Topic: Is Bitcoin good enough; there aren't critically important improvements needed? - page 4. (Read 6007 times)

Bin Laden scored about 99.99 out of 100.

To do that, he was offline.

cash(bank notes) are not anonymous. they are just peices of paper that never ask for human identifiable information.
neither does bitcoin......

and i have now read the cryptocoin jargon and i can already see 5 ways to trace people.

again no matter what you try to do with the protocol, it wont make it unlinkable/untraceable in regards to a governments efforts to seize your funds or your freedoms.

no matter if you swap coins between 2 different altcoins or 200, whether each altcoin promotes itself as having extra features or not. i guarantee you that there are atleast 5 ways the government can find you.

bank notes cant even protect you, and that have no traceability/linkability requirement of human identity...

cant you see the bigger picture of the reality we live in.. only humans can be the deciding factor of how,if or when thy get traced. no code, no software tool, no computer based thing will ever be 100%.

again only humans can be the deciding factor of how close to 100% you can get

jonald_fyookball,

Not confronting the government has never stopped them from extracting every ounce of power, tribute, and servitude they can get.

Partial anonymity is an oxymoron.

There has always been a war between the individual and the State. Before we had cash which was anonymous. Next if don't have anonymity because cash is replaced with non-anonymous Bitcoin, the human race is fucked.

I understand you may have a different opinion. That is why this is a poll, not a sermon.

franky1,

Given your reply it is clear you don't even know the technical meaning of the terms untraceability and unlinkability. Try reading the Cryptonote whitepaper and educating yourself before you blabber more nonsense.

even if Bitcoin could become totally anonymous, not even sure that's a good strategy.
OP seems concerened about governments etc... total anonymity would much more
confrontational than the partial anonymity...I say, let the regulators regulate
the exchanges with KYC,AML, etc... while Bitcoin grows toward adoption.
Maybe some disagree...but if we cannot even agree on the strategy,
obviously we cannot agree on tactics.  

Totally false and opposite of reality.

You don't understand the Knowledge Age.

Your mind is still suck in the worthless dinosaur paradigm of the resource scarcity Industrial Age.

my words were " so you are atleast moving slowly to see this." not 'closer to my position' so thats you lying by editing my own words to suit you.
but you do admit you changed your mind, thus atleast moving slowly to see this...

secondly..
where in the blockchain does it contain your home address, or anyones home address,
where in the blockchain does it contain your real name, or anyones real name,
bla bla bla
.. answer, no where.
bitcoin is pseudonymous in the sense that it never asks for personal identifiable information

the weakest point is not the ledger, its the human. even with dark coin and other practices of altcoins. if someone was to reveal their donation address, there are ways and methods to link it together.

for instance.
if you put funds into one address, mix it around through dark coin. deposit it into coinjoin, then move it to an exchange, swap it with litecoin, move the litecoin to another exchange and swap it back again.. YOU CAN STILL GET TRACED! if the government deemed you worthy of wasting their time on.

thus bitcoin cannot and should not concentrate on anonymizing data if humans cannot even protect themselves. its a fools errend.

bitcoin just needs to protect the ledger.. that is it.. again no matter what code you can ever think of adding to the bitcoin protocol to mask any believed traceability. those that truly want to find you and your funds, WILL find a way. as such with paper wallets or cascasius coins, which are off-chain(no logs), no protocol(passed hand-to-hand), no traceability, etc.. deemed as the perfect anonymous way to use bitcoins.. yet how many people have bank notes, gold coins and other physical assets seized.

yet,

oops lol ok

My prior post wasn't directed at you. You've been quite reasonable.

lmao.  i never said anything about changing the title.
dont even know what youre talking about.

i was actually somewhat defending your freedom of
expression from Franky's critcism, but all you can see is
conflict/negativity/attack...so...yeah.

Don't see what your ad hominem attacks against me
have to do with anything. 

