The best defense is a good offense. Was: Re: Silk Road gossip

juan juan.g71 at gmail.com
Tue Oct 16 14:45:20 PDT 2018


On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 19:42:38 +0000 (UTC)
jim bell <jdb10987 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> 
> >    Now, Chaum has a new cryptocoin :
> 
> >   https://elixxir.io/ 
> 
> 
> Looks quite promising.   Given that it is occurring after nearly 10 years of the experience of Bitcoin and, subsequently, hundreds of other crypto coins, it would have to be much advanced. 


	For what it's worth, a couple of bitcoin people I talked to were not impressed. Apparently Chaum's coin is "proof of stake" and PoS isn't robust enough. But I'm just repeating what they said. 

	But what caught my attention like I said is the use of a mixnet. 

	
> No doubt David Chaum wishes he'd managed to bring DigiCash to a world-wide fruition, but he had the big disadvantage that the Internet didn't really exist, to the average person. 

	Well digicash had good anonimity properties, so that probably was an incentive for banks to *not* use it. And it was based on government pseudo 'money' so that was an incentive for users to avoid it. I think it was also patented? 


>  Somebody (probably not myself) should talk to Chaum about the use of Elixxir in Dark-market applications.  

	heh =)


> 
> >    I don't know how good it is, or if it's even working (seems not), but if you take a look at their 'technical brief' you'll see they use a mixnet. My half educated guess is that only high latency mixnets may provide good enough anonimity.
> >   So, I was wondering, maybe it would make sense to get some bitcoin millonaire to fund some sort of mixnet? Such a project seems like a good fit for somebody like Roger Ver? What do you think Jim? Maybe you could sell the idea to him?
> 
> Like Zenaan, I don't think this will be very expensive.  It will be intricate, but there will be plenty of money in Dark market insurance payments.  Everybody (except those trying to enforce drug laws, for example) would want to see this occur.  The operators of the Dark markets, as well as the sellers, would love to see some guarantee of non-prosecution,
> And, I hesitate to approach anyone on this, 1-to-1.


	Oh sorry, my bad. I didn't mean to suggest that you talk to Ver about the whole idea. 

	My line of thinking was : Your insurance system requires good anonimity. Mixnets apparently can provide it. So the first step would be to set up a mixnet. And *that* first step is something that Ver might like to fund. 


>  Can I sell the idea directly to the operators of a Dark market?  Not likely, in large part because nobody knows who they are, and they like it that way.  B^)  


	Well I haven't checked lately but dark markets usually have forums and the operators pay attention to them, to varying degrees. 



> I think there needs to be further discussion, for example on CP, as to this idea.  What additional features?  Would it work?  But we should be cautious, as usual:  Maybe the people doing the discussion should state that we have no intention of actually, personally, implementing this idea. 

	Oh of course. We would never do anything 'illegal'  ^-^



> I should mention that such a fund should probably cover, with the permission and funding of the new funders, all prior people prosecuted for Dark-market related violations.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)     Also:     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Onymous          They didn't pay into the system, of course, but nevertheless they should be rescued.  One big reason is that the supporters of the DMIF system won't want to wait to see the enforcement aspect of that system until the next Dark market is taken down. 


	Yeah that's a good point. 


> But there needs to be more research and discussion.  How many  Dark markets have existed?  How many went down, and why?   

	I think all the big ones were either succesfully attacked by govt criminals, or the operators quit while they were ahead. Agora being the best example I know. 

	As to how they went down, my first guess is network surveillance. Here's a gem from the Tor-US-navy 'project' 

	"The longer an onion service is online, the higher the risk that its location is discovered. " 

	https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-onion-service.html.en
	
	

>How many are currently operating?  What are their approximate gross sales?  Would operators and sellers generally like the kind of system that DMIF could provide? What do they think the cost/coverage should be? 


> And, while I don't know how to arrange a survey, how about a 'test-market' for potential predictors, at least the subset that don't expect to survive:  Poll a random selection of people have have been given "medical death sentences", a/k/a victims of terminal illness diagnoses.  Somebody could ask them, purely as a hypothetical question, "What amount of money should be offered to people like you, those with terminal illnesses, to be paid to you or your relatives, if you manage to kill a person who has participated in the prosecution of a Dark market case".  I think we'd all be curious as to what their answers would be.


	Yeah that would be interesting. 



>                     Jim Bell
>   
> 
> 
>   



More information about the cypherpunks mailing list