Topic: Decentrally mined currency has failed so far - page 9. (Read 11292 times)

Missing the point.

The Internet itself (yeah the same one the NSA is spying on all the time),
is already spreading freedom memes more successfully than government
propoganda memes, at least in my opinion. 

Despite desperate attempts, "they" can't even control what people
think or say anymore, and you're somehow worried that
Bitcoin mining has failed? 

In the long run, the trend of humanity is toward greater freedom.
We are far more free, educated, enlightened, aware, connected,
and empowered as individuals today than we were 100 years ago.

What's the point of this thread?  What kind of discussion
are you hoping to achieve?  Do you just like to argue with people?
Are you interested in spreading FUD?  Or do you want to discuss
solutions?

You want a "high latency TOR" or whatever?  Fine.  Write up some
specs on it, or start a dedicated thread on THAT.  No offense, but
you're all over the place with doom and gloom proclamations and
I don't see the point.

an IP is just an IP.
just because you think Tor or proxies are the only way to change/mask/borrow an IP. is again nothing to do with the bitcoin protocol. but more to do with human choice and human knowledge.

there are many many other ways to separate yourself so your real life info is not linked to bitcoin transactions. this is not a fault of bitcoin. this is again human choice

Again, we're engaging in hypotheticals. Bitcoin isn't the only protocol that wants a better privacy. All I'm saying is that TOR is pretty good and most of the sites that have been shut down were just sloppy. Where do you think the governments get their hackers? They get people with little motivation to assist them, usually through coercion. While I'm not making the Libertarian argument that govts screw up everything, I go back to my point that people tend to resist ridiculous laws.

I don't know enough tech to assess your "technologically plausible solution" but I will say that there are plenty of people, if not governments, that will be interested in such pursuits. I also agree with franky1 that individuals have the power to resist and demand due process in the light of day. Bullies should never be tolerated, especially in positions of authority.

Hahaha. Glad to hear that you were escorted to the inner annals of the NSA (and GHCQ) and met the top crackers in the agency.

As if the NSA tells the FBI what their capabilities are.   Much less low-level FBI agents willing to talk to the public.

Watch cartoons much?

http://www.activistpost.com/2014/11/fbi-report-accidentally-exposes.html

I think most of us desire freedom.  There's
various avenues we can take to spread freedom:
information, politics, technology, social, etc.

Personally, I don't feel that we need an "airtight"
technological solution.  The famous words of
Étienne de la Boétie ring just as true today:


I personally talked to someone from the FBI
and they admitted they can't really track coins
on the blockchain.  Like many have said, its
as anonymous as you want it to be.

Sure, governments can try to clamp down but
only if we let them.

And if you really feel you need a technological
solution to all this, why not just
write a white paper already?   

franky1, please read my posts more carefully. I have made some of the same points you made.

You underestimate (the time lag to implementation and critical importance) however the fact that there is no high-latency mix-net in existence, thus IP anonymity is impossible at this time. Apparently you lack technological detail in your thinking.

Also Bitcoin doesn't have on chain untraceability and unlinkability, and CoinJoin can't provide it for Bitcoin (I explained why upthread). So sorry, the Bitcoin protocol is broken w.r.t. to resisting government regulation of mining pools. Monero is closer to being not broken at least w.r.t. to on chain anonymity, but still does not have all the technological aspects implemented.

unun you actually bring up very good arguments.

i hate to bring in the ultra-noob idea since i know very little and i'm sure this has already been thought of multiple times but is it not possible for a theoretical coin to track the entire array of PoW and dole out coins to every single participant? such as a decentralized system of pool mining built into the infrastructure instead of a winner take all?

each period of time the amount of work done by each participant running a mining client is recorded, added up and divided by the total to receive their share to their designated address.

anonymity i know nothing about. but i feel like some kind of 'good-enough' system that could be built to be scaled over time to deal with evolving threats could be built as well.

a thing of it is, there is a huge theoretical incentive to build such a platform. if you build the actual bitcoin 2.0 you will become a multimillionaire or billionaire. very few other jobs can offer that kind of salary so i'm sure some super smart ppl will be behind something at some point if the demand for it is present.

on that final point alone, i think something will be thought of. there's just too much money in making solid money to not be innovated on by someone.

the protocol is just the protocol nothing more nothing less.

if people want to decentralized mine, it takes less than 2 minutes to change pool details in their miner.. thus itsnot broken, its just not reached that critical point for people to change habits.

as for the anonymity and regulation

how YOU the people decide to mask your IP addresses
how YOU the people decide to volunteer personal information to third parties
how YOU the people decide to follow or disobey pieces of paper which some call rules or laws
how YOU the people decide to set up a business or service around the protocol

are all human traits and nothing to do with the protocol.

a police office cannot arrest the protocol
a police officer cannot inform the protocol that it has the right to remain silent
a police officer cannot hand cuff the protocol.

bitcoin is not broken, but humans decision to follow the law of one country where the protocol has no jurisdiction, is again your own failings. bitcoin will continue even if half if you people decide you dont understand its true benefits and give up.

