Quote from: kendo451 on March 10, 2014, 02:39:56 PM

The dev team recently announced the decision to chose SSL's PKI for the new Bitcoin merchant API , called BIP 70.

Mike Hearn defended the choice in this article by claiming that nobody offered any workable alternatives.

However, CACert is an alternative that works and should be considered for three reasons:

1. CACert works with SSL. It is a decentralized Certificate Authority that does not charge for SSL certs, with 20,000 members.

2. CACert has a working arbitration forum that has the potential to solve many of the problems that crop up with Bitcoin - the lack of trust and enforcability of contracts between users across national borders.

3. CACert has thus far successfully repelled attempts by intelligence agencies to insert their people into key positions in the organization.

In this article at financialcryptography.com, Ian Grigg argues that Bitcoin is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by adopting the mainstream SSL PKI.

Grigg says:

Quote

But what's the alternative, Mike Hearn asks? His fundamental claim seems to stand: there isn't a clear alternative. This is true. If you ignore Bitcoin's purpose in life, if you ignore your own capabilities and you ignore [the Bitcoin] community, then ... I agree! If you ignore CAcert, too, I agree. There is no alternate.

The Bitcoin community is exactly the kind of community that has the chops to provide a much needed alternative to the centralized corrupt corporate SSL PKI. If they aren't willing to give it a go, at least use CA Cert which is far more in line with Bitcoin's ethos.

All HTTPS coomunication is based on PKI, anyway. Even BIP70 does nothing better, it won't be worse

BTW, I think one could simply import the CAcert CA to the BIP70-compliant client