Bitcoin Forum

http://www.scribd.com/doc/155504772/Bitcoin-2-Freedom-of-Transaction (http://www.scribd.com/doc/155504772/Bitcoin-2-Freedom-of-Transaction)
They want to evolve BTC in the right direction, do they?

Not that I completely understand their ideas, but there are some points that I do like:

-Enable users to personally ostracize miners that behave contrary to their wishes. It gives us some power over miners.
-KYC-resistance, by zerocoin mix build in the protocol.
-Fork which won't increase total supply of coins and allows you migrate your BTC to BTC2
-Prevent feature creep: "Do not add new features unless they are critical for the existence of the system". All "nice to have" features should be moved to some overlay currencies.

What I don't like:
-Confiscation of lost/sleeping coins with lottery redistribution. IMO, it won't resolve the lost coin problem, but will make yours BTCs less yours: if you don't move them frequently, you lose them.

Well, there is some discussion: at http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-activists-suggest-hard-fork-to-bitcoin-to-keep-it-anonymous-and-regulation-free/, there are comments from Jeff Garzik himself. He said that:

a) It’s another altcoin ... The marketing of most altcoins is inevitably Bitcoin-critical, as they want to distinguish themselves from the main competitor.
So, they criticize bitcoin just to promote their altcoin?
Sorry Mr. Garzik, but it is just not true. They'are not planning any altcoins development, they just concerned with bitcoin going Pay-Pal way. Are you?
 
b) Wouldn’t it be wonderful if major corporations or governments published completely open, transparent, auditable, cryptographically proven accounting? Bitcoin technology enables that.

So, you'll let Big Brother spy on us, but we can spy on him as well. Do you really think it's good tradeoff?  :o
  
I had a poll recently on general subforum ("https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=256428.msg2738253#msg2738253").
"How much coin anonimity you want".
72% voted for bitcoin become absolutely anonymous.

Sorry guys, but you're not going to get it. Bitcoin dev team prefers bitcoin to become "tax-friendly" money.

Nobody's discussing it because this proposal needs a lot more work. It's half-baked, to say the least:

1. Adding a constant cost to becoming a miner as a means of tying identities to each miner. This actually has the reverse incentive effect than what is intended. A small miner with only a low percentage of total hashing power, needs to essentially throw away some/lots of hashing power to make an identity before they can start mining. ASICMINER can absorb the cost of making new identities much more easily, and can just craft a bunch of them to switch between at will. Same goes for pools. So their 'decentralization incentive' incentivizes centralization.

2. A block size that's already too small for bitcoin + maximum txout age = Effective upper limit on number of addresses (because every address needs to be able to make one transaction a year at a minum). Oh and it pushes users off the blockchain to use less secure/anonymous solutions to avoid the ever rising fees (defeating the point of the zerocoin addition).

3. Forced zerocoin? I assume they found some significant performance increases to it to make that work. Not that it'll matter because all the users will be shifted over to using shared web wallets to avoid needing to deal with the hassle of *seeing their funds frozen for 24 hours* based on magic calculations (you receive highly scored coins and use them in a purchase? Can't use the change for 24hrs). Bitcoin is already challenging to use for non-techies, this makes it even worse. Oh and it decreases fungibility.

This isn't a serious suggestion to improve Bitcoin. It's a grab-bag of plausible sounding ideas, thrown together without any serious thought.

EDIT:
Oh and it relies on mempool consistency to make miner ostracism work. That's eminently attackable. (And it's voluntary, not enforceable by full nodes, so members of a miners' cartel could choose to not enforce the rule against each other).

Sorry, Mr. Troll, but it is indeed true.  Changing the network rules is to make something that is not-bitcoin.  Another name for not-bitcoin, in general, is altcoin.

Jeff isn't always right, but if you ever find yourself about to take the opposite side of a debate from him, you should really sit down and think for a while to make sure you didn't miss anything.