Here follows what I think is technologically plausible (but not implemented) to stand up against the government.

1.	Mining pools must be hidden services in a high-latency improvement over Tor. The low-latency Tor is shown in recent events and research to not be anonymous (as I had warned for over a year and everyone thought I was crazy). This is the only way that mining is truly decentralized in the sense that the authorities would not be in top-down control over mining and thus transaction processing. But the economics of mining pools is such that they will always trend to centralization, even if they are anonymous. At least we could hope for the situation we have now in Bitcoin where the users migrate away from a pool when it approaches 50% of the network hashrate. Mining pools as high-latency hidden services would increase significantly the latency (i.e. propagation delay) on the block chain network, thus block times probably could never be fast[1]. The orphan rate issue can probably solved[2] so that dependence on propagation latency would be eliminated but Vitalik has pointed out some of the complex interplay between propagation delay and fast block times[1]. Also we have to consider if it is possible to decrease the verification delay for propagation.
2.	IP anonymity would be provided by the high-latency improvement over Tor. Block chain unlinkability and untraceability anonymity would need to be provided by prunable Cryptonote one-time, ring-signatures. Ring-signatures can be pruned if the inputs that are allowed to be mixed in each ring are limited to a defined set for all in that set. The pruning occurs when all in that set have been spent. This is also necessary to eliminate overlapping rings which could otherwise be used (along with Sybil attacks) to correlate and unmask the anonymity (which is the unmasking algorithm I was paid 5 BTC by jl777 and 2.5 BTC by Monero folks for finding). Afaik, no Cryptonote coin yet implements this improvement. Afaics, Zerocash fails to interact with my solution to the problem of selfish-mining and rented hardware attacks. Zerocoin (e.g. Anoncoin) has problems[3]. CoinJoin (e.g. Darkcoin) is jammable and the only "solution" is to trust masternodes to unmask the anonymity and not reveal it, but the masternodes can be Sybil attacked; it also suffers from a simultaneity requirement. All on chain anonymity mixing strategies are vulnerable to Sybil attack where adversary sends many transactions to reduce the anonymity set sizes. One mitigation is to employ tx fees. Tx fees place a cost on the adversary and all the users. This tx fee must be sent to the ether, else an adversary would have an incentive to invest in mining to recover the cost. If the adversary controls a significant portion of the coin's money supply, the cost is significantly offset by the resultant deflation, but not for the other users who do not control a significant portion (I will not write down the math, perhaps someone will in the discussion). Net costs on the adversary must be higher than the value to the adversary of unmasking the anonymity. If we are talking about governments and tax authority (especially a world government or G20 cooperation), that value is high. If txs were charged mining hashrate, the adversary would be limited to Sybil attack proportional to the adversary's portion of the network hashrate and users would be limited by their hashrate as to volume of txs they can send. If the threshold was set so that users typically only send tx volume which is 10% of their threshold (so they don't typically have a problem sending a tx), then the adversary could send 10X more tx volume than the proportion of his portion of the hashrate, e.g. with 10% of the hashrate the adversary could own (1 x 10/(9 + 1 x 10) = 53% of the txs and thus 53% of the anonymity sets. A solution is users could send for mixing continuously at their maximum mining hashrate threshold without impacting their threshold to send a non-mixed tx, but non-mixed outputs would need to be marked so they aren't included in ring sets so they don't reduce anonymity set size. This encourages a design where users are always mining and mixing.
3.	All anonymity strategies that rely on elliptic curves or other variants of factoring trapdoors are not secure against future quantum computing and potential advances in factoring[4]. This is important because everything can be saved and past anonymity can be broken in the future which is important if we are talking about snubbing government regulation and confiscations (ahem "taxes"). McEliece public key cryptosystems are secure against these. There is no known, well-vetted quantum proof Diffie-Helman, which Cyptonote depends on. Also there is no McEliece-based one-time ring signture, although I have seen a research paper for McEliece ring-signature and another paper for zero-knowledge proofs in McEliece, so it might be possible. Note I am not referring to using Elliptic curves for signing the tx, which is not the same risk as using them for the anonymity encryption; but in Cryptonote ring-sigs, these can't be unconflated.

