Topic: The Problem With Altcoins - page 3. (Read 16459 times)

I guess you want us to read your mind.

I think I know what you are thinking, and you are incorrect in your assessment.

Is Bitmessage a waste of time?

The real problem with altcoins is they can go up really fast and they can died all of sudden. Its risk vs reward...

If done correctly, it is precisely the opposite. The common man Tor use case will make it magnitudes more effective.

Rationalize all you want, hose beats crypto. So does surveillance.

Tor is not a web browsing anonymizer. Belittling it in such a way means that either your understanding of it is poor, or it is an attempt to manufacture a reason for your case, again. Neither choice leaves me impressed.

I am against you wasting your time on pursuits that are not that useful.

I already explained the lack of anonymity with Tor against a global entity.

Some other use cases of Tor are not threatened by such a global entity. Our use case is.

Defeatist. I would prefer to defend myself against the coming SHTF.

The key to achieving this is not use a general purpose web browsing anonymizer like Tor, and instead build-in a special purpose design for the coin.

Agreed. So I don't know why you are against improving the anonymity. I guess you assume it will be slow, expensive, and not scalable.

A P2P transaction network interfacing with tor is *not* the same as your typical (lol what?) tor user scenario. No, I'm not going to hold your hand until you understand the implications of this.

... it doesn't matter what gidget you come up with to anonymize the network, shit is going to hit the mother f***ing fan. There is no winning here.

If you sacrifice liberty for security... (do I need to finish this sentence or is the ellipsis enough?) Liberty being very loosely defined as the utility and accessibility of the network.

Cheap, fast, scalable are properties that are of paramount importance to anonymity. And IF you can find a way to increase anonymity via increasing difficulty/cost with little affect on those who do not want it or need it, then you allow a happy medium between both needs and, imo, have the best chance of achieving what I think is roughly the same goal between us.

The timing attacks research has been done by numerous different researchers from numerous prestigious universities and numerous confirmations. It is all peer reviewed. Go read the research papers so you are not ignorant on this.

Even if you don't believe there is much risk, why not protect yourself and be sure?

You mean like "well bruce schneier sez!!!"?

Sorry, but this fails the smell test. It is a manufactured argument for pushing an agenda.

Crypto accounts can't be frozen, and they are difficult and sometimes impossible to confiscate (lol let's raid EVERYBODY!!), let alone prove that you are in possession of them.

That is not acceptable in technical debate. Refute with technical argument.

Did you fail to read what I wrote upthread? That I don't want to have to prove that some criminal who used my coin before or after I held it, was not me or not involved with me somehow

Why are you accusing me of being a criminal?!!! Damn it that almost deserves reporting you to the moderator!

Did you fail to read what I wrote upthread? That I don't want to have to prove that some criminal who used my coin before or after I held it, was not me or not involved with me somehow (i.e. me as his financier)! Because that is not going to be easy in every case.

Also because of the Admiralty laws, governments can confiscate all money that was involved with a crime, even if you prove you were not involved.

Proving that your cash is connected to a crime is surprisingly easy to demonstrate. That's because 97% or more of cash circulating today contains tiny concentrations of narcotics residues—primarily cocaine. All police need to do is to bring in a drug-sniffing dog to inspect the cash.  If the dog alerts, police seize the cash. And, under civil forfeiture rules, it's up to you to prove that the cash has a legitimate origin.

Consider the case of Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez. During a traffic stop, Nebraska state troopers asked Gonzolez for permission to search his vehicle. During the search, the troopers found bundles of currency totaling $124,700. Based on a dog sniff, police seized all the money.

Gonzolez contested the forfeiture in court. Prosecutors neither convicted nor accused Gomez or any of the other owners of the seized cash of any crime. Nor did police find any drugs, drug paraphernalia, or drug records connected to the cash. Despite these facts, a federal appeals court upheld the confiscation of every dollar found in the vehicle.

In thousands of cases across the United States each year, police follow the same pattern. In a search of someone's home or vehicle, they discover a significant quantity of cash. They then bring in a dog to sniff the cash for the presence of drug residues. The dog alerts virtually 100% of the time. This supposedly gives police probable cause to seize the cash under state or federal civil forfeiture laws.

Owners of property subject to civil forfeiture find themselves in an Alice-in-Wonderland legal landscape where the property seized is accused of a crime, rather than the owner. The owners must follow obscure rules that originate in Admiralty law, with which most attorneys aren't familiar. Under these rules, the seized property is presumed guilty, and it's up to its owner to demonstrate that the property is innocent. (Yes, it's bizarre, but it's the law!) Since obtaining legal representation in a civil forfeiture case typically requires a legal retainer of $10,000 or more, most victims of this vicious procedure never contest the seizure.

In an era of across-the-board cutbacks in public spending, civil forfeitures are a lucrative funding source for cash-strapped agencies and states. Last year, the federal government seized more than $4 billion under civil forfeiture laws, more than twice the take in 2011.

You do not have a grasp on the situation here. I'll leave it at that.

Hmmm. AnonyMint, why are you so scared? May I imply that you are a criminal in various ways?

PS - For crying out loud, stop editing your posts.

Incorrect. For a timing attack, they only need to see the traffic passing between each node in the Tor network.

Hmmm. Etlase2 why are you are arguing against improvement of the anonymity?

It should be noted that if for some reason bitcoin fails, we would need an alt currency to take its place.  Bitcoin 2.0 or something which corrects the flaws created by the currency and brings the cryptocurrency to a whole new level.  Of course I would never want bitcoin to fail, but just as the most secure systems in the world are eventually cracked, bitcoin may fall as well.

And the gigantic point that you miss is that the originator of the transaction is lost in the noise. With basic protocol encryption, the NSA would have to not only be watching your connection, but they would have to BE every peer you are connected to on the "clear net" so that they can isolate the incoming tx that you see and retransmit, then they would have to control a vast majority of every bridge or relay in the tor network to ensure that they control each hop you use (which is astronomically unlikely if the client acts as a tor bridge--unless the NSA is the only one using it, you're fairly safe).

What in the ever loving fuck are they going to do? Control every bit of data, crunch all the numbers and put it in a tidy box for the IRS to examine and send a tax bill?

What happens if people start opening up their wireless connections for transactions?

The NSA does not have the ability to suppress this or do whatever it is you've gotten into your mind that they can do. Not without destroying the internet, the tool they have fallen so deeply in love with.

The data goes on a public ledger. It is decrypted.

And this is completely irrelevant in the case of a distributed shared file. No one is trying to hide anything except for a tiny little portion that they do not want attributed to them. They DO need to be able to decrypt the traffic if they want to know what transaction originated from where.

Tor is perfectly acceptable for anonymizing transactions. Why you don't see this is beyond me. And the trade-off for high latency is an unusable network for commerce, at least of the face to face variety. In that case, only criminals are likely to use such a system making the target much juicier.

SO WHAT? The relays do not know what the data is!

My apologies, I did not realize that you were a crazy person. Cary on.

Don't you see the media pushing Bitcoin? This doesn't happen without the permission of the ruling elite. It is my speculation, "they" (rockefeller/rothschilds/kissinger) created Bitcoin. Not the underlings such a Obama and Geithner. Compartmentalization of the underlings.

The government will continue to pretend to be somewhat against it, well for one thing the underlings don't know it is intended to be the next one-world digital currency. The elite don't want us to wake up too soon and realize we've unknowingly handed them the 666 control they want. They are hoping for the "there can only be one" outcome. That is why this thread is so important to me.