Topic: The Problem With Altcoins - page 4. (Read 16459 times)

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

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.

You don't understand that all low-latency networks are vulnerable to timing attacks if the attacker can see the traffic between each peer on the network. They don't need to decrypt the traffic, they just need to see the timing. This is well proven in research papers that have analyzed Tor. Tor even admits this.

The governments can see all the traffic on the internet. They have taps on all the main lines.

Also Bruce Scheier documented other attacks NSA has against Tor, such as a weakness they exploited in the Firefox browser.

There is no way the national security agencies are going to allow themselves to be blinded. The NSA is spending something like $50 billion. Do you even fathom what that can buy in terms of hacking?

Timing analysis can't be defeated with random sends, because the pattern of the random can be identified statistically from the non-random. Low-latency is the problem. High-latency mix-nets are much more resistant to timing analysis.

If this was an easy problem to solve, Tor would have solved it instead of admitting they can't.

Do you think they built that gazillion terabyte storage facility in Utah to mop up data they can't discern.

The NSA has attacks against SSL and HTTPS too, but that is an orthogonal issue.

Also some people has thought the Tor relays are honeypots. How can you prove they are not! You can't. Who is paying to give away all those free servers and bandwidth?

Add links:

https://www.google.com/search?q=tor+timing+attack

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/one-cell-enough

I still don't get your view on this. Even if they somehow manage to have such a massive amount of control over Tor that they can determine where a packet of data originated on the tor network, it does not prove or even imply that the transaction belongs to the originating connection. That is a preposterous presumption to make of a distributed shared file. Hell, I could imagine that even if the NSA was watching every local connection for everyone, this would be easily defeated by pseudo/fake Tor peers that occasionally feed each other nonsense data. How are they going to prove it? "We control every single node and we know that that isn't one of them?" That could be foiled by occasionally sending real data among the nonsense data.

I've written down an algorithm.


Bruce Schneier wrote about they are already coopted by the NSA some where:

https://www.schneier.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?tag=surveillance

I wouldn't trust them. Not reporting your stuff to the authorities and not being anonymous means jail time and bankruptcy in this coming G20 crackdown as the sovereigns go into sovereign debt crisis spiral.


I highly doubt the NSA hasn't been able to crack Tor given it is well documented that a global adversary can in theory crack every low-latency mix-net using timing analysis. And Tor only uses 3 hops.


Spending on the coin that has built-in Bitmessage-like anonymity (not low-latency) will ensure that your IP is not connected with the spend and thus the coin and all its ancestors. If you spend it on Bitcoin, then your IP address will not be shielded (even if you use Tor) and as well since everyone else's IP is not, then using a mixer doesn't surely help.


We have that any way, even with fiat. You can buy a child now in South Asia and Africa (probably also South and Central America) with local fiat.

Since you are anonymous, they can't say it was you.

Whereas if you use Bitcoin and your identity gets entangled with a prior owner of the coin (something that can't happen with cash or fiat banking), you could be false accused. The issue of taint is a serious insoluble problem for Bitcoin and the holders will demand government intervention at some point to get relief.

There is no viability for freedom with Bitcoin. It is going to kill all freedom long-term, even though it provides the illusion of increasing freedom short-term while the incriminating evidence mounts in the public ledger.

I think it is insane to use a non-anonymous coin like Bitcoin.

At least get your virgin coins from mining, but you can't even get these now unless you are in a country where you can buy an ASIC. And then you still need to prove that the spend was not to yourself, when you offload the coins. Be sure your government approved exchange can prove it and records aren't lost, etc..

The question is if this is actually possible and worth waiting for.

Tor and I2P seem to be safe now, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been already compromised. The Allies used to sent ships in certain death just to protect the secret that they can encrypt Enigma, so I'd really wonder if any of them would be safe if they really want to grab some coins.


Why is spending altcoins safer?

Freedom coin sounds so patriotic, how about terrorist coin or child molerster coin ...

I am most interested in using an altcoin, and none have IP anonymity. Anoncoin uses I2P darknet, which is low-latency thus not what I am willing to trust with large quantity of money.

What are these Bitcoin holders thinking? They have capital gains and if they are not reporting them to the tax authorities, yet they are not anonymous and it is all being recorded!!!

I will invest in what I can use, which is why I want to use it (for investment and shielding capital from the coming wave of confiscation), i.e. they are inseparable from my perspective.

So thus I haven't looked at other altcoins to evaluate them for investment, only to evaluate if their PoW is CPU-only and to make some analysis of PoS as a concept.

I arrived late to the party Spring of this year, because I was formerly investing in silver and I had ignored Tom Szabo's (of silveraxis.com) email discussions attempting to turn me on to Bitcoin back in 2010, 2011, or when ever it was.

Or maybe my memory is foggy and I am conflating him with Nick Szabo and perhaps someone had emailed his writings.

I also knew rpietila from Finland from my silver investing and he now publicizes that he owns 10,000 bitcoins. He raised my awareness again this past Spring.

