[hashcash] Re: Hashcash for Blogs

  • From: Jonathan Morton <chromi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: hashcash@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2004 14:36:37 +0100

When I reply to a blog
post I will usually do so by creating a post of my own on my blog, using a
client-side tool like BlogJet. When I type in a URL BlogJet could poll the
site and produce a stamp in the background, I imagine other
aggregators/posters could do the same thing. That doesn't help the casual
blog reader though.

It would be quite easy to include libfastmint in such a tool, if not hashcash itself.


Some of the neat things that I have seen with JavaScript include popping a
little floating window over the top of the screen with a small and simple
animation obscuring the calculations going on behind the scenes. I would
imagine that something similar could be done.

There's a big difference between Java and JavaScript. You're probably thinking of the former. Java is noticeably slower than native code, but you can indeed do funky things with it, and (very) careful coding can give you reasonable performance. JavaScript is slower still and much more limited - it's part of the browser, not an independent environment.


As for threading, the point of using it is that you can do more than one thing at once. It's unlikely to make things go faster on a typical machine. In the context of hashcash, it means you can have the user type his message, and provide an interesting-looking status display, while the hashcash is being generated in the background.

Something that may be worthwhile is packaging a JNI version of a Java class plus libfastmint, then having it certified and hosting the result somewhere public. That would let Web-hashcash implementations achieve similar performance to native versions. A certified Java class is able to bypass some of the sandbox restrictions that browser applets are normally subject to.

--------------------------------------------------------------
from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail:     chromi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
website:  http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
tagline:  The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.


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