+
It has been a while since I wrote about
+bitcoin, the decentralised
+peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
+have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
+state of bitcoin in
+Debian again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
+is now maintained by a
+team of
+people, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
+owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
+But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
+Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
+backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
+it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
+situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
+reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
+Corallo in a
+PPA for
+Ubuntu, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
+Debian package.
+
+
After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
+IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
+improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
+me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
+package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
+setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
+a
+patch to backport the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
+it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
+new version to unstable.
+
+
I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
+centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
+find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
+transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
+that the major credit card companies can block legal money
+transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
+need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
+they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
+Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
+Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
+pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
+in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
+use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
+quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
+have not tested them.
+
+
My
+experiment
+with bitcoins showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
+I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
+years ago, as can be
+seen
+on the blockexplorer service. Thank you everyone for your
+donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
+bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
+number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
+to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
+the same address as last time,
+15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
+
+