...snip...
What do you think of the Cypherpunk movement?
I'm starting to think we lost our way to a large extent.
Privacy is (still) mostly
dead. Totalitarianism is ever present and increasing.
Seems like there continues to be ongoing development in bitcoin in the direction of privacy and various privacy tools available, like you mention below. So seems kind of overly pessimistic suggesting that there is some kind of deficiency in the bitcoin direction because privacy matters are likely always going to be a matter of balancing, and some people are going to be better able to use tools that are available to them and to understand the upsides and downsides to various tools. Sure some of the technical matters might be a bit beyond the reach of a lot of normies, but still would not mean that there are few tools available or that bitcoin is broken or deficient in the privacy direction in such a way that has either been abandoned and not being worked on by some folks who are capable of such technical, development and coding attempts.
Many 'punks' seemingly gave up the 'good fight', became disenfranchised / maligned and/or sold out to 'the man' ...
I doubt that such a broad brush generalization applies. There are always going to be some people who are attempting to fight the "good fight" to the extent that they are capable.
Surely not a bad thing for more people to attempt, because frequently we already know that some of the privacy tools are more effective if they are used by a broader swath of folks, so in that regard, there will certainly be attempts to develop ways of holding or transferring coins that have built in privacy that lay people might not even realize... but of course, the more that there are attempts to realize good or better privacy practices, then there will be information that is out there regarding which privacy tools might be more available and effective than others...including discussions of "best" privacy practices.
I for one wish I could focus more on doing these things for good, but needs must.
Every person only has so many hours in the day, and sometimes has a variety of other matters and interests that will keep him/her occupied, which surely is not a bad thing to have a variety of interests and sometimes having feelings that there is not enough time in the day to add to his/her agenda another kind of "mission in life."
...
This is a very interesting topic. If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.
Originally, a coin can be just a chain of signatures. With a timestamp service, the old ones could be dropped eventually before there's too much backtrace fan-out, or coins could be kept individually or in denominations. It's the need to check for the absence of double-spends that requires global knowledge of all transactions.
The challenge is, how do you prove that no other spends exist? It seems a node must know about all transactions to be able to verify that. If it only knows the hash of the in/outpoints, it can't check the signatures to see if an outpoint has been spent before. Do you have any ideas on this?
It's hard to think of how to apply zero-knowledge-proofs in this case.
We're trying to prove the absence of something, which seems to require knowing about all and checking that the something isn't included.
Surely is good to be reminded of the words of Satoshi at various points in time that retrospectively seem to be quite early in bitcoin's development (and attempting to work out various problems), which frequently shows that there frequently is a kind of balancing in attempting to accomplish more than one thing at the same time, in this case both security and privacy might be traded off against each other to try to figure out degrees to which both can be attempted to be accomplished or even maximized within parameters of the other.