[1]	https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/ http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/4958 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2666847 https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf#page=11
[2]	https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3647346 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9692846
[3]	who ever creates the secret key can claim output coins for free, and this can not be determined if it less than the ratio of bonafide claimed outputs to minted inputs or if the accumulator is finite then it will be known when the accumulator is full and all inputs have claimed their outputs. if not finite, the accumulator grows without bound which is a burden on every user who wants to mint an input if finite, the secret key can not be chosen just once at a ceremony to try to insure it is not known by anyone. jammable by secret key owner if finite and will be unwound if secret key owner minted inputs. computational burden limits the tx rate
[4]	http://cacm.acm.org/news/170850-french-team-invents-faster-code-breaking-algorithm/fulltext

I am not trying to be an a$$hole, and I don't mean this as a personal dislike of you, but I am frustrated when you debate me and make so many incorrect technological assumptions. So I hope you understand that I need to speak frankly in reply, so that you might get yourself more grounded to accept that you can't make analysis of what you don't understand well enough.


Afaics, I am talking technological specifics and you are handwaving.


The "hiding in plain sight" because the "NSA doesn't can expend resources on small fish" doesn't apply, because the mining pools are not numerous. There are several pools which collectively have the majority of the hashrate. Thus they can be compelled by the government to blacklist the other small pools that don't comply with regulation.

Is not the recent action against 100s of Tor hidden servers not a reality wakeup call for you?



Also the government can make public examples of a few high profile cases of miners violating a regulation requiring miners to use only government approved mining pools, and this will be enough to scare most miners into compliance and provide the larger regulated pools with the majority of the hash rate.

The lack of realism in your analysis is difficult to comprehend.


Tor is not anonymous. 100s of hidden services have been seized and recent research paper explains that 81% of the users can be unmasked. I warned a long time ago that low-latency mix-nets can not be anonymous. I think you lack technological understanding to appreciate why that is so?


Impossible. I can't blame you that didn't read the important link I provided upthread which explained why:

---

---

In that post I cited:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/

Which links to:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/


Corporations don't have the ability to see all traffic that passes over the network. Governments do. Thus governments can unmask Tor, corporations can't.


You start with one false technological premise above, then proclaim that pools can create a better mix-net (and I know you don't realize that is the only possible solution to remain hidden) without even comprehending how a mix-net amongst a few pools would be trivially easy to unmask. For a mix-net to work, you need a lot of varied users of the internet involved, meaning you need to create the high-latency improved Tor I have called for. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect (sorry not wanting to ad hominen, but factually this is exactly Dunning-Kruger).

Anonymint, I am not ignoring your political arguments, I just don't feel any need to dwell on the problem when we have a solution in our laps.

blah blah blah...old news.

Suppose you're right about everything.  What's the implication and what do you propose we do?
Stop harping on the problem and get into the solution. 

Since all we're doing here is engaging in hypotheticals, I'll take a shot. TOR can obfuscate enough to make whackamole very time consuming. There is a plethora of black markets already using the technology as well as legitimate businesses that prefer privacy. It would be good for Bitcoin to minimize pool mining anyway. It's not risk of government censure that I see to threaten pools, but extreme corporate espionage. When Bitcoin gets to a certain level, miners will need to secure their facilities and pools even more so. At some point mining pools will develop their own proprietary obfuscation networks. It's not so much about hiding money, but more about privacy and security.

Cash dates back to Mesopotamia at least from which epoch Martin Armstrong has collected clay tablets of contracts (as part of the $1 billion in today's money value he claims he invested in studying and collecting data of the history of the world).

But the world never before had an internet and handheld computer to make electronic money viable. This changes everything. This is why electronic money is inevitable and imminent.

Also the physical black market is under numerous technological threats that did not exist before:

• Body scanners at all airports, borders, and soon to be mobile scanners are coming to our roads
• All human actions (and thus movements and transactions) are correlated via their use of mobile phones, social networks, and electronic currency.
• Surveillance cameras on every lamp post, traffic signal, business establishment, etc.
• Dependence on ATM machines (haven't you noticed the Daily Withdrawal Limits are being reduced?)
• The Civil Asset Forfeiture scam[1].
  
• Etc, etc, etc.

[1]

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/10/09/civil-asset-forfeiture-police-corruption-exposed/ http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/11/21/cities-budget-civil-asset-forfeiture-as-part-of-their-funding/ http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/11/11/civil-asset-forfeiture-scam-state-legalizes-marijuana-fed-confiscate-your-home-for-possession-of-just-10-worth/ http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/15/civil-forefeiture-laws-are-funding-pensions/ http://www.nestmann.com/the-justice-department-plan-to-maximize-asset-forfeiture http://www.nestmann.com/civil-forfeiture-of-cash-it-could-happen-to-you http://www.nestmann.com/civil-forfeiture-the-war-on-your-wealth http://www.nestmann.com/now-the-military-receives-forfeiture-kickbacks

I make a lot of footnote citations, because many of you readers are (understandably) ignorant and need to catch up on your research reading.

