in principle, no.

But it depends on:

1. How privately the Coinswap is negotiated

If Coinswap is to work as a public marketplace, the marketplace app must be able to secure the information about the specific UTXOs being swapped, otherwise there is no privacy gain. Belcher's model appears to handle this problem firstly by making the Coinswap marketplaces and makers use Tor hidden services, and secondly by open sourcing the server software such that anyone can run a Coinswap marketplace server.


2. Sybil resistance

Your immediate partner in any given Coinswap inevitably does know which UTXO was yours, and so any adversary may use this to collect some portion of the information about coinswapped UTXO's by participating in the Coinswap marketplace themselves (i.e. acting as a Sybil in the CS network). Belcher's model has a remediation for this issue too: firstly, routing Coinswaps through multiple participants, so that no one Coinswapper knows whether they are the first in a sequence of swaps, or the last. And then secondly, to avoid adversary-market-makers saturating the marketplace, market makers can purchase BTC denominated fidelity bonds as assurance. The bonds are simply "large" amounts of BTC timelocked for a "long" time, along with signed proof that the market-maker has the spending keys for the timelocked funds. Users decide how long a "long" time and how much BTC constitutes "large" in order to be sufficiently convincing. The marketplace board's Makers must provide some minimum bond amount in order to make their offers available on the marketplace (which you would think will be a configurable minimum, given that anyone can run a Coinswap marketplace server)


Assuming the above 2 points are well implemented in a Coinswap protocol, then this would be a huge privacy win for Bitcoin. A very small amount of Bitcoin users might be performing Coinswaps, but it would be very very difficult to ever detect which ones (and to do so might involve spending more money than makes economic sense, honest providers can price the analysis firms out of the market using high valued fidelity bonds)

that's not true for this particular method (nor is it for the privacy gains when using payjoin)


Coinswap breaks a fundamental assumption that blockchain analysis employs. When people can swap their BTC with each other off-chain, it's impossible to trace the ownership of coins simply by following patterns in the on-chain transactions, as there's no way to know if those coins were recently swapped with someone else's. This possibility has in fact always existed, but should an actual marketplace app for Coinswaps become available, it effectively gives everyone the same privacy improvements (as it's impossible to know how much BTC is having it's ownership swapped)

this is great for Bitcoin, as it gets us back the privacy that most people assume that Bitcoin has, and without adding any new features to Bitcoin node software. Coinswap worked in 2013 (when it was proposed), and it works the same way today. It's so simple that it could've even worked in Bitcoin version 0.1 in January 2009 as a clunky manual operation (and I'm pretty sure that at least some people probably did swap BTC even before Coinswap was conceived)

yes, gpg is a terminal based application


are you trying to verify the authenticity of Bitcoin Core binaries?

1. computer "Viruses" are an anachronism, they existed in the 1980's and 90's as a consequence of the appalling security of Microsoft Windows
2. John McAfee is a proven liar/fraudster
3. John McAfee isn't in any way associated with the McAfee AV software product for around 20 years now

a small correction to the text here: an updated design for a coinswap-like protocol is being scrutinized amongst Bitcoin developers, but there is no published implementation as of yet.

---

really gotta commend Chris Belcher, AdamISZ and ZmnSCPxj for their work on this new update. I must confess that I couldn't see the potential for developing a protocol around the coinswap process when I read the original Coinswap thread post by gmaxwell, it seemed more obvious that coinjoin would be developed into an actual working privacy solution. Looking at the spec and at the conversation on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, it seems that coinswap could be a big improvement over coinjoin for large sums of BTC, but that lightning payment channels can function in a similar way using fewer on-chain transactions (but only for smaller sums of BTC).

You can follow the thread on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list archive

why would you make such an assumption, do you have any reason to believe it?

for the fiat value of the assets, and likely a discounted value too


think about it: if a theft occurred, and the market value of BTC either rose or fell substantially before the insurers paid out, they couldn't possibly cover the previous value in several different scenarios. That strongly implies these policies are simply marketing fig leaves to hide how little clients can actually expect to be reimbursed in the event of theft of any significant amount of BTC reserves at any exchange.

Any insurance likely covers only some small fraction of the total reserves, if an exchange is so confident in their security infrastructure then there is no need to spend good money on insurance policies they will never need to use.

no it isn't


any statutory precedent is meaningless if it cannot be enforced (and hence such things are in no way any kind of law at all).

take the Mt Gox case, the Japanese law firm who are handling that case simply cannot hope to refund all of the 650,000 BTC that was stolen/embezzled. even if situations like this resulted in deposit insurance requirements, no insurance company could even dream of underwriting such a liability, the risk is simply too high.

