You really don't want to turn the Tor network into a capitalist system,
Why not? especially when those affected by censorship are usually the people without money.
Those who are willing to freely donate their bandwidth wouldn't need to stop doing so. Allowing people to exchange bandwidth for money would just create a faster, payable version of the Tor network. |
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Wouldn't it be much better if some form of tor would be invented that supports paying for the service on a usage basis?
I already thought about it, but it's hard to implement I guess. You can't just embed bitcoin transactions on each data packets. That would be a huge overhead for both networks. There should be some sort of contract. Like, you pay a certain amount (the relay may specify how much) and the relay grants you a key that you would use to sign each packet. The transfer should cover a good amount of data to be transfered before you have to pay again. There, you have some problems: - The anonymity would be somehow compromised since the relay would be able to link different connections of yours. He still shouldn't be able to decrypt it if he's not the exit-node, nor know your IP, but anyway, sounds a bit more vulnerable than the current protocol...
- There's a trust issue too. If it's a prepaid contract, the user has to trust the relay. If it's post-payed, it's the relay that must trust the user. Maybe the best would be a prepaid service with some sort of flagging mechanism to ban fraudulent relays. But then, all the thief-relay needs to do is request a new IP to his ISP...
But anyway, if somebody finds a way to implement a payable tor service that would probably have lots of bandwidth since most people don't use all their bandwidth all the time and would be happy to earn a few bitcents from it. |
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Cool images! Changing "stop the fed" by "stop inflation" would make it meaningful outside the US. hehehe, I would like to see some euros with such stamp.  |
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The more people suck off the system the quicker it will go down so im all for people doing that.
I'm not sure if that's really the case. If it was so, countries with large informal economies would be better off than countries with most of the economy formal. And that's not what we see... Normally having to constantly hide from the mafia is harder and worse than just paying them what they force you to. |
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Any country with low government debt. There are even countries that have no debt and own sovereign wealth funds too.
That's not always a good indicative. Take Japan for example. The government has a monstrous debt, but the central bank is quite conservative, they inflate very slowly. Prices in Japan have been falling in the latest years. Actually, one of the reasons the debt is so big there is because the government can't finance his enormous expenses with inflation, so it accumulates debt instead of monetize it. On the other extreme there is China, the biggest lender of all governments, but with an inflationary central bank - since it follows US Fed. You really have to look case by case... If I wanted to hold fiat, I would consider Australian dollars. Central bank interest rates are not artificially low, at 4.5%.
That doesn't seem that high as interest rate... anyway, it's not the interest rate that counts, you have to look at the monetary aggregations, how fast they expand. For example, Brazil has really high interest rates, but that's because the central bank prints so often that the rates adapted to the price inflation. Swiss, on the other hand, has low interest rates, and that's not due to monetary expansion. |
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The idea of signed PDFs is interesting, but as gavin said, probably overkill for the moment. If there's some rich dude willing to put a five-digits amount on it, he'll probably find his way of doing it safely. Not to mention he probably wouldn't buy it all from one only person...
@Gavin, why would the seller in your scenario be anymore protected against paypal frauds than all others selling hard currency for paypal? Just the presence of a delivery address you think is enough?
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An exchange BTC<->INR would be a good idea right now  |
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Contracts should be supported by law, but not protected by the state because that would be protection-socialism. That is externalizing the costs of protection of property to the taxpayer.
Yeah, but remember they retain a monopoly over contract enforcement. If they don't do, they won't let anybody else do it. So, for such a fundamental service, better have it monopolized than not having it all. And about cost externalization, that could be reduced... often is the party that loses the process that pays for everything. |
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Bon courage, ça serait cool si ça marche!
Tu sais c'est qui pourrait être sympa? Convaincre un magasin physique d'or/argent-metal à travailler aussi avec des bitcoins... les acheteur d'or seront peut-être intéressés dans les bitcoins s'ils comprennent les principes.
Le truc c'est que le premier à le faire aurait dû être quelqu'un de passionné par l'idée, car il aurait du travail... déjà comprendre comment gérer tous les aspects légaux, après expliquer aux clients etc...
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This, for me, is the biggest drawback to pure capitalism. It's shortsighted.
hehehe, right, and governments are very longterm oriented... They plan everything they can for the next election! Only by respecting private property rights you'll get people to worry about the future consequences of their acts, as the rightful owners will care about what happens to their property. Currently most of the amazon is owned by the Brazilian government. What do they care? Had you understood what I tried to explain about how governments stimulate consumption, producing short term booms at the expense of long term recessions, you'd understand who's really shortsighted... Destroying the amazon rainforest would bring great benefits to human society for a while. Then, after many years, it would be clear that the amazon had a crucial role to play in keeping the atmosphere oxygenated (the lungs of the planet, anyone?),
Seriously, the "world lung" hoax?? You still fall for it?? Try to remember the basic chemistry behind photosynthesis and you might realize how this is nonsense... the Amazon doesn't provide oxygen to the world. keeping floods under control, maintaining biodiversity, heck, I don't know what else.
