2013-03-13 new scientist Bitcoin Add On Makes Purchases Private

[Piper67]

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2013/03/bitcoin-zerocoin.html

[Monster Tent]

Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door.

 

[BTC Books]

Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door.

 

Hilarious.

But, without the back door, it's an interesting idea.

[Monster Tent]

Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door.

 

Hilarious.

But, without the back door, it's an interesting idea.

If its not open source its doa.

[Mike Christ]

Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door.

 

But really.  It's not private if the police can see what I'm doing.  Screw suspicion, a nose with a badge is still a nose I want out.

[knives]

Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door.

 

Hilarious.

But, without the back door, it's an interesting idea.

Okay, a little bit of conspiracy is in order here:

- 1st scenario: The guy is incredibly stupid. Only mentioning the possibility of a backdoor in a non open source project, will make most of your possible users run away, we're talking about a crypto-currency after all.

- 2nd scenario: The question was so stupid that he wanted to give back an equally stupid answer.

Either way, I'm never going to use (especially if I can't have a clear look at the source code). However it's a fine proof of concept for similar to follow.

[BTC Books]

Zerocoin would give you this incredible privacy guarantee, then we could add on some features which let the police, for instance, to be able to track money laundering. A back door.

 

Hilarious.

But, without the back door, it's an interesting idea.

Okay, a little bit of conspiracy is in order here:

- 1st scenario: The guy is incredibly stupid. Only mentioning the possibility of a backdoor in a non open source project, will make most of your possible users run away, we're talking about a crypto-currency after all.

- 2nd scenario: The question was so stupid that he wanted to give back an equally stupid answer.

Either way, I'm never going to use (especially if I can't have a clear look at the source code). However it's a fine proof of concept for similar to follow.

I'll go with Ockham's Razor here; and take #1 for 100 BTC, Alex.

[alexanderanon]

Very interesting. I look forward to hearing more about this.

Oh, and...if you include a backdoor...i'll download the inevitable fork that has backdoor excluded..

[Mike Hearn]

I've read this paper. It's a very clever technique. We can discuss it more when the paper is out. I am skeptical it makes sense to integrate with Bitcoin, however.

There are no back doors in their system. But let's face it. If you were just a curious researcher and some journalist asked you that question, you'd be tempted to just blow the question off with some stupid answer too. The alternative is to have your work be branded by the press as some kind of dangerous anarchist idea and all your friends and co-workers will think you are some kind of wacko criminal. Far easier to just say "oh yes, of course we can add a back door" and move on.