Thank you for your feedback.



Capital won't be a problem. The main goal of this project is to find many individuals who are interested in being part of the first legal cryptocurrency company owned by the community. Since every shareholder has exactly one vote, the price of a share should be a value that many people can afford, but on the other hand not too low, so people don't just vote for the fun.
We plan to achieve this by setting the entry price for a share based on the country in which the shareholder currently resides.
If you want more dividends, you can buy several shares (e.g. 10 shares). In this case you have 10x dividends, but you still have only one vote.

You would go to the project website, go through the necessary KYC/AML process, pay the share and then receive your share as an non-fungible token. By receiving the token, you can vote on any business decision, review fanancial and other business information, create proposals, etc..
If you wish to become a legal member of the company, you must sign the cooperative statues digitally (or manually) in order to be a legal member of the cooperative (general meeting,...).
Any token holder can be a legal member of the cooperative. There may be some administrative costs, but they will be really low.

Yes, you must process the KYC/AML process. To be legally involved in the cooperative, you must sign the cooperative statues digitally or manually.

It will be a legally registered (international) company that anyone can join.
As a cooperative, there will be at least one annual audit.
As a cooperative, the shareholders can replace the board of directors at any time if they wish. Each member of the board of directors has only one vote. The voting rights of each member of the cooperative are the same.

There will be a website with a digital shareholder board. It will display all financial data (liquidity, customer funds, expenses,...), and proposals can be created and voted on. The financial data is updated in short form (daily or weekly). As a cooperative, we are obliged to carry out an annual audit. However, since shareholders are in a position to make a proposal on all business aspects, they can also make a proposal to carry out a further audit at any other time.

Initially, the board of directors is formed by the development team. However, the shareholders have the possibility to make a proposal for the board of directors at any time. On the first day of operation, shareholders could propose to replace any member of the board of directors.

The digital shareholder board will have a list with the description (tasks, working hours, salary) of each employee of the cooperative. So each shareholder can see who is an employee of the cooperative, what his duties are, what he has done for the cooperative, what his current tasks are and his salary.
Since the shareholders can decide on everything that concerns the company, they can also make proposals such as "Each member of the board of directors must prepare a monthly report on...".

While there are endless possibilities for the community to make proposals that would create more transparency, more security, more participation rights, etc., the board of directors should show the community which of these proposals are appropriate and which would only cost a lot of money and resources but bring little profit. But ultimately the decisions are taken by the community.

As the board of directors are legally liable, they have veto rights (e.g. they will never publish private customer data, private keys, break on purpose any law,.. based on a proposal). However, if they exercise their veto right, they could easily be replaced by shareholders.

Hello!
We are a small start-up that plans to create a DEC/DAO (centralized) exchange.
Since it will be a cooperative venture, we will only be successful if there is enough interest from the crypto community. I would appreciate your feedback.


Our vision is to create a fully transparent, autonomous and malleable company in which each member has insight into the finances of the company, the number of employees/salaries, etc., and can co-determine strategic goals and the use of capital^[1].
It should also be possible for the community, for example, to reduce the salary of the board of directors or to dismiss the board of directors as a whole.
Each member can buy several shares (e.g. 10 shares), whereby each member has only one vote. Each member's dividend payout is proportional to the number of shares he or she owns.


We are in the process of developing a DAC with a corresponding exchange.
The DAC will be a company that is legally fully owned and managed by members of the community.
It will be a cooperative and anyone can be a legal member (shareholder) of that cooperative. Through a digital board, each member can make proposals and vote on them (E-Voting). A board is initially designated at the start of the company, but can be removed and replaced at any time.
Business decisions that exceed a certain threshold (e.g. decisions that would exceed $10,000 in implementation costs) must be approved by the community.
Virtually all of these decisions (with the exception of some very risky or time-critical ones) should be confirmed by a community vote. The community should also have the opportunity to make their own suggestions and vote on them at any time.
In addition to some basic rules (to limit liability risks), rules could also be set by the community.

Each proposal must be reviewed and evaluated by the board. The results of this process will be presented to the community. After reviewing the results, the community can decide whether to accept or reject the proposal.
The board of directors must implement the proposal as long as it complies with some predefined rules (for liability reasons).


Do you like this idea? Would you become a member/shareholder of this company? Do you have any remarks on the general idea?

Please don't address any specific problems (e.g. legal implementation), as I would rather receive feedback from the community about the general idea.
The handling of the following issues is described in our whitepaper:

- liability of the board of directors and shareholders
- privacy statement
- voting system
- turnout
- legal transposition


As it will be a community project and each member (including me) has no more than one vote, anyone who wants to support the idea can always be in touch with me.
We are an open team, everyone can join and support us.

