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The point is, privacy has to be as automated and perfect as the surveillance in order to be effective.
Right now doing everything right means doing it manually, which means sooner or later you will make a mistake.
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so you admit that one can obtain anonymity as long as they are not Coinbase users, ppl who leave their addresses on the forum here, or who perform traffic analysis type tx errors routinely, etc?
As long as the never use any service which is recording data and providing it to the NSA. This means more than just not having a Coinbase account - it also means never buying anything from a company that uses Coinbase as a payment processor (or Bitpay, or any other payment processor). It means an absolutely perfect track record with no mistakes, because automated surveillance systems don't get bored and complacent like humans do. Remember that after FDR banned gold not everybody turned in their gold, but it hardly mattered because they couldn't spend it without being worried about getting ratted out. |
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do you think you could de-anonymize most, if not all, addresses on the blockchain today with enough resources at your disposal? cuz you make it sound like you can. If proper countermeasures were not taken by the community it would be possible, given that "with enough resources" can mean almost anything. |
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I was at the Rio too...Went to the impromptu "Satoshi Square" following the Bitcoin Skytalk by Dave Perry, Bryan Micon, #roboshrem, and ytcracker. The atmosphere seemed a good deal better than last year to me. That said, you would think that bitcoin would indeed be more popular at defcon than it seems to be, but hopefully the situation is improving. The person I talked to has been going to Defcon for a long time and was on the short list to get a black badge. He had an... unexpectedly bad experience this year and will probably never go back. What I posted earlier was a summary of what he told me the organizers he knew had told him. That's why I said it was a rumour. |
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Everyone is so concerned about privacy and anonymity these days but even our smartest minds can't catch the bad actors. From mtgox to TradeFortress to SR, the good guys and the bad guys all work tirelessly to no avail. Even with a transparent blockchain, the control we have over privacy is still very much in our own hands.
Did you miss that Coinbase is doing blockchain analysis to identify which of their customers are using gambling sites? This will become more common over time, as Bitcoin becomes more widely used. |
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But first we better get to work on better privacy techniques.
Bitcoin isn't any good to anyone in its current state.
you keep saying this about Bitcoin's anonymity properties. if true, why haven't you identified the mtgox crooks yet and sold off the info? you'd make alot doing so... edit: not to mention identities of the numerous other thefts in Bitcoin-land. For one thing, we don't know that any bitcoin were actually stolen from Mt Gox. They might have bene running a ponzi/fractional reserve. The other thing is that even if the surveillance infrastructure isn't very effective today the one thing we know it's only going to get better over time. Information being leaked today is a problem, even if no adversaries are going to be able to exploit it until tomorrow, because the blockchain will still be here tomorrow. |
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i wish this were really true.
it seems many/most need banking accts yet are being obstructed by the banks. i wonder how Blockchain.info does it? All it would require, I think, is a place where you can pay to register your corp via a method that does not involve a bank transfer. What I would do if I was Microsoft would be to get a corporation registered in a suitable country. That corporation would be a purely-online entity. Its only expense is maybe the cost of a VPS to run its website, and those are easy to pay for with bitcoin now. This corporation would issues shares of its equity as colored bitcoins, which could be distributed via any method and have the useful property of being transferable outside the control of the issuer. Then I'd make sure this corporation "invents" some intellectual property which I need, and then negotiate a licensing agreement with it. The foreign corporation would specify license fees to be paid in bitcoin, and the rates would be very generous toward the IP holder. Since that foreign corporation has effectively zero expenses, all of its profits would be distributed to shareholders (whomever holds the colored bitcoins). I'd repeat this process several times, finding multiple creative ways to end up owing some foreign supplier bitcoins in exchange for good and services, until my US corporation was barely profitable at all. |
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But first we better get to work on better privacy techniques.
Bitcoin isn't any good to anyone in its current state.
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http://www.ibtimes.com/microsoft-admits-keeping-92-billion-offshore-avoid-paying-29-billion-us-taxes-1665938Microsoft Corp. is currently sitting on almost $29.6 billion it would owe in U.S. taxes if it repatriated the $92.9 billion of earnings it is keeping offshore, according to disclosures in the company’s most recent annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The amount of money that Microsoft is keeping offshore represents a significant spike from prior years, and the levies the company would owe amount to almost the entire two-year operating budget of the company’s home state of Washington.
The company says it has "not provided deferred U.S. income taxes" because it says the earnings were generated from its "non-U.S. subsidiaries” and then "reinvested outside the U.S.” Tax experts, however, say that details of the filing suggest the company is using tax shelters to dodge the taxes it owes as a company domiciled in the United States. Wait until Microsoft and its investors discover Bitcoin. The US investors of Microsoft would love to be investors in the non-U.S subsidiaries, but there's no way for them to bring their dividends home without moving them through the banking system, and there's no way for them to secretly own shares of a foreign corporation because all those foreign corporations need bank accounts and therefore need to comply with US laws in order to keep them. A Bitcoin-native company requires no bank account. It doesn't even really require a physical nexus at all. All it takes is one legal jurisdiction, somewhere in the world, that's friendly toward Bitcoin-native corporations and then then giant sucking sound you'll hear will be all the foreign subsidiaries moving there.
