Topic: Economic Totalitarianism - page 37. (Read 345738 times)

Zerocash does hide your identity on the block chain even if your IP address is correlated across multiple transactions that you send to the block chain, because in Zerocash the payer(s) and payee(s) are obscured and proven in a non-interactive zero knowledge proof (NIZKP). This is accomplished by proving that the machine ran a certain program (and no other program) on the inputs and that result was "true" (i.e. verified), rather than proving something algebraically about the variables to the program. This computational witness requires the global master key setup.

Whereas, Cryptonote one-time rings mix the payer amongst a group of payers with the requirement that it is publicly verifiable that each payer can only be spent one-time. The one-time key is manufactured by the Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) like exchange that creates a new stealth payee address on each spend and that stealth address can only be spent once. So the problem is that if your IP address is correlated across spends, it becomes possible to link stealth addresses together as the same payee and then start to unmask the anonymity set of the payer rings.

So it would seem that Zerocash is the solution, except read my discussion at the quoted link about anti-DDoS protection. The problem is the huge verification cost for each Zerocash transaction and thus giving the attacker a huge asymmetric advantage when sending invalid transactions, i.e. unprotected Zerocash can be DDoS'ed to death.

And if using my suggested technique to create a hash-based signature as a first line of verification of incoming transactions sent to the block chain, then you've got to incorporate a simultaneity mixnet such as CoinShuffle to detach these hash signatures (and the payee's IP address) from the Zerocash transaction being submitted to the block chain. But then your anonymity is reduced back to the mixnet again so you've lost the benefits Zerocash provides. Perhaps Zerocash could devise a quick check on invalid signatures. I don't enough about the "moon math" in the white paper to deduce whether that is possible, but I 95% doubt it based on my understanding that such NIZKPs are a holistic math affair.

Perhaps instead of my hash suggestion (and as suggested by Gregory Maxwell at the aforementioned linked thread), each Zerocash (or RingCT) could require some PoW be attached to every transaction to rate limit spam, but the problem is the attacker has an asymmetric advantage by being able to place his hashing resources in venues with the cheapest electricity (e.g. 3 - 4 cents per kWh in WA State or China near hydropower) and leverage the latest ASIC efficiencies whereas the legitimate payer is running on retail electricity that costs 4 times more and non-optimum hardware that is at at least an order-of-magnitude disadvantage in power and speed. So the delay (or the transaction fees if the full nodes speed more on hardware to increase their spam bandwidth) will increase for legitimate payers asymmetrically to the attacker's costs. And that asymmetry will be amplified by the systemic ratio of the resources of the legitimate payers to the attacker's resources, thus if the anonymous system is only used infrequently then the cost of using it will be radically amplified (perhaps too high to be of practical use, although I haven't done some sample calculations yet). And for the system to be widely used (e.g. for microtransactions) the extra costs imposed by the attacker disincentivize its use when the legitimate participants don't value anonymity as a concern. Also the PoW required could vary per full node and vary in time (even in real time!) depending which nodes are receiving the most incoming DDoS spam, which complicates the determination where to submit a transaction and how much PoW is required to be submitted with it. So then it appears any any such Zerocash + PoW anti-DDoS system is going to be used only for anonymous mixing and not all transactions, but then the problem is the anonymity leaks as these anonymous mixes are then traded for coins in a system that is used in everyday commerce (e.g. microtransactions).

Even though I haven't thoroughly understood every technical aspect of it, the other problem with Zerocash appears to be that it can't merge the entirely opaque block chains, e.g. if there are two major chains fork due to a network split. Transparent block chains can be re-merged to the extent that double-spends are not intertwined. The major fault for Zerocash (that is not present for transparent block chains) being that I believe it is not possible to prove which coins were double-spent on both of the block chains. Normally this isn't a problem for an orphaned chain because you just throw away the orphans, but this is perhaps a problem in a major network split.

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

Making anonymity that is immune to the global police state is an immense challenge especially for businesses, because they can't just go hop on another anonymous WiFi connection every time they want to interact with the block chain (and that won't even help you individually with a low scale coin like Monero, because you are the only person hopping on anonymous WiFi in your geographical area so your transactions can still be correlated!). Making an IP address mixnet that is immune to a party which can see all traffic over the internet is an extremely challenging if not implausible statistically. I have been thinking deeply for a long time about the sort of attacks that are possible on mixnets and nothing (that I've analyzed) seems to entirely immune.

