Economic Totalitarianism

[suda123]

This is not just about Putin as the good guy in the good cop bad cop dialectic. This is not the red vs the blue or bad nations vs good nations.

Reading regular news sites around the world people see that yes, scumbags are lying, perpetrating false flags, stealing money...to the benefit of the few. This is not just exposing the bad cop which would be some nations, but it is exposing the bad cop as the rulers of those nations.

I already said that if you read some sites, forums, it is littered with comments about banks, NWO, question about terrorist attacks, who benefits, people questioning what happens after this scripted WW3 (if it happens).

They know WW3 is a script!

The point is this: people are becoming very aware of the false hegelian dialectic that leads to something. Problem, reaction, solution, because it happens time after time.

As you said, Putin is laying out how corrupt the G20/USA/dollar hegemony system is. This is all to join with Asia to push for a NWO reserve currency where not one nation's currency is used as a reserve. This is globalist hegemony. Putin knows who he works for.

The banksters are running the script... except as I explained upthread to rpietila, if these banksters refused to do this, nature would overpower them and replace them with banksters that will do it, because the people demand their humanistic outcome.

This is all the nature of man— the 666.

There is nothing anyone can do about this. It is a cycle of nature. It is entirely natural. Get out your popcorn and watch it on CNN.

DUBYA DUBYA E WORLD CHAMPION PEW BOOM DUND UNDUDNDUN DUNDUDNUDN


Wait is buttcoin going to go down anytime soon >.<

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[vokain]

"NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday"
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0TG27120151127

FWIW

[macsga]

"NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday"
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0TG27120151127

FWIW

Obsolete... they now got fb

[suda123]

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

Can't have a top to bottom society without sheep right? We have roles to play, people are content with there current reality and they will fight to the very end defending that.

[suda123]

"NSA to shut down bulk phone surveillance program by Sunday"
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0TG27120151127

FWIW

Obsolete... they now got fb

They have always had facebook...

[rpietila]

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

Can't have a top to bottom society without sheep right? We have roles to play, people are content with there current reality and they will fight to the very end defending that.

Cryptokingdom.me is a top-to-bottom but no sheep.

[trollercoaster]

 

http://www.thelocal.se/20151121/swedish-king-calls-for-global-bathtub-ban

[suda123]

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

Can't have a top to bottom society without sheep right? We have roles to play, people are content with there current reality and they will fight to the very end defending that.

Cryptokingdom.me is a top-to-bottom but no sheep.

What is everyones review on the IMF accepting the chinese quan or rumbie in there easter egg baskets >

[tabnloz]

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

Can't have a top to bottom society without sheep right? We have roles to play, people are content with there current reality and they will fight to the very end defending that.

Cryptokingdom.me is a top-to-bottom but no sheep.

What is everyones review on the IMF accepting the chinese quan or rumbie in there easter egg baskets >

It has been in the works for a while, being written about in Currency Wars & Death of Money by Jim Rickards. China wanted to join 'the club' so needed to play by the rules: get their gold reserves up (but only announce a minimum), toe the economic line. This is the orderly de-dollarization of the global economy - because during the next crisis there is no government with a clean balance sheet, therefore no ability to bailout the golbe. The only institution left is the IMF and their SDR (which is a kind of behind the scenes currency). This suits China because they can swap exposure to USD (their trillions in foreign reserves) into SDR's.

[tabnloz]

It has been in the works for a while, being written about in Currency Wars & Death of Money by Jim Rickards. China wanted to join 'the club' so needed to play by the rules: get their gold reserves up (but only announce a minimum), toe the economic line. This is the orderly de-dollarization of the global economy - because during the next crisis there is no government with a clean balance sheet, therefore no ability to bailout the golbe. The only institution left is the IMF and their SDR (which is a kind of behind the scenes currency). This suits China because they can swap exposure to USD (their trillions in foreign reserves) into SDR's.

But if they force pension funds, and other investors to buy $ denominated stuff, then the $ might not lose total reserve status.

Remember those bonds, derivatives, oil, etc.. All based on USD.