Cash will never get banned. Just a small reminder, "cash" is know to humans since anno domini 600 B.C.

How is it possible now? I am guessing you don't have a technological noodle to contemplate what you are saying.


Huh? Where is your rebuttal to the fact that the government can regulate the mining pools?


The USA Constitution is dead and was shredded a long time ago. You are living in a fantasy bubble, not reality. And you have not studied the history of how bankrupt mainstream governments always become totalitarian states. Armstrong has studied this, and I have cited him. You choose not to read his expertise at your own peril.

You are correct that the USA is going to fracture and it will come to a shooting civil war being those few who believe in the Constitution and the masses who are quite contented to be taken care of by the government. I guess you haven't noticed how many millions of Americans are on food stamps, Medicare, long-term unemployment, disability payments, etc.. The government knows this is coming, that is why they have militarized the police so they can be sure to "take your Constitutional gun from your cold, dead hand". I wish the "Bundy Ranch" types can prevail, but that would be fantasy.

Nobody is trolling here. Let's stick to the facts please. Answer the questions with facts. Btw, my AnonyMint profile would be at Hero or Legendary status by now if I had not abandoned it on purpose, so please don't claim tenure over me.

Not only is this very possible, it is our civic duty to do so. Government employees must be shown their limitations to power that are already clearly laid out in the US Constitution.

I was confused by your statement regarding the blocking of private keys. It is very strange that you think government can have any control over Bitcoin at all. You seem to think you speak for most people. I disagree.

While probably factual, it is irrelevant. There is nothing in the US Constitution about any of this. I think Obama's last act will be to mint many One Trillion Dollar coins to pay off all debts. But my opinion is also irrelevant. Methinks this is a troll and I fell for it.

Why would the government want to ban Bitcoin? Heck no! It is the greatest tracking tool ever invented. The governments want electronic currency, because then they can eliminate cash and control everything we buy and sell.

They don't need to ban it. They can regulate the mining pools, thus they can force every Bitcoin owner to comply with edicts or lose their ability to transact.

Those in the government who are astute (e.g. Larry Summers and his push for electronic currency) love Bitcoin!

(and they should, because "they" invented it. All the insiders strongly speculate that Satoshi = NSA think tank or working group)

You are making the same category error in your comparison as Holliday did (erroneously equating two orthogonal categories). Please refer to my reply to him, wherein I pointed out that the government can not centralize actions (e.g. growing marijuana) people can do independently.

Whereas, money is inherently a centralized concept, because we all need a ledger that we can agree is the record of who paid what to whom. Thus individuals can't ignore government regulations acting independently with their Bitcoin if the authorities can find the mining pools (and thus the government can regulate the mining pools, i.e. the servers control which transactions are put on the block chain).

The only way you can stop the government from having this power, is to hide the mining pools so the government can't find them (the servers).


1. How many times do I have to repeat that the government doesn't need to ban Bitcoin, as long as they can regulate it, tax, and confiscate their desired portion of the wealth (which is the what governments are always doing, nothing out-of-the-ordinary here). When I write "government can block your transaction by regulating the mining pools", I mean if you are not cooperating with the going to be very high confiscation (ahem I mean "tax") rates. Most of the people will cooperate and comply with government regulation (many of them are receiving government aid any way). It is the people who have wealth that have to worry, i.e. if you are in "the 1%". The masses ("the 99%") are hunky-dory with government regulation. Click here to see if you are in the 1%.

2. Government has a huge moral obligation to regulate Bitcoin to protect the public from fraud, theft, and tax evasion. And please realize the government is bankrupt and has an obligation to the public (e.g. unfunded promised future liabilities of the USA government to its constituents is $150+ trillion), so they will be increasing the portion of the wealth they confiscate each year. Governments will confiscate (ahem "tax") increasingly larger share of the GDP every year for next next couple of decades, because the global debt is $158+ trillion and the debt-to-GDP ratios are greater than 200% in every western nation on earth.

History is full of examples where common citizens ignored ridiculous laws until they went away. Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s didn't stop people from drinking. Doctors prescribed alcohol as medication. Private drinking clubs proliferated. Police were easily bribed because they didn't believe in that law. Slavery laws were often disregarded in favor of human decency. Traffic laws are routinely ignored.

The thing about Bitcoin is that there is no moral reason to ban it. In fact, it's just the opposite. Cash is used for violent crimes because it is untraceable and anonymous. Since paper money technology isn't banned, there is no worry that Bitcoin will be outlawed.