Topic: Mike Hearn, London 2014 [video presentation] - page 4. (Read 6935 times)

I watched the whole video and he did say it was required. So I doubt you watched the video. Also it is anonymous not one is saying different, we are just saying why do we need government ids to use our nodes. He didn't say at all that you will be content to be defrauded, he is saying use it or don't use bitcoinj or bitcoin-qt. You clearly need to use your listening skills much more, he used that as example he never said you can use one or the other.

His tor proposal was to stick in tor in his bitcoinj, guess what I already use tor in the way he describes so he is just making it easier for people that probably have no clue what tor is or how it protects you on the bitcoin network/internet.

To be clear... when I talk about node identities and the like, I'm not talking about real-world identities of individuals... just some random token associated with a node that is the same for all nodes controlled by the same actor and different for nodes controlled by different actors.

Hi everybody,

I was at the event at which Mike spoke and the proposal seemed pretty clear to me.  Here's my recollection of how he laid it out.

1) We need to improve protection against certain classes of Sybil attacks.  That is: we need to make it harder for one "actor" (person, entity, whatever) to masquerade as multiple "actors".   e.g. if I am connecting to eight peers, I'd like some reassurance that they are controlled by different people and not actually the same person pretending to be eight different people

2) There are some interesting ways of achieving this.

3) One way is "proof of sacrifice":  you could devise a scheme whereby creation of a unique "node identity" (my loose term - Mike didn't use this phrase) requires visible destruction of some small number of satoshis.  This is easy for you to do if you only want to present one such identity to the world but very expensive if you wanted to create 10,000 different identities.  So.... if you had this system, a client could make sure to connect to nodes with different identities and they could be more sure that they were controlled by different actors.  Not perfect but it would probably be OK.   Big problem though:  nobody wants to throw away their money!

4) So is there another way?

5) Mike's insight:  why don't we ask ourselves this question:  "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of?"   I guess some answers might be a house or a car or something like that... but Mike added the additional condition: "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of and *which they can prove they have over the internet*?"

6) He then pointed out that the spec of most modern passports calls for them to have an embedded chip and for the chip to have the option of including a private key that can be used to sign arbitrary challenge messages.

7) A ha!  So we already have a widely-deployed infrastructure that maps (roughly - not perfectly) one person to one private key.

8 ) So.....   you could come up with a crypto scheme that allowed you to create a node identity that everybody could see could only have been created by the holder of a passport... and which would be different for each person.... but it would not reveal anything about the person or their passport... just that the controller of that node *has* a passport.

9) Unfortunately, most passports don't implement the signing function so it looked like the idea was dead in the water

10) However, a paper presented at the May BTC conference showed that it may be possible to work around this problem and still achieve the same ends (the details are complicated and I didn't understand them).

Bottom line:  this part of the talk was all about a really interesting approach to preventing a particular type of sybil attack.   

Hearn is a run down government whore. Nobody cares what he has to say on any topic. No project associated with him will ever get anywhere.

End of story, really.

You guys CLEARLY didn't even watch the video. So quick to jump to conclusions. Typical.

It's not required. AT ALL.

If you have an SPV client (ie Android Wallet, or MultiBit), it has to trust the nodes they are connected to (for 0-conf transactions). If you have an Android wallet, there are usually 2 ways to improve this: increasing trust-less interactions (although I'm not sure how) for SPV clients, OR improve the trusted-ness of the SPV clients you are connecting to. As Mike states, spoofing this isn't difficult. To make sure spoofing is decreased you have submit a proof that's expensive or hard to forge. A passport is only 1 such implementation. Thanks to wonderfully complicated maths of zk-snarks, it is ANONYMOUS. And you don't HAVE to use this method, then you'll just have to be content to possibly be defrauded OR you just have to more precautions to make sure you are connected to 'right' Bitcoin network: waiting for confirmations, and shuffling networks (wifi, 3g)/nodes. It's up to you.

Educate yourself, please. You also seem to miss Mike's Tor proposal. Or his proposal on merge avoidance, both INCREASING privacy.