The dollar still retains the heaviest weighting in the basket, but this all happens whilst things remain 'orderly'. The US will not be able bail itself out again either in scope or with the confidence of the market.

The monetary reset will come eventually, so the hypothesis is all the main players agree to stock gold reserves roughly equivalent & equal compared to their GDP. If they get there before the next crisis hits, all the better. Remember, with SDR's, there will be no single government to blame or hold accountable, it will just be dictated by the IMF.

While everything remains largely USD based, see 1) as emerging market currencies implode USD reserves are depleted and treasuries sold off to cover the devaluing effects, and 2) increasingly swap lines have opened up for commodities like oil that bypass the USD 'middleman' altogether; China, Russia, some Euro, Australia etc etc trade directly with each other in some instances.

[TPTB_need_war]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

Making anonymity that is immune to the global police state is an immense challenge especially for businesses, because they can't just go hop on another anonymous WiFi connection every time they want to interact with the block chain (and that won't even help you individually with a low scale coin like Monero, because you are the only person hopping on anonymous WiFi in your geographical area so your transactions can still be correlated!). Making an IP address mixnet that is immune to a party which can see all traffic over the internet is an extremely challenging if not implausible statistically. I have been thinking deeply for a long time about the sort of attacks that are possible on mixnets and nothing (that I've analyzed) seems to entirely immune.

A generative essence realization is there is no possible way to obfuscate your IP address with an autonomous cryptographic protocol (such as RIngCT or Cryptonote). The only way to obfuscate IP addresses is with an interactive mixnet, which then either incurs a simultaneity requirement or the mixnet must generalize to many forms of internet traffic so a sufficient mix set always available. But especially generalized mixnets suffer from Sybil attacks because of the cost of scaling relaying nodes scales with traffic and DDoS. As smooth knows from our past private discussions (afair last year), my only idea on how to attack the Sybil problem of Tor and I2P is to pay the nodes you are want to relay through for an onion routing. But this comes with another set of holistic issues. So far, I haven't been able to design the system that is immune to the NSA. I am still working on this problem, but have deprioritized it, because to my consternation it is such an intractable quagmire (a.k.a. clusterfuck).

So let's say we only want privacy against other smaller corporations that don't have special access to NSA analysis. Yet now we must assume the NSA can't be hacked or individual employees bribed. And the NSA is not the only national security agency doing this. We have at least the 5 Eyes nations plus Russia and China with sophisticated, well funded national security agencies.

Can you know understand better why Martin Armstrong (and I reguritated) that a Dark Age is possible?

The world is in a pickle. I am doing my best to try to find a way out. I am now thinking perhaps anonymity is not the ticket (yet continuing to develop and consider it, as an option) and instead massive volume of micro-transactions might be more liberating. In short, to pursue my Knowledge Age theory of breaking the Theory of the Firm down to individualized production. In short, death the corporation as being too slow to even effectively use the data it is accumulating. If you read my 2010 thesis linked from the OP of the Economic Devastation thread (in the Economics forum), you can gain insight into what I am referring to where I explained that top-down access to information is not knowledge creation. Knowledge creation is accretive, spontaneous, and highly individualized.

Paradigm shift. I am apparently good at creating those, not so much at the intricate patterns of chess (too many intricacies are burdensome to the degrees-of-freedom to see over the forest). In short, I prefer deforestation paradigms.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

No, privacy from every idiot who wants to front-run you, or play amateur detective and figure out a lot of private things about your business or personal affairs and publish them. I've seen both happen on this forum.

Most businesses and people are just too obscure and unimportant to warrant much interest from the NSA or from the largest globalist corporations. But they all have nosy neighbors, with varying degrees of sophistication.

Though if the global police state does evolve to the point where everyone is a person-of-interest, then indeed it will be a dark age, and it isn't clear whether cryptography and cryptocurrencies can help with that at all. Maybe.

Don't know if you read the edit I did on my prior post.

Problem is that if anyone is collecting that data (even if the NSA has no desire to analyze it or retain it forever), they can be potentially hacked or individual employees bribed. The prize is so valuable, it nearly insures another Edward Snowden will surface yet with a profit motive to exploit that dataset. The problem is that even to collect that data means they have peeping routers all over the major backbones and these are thus vulnerable to hacking and bribes, etc..