A generative essence realization is there is no possible way to obfuscate your IP address with an autonomous cryptographic protocol (such as RIngCT or Cryptonote). The only way to obfuscate IP addresses is with an interactive mixnet, which then either incurs a simultaneity requirement or the mixnet must generalize to many forms of internet traffic so a sufficient mix set always available. But especially generalized mixnets suffer from Sybil attacks because of the cost of scaling relaying nodes scales with traffic and DDoS. As smooth knows from our past private discussions (afair last year), my only idea on how to attack the Sybil problem of Tor and I2P is to pay the nodes you are want to relay through for an onion routing. But this comes with another set of holistic issues. So far, I haven't been able to design the system that is immune to the NSA. I am still working on this problem, but have deprioritized it, because to my consternation it is such an intractable quagmire (a.k.a. clusterfuck).

So let's say we only want privacy against other smaller corporations that don't have special access to NSA analysis. Yet now we must assume the NSA can't be hacked or individual employees bribed. And the NSA is not the only national security agency doing this. We have at least the 5 Eyes nations plus Russia and China with sophisticated, well funded national security agencies.

Can you know understand better why Martin Armstrong (and I reguritated) that a Dark Age is possible?

The world is in a pickle. I am doing my best to try to find a way out. I am now thinking perhaps anonymity is not the ticket (yet continuing to develop and consider it, as an option) and instead massive volume of micro-transactions might be more liberating. In short, to pursue my Knowledge Age theory of breaking the Theory of the Firm down to individualized production. In short, death the corporation as being too slow to even effectively use the data it is accumulating. If you read my 2010 thesis linked from the OP of the Economic Devastation thread (in the Economics forum), you can gain insight into what I am referring to where I explained that top-down access to information is not knowledge creation. Knowledge creation is accretive, spontaneous, and highly individualized.

Paradigm shift. I am apparently good at creating those, not so much at the intricate patterns of chess (too many intricacies are burdensome to the degrees-of-freedom to see over the forest). In short, I prefer deforestation paradigms.

Don't know if you read the edit I did on my prior post.

Problem is that if anyone is collecting that data (even if the NSA has no desire to analyze it or retain it forever), they can be potentially hacked or individual employees bribed. The prize is so valuable, it nearly insures another Edward Snowden will surface yet with a profit motive to exploit that dataset. The problem is that even to collect that data means they have peeping routers all over the major backbones and these are thus vulnerable to hacking and bribes, etc..

When we live in a world where it is possible to collect all data, then the defense against bad outcomes with your data (and the greater threat than the NSA w.r.t. to data aggregation may be Google, Ad Sense, and Facebook Likes) is perhaps not to depend on the implausibility of statistical correlation (which may not be so implausible as the naive assumption, e.g. per my examples above and in the general paradigmatic category), rather perhaps to depend on keeping your assets stored in micro-granular Knowledge Creation paradigms instead of stored monetary calls on labor (which I claim is a dying paradigm). The data aggregator can't do anything with aggregated data against a micro-granular asset with attributes perhaps orthogonal to the flows of popularity. I mean everyone can see which ventures are popular and trending by numerous means such as Google metrics. Transparency aids competition which accelerates knowledge creation. The government can't tax to death a populous activity without declaring a global Dark Age (which has never occurred, i.e. even during the Dark Age in Western Europe the prosperity trended up else where).

As for being vulnerable to haters, I am surely vulnerable by posting on this forum and not being anonymous. This seems to go along with any action on the internet. I read where some teenager in the Philippines shot another teenager because of some insulting remark about a girl friend on Facebook. I am not so sure that anonymity can be holistically ubiquitous to protect me from all the potential ways the internet spreads the opportunities to be hated and not anonymous. It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth). Other than the risk of large wealth (and the obvious issues that raises) and being outspoken on the internet (and the conflicts that raises), my personal life story is a prime example of how risk to life and limb comes from chaotic, unexpected directions, so I don't know if focused on the very difficult issue of anonymous money transfer stands out as the greatest risk in most people's lives.

Any way I am not sure. So as I wrote, I am hedging my bets by still pursuing anonymity, but I have deprioritized it somewhat (not entirely) to focus more on micro-transactions.

