Sorry for reviving this old thread. Just noticed I replied directly to Steven instead of the list, there might be something in here people find interesting ... replies inline. On Wed, 23 Aug 2017 12:26:43 -0700 Steven Schear <schear.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 8:34 PM, Lee Clagett <forum@leeclagett.com> wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 14:18:40 -0500 Steven Schear <schear.steve@gmail.com> wrote:
And now some politics...
*Here is why Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Is The Real Bitcoin*
*It is the original bitcoin* It was hijacked from Gavin Andresen very surreptitiously by Adam Back (back in the day, Adam and I worked on hashcash and digital cash-related projects) with his Sidechain <http://www.satoshisdeposition.com/podcast/BTCK-169-2015-09-11.mp3> proposal. It was a "Trojan Horse" and together with the help of Blockstream, Theymos and the Core developers the process was completed. We, the original community, have finally regained control of the Bitcoin project, except that we have lost control of the name. This position is about to be redressed.
*It does not have Segwit.* If you look at a Bitcoin file as AD. A being the address and D being the data, Segwit removes the address portion A, It is reduced to a hash and the original signature is discarded after it is verified. So if your "fingerprint" is the hash of all your signatures, the signatures are discarded after being checked, and only the "fingerprint" is kept. This is in effect what Segwit does.
The signatures are stored on another chain, but not the main chain. Some nodes will keep signatures, some only keep partial records, some will discard them entirely. If you ever need to refer back to the transaction to check on the signatures all you have is the hash. "The fingerprint". Satoshi's original design of bitcoin being an unbroken record of signatures is violated.
It has been possible to "prune" old transactions from a local copy of the blockchain with Bitcoin Core for some time before Segwit was ever merged. You cannot realistically force someone to store the entire blockchain for you. The ability to prune old signatures while keeping the core transaction is actually a benefit - every transaction is necessary to verify that no double-spending has occurred or that miners did not create more coins than allowed. So even if the entire network dumped all segwit information, some critical checks of the system can be done by newcomers (but only if at least one person stores the entirety of the transaction information).
Accessing information from another's blockchain db is a privacy issue. That's why running your own full, private, node is such a good idea. Its not practical to do so in your mobile so an appliance is good solution.
A few years back some cypherpunks write a paper with controversial suggestions on improving the Bitcoin blockchain. I think its still worth a read. Here's the coverage article. There's a link inside to the paper on scribd.:
https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-activists-suggest-hard-fork-to-bitcoin-to-k...
What did this have to do with my post? You seem to be addressing a tangential part - yes pruning transaction information in your local blockchain may cause information leakage - but my focus was refuting the argument against separating the signatures from the transactions. Bitcoin is not a cryptonote like design where the signatures are intricately linked to double spending and the inflation schedule. So the impact/negatives are in more of a "gray" area.
Key suggestions:
1. Use forced mixing (like ZeroCoin/ZCash) to improve transaction privacy 2. Enforce a limited, regular-sized, block chain 3. Ability to choose miners of payments
Steve
1. Privacy transactions are optional in ZCash, which reduces its cloaking set. I am not sure about the Zcoin variant, but privacy transactions are also unlikely to be mandatory due to the costs of computing such transactions. And most likely Bitcoin would switch to something closer to Dash than the ZeroCoin protocol (not that its necessarily a better privacy option, just that its a smaller less risky transition). 3. I do not see how this is desirable based on the information provided in that Bitcoin 2.0 paper. The "winner" of the next block is still based on hashing power and therefore this does not appear to be a solution that prevents mining centralization. No reasonable person would select a miner with low probability of mining the next block. I suppose if magically nearly everyone agreed to ban one miner it could work, but only until the miner generated another alias.
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Steve
Lee
Lee