PGP over NuNet

[Hyena]

Here’s what I would propose.

Owners of nubit receiving addresses should be able to exchange messages over the block chain. The messages would be held in the block chain for 30 days, after which all nodes should delete the message from their copy of the block chain to save space.

The PGP private key should be deterministically generated from the nubits private key. The resulting PGP public key should be stored in the block chain with a special transaction. It should be optional to enable PGP message receiving for your nubits receiving address. When the recipient hasn’t stored their PGP public key on the block chain, it would be impossible to send them a message over the block chain.

The wallet client would have to have the necessary functionality for this to work.

How this would be useful? Easy, payment details. Often times merchants want to know more than just the amount and the TX inputs. Or, alternatively, people who don’t care about currency TXs would use nubits as their private e-mail client. We could ask higher fees for sending messages and have a new revenue stream.

The conventional e-mail system is still lacking native PGP support and Bitcoin’s approach to use HTTPS and a publicly known central server for attaching a message to your payment is IMO a complete failure. What if the merchant has no publicly available centralised server and a HTTPS certificate?

[Ben]

I could definitely get behind something like this. In many ways, key ownership for signing short-term messages is a natural progression from using the key to cast votes.

While this could certainly be built into the core protocol and client, would treating this as a plugin be a better first step, or do you envision this as a mechanism that the network could use to generate revenue?

[masterOfDisaster]

Emercoin is already dealing with a PKI on the Emercoin blockchain:
http://emercoin.com/EMCSSL
http://emercoin.com/EMCSSL_GUIDE

This is a little bit different from the approach to store messages in the blockchain as well, but it already solves the key management that is required for @hyena’s proposal.
As Emercoin is a Peercoin fork it could be possible to reuse some of the code without too many trouble - please take into consideration that I’m no programmer; I might be far off…

[Hyena]

I think it would be doable as a plugin. The message would be put after OP_RETURN. Then nodes can purge that data later on if the block chain size gets too big. However, such purging is too general. These particular messages should be deleted much faster than other OP_RETURN messages (whatever they may be).

I certainly think that it would generate revenue if the prices were not too big. If we think big and imagine that in the future, everyone uses nubits, then there would be justified demand for such a feature. Right now what are the alternatives? PGP/GPG is hard to understand for regular Joes. Bitmessage fails, let’s be honest, as it’s not reliable enough. E-mail is centralized and thus not compatible with DAOs.

And of course, I have a personal interest in this I am sick and tired of using gpg to decrypt the PGP e-mails that I receive. Instead, I would require my partners to use the nubits network to send me those messages and have the wallet software do the decryption/encryption automatically.

I don’t want to promote illegal activities, but theoretically speaking — since dark markets rely on PGP to begin with, perhaps they would switch to nubits if we had PGP native support?