I dare you to find one quote from a core dev that backs up your claim that they want to change bitcoin to become "tax-friendly".  Note that I'm familiar with a variety of quotes that mean nothing of the sort, but are usually twisted inside the minds of the lunatic fringe.

This is the wrong direction. They want to take a currency and change it to a black market. There are plenty of black markets; Bitcoin is not one of them.

Transactions should be open and comply with all local laws. Taxes should be paid, because Bitcoin is a currency. Bitcoin is not a tool to avoid the law.

They can go ahead and start Bitcoin2 if they like. Maybe they'll get Silk Road to join them. But most Bitcoin users want a global, decentralized currency, not a tax haven.

This whitepaper is crap

There are two parts in the paper: concerns and suggested solutions. If the solutions are wrong, but the concerns are valid, we have to look for other solutions, rather than dissmiss the whole thing.

Given that I'm one of the designers of the payment protocol, I'll weigh in here.

The payment protocol is an optional way to encode the identity of a merchant (really, receiver of payment) into a payment request, along with various other bits of data. This has a variety of benefits: better security, and because of how the payment request is structured internally (it's not just an address) better privacy on the block chain too.

It's important to stress that the identity data doesn't go into the block chain. Only you have it.

Also important - it verifies the receiver of the money, not the sender. You already know the identity of who you are paying, even today! Yes, even Silk Road users know an identity of who they are paying (it's just an identity separate from a meatspace arrestable identity). And I'm willing to bet most users already keep ad-hoc notes on which transactions they make paid for what. The problem is that the computer doesn't know any of this. That opens up the potential for confusion attacks, especially if you have malware on your computer. That's the primary motivation for the payment protocol, actually - security when you have a Trezor.

The linked paper contains a number of bogus assertions.

The first one is that it's impossible to issue receipts with Bitcoin, currently. Wrong. Businesses issue receipts for cash transactions, do they not? So obviously they can issue receipts for any kind of transaction (and they do).

The second one is that the signed payment request goes into the blockchain. Wrong.

The third one is that the release of Bitcoin 0.9 will somehow change what merchants are legally required to do, by adding the payment requests feature. Wrong. If merchants are required to issue receipts in a jurisdiction today, then saying "my software makes it inconvenient so I don't do it" is not going to impress a judge.

In practice nearly all merchants do issue receipts or order confirmations of various kinds, anyway, just because it is common sense. If there's a dispute how else can a buyer prove they purchased something?

So finally the paper says: "Of course, the reason for the introduction of Bitcoin Payment Messages and Transaction Metadata given by Gavin Andresen is a different one"

Yes, "of course" it is different to what the paper alleges .... because the authors of the paper have a garbled understanding of what's happening.

tl;dr as others have already noted, this "paper" has about the same value as a rambling forum post, and could easily have been one.

Why people get so stressed about Bitcoin2 proposal? No one can force anybody to start using it. And if many people would want to use it, it's their choice. You may feel free to join them or keep hashing good-ol Bitcoin. We have tons of altcoins around and none of them (including Bitcoin itself) is forced upon anybody.

I myself don't care about Bitcoin2 and some of their ideas can be implemented on top of Bitcoin 1 just fine.

What if the law said it's now illegal to fund, say, Wikileaks?

What if you need to send money to Edward Snowdon but the government declares that you shouldn't as he's an enemy of the state?

Would you want Bitcoin to be able to do that?

Bitcoin is always able to do that. But if the law says so, and a transaction is possible to track, then doing it is illegal and should not be done.

Look, I'm all for less government regulation. I'm a libertarian politically, and I oppose any financial barriers. But Bitcoin is not for circumventing regulation. It's for transacting money across the globe quickly and inexpensively. I oppose any Bitcoin2 project because it tries to do more than that. Anything that tries to accomplish too much will end up accomplishing nothing.

Thanks to everybody for the explanations. My paranoia is much better now :)  Yes, and my apologies to the bitcoin dev team.


