It's Yusuf Islam to you, infidel!

Those were not my responses, except the requirement that you prove you understand the topic before you propose sweeping changes.  You will find that I'm not alone in this regard.

A census list has names and addressses.

The dollar is, already, and established frame of reference.  It doesn't need to be backed now, because it once was backed by gold.  It's the Regression Theorem.  A p2p credit system needs a currency as a frame of reference because it doesn't have a history of use as a medium of exchange, and it's total base would be both largely unknowable and subject to extreme flexibility.  I've already given you the tools you need to understand, but you don't even know which end is the handle.  Bitcoin has both a history as a unit of exchange and it's base is both perfectly knowable at any given moment and it's future base is highly predictable; two attributes that are significantly better as a currency than both the US $ and gold.


I don't suffer fools easily, at least not for long.  You do know who you're talking too right?

More likely they want funding to develop the code, and then an open source clone without the backdoor would be devleoped and would be the actual system used, and the banksters get left with notihing of useful value for their "investments".  It's open source, dude, if there is a backdoor, it can be found in the code and either altered or exploited.  IT's not really going to happen in practice.

No, you proposed altering the blockchain to be encrypted, which as many have pointed out, would break the zero trust rule.  My alternative doesn't do any such thing, as I presented a method to do it outside of the main blockchain.  Furthermore, I've since discovered that some group has already annouced that they have developed a parrallel p2p netowrk to work with Bitcoin to do pretty much what I proposed, in practice, and intend to present the system at some upcoming confrence.  It's being called Zerocoin.


You can decide to quit, but you can't close the topic from me.  I hope you learned something, at least.

Yes, there is a rational; and yes, you don't see it.  It's not even that you don't quite see it, you're not even within a line of sight yet.

A monetary base forms the frame of reference for value calculations.  In this sense, the monetary base must be knowable, and it also must be difficult (if not impossible) for the common user to create new currency.  For Ripple, a peg to the US $ would work fine, as it has for Paypal.  But without a currency base to use as a common frame of reference, Ripple users would be able to create debt based currency as easily as is done in a LETS and would remain as local for the same reasons.


Krugman hasn't been correct on any topic since he's been at the NYT's.  I'm somewhat certain that he lives in opposite world, and you might be his neighbor.

Wait a minute...

You own an old copy of an economics textbook, over fourty years old, Krugman fan...

Do you live in NYC?  Your choice of username makes mroe sense now.

It doesn't, because the wealthy are the only group that can efficiently save their funds in gold, land, etc.  It's much more difficult and economicly inefficient for the poor and middle classes to do the same thing.  Thus, inflation harms the lower classes more, percentagewise, because they have to keep a majority of their savings in dollar denominated assets for liquidity reasons.

Ripple is p2p credit, yes.  Ripple is not a currency, however.  The distinction is not trivial.  Credit does not equal currency, and serves a different function.  Bitcoin can exist independently of Ripple, and Ripple can exist independently of Bitcoin; but Ripple cannot exist independently of an established common currency base.


I didn't say that you couldn't change your mind.  It does tell me more about you, however.

Nonsense, I proposed a system that offers users a choice.  There is a significant difference.

Don't gamble on SatoshiDice?

I know for a fact that there are "quiet mode" full clients running on Tor that act as bridges from all Tor clients to the open Internet.  You have to use a full client, and it has to be "quiet mode" and well locked down to prevent leakage, but it's possible to transact in Bitcoin without leaving a mark.

Puppet, credit systems within bitcoin will develop when the market is right for them.  To some degree, they already exist, but are very personal and unsecured.  I've done several myself.  As you already noted, Ripple is a decentralized consumer credit system.

You promised to respond to my arguments yesterday.  Did you not have a rational response?

You could use tor.


We didn't say it wasn't an issue, we said that the way that you want to do it can't be done without breaking the zero trust requirement of the main blockchain.  However, your idea did spark my own....

The root problem isn't that the openness of the blockchain permits some transactions to be seen in cleartext, it's that it permits all of them to be seen.  But this isn't entirely true, as off-network transactions do occur and hiding services (commonly called bitcoin laundries or bitcoin mixers) also exist.  Examples include transactions that occur directly between users of MtGox, or directly between users of Silk Road.  The advantage of such services, particularly with large user bases, is that it's impossible to track the flow of funds among the membership without access to the server itself; and the disadvantage is that users must have trust in the sysadmins to 1) not steal their coins, 2) not be bested by motivated hackers and 3) not roll-over when the MiB show up at tehir door.

But what if you could run a decentralized service?  Sort of a hybrid between the full blockchain and a hosted wallet service.  Take this one, for starters...

An alt-chain, wherein the headers contain all the info that Bitcoin's headers contain, plus some additional info that ties each block to a recent transaction on the main chain, namely that the miner of the alt-chain first creates a send-to-self transaction, then references both the block number that included that transaction, the transaction ID#, and signs something in the block with that addresses private key.  The point is that 1) it establishes a timestamp in lockstep with the main bitcoin chain, 2) leverages the difficulty level of the main blockchain since in order to alter that block later, the alt-chain attacker should have to also alter the main blockchain and 3) establishes the miner's Proof of Stake. 

Once that has been established, the structure of the alt-chain block is as follows.  There is still a merkel tree, but instead of each pair of transactions being hashed, blocks of encrypted data is being hashed into the tree, and the miner's only job is to verify that the blocks of data are 1) not corrupted and 2) are signed by at least two other alt-miners.  Heres the overall idea.  Instead of a running ledger, each miner is effectively a trusted supernode that manages a limited userbase.  The data blocks are updates on the values of their users' accounts.  Each of these miners have traded keypairs with at least two other miners, so that they can 1) negotiate transfers between users of each others userbase and 2) verify and sign their submitted data blocks.  This means that, although the compromise of any single miner by hackers/MiB would open that set of users/transactions to view, it would be practically impossible for any single node to decrypt an entire alt-block.  Thus, some portion of that block would remain unknowable, and insomuch as this system would be a popular off-blockchain transfer system, funds that pass through it would break the chain of visable custody.

Even writing it down, I'm not conviced it can even work, as users must be able to trust the miners/supernodes and those miners would have to be able to trust each other.

Not really worth my time.  Prove that you understand how the system actually works, and then I might consider hearing out your theories.

No. 

There is no encryption method that would work that wouldn't simply be a waste of resources, since the key would have to be widely known anyway.

Can you prove that's my only wallet?

Amen.  Stupidity should be more painful.

Perhaps it could, but how would that work?

Therein lies the rub, no one has been able to work out a better solution than what Satoshi has devised from the beginning.  His solution is both elegant, well interconnected, and easy to understand (from a theory basis, not from a practical implimentation basis).

It's more than feasible, it's part of the future development plans of Bitcoin from nearly the start.  Maybe even the start.  As I said, Bitcoin was designed for future flexibility in addresss types, so that new address types can be created, and easily identified by both human and machine, without breaking backward compatibility with the current address type.  The future clients will just have to check the first ascii character to know how it should process that address; and teh running network won't even skip a beat.  There is much to the finer details of Bitcoin that are so elegant and so well thought out, I have long said that Satoshi was either a polymath or three or more geniuses in their own fields working in concert.