Contact:
Felix Maduakor
felix.maduakor@rub.de

^[1] However, some sensitive data are not disclosed to shareholders (e.g. customer data, private keys, ....).

Thanks for your feedback and remarks.
5) Bitcoin qt was my first choice, however I didnt have much time for coding and blockchain.info had some speed and filtering advantages. So I talked to my supervisor and decided to use blockchain.info api. However, if I would implement this in a more serious fashion, I definitely would only use original bitcoin data to be sure of their integrity.

Thank you. Its updated.

For everyone who is interested in Bitcoin privacy:
Recently the bitcoin.it privacy page (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Privacy) has been updated by Chris Belcher (https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2019-February/016698.html).

Yes, you could define it like that. But generally speaking there are only two big steps:
1) Identify mixing service transactions within blockchain data
2) Find an algorithm to connect input transactions to output transactions

The method of solving each steps is based on the implementation of the mixing service.
In case of coinmixer.se the first step could be solved by analyzing transaction data and the second step could be solved by analyzing the transaction flow and transaction data.
In case of bitmixer.io both steps could be solved by analyzing transaction data - no transaction flow is needed here.

There is a lot of interest in this topic. I will definitely also look into decentralized mixing protocol implementations. However, I will focus in my next work on chipmixer.com and some privacy enhancing coins (dash, monero, zcash) as this seems a very challenging and interesting task.

Mixing Services work like black boxes. You put your coins in, some "magic" happens and you receive anonymized coins. Since Bitcoin is purely transparent and you are able to to analyze each transaction in blockchain space you have enough data to identify and deanomyize transactions regarding the mixing service. You just have to filter all blockchain data which is not interesting for you and analyze the rest.

These services are purely centralized, since you send your coins to a centralized party. If the mixing service wants to steal your coins - they definitely are able to do this. Just remember: whenever you lose the control over your coins and some party is able to steal your coins - it is a centralized service.
In decentralized mixing/tumbling no centralized party is able to steal your coins.

I did not look into the specific implementation of dash, monero, zcash. General speaking the difference between mentioned cryptos and bitcoin is, that bitcoin is not meant to provide privacy while the main focus of monero and zcash is privacy. They are built in a way to provide privacy, while in bitcoin some services try to implement algorithms to provide privacy on a cryptocurrency which is not meant to guarantee privacy.

Hello electrobit,
storing verification data in a public blockchain is in general good use case of blockchain. However, I know at least one project which has the exact same aim (saving pdf-files and certificates in blockchain). I forgot the name, but Google will surely have the answer.
When they explained their model, I had the feeling they used "blockchain" only as a marketing buzzword. Especially in these use-cases of blockchain, you have to think about centralization. Has there to be a trusted party? If yes, why should it be trusted and where is the benefit of using a blockchain instead of a centralized database?
When the team explained their reason for using blockchain I was not convinced. I did not see any advantages of their approach compared to digital signatures or the usage of a centralized database.

If this should not be a "just-4-fun"-project, you honestly have to discuss the following questions:
(Don't answer them here.. otherwise its going to be an endless discussion. Just be sure you have an answer to each question which you honestly believe)

1) Why does the whole pdf need to be stored in the blockchain? Wouldn't it be enough to save the signature of the pdf in the blockchain?
2) What are the advantages of your approach compared to digital signatures for pdfs (check adobe)?
3) If it's about storing documents in a decentralized fashion - What is the benefit compared to storj, filecoin, sia?
3) Should it be a standalone blockchain, forked chain or subchain?
4) Should it be an open blockchain, federated or private blockchain?
3.1) If it should be an open blockchain: - Who are the miners/nodes? What is their benefit?
3.2) If it should be a federated/private blockchain: - What's the benefit of using a blockchain in your use case compared to a centralized (open) database?

Thanks for all of your feedback!


Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, you are correct, it was pretty easy to identify coinmixer.se's network. However, it was the biggest mixing services at the time and it should be seen an example of how to break these services.
The general problem of these mixing algorithms is, that they use generic transactions. Even if every transaction of a centralized mixing service is completely randomized you will be able to differentiate (with a great possibility) generic randomized transactions sent by a mixing service from genuine user transactions.
However, identifying a network does not necessarily imply that transactions of this network can be deanonymized (but in a regulated future you might get some problems trying to use these coins).

Generally speaking, the algorithms of coinmixing services are evolving. While the first generation of mixing services could easily be broken through simple taint analysis (bitcoin fog, blockchain.info mixing service), the next generation of mixing implementation needed some more work to be broken (bitmixer.io - timing attack, coinmixer. se transaction analysis) and with the newest mixing algorithms (chipmixer.com) you might already need heuristic methods.

