Topic: Edward Snowden Final Warning for Bitcoin - page 2. (Read 1767 times)

Infrastructure = miners/nodes ?

The fact that Bitcoin is pseudonymous should be enough for the majority of cases, lightning and liquid provide an additional privacy layer, that is not bad at all

And coinjoins are features. A softfork that would make privacy on a protocol level optional, would also be a feature. If you want to stay pseudonymous be traceable, no problem. Don't use the softfork technology. 

The only entities which censor Monero are centralized exchanges which simply remove it from their available cryptocurrencies, because their chain analysis buddies can't trace it. Every person who understands privacy, trades their BTC for XMR in a decentralized, unstoppable fashion and uses that for their spending. You can get privacy with Bitcoin already, you just need to trade it for an altcoin. So, the question is: why can't we just implement a feature that would make it optional again, without having to trade it for an altcoin?

What else do you want from privacy? To make us rich?

Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. This isn't something new. This also isn't something that we've just realized. It's more of a feature other than anything else. Altcoins that have implemented privacy features such as Monero, while good at what they do, face the issue of decreasing or stagnating adoption rather than growth.

We have to realize that censorship goes beyond nodes and a decentralized network though. Monero, due to the very fact that it features anonymous payments, is the victim of a continuous censorship attack. Being desisted from exchanges, blacklisted from institutional adoption etc.

So even if bitcoin made the bold move to make a departure from an open ledger standard, it would still be very prone to censorship. We have to consider the cost-benefit analysis.
What are the current benefits of BTC (especially among all crypto)?
More adoption.
More market access.
More widely recognized.
Deep market allowing for large transactions without killing liquidity.

What would bitcoin gain from being anonymous?
Recipients won't know where coins are coming from (averting some censoring scenarios).
What else?

If Bitcoin forks to be more like Monero, all the above benefits though are lost in an instant. Are anonymous payments worth that much over destroying what has already been built on bitcoin? I'd argue that this change would only bring more censorship by giving credence to FEDs and legislators to destroy all BTC infrastructure as it could more easily be deemed a notorious market.

Bitcoin is not private by default. Chain analysis doesn't need your IP address to de-anonymize you. And as long as self-custodial privacy solutions get shut down one after the other, we can't have good privacy on the main layer.

Being the top asset != being the most widely adopted. Most vendors report more transactions happening on Monero and Litecoin than Bitcoin. Sure, everybody in the crypto space will accept Bitcoin as a payment, but the most usage for real transactions doesn't happen on Bitcoin.

An AWS node would accept a coinjoin transaction without worrying for being banned, so why couldn't it just run a past-softfork node that'd accept a post-softfork private transaction?

It doesn't help that most nodes are being hosted on cloud service providers. Imagine for example if AWS were to announce a total ban on running Bitcoin nodes - we would see the overall node count plummet.

Nodes not only have to be plentiful and geographically dispersed but also distributed across many ISPs and countries. We do not want a situation where the majority of nodes are hosted in the US and then they suddenly ban them all.

Or as gmaxwell said we can all just make our nodes listen on more private protocols, such as Tor and I2P.

Correct.  But, above all, it does need to be resistant to regulatory shutdown.  If something is hard to trace, it's hard to kill.  If there were any sense in this place, people would recognise the importance of that.



Which is precisely why it needs to be the most robust to regulatory takedown.  Many governments and regulatory bodies can only see Bitcoin as "the biggest and most successful tool for illegal activity".  They would like nothing more than to take it away from us.  Like it or not, we're at war with these entities.  More privacy makes their task more difficult.  

So? Bitcoin doesn't need any protocol level changes because already it's not mandatory to use it with identification or your real IP address. Are you then saying that Snowden is stupid?

If he had wanted a Blockchain where the inputs and outputs of transactions aren't broadcasted he's free to fork Bitcoin as many have already done, or follow one of the existing forks.

It's not about the ETFs or the finance markets either. But at this point one has to recognize that Bitcoin remains the most highly adopted   cryptocurrency because its existing festureset is still more robus than all competition, even after so many years. For less traceable transactions go to Monero, Dash,  Zcash... Whatever. If you start to ponder why these coins aren't #1 you'll realize that in order to support a revolution you need more than electronic cash. Electronic cash will get you as far as toppling the banking system at best. What then? That's not much on its own. It's just a tool.

