Hello, I'm Coyo. I've been watching bitcoin and raving to all of my friends and family about it and the possibilities of what could happen society-wide if it were widely accepted by vendors as payment.

I've accidentally glazed my credit union teller's eyes yapping about bitcoin. I'm excitable.

I know enough about bitcoin to understand that bitcoin works via a public record, the blockchain, that you possess private keys in your wallet in order to post signed records to the public accounting record. it's all based on a huge chain of signatures and public key cryptography. when you lose your wallet, you lose your private keys, and thus the money is irrevocably unclaimed in the blockchain itself.

the exceptions to this is if you use deterministic keypair generation to generate a bitcoin address (a public key, or identity), and simply memorize the passphrase used as the seed to the keypair generation. this is also known as a brain wallet.

I know enough about bitcoin to see the genius concept, and am humiliated that i never thought of a transaction-chain concept using a distributed public record for payment bookkeeping. Oh well.

The idea is really simple once you actually understand it, but it's so jarringly genius at the same time that i'm so very glad people rallied behind it.

About me: I'm a mathematics and business major in college. Considering studying cryptograhy and finance. Havent decided yet.

My primary interests are in overlay networks such as tor, gnunet, and retroshare, and in other P2P projects such as bitcoin, bittorrent, and sesha.