If you have some data to back this statement, can you share it with us?
All I have is result of a poll on this forum and it shows that 70% want completely anonymous coins. That is tax haven. :)

To me, it's not about hiding my transactions from the government; it's about making sure my transactions aren't obviously exposed to everyone in the world. I don't want everyone I've ever interacted with financially to be able to too easily piece together every transaction I've ever done.


That's good to hear. I want nice features, but I don't want anything more than necessary publicly set in the blockchain forever.

Please go an look at the US constitution regarding legal tender.
EVEN the law makers don't care about the constitutional-law.

And now you come and tell us you are an "libertarian".  ??? 
You are not.

If you where you would let people decide for them self what is "legal" and what is not.

Thas your opinion, in my mind its a tool for resisting govermant controls (inflation, force ...)


You are allways free to use what you want. That is liberty!

I am a law-abiding libertarian. Yes, they exist. I promote libertarianism, vote for libertarian policies, etc. But I do not tarnish libertarians' image by making it seem like they are all criminals.

I don't agree with the law. I believe this stuff is morally unacceptable. However, I abide by the law.

I don't know about you, but I find having myself put in jail or even subject to procedural-torture by a civil or administrative court pretty 'morally unacceptable'.

Laws I disagree with ought to be fought but there are many ways to do so, all of which have their trade-offs.  But any of that fighting serves an ultimate purpose: providing a good life for myself and others... Being in legal trouble isn't very compatible with that goal and rationalists win (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationality_is_systematized_winning).  That isn't to say that there aren't cases where civil disobedience with likely imprisonment isn't justified, but it's certainly not the first tool we should turn to.

As far as the paper goes.  It was linked on IRC the other day... I haven't commented on it because its ... kinda meh all around.  There are some reasonable arguments in it, and some pretty unreasonable ones too and I thought they were obvious enough that it didn't demand much commentary.

as long as I agree with the keep it simple idea, the others like "sliding blockchain with fixed block sizes, the redistribution of dead coins with an unforgeable lottery, enforced mixing, and miner ostracism" - this is some crazy shit :)
why would any sane person want to e.g. redistribute dead coins?
how would he even know if they are actually dead?
so yeah, keep it simple. and the bitcoin core - the blockchain parser - should have been a separate app long ago. no wallet, no mining just API to allow it. untouchable - unless like once a year, upon voting.
but it wont be as such - not for a long time. instead all the shit satoshi client does, will be mangled together with the chain parsing protocol.

Its so obvious that you have not read the paper. Please go and do your homework before "discussing" this topic in which you are not informed.


There is no voting about feature creep ! But its coming slowly ... and there is no voting at all! But we can and we will vote with our values in BTC. We will be able to vote for or against any hardfork! Just let us vote and the people will decide what suites them best in their opinion. That is liberty at its best.

Mining is the voting - everyone knows that.

And as for the homework I should supposedly do: what is so obvious that I don't know?

I'd welcome some paper though, that would allow some kind of coin mixing services, so one could launder his coins, without using a third party, but only a widely accepted protocol.
But I guess that will have to be done one day together with off chain transactions.
Obviously this system is not going to process 100tx/sec - if anyone believes that, he must be insane :)

This bitcoin2 paper didn't do much more for that topic than say "implement zerocoin", which currently has major performance issues. If its performance was much better, I'd love to see it implemented within Bitcoin itself. As it is, maybe some innovative altcoin will take it up, with its current performance.

That's why the miner ostracism was suggested. To give bitcoin users some leverage on miners, to let them affect the future of bitcoin. Currently the only leverage available for bitcoin users is rambling on forums  :-\

The paper contains a few points worth of discussion, but mostly wrong assumptions (payment requests) and is probably impossible to implement. The dead coin handling is completely unnecessary, running against their own goal of keeping superfluous stuff out. Expensive miner keys could lead to even more miner centralization, or less mining and hence less network security.