I had been trying to think of how to decentralize gold and silver transactions, and eventually gave up around 2010 or 2011. So many emails and posts were flying around my world, but I had sort of shut it all off, after burning out given I entered that education process learning about how the world really works starting about 2005 when I could sense that something was wrong (I guess it really started 9/11/2001 but took a while to really sink in)

As early as 2006, I was thinking about P2P, given I am a programmer and computer scientist.

P.S. I turned against silver and liquidated. Entirely useless and hassles, if you aren't in the liquid markets of USA or say Hong Kong. I think one of my frustrated posts in 2010 or 2011 was "how can you travel with this shit".

Damm, you seem to be even more paranoid than me ... 

What's actually your position on bitcoin/alts? What alts do you find interresting to invest in now?

But the Bitcoin <-> altcoin FX is a mixer, so once they spend on Bitcoin without IP anonymity, then the same points still apply.

They must spend on the altcoin to be safer.

Bitcoin will become known as the government's coin, due to the cartelization of mining and the lack of safe anonymity. It will be the government approved coin. The anonymous altcoin will be the freedom coin.

---

Speculation follows.

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.

Thats very different than proof of stake.

The main problem with proof of stake is the very first person can effectively turn into a centralized entity if there is any premining whatsoever.

I think my concluding point was that if we create an altcoin that does allow for anonymity, it will just end up being used as a mixer for bitcoin.

I am posting so much in this thread because this is rather important to me at the moment, as understanding the correct logic affects some big decisions I need to make pronto.


Include variants of that under my Mancur Olsen's Logic of Collective Action weakness of PoS upthread.


I thought I already explained why upthread. But in case I didn't or wasn't clear and thorough, I will reiterate.

There are two aspects to anonymity. The first is to anonymize your IP, so that no one knows who spent that coin. The second is to use a coin mixer to break links between identities of spends that derive in making change for each transaction in the same coin tree.


Problem is that if everyone is not doing IP anonymity correctly, then the mixers aka tumblrs or laundries (you mentioned a few) are useless, because the degree of uncertainty about who owns a coin that comes out the mixer is proportional to the number of coins that don't reveal their identity on any spend downstream.

Also mixers can be honeypotted, employ timing analysis, etc..

Mixers just don't really provide anonymity and amazing that so many people naively think they can rely on them.

So the point I just made is that IP anonymity needs to be built into the coin.

Also note that Tor, I2P darknet, etc are all low latency mix-nets for anonymizing your IP. Yet these are all subject to timing analysis by an entity which can see the all encrypted packets, e.g. the NSA. Read here at Tails (a bootable OS with Tor) to confirm:

https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/warning/index.en.html#index7h1

Thus there is no adequate IP anonymity available for use with Bitcoin.

If you trust a VPN, you surely can't prove it is not a honeypot.


Agreed. They may have been talking about the potential for Bitcoin to become cartelized in the future, which is a form of future insecurity. If they were implying that PoS is not subject to 50+% attack, my analysis says they are mistaken,  but I really don't want to revisit that because PoS algorithms are very complicated to describe and discuss.

The issue I have with PoS is that a bank that has the most amount of money will have the biggest stake, and we already have that system, and examples of the results.

Why is anonymity being brought up as an argument against bitcoin? Anonymity is a feature, which can simply be built on top of the underlying bitcoin protocol. We already have a few propozals, like zericoin and coinjoin. And if a "cryptocurrency" is built that implements anonymity, but the only use it has it to be used in conjunction with bitcoin to add anonymity, then I wouldn't even call it a separate currency, but simply a Bitcoin plug-in.

Someone also mentioned that there are many coins that are more secure than bitcoin. That is patently false, since to be more secure than bitcoin you have to have a bigger network that secures your system, and more higher-skilled developers that work in your code. There aren't any currencies that have either of those be better than what bitcoin has.

100% consensus requires bickering and war. Competition allows peace and coexistence.

I think we have concluded that There Is No Problem With Altcoins and have refuted the OP.


I see both as imperfect. Chocolate and vanilla. Choose one. Yes I lean towards CPU-only PoW (not Bitcoin's PoW!) as superior in my analysis so far. I am not claiming omniscience. I'll let the market decide.


I have no opinion nor analysis on that at this time. I did some reading on that coin which has that, but have forgotten if I concluded anything.


Bitcoin won't be able to implement most everything without losing current consensus.


CPU-only PoW won't have that problem (if someone ever successfully creates such a coin), as I explained upthread.


Agreed but you need to count all the downstream outputs, and I explained upthread how for example innovation on microhydropower has potential cascading benefits that were not in your calculation.

And the nature of free markets and knowledge creation, is that none of us can be omniscient and see all benefits from innovation.

We can't calculate what we can't see and measure. And I already provided at least one example of cascading benefits that refutes the claim of total waste, and that same innovation wouldn't be incentivized in PoS.

I am not asserting forcing people to expend resources creates innovation. First there is choice here whether to mine or not. It is a free market. Second note that innovation on energy has the potential to create more energy than was consumed by what caused the innovation.


I still don't understand. We have to pay for mining agreed. What does this have to do with PoS vs. PoW?

Blockchains don't have to be bloated. The mini-blockchain design solves that.

