Proposed anonimity feature : The Dark Blockchain
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But there *is* privacy. Feathercoin has as much privacy as bitcoin. There were notable cases where many members of general public had great interest in breaching privacy of another user, namely Sheep Marketplace thief, or Mt Gox thief. Did they succeed? No. So what problem, what hurdle are you talking about?
OK, maybe I understand, the prices are hitting rock bottom and we are searching for culprits. But it is not privacy fears (which would be groundless as I’ve just shown), but the lack of advertisement that keeps the prices down. Don’t blame the wrong cause, instead do you homework of introducing Feathercoin to the right people, like I do.
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Hi panoramix,
But there *is* privacy. Feathercoin has as much privacy as bitcoin. There were notable cases where many members of general public had great interest in breaching privacy of another user, namely Sheep Marketplace thief, or Mt Gox thief. Did they succeed? No. So what problem, what hurdle are you talking about?
Actually I disagree here. The public blockchain is great for organisations that wish to be open and publicly accountable for what they spend, and how they spend it. But for businesses and individuals that are using it as a bank account it leaks information all over the place about what other BTC/FTC/etc addresses that user holds, and also what they are spending it on.
I can see a whole new field of crypto-forensics being developed specifically to tap the blockchain information leaks to allow specific address(es) to be linked to a person or organisation.
Just like Google uses our browsing history for targeted advertising, block-chain information too could ultimately be used to, say, identify high net worth individuals and target them (be it happy things like selling yachts, or nasty things like extortion). It would just be another tool in the box.
I have come to the opinion that BTC is likely to fill a niche roll in business (like accept bitcoin payments for customer convenience and immediately converting to fiat), and businesses are not likely to keep a substantial amount of crypto for security reasons (example: companies would be able to work out how much BTC their rivals have, another example: customer pays in BTC, company can then check the balance of the sending addresses used, work out a rough estimate of net BTC worth, and adjust prices (up?) for the next purchases accordingly, or even target ads at the customer to sell more expensive kit).
Privacy is not just something to protect the bad guys.
To flip this on it’s head - information is power, and just how much power do you wish to give away?
Cheers
Dave
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Dave, do you know what the Sheep Marketplace thief has done? He sold. At the first ocasion. What do you think he has done with most of his money? He bought back lower. Laundered. No need for obscure blockchains. No member of general public knows who he is. But if you are a forensic guy with really high-level information access, then there is no way he can in this surveillance society hide the fact he got filthy rich from the theft. You know what, you are a good speaker. You should set up a feathercoin laundry business and persuade your customers that they need your services.
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Darkness is a bad idea. The inspectable blockchain and wallets ensure a straightforward way of checking that coins are not being created out of thin air, just like ic can be easily checked that computational work on the blockchain has really been done. The main goal of cryptos is to supersede the debt based fiat currency, whose units are created out of nothing.
Thanks for the discussion, it’s been very interesting.
As far as the problem that a straightforward method of knowing coins aren’t been created out of thin air. I think that has now been proved, at least for Bitcoin. It may be too early for other coins to go completely Dark.
Even so, the holder and sender of funds will know the amount is correct. There will be also a slight leak of coin amount information, where coins are mined. If it is a solo mine then the encrypted coin total will be known / surmised. If it is a pool, then unencrypted amounts could be taken from the total, to show the amount encrypted miners obtained.
I’m still considering if there are any technical problems and am interested to investigate how any other coins are approaching extra the anonymity requirement.
Cryptonote whitepaper - https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf
Monero main site - http://www.monero.cc/
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I’m also happy to be in the light. Iv got nothing to hide. I don’t really care of everyone in the world knew how much money I had. 99.9999% of people don’t give a crap.
The government would want to know to make sure I’m not a drug dealer or not paying my taxes. Why is anonymity so important?
I love the dark block chain theory tho. Its quite a clever idea. :)
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People are slowly growing allergic on anon coins imo…
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Nah just anon coins are flavour of the month
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Hi panoramix,
Actually I disagree here. The public blockchain is great for organisations that wish to be open and publicly accountable for what they spend, and how they spend it. But for businesses and individuals that are using it as a bank account it leaks information all over the place about what other BTC/FTC/etc addresses that user holds, and also what they are spending it on.
I can see a whole new field of crypto-forensics being developed specifically to tap the blockchain information leaks to allow specific address(es) to be linked to a person or organisation.
Just like Google uses our browsing history for targeted advertising, block-chain information too could ultimately be used to, say, identify high net worth individuals and target them (be it happy things like selling yachts, or nasty things like extortion). It would just be another tool in the box.
I have come to the opinion that BTC is likely to fill a niche roll in business (like accept bitcoin payments for customer convenience and immediately converting to fiat), and businesses are not likely to keep a substantial amount of crypto for security reasons (example: companies would be able to work out how much BTC their rivals have, another example: customer pays in BTC, company can then check the balance of the sending addresses used, work out a rough estimate of net BTC worth, and adjust prices (up?) for the next purchases accordingly, or even target ads at the customer to sell more expensive kit).
Privacy is not just something to protect the bad guys.
To flip this on it’s head - information is power, and just how much power do you wish to give away?
Cheers
Dave
+1
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For ftc, nothing is a flavour. They are all features.
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I’m also happy to be in the light. Iv got nothing to hide. I don’t really care of everyone in the world knew how much money I had. 99.9999% of people don’t give a crap.
The government would want to know to make sure I’m not a drug dealer or not paying my taxes. Why is anonymity so important?