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I have been away without internet access for 4 days. I see not much has changed with the price or the posting. Have you guys figured out this bitcoin thing yet?
I heard it was some kinda Ponzi plan. I thought it was some sort of pyramid pretty sure its a circle with a B in it. Blow stamps |
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The coin itself is actually a counterparty asset so it exists on the counterparty protocol
Remember when Wall Street started making synthetic derivatives composed of mortgage-backed security derivatives? |
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Serious question - why is Mark still alive?
Because we are not murderers. Ah, right, you are the guys who got bullied at school and never fought back, hoping they will just get bored and "go away". You are spineless, that's what you are. I thought that most of MtGOX's former clients were not particularly attracted to the idea of spending a couple decades in prison. But there are exceptions, it seems.  Anyone trying to incite anonymous forum posters to get involved with violent crimes is almost certainly a cop trying to meet their arrest quota. http://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/only_1_percent_of_terrorists_caught_by_fbi_are_real_partner/ |
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You can reduce the argument right down when you look at the broader economic context. Namely, why even use a service, however well it provides that service at a mechanistic level, that needs it's own special tokens? Unless the service fails as a concept without a built in currency, then the developers are adding friction to information services instead of continuing in satoshi's spirit of liberation as they claim to. It's all wrong from a plain information theory perspective, either you're a distributed TLD system or you're a currency. If you want to be both, expect inefficiency, confusion or conflict. Put another way, imagine if we all did this in commerce now? Shoecoin at footwear stores, foodcoin when you buy food but don't forget to keep some beercoin just in case you buy that at the same time. No beercoin? Hey, we convert at great rates! Doesn't take alot to see where that would end up... everyone who's not profiteering agreeing on something universal.
There will be a natural recognition that schizophrenic designs don't benefit users, and so Namecoin and Maidsafe will survive in their overall purpose as differentiated from bitcoin, but the token component cannot. If the tokens are not made optional or allow for direct access to the bitcoin protocol, then they won't compete well against rival systems that employ bitcoin as money and stick to addressing the actual problem they purport to solve. Maybe all this appcoin insanity is a good thing. It keeps Bitcoins out of the hands of people who've shown a lack of discernment, therefore they'll control a smaller fraction of the future economy. Well, except for the developers who sell their scamcoins for Bitcoins. You'd think the fact that the developers prefer to hold bitcoins over appcoins would be a giant red flag for potential investors... |
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What's wrong Adam?
stress.... Do you have a life-changing amount of bitcoins deposited with Bitstamp? |
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Mine's in my sig (hosted by Google Sites).
So I would more or less need to have it hosted somewhere and post a link to it? There is no good place in the forum itself to keep it? Maybe we should invent a place to host this information exactly for the purpose of allowing other people to find it. It'd have to be some kind of server that holds public keys. Before we build it, we need a good name for it. What kind of name should we give to key-holding server? Decisions, decisions... |
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I heard they already had over 2 Million $ debts they have to pay. For lawyer marketing and so on.
So I guess they really need the money, it's not an investment for them. They need this money to keep everything running for now.
I heard that most or all of those debts are owed to the many of the same people who invested so many coins in the presale. It's a neat trick that happens in political campaign fundraising: Some company who wants to donate a small amount to a candidate actually donates a lot more, and then that candidate's campaign spends most of the money buying services from that company. It helps the company launder income they'd otherwise have trouble accounting for and it makes the candidate appear to be more successful at fund raising than he or she really is. |
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upside to the above approach is probably that maintaining such outward "purity" makes the bitcoin ecosystem less of a turn-off to the set of newbies who are prone to consider the whole thing a scam or some such. Who cares of those newbies are turned off? You really don't want flaky newbies buying Bitcoins right now because they'll panic and bail at the first sign of trouble. It's better if the people buying are the ones who want Bitcoin to use it as a unit of account. |
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BTC is a safer bet than gold imo
Not safer. It has a higher risk of going to zero. Much more +EV though. Would you rather take 30 of these:  Or 2700BTC? If you cant take anything in between? 2700 BTC if the current price is higher. Gold safe bet is about 4x in the future (gold $5000) whereas Bitcoin still has at least 10x to go. It's about risk/reward. But you can't really say. I personally own both. I see gold safest bet there is. BTC is still a mystery in long run. Have some just in case, but wont make a dent if BTC goes zero. Gold is an anchor that leaves you locked into a limited geographical area. You can take 100% of your Bitcoin savings with you undetectably across any imaginary line on a map. |
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just HODL
...off the exchange, so you can be sure you actually have the coins. |
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