Proposed anonimity feature : The Dark Blockchain
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The main side channel problem I saw with Bitcoin protocol is all transactions are fundamentally linked. This means all transactions are traceable, and easily cross linked if you can combine, say IP addresses (like the N$A can). Thus it is useless for its fundamental principle to be anonymous digital cash.
My first thought was that there is a way to perform transactions off line, so they don’t appear on the block chain, but are valid.
It still might be possible to extract a private key, send that to someone. The old address becomes invalid, but the new address doesn’t appear on the blockchan till the private key is registered again.
If this is possible then the main disadvantage is each private key is the full amount for that address.
However, that could be pre processed, by sending the correct amount to yourself first, before generating the exact key from an address with the full amount of coins in.
I’ll be interested to watch and read some more about what the state of the art is. I was assuming Dark coin or such would already be doing this, although I think it isn’t the same as zero coin, or other schemes I’ve read about…
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If a warrant was raised to check a suspect for money laundering, would that be possible without the address holders consent?
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If a warrant was raised to check a suspect for money laundering, would that be possible without the address holders consent?
In Britain you can be forced to disclose encrypted information. They removed the right of silence a while back.
I’m more interested in its use to prevent unlawful snooping by the police and security forces, particularly in totalitarian regimes.
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I support privacy and if the only way to achieve that on a blockchain is with anonymity features then I agree they should be developed.
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Academic Study on Bitcoin’s privacy.
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Could this also be done with a side chain?
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Could this also be done with a side chain?
I was thinking this. A two way pegging system for darkchain coins?
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Here are the 2 talks / interview by Kristov Atlas on the level of Bitcoin anonymity and why that is important - these talks got me thinking a Dark Blockchain would now be possible, using Multi-signature transactions / Public, Private key encryption technologies.
Great talks.
Kristov Atlas, pt1 : Anonymous Bitcoin, Cryptography and Online Safety - #203
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xSMEuhEWGM&list=UU_lvvd3d3K7NgLtWstl6YNg
Kristov Atlas is a network security and privacy researcher who studies crypto-currencies. He is the author of Anonymous Bitcoin: How to Keep Your Ƀ All to Yourself, a practical guide to maximizing financial privacy with Bitcoin. Kristov is also a correspondent for the World Crypto Network, appearing regularly on the the weekly roundtable show “The Bitcoin Group”, and host of “Dark News”, a show about un-censorship technologies.
Kristov Atlas, pt2 : Anonymous Bitcoin, Cryptography and Online Safety - #204
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym8oDhwhHGg
This episode is part 2 about Bitcoin, cryptography and online security and safety and is called Anonymous Bitcoin, Cryptography and Online Safety: It’s being released on Wednesday, July 2, 2014, and was recorded yesterday on Tuesday, July 1, 2014.
Kristov Atlas is a network security and privacy researcher who studies crypto-currencies. He is the author of Anonymous Bitcoin: How to Keep Your Ƀ All to Yourself, a practical guide to maximizing financial privacy with Bitcoin. Kristov is also a correspondent for the World Crypto Network, appearing regularly on the the weekly roundtable show “The Bitcoin Group”, and host of “Dark News”, a show about un-censorship technologies.
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On the subject of security, most people now understand that the security services have compromised our hardware and are complicit in inserting or retaining bugs and features which can be compromised by bots, trojans and malware. Email services such as Google and AOL would appear to be completely open to snooping by the USA and others, especially if you are not a “USA citizen”.
Bitmessage has been developed as an open source and peer to peer answer to secure data transmission. It makes using complex encryption security available to the normal user (I’ve only got a PhD, so I include myself in that).
You send a receive address to the person encryption the message, that is a public key to encrypt the data. Only you have the private key which can decrypt their return message.
The disadvantage of Bitmessage is that it uses a small amount of CPU power to encrypt messages and like with torrents, you are a node passing messages around. However, it is easy to send a PM saying message awaits, you are only leaking that secure information is being sent.
In particular, for Feathercoin, as more members get involved, it is important that private discussions can occur, or password and other secure information can be passed between members. It might be personal information, like you are ill, or going on holiday. This is especially as such information is routinely intercepted by “who knows who”, and forums and email will always be hackable.
“There is no such thing as 100% secure system”, according to “Wrappers complex systems unsecurity principle.”.
Test Bitmessage: BM-NAvPCPDMTG5PSN5JV8uuU5BcdWENjC4G
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Could this also be done with a side chain?
I think side chains are still a proposal for Bitcoin 2.0. Side-chains would effectively be new blockchains that are backed by Bitcoins, in much the same way that fiat currencies used to be backed by gold. They could be backed by Feathercoin at that stage of development the Feathercoin client would include side chain facility.
So, Feathercoin could have Dark Side Chains, assuming we can fully invent how the Dark Blockchain / Dark Addresses will work. It would also be possible to also start a separate Dark Blockchain coin.
By being flexible, Feathercoin is making itself more relevant to it’s community / distributed direction, for instance, by returning to GPU mining. Developing extra anonymity features is another area that could be beneficial to that philosophy. It is also an area that attract development assistance and finance from interested partners as the first major coin proposing such an update to increase user security / anonimity.
We can (at least) investigate some aspects / consequences of including Dark Address in the normal Blockchain as it is a relevant area for for further discussion, particular with world security situation in mind.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/19/bitcoin-2-0-unleash-the-sidechains/
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Yes the digital millennium act in the USA is far reaching.