I love the dark block chain theory tho. Its quite a clever idea. :)
My attitude is a bit different. There are two opposing types of major threats: One is that of individual evildoers (“terrorists”) harming everyone they can reach. The other is that of a misguided government harming everyone they can reach. To counter the first one, we need surveillance and disempowerment of individuals. To counter the second one we need privacy and empowerment of individuals. I think that the second threat is bigger so I think we need privacy. Also, individual disempowerment is almost complete today. I am for privacy, but we need to figure out how to prevent individuals from launching existential disasters.
That being said, dark blockchain is a snake oil with respect to privacy. Transactions of a decentralized electronic currency must be published to prevent double spending. So the the “dark” transactions *must*, by definition, be also published. As Nakamoto points out in the bitcoin whitepaper, privacy properties of a decentralized electronic currency are necessarily worse than those of cash. One thing that can be done is laundering: Splitting a transaction into a number of partial transactions. “Dark” blockchain merely integrates this laundry service, which was already available before, into coin software.
There are several reasons why “dark” blockchain is not very helpful in solving the privacy problem:
1. Laundering is not too hard to analyze. Privacy properties of “dark” currency remain worse than those of cash. At the end of the transfer, it is still a matter of the user keeping secret her ownership of the wallet(s) – same as with bitcoin.
2. The real privacy battleground is not the blockchain, but the user’s machine. As Snowden said, practically all computers have hardware and software backdoors introduced by the manufacturers. Dark blockchain is irrelevant when a misguided government can read (or worse) the state of your wallet off your screen.
The above two reasons mean that a “dark” blockchain disempowers the individual users (for whom the blockchain becomes much less transparent), but keeps empowered the organizations that are already very powerful. On the contrary, real name wallets would have opposite, equalizing effect, while sacrificing a only a tiny bit more privacy â€" because we don’t have almost any left. In other words, I instinctively prefer individual empowerment over centralized government (though I would promptly change my mind should individuals turn out to be more existentially dangerous), but if I can only choose one, then I prefer white government over a dark one.
3. Aside from the privacy / government concerns, “dark” blockchain may simply be an invitation for dark software engineers. It is not possible for me to think about all the fraud possibilities for self enrichment by modifying (backdoor, virus…) the coin software, but I can imagine that “dark” blockchain would make such irregularities much harder to discover.
In sum, I think that the hype of dark blockchains will soon be over, and it will no longer be necessary to explain why we don’t need them.
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My only issue is that there’s always that very real chance that gov’s will give the thumbs up to crypto’s provided they do not have an anon feature…
If that happened, we would have to pull the feature immediately.
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@Calem, that’s exactly why I proposed a subnetwork with real name wallets. Because New York proposed BitLicense is nothing else than that.
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I haven’t had a chance to read the bitlicense thing but I am aware if it. Is that basically the jist of it?
Also… Subnetwork? sorry, I just finished a 6 day week… sorta missed a lot on this topic… ill go through and read everything in a moment.
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There is some anti goxification sugar coating on it, but the jist is that brokers must identify their clients, whose wallets thus become known. In effect, it creates an real-name subnet, which can be expected to expand. In the future, imo, restrictions against transacting with anonymous addresses are likely (Tell us the reason or give us a gift tax from the coins you send/receive from the anonymous address…) I’ve seen this flood coming months ago, and I proposed to Bush to flood Feathercoin with clean water before the muddy flood water arrives â€" that is, create a real-name subnet for Feathercoin on our terms. But nothing happened yet. Governments will turn cryptos into a tool of financial monitoring, which is nevertheless still better than fractional reserve banking.
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Well…
How about we look at it this way…
Let 3rd parties make mixing services for ftc if they wish to risk so.
Let’s consider the current method of transacting with ftc as “Dark” as it is psuedo anon, which is just fine.
But maybe what needs to be developed instead is a real “Light” address…
Maybe simply impliment google/facebook linking… isn’t that the favored way of authenticating identity now days amongst the cool kids?
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Sorry to flip flop the idea around wrapper but can this be done just as easily?
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It cannot be done too easily, as it requires a non-negligible amount of coding. I feel bad for cutting work out for other people, since my coding skills are limited to physical simulations in high-level languages. But I think we have to do it before we are forced to do it.
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There might very well come the possibility that coins will be required to comply or die. Ok, whilst you can’t stop the network they could make it very difficult to develop anywhere other than a handful of countries. Perhaps the solution isn’t one of the other, perhaps it’s both. Perhaps individuals and businesses want anonymity and governments want compliance. I think panoramix is right, at very least they the legislation which is coming will want some sort of KYC, so perhaps the solution is a solution that offers bank like privacy rather than secretive anonymity. I would still like to see it built as a decentralised solution, but with everything compliant they are going to want some bricks and mortar to knock on when they get upset.
Personally I think It’s too big a compromise and it goes against the very ethos of the currency’s concept. But making he technology scary is going to drive it underground where the general public will also be fearful of using it.
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MrWyrm, when I build a house, I do it under a conditional assumption that it won’t burn to the ground. It is good to keep the possibility of fire in mind, but the house is still built on an assumption it will stand. I have a feeling that coins are our last chance to avoid Sinicization of the Western civilization. Totalist enforcement of centralized banking should be viewed as a disaster that can happen. I am therefore working on an assumption that coins will survive, and the republican governments will survive, too. If we don’t establish a white subnet, governments will do it for us with much less efficiency and will have no qualms about extracting fat tax for their service. If we don’t tackle volatility, same might happen, or worse, we might completely fail to take off.
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Does this service have to be FTC specific? Essentially it could just be an I’d lookup where you enter an address FTC,BTC or PXC and it will point to the owner if any.
