ecash & bitcoin & privacy tech - never better (Re: Bitcoin mining efficiency and Botnets)

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Tue Oct 15 05:26:13 PDT 2013


On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 11:31:02AM +0100, Cathal Garvey wrote:
>4) It was supposed to be untraceable, but for architectural and simple
>network-analysis reasons, it's not untraceable to a large enough
>opponent. If you ask me, this is the reason the NSA hasn't just fired
>up its sha256 brute-forcing rigs to out-mine everyone and destroy the
>currency.


>[...] the political, architectural and privacy goals are a flop, and the
>mining pools who control bitcoin at this point won't back the developers if
>they try to fix the architecture.  

The mining pools have no protocol policy control.  The users have control,
if miners change their policy in a protocol incompatible way, they will have
created an alt-coin which contains only them and their mining profits will
evaporate.  See bitcointalk thread on committed coins I posted in previous
post for a big discussion of this topic.  Its much better than you think,
clearly committed-coins are not implemented, but they could be added
relatively easily.

>It's deadlocked; it needs replacing.  And, as big and awesome as bitcoin
>is, nobody should every have expected us to get P2P anarchic
>crypto-currency right the first time.

About privacy features its not actually clear if that was intended or not. 
Some privacy fig leafs are offered in terms of new addresses automatically
and no names on addresses.  But the entire transaction log is public, clear
text for anyone to see.  If credit card transaction logs were that public
(even with just card numbers and no name) people would be outraged.

It also not clear if more privacy would have helped bitcoin to date - too
much privacy too early could be inviting regulatory problems.  Maybe its
better for users to work on privacy themselves, or others to add privacy
separately, or privacy features to be added to alt-coins etc.

See also zerocoin, and homomorphic encrypted value coins.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=305791.msg3277431#msg3277431


btw speaking as someone who was fascinated by blind ecash and spent a lot of
energy on this list years ago trying with others to figure out someway to
make something deployable, I have to say bitcoin is a stellar success.

Ever since the digicash betabucks $1m capped coins went out of existence
with digicash filing bankruptcy, it became clear to everyone that a single
company with a cental server was not going to work.  From there we had a lot
of interest to solve that deployment and design problem: hashcash
distributed mining, Wei Dai's B-money/Nick Szabo's bitgold, Hal Finney's
RPOW and finally bitcoin!  As well numerous other cool stuff like David
Wagner's blind-MAC (implemented by Ben Laurie as Lucre) (chaum patent
workaround), Niels Ferguson's single term offline coins (still blindable but
with more efficient offline fraud tracing than Chaum's cut-and-choose),
Stefan Brands ecash/credentials (multiple attributes, efficient, many
features) as well as Sander & Ta-Schma auditable anonymous ecash.  Its not
clear Satoshi is related to the other ones (other than using hashcash like
B-money/bitgold & RPOW), he seemed to not be aware of B-money (or bitgold),
but he couldnt pontificate for risk of narrowing the potential authorship :)

Then you have open transactions.

Anyway for deployed ecash and privacy tech political environment life has
literally never looked better - NSA shot themselves in the foot, so public
opinion is strongly in their dis-favor, the 9/11 death-pall to security vs
privacy arguments finally get swept away.

So by all means lets see some work on improving privacy, security,
decentralization and scalability of bitcoin via alt-coins or direct protocol
work.

Adam



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