P.S. If I'm wrong on the technical implementations, please correct me, that's how I understand it.

I have a database dump here with 200.000 complete german data records of real people (name, address, date of birth, place of birth, ....) with correct passport number and issuer office.
I will instant release this anywhere, if this proof of identity becomes part for Bitcoin.

Guess who doesn't have a passport me. I run a couple of nodes, I guess those will be shutdown and since I want to be trustless, and I can't be, I will be selling my bitcoins. Thank you Mike Hearn for another great idea. I was forced to stop using bitcoinj due to his redlisting idea, now he is making it so I can't use the bitcoin protocol at all, great work guys! Keep it up, the foundation is really pushing forward with some fantastic ideas.

proof of passport is anonymous to individuals as the serial numbers are not names/addresses and individuals do not have access to the government databases. but governments can use their database to identify people.

this is also going to make bitcoin harder to use for individuals. imagine it this way. would you sign up to pay pal if they asked you to not just make a username and password, but to also input your passport numbers.

i know my parents and a few other relatives don't have passports. so even if they wanted to sign up to a payment gateway, they cant because it asks for info they do not have.

and also, who verifies that the passport is valid.... this would involve a government agency controlling user accounts.. by them veryifying passports to allow or disallow people from having bitcoin accounts.

mike hearn and luke jr are not good people when it comes to anonymity and ease of use for the individual.

Come on, there is zero problems with dishonest nodes. Sybil attacks are very hard to pull off and there are other easy ways to compete against it. (e.g. just using the hard coded seed nodes or downloaded lists of trusted nodes on insecure network connections)

Maybe now "Proof of passport" is zero-knowledge proof. But who gonna guarantees it stays this way. Nobody! As it will be be changed for sure sooner or later.

This is BS. This would have no chance if Satoshi would be still here. It's a big disgrace to his invention.


If Mike Hearn stays Bitcoin coder, we will get a Paypal-version of bitcoin for sure.

First: he pushes for blacklisting
Second: he pushes for SSL and extern CAs
Third: he pushes for everybody to proof of identity by showing their passport

I have no imagine what fourth or fifth will be.

This is ill.

Before people go on another witch hunt.

It's a zero-knowledge proof. Doesn't reveal anything.

In order to run honest nodes, you either needs to make it expensive (and slightly prohibitive), ie proof-of-sacrifice, or cheap (using other forms of identification that is expensive to forge), ie proof-of-passport. With zk-snarks, you can prove you own a passport, but reveal nothing. This isn't the best way, due to possible government intervention, but it is a practical, cheap, anonymous alternative.

There could be other ways to establish identity, OR to establish honest nodes.

"Proof of Passport" WTF WTF WTF
He can't be serious.

London, Tuesday, 21st January at Club Workspace, Clerkenwell.  Coinscrum host an informal evening with presentations from Circle’s CEO, Jeremy Allaire, and CTO, Sean Neville. Also core Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, will be joining Jeremy and Sean and will also be taking to the stage.

http://www.iamsatoshi.com/coinscrum-networking-evening-circle-london/

BobAlison (summary):

What's ahead for Bitcoin? Here are some highlights from the video:

    HD Wallets, used by Trezor and others
    Time to scrap addresses. They are too limited and problematic.
    The Payment Protocol to replace addresses. Supports refunds, memos, receipts, proof-of-purchase, and digital signature.
    Minimum fee will float. Payment Protocol to allow receiver to pay fee.
    TOR by default (ambitious goal). Encryption for free and other advantages.
    WiFi hacking countermeasures. How do you know you're connected to the real network and not a spoof? Localbitcoins seller can trick you into connecting to his/her own wifi network at a cafe and cheating you.
    TOR disadvantages. Tor hides node IP addresses. How do you know you haven't connected to 10 different nodes that area actually all the same computer?
    Proof of Sacrifice. Node burns coins to make it costly to spoof the network.
    Proof of Passport. Goal is to make network spoofing harder. Goverment-issued passports contain an NFC chip. Data digitally signed by governments and can be read with standard hardware. Didn't understand the rest.