Bitcoin Forum

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/05/03/rYV9H.jpeg
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1786170805728039127

Edwards Snowden just made a tweet with final warning for everyone that privacy for Bitcoin is needed on protocol level.
I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.
Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this  :P
The clock is ticking...

It wouldn't be surprising. Aside from potentially hindering Bitcoin adaption, privacy feature usually leads to higher TX size or longer verification time. In addition, gmaxwell propose Confidental Transaction back on 2015[1], but it was never added into Bitcoin protocol and added into Monero protocol (as part of RingCT) on 2017.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.0)

Is privacy good for Bitcoin?

I am skeptical that Bitcoin only give us completely control of our bitcoins but with privacy, only pseudoprivacy, not completely privacy. If turning to complete privacy can cause more anti Bitcoin regulations, I will not want it to happen.

If people want superb privacy, they can go with Monero.

What is Jameson implying by that statement. Does he mean that Bitcoin developers don't see eye to eye on this?

Most likely reason because if they've been seeing eye to eye, this would've been done a long time ago right? I'm not a programmer but I think that with the slew of developers that are updating bitcoin, this would've been done a long time ago right? I don't get the part where this isn't implemented yet though, privacy is what bitcoin advocates right? Then how come they're not yet putting this in yet? What's holding them up besides the speculation that devs aren't seeing eye to eye on this thing.

I'm definitely not skilled enough to be called a 'developer', but I think you're just totally underestimating how difficult it is to achieve this without potentially fucking up the entire protocol. Bitcoin is already gigantic enough that we can't afford to move fast and try to just push upgrades under the sun.




He's implying that things look far more difficult and complicated than most people think.

Is it possible some commented that Monerro is better than Bitcoin in the context in question?

I will save the topic of Confidential Transactions, Content privacy for Bitcoin transactions (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.msg11572844#msg11572844) that are posted by gmaxwell for me to read because the contents of the topic are very long and need a quiet atmosphere for me to try to absorb slowly in the learning process of more technical things.

In the topic of confidential transactions, he mentioned Borromean Ringsig (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1077994.msg11512238#msg11512238). Really, it is very important for me to learn.

bitcoin is a public ledger on purpose so the network can audit that the value transfer is real to avoid new/fake/unruled currency unit injection and avoid double spending and other financial security failures which can happen in other systems of lax financial security

tricks like gmax/a.backs' CT are not true privacy of the users involved. but just appearance of randomising the amounts within the group of who received what within a small set group, and done in a bloated wasteful data way, thus not really achieving anything, because child transactions upon leaving the set group later reveal how the amounts are then distributed.. it only works if the group stay together and keep spending within the group.. for outsiders to not know who received what(research 'federated transactions'/multisig groups). as soon as they leave the group to take their shares it then undoes all the effort and outsiders then see who took what.
in short it only hides the spend amount of that moment not the end net result of who gets what when they go their own way outside the spending event

the funny part is you dont need anything complicated at protocol level to achieve CT, it can be done at a groups own wallet level of agreeing to use a agreed signing process. without needing all the added bloat

hence why CT didnt go far

---

bitcoin already doesnt request human identifiers to move value.. and if we start messing with the auditability of the value itself where its no longer easy to see value being spent did originate from a real blockreward. or which address authorised value transfer it owned.. it then breaks financial security, thus breaking the purpose of bitcoin as a whole.
id rather have sound money, not mumbled deaf money

Bitcoin does not have to be completely anonymous. I know that solutions have been proposed before, but I think the anonymity of Bitcoin is enough. If someone wants to hide, they can use mixers and Monero. But I believe that all anonymous tokens will be banned by the authorities.
I understand that anonymity is one of the rules of cryptocurrencies, but personally I do not use Monero and I think that I have no reason to hide, because I do not do anything forbidden. And if Bitcoin also becomes anonymous, then there is a chance that regulators will make even more problems for Bitcoin.
It is also likely that the situation with the already busy Bitcoin network will become even worse than it used to be in the days of Ordinals.

That is simply impossible because Bitcoin was not designed that way. If we add privacy features into the existing protocol (eg. though some weird soft fork) that won't fix anything because opt-in privacy is not improving the whole system.

The alternative is a hard fork that fundamentally changes a lot of things about the Bitcoin protocol. Why break what is already working fine and risk the whole system crumbling down? Most importantly why do it when something like Monero already exists?

A better solution is to work on privacy improving techniques that are more decentralized and get people to use them more. But solutions that are built on top of Bitcoin (like decentralized CoinJoin). It would still be opt-in and won't improve the whole system but at the same time it won't require any kind of fork and change in the protocol that could break things.

Turning Bitcoin into a privacy coin would lead to a mass government ban of BTC around the world.
The BTC price would most likely go back to the levels before 2015. I'm sure that 90% of the Bitcoin investors don't want this to happen.
They prefer big profits over privacy. I kinda understand them. Bitcoin being a speculative financial asset with a potential future price of 100K USD(or even more) is way more exciting than BTC being a privacy coin used only by shady people and criminals, with a price in the range of 100USD-1000USD. Achieving full privacy in the modern day internet is almost impossible.

Monero is cool and has better privacy, but we need something that is easier to implement in Bitcoin protocol, maybe privacy sidechain would work great for this, without increasing TX size.

No.
Real problem is that certain someone doesn't want to have any privacy on bitcoin, and on anything else that people use for that matter.
There are other coins that have much better privacy, so it's possible to do it and we don't need a century to do that.

It is intentional. "We" want to make it into the system. And, to make it into the system means to have tradeoffs. Trading privacy kind of tradeoffs.

Why not? RingCT in Monero wasn't a thing back in 2016, and it got implemented in January 2017. XMR amounts hidden, boom. More privacy gained. Bitcoin could have optional privacy with softforking to confidential transactions and ring signatures. It's just that we want it to enter the system like a trojan horse, therefore we can't risk with stuff like that.

Honestly, I don't consider Snowden an authority, considering that he's been living in Russia for over a decade now, and got Russian citizenship, awarded personally and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by an internationally recognized war criminal Putin.
I support leaks in the interest of civil society, and I respect privacy, but that's not the same as what Snowden's been up to for a while now.
For me, Bitcoin is private enough, with the pseudonymity and non-custodial wallets requiring no private information.

Ok. Let's assume that the majority of bitcoin users agree with this. Should we all get together and come to the BTC-developers and force them to include privacy in the bitcoin protocol? :)

How should this even be implemented? Including technically.

I would ask a little differently: what has been done (significant) over the past ten years?

If this is done (not done) intentionally, then the issue of trust in the developers arises.

If these developers can't do this, then is there really no replacement for them in the whole world?

In ten years, governments will regulate everything that is possible and not possible, and by that time privacy will already be useless.

This would lead to a mass exodus of miners, which means way less hashrate, therefore it would take ages to mine a new block before the difficulty readjustment. Do we really want that?

Even Satoshi himself hadn't envisioned such a doomsday scenario... he took it for granted that hashrate would always go up long-term.

Truth be told he had envisioned Monero-like features in Bitcoin:

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/05/03/rfrk9.png

And no, it's impossible to implement RingCT with a soft fork, you need a hard fork (good luck trying to convince 90% of the miners):

https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2016/12/17/a-problem-with-ringct/

People don't seek anonymity because they want to do something that is forbidden, many people want mixer for mainly anonymity. Let's say I just don't want my wallet to be noted by other people like where my funds are going even I am not doing anything wrong with those funds. Well, let's say people just want to attain more privacy which is harder with BTC itself, so we need extra tools to make that happen.

And speaking of regularities, they are already after BTC anonymity providing platforms. And they have banned many and will come after many, like sparrow wallet, etc. This is not good, but I do agree with the fact that bad activities on the BTC is bad thing and should be stopped.

If Bitcoin add the same feature like Monero, it has been banned by most of countries because privacy coins was been delisted by many big exchanges. So far Bitcoin is already very good, it give a freedom to choose whether people need to use privacy tools or not.

Edwards Snowden think he's Satoshi Nakamoto, so he has a huge power to make the developers listen to him, while actually he's just an Average Joe in Bitcoin...

Do you think that we can simply just copy-paste some privacy code from some other project and just slap it onto the Bitcoin network's source code then poof we got privacy on the protocol level? Because it definitely doesn't work that way lmao.

You definitely don't understand Bitcoin if you really think Satoshi Nakamoto has such a power/influence over BTC devs.

Hell, BTC Core devs have zero power/influence over miners... miners have the final word, since they possess the hashrate.

THE `'empirical'` administration to support/not approve... ideas to bitcoin, whether to project itself into current or future discussions, is generally always led by external agents,( "x"/OP), there are no "official" spokespersons who lead a talk in reference to the topic in an open manner. Anyway...

