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  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from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