Knowing Bitcoin private keys and in turn the blockchain enforcing their ownership are a law unto themselves, far more powerful than any judicial or statutory pronouncements. that was Satoshi's clear intention from the very start

wholeheartedly agree, sounds like a good business move by Pine computing (I've been considering getting a Pine64 board, and was hoping they would be accepting Bitcoin for them)


Pine64 boards look to me like a good hardware platform for a Bitcoin node, as well as lightweight personal server of any kind (the top models have 6 cores, 4GB RAM and a x4 PCI express expansion slot, Pine can also supply a M.2 NVMe board and a SATA slot board that function using said PCI express slot)

J.K. Rowling:

• is a billionaire denominated in a government issued currency (many Zimbabweans and Venzuelans know what that's like )
• is a former student of a UK red-brick university
• wrote childrens books that subtly glamorized both the university-education and banking industries

bearing those biases in mind, I'm not sure if her comments are especially meaningful.

ourworldindata.org is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

your "proof" is basically a black line on a pair of numbered axes, provided by a corrupt organization, and hence proof of precisely nothing.

I find myself horrified to agree (with you, @BADecker), but this is self evidently true

• Bacteria exist on the scale of micrometers, i.e. 1x10^-6 meters
• Viruses exist on the scale of nanometers, i.e. 1x10^-9 meters

a piece of cloth is no barrier to a fragment of RNA with adjoined proteins, such things are typically smaller than 100 nanometers in their longest dimension


if you still believe this nonsense, wake the fuck up, this whole virus panic is a farce

that is a spectacularly arrogant comment

you frequently express pleasure at not being able to understand:

• how Bitcoin works
• how new developments to Bitcoin work

please learn to moderate your tone (and your ego)

I think no, that would mean that enabling the NODE_BLOOM service bit on a given node would subject that node to the BIP 37 DOS risk even if the operator only wished to serve BIP 157 filters to SPV clients (and BIP 157 filters are not bloom filters anyway)

sorry gentlemen, but this cannot be true


mining most certainly does influence price in the most foundational way: with zero hashrate, there is no network, and hence Bitcoin is meaningless (and hence worthless). That means that every additional hash per second is at a minimum serving as ballast against a hashrate of zero.

and this is without paying regard to the fact that the hashrate provides protection against several different attacks, and that the amount of protection is commensurate with the hashrate (i.e. Bitcoin is increasingly safer from these attacks the more the hashrate increases).

One cannot directly correlate the effect of changes in the network hashrate with changes in the market price, but if we fail to recognize that hashrate is a (literally) vital part of what makes up Bitcoin's value proposition (and price is a measure of Bitcoin's value), that would constitute a fatal misunderstanding Bitcoin's market dynamics.

and it's easy to forget that exactly this (miners readjusting to the new block reward) has already happened twice before. There's no compelling reason to believe they will not do so again for this imminent 3rd block reward halving.

To an extent I agree, although there will be (eventually) a natural ceiling in the hashrate. But really, it's unlikely to reach such a point before a vast amount of cumulative hashing has taken place at progressively higher mining difficulties. Let's not forget that this provides an increase in security against chain-rewriting attacks (currently several hundred days of security according to this graph), and the protection provided increases exponentially according to how much more work is performed in each new block.



Sure, and it doesn't really matter. The bitcoin protocol doesn't care where the hashrate comes from, it only cares whether the hashrate is following the rules on the chain which has accumulated the most PoW. If that means that the cheapest electricity sources are used more when the hashrate drops, all that does is increase the incentive for more hashrate demand in those regions where any lower costs are available (not just electricity, although that is the main cost in BTC mining).

try it. I found it worked for me, and always has done. even LTS bugfix releases like 0.17.2 downloaded for me using only DHT peers, and my own bittorrent peer typically serves a few hundred MB to other peers. Seeding ratio for the LTS releases tends to be < 1.0 however (although maybe that's just a representation of how popular those releases are)

could it be that implementations of bittorrent's DHT design have improved since 2011-12? not sure, but I've been using a DHT trawler recently to discover torrents from the DHT, and the daemon typically finds 40,000-60,000 per day (rate limited to 20 Mbit/s using a wonderful linux utility called Traffic Control, which I understand you're familiar with thanks for that!)

every single person at WHO should resign, and the whole organization dissolved. The way they hyped up this (likely not so dangerous) virus was spectacularly irresponsible.


OP, you are also spectacularly irresponsible for linking to this nonsense. All you will achieve is popular legitimization of the WHO to both exist and to gain more power over people to which they are not accountable to, and who did not ask to be presided over by these self important control freaks (i.e. the WHO)

Surprised to see this thread is not stickied?


Anyway, here is the trackerless, decentralized (i.e. DHT-only) link for those wishing to download version 0.19.1 using Bittorrent:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:8b6ad1da5bbb24656234efc2370abc14781a6f83


IMO, decentralized network technologies are becoming more important, as we now have renewed impetus from government/corporate bullies seeking to censor the internet