It's not a fake problem at all. If in 6 months magically Bitcoins are $100,000 each then the incentive to target users is now much much higher. Malware will be written by the best of the best and you wont be able to detect it with any sort of virus scanner software or countermeasure. Nothing can be done to stop undetectable malware attacks, randomware attacks, or anything else. The best idea we have from the community is the Trezor wallet and they are taking too long to make it. Now you're trying to play the bait and switch game. Fixing the catastrophe that is PC security, or at least figuring out decent workarounds, is not the topic at hand. |
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I don't think -anybody- at the Foundation is happy about even having to have this discussion. But the discussion has to happen, because Cryptolocker is a real issue that's going to become a lot bigger soon. There are very few vectors of attack against Cryptolocker (and inevitable copycats), whereas stuff like Silk Road is almost guaranteed to fail long-term due to the huge number of vectors for law enforcement to use against it. Unfortunately, one of those very few vectors usable against Cryptolocker is bitcoin. Cryptolocker is not Bitcoin's issue any more than it's Ford's issue if a bank robber drives off in one of models. If somebody should be thrown under the bus here it should be Microsoft for being unable or unwilling to build secure operating systems. Anyone who says they are worried about Cryptolocker's effect on Bitcoin adoption is lying. By every objective measure: transaction rate, blockchain.info wallets, frequency of conferences, exchange rate, etc, growth is exponential and shows not the slightest sign of being negatively affected by Cryptolocker. This idea of a Cryptolocker backlash is a fake problem used to scare the community into accepting a compromise that's against their best interests. These plans have been in the works for years, as evidenced on this very forum, and the proponents have just been waiting for a suitable excuse the put their plans into effect. |
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The mixing application described in the OP uses same valued outputs And I believe that drastically reduces its usefulness. It's fine as an academic exercise but how people actually use their bitcoins in the real world is considerably more messy. Unless you can handle situations where the users need to mix differing amounts of coins you'll either degrade the mixing to uselessness or else end up with a double coincidence of wants problem where nobody can find suitable partners top mix with. |
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Why are those who claim to be protecting free markets so passionate about shutting down the experimentation of other parties? What is the problem with private companies compiling publicly available information and voluntary contracts? Again, this doesn't involve any change to the bitcoin code whatosever. The witch-hunt mentality seems more consistent with totalitarian tendencies than free markets.
Nice try. |
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The only way to prevent this from happening is to get involved in politics and convince the decision makers to not do it. If this fails, the worst case scenario is that this is done in a way that makes use of bitcoin in the country involved very impractical. If you don't like this scenario. Here's what to do: - Keep an eye on the political scene in your country to make sure you don't miss movements towards this scenario
- If you see any, do what you can to oppose them
- Think up technical ways to combat usefulness of redlisting
- Stop trying to silence people calling for discussion. That will make the problem worse.
Getting involved with politics or lobbying in any way is a pure waste of resources at best, or grossly counterproductive at worse. The current proposals that are being floated are a direct result of "opening a dialogue" with regulators. If you want to do something effective focus entirely on technological solutions which make politics and regulation moot. |
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Yep, and Mike Hearn really does not understand all this, despite his capabilities as a software engineer and systems designer. Show yourself, Mike. It's trial by fire time, you're gonna have to get this out of the way.
He's hiding in the shadows of the private Bitcoin Foundation forums, where he doesn't need to answer inconvenient questions posed by the hoi polloi. |
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Its based on significant misunderstanding about bitcoins value proposition - destroy its fungibility and the costs float up to meet credit cards and paypal. I don't think there's enough evidence to assume that it's based on a misunderstanding. Credit cards, PayPal, and many other existing players have a lot of investment at risk in the long term if Bitcoin manages to keep its value proposition. They have a very strong financial incentive to understand exactly how to bring Bitcoin down to their level. Reality,
Boycotting won't stop them. We need to put our thinking caps on, as Adam said, and figure out a better solution. It seems the dark wallet and mixes is the best option. If we figure out now what will fix the problem, we can popularize it while the coin is still young.
