Bitcoin Forum

MIT ChainAnchor - Bribing Miners to Regulate Bitcoin

Based on the information I have available to me, it appears that the MIT ChainAnchor Project is in part an attempt to get Bitcoin users to register their real world identities and associate their transactions with those identities. Initially this would be on an opt-in basis, however it appears that ChainAnchor has a longer-term plan to bribe and coerce miners into only mining transactions from registered users, eventually prohibiting non-registered users entirely.

https://petertodd.org/2016/mit-chainanchor-bribing-miners-to-regulate-bitcoin

Bastards!!!
So another attempt to undermine Bitcoin right. >:(
Wow! They're really scared and pissed.
Would really like to know who are these prominent Bitcoin members who play a wrong game with us, the whole community!!

If they pulled this off they would only destroy bitcoin, leading to other cryptos taking over in popularity and usage.

I wouldn't worry Denker, it's more cat and mouse stuff. Any miner that complies will end up mining nothing; novel cryptography (ZKP or SNARKS or something similar) can almost certainly be implemented in a way where public keys cannot be read directly, and so neither the user nor the miner would posses the information needed to make "ideas" like this work. Then, it's yet another case of "your move, dickhead"

If this becomes reality, I'd be switching to another coin immediately, I wonder if something like this will be mandatory in the future when using Bitcoin.
I can perfectly imagine the government requiring you to first register to be able to use Bitcoin.

If this is true than we just have to nuke this out of the solar system. What the hell is wrong with MIT? Just build your own blockchain and good luck.


I seriously don't know who would fall for this to begin with.


I'm glad he did :D


::)

Just ignore ChainAnchor mined blocks. Let the blockchain fork.

good luck to map quadrimillion adresses ...  ::) and follow the tracks of erased traces in the exchange.

Sounds like a significant leak, grats on Peter Todd for this relase.

While you are quite correct with the available workarounds, we need to also send a strong message to any person, state or business that this behavior should not be tolerated .

These people have a lot of explaining to do and should be thoroughly ashamed-

Thomas Hardjono
MIT Internet Trust Consortium
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Email: hardjono@mit.edu

Ned Smith
Intel Corporation
MS:JF1-255, 2111 NE 25th Ave
Hillsboro, OR 97124
Email: ned.smith@intel.com

Alex (Sandy) Pentland
MIT Media Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Email: sandy@media.mit.edu

Well, as long as the miners remember that the money from this isn't as good as the money over the long term, I doubt we'll start seeing people start to switch over.

Hell, I don't think any of the community will switch over, they'll opt to abandon the service altogether.

Does that mean Satoshi's 1M BTC will become useless if he never ever reveal his identity?

Interesting analogy. But I don't think it is relevant to the case now.
I was telling you guys that the best way to regulate bitcoin will be through implementation of mining licenses and/or regulation of mining hardware.
It is the most efficient way to subjugate bitcoiners. And this scenario is now happening? Call me a prophet.

Sure you are right.
But it still pisses me off that we have people in our community, prominent members as Peter said, that give a shit about privacy and freedom.
The question I ask myself is, do these guys had been like that from the beginning? That would mean they would be something like a trojan horse. Or do they became weak, open for a bribe and other promises, lost their ideals for whatever reason?

I assume this will be even easier to do with Lightning Network, even if they cannot force/bribe miners to do this they surely can do it for companies running Lightning Network and the small number and expensive on-chain transactions will be irrelevant, correct?

I'm not sure about that, to my mind it would be the opposite: the big miners are easy to identify due to the significant hardware requirements (and everything that hardware itself requires...), but being a high throughput Lightning channel requires no more hardware than is needed to run a Bitcoin node today. How can the Lightning channel owners be identified if the channels are decentralised, self-organising, and the owner obscures their IP?

Because it requires a shit load of bitcoins, I assume only exchanges will run such channels, at least the relevant ones.

What's the biggest percentage of the network do you think a single miner has? 5%?

Well, that assumes the exchanges are the biggest holders, but remember the blockchain tells us that the majority of Bitcoins are not being traded or transferred at all. My bets would be that wealthy early adopters or some of the big DN marketplaces would be equal or bigger players than the exchanges, and all this assumes that Lightning channels will elicit a centralising phenomenon, which is not necessarily so. The political environment (of which your scenario is only one possible example) will partly determine the way in which these Lightning channels become arrayed, the underlying design doesn't necessarily force any particular outcome.


I think it's higher, probably closer to 15% or 20%

Doesn't make it better, still middle man, still centralized.


I find that hard to believe, is there anything to support that?

To: State of Rhode Island
From: Anon
Subject: Son, I Am Disappoint.


So... send them strongly-worded emails?

and how they can do it for all those that are using bitcoin? it's not even possible

they basically need to force the first stage of the opt-in..

IP addresses are already regulated

Scam written all over it

this is and an answer for everyone that talk about a problem with chinese miners. I think bitcoin mining in usa is far more dangerous than any other part of the world. We all know that USA especially their agents act in the shadows and manipulate everything that cant control.

and i think this is a ridiculous attemp with no luck atm.

Didn't anyone follow the link (https://petertodd.org/assets/2016-04-21/MIT-ChainAnchor-DRAFT.pdf (https://petertodd.org/assets/2016-04-21/MIT-ChainAnchor-DRAFT.pdf)) to the MIT paper that Todd himself supplied? Suffice it to say, MIT does not propose a method of "bribing" bitcoin miners. The project is exactly about what it says it is about in the paper's title: "Anonymous Identities for Permissioned Blockchains". I'm a true-blue Bitcoin believer and user since 2011 and think the idea contained in the paper is a very interesting and potentially useful one. There is nothing in it to be afraid of.

An MIT rep involved in the project has posted a badly needed (if far too polite) corrective, at:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4foatp/mit_chainanchor_bribing_miners_to_regulate_bitcoin/d2bs0tj

I must say that reading the comments here and on Reddit has been a disheartening experience. I'm no techie but I knew immediately that Todd was at worst a liar and provocateur and at best an ignorant and panic-stricken simpleton.  In either case, he set off a herd-panic because everyone simply took him at his word, like the townsfolk in the James Thurber story who ran screaming because the dam had broken. Only later did they remember that there was no dam. The next day, nobody talked about it.

As for Todd, April 1 is over. He should be banned permanently from Reddit. There is no excuse for what he wrote.

So like a cop at the scene of an accident, I will say: Move along, folks. It's all over. There's nothing to see here. Move along. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.

Thanks for pointing it out BruceSwanson.

Quoting answer here for the lazy. :)

It is a scam, it's a bunch of techies from MIT thinking they can make a bunch of money by bribing people to work for them.

I would give them two moments of though if I was a miner, and I would ignore their attempts at bribery.

From a paper titled: "Anonymous Identities for Permissioned Blockchains."
P.S. And stop peeking through the blinds, that orange tabby isn't a government spy.

I think it is their right to do so, so if anyone still want to use their services then the person must accept the risk that would be incurred in the future. Because of all the things that would make the company famous/not is its users. If you want all people not using their services then you can tell it to those users who already participated.