Topic: NXT :: descendant of Bitcoin - Updated Information - page 1253. (Read 2761626 times)

nothing, just being sarcastic

Yeah I meant the forums. Joefox is including it in the wiki for the whitepaper (we ought to be proving theorems in it, not just writing prose). Math is the foundation of the Nxt protocol, and supporting algorithms like the Reed-Solomon address encoding ricot and nxtchg are working on and which I've helped with. Definitely easier on the eye if we can display it more like math, instead of like English.

I guess you mean the forum is managed by someone else? (adminius?) I somehow equated forum with www in my mind (even though I realize the wiki is also using a nxtcrypto name and run by joefox rather than you). I'll post this in the forum then.

- yes, I can:

- I don't want any phone calls. I want to spend my money as I want, not as NSA or government agent wants.

The testnet is being updated to new version right now. Maybe this caused ur error?

It is not on the public forum, only beta testers can read it (if not deleted)

@CfB - to me this looks like a security feature on the testnet. I have been doing this manually, and not really massively, maybe 10 or 15 times over the course of 1 hour.

Is it a bug, or is it a feature

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/azure/workbench/nxtDev/nxTrader/nxtApiSigs.py", line 249, in getBalance_Slot
    self.apiRepl1=requests.get(  self.userData['serverProt'], params = self.apiReq, verify=False)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests/api.py", line 55, in get
    return request('get', url, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests/api.py", line 44, in request
    return session.request(method=method, url=url, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests/sessions.py", line 357, in request
    resp = self.send(prep, **send_kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests/sessions.py", line 460, in send
    r = adapter.send(request, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/requests/adapters.py", line 354, in send
    raise ConnectionError(e)


requests.exceptions.ConnectionError: HTTPConnectionPool(host='holms.cloudapp.net', port=6874): Max retries exceeded with url: /nxt?account=7126304194855053556&requestType=getBalance (Caused by : [Errno 111] Verbindungsaufbau abgelehnt)

Mom told me to study C++, but I preferred useless stuff like Asm, Basic and Pascal.

you also have their C++ code?

https://github.com/Zerocoin/libzerocoin

one guy who speaks for multiple guys.

Thank u, this is very useful.

I found summary transcript, I hope this is useful:

________________

* Bitcoin may not be particularly anonymous
* Zero-coin / Zero-cash to anonymize the bitcoin currency
* transactions recorded in public ledger; nothing sophisticated done with the ledger; people can identify and map your identity; if you're very paranoid you can prevent (maybe), but in general case hard to use bitcoin for privacy;
* this should matter to all of us; the technology behind bitcoin may be with us for a very long time; countermeasures are weak even in the face of unsophisticated attacks
* if we make bitcoin private, can possibly find applications beyond currency

* two approaches for anonymous version of bitcoin
* zerocoin - technique to implement electronic cash in bitcoin protocol
* zerocash - way to make zerocoin practical and deployable and usable as ecash currency