Give up on traditional business that have VC investors, physical offices, and bank accounts, and replace them with censorship-resistant organizations. |
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Obviously, perfect output indistinguishably is best, but even when the outputs are fully distinguishable (and everywhere in between) there is value too. Why not right now encourage a standard that will more often result in the superior case? I'm not particularly thrilled with merely degrading taint calculations when analytic capability is only going to improve over time. I'm not really sure I follow. From my analysis there is zero benefit to mandating common output sizes across multiple transactions. gmaxwell, am I mistaken? Consider a hypothetical CoinJoin transaction with several inputs and two outputs, A and B. Output A is 5.21875 BTC and Output B is 3.4375. In order for an attacker to break the mixing he must answer the question, "which combination of inputs add up to each output", and that question could likely have only one solution. If there is only one solution, the mixing has no value other than forcing the attacker to spend a bit of CPU power on it. If the participants in the mix instead choose to only use integer powers of 2, they can break their desired outputs down like this: Output A can be broken down as follows: 1 x 2 21 x 2 01 x 2 -31 x 2 -41 x 2 -5Output B can be broken down as follows: 1 x 2 11 x 2 01 x 2 -21 x 2 -31 x 2 -4So now the transaction has 10 outputs: 4 BTC, 1 BTC, 1 BTC, 250 mBTC, 125 mBTC, 125 mBTC, 62.5 mBTC, 62.5 mBTC, 31.25 mBTC. The odds of finding an unambiguous mapping of inputs to outputs should be far lower in the second case. |
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Everyone should note that franky1 keeps posting damage control in the form of unbacked assertions, never once addressing the actual quotes from the people who are involved in this. There's also the actions of a one Mike Hearn who is quietly supporting this initiative in the private Bitcoin Foundation forums, where the community doesn't get to see what's going on: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qmbtu/mike_hearn_chair_of_the_bitcoin_foundations_law/You're being sold a bill of goods. |
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Obviously, perfect output indistinguishably is best, but even when the outputs are fully distinguishable (and everywhere in between) there is value too. Why not right now encourage a standard that will more often result in the superior case? I'm not particularly thrilled with merely degrading taint calculations when analytic capability is only going to improve over time. |
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Someone knows! Not me.
Maybe not anyone on this forum. |
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You may coinjoin your coins as much as you want. If you want to use them in "the land of the free" you'll have to give away your freedom and privacy by declaring them to Big Brother. Otherwise your output might just be frozen by the "law abiding merchant" that receives it.
Mixers are not enough to fight back. But I fail to see alternatives.
I know you and many other bitcoin developers have brilliant minds... I hope you manage to come up with a solution.
The alternative is to give up on "law abiding businesses" and create infrastructure that assists individuals in operating censorship-resistant business models. |
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2020: Americanwidgetprotectors.com: Hi Dan there is a problem with the bitcoins you sent for the widget protectors you've ordered from us. Chinawidgets.co: Hi Bob What's the problem - the transaction has been in the blockchain since the weekend? Americanwidgetprotectors.com: Hi Dan Well I'm afraid your bitcoins are blacklisted. Chinawidgets.co: ? Americanwidgetprotectors.com: According to CoinValidation one of the coins ancestors has been identified as a known criminal. Chinawidgets.co: That's terrible Dan - what did he do? Americanwidgetprotectors.com: Well apparently he failed to pay for his medical bills then was arrested when the they tried to throw him and his family out of his house for rent arrears and he wouldn't leave on time. Chinawidgets.co: What a sad story - why didn't he leave? Americanwidgetprotectors.com: Oh well his illness made him quadraplegic so he was stuck in his bed. The police arrested him for 'non-cooperation'. Anyway that's another story - the point is I need some clean coins. Chinawidgets.co: Ok well can you send your ones back as I can still use them. Americanwidgetprotectors.com: Sorry Dan I can't do that or I'll be charged with passing on stolen goods. So I'll need some more coins. You could try sending to a fresh escrow address and we can check them that way? Chinawidgets.co: That's another few % Dan. And I've lost the coins I sent. I'm already doing you a favour as I've relatives in the US and I've seen the poverty and trouble you're having on the news. Americanwidgetprotectors.com: But you're my last customer! All the others are using African suppliers! Chinawidgets.co: Sorry Bob but I've got a family to feed here and bitcoins don't grow on trees. Americanwidgetprotectors.com:  Ok Dan. They've bounced my visa application for Canada again. But things are looking up for my Mexican application! Chinawidgets.co: That son you didn't know you had been in contact again? Americanwidgetprotectors.com: Yep, god bless that Fernando. Of course he wants some of my remaining bitcoins but hey, it's all family! Chinawidgets.co: Good luck Dan Americanwidgetprotectors.com: You too Bob This deserves its own post. You should put it on Reddit or a blog or something. |
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justusranvier, I'm not sure I follow. Mixing is only occurring within a single transaction. Within that transaction, some subset of the outputs must be same-sized. But I do not think there is any reason that all transactions must use the same (set of) output sizes...
