I'd like it if someone could address a concern I raised in another thread, but is relevant to mention here:
The outputs of a CoinJoin transaction will have an amount of red taint equal to the amount of red taint on the inputs. So basically half of the participants will get cleaner coins and half will get dirtier coins. There is no net reduction in red taint.
Unless you are assuming that number-of-hops somehow makes your redcoins less red, but I don't believe this to be the case. The redness factor is really about the source transactions that lead into your transaction, and if a high % of those are red then your coins are tainted.
What incentive is there for clean coins to participate in CoinJoin? Wouldn't it tend to be the case that CoinJoin inputs are all quite red?
If you are a Bitcoin investor, then you really should give a damn about Coinjoin. Destroying its fungibility would allow Wall Street's money masters to separate Bitcoin into assets of different sorts, like "good bitcoins" and "bad bitcoins", and manipulate their values while giving themselves unfair advantages like they have always been doing(e.g., with gold). The bitcoins they control will obviously be A+ grade, and yours may become entirely worthless someday even if you just hoard them and do nothing, to ensure your asset doesn't get depreciated is a pretty big incentive I guess. |
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I have been closely following this project, and that's why I have been thinking about it. Theirs is about the most practical solution you can find, but it's not very elegant and contains some weak links(e.g., the use of an "oracle" server allows certain organizations to track if you are buying bitcoins), and I am purely exploring theoretical possibility here, so I am more interested in hearing why SNARKS is not the right tool, because it doesn't scale for complex jobs? about tracking - it's an interesting and valid criticism. The original concepts did not involve an oracle, and were more based around escrows being instantiated by lots of users. We developed the idea of a P2P network of escrows (local/remote port forwarding via escrow to avoid NAT issues), with random choice of escrow (and obviously Sybil mitigation), and I in particular liked the extra twist of 2 escrow steps for additional verification. In this kind of model tracking is far less of an issue (but it would of course require a big network, but then there's an obvious way to incentivise that). In the oracle model we could still have a network but if we're using Amazon or whatever as our trust root, then clearly the decentralisation effect is somewhat limited. On the other hand the oracle model has very significant trust benefits which might outweigh the theoretical possibility of tracking/flagging. About inelegant - I totally agree, but I think that was an inevitable consequence of what the project is trying to do. We're trying to do something that is trivial to achieve if the bank wants to help - they simply sign their statements, end of discussion. They don't do this, and they will not be interested in helping us. It's not about features in TLS, it's about banks prefering to keep repudiability. They've known how to do digital signing for a long time, they choose not to. That's why inelegant hacks are the only approach. Let me be clear that I absolutely appreciate your guys' effort, it's just my obsession with theoretical elegance and my "greatest idea ever" bullshit that induces me to make this post.  I haven't given up on it entirely yet, despite what seems like insurmountable difficulty. |
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Given the infamy of Japanese Ms. Watanabe's, it seems no surprise as to the rise of Chinese Dama's. That's the good thing about having a senior around, I haven't realized that historical perspective. |
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I highly doubt the 40% figure, you can't take it seriously.
They probably decided on the title first, then made the number.
The CEO of the site only talks about the gender ratio, it'e the media who applies the title to those female investors, you are not going to fuck up your VIP customers by calling them "dama"(it has a negative connotation). |
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It's just not possible. As long as there's a single copy of the blockchain anywhere, on any hard drive in the world, the network will rebuild itself, even if every other node had been destroyed. It may seem unsettling, but there is actually nothing that can stop it, short of 'turning off the internet', which is of course impossible, since the internet itself was designed to reconfigure itself in the face of any disruption.
Bitcoin must prevail, its code does not permit any other outcome.
A single copy of the blockchain is open to manipulation. Not really, you need hundreds of millions of dollar of hardware and electricity to work months for you to recreate another one. Except for the latest few weeks or maybe a month, most miners could recreate most of the early stuff with ease. Especially if you have a farm. Remember the last blockhash of a recent date and you will really give them some big headaches. |
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It's just not possible. As long as there's a single copy of the blockchain anywhere, on any hard drive in the world, the network will rebuild itself, even if every other node had been destroyed. It may seem unsettling, but there is actually nothing that can stop it, short of 'turning off the internet', which is of course impossible, since the internet itself was designed to reconfigure itself in the face of any disruption.
Bitcoin must prevail, its code does not permit any other outcome.
A single copy of the blockchain is open to manipulation. Not really, you need hundreds of millions of dollar of hardware and electricity to work months for you to recreate another one. |
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Yes.