Bitcoin doesn't need to be everything, everywhere all at once under this pretense. Many have said that bitcoin should be anonymous, support smart contracts, support NFTs, be turning complete, support tokens etc. Those that try to build that on Bitcoin can only do so in a very sub par way because it was never designed to do thst. Bitcoin works well as is and is pretty successful so far doing what it was designed to. For radical changes hardforks have always been allowed and even supported by many, but they're not Bitcoin.

i do tend to agree that no amount of "privacy features" in a cryptocurrency will protect someone who is broadcasting to the world on social media and anywhere else that anyone will listen how smart they are because they use bitcoin. a cryptocurrency can only go so far. the person using it if they want privacy then don't tell other people they are using bitcoin. simple as that. but how many people do that? very few because most bitcoin users WANT to tell other people they are using bitcoin.


well, there's nothing wrong with injecting arbitrary data into a transaction if it's not very much data. but if it's a huge amount of data then i think that's different.  want to use OP-RETURN to inject 80bytes, fine! want to use ordinals to store a 1 megabyte video? maybe that's not so fine. because with the ordinals data you're getting a 75% discount on data storage. vs OP_RETURN. so it's like encouraging people to do that.

i don't see why we need OP_RETURN at all in fact. let them inject small arbirary amounts of data into UTXOs and get rid of the prunable transaction altogether wouldn't bother me at all!

but back to edward snowden. i wonder what he thinks about ordinals 

I guess he is just playing with it and not actually serious on his comment. If others have found this concern to be given the highest priority, then I don’t think the developers themselves have never thought of this. Of course, they know what they’re doing, maybe it takes time but it will be soon realized.

However, I can’t blame the people from not feeling this because it’s their money that they risk with bitcoin. And if this privacy matter won’t be given a solution in the nearest time possible, I’m afraid that this would lessen the bitcoin community in the future. Just my thought as well.

Yeah, it's odd.  It's like you give people a tool for freedom and then they bitch about it because other people can do what they want.  I'm sat here thinking "Uh, yeah, that's kinda the whole point" but other people just don't see it that way and think it's somehow their place to try and police things that are of no concern to them.  Doesn't really make much sense to me, but I just chalk it up to that innate ability some humans have to try and ruin everything because they suck. 

Luckily, none of those deluded imbeciles are getting what they want. 

It's ironic how the Bitcoin community prioritizes ETFs, regulations, and wealth accumulation over privacy-- the very essence embedded in the cypherpunk manifesto and its core principles. Was that Bitcorn thing presented as an anarchist movement that was supposed to overthrow the government and operate without any oversight? Must have been my mistake. 

I just don't know. Here's another question of mine: Why don't people understand you can't ban people from injecting arbitrary data in their transactions?

Verifiable != traceable or identifiable

You can verify a transaction is valid without needing to know who the participants are.  Information about the real-world identities of the sender and the recipient is not a prerequisite for a public ledger.  The IP addresses of users are not required for a public ledger.  These things can be private.  How do people not understand this yet?

So people are forming a bandwagon with Snowden saying that BTC needs to have privacy on the protocol level, a change so radical it could see it delisted from all major exchanges and having its ETF status revoked, yet people aren't willing to accept that Ordinals and Runes abusing taproot features to front-run regular transactions at a comparatively cheaper rate is something that should be patched? The latter wouldn't even be that radical as it would essentially be just a bug fix. Whereas Snowden's suggestion would make BTC into an altcoin and also radically shift bitcoin's philosophy of public ledger and verifiable transactions.

I just see so many contradictions in today's bitcoin community. It's funny.

Bitcoin is a Project of Transparent Ledger Technology. It's Half the Purpose.

But bitcoin works with an unprecedented level of transparency that most people are not used to dealing with,does it mean that after all these years of improving and promoting bitcoin it still lacks privacy to operate for functionality and security.
To be honest,this latest warning has instilled fear amongst/midst of  crypto communities.Bitcoin developers are supposed to be aware of this lapses all along.

Bitcoin was invented as a heavy dose of anonymity and privacy altogether.So if privacy becomes a threat,that should be a withdrawal in privacy services and system abnormality.Anyways,bitcoin has it ways of responding to solutions and protocols.
It could be a REMINDER or WARNING!

It would be nice if he provide some example about how to implement, the privacy in the protocol. We have coins that already did it like monero and zcash, but maybe there are other ways to do this. But the problem is how big this change would be to bitcoin, it would hit the point where the coins is not bitcoin anymore, it will look like a totally different coin.

At this point, the governments are involved into bitcoin, and a change like this will not like them at all, this could make some governments like El Salvador, decide to stop using bitcoin and move to another coin like LTC.

In order to be less identifiable as bitcoin traffic-- and iirc anything using the noise protocol also has an undifferentiated bitstream.

But that's not the purpose of the protocol, the purpose is to encrypt communications so that a passive monitor can't  simply watch where every transaction (/block) originates. 

It's just the case that since the protocol was changing it was convenient to switch to a form which would be more difficult to block (or at least would be when users move it off the default port. ).

Curious about BIP324 - In order for this to be effective, doesn't it require non-Bitcoin applications to purposely design their network communications to blend in with Bitcoin's encrypted traffic? Are there any of these applications in current use that add to the anonymity set of upgraded Bitcoin nodes?

Although personally I am a minimalist of altcoins/shitcoins, I believe that everyone, Bitcoin-only or not, should support your movement. Transparent blockchains and blockchains with obfuscated transactions can co-exist, and be complementary with each other.

Because the community considers that Monero is the best altcoin for privacy, from a technological standpoint, how does Iron Fish differentiate itself from Monero?

https://ironfish.network/