When we live in a world where it is possible to collect all data, then the defense against bad outcomes with your data (and the greater threat than the NSA w.r.t. to data aggregation may be Google, Ad Sense, and Facebook Likes) is perhaps not to depend on the implausibility of statistical correlation (which may not be so implausible as the naive assumption, e.g. per my examples above and in the general paradigmatic category), rather perhaps to depend on keeping your assets stored in micro-granular Knowledge Creation paradigms instead of stored monetary calls on labor (which I claim is a dying paradigm). The data aggregator can't do anything with aggregated data against a micro-granular asset with attributes perhaps orthogonal to the flows of popularity. I mean everyone can see which ventures are popular and trending by numerous means such as Google metrics. Transparency aids competition which accelerates knowledge creation. The government can't tax to death a populous activity without declaring a global Dark Age (which has never occurred, i.e. even during the Dark Age in Western Europe the prosperity trended up else where).

As for being vulnerable to haters, I am surely vulnerable by posting on this forum and not being anonymous. This seems to go along with any action on the internet. I read where some teenager in the Philippines shot another teenager because of some insulting remark about a girl friend on Facebook. I am not so sure that anonymity can be holistically ubiquitous to protect me from all the potential ways the internet spreads the opportunities to be hated and not anonymous. It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth). Other than the risk of large wealth (and the obvious issues that raises) and being outspoken on the internet (and the conflicts that raises), my personal life story is a prime example of how risk to life and limb comes from chaotic, unexpected directions, so I don't know if focused on the very difficult issue of anonymous money transfer stands out as the greatest risk in most people's lives.

Any way I am not sure. So as I wrote, I am hedging my bets by still pursuing anonymity, but I have deprioritized it somewhat (not entirely) to focus more on micro-transactions.

Edit: I am contemplating whether it is possible that fungibility could be orthogonal to anonymity. Fungibility could first be defined as the ability to get your transactions into the majority consensus of the block chain, instead of a stricter definition that would require that anyone who accepts such a transaction can't be coerced nor hassled by the government nor whom ever. As long as you can get your transactions on the block chain, then if you spend them to parties that careless about coercion (e.g. in small morsels in social interactions where the government can't possibly go after every person who received a microtransaction). So instead of just anonymity designs, I have also been thinking a lot about how to insure block chain inclusion remains permissionless.

It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth).

No, because these ventures will have large flows of money. Even if you are correct and storing monetary wealth is becoming irrelevant, moving it privately will still be desired.

Even things as mundane as Facebook likes can have proprietary knowledge behind them. Everyone can see when someone or something is getting a lot of Facebook likes, but not everyone can see how that popularity is being monetized, and the latter is what is really valuable.

Well that is the sort of statistical pattern that I think it implausible to hide if the person who needs to know thus can afford the resources to know.

I don't think in this Technocracy age of Big Data, one can't hope to obscure patterns on large data sets. The generative essence of the implausibility is that the statistical patterns hidden at one layer, leak into the next layer, so it becomes a requirement for a globally leak-proof synergy of activity in cyberspace. It seems futile from that high-level perspective. And I stubbornly didn't want to accept that, but having really looked deeply at the technical issues, I now lean to that being the hard reality.

That is why I posit that the paradigm of wealth stored in forms that others can easily emulate, tax, and expropriate is dying.

Rather as I suggest, if you have your wealth stored in forms that others can re-use but not entirely emulate/replace, then your "wealth" can't be siphoned away with any means of introspection. For example, see the modules I am adding to my Github account. Sure someone could copy those some where and basically run away with my effort to-date. But they'd be silly to do that, because they'd lose my ongoing knowledge to maintain and improve those modules. They'd be much better rewarded by contributing and re-using them with attribution. And from there, my wealth grows in units of active and ongoing knowledge creation. The monetization will come and I will be able to eat. The big story isn't whether I can buy a Maserati but whether I can impact the world in my small way.

