseed all messages they receive. More seeders is obviously better for network health, but it's not always a reasonable option. The paper suggests that clients can choose to be "achivists" which means that they keep messages and seed them to others (so it's optional). Clients like mobile phones could easily disable this behavior.
Also Twister can't use Namecoin because the incentives are wrong. In Namecoin, miners get to create domains. It would be horrible if only Twister miners could make accounts. Instead they get to make promoted posts, so it has to be a separate implementation.
Furthermore, not all clients need to store and reseed all messages they receive. More seeders is obviously better for network health, but it's not always a reasonable option. The paper suggests that clients can choose to be "achivists" which means that they keep messages and seed them to others (so it's optional). Clients like mobile phones could easily disable this behavior.