Anyone can send an email (bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org), then plan your ideas or improvements, instead of launching a Tweet, x. Snow, you did that formality : )

Sure, go transact in an altcoin that many exchanges do not accept anymore.
Let's say I own bitcoin and want to privately transact using XMR - how do you expect me to do that? Exchange it on DEX and then transact and again exchange it back?
That's going to take some time and be really expensive.
Let's face it, most bitcoin owners will not send their transaction through an altcoin network just for increased privacy.

EUR owners/no-coiners will tell you the same... why should they transact in BTC? Why should they use any kind of exchange (CEX/DEX)?

EUR is more hassle-free.

ps: Kraken still accepts it:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/#Markets

when you learn who moderates all "prefered" technical discussion platforms, you soon learn using the "preferred" method doesnt get people anywhere in any awareness discussions of issues that already exist or proposals that want something outside of the roadmap plan.. , you soon learn it falls on deaf ears if the proposal/critique/observation doesnt match the ideals of the moderator. which is when people end up discussing things outside of the "preferred" method, because it avoids being muted, ejected, banned, deleted from the "preferred" method

lol what the fuck is he going to do.  What "final warning"?  I was and am still in large part on his side for what he did in exposing the governments surveillance tactics and what not, but the more I listen to this guy talk, the more I realize how full of shit he is and how little he actually knows about a lot of these topics that he's constantly harping about.

Not to mention, aren't there other countries he could have chosen over Russia?  I'm not a fan.

I think Bitcoin has the right amount of privacy. Strict privacy at protocol level I think would be a major negative for Bitcoin adoption. Just build better privacy through the ecosystem. I think we've seen with privacy cryptos that they only get a niche use and are generally seen in a negative light. I think its good for privacy cryptos to exist, so when people do feel they need total privacy they can use those altcoins, but if that was implemented on Bitcoin it would basically hamstring it into more niche use cases and adoption.


Maybe in like three or four decades once Bitcoin is already widely adopted and used on a daily basis, to the point where this wouldn't be able to affect adoption, maybe then it would be okay. But not before.

Are you serious?

It will be much harder if the network effect gets even bigger.

TBH, I think Satoshi had the power to enforce a hard fork back in 2009-2010 at the latest, but no more than that.

It's immensely difficult to convince thousands of miners today (15 years later), let alone 30-40 years from now...

ps: Of course there's always the possibility of letting the AI take over control of everything (ASICs, writing BTC code, bug testing etc.), but I think this isn't a good idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator)). ;D

If you have nothing to hide, show us your bank statement from the very beginning to now... unless you're a criminal ? /s


So now regulators decide how Bitcoin will be developed ?


For regular Joe, it has no privacy. You're saying it has the right amount for the right people ? that's not very comforting.


It's already too late to make that big of a change, why you think it will be easier even later ?

From what I see in the comments, people are afraid of changes because that could affect the price. No one wants to upset the REGULATORS!
Please, Just don't call yourself cypherpunks.

And calm down, I'm pretty sure that true privacy enhancing technology will never be added to the Bitcoin nor any substantial changes, so you will be able to run a worthless, non-mining full node on your Pentium 1 CPU and slow Internet connection that contributes nothing to the network security.

If Snowden wasn't paid for shilling ZCash in the early days, he would probably just said it straight like McAfee did - use Monero.

Bitcoin will always be a true hero for bringing our attention to the problem of financial freedom and privacy issues, for showing us the way, but it's outdated - on purpose.

HmmMAA, is that you?

Last time I checked, a Raspberry runs circles around a Pentium 1...

Nope.


Well, that was my point - technology advances, you get faster hardware for the same amount of money, whole infrastructure is upgrading but Bitcoin still can't be updated because it wouldn't run on computers from decade ago..

https://www.popsci.com/technology/fiber-optic-wavelength-record/ (https://www.popsci.com/technology/fiber-optic-wavelength-record/) - I'm glad Bitcoin can run on 56k modem... /s

Have a look at IPv4 and then tell me why can't we ditch it for the superior IPv6. Modern computers/CPUs can easily handle 128-bit numbers, unlike 8-bit CPUs from the early 80s.

ps: I'm not sure if Bitcoin can run on 56k modems, I'd say ADSL is the bare minimum.

Would you enjoy it if Bitcoin became IPv6-only? Why do they keep IPv4 compatibility? Why keep hacks like NAT and UPnP when we can all have a real IP address?

It must stay for compatibility, maybe in future it will be ditched altogether.

/s = sarcasm.



If we could start everything from the beginning, I'm sure many compatibility layers used today wouldn't be required and many things would be designed differently, with encryption and privacy in mind.

But we don't need Bitcoin running for compatibility reasons, it's not a backbone of cryptocurrency.

Thanks for proving my point.

IPv4 will never be ditched (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeUZMtznHog). Same for BTC (block size debates and whatnot).

But we cannot start everything from the beginning. Trillions of dollars would be required to change all the IT infrastructure globally. Perhaps the A(G)I could do it by itself in the distant future, but that opens a whole new can of worms for humanity.

That's why we have monstrous x86-64 CPUs (instead of lean and mean RISC) with tons of legacy baggage (including 16-bit/DOS compatibility), Windows, even WINE (https://www.winehq.org/) on Linux...

I hate to break it to you, but Bitcoin is the TCP/IP of money. It's as ossified as the ancient IPv4.

Imagine if TCP/IP offered default privacy on a protocol level and Tor wasn't even needed... where would the internet be today? Would the elites permit such a global network to exist?

Well, I hate to break it to you as well, but you are simply wrong.

Bitcoin is just another cryptocurrency project, it was first (decentralized) project - that's it.

It's not as important as you may think, it was important in the evolution of other projects - yes.

But it is not required for the cryptocurrency ecosystem to live.

It's late where I live, maybe someone else will answer your other funny assumptions.

Why did you crop the context out of the screenshot? Snowden's post is about Wasabi Wallet's default coordinator:

https://i.ibb.co/CPD1w9Z/firefox-z03-W5-Mnu-UT.png

This isn't as hopeless as he originally thought. Anyone can run a WabiSabi coinjoin coordinator because the code is open source. I run one myself, all you have to do to connect to it is add this line to your Wasabi config file:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1cfw1nf/the_creator_of_gmail_on_the_promise_of_bitcoin_at/

According to your "logic", TCP/IP and the internet aren't needed either for Bitcoin, because we have Blockstream's satellite and radio waves (https://nederob.medium.com/entrepreneur-sends-bitcoin-over-radio-waves-6be75c7af6f5). ::)

Sorry to break it to you, but if Bitcoin goes to zero for whatever reason (nuclear WW3 or whatever), then literally every cryptocurrency will go to zero.

Bitcoin for the cryptocurrency ecosystem is the equivalent of USD for the fiat ecosystem.

Sleep tight! :-*

Bitcoin is not an TCP/IP equivalent, Bitcoin is just a transaction processor.

So if you want to put it in analogy, Intel 8086 made in 1978 was the first processor of the x86 family.
From your logic, we should only use the original instruction set and never add any new instructions or superscalar pipelines and we should stick forever with 16 bits.
Well, go ahead - switch to 8086 from 1978, any other are just forks (shitcpus).

The TCP/IP analogy was made up by uneducated Bitcoin fanboy who tried to imply that Bitcoin is the backbone of cryptocurrency and even if something better comes, Bitcoin will stay relevant.
That everything else will be just a second layer for it, the problem with this logic is that other projects have their own evaluation based on usage and Bitcoin "standard" is just a pipe dream.
You can see it on charts when Bitcoin gets into bear market but some projects don't react at all or even go up.


Seems like you're just a troll, I will not continue discussion with you.

Privacy sidechain? Liquid network might be what you're looking for since they implement Confidental Transaction. For something easier or lighter on Bitcoin on-chain, MimbleWimble or other form of non-interactive CoinJoin probably are better option than CT.


I wouldn't call him "Average Joe in Bitcoin" considering his history and expertise in computer security.

Not only you are a troll, but also technically illiterate.

I mentioned the x86 analogy first (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5495138.msg64028954#msg64028954) to prove a point: you need to have backwards compatibility at all costs to be successful in the IT field.


Intel/AMD stick to the x86 standard, they don't do hard forks (Itanium teached them a lesson), they only do "soft forks" (instruction additions from x86-64 to AVX-512).

So stop bringing strawman arguments and embarrassing yourself!

You don't even remember that way better technologies (Commodore Amiga, SGI, RISC) went the way of dodo.

That's because the IBM PC/x86 standard offered BC and absorbed every single exotic technology (modern Nvidia/AMD GPUs are like Blitter/SGI on steroids).

Guess what? Bitcoin seems to follow the exact same path.

It absorbed NFTs (Ordinals) from ETH and now they're also trying to absorb smart contracts (BitVM) without compromising backwards compatibility (legacy addresses, 1MB blocks etc.)

Is that so hard to understand?

Every individual developer will have their own priorities and things they'd like to see implemented first.  Privacy improvements will naturally be more important to some compared to others.  It's all a question of who is putting the work in and what they can convince others to accept.   

