{}coin: good enough for election politics?

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sun, 19 Jan 2014, Troy Benjegerdes wrote:

> I may be a fool, but I'm not fool enough to play with Assassination 
> politcs. I am, however, stupid enough to go do something provacative 
> like attempt to prove that code is speech,

Already litigated in the USA, with very strange results: for example, code 
printed on your T-Shirt is free speech, while the same code may be a 
munition if instantiated on a processor.  Money == spech (recent SCOTUS 
explosion of pro corporate diareaha). bits (for email) may be private, or 
not, depending on whether they are "at rest" or "in motion", etc... There 
are an unknown number of permutations, which leads to the inevitable 
realization that everything must be protected from governmental decisions 
as to whether any subset of bits is "free" or forbidden, by making the 
meaningful only to the entities (persons or corps) that have an actual 
right to know: encrypt *everything*, and only let those who you want to 
have access be able to decrypt them.

> ...  and someone better figure out a better way to deal with campaign 
> finance or we are all screwed.

Too late in the US. And with Roberts being such a young guy, expect no 
changes for a very, *very*, long time.
 
> So I present {}coin, the broken cryptocurrency, neutered of all the 
> privacy I can strip out of it, for broken election systems.

Very bad idea.  Allowing the entire planet know your financial 
contributions [trail] will lock you out of some employers, lose your job 
with still other employers, act as a basis for reputational destruction of 
future candidates inder the right [or wrong] conditions, etc.

The problem I think you are looking to "solve" is *Corporate* 
anonymity/pseudonymity.  Won't happen under todays paradigm: the *fix* is 
to go back to separation of "natural persons" and "Corporate/chartered 
persons".  The two types of personhood were never designed to be ewuals, 
yet her we are. :-(

> https://bitbucket.org/dahozer/--
> 
> Could a good anonoperson

WTF is an "anonoperson"?

> cipherpunk tack on higher-level layers that are actually anonymous, as 
> opposed too what I see being proposed for Bitcoin? Probably.
> 
> From the techno-political-economic angle, it looks like overlaying
> distributed high-frequency futures trading would provide more than 
> enough noise on top of fully-surveillable {}coin to provide a 
> sufficient anonymity set, while actually providing a usefull value
> to us farmers, who could actually see who's on the other side of a
> trade.

Obscurity as actual security isn't going to fly anymore (if it ever did).
 
> The experts at stealth, redirection, misdirection, and over-all 
> dirty tricks (aka Wall Street) could simply move up a few layers and
> continue their anonymous game-of-thrones ( I mean game of CEO), and
> hide in plain sight in huge volumes of trades, and then so could 
> anyone else.

You are describing the state of the world today, at least in *most* 
jurisdictions.  Hell, fully automated trading has had the effect of 
greying out their respective meta-transactions from most forensic 
accountants since the mid-80's, but only for routine audits.  If you know 
what youre looking for the meta is easy to see, and prove.

> But then **I** don't have to pay to be someone else's anonymity set,
> and I could make money if I wanted to play that game, and take 
> money from those who want to hide, instead of having value siphoned
> off by thousands of economic vampires hiding under regulatory
> capture of our current finance system.

And this seems fair to you? Why would we want to penalize the excersize of 
privacy?????

> Does this sound anywhere near possible, or am I just an optimistic
> hashcash fool?

First off, I liked H/C: we even had a local bank here that dealt in H/C!  
Secondly though, I think you need to re-examine the privacy implications 
of the systems you are advocating.

//Alif

-- 
Those who make peaceful change impossible,
make violent revolution inevitable.

An American Spring is coming:
   one way or another.