Topic: What is the right and fair way to stop Mike Hearn? - page 7. (Read 14093 times)

bitcoin is a voting system. Here are the two sections of the bitcoin paper where the word vote appears. Its clear now in how far the scheme is limited: there is no obvious mechanism to achieve consensus on new rules.

But it's not the same is it. People are getting very excited about distributed voting systems based on bitcoin-style ideas, but it doesn't transfer. Blockchains can create verifiably unique items in the digital world, but they can't reliably correlate real-world things with those items. This is the same complaint I have about ideas of pegging non-blockchain assets to the blockchain. I don't see how it really works.
I have often mused that actually the blockchain creates, far from "virtual" objects, objects which are actually far more real than physical ones.

The main substance of your argument is that optional identity verification is acceptable, as long as it stays optional. I agree. I do think, however, that the reach for the passport option comes out of believing that there ought to be *some* solution to the identification of individuals, and I tend to think there will never be a good solution, as long as we preclude North Korean (or even Chinese) style tyranny.

Biometrics are another idea along the same lines of course. I would like not to use either. But then I'm one of those people that doesn't use Facebook

turns out producing pieces of paper / objects that have the property of not being copy-able is extremely hard. incidentally there is the overlap with proof of work in producing numbers which are not copy-able, i.e. producing artificial scarcity. there are better ways to do this, without using governments. if there would be such a mechanism you could also replace economic majority with a better system. governments exist because of centralization of force, control and money. the two are completely in sync.

I think you're almost on to something. Could you possibly expand upon what you're thinking, and any solutions?

It's even simpler than that, we only want to prevent anyone from spamming us with "guys", be they good or bad.
The basic idea is, someone who pretends to be a lot of random guys is probably up to no good.

Again, it's simpler than that, it's just a hand wave saying "hey, I do have (exclusive) access to a random, unique piece of paper". It doesn't qualify you as being okay.

Allow me to make a slight correction which may or may not impact your thesis:  The idea is not to identify a 'good guy'.  It's more to identify a 'same guy'.

After thinking this through I believe it's a very, very clever idea.

Let's recap the problem: we want to identify the "good guys" in our network but without centralized authority. This is especially useful for lightweight/SPV clients to trust a transaction has occurred before confirmations.

Before I comment on the passport idea let me put forth my own, which is a sort of distributed trusted node model. As Bitcoin grows we can expect higher profile "good guys" to emerge. Examples might be blockchain.info, MtGox, Bitcoin Foundation, and more recently even Overstock.com (CEO is anti-central bank). This should only increase not decrease and wallets can store/update the IP addresses of such entities once in a while (they shouldn't change often). Now in situations where a connection to the "real network" is questionable direct IP address links to trustworthy nodes are available, probably numerous ones.

I think it's better though to have more than one trust model. I think Mike's other ideas can be added. Start with the proof of sacrifice nodes which incur a cost. While this isn't ideal since we want nodes to be cheap many people may not care about some cost. So I think that can be added into the mix.

Last is the controversial passport idea. I can understand the knee-jerk reaction to anything allying itself with government (I recoiled initially too), but people should look deeper. There was a US senator who was dismayed many American youths saw Edward Snowden as "some kind of Jason Bourne". I had to smile at his consternation that high-tech defiance of the state could be seen as cool. This reminds me of that. If people see themselves as Bourne maybe they'll warm to this idea better. Remember, this isn't anything to do with transaction verification power and the integrity of miners. It's only a hand wave to say hey I'm okay if you want to listen to me. If some users opt to add passport verification to their node, and this happens in different countries, and clients see thousands of such nodes then I don't see a risk of granting govts any undue weapon/advantage; especially when merged with the two other ideas mentioned. These things taken together can give wallets a great resource for determining network authenticity.

Since this is a Mike-gripe thread I may as well briefly weigh in on his other proposals:

Re: CAs for the payment protocol - I think it's fine. Remember it's only a tool to help users decide if what's on their screen is  trustworthy. If in doubt they can pick up a phone or use PGP etc. in addition before sending the transaction.

Re: red/black lists for coins - No. Sorry, Mike, I think you're wrong on that one. While I understand the motivation to thwart bad guys external crime fighting methods must suffice. Coins remaining fungible is paramount.

Mio dio...

Who's Alberto?

 

The cryptographic ZNP assertion could be done by any device that has a non-zero cost and allows generation of digital signatures - e.g. SSL certs, or Oyster Cards, or even EMV credit cards.

This thread has gone totally out of hand - Mike was not suggesting that you will need a passport to use Bitcoin, just that you can prevent certain types of attacks that require large numbers of malicious nodes by attaching a non-bitcoin cost to the instantiation of each node.

Will

Requiring passports is one step. Can you explain how it should be seen otherwise? What if the next core revision prevents trust of passports from Gabon, or Suriname, or Venezuela? The centralisation and surveillance may not be built in now, but unless we make distinct steps to prevent it ever creeping in, it will always be possible for someone to add it in later.

The big economies will hold all the votes, the small ones will have no say. This is exactly counter to the core ideologies of bitcoin.

And Alberto 'Bitcoin has nothing to do with personal banking' - what are you smoking?

I don't know where you're getting this from. Nobody has suggested enforcing US law in Bitcoin.

What is necessary is to reduce or eliminate the ability of any developer, no matter who they are, to do evil.

This is necessary because some of the developers actually want to do evil, and some of them might be pressured or forced into doing it regardless of what they want.

anti-scam, bitcoin is much larger than any one government, even the US government. if you read the quotes I have provided, from those who made bitcoin possible, their ideals were much the opposite. so even if I would accept the assumption that some "laws" are necessary, the question is: laws of what country? there are roughly 200 nations on this planet earth. its not necessary that bitcoin works with US law makers or law enforcement, simply because it can exist outside the United States.

 

WOW.

Much delusion!

DOGE is going to save you, brother.

Would you rather have Gavin lie to you and tell you that we're living in a libertarian fairy tale where everyone is a rugged individualist committed to the principles of decentralization? I don't think he "argued" anything there. He simply gave a realistic assessment of the situation. The community searched for and successfully found solutions (stealth addresses, coinjoin) in response. It sounds to me like he did his job.

well, this passport nonsense clearly is not going to go anywhere, but these tendencies seem to be increasing quite strongly. Gavin argued this:

For many of us this is a religion. It's something we hoped on and worked for more then 10 years. (Older active cypherpunks even longer.) We are not allowing corrupted and compromised developers to take this innovation Satoshi gave us, not them, to be taken away.

Satoshi did it for the people in the world, devs do it just for their income.  

No Bitcoin core developer specifically promoted blacklisting, and the whole idea seems to be mostly dead, especially in light of stealth addresses/coinjoin/zerocoin. You are worried about an issue that never really was one.


There are plenty of free cert providers. But why shouldn't they pay? Identity verification doesn't happen for free and if you can't pay for a cert then how can I possibly trust you to actually deliver a product? If you don't like it then just use the PGP implementation that will assuredly pop up alongside it.


What's wrong with that? Passports are a reasonably scarce resource for your average person, providing good anti-sybil properties, and requiring only zero-knowledge proofs of their possession has little privacy impact. It would hardly be required either. It would simply be a tool for users of a particular Bitcoin implementation to make a more diverse selection of nodes. You wouldn't even have to use it.

You're all hysteria and no imagination.

Who helped creating and created such centralized system which bitcoin is. So that now it must be fixed by people like Mike, who want to make it more decentralized.