---

In theory, yes.  However, it's impossible to tell how governments and regulators will react.  Plus, it's all largely moot if the majority of users are simply handing their funds and their personally identifiable information over to total strangers in the internet (KYC'd exchanges) to hold onto anyway.  Some people just can't be helped.

Litecoin, which signaled MWEB into activation in May 2022 (https://wenmweb.com/), has always been something of a test environment for features later implemented in Bitcoin. Litecoin was the 1st to have SegWit, a Lightning Network, and now MWEB, which is an optional privacy enhancing feature, used by Grin as default.

Here's a pretty in-depth article (https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/6575f4d54a05d1110e524428/) about how it all works. I honestly don't see why this can't also be integrated with BTC, if miners signaled for it... maybe there's a good reason but I don't know what it is.

If I had to take a guess, I'd say WEF (https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-own-nothing-have-no-privacy-and-life-has-never-been-better-ee2eed62f710) & BlackRock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTDdDgr-xYo) wouldn't like it very much... ::)

I think that Bitcoin still doesn't have privacy built-in at protocol level exactly because a certain type of reaction from governments and regulators is expected.
And, sadly, I think that because of this we will never have privacy built-in... or we will have it only when something will change (greatly) in the ways the governments "see" the things. :(

Bitcoin's future seems to be ETF and KYC. I hope I'm wrong though.

Bitcoin came to light too early, developers are now afraid of devaluation consequences and possible chain splitting.
It would be much easier for the developers to take action if not the high marketcap.

They have bet a lot on LN development and unfortunately it failed at what it promised and it's becoming more centralized everyday.
We now know that privacy must be on L1 and scalability issues of L1 will hinder L2 capabilities.

Trying to build something on current Bitcoin base layer is like building an upside-down pyramid - it won't stand.

Yeah but I don't think anyone truly down with the bitcoin ethos (miners included) has ever really cared what those two entities have to say about... anything.

Eventually - if/when - we get invaded by aliens, a one-world government might not be such a bad idea. We'll really need to get our shit together. Until then we'll continue to argue with anyone who holds different beliefs than we do.

Miners who secured the network in the early days cared about the core values of Bitcoin, current miners (big companies) care only about FIAT profit.
They don't care about ethos.


We wrongly belief that government is needed. I think there would be much less wars / less deaths that are usually fueled by profits,  if there was no government at all.

But they do care about their profitability (which is directly affected by BTC/USD and ETF inflows), don't they? ;)

An informal one-world government already exists and people keep arguing about West vs Russia (controlled opposition). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxJ1wPnkk4)

Be careful what you wish for, because this might turn into a global technocracy/dictatorship (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTDdDgr-xYo) (we got a small taste back in 2020-2021)...

I've been following up this case and I've come to understand that this wasn't the first time Edward Snowden has highlighted vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's privacy measures, over 10 years now he's been repeatedly warning Bitcoin developers that Bitcoin's protocol level has been flawed.

It's really shocking how they've chosen to pay no mind these several warnings over the years even after knowing the essentiality of privacy and anonymity in the Bitcoin community.
Perhaps his last warning now about the clock ticking would awaken their interests on this issue. Or not.

The community needs to understand that, putting privacy measures in place, just like conjoin, confidential transactions as well as other anonymity enhancement techs at Bitcoin's protocol level could be quite a viable option towards maintaining the privacy and security of the Bitcoin network.
The community needs to put some unanimous effort towards addressing this issue in order to make sure that bitcoin remains safe and privacy preserving asset for all of its users.
Let's just hope it doesn't require or take another ten years or decade before this issue is addressed just like Jameson had potentially said.

Well yeah I think it should just be that way since we do have choices with Altcoins like Monero if we wanted a full privacy when it comes to our assets. Maybe devs just live it what it is before or maybe they are cooking something to enhance the privacy of Bitcoin who knows right? Is it because of emerging supercomputers with incredible computing power that might be threat to it, or just the privacy alone? I  just don't understand why he is concerned about Bitcoins privacy wherein privacy coins are available around for many years now. Please enlighten me here since I don't know much about technicalities.

Yawnnn! I see a lot of what the community should do, what developers should do, and how we need to achieve whatever but very little on how many users or investors outside this forum would really want this, would really need this and more importantly would take privacy over risks of huge profits blown away by such move!

Common, some really need to understand that there are Bitcoin lovers of different degrees, some like the maximalist here and some others who only DCA cause it will go up, the moment you present them with an option that they might not need but would mean the end of ETFs and as much of there trading on CEXs you would need to be daydreaming to think they will support it.


Make that 2011 as getting restrictions after being accepted will be one hundred times worse than when it was just a gray area.

Of course we should invest with Bitcoin privacy because many times it is better to invest by watching. Many times we discuss about Bitcoin privacy in public. If Bitcoin is not accepted in our country, then it is never right for us to discuss it in front, so if we consider it from that point of view, if we can invest while maintaining the privacy of Bitcoin, it is very positive from our side. Bitcoin is a digital currency so we must invest patiently while maintaining enough privacy in that investment, we will get success through investment.

If I am being honest, I am quite fine with the amount of privacy there is to bitcoin as of right now however I see that many people are not satisfied and thus they seek out services of other projects.

Now we are seeing that the government seems to be sniping down on privacy projects hence why Snowden must have been alarmed. Is it possible that the government is doing something again to take away the privacy we think we have?

Again, the problem is as stated by @dkbit98, improved privacy means more transaction size and longer verification time so it's not viable to just put it in at a protocol level just because it's a good idea to do. There's Lightning Network which can improve your bitcoin privacy but that's not a good long-term solution. As much as I agree with you that privacy improvement is a top priority for bitcoin, it's not easy especially with such conflicting ideas from other developers, don't lose out of hope though because I'm sure that they'll find a way to do it but I hope that they do it soon.

The reason could be the strong crackdown the US government has on privacy oriented softwares. Bitcoin developers seem cautious of new forks or changes in the network regarding privacy. Read through your shared link, and it's true of the privacy features on Litecoin network. The similarity it has with bitcoin's POW shows how simple it'll be to run similar updates on Bitcoin. But, Litecoin is not as mainstream as Bitcoin, despite its lesser fee features and faster integration of blocks, the government would be very strict on such changes if it came from Bitcoin developers.

A privacy oriented startup Zksnack (https://news.bitcoin.com/zksnacks-to-cease-coinjoin-transactions-affecting-wasabi-trezor-and-btcpay/) has removed their coinjoin features from wallets that utilizes it, such as btcpay, because they want to obey the government. Since they want to keep track of all transactions happening in the Bitcoin network launching a privacy oriented upgrade on bitcoin may get an immediate attention of the government on Bitcoin. Snowden on the other hand, has been reminding Bitcoin developers of this for a long time. He commends projects like Zcash for their privacy features, so I think of him as someone who cherish privacy on cryptocurrency transactions. But, he's been ghosted all through these years by Bitcoin developers. Hence the government happens to be a reason why.

the article is not indepth at all
70% of the article just tells you about bitcoin and litecoin.. then it just says MWEB offers privacy due to confidentiality, and thus uses confidentiality to give privacy
its just a bundles of words shuved together that doesnt go in depth at all

---

so lets explain
you lock funds up and then those coins are grouped together and pegged where it only publishes the group total holdings and a hash.. the hash is for the group to work within as their proof of certain things only they know whereby outsiders cant see the raw data of your transaction because only the hash is published of the sum total.
you personally wont see your transaction on the litecoin network

but when you want to exit the group you then become individual again and now your funds are normal litecoin transactions on the litecoin network

the major downside is your funds are part of a group fund and then when in the group you are then only playing with pegged units that are not audited by the litecoin network

for instance
here is someone locking in ~4.25LTC into the group (of ~29k ltc) of the other network group stash
lock:
https://blockchair.com/litecoin/transaction/dd375cbbc377b7e6d1985a4a201b661ccc8db124811a9efaac6e63edbf646485
combining:
https://blockchair.com/litecoin/transaction/afdfb3e076b9a355fab8057e21585364efe4cee86fb69fcc8d9c0c0787b57ecd

its not making your payments private. its instead you giving away your coin to a group so you can then make silly private IOU pegged notes to each other in a separate network not seen by the litecoin network

the second major downside is you cant make real litecoin transactions to normal litecoin users. you are only making iou pegged notes to other MWEB users in the group

Personally, I don't like optional privacy in altcoins (like LTC or Zcash). Only 10% of ZEC's transactions use shielded addresses, which kinda defeats the purpose. I don't even understand why Snowden used to shill ZEC. ???

I prefer mandatory privacy (XMR, BEAM etc.)

When it comes to BTC, some people argue that transparency is needed to avoid (rare) bugs like this one (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident).

Theoretically if this bug happened on XMR nobody would ever notice it (well, unless someone was dumb enough to dump so many coins in an exchange ;D).