Also I admit there will perhaps be a transitional phase from the economy we have to the Knowledge Age (and perhaps a totalitarian interlude, but isn't that my point about what is dying), so I have not yet tossed aside anonymity entirely. But I am increasingly seeing it as an albatross around my neck as it seems to mess up everything with scalability and still not give the assurances I wanted when I was originally so concerned about needing anonymity. i am still working through the details of it all, so let's see where I end up with my conclusions. If there is useful anonymity that integrates holistically with scaling, then I will be more positive about adding it so people who feel they need it can. But I also worry that they are creating for themselves a false sense of anonymity (and may be later shocked that their actions were not anonymous).

[suda123]

Even if the people have a vague understanding they are getting fucked, they still have their bread and circus to keep them from taking to the steets and lynching daddy warbucks.

I have little hope of ever getting off this damn merry go round.

yea bread and circus ! >:C

[TPTB_need_war]

The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

[...8<...]

The relevant (to your stated concern) distinction from Zerocash (and a friendly reminder to not conflate Zerocoin with Zerocash because the former requires equal revealed values and doesn't integrate with hiding values) is that there isn't a global trusted master key (generated once at setup of the sytem) to be potentially abused (if the trusted setup was gamed some how). Yet in both systems, if you can muster enough computing resources even just once (and/or break/weaken the number-theoretic cryptographic assumptions security), you can create unlimited money out-of-thin-air and this can't be detected (unless detection means everyone has the same level of breakage capability and all values can be globally unmasked rendering value hiding useless).

Homomorphic values and ring signatures come with potentially huge anti-DDoS costs as I have been explaining in a thread I started in the Bitcoin Discussion forum. In that thread, I have alluded to we might be better off to just eliminate homomorphic (hiding) values and also eliminate Cryptonote's one-time ring signatures and move to something like CoinShuffle, because we are going to need to do a CoinShuffle any way. The details on this tradeoff need to be further mulled over and elucidated.

[...8<...]

Anonymity is very difficult to accomplish holistically especially at-scale (Monero is no where near accomplishing that at-scale) and it doesn't come for free.

[...8<...]

A generative essence realization is there is no possible way to obfuscate your IP address with an autonomous cryptographic protocol (such as RIngCT or Cryptonote). The only way to obfuscate IP addresses is with an interactive mixnet, which then either incurs a simultaneity requirement or the mixnet must generalize to many forms of internet traffic so a sufficient mix set always available. But especially generalized mixnets suffer from Sybil attacks because of the cost of scaling relaying nodes scales with traffic and DDoS. As smooth knows from our past private discussions (afair last year), my only idea on how to attack the Sybil problem of Tor and I2P is to pay the nodes you are want to relay through for an onion routing. But this comes with another set of holistic issues. So far, I haven't been able to design the system that is immune to the NSA. I am still working on this problem, but have deprioritized it, because to my consternation it is such an intractable quagmire (a.k.a. clusterfuck).

[...8<...]

[...8<...]

Well that is the sort of statistical pattern that I think it implausible to hide if the person who needs to know thus can afford the resources to know.

I don't think in this Technocracy age of Big Data, one can't hope to obscure patterns on large data sets. The generative essence of the implausibility is that the statistical patterns hidden at one layer, leak into the next layer, so it becomes a requirement for a globally leak-proof synergy of activity in cyberspace. It seems futile from that high-level perspective. And I stubbornly didn't want to accept that, but having really looked deeply at the technical issues, I now lean to that being the hard reality.

That is why I posit that the paradigm of wealth stored in forms that others can easily emulate, tax, and expropriate is dying.

[...8<...]

Zerocash does hide your identity on the block chain even if your IP address is correlated across multiple transactions that you send to the block chain, because in Zerocash the payer(s) and payee(s) are obscured and proven in a non-interactive zero knowledge proof (NIZKP). This is accomplished by proving that the machine ran a certain program (and no other program) on the inputs and that result was "true" (i.e. verified), rather than proving something algebraically about the variables to the program. This computational witness requires the global master key setup.

