Bitcoin Forum

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/05/21/marc-andreessen-in-20-years-well-talk-about-bitcoin-like-we-talk-about-the-internet-today/



 Investor and Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen explains..

"Anybody who thinks Bitcoin makes it easier to do transactions that aren't tracked by the government is 100 percent wrong. The transactions all happen in public view. Anybody can look at the entire ledger and verify who owns what. So if you're a law enforcement agency or an intelligence agency, this is a much easier way to track the flow of money than cash. So I think actually law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to wind up being pro-Bitcoin, and libertarians are going to wind up being anti-Bitcoin."


Do you agree?

The moment is here, and it's time to make a choice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ouo7Q6Cf_yc).

let there be dark

Yes the government will still be able to monitor actions of people, but bitcoin gives people the power to monitor the actions of government for the first time

and then, bitmixer appear ...  ;D

Let there be dark

Why would they swap what they think? I think governments will chnage their mind though.

Yes I do agree. Any person that claims bitcoin is untraceable really just needs to look how hard it is to track paper money and they'll soon shut up. Bitcoin is more traceable that cash in this respect.

That would be very sad. I really hope more privacy-enhancing features will be introduced soon.

There is no reason for the government having any right for doing surveillance on private business.

ya.ya.yo!

Bitcoin is whatever we make it to be as an Open source technology. Seems as if most of the developers, even on the core team, are serious about privacy so coinjoin and stealth addresses are here to stay.

 In Gavin's last presentation he stresses the need for at least 3 implementations that interact with the same bitcoin blockchain. Right now we almost have 2 full implementations with two different sets of developers and project maintainers. What needs to happen is more developers need to work on Libbitcoin and than others to create another full implementation(instead of one of the many partial floating around). This will insure that if any one group of developer is co-opted to undermine security and privacy we can quickly move to a more secure codebase(Full nodes decide this , not just the miners)

Stealth addresses and coinjoin actually make Bitcoin similar to cash in privacy. Cash is serialized and can initially be traced, but is harder to track all the intermediary's that handle the bills which is exactly like bitcoin if you use stealth addresses(Gives privacy to the merchants/sellers) and coinjoin(gives privacy to the buyers/clients).

gov follow always the money ...  ::)

The way Bitcoin works and is used right now he could be right. Bitcoin is all about data and computers are incredibly good at processing data. It's not that Bitcoin was designed to provide automatic perfect anonymity. However, Bitcoin moves the anonymity ball into into the digital realm where tools and techniques can be developed to enhance anonymity greatly.

Most people are not interested in activities that run afoul of governments. That's why Bitcoin is probably fine being an open ledger. Default privacy tools (like coinjoin etc.) built into wallets will probably suffice for most users. If you're some high profile target the government is after, though, you're probably better sticking to offline transfers, unless you have Snowden level abilities.

But I'm small fish.

Small Fish are fried all the time because they are easy to catch and make great examples to strike fear in the rest of the pool. Larger fish can be harder to catch and often will create a much bigger struggle. Sometimes it is dangerous to catch a larger fish because there reputation makes cooking them unpopular and they don't want another martyr inspiring all the other smaller fishes to escape the hatchery.

Let the politicians a nice donation to rise up and they will change their mind even about their mother..

I will take less privacy if it brings greater accountability of government actions. I can find ways to use my btc privately if I choose to do so.

Gavin is fond of saying that in interviews and at conferences, because that's what people want to hear.

Meanwhile, on GitHub, Bitcoin Core developers do everything they can to stonewall the kinds of changes that are needed to create a clear and well defined protocol that alternate implementations need: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3982

Insert a comment here regarding the relative volume of actions vs words.

Their personal motivations do not matter as their code is open and readable by other developers. Libbitcoin is another mostly full implementation which works with the blockchain with other developers and a chief maintainer.

All we need to do is support Libbitcoin and than create a third option after the fact.

Bitcoin is as as anonymous as you want it to be. Which is good. People and businesses wanting to pay taxes and play nice with governments can use normal wallets while us libertarians can use Darkwallet and such, making it very hard not to say impossible for government to track our transactions. No need to use a ceparate crypto for that like as far as I'm concerned.

I think the people who have hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in btc have long since opted for offline wallets with strong security so the only thing that tracking the transactions will accomplish for the sketchy feds trying to follow the big money is that they slam head first into the dead end wall - offline storage and they can't do anything from there.

They can't (legally) just get a blanket warrant on an exchange, and even a federal warrant has to be specific about what they're looking for. So a blanket search is illegal and infringing on the privacy of everyone else not involved in their particular investigation and would almost certainly get tossed out in court. If the feds are already following someone/people in particular and learn about them doing business in bitcoin, they'd have to seek it out the hard way.