I bet all these things can be done much more cheaply than the cost of not using such precious resource as all that land. About biodiversity, what's the point, preserving just to preserve? Useful species will be preserved, you bet. Soon we'll even be inventing new species, DNA synthesis is a reality already. You should watch this George Carlin video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjfiIow-eW0I insist that it's probably useless to preserve such a huge jungle just for the sake of preserving it. It's pointless. Preserving small parts of it might be interesting, but not all. |
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Campaigns can't accept anonymous donations due to campaign laws.
Bitcoins don't have to be anonymous... it's true that it becomes a little harder than just displaying a fixed donation address, but unique addresses may be generated after donors provide necessary personal data. |
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In Brazil is not so rare to find reais bills with an entire prayer written on it... I guess a short phrase + URL would not be a problem at all. |
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Again, you deflect the issue. Brazil is a clear example of the violation of individual rights (in this case mainly property of the natives) by a collective organization (the Brazilian government). If individualism* was respected in Brazil the Amazon would be a lot better. *Individualism in politics mean respecting individual rights, NOT going along in live. Individualism is a set of rules for cooperation between people.
There are levels of collectivism, I'm referring to a community of nations. The world, at present, is respecting Brazil's right to do what it wants with its own land. Is that a good thing? Do you think that the Forces-Of-The-West should invade Brazil in order to install a better western style democracy with greater respect for individual rights? And, how can you be so sure that individual farmers, in the Amazon basin, wouldn't do even worse? Lovely fertile land, all you need is to chop down some irritating trees first. I'm not being sarcastic - I'm really asking how you can be so sure. It's not clear to me. Just a post about this particular subject. It seems both of you are mislead in your arguing. It's the same kind of mistake I see often when people talk about smoke-free environments. The pro-market people try to argue how a free market would create all sort of smoke-free and non-smoke-free environments for all tastes, and the other side remains skeptical. Same thing here with "how would the free market preserve the Amazon". The first thing that is important to remember is: the free market pushes towards the best resource allocation humanly possible. That's what it does, always. The definition of what is the best allocation is where you both might be mistaken there. Who says the Amazon has to be preserved in the first place? The free market "criterion" is utility to mankind. We have to remember that everything has a cost. Maybe having lots of smoke-free environments is not the best resource allocation due to high costs and reduced benefits. Same thing for the amazon. I strongly doubt that preserving that huge forest as is is the best resource allocation to mankind. It's really a huge amount of land that could be much better used than just let it there for monkeys and snakes. Of course, in a true free market, some would acquire land in the amazon to preserve it, either for tourism, or for science researches, or whatever reason these owners decide to give to their land. But I bet that most of the forest would be destroyed to give place to something more useful to human beings, like agriculture and livestock for example. Am I wrong? Maybe. The only way to really know is to let people free and see what they prefer to do. |
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It is still the site owner responsibility. I'm not saying there's an obligation of refunding any losses, that's where the contracts, insurances and premiums come in, but rather that only the site owner could have prevented this, and I'm sure in this case Jed has already closed this particular hole.
Ok, it's just a semantics misunderstanding then... I find the word "responsibility" a strong one. If you say somebody was responsible for a criminal act like this one, I understand that s/he is guilty of it. And if you're guilty of a crime, you must pay for it. MtGox is obviously not guilty of what happened, that's why I say they have no responsibility. I would go so far as to say Jed should have an opt-in system that would raise the fee per transaction for those who chose to allow it, and the extra fees would go to a fund to cover just these situations, but then it would become very hard to separate real cases from scams, and I don't think Jed wants to become a lawyer (assuming he's not one already) This would be cool, but as you noticed, it's quite difficult... they would need to contract a external service probably, and I don't think there's enough volume for that. |
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I guess common sense comes to play here. I for one fully trust Jed, so if he told me someone used my account by trying out 3 different passwords I'd pretty much accept full responsibility. But that is not the case here, there was a dictionary attack so either the site doesn't allow weak passwords or it has to have measures to prevent these attacks. Or it is the site owner responsibility.
It's not the site owner responsibility. I don't want to blame the victim either (only the criminals are to blame), but MtGox doesn't have any obligation whatsoever of refunding him. Unless they had explicitly sold such guarantees, they don't have any obligation in keeping our funds protected at all. It's our choice to trust or not in their capacity to do so. They should have, of course, interest in protecting their site and maybe even refunding our friend here. But that opens dangerous precedents for them as somebody else has already noticed... this case seems true, but who knows about the next that might come... The whole problem with this is that the bitcoin world is still too small to have professional insurances behind everything. Normally insurance companies would refund such losses, and these same insurances audit the platform for security flaws etc. |
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mtgox should not have allowed dictionary attacks to take place. Ask them to sort this out for you.
