Bitcoin Cryonics Fund

lsparrish

The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.

Details: I had added 10 bitcoins to get things started, and there were 4.75 worth of additional donations. These were partially lost when the hosted online wallet that I was using (MyBitcoin) was hacked, but 49% was recovered. As of today, after refunding part of the donated money, it is now worth 5.2675. I will be adding from my personal store to bring it up to an even 5.5. At $140 per coin, the new total is $770.

I've decided to follow the buy-and-hold strategy for at least another year, since it worked so well. I don't have exact details on what I'll do with it, but it will not be converted or spent for at least one year, and will eventually be used for promoting cryonics in some way.

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:

subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people
covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance due medical problems
cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology, the dying process, and other neglected areas of concern to cryonics
hiring a public relations team professionally to repair the image of cryonics
research to improve viability and reduce dehydration
empirical validation through scanning the connectome

Contributions can be made to:

1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo

(Updated, since the previous address was attached to my personal wallet on an outdated client, which was causing money to be moved out of it by accident. The above is a brainwallet with a reasonably secure passphrase, generated using Blockchain.info.)

The bitcoins that I had set aside for a Cryonics contest two years ago (and were unredeemed) are suddenly worth a lot more.

Some things I have in mind if it gets big include:

subsidizing cryonics dues for low-income people
covering funding shortfalls for those unable to obtain life insurance due medical problems
cryonics scholarships to support the development of expertise in neural cryobiology, the dying process, and other neglected areas of concern to cryonics
hiring a public relations team professionally to repair the image of cryonics
research to improve viability and reduce dehydration
empirical validation through scanning the connectome

Contributions can be made to:

1Jdn36JUwvJdr3Qiie4aAseFdcoTsND9Qo

No idea. I have a vague understanding that colored coins are a work in progress and may be added at some point in 2013

I have been looking into the protocol for how this works. It doesn't require anything additional to be added (to the bitcoin daemon). To be practical it does require that clients are made that process them conveniently, this is what is the work in progress and does seem to be at the 'usable in a stable form some time this year' point.

The above distinction matters to me because it influence whether it is something I can just use if I find customers who want it and I am willing to do some coding to facilitate it versus features that require creation of a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal then the politically influence of a miners to start adopting it. For example zerocoin (the solution to anonymity and privacy) would require huge political advocacy to get into play in the existing bitcoin currency.

but I've never seen anyone lay out a list of the scripting language elements with the enabled and disabled ones specified.

Indeed, my research has failed to turn up such a document too. The information that is out there is also significantly out of date unless pieced together rather carefully. A summary of the availability of the features that are of interest. I am reasonably confident in these findings but not certain. (90% confidence.)

Timelocked transactions: The protocol (and actually in use bitchain) supports it but miners will nearly always reject transactions with future dates. This seems stupid to me but there doesn't seem to be any strong pressure to start accepting them. It is still possible to create such transactions and store them until the time is up then send them in. This solves some timelock usecases but the possibility of double spending prevents it solving many other use cases.
Multisignature transactions. ie. Escrow. Transactions that require n of m signatures in order to spend the output. These work. Technically. You can create them manually via the command line, send them to the blockchain and then use the command line and use of or access to someone who will cooperate with n of m signatures to create transactions that spend them. But current clients don't do this for you (except in the crippled case whereby if you have m of m keys in your wallet it will deign to let you spend them.) But this feature is there to be used if you want it.
Zero Knowledge Proofs eg. Zerocoins. Reliable privacy and anonymity right there within bitcoin. The research and cryptographic technology is available. As are proof of concept reference implementations. But this system (or an equivalent or superior one) isn't accepted and likely will not be for at least several years. An alternate currency could do it today.

Since this is such an obscure area of Bitcoin, you probably will have to read the source to find out.

Done. Now I'll have to read the source even more to work out how to make clients that use the (available) features to serve my purposes.

Well, good luck. I don't know a lick of C++ or real crypto coding, so as interesting as I find it all to read and watch and write essays about, don't expect any help from me. I hope you succeed in getting some of the features in more general use.

But this system (or an equivalent or superior one) isn't accepted and likely will not be for at least several years. An alternate currency could do it today.

But also risks there being some minor problem with the unpublished Zerocoin proposal which de-anonymizes everyone who ever uses the functionality. Since la... (read more)

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Bitcoin Cryonics Fund

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