If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me. At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.
I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.
The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.
This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.
Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.
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.