I agree.
You might see security issued with PoS that I don't see, but you fail to see that there are security issues with PoW aswell. It's pointless to discuss which one is better on it's own, but a combination beats them both. That's something bitcoin will never be able to implement, even if there were no PoS rewards.

PoS is a way to get a decentralized "central authority" that validates a block chain. PoW will never be decentralized since only the strong have enough hashing power, on PoS everyone can participate and noone can be forced to stop doing it.

That's an akward definition of wasting.

If I have 2 ways to finish a job and one takes 1000 times the resources than the other it is wasteful to go with anything but the efficient method. We don't have unlimited energy so we have to use it efficiently.


Once my funds are in the blockchain burried after a few 100 blocks I don't care about the network beeing safe and non reversable. It's expensive to keep it that way so people loosing the PoS rewards pay for that. Fees alone aren't enough in a late state. People rather loose profits than money, altough it's the very same.

Insurance is guaranteed failure. Fearing competition is fearing life.

You reinforce my thought that a CPU-only PoW algorithm needs to be provably so.

I think PoS isn't secure (explained upthread) and if I am correct, you have similar risks then.

Your points stand and my points stand. Thanks for the discussion. Any way, we can have both. That is the point of this thread. Let the market decide.

Interesting arguments.  

But I and most probably many people want is to have the cryptocurrency that has the least risk of destabilization and manipulation. Mining just brings in too much physical factors that may affect bitcoin's stability. Innovation may even bring bitcoin's demise. Let's say some people developed new mining hardware that is superior to the current ones. Who knows the future right? I fear that it may go to the wrong hands and manipulate the block chain. Or, what if suddenly a big enough corporation starts hoarding mining hardware? Heck, bitcoin's current market cap is nothing to mainstream companies. By innovation, what if a country is suddenly capable of producing unprecedented amounts of energy? They would be capable of manipulating the block chain and do attacks because the costs of trying so is lesser. But if you put that same country with a PoS coin economy, that country may acquire, hoard and then dump coins. However, that would inflate the value of the coins and inject more purchasing power for the free market before the dump. The value would decrease and so it defeats the purpose of hoarding. I'm not aware of any other risks of having a PoS system in an economic perspective.

Walking to work gets you there, but using energy to get you there is much more efficient and leads to more production overall for society. Creating a demand for that use of energy leads to all sorts of new technologies and innovations and causes the economy to expand.

Energy is not a finite resource. The more innovation we do, the more energy we produce.

The only limit of mankind is our knowledge.

Try to lose that Malthusian zero-sum nonsense that mass media has brainwashed into the people.

The elitists want you to believe that nonsense. Refer to the stated goals on Ted Turner's (CNN) Georgia Guidestones.

Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.


No.

Waste is where there is no return. Efficiency is output divided by input.


Debasement should continue forever. It is good for economics and the middle class. I've already had that debate in the Mini-blockchain thread. Refer to it there if you want to refute it. I don't want to repeat that debate again here in this thread. Getting too far off topic.


PoS has a huge cost in laziness and lost innovation.

You are valuing hardware (energy) more than knowledge! Big mistake!


Correct, there is wealth destruction. But I doubt you see why.

First of all, the laborers (knowledge workers) spend a higher percent of their income and gains and savings, thus they fall behind the rich. Yet the rich can't innovate, because innovation requires small capital and thus fitness. The rich can only replicate. Mass production is coming to an end with the 3D printer.

Secondly, it encourages laziness, which is the epitome of capital destruction. Remember capital is not money, money is a claim on future knowledge production. If you stop producing knowledge, then the capital (the value of the money) declines w.r.t. to knowledge that has utility. The utility of the money declines.


Don't conflate that with the motivation the system has on the participants.


You could try to rewrite this last paragraph so I can understand your point.

Securing the network with a technology that has to use lot's of electricity insead of POS that doesn't require any is a good example of wasting resources. It isn't innovative to use a expensive way to do it if you already knew a better one to do it for free.

Your argument is invalid, since it basically says it's impossible to waste resources at all.
Remember we are talking about securing the network, not distributing new coins to anyone willing to work for it. Once blockrewards decline POW won't do that anymore and it's 100% wasteful while POS doesn't cost anything at all.


When looking at POS you seem to miss the point that there is no new wealth generation. If we would add a zero to every dollar bill, bank account,wages, etc nothing would change. Noone would be richer or poorer, in fact nothing changes. Even a 10-fold wouldn't make a difference, so 1% per year isn't even worth mentioning in term of costs.

People sending funds loose fees and interrest, but it's these people that need a safe and non reverseable network. Someone holding a wallet doesn't need that once it's in the blockchain. Why should someone else or all pay for them the efford to do the work.

See upthread in my first post why I expect CPU-only PoW to be dominated by hobbiests running their PC at night while they sleep. The serious miners will likely have to go microhydropower. It is not the level of demand, yet that all the serious demand goes to some new technology that once the locals see it applied, can spread like wildfire and be applied to powering local communities.

I want to send westerners out into the hinterlands. Ready to live in Machu Picchu?

P.S. This benefit can't come from Bitcoin as mining will be dominated by corporations behemoths, due to the ever expanding blockchain and the ASICs economy-of-scale.