Petter Reinholdtsen: A word on bitcoin support in Debian
It has been a while since I wrote about
bitcoin, the decentralised
peer-to-peer based crypto-currency, and the reason is simply that I
have been busy elsewhere. But two days ago, I started looking at the
state of bitcoin in
Debian again to try to recover my old bitcoin wallet. The package
is now maintained by a
team of
people, and the grunt work had already been done by this team. We
owe a huge thank you to all these team members. :)
But I was sad to discover that the bitcoin client is missing in
Wheezy. It is only available in Sid (and an outdated client from
backports). The client had several RC bugs registered in BTS blocking
it from entering testing. To try to help the team and improve the
situation, I spent some time providing patches and triaging the bug
reports. I also had a look at the bitcoin package available from Matt
Corallo in a
PPA for
Ubuntu, and moved the useful pieces from that version into the
Debian package.
After checking with the main package maintainer Jonas Smedegaard on
IRC, I pushed several patches into the collab-maint git repository to
improve the package. It now contains fixes for the RC issues (not from
me, but fixed by Scott Howard), build rules for a Qt GUI client
package, konqueror support for the bitcoin: URI and bash completion
setup. As I work on Debian Squeeze, I also created
a
patch to backport the latest version. Jonas is going to look at
it and try to integrate it into the git repository before uploading a
new version to unstable.
I would very much like bitcoin to succeed, to get rid of the
centralized control currently exercised in the monetary system. I
find it completely unacceptable that the USA government is collecting
transaction data for almost all international money transfers (most are done in USD and transaction logs shipped to the spooks), and
that the major credit card companies can block legal money
transactions to Wikileaks. But for bitcoin to succeed, more people
need to use bitcoins, and more people need to accept bitcoins when
they sell products and services. Improving the bitcoin support in
Debian is a small step in the right direction, but not enough.
Unfortunately the user experience when browsing the web and wanting to
pay with bitcoin is still not very good. The bitcoin: URI is a step
in the right direction, but need to work in most or every browser in
use. Also the bitcoin-qt client is too heavy to fire up to do a
quick transaction. I believe there are other clients available, but
have not tested them.
My
experiment
with bitcoins showed that at least some of my readers use bitcoin.
I received 20.15 BTC so far on the address I provided in my blog two
years ago, as can be
seen
on the blockexplorer service. Thank you everyone for your
donation. The blockexplorer service demonstrates quite well that
bitcoin is not quite anonymous and untracked. :) I wonder if the
number of users have gone up since then. If you use bitcoin and want
to show your support of my activity, please send Bitcoin donations to
the same address as last time,
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.