From jancsika@yahoo.com Fri Jul 6 02:39:29 2018 From: Jonathan Wilkes To: cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org Subject: Re: [Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox and Bitcoin (and the petition) Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 02:39:29 +0000 Message-ID: <172289278355.3881296.14415822779161424718.generated@mail.pglaf.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============7380338289275419148==" --===============7380338289275419148== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ----- Original Message ----- > From: Ted Smith > To: freedombox-discuss > Cc:=20 > Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 8:51 AM > Subject: Re: [Freedombox-discuss] FreedomBox and Bitcoin (and the petition) >=20 [...] > For reference, it's really, really, really hard to take web browsing and > make it anonymous. Forcing every connection from browsers to go through > Tor won't help you anywhere near as much as it does for Bitcoin. Bitcoin > has already done 99% of the hard work building a protocol that is > totally (as far as either of us can tell) anonymous if it's _just_ > tunneled through Tor without any other filtering. When I referred to "these" attacks going away, I was talking about implementa= tions of the Kaminsky attack, or efforts to link an IP address with a transaction e= ven without connecting to all nodes (say, making inferences from the data availab= le at blockchain.info). Bitcoin behind Tor still isn't anonymous in many obvious ways. I refuse to respond to a phrase as fatuous as "totally anonymous", but= if the system really protected its users' identity[1] in a practical way then the "c= oin taint" discussions and (unfortunately) implementations by some services would not be possible. Bitcoin is not Chaumian cash-- which _would_ give the user the kin= d of anonymity to protect against a self-destructive coin-tainting scheme since it= 's untraceable. Whatever definition of "totally anonymous" you're using, it is = false. That is just one of the consequences of Bitcoin not being anonymous, and ther= e are many other problems with transactions linking to user identity. You should h= ave a look at http://bitcoin.org/ if you don't understand the technology and its (non-)f= eatures, and ask questions on a Bitcoin-specific list or forum for more information. -Jonathan [1] The Bitcoin-behind-Tor user is trusting that no one will care about the i= nferences that can be gleaned from a database that holds every single transaction ever made.= Even in the best of circumstances where this user doesn't leak _any_ identifying info= rmation out of band, the "coin taint" problem shows that they cannot be immune to such an at= tack. Whether we like it or not, "coin that well-known Bitcoin service foo claimed = was stolen" is mathematically provable, uniquely-identifying information that _will_ curr= ently break that Bitcoin's fungibility. There have been ways proposed to address this, but it= 's sheer confusion to claim "total anonymity" for Bitcoin-behind-Tor in its current state. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- --=20 Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE --===============7380338289275419148==--