Edward Snowden is right I mean bitcoin is not totally anonymous in my opinion now there is organization that can track about bitcoin transaction heck you can track people.

But organization like Arkham can do the job more detail. So no wonder that Edward Snowden worries about this

I wonder exactly what he means by "the clock is ticking" maybe he is pointing at the inevitability of a CBDC becoming the ultimate medium of exchange in the future in every country? Something like that? I'm not sure what else he would be speaking to, but I would certainly agree that this needs to be implemented. Privacy is key, why else would USD say "this is legal tender for all debts public and private" If cash now is anonymous in physical form then BTC should also be anonymous at the digital level if it will ever be the primary "medium of exchange" or world reserve currency used by the entire globe.

It won't solve anything for the same reason people are still using P2PKH/P2Sh addresses even though we added SegWit many years ago and it offers a lot of benefits.
An opt-in option is not going to help much with privacy specially in a world where centralized places are rejecting CoinJoin transactions (opt-in) they can reject the said opt-in privacy feature too hence forcing its adoption to remain low which means it won't solve anything.

Aside from the technical issue, here's what happens:


If that were to happen, which is not going to happen, as things are now, the Bitcoin would only be used to buy stuff on the deep web and today it would not even be used to bet in casinos, since there are hardly any unlicensed casinos left, and with all the cryptocurrency alternatives there are, they would be forced not to accept bitcoin.


Something like that.

Let the clock tick.

Privacy is a bad idea for Bitcoin, it is not needy and it will only make Bitcoin looks bad, all the nonsense that Elizabeth has been talking about makes no sense because Bitcoin is not a privacy coin, if Bitcoin was a privacy coin it will be very harder for it to progress, I believe that most countries including the US will see Bitcoin as a great threat to their country.

If the government can't trace movement of money or fund on your innovation, that makes it a threat to the centralized world, please leave Bitcoin be on its decentralised feature only, this is tolerable by every centralized entities and to say the truth some still don't sit well with Bitcoin, and if privacy is add it will ruin everything.

---

We have seen what happened with mixers and privacy featured crypto wallets, that is a big lesson as to what could possibly happen if Bitcoin is a privacy-featured coin.

I'm up for it.

Let's start by implementing CoinJoin at a protocol level, with the new TapScript functionality. Time to utilize it for more than just JPEGs.

We are heading into a world where Everybody is about to be able to see your financial transaction history. Even random anonymous strangers. Including if you use most crypto. So if having any financial privacy is more important to any of you than HODL memes, then you should support it.

Yes, I like stacking sats just as much as the rest of you, but I am also a fierce privacy advocate.

It is shocking how the sentiment in this community has changed from promoting privacy to shunning it since the new year.

@everyone who's saying such a thing would cause BTC to get banned everywhere: I don't think that is possible, now that ETFs are here.

No point in using Tor, VPN, private email, Graphene OS, Bitcoin, Tails if everyone can see your financial history. That is all that is needed to take you down.

That's fear talking. Fear like this is the reason North Korea is what it is today, a hell hole with absolutely no privacy.

Everyone needs privacy, everyone loves privacy. Even Satoshi wanted to add it.
And now because of some bag of shit called "Elizabeth" and alike, you don't want it ?


That's not true and other privacy projects are a proof that economy outside DNM's is growing, I pay for many things using private cryptocurrency and it's not DNM related.

Monero beats Bitcoin on ShopinBit
https://twitter.com/shopinbit/status/1775930595731775991 (https://twitter.com/shopinbit/status/1775930595731775991)

Monero beats Bitcoin on Coincards
https://twitter.com/CoinCards/status/1610105220138405889 (https://twitter.com/CoinCards/status/1610105220138405889)

Now you can buy anything from Amazon using Monero
https://monezon.com/ (https://monezon.com/)

Some recent businesses from Lebanon
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19dmsvz/1st_business_shop_in_my_town_accept_the_adoption/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19dmsvz/1st_business_shop_in_my_town_accept_the_adoption/)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19dmupj/2nd_business_start_to_accept_monero_as_payment/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/19dmupj/2nd_business_start_to_accept_monero_as_payment/)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1cju2pk/3rd_business_in_lebanon_accepting_monero_as/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1cju2pk/3rd_business_in_lebanon_accepting_monero_as/)

That's just few examples but of course, you personally may prefer no privacy and higher cost of transacting.

It's a free world (still) and as much as I respect Bitcoin for what it did, I prefer to use other means for transacting and storing my money.
I don't like random dude on twitter yelling to the whole world that I made a huge transfer or for the government to know how much I have and possibly wanting to tax me for the crypto I didn't even trade to FIAT.

Without financial privacy you may put in danger your family members, criminals may (and already did) kidnap and request ransom because they knew exactly how much money certain people have.

The fact that someone is arguing against privacy is insane for me, pure insanity.

If somehow my amount of wealth would leak to the public, I would need to change my name and move out to another country - Me and my family would be in constant danger.
People act like there's no evil, like privacy is just a fancy gimmick.. but very evil people do exist and they are just waiting for the opportunity.

For many people privacy and no privacy is a life and death difference.
Privacy = Safety, you don't want more safety ? it's like driving without your seat belts on.

Like a Trojan horse obviously what the rest of us expect as any addition seems to be unnecessary and users become skeptical about additions to the network as soft forks, which is seen to have no value as things will always return to normalcy with time based in on-going activities.

While it doesn’t solve much, if their is a chance that it could help provide more options, then it could have been something what trying but, as complicated as humans would be especially given the adoption of innovations and policies, most times it’s best to live things as it is and have people build a behavioral pattern about it’s nature and usage.

Snowden is referring to the default coinjoin coordinator of Wasabi Wallet shutting down. dkbit98 cropped this information out of the screenshot:

Kruw - You have already posted this and even with full context, it still remains the same (Bitcoin protocol change to include privacy).

Edward reacted happily when he learned about this, he liked my Tweet about my WabiSabi coordinator: https://twitter.com/Kruwed/status/1786217133279412385

https://i.ibb.co/khz4ywd/Smart-Select-20240505-071405-X.jpg

Everyone in the crypto space no longer sees Bitcoin as the ideal medium of exchange, myself included. With privacy being the exception, Bitcoin is the best form of money that humanity has designed and engineered. In other words, it's so good, that you don't spend it.

We can softfork; we can have privacy on the main chain by default. Stealth addresses, ring signatures, CT, all these can be implemented in a softfork way. "We" just don't do it, because "we" are afraid.

Edward wasn't talking about Wasabi, he just used it as a triggering event. He is clearly talking about main chain privacy by default. Anyway, could you disclose us your liquidity?

anyone who cares about privacy has moved to monero

it's clear saylor, blackrock etc will never allow consensus for it

if there was going to be privacy on base layer, it would have happened already

FTFY.

Yes he was, he directly quoted the Wasabi Wallet account. dkbit98 just cropped it out of the screenshot:

Kruw - could you post it one more time, I think my eyes aren't what they used to be...
YES, we know it was in relation to what Wasabi devs posted on their twitter, but he was talking about Bitcoin protocol, not Wasabi.

Because if Bitcoin did it on a protocol level, there would be no need to do it by Wasabi and putting them in danger of money laundering.
Maybe that's the true reason we won't see privacy tech in Bitcoin, because there is a company behind Bitcoin (https://youtu.be/eafzIW52Rgc?t=1051) and they are afraid of money laundering accusations.

Unless you really think he was warning Bitcoin developers 10 years ago, about privacy on protocol level for.... Wasabi wallet that was created in 2017....

Yeah, makes sense.

For some unfathomable reasons some people need to have everything private.
What happened to the opensource movement, they are anti privacy?

Privacy is centralized in a sense.

What do you mean by that?

if privacy was made at the protocol level of the bitcoin network. bitcoin is no longer treated by regulators as a open ledger, but instead a AEC (Anonymity Enhanced Currency) by which all users of bitcoin become suspicious an become watchlisted and investigated and all services then will stop using bitcoin due to the headache of that...
(its why exchanges dont do monero, to avoid all the extra requirements because monero is a AEC)

adding privacy at protocol layer would kill bitcoins utility.
adding privacy wont actually give privacy because people will always be dumb to publish their payment/donation addresses and talk about the stuff they use a coin for

we see many idiots advocate for privacy but promote themselves transparently.
if you want to stay private, stay quiet

privacy breaks not at the currency layer, but at the human layer.

those mixer services seized by government were not seized via locating them physically due to bitcoins blockchain. they were caught via other communications outside of the bitcoin network

bitcoin does not need any added privacy.. it needs users to be private themselves and use bitcoin properly and understand how privacy really works

Thank you for the context, I understand now lol. I think that ultimately privacy is very important and people will go to great lengths to get it, even using mixers to help guise their funds and paying a premium to do so. I’ll be interested to tune into the Bitcoin conference in Nashville where apparently Snowden is going to be attending and speaking. Which I don’t know how he will do that isn’t he not able to step foot in US soil after the NSA whistleblow ?