Don't really know if your intentions are FUD or to improve
cryptocurrency, but you seem live in a world where everything is "win/lose"
whereas I prefer to see things mostly as "win/win" whenever
possible. 

Have a nice evening.

Good riddence. You continue to post off topic nonsense. For example (and there are many more), without on chain anonymity it is impossible to have robust untraceability and unlinkability no matter what anonymity techniques you do off chain. That you don't understand this, shows you are not technically qualified to blabber (which we already proved in the thread linked from the OP), but yet you do foam at the mouth any way with lies such as "you changed the title thus you are moving closer to my position". Liar. I changed the title because I realized it was possible to achieve the same level of pool centralization we have now within the proposed anonymity paradigm. Typical ignorant politician, all you know how to do is lie and fool the constituents. You lack technical ability.

franky1 I wouldn't want an idiot like you any where near me. I am thus grateful you voted 'no'. Do I need to say it more clearly? You are a Dunning-Kruger blabber mouth dolt who lies and debates disingenuously.

The reason the dark coins have failed (if they have) is because they suck. I don't write software that sucks. We can start with the fact that they don't solve any use case (neither does Bitcoin but it did solve the delusion use case and was first). They don't make transactions faster. They have block chain bloat (Monero) or they are subject to Sybil attack on master nodes (DarkCoin).

I (as AnonyMint) have long ago stated that from a marketing perspective anonymity alone was not a sufficient use case for a crypto-currency.

What you haven't realized is that I proposed a use case that could skyrocket the demand for an anonymous coin. And it is good you failed to realize this. Carry on ignoramus. Nothing for you here.

Unun,

Absolute freedom exists only in the way you choose to relate to things, but not in the realm of things themselves. You will always find a constraint if you want to, and you can always choose to not be happy about it, or on the contrary, choose to see how it can benefit you.

The way current governments seem evil is because they are not the top players, the banks are. What you're suggesting is a completely totalitarian utopia, because without governments big businesses will be taking their place. Big businesses will have private armies, they will own a lot of land, they will acquire media companies.

But as I mentioned in my previous post, all businesses are totalitarian in nature, people get orders from above, they get thrown out if they disobey. Competition will make sure that small companies join together to form bigger and bigger businesses to survive, until the market saturates and all the land and resources are privatized.
 
Small individual entrepreneurs will have no chance of staying afloat, and will have no freedom whatsoever. They will either be bought out to bow under the same chain of command or thrown out of their land because some private armies will come knocking their door.

If that's what anonymous transactions is going to bring, I would rather stay away.
It was nice talking to you, I have some stuff to attend, so I'm signing out for now.

i voted no too

good points Franky, but to be fair to the OP, that is what the poll is asking:
would you switch to another coin?  I voted no.

3 pages in on this topic and more pages on the other topic and the OP still has not got the point.

his anonymity worries are not bitcoin protocols problem. they are human decisions locally at those humans own computers. maybe some people want to be highly anonymous, maybe they dont.

bitcoin is not suppose to be a monetary system where people need to download 3 different programs, and lease a different building every 2 months to avoid arrest if regulations make it a offense to mine. bitcoin has no jurisdiction and it is a free market. all bitcoin needs to care about is the most simplest way to secure the bitcoin ledger. ...

human identification should be the purpose of humans to protect and be fully aware that what they transmit by mouth, on paper or on the internet, can be used against them..

there are atleast a couple dozen ways for people to become anonymous. but thats a human choice. and should be left to human freedoms to choose, and not to bloat bitcoin protocol in such a way it can reduce bitcoins base purpose, reduce the security of the ledger(bugs due to bloated code) or increase the resistance to access of bitcoins by having bloated software people need to download/configure.

in short: OP if you dont like bitcoins.. go play with darkcoins, and if EVERYONE wanted it, everyone would be using darkcoins and thus darkcoin would be the new leader.(or some other altcoin that is bloated with supposed 'anonymity' protections)

as for the decentralization stuff. i hope by now you have realized that decentralization has not been broken, and i can atleast see that you have edited the title of the other topic, so you are atleast moving slowly to see this.