Yes, when I started my research bitmixer.io and after that coinmixer.se were the biggest mixing services. However, I realized that chipmixer.com has a better approach of mixing but was not used that much. Right after my thesis, I began with other bitcoin projects, so I didn't look further into my approaches to attack chipmixer.com. But I see, many people are interested in chipmixer.com. As soon as I got time I will again look into it. I think I already have a little python script.

In general, I would recommend using privacy driven cryptocurrencies if you want to have privacy in your transactions. But if you really want to use Bitcoin, than chipmixer.com might be the best solution for now. But remember, bitmixer.io and coinmixer.io were the best solutions in their times. Today you are able to identify and deanonymize nearly all transactions which have been made through these services. If someone used these services to anonymize their criminal activities they might still get caught.

Yes, it would be very interesting to check if/how many criminals use these kind of services. I remember, my professor also asked me this question. But I have worked on other projects right after my thesis, so I didnt follow up on this.
Actually I did not publish my thesis till now, because I woked on other cryptocurrency related projects. This is the first place I publish it.

Thank you!
Yes, I completly forgot network attacks. I remeber, that I thought about it - dont know why I didnt add it.

My conclusion is, that breaking mixing services can be compared to cracking/reverse engineer software. While some years ago it was pretty easy to crack software, in today's world it got way harder. However, in both cases, attackers will always be able to break it.

Hey,
more than a year ago I wrote my bachelor thesis about mixing services/anonymous bitcoin transactions (yes, bitcoin is pseudonymous).
I found some trivial bugs (timing attacks, leakages, xss, ...) through which nearly all relevant centralized bitcoin mixing services could be broken. Based on outgoing mixing transactions (transactions sent by the mixer) I was able to identify the correct incoming transactions sent by customers (vice versa).
My thesis is quite easy to understand and the bugs are also trivial, however, at the time of writing, I did not find any specific work related to these problems.

The most important conclusion of my work is, that even though a mixing service/a mixing algorithm might seem to be reliable at the moment, through a single leak/implementation fault, an attacker could be able to deanonymize any past transaction which has been processed by the mixing services. Even though the leak/implementation fault gets fixed by the service, every transaction which has been processed prior to the fix is irreversible vulnerable.

bitmixer.io & coinmixer.se are offline now, however its still possible to use the bugs I describe in my thesis to reverse nearly all transactions which have ever been processed by these services.
In my thesis, I attacked coinmixer.se (at the time of writing it was the biggest centralized mixing service), however - except chipmixer.com¹ - every other centralized mixing service I checked could be broken in a similar fashion.


If there is interest in this topic, I can publish further information (source-codes, examples, ..) on this topic and attacks.


Link to my thesis (python source inside): https://www.dropbox.com/s/3yapwyfz72tvswh/BA_mixing_services.pdf?dl=0

Author: Felix Maduakor
Email: felix.maduakor@rub.de

¹ Chipmixer was the only centralized mixing service which I did not break fully. However, I did not put much work into checking this mixing service.

But they began to be quite when they saw everyone is "ok" with segwit2x. Till now, when segwit will be implemented next week.
It was like "ahh they are signaling segwit2x.. well segwit is ok, they can signal it.. lets tell them when segwit is implemented, that we wont support the 2x part".
That they are strictly against segwit2x - even when the miners are signaling segwit - they should have given out weeks ago.

I observed this segwit,segwit2x,2mb,4mb,8mb discussion for several months. Im really disappointed in bitcoin core. When everyone was signaling for segwit2x it seemed that everyone is ok with that and we finally got a consensus. And suddenly bitcoin core says they dont want to stick with segwit2x.
Even tough there are 5k core nodes, this does not has to mean that the community want to follow bitcoin cores path.
For me it more seems like there is a company which tries to force the whole community to follow their path.
Im going to install and run segwit2x node.
Hopefully everyone else who is the same opinion is going to do that.
Kind of sad to see how a single company is killing Bitcoin.

Hey,
I am right now a little bit researching about financial stability and monetary policy.
It seems that monetary policy through a central bank is pretty important for the global financial stability.
For example if there is a financial crisis, central banks try activly to stabilize the financial system.
If Bitcoin would replace fiat money and such a crisis would occur, wouldnt this lead to long term financial instability?

This wont help. You would need to mine and process your own transactions. Will be definitely to expensive.
Bitcoin is not a good solution for nanopayments at the moment. Better check out some other cryptocurrencies till the blocksize-problem is solved. Once the blocksize-probkem is solved and/or the lightning network is implemented nanotransactions through Bitcoin wont be a problem - but no one knows when (or even if) the blocksize problem will be solved