Again, it's fear talking - maybe we should get rid of all privacy like protonmail / and other encrypted services ? because it could be used for nefarious things.
Why are you so concerned about centralized exchanges banning Bitcoin when there are decentralized exchanges around and using Bitcoin on CEX is like using regular banking system.


What is it's utility ? stacking and praying for number go up ? yep, due to no privacy it has no utility outside of being a speculation tool.


Being transparent on demand about what you think and giving up your privacy are two different things, you should know better.


Yes, that's why it's needed at the protocol level because people are not savvy enough to use all the manual techniques to stay private.
Even having Bitcoin as a donation address can reveal how much you have and where you spend your Bitcoin.


Tools that are used for making Bitcoin private are getting seized by the FBI and people get their accounts banned on CEX because they used them, that's not a great way.


Among many private aspects of life, financial privacy is the most important one.


Do you, my friend ? I think we need at least five more copy/paste of this image that proves he was talking about Bitcoin.

Snowden's tweet certainly raises important concerns about privacy in Bitcoin transactions, especially given his background in cybersecurity and privacy advocacy. It's intriguing that despite these concerns being highlighted for years, there hasn't been significant action taken on a protocol level. I wonder what the potential reasons for this delay might be—are there technical challenges or perhaps differing priorities within the Bitcoin community? And Jameson's comment adds a bit of humor to the discussion, but it also begs the question: why might it take so long to address such a critical issue? I am looking forward to hearing more insights on this!

I don't think it applies in this case. Looking at bitcoin-dev mailing, there's no serious plan to implement MimbleWimble on Bitcoin.


It's not in-depth and only small part of the article actually talk about MimbleWimble.

Imagine if Satoshi was a scared little P***Y as some people around here when he was designing Ditigal CASH...

He would be like "This could be used by criminals.. and used for money laundering.. we don't need it, people don't need anonymous cash, privacy like this would be abused and we already have paypal"

Dear cryptocurrency friends, grow some balls. It was never about conforming to regulators.
You've lost your way or you never were on the right path.

If Bitcoin does not include privacy, it must not be because of regulators but because of technical issues.

With privacy by default on protocol level, you still have option to provide view keys for anyone you wish - so it can be transparent when you want it to be.

There's really no reason to not have privacy like this on Bitcoin, don't let fear of regulators shape your future because they will never stop until they have full control - which will be achieved on mining level and black listing of transactions.

But maybe you won't even care about freedom when your BTC will be worth 10x...

Maybe he was scared:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/s/pLhd7mF9IX

The thing is that there isn't really much threat nowadays to bitcoin, and unless some super sentai hackerman from the Power Ranger's Universe intervenes and does the unthinkable, there wouldn't be much need for increased privacy.

Especially nowadays when the main selling point of bitcoin is the anonymity that it provides, but not so much anonymity that it hampers with the government's attempts at regulating it, we wouldn't really be able to implement such a major change in bitcoin's system nowadays, especially since governments are just starting to understand and accept how bitcoin works. Doing something as major as this will make countries who were once tolerant of bitcoin immediately pull out from their decisions.

Plus heightened privacy means heavier to deal with transactions, and I don't need to tell you how much fucked up the transaction traffic of bitcoin is, so yeah, this thing's getting canned for the meantime, sorry Edward Snowden, we know you mean good but for now, convenience is king.

If convenience is the king, then we should switch to paypal.

The true king here is FIAT evaluation and big investors who seem to indirectly control what Bitcoin is.

We don't want to upset the money flow from this big investors, aren't we ?

As with most contentious issues, there doesn't seem to be much agreement within the community.  Unless someone acts, the default outcome is that the status quo remains.  

I'd love to see more support for privacy within the base protocol, but I don't think waiting patiently is going to produce that result.  Someone will have to find a way to implement it within the current rules and then just go ahead and do it.  I'm no coder, but I *think* it's possible to create something vaguely akin to Liquid, which would yield greater privacy, but hopefully in a way that is more accessible (Liquid is somewhat permissioned and relies on 'functionaries').

If there's a way to improve on that design and either eliminate the need for functionaries, or make it so that every user who has opted in is performing the role of a functionary, we'd have a privacy-oriented sidechain, where users could come and go as they please. That way, we aren't forcing it upon anyone who doesn't want it.

Here's what happens: Most of the people who buy Bitcoin don't really care about using it as currency. Those who do care about privacy, buy bitcoin and swap it for XMR whenever they want private cash. So, it's more like everyone's happy without breaking things. I agree that Bitcoin should have some appropriate levels of privacy in the base layer, though. Currently, it's just far from that.

We don't need to create a sidechain. Privacy can be available directly to the main chain with softforks, and maybe with no forks through some complicated decentralized coinjoin, like Joinmarket but vastly more available in wallet software like Sparrow, but that wouldn't be very effective and cheap.

Either way, I don't think we're near accomplishing Monero's levels of privacy without a hardfork. Even if we implement ring signatures, Bitcoin UTXO are known in comparison with Monero, so rings can be deconstructed overtime.

And, either way, it's likely going to be independent developers who build it.  If it's something people really do care about, then someone will hopefully find a way.  Even if it does prove to be more costly than a conventional transaction.

Isn't Bitcoin going obsolete in long-term ? I mean, you can get Monero on DEX / P2P anywhere in the world without ever needing CEX,  why would you add Bitcoin to the equation ?
I understand using Bitcoin for it's FIAT pumping capabilities and on/off ramping but when that breaks, what will be the point of Bitcoin versus something that's cheaper to transact without all the privacy issues ?

Surely old holders will stay in Bitcoin much longer if not indefinitely, but newcomers will have no reason to use Bitcoin as a proxy, that only harms privacy for additional high fee.

Even gold was never that popular when it comes to regular "Joe's", how many of your friends have stored their value in gold ? granted, some may keep it secret for security reasons.

But we all know how it is, people are not "savers", people are spenders.
Bitcoin attracted a lot of people to saving only because of "becoming a millionaire" dream but as soon as it pumps and dumps, their spending nature will overcome the greed of holding for another year or so.

The problem I see for Bitcoin in long-term is not enough incentive for miners to keep it secure, even more than possible censorship that will be forced on miners because as you said - holders don't care about using it as currency.
Just holding Bitcoin harms it in the long-term.

I might be wrong... but I see a lot of concerns with a chain that want to survive on transaction fees alone when it's main purpose is to hold it.


If it's (much) more costly, people will not use it. Why pay $20 or more to make your transaction private when you can have privacy for free ?

I guess that all depends on where you can spend your funds.  Merchant adoption will also be one of the deciding factors.  If XMR proves popular among merchants, then problem solved.  Otherwise, more privacy in Bitcoin would be the next best thing.

Maybe not even privacy will attract as much as lower fees and faster transactions compared to BTC with *bonus* privacy for which people don't care that much until they face problems due to lack of it.
Actually, merchants could care for privacy much more than customer as some sales data could be uncomfortable to be transparent in face of competition.

Merchants can also not like the fact that their clients are spending a nice percentage on fees, money that could be spend in their shop.
They could also decrease the margin they earn per product/service in order to price in this fees to make it more viable for customers but that's just money lost.

Transaction fees are like tax, Bitcoin has a really high tax.
I can see why merchant adoption for Bitcoin could still rise because that's new revenue and a good way to advertise along Bitcoin.
But other than that, merchants are already drowning in multiple tax obligations before they can earn something.

Many shops to this day don't offer VISA/Mastercard due to additional costs and if they finally add this option, it's because they've lost too many customers because of lack of it.
Some merchants offer it because they are forced by the "adoption", I think it's really sad.
Cryptocurrency with low fees could help them earn more money and this could trigger higher adoption to lower fee cryptocurrency because the competition will have higher price for products when offering it for Bitcoin or less revenue if they lower the prices to price in the fees.

From a Merchant point of view, using physical FIAT/cheaper cryptocurrency, will give more revenue and people will choose the cheaper option to pay.

This is the extortion merchants have to deal with today when it comes to payment processors alone:
Source: https://www.merchantmaverick.com/credit-card-reader-fees/ (https://www.merchantmaverick.com/credit-card-reader-fees/)

My friend has a shop for almost 20 years now, he has a card reader for only 5 years now because his revenue was too small to pay additional fees but currently most customers prefer card payments so he had to go with the times.

Bitcoin won't go obsolete long-term, as a whole. Perhaps Bitcoin as efficient medium of exchange does, but in general it cannot disappear. It's too important to overlook. It's the best money there is, again with only the privacy as the weak point.

Bitcoin is the universally accepted version of cryptocurrency, and the one with the greatest network effect and development. It's very difficult to lose this position once it gets it, and it's already been 15 years.

