Stefan Thomas, a web developer and bitcoin fanatic is the author of BitcoinJS. Stefan argues the the weusecoins video he was involved with, didn’t actually accomplish what they where after: mainstream adoption, because, as he says “the client itself, just isn’t there yet”. Stefan gives a rough overview of the different types of clients that exist and how his project, WebCoin fits in there.

The main part of the talk is about WebCoin and different possible implementations of the Split Key approach to securing access to money.

Stefan discussed about making bitcoin work in the web browser. He argues that the browser is already built to be a safe sandbox, the only problem is that the data is public by design. On the one hand, everybody is using browsers today and they are the ultimate in accessibility- as we can see with the wallet services coming out now.

Conversely, I feel paranoid enough that I do not want to go near the web browser. Here’s a quote from Julian Assange on a command line tool he made called Surfraw:

Surfraw provides a fast unix command line interface to a variety of popular WWW search engines and other artifacts of power. It reclaims google, altavista, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot, and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html forms, placing these wonders where they belong; deep in unix heartland, as god-loving extensions to the shell.

But I realise I am in the 0.0001% of users worldwide. Thanks to Stefan for this informative and compelling talk.

Forgive me for including this social media spam but it helps our dinky small site get exposure D:

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