You know this how? What stops the first person coming online from doing a 51%? That's not how 51% attack works, you need to have a main blockchain you don't work on first to pull off a 51% attack. Use your brain. If you came on first wouldn't you start mining (lets say the diff. adjusted)? Then you'd be 100% hashrate. There has to be two competing blockchains, or there is no way to do double-spending, thus no 51% attack. You simply have no idea what 51% attack is, read more, talk less. |
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News flash: http://finance.sina.com.cn/money/bank/hykx/20131115/083317332778.shtmlThe CEO of Huobi, one Chinese Bitcoin exchange which processed tens of millions of dollars a day, has told a journalist that out of the site's VIP customers(those who trade more than 10 million CNYs per month), 40% are females, it's widely suspected that most of them are damas, i.e. female kins of wealthy businessmen in China. He also confirms that they have started talks with Great Wisdom, maker of China's leading stock trading software, about the acquisition of his company by Great Wisdom, and is developing a series of financial products based on Bitcoin. |
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I've slowly learned that almost every single thing I learned in school and university was wrong, or else in some way majorly corrupted. No fields are spared as far as I've seen, besides maybe the practical ones like engineering (there's a market test for wrongness in engineering). Economics of course, but math (pure math, like analysis) and physics and linguistics and logic have severe fundamental issues that have a strong and far-reaching corrupting effect. It's just government funding and the power structure of intellectuals that allows them to equivocate and win by flashiness and the illusion of rigor rather than actual rigor.
There is absolutely no substitute for learning to think for yourself.
Huh, it's not like mathematics, logic and physics are invented after the modern governments grabbing power, or after there is a public school system, at least not those you are expected to understand. Most of the real madness started about 100 years ago, but yeah actually it's not all due to government influence, some is due to human nature and status games. Government just makes it way worse. I don't know what to say, but I guess since you have such strong opinions about logic, math and science shouldn't make much sense to you as well. |
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I've slowly learned that almost every single thing I learned in school and university was wrong, or else in some way majorly corrupted. No fields are spared as far as I've seen, besides maybe the practical ones like engineering (there's a market test for wrongness in engineering). Economics of course, but math (pure math, like analysis) and physics and linguistics and logic have severe fundamental issues that have a strong and far-reaching corrupting effect. It's just government funding and the power structure of intellectuals that allows them to equivocate and win by flashiness and the illusion of rigor rather than actual rigor.
There is absolutely no substitute for learning to think for yourself.
Huh, it's not like mathematics, logic and physics are invented after the modern governments grabbing power, or after there is a public school system, at least not those you are expected to understand. Most of the real madness started about 100 years ago, but yeah actually it's not all due to government influence, some is due to human nature and status games. Government just makes it way worse. How was school before? How was school when it was ideal? Obviously at no time was it ideal, but aren't we talking about since when government starts to have a hand in school affairs? |
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I've slowly learned that almost every single thing I learned in school and university was wrong, or else in some way majorly corrupted. No fields are spared as far as I've seen, besides maybe the practical ones like engineering (there's a market test for wrongness in engineering). Economics of course, but math (pure math, like analysis) and physics and linguistics and logic have severe fundamental issues that have a strong and far-reaching corrupting effect. It's just government funding and the power structure of intellectuals that allows them to equivocate and win by flashiness and the illusion of rigor rather than actual rigor.
There is absolutely no substitute for learning to think for yourself.
Huh, it's not like mathematics, logic and physics are invented after the modern governments grabbing power, or after there is a public school system, at least not those you are expected to understand. |
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Mike's core concern, based on the thread on the Foundation forums, is that Cryptolocker is a serious problem, and because it's such a demonically simple way to extort cash from people, it's going to become a huge problem. There will be many, many copycats soon, and you get enough non-techies getting ripped off and having their first experience with bitcoin this way, and suddenly govs around the world become very hostile to bitcoin (vs barely caring about it, and figuring out how they feel about it as is the case now). And then (or perhaps before), you can kiss any hope of business acceptance of bitcoin (something we all dream of, I'd imagine, so that we can transact in bitcoin without having to resort to exchanges) goodbye.