Even though I agree that a tail emission is safer, I sense that due to the aforementioned network effect, transaction fees alone will be sufficient. And at this point, you would absolutely not want to transact on-chain, because fees would perhaps reach even three digits.

---

As for Monero essentially replacing Bitcoin in the vast majority of merchants as a medium of exchange, I think it's difficult to know. Monero comes with its own issues, like scalability, which might not be apparent currently, but I'm sure it will be remarkable as time goes on.

Actually, scalability is better than in Bitcoin due to variable block size.

There's no bottleneck when it comes to current Monero protocol scalability, the only scalability issue people talk about is the higher hardware requirement but this is quickly going away as technology progresses.

Running own node on an old computer with SSD drive is not a problem, having your protocol neutered just so it can run on 20 years old computers and 56k modem is not necessary and only harms it. 

Scalability isn't defined over the block size, or how many transactions are processed every second. It is defined over the size of the transactions, the size of the block, and the time it takes it verify the block. Transactions in Monero are much larger in size due to ring signatures, and require orders of magnitude more time to verify, because the client has to check the entire TXO set (as opposed to only the UTXO set, as in Bitcoin). So, it is becoming more computationally expensive (linearly, I think?) to verify a transaction, as time goes by.

You are right. Scalability is the capability of a network to handle a growing amount of transactions either in the future or present without delay just by changing in size or capacity. That is where we hear the phrase to scale up which also means to increase in capacity.


The Bitcoin scalability problem seems to be the main center of attraction as Monero doesn't show any major similar effect. The bottleneck problem happens to be a problem that has affected the Bitcoin network, thereby limiting its ability to progress in handling a vast growing number of transactions within a period of time and in a secure manner, which tends to lead to a delay in confirmation of TX and high TX fees.

So a variable block size is increasing it's capability to scale up.


Single Bitcoin transactions weights more than single Monero transaction when people want to make it private by multiple hops.
I don't have actual numbers on it but years ago I've seen someone doing a report on it.

The key difference is that Bitcoin having protocol limitations to scalability (block size capacity being the main bottleneck) can't be solved by upgrading infrastructure.
On Monero network it can be solved without any change to the protocol.

I didn't want to change this discussion to mainly comparing this two but there is no better example of protocol scalability issues on Bitcoin and the solution to it without sacrificing decentralization.
I've seen some Bitcoiners talking how bigger block could negatively affect the decentralization but it's BS due to quickly changing infrastructure around the world and the fact that requirements for it are not that big.

Reminds me of people that couldn't give up Windows XP for years because it was smaller and less bloated, yes it was smaller, took less memory but performance wise slower than newer OS.
Bitcoin is slower due to software limitations, software should never limit hardware capabilities.

I like the visual representation of the problem:
https://tx.town/v/xmr-btc (https://tx.town/v/xmr-btc)

The question I would ask, how long Bitcoin is gonna stick to the medieval hardware requirements ?
I remember when I was a kid, selling my motorcycle to buy a 128 MB stick of RAM, now I have 32 GB RAM on my cheap laptop. Same can be said about all the other components and Internet speed.
And it seems it's only getting momentum, people think we're on the edge of tech while in reality we've just put our foot outside the cave.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/fiber-optic-wavelength-record/ (https://www.popsci.com/technology/fiber-optic-wavelength-record/)

We don't need Bitcoin to be able to run on archaic hardware forever, it doesn't make sense, gives no advantages in the long run and only slowing it down.

The only other argument I've heard aside from bigger hardware requirements is that fees need to stay high and get even higher because that's how miners will be paid.
But I think it's better to have more smaller fees than fewer high fees, it would be much more stable than relying on fewer big fishes and the utility wouldn't reduce to "not using it/holding".

That's reminding me of the FUD that Mike Hearn was spreading when he sold every coin he had and quit Bitcoin. I believe he sold everything below $300? Mere three digits against a possible six digits during the peak of the current cycle.

But about Snowden's tweet, it's debatable. There are important issues, technical and social, to consider. There's also the political issue.

If we follow this line of reasoning, simply increasing the block size by a factor of 100x, scales the system up by 100x.

I agree, but if you compare "non-private" Bitcoin transaction with Monero transaction, they weigh much less.

In dynamical block size, you do sacrifice decentralization. It's just that the difference increases and decreases based on demand for new transactions.

It is a very poor analogy...

That's actually the most valid argument. In 20 years from now, block subsidy will be less than 0.1 bitcoin. This means the miners will earn less than 3.33% of what they currently earn from subsidies. There has to be competition on transaction confirmation, otherwise the security will overtime decline rapidly.

I agree. The problem is that nobody will try this experiment in a trillion dollar asset. And this is precisely why it will never change its sustainability model. But, hear me out; this isn't a bad thing. The ingenious part of this technology is that we experiment on several networks and see which fits us best, without having to quarrel over ideals and shortcomings of one network.

If you want dynamical block size, you don't need to convince Bitcoin people to change their rules. You just need to migrate to Monero.

Final warning? Does that mean he'll shut up about bitcoin from now on?

I like Snowden, but he of all people should know that issuing warnings is only going to make people feel on edge, uncertain if they want to hold bitcoin. Al that this is going to achieve is make a few people miss out on the opportunity just because Snowden said bitcoin is not private enough and can be taken over or whatever they'll make out of this.

Does he think that writing messages on social media will change the bitcoin protocol?

Oh wow, you did say that! I wouldn’t have expected it from you but it’s okay, you’re allowed.

Still, it’s better to not risk convince with best fit. Bitcoin and the many services of its kind exists as revolutionary, tends to question the status quo, models to doing things as well as introducing new models to achieving previous means to transacting.

Bitcoin was made to be decentralized which in many ways speaks anonymity and in turn privacy. Hence, not having privacy as some critical level of the innovation as an oversight that shouldn’t be allowed to persist. These are security levels for an ordinary Bitcoin investor.

Snowden is correct. This question has been lingering for a decade as our governments continue to regulate and sanction the crypto space. The day will come when this will be an emergency question. We need privacy blockchain solutions ready for a future that is adversarial to crypto. Projects like Iron Fish can be part of a private transaction movement away from transparent blockchains, which are vulnerable to restrictions of individual freedoms.

Couldn't agree more, I guess only time can tell if any of this models will survive in the long-term.

Worst case scenario, we can go back to gold - if we're allowed  ;)

ABCBitcoin has linked Joinstr (https://joinstr.xyz/) in another thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5495428.new#new), which seems exactly like that. Basically it's CoinJoins with the communication being coordinated via Nostr (a decentralized messaging protocol). It has an Electrum plugin. Only drawback is that it seems to be in beta still, i.e. it's not recommended to use it on mainnet.

I'm a fan of combining several approaches, so for me it's not a "this solution OR another". Litecoin is showing that the sidechain approach (extension blocks are something like an "official" sidechain, see here how they work (https://medium.com/interdax/litecoins-mimblewimble-extension-block-proposal-209337b38b11)) seem to work. In addition, sidechains would help to alliviate the scalability problem (even if franky1 will yell "IOU! IOU!", he's wrong with that).

I have already proposed it in another context, but Bitcoiners could fork eventually a platform like Stacks (STX), replace the centralized premined consensus token with a PoW token, and you'd have a full decentralized sidechain. Stacks sBTC (the sidechain "bridge") is set to go live in the remainding of 2024. You could then integrate a privacy protocol there.

OP_CAT, which has recently got BIP status, could also help with the sidechain task, as it would allow covenants, required by some sidechain types.

And additionally solutions like JoinStr on the base layer.

The good thing about a "multitude of options" is that the Bitcoin developers themselves would not have to "know" about these solutions, i.e. they wouldn't be in danger to be accused to cooperate with privacy tools. The users wanting to buy Bitcoin with KYC or via ETF would also not have to bother. Yes, that makes the privacy set a bit smaller as if privacy was mandatory but I think even a set of 10% of Bitcoin users would be already a lot. Bitcoin isn't as small as an altcoin like Zcash.

if you want privacy then use a coin designed for privacy. simple as that. but to expect bitcoin to change the way it fundamentally works is kind of naive. snowden  doesn't seem to understand how bitcoin works... :o it's not that simple to just turn it into something like monero.



yeah at least until the IRS starts requiring people to register their gold with them, gold is pretty anonymous and private. it has no history that can taint it. you can melt it down and it is indistinguishable from all other gold. maybe edward snowden never heard of gold though.

Existing "privacy coins" change the security model pretty substantially--  a DLP break results in unbounded undetectable inflation.  They also tend to have scaling/scanning problems that in practice obliterate much of the privacy gains-- e.g. because huge numbers of users hand over scanning keys who might well just be selling them to your adversaries (whomever they are).

There is no free lunch, at least not yet-- though there is a lot of research ongoing.