now lets move onto centralization
it is a human preference to want to be centralized in regards to pools. bitcoin has not forced it... people have due to greed!.
bitcoins decentralization bases still exists and if people choose to they can EASILY decentralize their mining farm warehouses to help increase the physical security of their human body from being arrested, if regulations made mining an arrestable offense.

but thats all about human decision, human laws, and human jurisdictions, which are not applicable to the bitcoin protocol.

all bitcoin should be doing is concentrating on securing the ledger.... end of..
what people choose to do with those funds, what identifiable information people choose to give away is their choice. and no matter what extra code could be injected into any altcoin protocol to attempt to hide identity. anonymity can still collapse by people chatting to much about their real world lives. thus it makes it a fools errend,

bitcoin has never asked for people birth certificate registration numbers, never asked for social security numbers, never asked for an IP address that is registered to you the person, never asked for email or home addresses. thus any identifiable information gleamed from the blockchain, is because of humans lack of protecting themselves.

take bank notes for instance. people consider them anonymous because there is no electronic trail, it never asks for identification just to use. but because of human decision, many people will still get funds seized. again its not the fault of the bank note. but the human.

so in practice as long as a currency does what it is suppose to do(fungeability/secure value), then it does not matter what governments try to do. its upto the people to choose their own preferences on how they use it. and that's something no protocol in the world can dictate.

cryptogeeknext,

Brave the New World. You are the company, don't enslave your potential in your fear. The antithesis of risk and profit, is insured poverty and failure. You are most likely European and have been indoctrinated by the culture and school system to believe you can't prosper without the government (or unlikely very young and a recent product of Obama education system). You will soon (couple more years to go) learn that all governments are bad (it takes a while for the accumulated damage to manifest in ways you can recognize from inside the system). Governments can only interfere with the free market. The free market is optimization, because simulated annealing is nature's only known optimization method for dynamic systems where no limits on diversity are known a priori.

Without failure, there can not exist success. Without white, black can not exist. Uniform distributions have no change, thus don't exist (aren't alive). Diversity is beautiful.

Sorry to be so closed minded on this. I know you are trying to be amicable and open discussion oriented. You are intelligent and articulate. It is what you've been taught that has influenced your understanding.


Edit: the fact that many people think that government is necessary is precisely why we need anonymity, so that another person's ideas can't force me to adhere to their chosen failure mode. I will be sovereign if I can make your government impotent against me. You will then have no right to force me to be included in your preferred tax and spend master plan. I will have the power to disagree, instead of being your slave.


I will say these opinions as loud as possible, and if encourages more downvotes, much better. We need to know realistically if there is any sanity out there.


There is no limit to the damage government can do if they are not limited by technologies such as anonymity. We always had anonymity. It was here-fore known as "cash". You take away that feature of society with non-anonymous electronic money, and the government will be unchecked in power and they will murder every single person on earth.


Edit#2: the government tasks you with paying your taxes. The multi-national corporations capture the government via regulatory capture. You are squeezed. With anonymity, they can't control you with their forced slave labor tax. You then have time to work for yourself, you innovate faster than the slow moving dinosaur corporations, driving them to extinction.  Nothing in the universe is sustainable and constant. The fundamental matter of our universe is change. If you expect that, you will always chose insured failure over risky chances for success.

Unun,

I mostly agree with what you said.
I'm not saying that current model, where governments borrow from banks and have to pay back with interest thus getting themselves deeper and deeper into the debt blackhole, is sustainable. It is not, it needs to change.

I think historically governments represent pieces of land occupied by different cultures. It is quite different from companies and businesses that can have offices and producing facilities in many different places. People in various companies have managers and receive tasks, they usually have no say in what the company is doing and the direction it is going with. Governments, on the other hand, don't task people with anything, they only tax the gain, keep things in order and make sure that companies don't fight each other for pieces of land that they need.

