blog/data/2012-12-21-bitcoin.txt

   1 Title: A word on bitcoin support in Debian
   2 Tags: english, debian, bitcoin
   3 Date: 2012-12-21 23:59
   4
   5 <p>It has been a while since I wrote about
   6 <a href="http://www.bitcoin.org/">bitcoin</a>, the decentralised
   7 peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
   8 have been busy elsewhere.  But two days ago, I started looking at the
   9 state of <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/bitcoin">bitcoin in
  10 Debian</a> again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet.  The package
  11 is now maintained by a
  12 <a href="https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-bitcoin/">team of
  13 people</a>, and the grunt work had already been done by this team.  We
  14 owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
  15 But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
  16 Wheezy.  It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
  17 backports).  The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
  18 it from entering testing.  To try to help the team and improve the
  19 situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
  20 reports.  I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
  21 Corallo in a
  22 <a href="https://launchpad.net/~bitcoin/+archive/bitcoin">PPA for
  23 Ubuntu</a>, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
  24 Debian package.</p>
  25
  26 <p>After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
  27 IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
  28 improve the package.  It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
  29 me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
  30 package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
  31 setup.  As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
  32 <a href="http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-bitcoin-devel/Week-of-Mon-20121217/000041.html">a
  33 patch to backport</a> the latest version.  Jonas is going to look at
  34 it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
  35 new version to unstable.
  36
  37 <p>I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
  38 centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system.  I
  39 find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
  40 transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
  41 that the major credit card companies can block legal money
  42 transactions to Wikileaks.  But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
  43 need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
  44 they sell products and services.  Improving the bitcoin support in
  45 Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
  46 Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
  47 pay with bitcoin is still not very good.  The bitcoin: URI is a step
  48 in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
  49 use.  Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
  50 quick transaction.  I believe there are other clients available, but
  51 have not tested them.</p>
  52
  53 <p>My
  54 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Now_accepting_bitcoins___anonymous_and_distributed_p2p_crypto_money.html">experiment
  55 with bitcoins</a> showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
  56 I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
  57 years ago, as can be
  58 <a href="http://blockexplorer.com/address/15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">seen
  59 on the blockexplorer service</a>.  Thank you everyone for your
  60 donation.  The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
  61 bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
  62 number of users have gone up since then.  If you use bitcoin and want
  63 to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
  64 the same address as last time,
  65 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>