Edit: I am contemplating whether it is possible that fungibility could be orthogonal to anonymity. Fungibility could first be defined as the ability to get your transactions into the majority consensus of the block chain, instead of a stricter definition that would require that anyone who accepts such a transaction can't be coerced nor hassled by the government nor whom ever. As long as you can get your transactions on the block chain, then if you spend them to parties that careless about coercion (e.g. in small morsels in social interactions where the government can't possibly go after every person who received a microtransaction). So instead of just anonymity designs, I have also been thinking a lot about how to insure block chain inclusion remains permissionless.

Well that is the sort of statistical pattern that I think it implausible to hide if the person who needs to know thus can afford the resources to know.

I don't think in this Technocracy age of Big Data, one can't hope to obscure patterns on large data sets. The generative essence of the implausibility is that the statistical patterns hidden at one layer, leak into the next layer, so it becomes a requirement for a globally leak-proof synergy of activity in cyberspace. It seems futile from that high-level perspective. And I stubbornly didn't want to accept that, but having really looked deeply at the technical issues, I now lean to that being the hard reality.

That is why I posit that the paradigm of wealth stored in forms that others can easily emulate, tax, and expropriate is dying.

Rather as I suggest, if you have your wealth stored in forms that others can re-use but not entirely emulate/replace, then your "wealth" can't be siphoned away with any means of introspection. For example, see the modules I am adding to my Github account. Sure someone could copy those some where and basically run away with my effort to-date. But they'd be silly to do that, because they'd lose my ongoing knowledge to maintain and improve those modules. They'd be much better rewarded by contributing and re-using them with attribution. And from there, my wealth grows in units of active and ongoing knowledge creation. The monetization will come and I will be able to eat. The big story isn't whether I can buy a Maserati but whether I can impact the world in my small way.

Also I admit there will perhaps be a transitional phase from the economy we have to the Knowledge Age (and perhaps a totalitarian interlude, but isn't that my point about what is dying), so I have not yet tossed aside anonymity entirely. But I am increasingly seeing it as an albatross around my neck as it seems to mess up everything with scalability and still not give the assurances I wanted when I was originally so concerned about needing anonymity. i am still working through the details of it all, so let's see where I end up with my conclusions. If there is useful anonymity that integrates holistically with scaling, then I will be more positive about adding it so people who feel they need it can. But I also worry that they are creating for themselves a false sense of anonymity (and may be later shocked that their actions were not anonymous).

But if they force pension funds, and other investors to buy $ denominated stuff, then the $ might not lose total reserve status.

Remember those bonds, derivatives, oil, etc.. All based on USD.

What is everyones review on the IMF accepting the chinese quan or rumbie in there easter egg baskets >

Cryptokingdom.me is a top-to-bottom but no sheep.

Can't have a top to bottom society without sheep right? We have roles to play, people are content with there current reality and they will fight to the very end defending that.

Obsolete... they now got fb

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

"NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday"
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0TG27120151127

FWIW

As you said, Putin is laying out how corrupt the G20/USA/dollar hegemony system is. This is all to join with Asia to push for a NWO reserve currency where not one nation's currency is used as a reserve. This is globalist hegemony. Putin knows who he works for.

The banksters are running the script... except as I explained upthread to rpietila, if these banksters refused to do this, nature would overpower them and replace them with banksters that will do it, because the people demand their humanistic outcome.

This is all the nature of man— the 666.

There is nothing anyone can do about this. It is a cycle of nature. It is entirely natural. Get out your popcorn and watch it on CNN.

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

This is not just about Putin as the good guy in the good cop bad cop dialectic. This is not the red vs the blue or bad nations vs good nations.

Reading regular news sites around the world people see that yes, scumbags are lying, perpetrating false flags, stealing money...to the benefit of the few. This is not just exposing the bad cop which would be some nations, but it is exposing the bad cop as the rulers of those nations.

I already said that if you read some sites, forums, it is littered with comments about banks, NWO, question about terrorist attacks, who benefits, people questioning what happens after this scripted WW3 (if it happens).

They know WW3 is a script!

The point is this: people are becoming very aware of the false hegelian dialectic that leads to something. Problem, reaction, solution, because it happens time after time.

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

I'm not denying that the history shows that the real perpetrators got their way every time. I'm just saying in the age of the internet people are also realizing this in droves.

Few thousand is a seriously underestimated number.

But there are only a few thousand people who question these things .


Most people in Paris are so scared that they locked themselves inside their homes, and are afraid to go near the window.


When sheeps get scared, the wolfs roam free, and tyrrany will come.

No, it's not hard to believe. After one scripted mega fake attack that led to something the next one's also bring the same question.