SEEKING FREELANCERS - Portland, OR - Remote OK
Work on untapped aspects of Bitcoin with Python, GNU/Linux.
<a href="http://electrum.org" >
Developed by a brain researcher to satisfy his own need for a memory-based Bitcoin backup system, Electrum is known for its mnemonic restore function, which enables secure Bitcoin storage without a PC, smartphone or Internet connection.
Electrum was designed to be a simple, easy to use Bitcoin "thin client". Satoshi Nakamoto himself advocated for such a client on the original cryptography mailing list. [0] This is what Electrum is.
As a next step, I want Electrum to store, sync and share encrypted data. Electrum's label sync plugin [1] is already accomplishing encrypted data storage and sync. However, I want to make the label sync plugin more automated and versatile. For example, I want the signup process to be seamless and automated. I also want to be able to selectively share data, perhaps with some basic access controls. Bonus points if we can store data on federated servers or some other P2P solution.
In particular, it's possible to do (and to automate) data storage account signups with challenge-response authentication via Bitcoin message signing [2]. In theory, it's also possible to do automated SSH authentication with Bitcoin message signing. To me, this is one of the most important, untapped aspects of Bitcoin.
When you combine such an authentication scheme with Electrum's mnemonic restore function, you end up with a secure way to maintain access to all kinds of data from one seed phrase, and one application, without hardware or software. Effectively, Electrum can act as a portable API control center, granting you access to just about any type of data, on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. It could be files, emails, passwords, messages, to-do lists; there is vast potential here.
I'd like to hear from you if you'd be interested in working on such a system.
As we're already working closely with members of the Kivy core team, front end / pure GUI work is mostly covered. Automating Bitcoin message signing auth, and implementing encrypted data store + sync + share is needed. Systems engineers and talented Python devs would be a welcome addition to this project. Of course, if you have other skills that are a fit for this, feel free to get in touch.
We're lucky in the sense that Bitcoin enables us to introduce financial compensation for open source work, which is exactly what this is.
Here's how to contact me:
echo YW5keUBzaWVycmEzZC5jb20K | base64 -d
<a href="https://github.com/atweiden" >
[0]: <a href="http://www.mail-archive.com/REDACTED_EMAIL/msg09964.html" >
[1]: <a href="https://labelectrum.herokuapp.com/" >
[1]: <a href="https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/plugins/labels.py" >
[2] <a href="https://www.b1txr.com/" >
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2013)