Another kind of Altcoin

SatoshiDice opened my eyes to another facet of the power of Bitcoin.  For those who have not heard of SatoshiDice it is bitcoin gambling.  You send bitcoin to a predetermined address.  The transaction id of that bitcoin send is hashed using a predetermined "salt".  The value produced by this hash is compared to another predetermined number.  If your hash is lower, you win and the bitcoin prize is immediately paid back to the address you sent from.  While that explanation is not exact it is close enough to explain what is going on.

Now I want to talk about how SatoshiDice works from a server/service perspective.  The front end of SatoshiDice is a web server that at the very least must provide information about where to send bitcoin to make a bet.  I will call this the point of discovery because it is the touch point with the user where the user discovers the information needed for them to proceed.  In order to access this point of discovery the user has to know that they need to go to SatoshiDice.com and browse there with their browser.  In order for that server to be known as SatoshiDice.com the owner of the server has to register SatoshiDice.com coupled to an associated IP address for the server with a global nameserver.  Nameservers are used to route internet traffic to the correct end server.  Because you have to register everything and the physical location of the server is known because of the associated IP address it means that the point of discovery is physically findable by those with means to do so.  This is an issue for gambling sites that have been declared illegal.  In order for people to find your server you inherently have to provide a route for people to physically find your server.

The server that actually process the gambling for SatoshiDice does not face the same limitation of opening itself up to physical discovery.  That server is merely a node accessing the distributed bitcoin network.  Bitcoin works because you have all bitcoin information and the secret keys you have allows you to access and modify certain parts of that information.  Because of this you can set up your server anywhere that has internet access and you do not need to broadcast location information about the server.  The workhorse of the gambling operation is run on a server that can avoid confiscation and can move immediately without external coordination.

A fork of the Bitcoin code base (an altcoin) can be created to give the point of discovery the same benefits that as the SatoshiDice gambling server.  Specifically the script section of the transaction can be expanded in size to accommodate additional information.  In my vision this larger script allocation would simply be filled with html.  A browser could then be repurposed to monitor a single address and parse transactions as web pages.  All clients have the entire blockchain so technically each node has the entire "internet" on their machine much like each participant in Bitcoin has the full transaction history of Bitcoin.  Now if you want to publish information meant to be a point of discovery (like hosting a website) you would instead send a transaction to a known publication address with the webpage as a payload in the transaction.

A full system of page updates and market driven page importance could easily be worked into the system.  Pages could appear in order of importance by the amount of altcoin paid to the publication address.  A system of hashtags could be used to reference and bump pages or submit edits.