blog/A_word_on_bitcoin_support_in_Debian.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: A word on bitcoin support in Debian</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
  20
  21
  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">A word on bitcoin support in Debian</div>
  24       <div class="date">21st December 2012</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>It has been a while since I wrote about
  26 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
  27 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
  28 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
  29 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
  30 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
  31 is now maintained by a
  32 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
  33 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
  34 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
  35 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
  36 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
  37 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
  38 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
  39 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
  40 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
  41 Corallo in a
  42 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
  43 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
  44 Debian package.</p>
  45
  46 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
  47 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
  48 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
  49 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
  50 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
  51 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
  52 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
  53 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
  54 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
  55 new version to unstable.
  56
  57 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
  58 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
  59 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
  60 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
  61 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
  62 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
  63 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
  64 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
  65 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
  66 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
  67 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
  68 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
  69 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
  70 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
  71 have not tested them.</p>
  72
  73 <p>My
  74 <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
  75 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
  76 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
  77 years ago, as can be
  78 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
  79 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
  80 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
  81 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
  82 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
  83 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
  84 the same address as last time,
  85 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b&label=PetterReinholdtsenBlog">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
  86 </div>
  87
  88       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/bitcoin">bitcoin</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>.</div>
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