[Bitcoin-development] Sending Bitcoins using RSA keys

[Craig B Agricola]

Maybe I'm missing something crucial, but what benefit does this dance give over
the slightly more obvious mechanism of simply:
1) Alice generates a new address with her bitcoin client and sends the BTC to
   this new address
2) Alice exports the private key for that address (there is a well supported
   format for that)
3) Alice writes a nice email to Bob, including that exported private key
4) Alice encrypts the email with Bob's public key using GPG and sends it to him
   by email
5) Bob decrypts the email
6) Bob imports the private key into his wallet

There's no need for sending a whole wallet; just the one key is needed.  Every
bit of infrastructure needed above already exists.  And of course, the above
has the same issue as your proposal; this is a way for two trusting parties to
send BTC without using the Bitcoin network, but it's not a payment mechanism.
They now share control of an address; whoever spends that BTC first wins, so
until Bob uses the Bitcoin network to spend that BTC to another address that
only he controls, it's still in joint custody.  And if ensuring that he has
control of the BTC is the last (implicit) step in the procedure above, as well
as yours, then they might as well have simply used the Bitcoin network to do
the transfer in the first place.

Did I miss the point entirely?

 -Craig

PS. Re-reading, I realize that the above might come off sounding snarky or
    dismissive; it's not intended that way.  I'm wondering if I'm missing the
    big picture.

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 04:18:38PM +0200, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> So there's a slight world divide in digital payments with bitcoin using
> ECDSA and GPG, payswarm / webid etc using largely RSA
> 
> Here's how to bring the two worlds together and enable bitcoins be sent
> over webid or payswarm
> 
> 
> Problem: Alice and Bob have RSA key pairs, but no public bitcoin
> addresses.  Alice wants to send 1 BTC to Bob.
> 
> 1. Alice takes Bob's WebID and encrpyts it with her private key (to create
> entropy) ...
> 
> 2. Alice uses that message as the seed to produce btc address (as per
> http://brainwallet.org ) with ECDSA key pair
> 
> 3. Alice sends coins to this address
> 
> 4. Alice and then encrypts the seed again with Bob's public key
> 
> 5. Bob decrypts the seed using his private key
> 
> 6. Bob can now use the seed to recreate the wallet and spend the coins
> 
> Unless I've made an error, I believe this unites the web paradigm and
> crypto currency paradigm into one potentially giant eco system ...

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