Whereas, Cryptonote one-time rings mix the payer amongst a group of payers with the requirement that it is publicly verifiable that each payer can only be spent one-time. The one-time key is manufactured by the Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) like exchange that creates a new stealth payee address on each spend and that stealth address can only be spent once. So the problem is that if your IP address is correlated across spends, it becomes possible to link stealth addresses together as the same payee and then start to unmask the anonymity set of the payer rings.

So it would seem that Zerocash is the solution, except read my discussion at the quoted link about anti-DDoS protection. The problem is the huge verification cost for each Zerocash transaction and thus giving the attacker a huge asymmetric advantage when sending invalid transactions, i.e. unprotected Zerocash can be DDoS'ed to death.

And if using my suggested technique to create a hash-based signature as a first line of verification of incoming transactions sent to the block chain, then you've got to incorporate a simultaneity mixnet such as CoinShuffle to detach these hash signatures (and the payee's IP address) from the Zerocash transaction being submitted to the block chain. But then your anonymity is reduced back to the mixnet again so you've lost the benefits Zerocash provides. Perhaps Zerocash could devise a quick check on invalid signatures. I don't enough about the "moon math" in the white paper to deduce whether that is possible, but I 95% doubt it based on my understanding that such NIZKPs are a holistic math affair.

Perhaps instead of my hash suggestion (and as suggested by Gregory Maxwell at the aforementioned linked thread), each Zerocash (or RingCT) could require some PoW be attached to every transaction to rate limit spam, but the problem is the attacker has an asymmetric advantage by being able to place his hashing resources in venues with the cheapest electricity (e.g. 3 - 4 cents per kWh in WA State or China near hydropower) and leverage the latest ASIC efficiencies whereas the legitimate payer is running on retail electricity that costs 4 times more and non-optimum hardware that is at at least an order-of-magnitude disadvantage in power and speed. So the delay (or the transaction fees if the full nodes speed more on hardware to increase their spam bandwidth) will increase for legitimate payers asymmetrically to the attacker's costs. And that asymmetry will be amplified by the systemic ratio of the resources of the legitimate payers to the attacker's resources, thus if the anonymous system is only used infrequently then the cost of using it will be radically amplified (perhaps too high to be of practical use, although I haven't done some sample calculations yet). And for the system to be widely used (e.g. for microtransactions) the extra costs imposed by the attacker disincentivize its use when the legitimate participants don't value anonymity as a concern. Also the PoW required could vary per full node and vary in time (even in real time!) depending which nodes are receiving the most incoming DDoS spam, which complicates the determination where to submit a transaction and how much PoW is required to be submitted with it. So then it appears any any such Zerocash + PoW anti-DDoS system is going to be used only for anonymous mixing and not all transactions, but then the problem is the anonymity leaks as these anonymous mixes are then traded for coins in a system that is used in everyday commerce (e.g. microtransactions).

Even though I haven't thoroughly understood every technical aspect of it, the other problem with Zerocash appears to be that it can't merge the entirely opaque block chains, e.g. if there are two major chains fork due to a network split. Transparent block chains can be re-merged to the extent that double-spends are not intertwined. The major fault for Zerocash (that is not present for transparent block chains) being that I believe it is not possible to prove which coins were double-spent on both of the block chains. Normally this isn't a problem for an orphaned chain because you just throw away the orphans, but this is perhaps a problem in a major network split.

[TPTB_need_war]

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

I believe you're saying that under an assumption that corporations will adopt a form of blockchain that is already available on the market. I'm not so sure. Banks and certain IT companies do express their interest in blockchain, but judging from what I've heard them talk, it's more about permissioned blockchains.

It is a entirely different paradigm of privacy. You still have blockchain, which is easily auditable and verifiable for any party that might have such rights, but a competitor would not be able to even connect to the blockchain.

I assume this may prove to be more efficient for corporate goals than using permissionless anonymous blockchains, or even permissioned anonymous blockchains. I don't see big urge for the companies to be adopting open blockchains or particular cryptocurrencies, at least for now. There are of course certain cases when that can still be beneficial (e.g. on-chain bonds for smaller companies).

To say it in another way, the technology has converged on the market, but its tested application seems to be diverging from the original libertarian/anarchistic/openness ideas proposed by free-thinkers. Well, the time will say.