Normally security-sensitive sites like banks block an account after a number of unsuccessful login attempts, and then require some sort of positive identification to unblock. Another interesting thing is doing like facebook, which asks several questions each time you login form an "unusual" IP... it would probably be useless for Tor users as they would not have an "usual" IP in the first place, but it's something. These things are annoying but it's quite less annoying than having your account stolen like that... |
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2. Google keepass, download install (on clean system), use.
3. If you can remember a password it is too weak. Generate all your passwords, do not reuse the passwords.
Okay, but then you need to store your passwords somewhere, and you'll want to encrypt them... then you need a password-protected key... in a moment you'll have to remember one good password at least... But yeah, having generated password for sites seems a good idea... |
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@caveden:
... Now, is price reduction by deflation equivalent to price reduction due to a lesser value? I'm sure you think not.
Price reduction either means society values less the priced thing, or values more whatever you're using to measure such price (the money), or both at some degree. In a scenario of monetary stability (insignificant or zero monetary inflation/deflation - not to confuse with price inflation/deflation), it's normal for most prices to fall on the long run because society will accumulate more capital, what will make it more productive. More production, the supply of "stuff" increases. The supply increasing, the value decreases. Did I answer your question? By the way, why the question, I'm not sure I understood? savings: the credit-fueled boom of the past 40 or more years has done some wonders for western society (and now eastern too). But I agree with you, the politicians are selling us the present at the expense of the future, though I don't understand why all the capital created should now be destroyed as you suggest.
I didn't say all. If I did, it was a mistake, sorry. What I think I said was that lots of capital will have to be destroyed. And this is simply because the boom was artificial. There were no real savings to sustain it. And the projects that can't be continued due to lack of savings might have to be abandoned, what implies in capital loss. The typical example is the guy that starts building his home believing he'll be able to spend the equivalent of 1 millions dollars in resources and labor, but in reality there are only 500k available, and he doesn't know. He'll probably start a voluptuous project that he'll not be able to finish. If he discovers the problem in the beginning, say, after having spent 50k somebody prevents him there are only 450k more available instead of 950k, he might still be able to "patch" the project and in one way or another reuse part of the resources already spent. But if he figures out the issue after having spent something like 400k, he's probably screwed and will have to abandon the whole project. All the savings spent will be lost. This is what happens when people start big investments possible only due to the artificially low interest rates central banks produce with their inflation. And, as in the example, the longer the illusion keeps going on, the bigger the damages will be. That's why the best thing would be not to prevent the recession, but let it come with all its strength to reorganize prices and capital allocation as fast as possible. But, in any case, fractional reserve banking FRB allows investment *without* savings.
No... FRB doesn't create actual resources, it only creates new money. How is that going to allow investments to take place? Capital is not made of dollar bills. Investments need resources. These resources had to be previously produced and not consumed, otherwise they wouldn't be available for the investment. Resources that are produced but not consumed is the definition of savings. Conclusion, investments need savings. What might be said about FRB alone (without central banking) is that it puts saved resources available for investments more efficiently. I confess I'm not sure whether this is true or false, there's a big debate there. But, in spite of that, it's quite clear that central bank inflation only does damage. property rights: property rights will never stop people abusing the rules at the expense of others, *except* in small communities. And rights are worthless unless there is a police force to enforce them, and libertarians don't like things like police forces.
We don't like state police, don't mix things up.  Voluntarily providing protection services is perfectly fine and fundamental, as you note. |
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I suppose that could be done. I guess the user would also get other benefits from Tor as well, such as pseudo-anonymous browsing, etc.
Well, I was thinking of an embedded proxy that would be used only for bitcoin. If the user wants to protect his/her other traffics, he should look on how to. Automatically redirecting user normal traffic to a tor proxy just because s/he installed bitcoin would reasonably piss off some users. I wonder if the Tor project could be convinced to just include Bitcoin with their bundle.
Why would they? It's not like Tor depends on bitcoin to work better, it's more the other way around. It should automatically setup a Tor hidden service with a port forward back to Bitcoin too then. We can leave it up to the user to publish their .onion address/port number. It should also contain a list of "seed" nodes in the torrc. (Public hidden services to bootstrap from.)
This would be nice, integrating the bitcoin protocol with hidden services... I don't know how the protocol currently works, but I suppose there are messages to ask for other nodes, right? These messages could send not only IPs, but Tor hidden services addresses too. I don't know why leave it up to the user to publish or not a hidden address though... I suppose one maybe have numerous hidden service addresses, right? Why not making it automatic? You connect and publish your hidden service address to your peers so they publish to theirs and so on... |
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Still, ultimately you do not need DPI to simply observe bursts of incoming and outgoing traffic behave (a) like bitcoin P2P and (b) unlike HTTP. Application fingerprinting by packet sniffers is quite advanced. A lot of information may be deduced even without access to the unencrypted plaintext.
If it's government censors, they don't need DPI nor fingerprinting, it's actually much simpler than that, all they have to do is to connect themselves to the P2P network in question and log the IPs that connect to them. SSL connections (or random obfuscation data) are useless. This is what Hadopi is supposedly doing in France right now. |
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