Here's a thought - why don't people keep their virus definition files up to date? Microsoft deserves a huge amount of blame for leaving their OSes unprotected for such an incredibly long time, but windows 8 actually does include Microsoft Security Essentials for free. Anyway, how many people have actually gotten the cryptlocker virus? I think it's pretty unlikely that this will be anything more then a fringe thing affecting people who probably don't have any valuable files anyway, because they don't even know how to use their computer. A virus writer will have to be extremely selective in targeting people if they don't want their virus to end up in virus definition, which in turn means not very many people will be effected. If they try to spread it all over the place it'll end up blocked everywhere, which in turn, again, means no one gets it. I had a friend call me and tell the story of a small company (20 PCs) catching cryptolocker and needing bitcoin from him. It is a problem and it could become big. Unfortunately it also is a problem for Bitcoin (by association). The answer to this threat however, does certainly not lie in trying to render Bitcoin payment less attractive for those criminals. It lies in tightening your security and making regular backups... which you should do anyway. The reason why Cryptlocker is putting people in misery is not too much Bitcoin, but too little, and too late, Bitcoin should have been invented right at the beginning of the internet. Cryptlocker relies on some command and control servers on the botnet to send it the public key, the reason botnet exists? It doesn't cost any energy to send spam E-mails, which is exactly how Cryptlocker spreads. Bitcoin, created to thwart the botnet, shows how useful hashcash is, and how irresponsible the E-mail providers are. Responding to ransomware threat by proposing to regulate Bitcoin is another step towards the wrong direction. And we should really regulate RSA, really really should do that, Ransomware will be useless without it. |
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But if I don't get to check the signatures all the way down to the last node in the graph, how can I prevent, let's say, a validator cheats on me saying:"Oh, sorry, I was tricked by some nodes on my trust list as well, so I relayed to you this false information they relayed me, I have removed them, don't worry.", so he succssfully double-spends me without getting caught?
A validator can't relay false information. Every message is signed by its originator and validations and proposals are currently flooded. (We have plans to optimize this in the future.) You are correct that bad things can happen if the majority colludes against you. But that's true of pretty much every system. In Bitcoin, you can be screwed if the majority of hashing power colludes against you. In a Democracy, you can be screwed if the majority of voters decide to pass laws that affect you. The difference is that Ripple lets you choose who you will trust. Yes, someone can build trust and betray you once, but then they have to start all over again. We all know that the main thing we have to avoid is the case where a majority of trust will be controlled by one entity. So the entire system will be designed to make that as difficult as possible. (See my link upthread.) So that's what I was saying, I need to check signatures all the way down to possibly the last node in the reachable network to determine if the network is being partitioned, right? |
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If I don't, what composes that supermajority that confirms that my trusted validators are not disconnected from the network at large?
Each of your trusted validators makes this determination based on their trust list and reports it to you in their validations. So you would need a supermajority of your validators to all see a majority of their validators and still not actually have a simple majority of weighted trust. That would require a very broken topology despite it being the very thing that the humans who choose the topology know that they have to prevent. Most real world failures will be either nearly complete or nearly empty. Dealing with failures near the 50% mark is the hardest case. For example, Bitcoin has no solution to the case where you consider one or two confirmations sufficient and somehow 60% of the hashing power is cut off from you. One could be added, but it would basically require knowing which mining pools have the hashing power, just as Ripple requires some knowledge of which validators have the weighted trust. We did design the system to detect these failure cases and become unavailable if reliable operation is impossible. Long before poor topology could cause false confirmations, it would cause poor service, prompting humans to address it. But if I don't get to check the signatures all the way down to the last node in the graph, how can I prevent, let's say, a validator cheats on me saying:"Oh, sorry, I was tricked by some nodes on my trust list as well, so I relayed to you this false information they relayed me about the network being good, I have removed them, don't worry.", so he succssfully double-spends me without getting caught? He may well be innocent as well, this is a unverifiable claim. |
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[ Ripple actually doesn't seem to fare much better on the detection of the former case either: if you don't keep record of every validator which has a long history of honest validations from time to time(kindly enlighten me if you have some better algorithms), you can't detect if the partitioning takes place because the supermajority you are seeing could just be "phantom validators" operated by a botnet, while with Bitcoin, all you need to know is a number: the hashrate. You don't care about validators you don't know. And those validators don't care about validators they don't know. This is the number one scenario everyone knows they have to protect against, so the entire scheme by which validators are chosen will be designed to address exactly this. https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3881&p=19423#p19420With Bitcoin, you can only statistically infer the hashing power you are seeing over time. You can't directly tell how much of the hashing power you are connected to. If I don't, what composes that supermajority that confirms that my trusted validators are not disconnected from the network at large? |
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Anyone knows if Eligius is still doing zero-fee transactions?
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theymos, gmaxwell, everyone - excellent project! My donation on the way too...
IMHO we should motivate miners to operate liquid CoinJoin pools and pass all their new block rewards through it. Then integrate CoinJoin in as many clients as possible, for automatic or semi-automatic use. When everything is tainted, nothing is, and all list operators will look pretty stupid. It's in the best interest of miners that bitcoins remain fungible long term, but some short sighted individual miners might object to getting slightly tainted coins. This could be offset by a small fee paid by CoinJoin users, and shared between pools and miners. I tend to think that Coinjoin pools should be like Tor flashproxies, ephemeral, ad-hoc and untrackable. |
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