However, a real huge problem is parallel to what we might be discussing here. I bet nobody can point to a company or a particular painful use case that CryptoNote or Monero can be serving. The real market I mean, not our dreams of such. We've all been involved in creating a new better economy, while the course of history shows that we rather need the traditional economy upgraded instead.

I am not trying to say that privacy is an irrelevant issue. It surely is. I'd agree with TPTB_need_war. The big data and surveillance may actually drag us into techodark ages. However, I don't see how private cryptocurrencies can be incorporated into real markets. There's no decabillion market value here. And unfortunately, I would remain pessimistic on the perspectives: I doubt that there will ever be such a market.

Your point about private block chains (which I don't think will work well for similar concerns that corporations are learning not to depend on closed source), ties back into another distinction I want to make about public block chains.

Hide Data, Not IP

If we accept my studied intuition (which I detailed over my past few posts in this thread) that anonymity is untenable (because leakage is catastrophic to the point of doing anonymity, i.e. anonymity assumes 100% perfection otherwise don't bother with the flimsy/undetectable assurance of it), this doesn't mean that for example Confidential Transactions (CT) hiding of value is untenable.

So in general the privacy we want, may be to hide the data and not who is doing it. This data can also leak into layers where it is not hidden, but that would be the same as what we have now in the current world.

So I have been thinking to give up on anonymity of IP addresses (and thus Cryptonote, RingCT, and the ring aspect of my Zero Knowledge Transactions are not needed), but retain end-to-end encryption of the data. CT enables hiding of the values that are being traded.

So the government can still identify who is making those transactions and compel you to reveal your private keys or face the gulag, but in the normal use of the public block chain privacy is retained (to the extent it doesn't leak into non-hidden layers but that is the current world situation any way, so no worse).

Governments and police agencies will feel less threatened, yet some of the NSA-gone-amok indiscriminate big data collection will be foiled (which is a good thing since that crap has been argued to be entirely ineffective and puts the data at-risk of abuse ... remember the stories of TSA agents masturbating to nude airport scanner images and also I believe I read about GHCQ collecting Yahoo Messenger videochats and perhaps some agents were growing hair on their palms as well).

I believe this epiphany (separation-of-concerns) is foundational and very important.

So next we try to find ways to hide the data of smart contracts on the block chain. Actually my Zero Knowledge Transactions white paper also has innovations on hiding value that are not present in CT nor CCT, so if those are correct, I am already making progress on this paradigm.

Mix Data, Not Identity

Perhaps if it is possible to somehow mix currency data with smart contract data, it would make each more fungible in the sense that one can't construct a blacklist based on IP address of who is sending to the block chain if they don't even know which class of data they are black listing.

Also in general, I explained in the thread I linked to (and my coming research writeup will explain in more detail) why blacklisting by IP address in untenable any way. Thus I think the argument that anonymity of IP is essential for fungibility is being vacated.

I need to write up all this in a more technically detailed exposition so I can see how it all fits together in detail. I may have holes in this high-level overview. For example, need to work through the details of how identity of payer and payee on a block chain differs from the notion of IP address identity.

[TPTB_need_war]

A ha! End-to-end identity anonymity is possible!

The reason identity anonymity can't be done end-to-end principle (Zerocash almost does it, but as I pointed out there is a DDoS weakness incurred), is because our IP address is an identity that we can't easily detach from ourselves. For all other forms of data privacy, the IP address problem is irrelevant.

So it would seem that Zerocash is the solution, except read my discussion at the quoted link about anti-DDoS protection. The problem is the huge verification cost for each Zerocash transaction and thus giving the attacker a huge asymmetric advantage when sending invalid transactions, i.e. unprotected Zerocash can be DDoS'ed to death.

And if using my suggested technique to create a hash-based signature as a first line of verification of incoming transactions sent to the block chain, then you've got to incorporate a simultaneity mixnet such as CoinShuffle to detach these hash signatures (and the payee's IP address) from the Zerocash transaction being submitted to the block chain. But then your anonymity is reduced back to the mixnet again so you've lost the benefits Zerocash provides. Perhaps Zerocash could devise a quick check on invalid signatures. I don't enough about the "moon math" in the white paper to deduce whether that is possible, but I 95% doubt it based on my understanding that such NIZKPs are a holistic math affair.

