Decentralized Mailing List

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Revision as of 12:19, 1 August 2013 by AyrA (talk | contribs) (changed for 0.3.5)
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A Mailing List without the requirement of a central "authority". Sometimes called Chan (short for channel) because they usually focus on a subject which also is the password for the deterministic address too.

Issues with regular Mailing Lists

Even if Bitmessage is a decentralized p2p network, mailing lists require the client who operates the list to be online, creating a Single Point of Failure. Decentralized lists circumvent this issue with everyone having the private keys to the Address, on the cost of signing. In a centralized list, it is known, who sent a mesage, in a decentralized, this is only possible with additional measurements (Hash tagging, PGP). Decentralized lists however cannot be clogged up with large messages because POW is only done by the sending client.

Creation

A DML can be created in the File menu with the Option "Join / Create chan". A Passphrase must be entered and the address is generated.

Usage

A DML can be joined by opening the "Join / Create chan" window and entering the label and the address the user wants to join.

Issues with Decentralized Mailing Lists

Since all users share the same address it cannot be easily verified, who sent a message.

Spam cannot be blocked on address base, since everyone shares the same sender address.

Updating

If a user was a member of a DML before 0.3.5 came out, he might want to update the address to a DML. To do so, first of all the subscription needs to be removed in the GUI, after that, the keys.dat needs to be edited and the line "chan = true" needs to be inserted into the address block that should be a DML.

Example Address

Passphrase: general, Address: BM-2DAV89w336ovy6BUJnfVRD5B9qipFbRgmr. The Address Block of a DML should look like this (it may have additional entries):

[BM-2DAV89w336ovy6BUJnfVRD5B9qipFbRgmr]
label = general
enabled = true
decoy = false
chan = true
privsigningkey = 5Jnbdwc4u4DG9ipJxYLznXSvemkRFueQJNHujAQamtDDoX3N1eQ
privencryptionkey = 5JrDcFtQDv5ydcHRW6dfGUEvThoxCCLNEUaxQfy8LXXgTJzVAcq

Address List

A list of addresses can be found at the forum.