* zerocoin - join work with students and colleagues at John Hopkins (JH)
* bitcoin doesn't give us much privacy despite academic thinking from 1980s (esp. David Chong) to build untraceable ecash
* ecash tried to tackle one problem without thinking of all other practical concerns; nobody in the history of academic ecash managed to setup a working, centralized bank; chong's bank attempt failed
* bitcoin solved this problem of a currency take-off and early adoption; but we need a different technique to get rid of a centralized bank
* zerocoin new approach for ecash to get rid of centralized bank; basic idea is public ledger (constructed by bitcoin) blockchain; use this to wash bitcoins that does not require us to trust a centralized party; key ingredient (blockchain) is given by free by the bulletin board;
* zerocoin high-level intuition of original protocol: layer on top of bitcoin; i have some bitcoin; i want to break the link between my current address and a future address; take my bitcoin and turn into zerocoin; they get mixed up; all people making zerocoins will shuffle them together so no linkage with creation and redemption; at some future point, can redeem zerocoins into bitcoins ideally unrelated; breaks graph analysis; when disappearing into the zerocoin network minimizes/removes leakage;
* zerocoins are numbers; digital commitments to a large serial number; viewing the commitment, you should not be able to tell the serial number; once these commitments are minted (easy to create), you put them on the bitcoin blockchain; new instruction in the bitcoin system to produce a transaction that spends a bitcoin for a zerocoin; anybody that sees this transaction sees that this valid zerocoin is worth some money;
* at some point in the future, you redeem; you first reveal the secret serial number to make the first zerocoin and put into transaction; prove that the serial number corresponds to a zerocoin; then prove that the zerocoin is one of the set placed on the blockchain (which somebody paid money);
* zero-knowledge proof; prove statements without using any other information other than that the fact that the statement is true; "there exists some zerocoin in the set of zerocoins placed on the blockchain & the serial number we're revealing is the actual serial number in the coin";
* if the proof is valid, then double-spend is impossible since serial number would have to be revealed again;
* efficiency is important here! the approach used is the accumulator; collect all the zerocoins into the accumulator, then prove that the zerocoin you're trying to spend is contained in the accumulator; proof of knowledge is 4KB; the entire thing is 25KB after optimization; for crypto this is awesome!; but developers hated adding this much to the blockchain; so unlikely to happen in real world
* summary: zerocoin good first approach, libzerocoin; but the problem is that the proofs are just too big; and coins have all the same value; but this means that if you want to spend fractional amounts of bitcoin, then it won't work (have to translate back to bitcoin)
* new solution: zerocash
* presented in May and Bitcoin conference in San Jose; in both conferences with teams working on small zero knowledge proofs aka SNARKS; other cryptographers already had them ready;
* SNARK - Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge; Bryan Harno (MS Research); basic idea is that you can prove arbitrarily complex statements in 288 bytes; in addition to having these efficient proofs, there are compilers that have proofs that the program executed correctly; we should simply take existing libzerocoin code and run through the compiler to produce these proofs; but these compilers produce large circuits; the time to make a small proof takes hours or days;
* co-authors have spent a lot of time optimizing these proofs; the right way is NOT to take existing libzerocoin, but throw away RSA and other cryptographic techniques and replace with components that are easier to prove such as hash functions like SHA256 and Merkle trees; easy to prove hash with small circuits e.g. sha256 in 30K gates
* each coin is really the hash of some randomness and the serial number = commitment. once we have these coins we put in the hash tree; 64-depth key (2^64); when want to redeem; reveal the serial number, and can reveal 64-hashes before in the tree;
* if these proofs are powerful and efficient; why need bitcoin? why not put entire system into zerocoin and make everything anonymous through generation, use, redemption of coins? the only information that makes it into the blockchain is the fact that a transaction occurred. just show that two new coins where the value totals the bitcoin that you're splitting; when we merge we spend two coins we prove that the two = same value of the new coin; transfers can be done completely anonymously without knowing who and how much.
* can encrypt transactions and hash the values
* transaction fees have to be public, but everything else can be anonymous
* name for this process; generic transaction is called "pouring coins"
* is this efficient? one detail - the problem with zerocoin 1.0 was that the proofs were huge and took 0.33s; these results mixed; to merge/make takes 87s-108s on a single core; but on bright-side bitcoin takes up to an hour for each transaction; verification time is in ms; comparable to bitcoin; verification is in the network; the catch is that to verify the proofs you need a large set of public parameters; 1.2GB in size
* best part of this is that you already need 16GB to store the blockchain, so to add this is around 7% increase in storage
* somebody needs to generate these parameters; trusted party; possible to find a dozen people that people trust to set up the parameters;
* system that is efficient; will be separate system released in May; real-world crypto; want to get people to use;
* release an altchain; client that implements all these things; put it out there; hope that nobody puts a lot of money in this because these are new techniques and might break down; idea is to test this in an environment separate from bitcoin so we don't break anything else while trying to make this work
* should we even be doing this research? lots of people criticizing us. this is important research not just because people want to commit crimes, but because when you spend money your transactions are hidden from neighbours, but with bitcoin people can see your transactions; important to get it out there.

No, unfortunatelly, video is not for me. I hardly comprehend speech, only written text.

done

did you get a chance to see Matt Green's video? In it he outlined a much more efficient solution than the alpha version. Seems very promising.

Using this logic, we should just outlaw the use of cash immediately.

Everyone must use a credit card that can be tracked. What if you purchase a prescription for some illness and your insurance company sees this and cancels your insurance policy, or your company finds out and terminates you because they don't want to be liable for your health costs. Privacy? It is important.

The presumption of guilty until proven innocent seems to be a bit backwards from what it used to be.

Do you want your neighbors to know how much you spend on everything? Do you want the local thief ring to know you have valuables in your home, because they figured out your spending pattern?

I could go on and on. Cash is something people have had for thousands of years and it is disappearing. Possibly permanently.

The war on bitcoin and all crypto is in full swing in america. It costs millions of dollars to comply with all the regulations. Only big VC companies like coinbase can possibly afford full compliance.

The feds view is that anybody that has bitcoin is a criminal. It won't matter if we have mixing or NXTcash, so there is no difference on that score if we do get NXTcash implemented. On the gain side, as soon as we get NXTcash, it will have restored to people across the world, cash, like it used to be!

James

We need a trustless solution.

Maybe someone used published sources to create a fake client. The published source stops at 22K.

And I can see that and agree with jl777's thought, it is well said... but would a government agent who supported the NSA agree with that?  Just seems to me like I could see them being unhappy about it and arguing that people who use them have criminal intent or something along those lines.  Can you name some legitimate reasons you'd want some transactions to remain anonymous though?

I don't know.. I guess I'm just not in such a hurry to implement it until we've been around for a while.  Basically until we're big enough to be able to lobby that mixing stay legal.  Though even if it isn't built in, they'll probably always be mixers around for the bigger cryptos as long as they are around for those who do want to use them.

One more thing to throw in is I'm currently in the process of getting a mortgage and one question they asked was for me to trace where my Bitcoins came from and how they flowed around my accounts since they were worried about money laundering.

- very well said, James!