Meanwhile there are ways to use bitcoin much more privately with little cost-- and yet few users avail themselves of them.  So technology isn't the limiting point or at least not the only limiting point.  Even better things have been imagined and could be developed, but a limiting factor there is just that no one will use them.  Or only people doing actually shitty stuff will:  Helping bad actors as an unavoidable side effect of helping everyone else is one thing-- it's an inherent consequences of development and invention--, but helping mostly the bad actors is something else entirely. -- and a privacy tool that is mostly used by bad actors isn't really much of a privacy tool anyways.


Look at zcash or whatever, use of the anonymity part is such an insubstantial part of the system that careful bitcoin use probably gets you a better anonymity set in spite of the huge theoretical gap in the potential privacy level.


Aside: Stronger privacy tools built out of non-privacy or weaker privacy functionality are inherently more censorship resistant and techniques that can also join users that don't care about privacy in their anonymity set will tend to have bigger anonymity sets.


As far as the tweet goes-- I doubt any bitcoin developer has ever heard from Snowden, I can imagine if they had they'd be quite exited.  Don't read too much into hyperbole.

Ah and aside: the latest Bitcoin Core major release supports a new p2p protocol which is encrypted, -- an important step forward against global passive observers... yet only about 9% of listening nodes are running it!

Although personally I am a minimalist of altcoins/shitcoins, I believe that everyone, Bitcoin-only or not, should support your movement. Transparent blockchains and blockchains with obfuscated transactions can co-exist, and be complementary with each other.

Because the community considers that Monero is the best altcoin for privacy, from a technological standpoint, how does Iron Fish differentiate itself from Monero?

https://ironfish.network/

Curious about BIP324 - In order for this to be effective, doesn't it require non-Bitcoin applications to purposely design their network communications to blend in with Bitcoin's encrypted traffic? Are there any of these applications in current use that add to the anonymity set of upgraded Bitcoin nodes?

In order to be less identifiable as bitcoin traffic-- and iirc anything using the noise protocol also has an undifferentiated bitstream.

But that's not the purpose of the protocol, the purpose is to encrypt communications so that a passive monitor can't  simply watch where every transaction (/block) originates. 

It's just the case that since the protocol was changing it was convenient to switch to a form which would be more difficult to block (or at least would be when users move it off the default port. :P ).

It would be nice if he provide some example about how to implement, the privacy in the protocol. We have coins that already did it like monero and zcash, but maybe there are other ways to do this. But the problem is how big this change would be to bitcoin, it would hit the point where the coins is not bitcoin anymore, it will look like a totally different coin.

At this point, the governments are involved into bitcoin, and a change like this will not like them at all, this could make some governments like El Salvador, decide to stop using bitcoin and move to another coin like LTC.

But bitcoin works with an unprecedented level of transparency that most people are not used to dealing with,does it mean that after all these years of improving and promoting bitcoin it still lacks privacy to operate for functionality and security.
To be honest,this latest warning has instilled fear amongst/midst of  crypto communities.Bitcoin developers are supposed to be aware of this lapses all along.

Bitcoin was invented as a heavy dose of anonymity and privacy altogether.So if privacy becomes a threat,that should be a withdrawal in privacy services and system abnormality.Anyways,bitcoin has it ways of responding to solutions and protocols.
It could be a REMINDER or WARNING!

Bitcoin is a Project of Transparent Ledger Technology. It's Half the Purpose.

So people are forming a bandwagon with Snowden saying that BTC needs to have privacy on the protocol level, a change so radical it could see it delisted from all major exchanges and having its ETF status revoked, yet people aren't willing to accept that Ordinals and Runes abusing taproot features to front-run regular transactions at a comparatively cheaper rate is something that should be patched? The latter wouldn't even be that radical as it would essentially be just a bug fix. Whereas Snowden's suggestion would make BTC into an altcoin and also radically shift bitcoin's philosophy of public ledger and verifiable transactions.

I just see so many contradictions in today's bitcoin community. It's funny.

Verifiable != traceable or identifiable

You can verify a transaction is valid without needing to know who the participants are.  Information about the real-world identities of the sender and the recipient is not a prerequisite for a public ledger.  The IP addresses of users are not required for a public ledger.  These things can be private.  How do people not understand this yet?

It's ironic how the Bitcoin community prioritizes ETFs, regulations, and wealth accumulation over privacy-- the very essence embedded in the cypherpunk manifesto and its core principles. Was that Bitcorn thing presented as an anarchist movement that was supposed to overthrow the government and operate without any oversight? Must have been my mistake.  ::)

I just don't know. Here's another question of mine: Why don't people understand you can't ban people from injecting arbitrary data in their transactions?

Yeah, it's odd.  It's like you give people a tool for freedom and then they bitch about it because other people can do what they want.  I'm sat here thinking "Uh, yeah, that's kinda the whole point" but other people just don't see it that way and think it's somehow their place to try and police things that are of no concern to them.  Doesn't really make much sense to me, but I just chalk it up to that innate ability some humans have to try and ruin everything because they suck. 

Luckily, none of those deluded imbeciles are getting what they want.  :D

I guess he is just playing with it and not actually serious on his comment. If others have found this concern to be given the highest priority, then I don’t think the developers themselves have never thought of this. Of course, they know what they’re doing, maybe it takes time but it will be soon realized.

However, I can’t blame the people from not feeling this because it’s their money that they risk with bitcoin. And if this privacy matter won’t be given a solution in the nearest time possible, I’m afraid that this would lessen the bitcoin community in the future. Just my thought as well.

i do tend to agree that no amount of "privacy features" in a cryptocurrency will protect someone who is broadcasting to the world on social media and anywhere else that anyone will listen how smart they are because they use bitcoin. a cryptocurrency can only go so far. the person using it if they want privacy then don't tell other people they are using bitcoin. simple as that. but how many people do that? very few because most bitcoin users WANT to tell other people they are using bitcoin.


well, there's nothing wrong with injecting arbitrary data into a transaction if it's not very much data. but if it's a huge amount of data then i think that's different.  want to use OP-RETURN to inject 80bytes, fine! want to use ordinals to store a 1 megabyte video? maybe that's not so fine. because with the ordinals data you're getting a 75% discount on data storage. vs OP_RETURN. so it's like encouraging people to do that.

i don't see why we need OP_RETURN at all in fact. let them inject small arbirary amounts of data into UTXOs and get rid of the prunable transaction altogether wouldn't bother me at all!

but back to edward snowden. i wonder what he thinks about ordinals  :o

So? Bitcoin doesn't need any protocol level changes because already it's not mandatory to use it with identification or your real IP address. Are you then saying that Snowden is stupid?

If he had wanted a Blockchain where the inputs and outputs of transactions aren't broadcasted he's free to fork Bitcoin as many have already done, or follow one of the existing forks.

It's not about the ETFs or the finance markets either. But at this point one has to recognize that Bitcoin remains the most highly adopted   cryptocurrency because its existing festureset is still more robus than all competition, even after so many years. For less traceable transactions go to Monero, Dash,  Zcash... Whatever. If you start to ponder why these coins aren't #1 you'll realize that in order to support a revolution you need more than electronic cash. Electronic cash will get you as far as toppling the banking system at best. What then? That's not much on its own. It's just a tool.

Bitcoin doesn't need to be everything, everywhere all at once under this pretense. Many have said that bitcoin should be anonymous, support smart contracts, support NFTs, be turning complete, support tokens etc. Those that try to build that on Bitcoin can only do so in a very sub par way because it was never designed to do thst. Bitcoin works well as is and is pretty successful so far doing what it was designed to. For radical changes hardforks have always been allowed and even supported by many, but they're not Bitcoin.

Correct.  But, above all, it does need to be resistant to regulatory shutdown.  If something is hard to trace, it's hard to kill.  If there were any sense in this place, people would recognise the importance of that.



Which is precisely why it needs to be the most robust to regulatory takedown.  Many governments and regulatory bodies can only see Bitcoin as "the biggest and most successful tool for illegal activity".  They would like nothing more than to take it away from us.  Like it or not, we're at war with these entities.  More privacy makes their task more difficult.  

It doesn't help that most nodes are being hosted on cloud service providers. Imagine for example if AWS were to announce a total ban on running Bitcoin nodes - we would see the overall node count plummet.

Nodes not only have to be plentiful and geographically dispersed but also distributed across many ISPs and countries. We do not want a situation where the majority of nodes are hosted in the US and then they suddenly ban them all.

Or as gmaxwell said we can all just make our nodes listen on more private protocols, such as Tor and I2P.

Bitcoin is not private by default. Chain analysis doesn't need your IP address to de-anonymize you. And as long as self-custodial privacy solutions get shut down one after the other, we can't have good privacy on the main layer.

Being the top asset != being the most widely adopted. Most vendors report more transactions happening on Monero and Litecoin than Bitcoin. Sure, everybody in the crypto space will accept Bitcoin as a payment, but the most usage for real transactions doesn't happen on Bitcoin.

An AWS node would accept a coinjoin transaction without worrying for being banned, so why couldn't it just run a past-softfork node that'd accept a post-softfork private transaction?

Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous. This isn't something new. This also isn't something that we've just realized. It's more of a feature other than anything else. Altcoins that have implemented privacy features such as Monero, while good at what they do, face the issue of decreasing or stagnating adoption rather than growth.

We have to realize that censorship goes beyond nodes and a decentralized network though. Monero, due to the very fact that it features anonymous payments, is the victim of a continuous censorship attack. Being desisted from exchanges, blacklisted from institutional adoption etc.

So even if bitcoin made the bold move to make a departure from an open ledger standard, it would still be very prone to censorship. We have to consider the cost-benefit analysis.
What are the current benefits of BTC (especially among all crypto)?
More adoption.
More market access.
More widely recognized.
Deep market allowing for large transactions without killing liquidity.

What would bitcoin gain from being anonymous?
Recipients won't know where coins are coming from (averting some censoring scenarios).
What else?

If Bitcoin forks to be more like Monero, all the above benefits though are lost in an instant. Are anonymous payments worth that much over destroying what has already been built on bitcoin? I'd argue that this change would only bring more censorship by giving credence to FEDs and legislators to destroy all BTC infrastructure as it could more easily be deemed a notorious market.

And coinjoins are features. A softfork that would make privacy on a protocol level optional, would also be a feature. If you want to stay pseudonymous be traceable, no problem. Don't use the softfork technology. 

The only entities which censor Monero are centralized exchanges which simply remove it from their available cryptocurrencies, because their chain analysis buddies can't trace it. Every person who understands privacy, trades their BTC for XMR in a decentralized, unstoppable fashion and uses that for their spending. You can get privacy with Bitcoin already, you just need to trade it for an altcoin. So, the question is: why can't we just implement a feature that would make it optional again, without having to trade it for an altcoin?

What else do you want from privacy? To make us rich?

The fact that Bitcoin is pseudonymous should be enough for the majority of cases, lightning and liquid provide an additional privacy layer, that is not bad at all

Infrastructure = miners/nodes ?

Perhaps reading Snowden's post was different for a pleb like me from a person who actually developed and contributed to Bitcoin Core. From the plebs viewpoint, we immediately think that he might be right. But from a Core Developer's viewpoint - active, inactive, or retired - they're probably reading it as mere engagement farming by Snowden. Snowden never developed in Bitcoin, nor did he contribute code.

LOL, in that case, good luck with that. Feds have no chance of banning Bitcoin worldwide even if Core developers merge a privacy protocol. That would destroy all crypto businesses and could actually contribute to a recession in many countries.

     As far as I understand it, Bitcoin is the only visible and transparent one that all the transactions we start with the address we use are the ones that are not anonymous instead visible in the blockchain network.

     But the identity is anonymous, unless they investigate where it came from, it can be matrace whether it is from CEX or DEX, or it can also be from any crypto gambling platforms and other custodial wallets.

I like what Litecoin is doing with mimble wimble, but they only have one wallet supporting it so far (Litecoin Core), and there is no support for mobile wallets yet.
Another important thing to say is that for mweb addresses to be more private we again should use coinjoin for them.

Aliens are a scam, and they could try creating fake alien invasion, but one world government is never a good idea.
It's stupid utopia with goal to make all people into slaves.

Yeah, it would all be just a security theater, but I think some people are scared they could value of their coins if bitcoin changes anything related with privacy  ::)

Sure, he even clearly mentioned Privacy in Bitcoin Whitepaper section 10, but who reads that right...  :P

Of course, turning Bitcoin into a privacy coin makes governments sultry and is perceived as a threat to their financial regulations. However, in practice it seems to me that the depiction of privacy coins is necessary but not to be used like irresponsible criminals but in the context of normal circumstances. as needed.

You're right and that's one of the fundamental things why it's not really needed and considered important by some investors because it understates they profits.

Don't forget all of the hateful members of the Bitcoin community (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5482198.msg63517432#msg63517432) that prioritized scamming people with custodial "mixing sites" while purposely attacking trustless open source privacy software like Wasabi, BTCPay Server, and Trezor.


Do something about it then and run a coinjoin coordinator yourself. I already am:



This is COMPLETELY FALSE, you get complete privacy on Bitcoin by spending your coins in WabiSabi coinjoins. There are absolutely no shitcoins required, read the explanation from gmaxwell:

Lest we forget all this "privacy" talks began when centralized services got shut down! If people were worried about their privacy they should have been worried about it when these centralized services were up and they used those services not when they got shut down.

In fact in this context the Wasabi mouthpiece @Kruw pointed this out without realizing it. The part of the tweet that OP cut off is another centralized service that is known for cooperating with deanonymizing services (ie. blockchain analysis companies) that supposedly shut down its CoinJoin coordinator.
That is what the former employee of United States Armed Forces (ie. NSA which is part of DoD) Snowden replied to.

In other words people who are reacting these days have already realized what the actual problem is but their opinion is being swayed in a different and wrong direction making them think "privacy features" have to directly be added into the Bitcoin protocol itself.
Bitcoin already provides a good level of privacy to those who use it correctly. Meaning the problem is not the Bitcoin protocol, it is that people use it wrong and through centralized services that invade their privacy, some of them in the name of improving their privacy!

It is true that they change the security model and make the system less scalable, but it is also true that through the use of privacy technologies, they accomplish ideal anonymity. WabiSabi, Samourai, Joinmarket are all easier to attack than Monero, so there's robustness too.

But, who am I talking to. "Monero is a shitcoin". OK, lol.

What's the "correct" way to use it? For if you go with coin control only, you're easily traceable by chain analysis firms.

At very least, they could slow down block generation if government go after centralized mining pool. I say slow down since someone will create new centralized mining pool and maybe even revive P2Pool.


Just like there's no thing such as 100%, absolute or complete security, there's no thing such as complete privacy.

BlackHatCoiner says otherwise:

Strictly speaking, there's no solution that can provide 100%, absolute privacy, but there exists realistically impossible to break solution. Similarly as to finding an address collision being not completely infeasible, but realistically, practically infeasible. You wouldn't ever argue that it is possible to generate somebody else's private key, even though it is. Instead, for the sake of simplicity, you would say it is simply impossible.

Monero does not provide absolute privacy, but it is realistically infeasible to break it.

The correct ways is not linking your identity to your coins.
I have coins I received in addresses I've published on this forum and are linked to my identity. I have "other" coins that aren't. I spent some of those "other" coins in the past 24 hours. Nobody including chain analysis firms can tell which transaction belonged to me even though I just significantly narrowed the search space with this information...

That comes down to using anonymity tools, because as I mentioned in other places, even chain analysis firms cannot de-obfuscate the transactions that pass through a mixer barring some catastrophic privacy mis-configuration like keeping a log of all the addresses used with a session, or access to the entire historical UTXO set by means of some wallet running in a full node used by said service.

Well, it's always going to be a factor when it comes to every Edward Snowden-related stuff. Privacy, he has always been on the watch out for something that could be detrimental to the general public.

Like what the other members said, it's going to be another concern to have that kind of addition to the development, it might take even more time.

There are better coins for privacy IMO. BTC is already an asset.

Recession in which countries?

BTC has had 3 huge bear markets so far and no country was affected.

I agree that no one can ban it, but with 1% global adoption it's hyperbolic to claim it's going to cause recession in many countries.

Yeah and that is why many are concerned about it that they wish Bitcoin is more anonymous.

It was CEX or CEW (Centralized Wallets) are the ones that are more traceable but as long as you use a fake info and don't submit your own KYC, I guess you will still be fine.

@OP, maybe yes that it was intentional because if not, then they already changed it a long time ago even if there are no suggestions from other people but if let say it happened, I think there will still be people who will complain or wish that BTC will only be like this ( the current that we have now ) because its already in our nature to be like that. Anyways, there are still tools that can make us more anonymous and then there are still more private coins out there that someone can use instead of BTC.

It's probably mere FUD for engagement farming from a person who was never a Bitcoin Core Developer, nor did he contribute code for the network. Plus many people like to post/complain about what the developers should do, but they have no intention of making a proposal or to provide a solution to the "problem" that they have indicated.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But, just so it's clear, the conversation could be completely disregarded if someone finds a way within the current consensus rules to offer greater privacy and people choose to use it.  Actions ultimately speak louder than words.  Privacy isn't something we have to ask permission for.  It could just be something we take if a good enough solution is found.  A discussion isn't going to deter those who truly want privacy.

Hell yeah!!! So you're going to run your own coinjoin coordinator too, DooMAD?  What info do I use to connect to it?

Just FYI, you're trying to have a conversation with AI (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5456516.msg64079844#msg64079844). This account will never respond to you or anyone else in a meaningful manner.

Regardless, I do agree with you. True to cypherpunk ideals is the concept that privacy should be a right. Privacy & the right to do what you want, so long as it doesn't infringe on the privacy or rights of others.