[silk] Bitcoin

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 05/18/11 11:25, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 May 2011 03:34 PM, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote:
>> Yep. I've written about this, and many people have suggested that Tor is
>> a way around that: see
>> http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/archives/2011/05/12/bitcoin-security/
>
> That's called a pipe dream.
>
> 1. Tor nodes get sniffed and monitored, a lot - eg
> http://lwn.net/Articles/249388/ so certainly not a substitute for strong
> encryption [e&oe mitm attacks in fake tor nodes etc]
>
> 2. There's all the "follow the money" aspect that lets the transaction
> get traced back to you one way or the other

That's largely my point in the blog post...

...which is IMHO a good thing as:

> 3. You'll find that - as with most of the other currency equivalents
> like webmoney, its all too easy for the service to get a rep for being
> primarily used by carders and botmasters [the second highest user
> constitutency would be the sort of german geek who pgp signs everything
> from a post to mutt-users to an email to his wife reminding her to take
> the dog to the vet] <- not sure why its mostly german geeks who do this

Bitcoin being not very anonymous against concerted attackers will make
it less attractive to Evil People, so it'll be legitimised and
(hopefully) not destroyed by governments.

I know what you mean about those German geeks, but there's plenty of
British ones too - they tend to be the tall, thin ones with ponytails!

> 	srs

ABS

--
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

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