If there's only one solution to the question of "which combinations of inputs add up to the individual output values" then the mixing isn't effective. If I put in 5.2543 BTC worth of inputs and you put in 2.6098 BTC worth of inputs and we create a Coinjoin transaction it's possible for there to be only one combination of inputs which add up to each output. In that case the mixing could be trivially reversed, unless I'm missing something fundamental about CoinJoin. |
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For this to work, there can not be an unambiguous mapping of input balances to output balances.
One way I can see to avoid that is a convention where outputs are always a standard size (integer powers of two, for example).
You put in a few random sized inputs, and get back several outputs of standard sizes so there's no way to tell which one belongs to what inputs.
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I am thinking that if all the inputs and outputs are of the same size, there is no need for the server to know the mapping?
That's fine for a theoretical exercise, but in the real world you're going to have a wallet with outputs of random sizes. Then you're going to need to spend them on a real purchase, also of a random size. For the protocol to be usable there's got to be a way to deal with that. |
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1. The Bitcoin Foundation is in no way associated with these jokers (neither is DATA, as far as I know). Peter Vessenes is the one who got this ball rolling, and he's one of the founders. Perhaps the current makeup of the Foundation is less inclined this way, but the damage has already been done. 2. No sane US merchant will cooperate unless they are required to by law. You don't turn away customers, or make them jump through extra hoops to pay you. They will be, at least any of them under FinCEN jurisdiction. Even if we stop this initiative, though, they'll just start over and just not announce it next time. US law allows/requires them to do this. 3. All merchant associations (BF,DATA, etc.), especially those whose members are mostly US based, will be the ones most hurt by this system becoming legally required. I very much hope so. I sympathize with the people in the US who have tried to play by the rules and do the right thing just to be allowed to operate, but Bitcoin is more important than any individual business. |
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Here's how it works:
Society is run by a bunch of assholes who use any excuse they can get their hands on as a reason for why they need to be given more control and power.
Your "resource based economy" is nothing more than the next excuse the same assholes who you claim to hate are going to use when their current ones are played out.
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You must be confusing me with the united States military, which is currently engaged in the systematic killing of random people in many countries around the world in the name of national security. Or Chevron/Texaco who poisoned the central and south american environment and people for decades in order to reap obscene profits. Perhaps you are the poor idiot whining for the limitless power of capitalists to do as they please, no matter the number of people that have to be killed, the number of deformed babies that have to be born, the acres of land that have to be rendered toxic and unusable and the number of communities that have to be terrorized in order to generate profit. You are certainly not harmless however. You're deranged. I'm done talking with you. Please know that you don't have to continue to be wrong, I encourage you to learn more and be as informed as you can. Your error is assuming that whatever the United States military or government does has anything to do with capitalism. In fact, the exact same kinds of sociopathic authoritarians who operate the US fascist military/industrial/congressional complex are the exact same types who want to have the type of micromanaging control over all human activities that you RBE would entail. Everything that you're claiming to combat would be exactly what you're creating. If you are indeed sincere, you're playing the role of a " useful idiot" perfectly. |
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