Anyone can create a random key with a random email. See all the president@whitehouse.gov addresses on the keyservers. So if they used the keyserver network I could just make a fake key for anyone I want to impersonate and upload it. Github has no way to authenticate which keys are good and bad if they only use the keyserver network. So they have you upload the key on their site to implicitly authorize the key as one that you (the person with the github account, or at least its password) consider valid.
> Github has no way to authenticate which keys are good and bad if they only use the keyserver network. So they have you upload the key on their site to implicitly authorize the key as one that you (the person with the github account, or at least its password) consider valid.
Yes they do. It's called "the web of trust" and has existed for quite a long time.
Keybase lets you do some key stuff, but the bigger feature is that it provides a bunch of ways to authenticate the source of a key above and beyond the WoT and getting into the strong set. Authentication is an inherently hard problem. With keybase you can, for example, see that the key that you want to use to send an encrypted email to x@example.com's website is owned by someone who also controls x@example.com's twitter, reddit, github accounts, web-site, etc, making it less likely that there's a MiTM going on.
It depends on whether they use PGP/MIME or inline PGP. Without installing the tool, I'm guessing they use PGP/MIME, because you pretty much can't use html email with inline PGP, and I doubt they're going to default to plain/text mails.
Their FAQ explicitly says that they do not currently support RFC 3156, "MIME Security with OpenPGP" (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3156). I don't know this stuff well, but that makes me suspect that PGP/MIME is not currently supported.
For this to be able to send PGP/MIME emails, the webmail service would have to allow the client to uploaded a body which is not tampered with at all, and also to specify the mime type of the email. That way, you could upload a pre-built MIME structure to be used as the body, generated by the OpenPGP extension, which includes the encryted attachments.
This could work, but the web service would have to support it as well as the extension.
Then there is also the issue of how does the receiver read the message? The extension would need to be able to parse MIME, and allow access to the separate parts.
Actually the current guidelines are pretty clear. Mining is income. When you receive your coins from mining, that's a taxable event. Current value - mining expenses = income. After that any gains or losses are unrealized until you sell, creating another taxable event. Current price - cost basis = capital gains. Since bitcoins were worthless when Nakamoto was mining, he has no tax bill there. No taxes are owed for simply holding the coins. If he sold today, he'd be taxed at the long term capital gains rate of 15% for 100% of what he sold.
EDIT: but of course I'm making the silly mistake of assuming he's an American.
Inflation adjusted, that would put him in the range of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Mellon, etc. If (and it's a big if) bitcoin was worth as much as the world gold market, it isn't disruptive like an internet startup, it's disruptive like Marxism. We could argue about the insanity suggesting that bitcoin will reach that sort of value, but if it somehow did, then $500 billion isn't totally out of line.
True, but they were able to process a single quarter-million dollar transaction and easily turn that into 'real' cash. That's still a pretty decent accomplishment for magic internet money.
Switzerland has its own currency and its own central bank. It doesn't use the Euro. So the money doesn't need to 'paid for'. The government can just create the money and hand it out.
Of course this might devalue the currency as a whole, but the central bank had to institute an exchange rate floor because Francs were becoming too expensive relative to the Euro. So they probably wouldn't even consider a minor devaluation a bad thing.
All the telecom companies, which cooperate fully with law enforcement, charge for their services. It's perfectly fair to bill time and materials that you can no longer use to improve your business and generate revenue.
http://pool.sks-keyservers.net/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=p...