The more security protocols are implemented it'll just make the feds jobs that much more difficult to pursue. What we can expect is the same sort of thing that happened with Napster...they'll clamp down on 2 or 3 people, make scapegoats out of a couple of 13 year olds, the media will start fear mongering, and then it'll settle down because they can't do squat about p2p and they know it.

This is a reality: you can combine every single federal enforcement agency and every police and sheriff's departments in this entire country and you still would not have the manpower required to even put a dent in stopping p2p. They cannot devote all their resources to pissing in the dark...there are still other actual crimes going on that they are going to be more focused on.

Don't sweat it. Mass adoption doesn't even need to be 100% to make it insanely difficult for any given government agency to disrupt bitcoin. Even another 1% would be about the thresold before they're simply overtaxed.

No.

I tweeted Andressen, "@pmarka If anonymity blacklist-proof features are built into the protocol or most wallets, will #libertarians go back to liking #Bitcoin?"

His response, "@Ragnarly Maybe, but a lot of the same data mining techniques that work on email and IP addresses also work on the blockchain."

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/469880753229033472 (https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/469880753229033472)

Care to translate that?

Translation:
Perhaps Andressen is not aware of how effective and secure Dark Wallet is supposed to be....?

Perhaps Andressen is personally funding startups that will do everything they can to datamine the blockchain, and believes the resources they have at their disposal will defeat anything Dark Wallet can do.

Maybe Andressen has reason to believe that they can block any changes to Bitcoin that would make data mining less effective by having an understanding with key developers.

Good point, justusranvier. Sounds to me like an epic, high stakes battle with tons of wealth on the line.
Also, early users of Dark Wallet will not know for certain if they are completely secure. Perhaps in the future: Libertarians and Governments really will swap what they think about bitcoin.

If you create a new public address and somebody sends bitcoin to it, there is NO WAY for anybody to determine who owns that. Could be anybody in the world.

If you SEND bitcoin from an address, you are more easily tracked down as which nodes received the transaction first. It still would be very difficult to find the exact IP address it originated from.

Am I wrong and if so how?

I'm certainly not convinced about CoinJoin.

It clearly works in the case where everybody is joining the exact same amount - but nobody uses that way.

If you never reuse addresses, and if you never create transactions with multiple inputs, and if you are careful about making change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends, and if you take proper precautions at the network layer, then you're difficult to track.

It all depends on the size of the transactions. For most people Bitcoin can be made very close to anonymous and "dark" can actually work; however for a large drug cartel, let us say a few hundred million or more 2014 USD, Bitcoin will provide very little privacy and no amount of "dark" will help. Furthermore unlike the case of HSBC there is no "too big to fail" bank to protect the cartel.

The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months ...


http://gigaom.com/2013/08/11/zimmermanns-law-pgp-inventor-and-silent-circle-co-founder-phil-zimmermann-on-the-surveillance-society/


-circle of :-X  ;D

How do you make change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends?

What do you mean by precautions at the network layer? Tor?

I know 'security through obscurity' isn't safe. But let's not underestimate how very, very messy the ledger is. The government can barely figure our mortgage backed securities; they're not skilled at complex systems. And I'm not sure I could identify what accounts where mine if I didn't have a program telling me.

 Now imagine a world where people are intentionally obscuring things... The problem of solving which physical bodies owns what virtual accounts is going to be an immensley hard problem. I think it would be literally the hardest single problem the government has ever solved. Want to fly to the moon? It's a lot of semi-interdependant systems you can individually test. Want to build a nuke?

 It's some basic algebra that you use computer models to iterate on. Matching a billion one-time-use accounts with tens of millions of people based on transaction clustering, bank statements, internet traffic logs, and spyware as your only guides is a nightmare of complexity.

it is interestesting to think about the projects of UNSYSTEM in this scenario headed by Amir taaki and cody wilson...

Those projects like dark wallet really present an opposing view of this topic

Libertarian doesn't mean anarchist. Two very different things. Libertarians just like limited law. If you don't want a public camera over your crapper or or someone telling you that you can't eat spinach, then you might be a libertarian. If you want a law and enforcement that prevents others from detonating a nuke 100 yards from your home, you might be a libertarian.

And then on-top of that we have Dark wallet ;) .... Making that nightmare literally "Hell"

Um i don't think anyone would want that ;)

In the future there will be zk-snark based coins either embedded in Bitcoin or on their own. They may still be able to track meta-data associated with them, but it'll be significantly more difficult.