The biggest part about it is any company that is considered US owns is subject to it and must had over data if requested by US federal agencies and are not allowed to tell the data owners.
To realise how deep that goes, if as an Australian citizen I decide to use Microsoft’s dropbox, gmail even though I’m an Australian citizen under the act the US governement has the right to request access to my infromration, even if it was stored by Google or dropbox outside of the USA.
This is where the term ‘data sovereignty’ comes into play.
Should I choose to have my information hosted by a company that is not a US owned company the only way ot could be legally collected by the US government is if they have a treaty with the country that is hosting it and through those legal channels request it, making it much harder for my information to be legally snooped on.
Most state (and I’m guessing federal) agencies in Australia have IT policies that their information can only be stored by Australian companies and in most cases it is not even allowed to leave the state it is for, this is to protect themselves against foreign countries laws giving that country the right to snoop on their information
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Notice that the EU declares snooping Illegal and an infringement to human rights and the UK government quickly rush through laws to retain powers at all costs. Most people condemn dragnet surveillance but few will take action to protect themselves for fear of making themselves look like they have something to hide.
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http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/tor-us-attack-identity-privacy-150044
The Tor Project has warned users of a lengthy campaign which may have unmasked users of the suppsedly anonymous service â€" and pointed the finger at researchers funded by the US government.
The Tor service keeps users’ identity and location secret, but for the first five months of this year, it was infiltrated by servers which have been altering traffic in a bid to identify users, according to a blog post from project leader Roger Dingledine. From circumstantial evidence, the Tor Project says the effort is likely to have come from researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University, funded by the US government, whose paper on idenitifying Tor users was pulled from the Black Hat security conference earlier this month.
Tor is under attack from all sides: last week, the Russian government offered four million roubles for a way to eavesdrop on converasations on the secret network.
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I’ve done some more research and haven’t found another coin that has proposed or invented the Dark Blockchain yet. Looks like we are first.
Wonder if Darkcoin would bounty the development?
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I was completely unaware of this myself but I thought recently, we should have the choice to have our coins anon…
A choice though. Businesses need to have transparency.
Colored coins on one side, and Dark coins on the other, and in the middle, your regular ol’ normal coins.
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I was completely unaware of this myself but I thought recently, we should have the choice to have our coins anon…
A choice though. Businesses need to have transparency.
Colored coins on one side, and Dark coins on the other, and in the middle, your regular ol’ normal coins.
It’s part of my original specification that we could have normal light or dark addresses. You would choose when you create the address.
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Stealth addresses.
The closest thing of found to “Dark Blockchain addresses”, (where all the address and data is encrypted with extra keys and only viewable by the sender and receiver.)
Stealth addresses. Mentioned in another of Kristov’s podcasts.
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20701/what-is-a-stealth-address
The original article in which the concept of stealth addresses is introduced is written by Peter Todd and can be found on
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/31813471/.
The abstract of the Stealth Address article states:
A Stealth Address is a new type of Bitcoin address and related scriptPubKey/transaction generation scheme that allowers payees to publish a single, fixed, address that payors can send funds efficiently, privately, reliably and non-interactively. Payors do not learn what other payments have been made to the stealth address, and third-parties learn nothing at all. (both subject to an adjustable anonymity set)
With a stealth address, you ask payers to generate a unique address in such a way that you (using some additional data which is attached to the transaction) can deduce the corresponding private key. So although you publish a single “stealth address” on your website, the block chain sees all your incoming payments as going to separate addresses and has no way to correlate them. (Of course, any individual payer knows their payment went to you, and can trace how you spend it, but they don’t learn anything about other people’s payments to you.)
But you can get the same effect another way: just give each payer a unique address. Rather than posting a single public donation address on your website, have a button that generates a new unique address and saves the private key, or selects the next address from a long list of pre-generated addresses (whose private keys you hold somewhere safe). Just as before, the payments all go to separate addresses and there is no way to correlate them, nor for one payer to see that other payments went to you.
It appears that the “stealth address” is intended to address a very specific problem. If you wish to solicit payments from the public, say by posting a donation address on your website, then everyone can see on the block chain that all those payments went to you, and perhaps try to track how you spend them.
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Well, this is better than Tor.
Wrapper, do you think we have a chance at developing this?
After the algo change, I think this should be a priority.
The choice.
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Re: Do you think we have a chance at developing this the Dark Block chain addresses?
In principle I don’t think it is that difficult. Basically it is adding another level of encryption, otherwise uses all the same technology. Assuming there is no other draw backs.
It’s a good first step that no one so far is saying that it’s not possible or has been done / proposed already.
Personally, why I have highlighted it, it needs discussion, and maybe there are other technologies developing we should consider. I see feathercoin being flexible is one of our strength, just considering it is good.
The long confirm time for merchants and Bitcoin being only being pseudo anonymous, with it’s privacy concerns with rampant state surveillance, are disadvantages to Bitcoins stated purpose as a decentralised currency.
Extra privacy is also an area where, as I mentioned before, we might get extra support to implement it, so it would be “easier” than the hashing algorithm change.
Firstly we need more discussion. I’m still a bit too ill to be writing white papers, but have thought this through a lot so should be able to help answer any further questions on how it could work…
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I agree that we need the option of sending coins anon.
People should be able to choose their level of security.
I see both 2FA and Dark Addresses as been a priority.
Once the Neo dust has settled, we will get this in the works.