And it looks like they dilute the value of bitcoins. From the moment their fork starts there are block rewards in both forks, and if bitcoin1 keeps running long enough and everyone moves over their coins to v2, v2 can in theory end up with about 30.000.000 BTC2.

The sane parts boil down to zerocoin, but still don't explain how this will solve KYC requirements at exchanges.

Is it technically possible to have a fork without increasing of total coin amount? Say, by disabling mining in v2 (or v1) and by allowing a user to switch their coin between branches. Then, after several such forks, everyone will have the brand of coins he personally prefers. There would be some mainstream coins, some niche coins, all flavors of coins, and none of them would lose value. Competion between branches (aka altcoins) will work not by them losing value, but by decreasing their amount. Say, if 20% of bitcoin users would like bitcon to become tax-coins and 70% to become anon-coins, so be it. 20% of coins will be tax-coins and 70% - anon-coins. But each of them would still cost 1M$ apiece ;D  Wouldn't it be beautiful?

This kills the coin.

Sorry, could you elaborate?

OK, if it won't work, then by making reward proportional to total amount of this brand of coins. Then mirers will distribute proportionally too. Say, if 20% of coins are tax-coins and 70% are anon-coins, then reward for tax-coin mining would be 5 coins and for anon-coins would be 17.5 coins. So 20% of miners would mine for tax-coins and 70% for anon-coins. But the total amount of coins and their value won't be affected by such a branch.

I'm not an expert, and I'm not claiming it is the way. I'm just asking: is there a way?

Why don't you just use Bitcoin? You can already make it almost anonymous.

Yes, currently anonimity doesn't matter much. Bitcoin is too small for regulators to really care. But with the bitcoin growth it will change. And then "almost anonymous" will be like a bullet that almost missed  :-\

And the anonimity is not the only point of disagreement. Different people want bitcoin to be different things and want it to evolve to different directions. They will never agree and splits are inevitable, early or late. That's why it is so important to find a way to a "peaceful divorce", to a fork that won't harm bitcoin's value.

By the way, I'm still interested in getting an answer to my question.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262564.msg2810869#msg2810869

From bitcoin.org. No mention of "tax haven" there.

tldr version:

Small block sizes so that only the friends of the miners get to have their transactions included in the blockchain. Everybody else has to go through regulatable gatekeeers.

Demurrage, a.k.a, your coins get stolen from you if you don't use it in a way the designers of Bitcoin 2 like

A cartel decides who can mine and who can't mine.

"We know that nobody sane will want to stay in this system once they figure out how it works, so we're going to force you to destroy your Bitcoin 1 coins first so there's no going back."

But there is. It's included in "much more"  ;D

And if you want something more representative than opinion of one person that wrote the text you've quoted, look at the one I've already quoted to you. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=256428.0
Out of 54 person only nine want bitcoin to be tax-friendly, while 39 want it be totally anonymous. Sure, you can argue that they reasons for anonimity are not tax-related. But the results will be the same: if people can not pay taxes, they will not pay them. The history of intellectual property shows it clearly.

We don't know if something like ZeroCoin is feasible. We should find out.

I think there are two camps:
1) Pro anonymity - Deploy something like ZeroCoin. The US government will monitor people as much as possible using their vast resources. Sometimes they will be successful. At least we'll have better anonymity.
2) Pro "transparency" - Don't deploy anything like ZeroCoin. The persecuted will have to make do with some parallel anonymity system, while the government can still see every nearly anonymous thing people do. The government will use its resources to hide its activities as much as possible.

I think "transparency" is a misguided pipe-dream. The current situation favors the government, and so we should try to implement something like ZeroCoin to give the persecuted more power. Ostracize the governments, not the persecuted.

Not really. Currently the only leverage available for bitcoin users is buying a mining hardware - which has been all along the key design idea behind bitcoin's security, and thus it's value.

It's not only the US government that can monitor the public blockchain. It bothers me that anyone I interact with financially can do some easy rough analysis to trace many of my transactions.