So, while anonymous transactions might be normal and workable for businesses, it conflicts with the idea of having a government. I know we have bad examples of governments and the word itself starts to have a negative connotation. But I'm not so sure that a world where companies and businesses are the top players is the place we want to live in.

Governments need to be stable and self-sustainable, businesses are volatile and profit-driven.

cryptogeeknext,

If anonymity requires us to give up collaboration and interaction, then we've failed to implement it properly.

For example, just because the government can't identify a transaction to tax it, doesn't mean the parties to the transaction can't know each other.

All prosperity is created in the private sector. They can still collaborate with anonymous transactions. This will be even more so as we move to the Knowledge Age economy, where for example you don't need to know the identity of the person you are collaborating with on some digital work project (programming, 3D printer designs, marketing, etc). One day those complex physical machines you mentioned will be designed collaboratively via online interaction and anyone can print any part on a 3D printer. You want a space shuttle, okay download the designs and print the parts and assemble it.

The government doesn't create any prosperity, it only takes some from one group and redistributes it to another group, and sells debt bonds to finance any short fall.

Transparency of government doesn't solve the problem that collectives consume more than they produce, because government is forced to promise what voters want to hear regardless of available resources. The government that promises less, gets voted out to replaced by the government that promises more.

Surely Europeans love all their benefits (e.g. 35 hour work weeks, 1 month paid vacations, free health care, free schooling, free natal for mothers, guaranteed retirements, inducements to stop working by age 50 or so, etc). And their governments are bankrupt because of it and will soon implode economically with great hardship on the people.

A gorgeous super intelligent female:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8EA_1YHztE (Brave the New World)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp6C4g23uYo (so you can learn about Russia)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f5gqROO2Zc (wow)

It's an interesting topic and I'm only developing my opinion on it.

Anonymity feels somewhat darkish and shadowy. If everything and everyone is anonymous, it is quite scary.
Historically societies converged towards having a government instead of anarchy and anonymity. Maybe because government outlines a clear vision, a goal and a way to achieve it. It is a public service, and it needs to be open about everything including finances and spending.

When people are open and transparent about their intentions it brings comfort and direction in life. People can only achieve great things if they work together. Building complex machines, space-shuttles, submarines would not be possible in a totally anonymous society where everyone is hiding in a shadow looking only to satisfy self-interest.

I would compare anonymous society to a dust-cloud in outer space, where it remains cold and dark. Only when the dust in the cloud starts to coalesce, it forms clusters of gravity, which eventually give birth to stars. It is the stars that give light, heat and produce a whole ton of useful stuff.

Part of the problem there is you have two powerful governments (USA and Russia) fighting a proxy war in Ukraine. So the Ukrainian people don't have enough military power to protect and enforce their collective will.

These powers are preventing Ukraine to split by language and culture and needs to probably be two countries.

So this is an example of the problem of a groups' collective military being too small. One long-range, idealistic solution is if the USA and Russia also adopt the "vote with your feet" and they reduce the size of their militaries to put a stop to this abuse of Ukraine. But the Russian people support Putin with 80% approval rating. But they support him because they are ignorantly trapped in top-down oligarch economy and haven't tasted decentralization. They were manipulated by the powers-that-be that funded the Bolshevik revolution (to bring communism to Russia) and then after the fall of USSR the powers-that-be awarded all the collectivized (from communism) national resources to a few well connected oligarches.

So the process of freedom from decentralization is going to have to first break down a lot of inertia.



I agree with you that decentralization technology must improve matters, because empowering the individual always does improve prosperity because decentralization has more degrees-of-freedom, i.e. is more efficient.

I don't think we will have decentralization without anonymity, because otherwise the government can regulate what it can find (all the details of how this entirely plausible is covered in the links from the OP of this thread). That is why I remain diligent in my stance on this forum.