(context post by ShadowOfHarbringer)

I found something interesting.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1138345/best-compression-algorithm-for-short-text-strings

There is a small OS project on github, which does good compression of short text strings. http://github.com/antirez/smaz

So we could further get the 384 bytes down to <200 or <175 bytes.

I also wonder if the message has to be taken into account for the hash computation. Not doing so would allow to delete it later.

I very much don’t like this idea of a message. Since it is not necessary to the protocol, I’m not sure if it would be easy to find a place where it really fits. I’m not a programmer though. I’d be curious to have Satoshi’s thought on this.

Edit. I have a funny idea. Imagine that numeric precision is increased way beyond 8 decimals, say 128 decimals for instance.

What about using those decimals to code your message ? Somehow you would have a “natural fee” for this service, and we won’t have to modify anything from the protocol.

Edit #2. Gosh I LOVE this idea Smiley

Edit #3. We don’t need 128 decimals. Correct me if I’m wrong, but with 32 decimals you can code a 17 characters-longed uncompressed message in a 64 characters set. (32*log(10)/log(64) = 7.717)

Quote from: grondilu on October 23, 2010, 06:07:41 PM

I very much don’t like this idea of a message. Since it is not necessary to the protocol, I’m not sure if it would be easy to find a place where it really fits. I’m not a programmer though. I’d be curious to have Satoshi’s thought on this.

Yeah, I’m curious of that too.

ECDSA can’t encrypt messages, only sign signatures.

It would be unwise to have permanently recorded plaintext messages for everyone to see.  It would be an accident waiting to happen.

If there’s going to be a message system, it should be a separate system parallel to the bitcoin network.  Messages should not be recorded in the block chain.  The messages could be signed with the bitcoin address keypairs to prove who they’re from.