There is a simple solution for DDoS with Zerocash. Use my hash-based signature suggestion on a non-anonymous basecoin, when sending the anonymous zerocash (the Zerocash paper names these zerocoins, not to be confused with Zerocoin) transaction. Since on a spend transaction (aka pour) the anonymous coins are entirely mixed with all anonymous coins, then your IP address and your non-anonymous transactions do nothing to help anyone trace the anonymous coins. And putting the non-anonymous funds at-risk with the fast to verify hash-based signature (3 million verifications per second on an 8 core CPU!), solves the DDoS attack issue.

Alternatively it may be possible to mint the hash signatures in such a way that the anonymous coins are forfeited when doing a DDoS attack, but are still not non-anonymously linked to the hash based public key, instead of needing to use a separate non-anonymous basecoin. This would be preferred for permissionless commerce.

So thus unlike RingCT, no CoinShuffle (mixnet) would be needed. Unlike Cryptonote (and RingCT), Zerocash hides everything because the inputs to the NIZKP are never revealed! This is the advantage zk-SNARKs because it proves that a program compared the inputs in the desired way, without revealing what the inputs were. Whereas in CN and RingCT, we all see the input public key addresses and the proof of which public address is spending is obscured by the mix, but correlating the IP address across mixes can correlate which of those addresses were in both mixes. For CN and RingCT to be as anonymous as Zerocash would require they mix with all known (and future!) public key addresses.

Note that zk-SNARKs are very slow to verify (roughly 300ms for a Zerocash transaction) and consume more bandwidth so this can't be used for all transactions. It would be a mixer that you mint non-anonymous coins into when the slow verification and its higher fees are justified.

Even though I haven't thoroughly understood every technical aspect of it, the other problem with Zerocash appears to be that it can't merge the entirely opaque block chains, e.g. if there are two major chains fork due to a network split. Transparent block chains can be re-merged to the extent that double-spends are not intertwined. The major fault for Zerocash (that is not present for transparent block chains) being that I believe it is not possible to prove which coins were double-spent on both of the block chains. Normally this isn't a problem for an orphaned chain because you just throw away the orphans, but this is perhaps a problem in a major network split.

Apparently I am mistaken. Zerocash coins have serial numbers, so it should be possible to know which serial numbers have been double spent on both forks.

[suda123]

A ha! End-to-end identity anonymity is possible!

The reason identity anonymity can't be done end-to-end principle (Zerocash almost does it, but as I pointed out there is a DDoS weakness incurred), is because our IP address is an identity that we can't easily detach from ourselves. For all other forms of data privacy, the IP address problem is irrelevant.

So it would seem that Zerocash is the solution, except read my discussion at the quoted link about anti-DDoS protection. The problem is the huge verification cost for each Zerocash transaction and thus giving the attacker a huge asymmetric advantage when sending invalid transactions, i.e. unprotected Zerocash can be DDoS'ed to death.

And if using my suggested technique to create a hash-based signature as a first line of verification of incoming transactions sent to the block chain, then you've got to incorporate a simultaneity mixnet such as CoinShuffle to detach these hash signatures (and the payee's IP address) from the Zerocash transaction being submitted to the block chain. But then your anonymity is reduced back to the mixnet again so you've lost the benefits Zerocash provides. Perhaps Zerocash could devise a quick check on invalid signatures. I don't enough about the "moon math" in the white paper to deduce whether that is possible, but I 95% doubt it based on my understanding that such NIZKPs are a holistic math affair.

There is a simple solution for DDoS with Zerocash. Use my hash-based signature suggestion on a non-anonymous basecoin, when sending the anonymous zerocash (the Zerocash paper names these zerocoins, not to be confused with Zerocoin) transaction. Since on a spend transaction (aka pour) the anonymous coins are entirely mixed with all anonymous coins, then your IP address and your non-anonymous transactions do nothing to help anyone trace the anonymous coins. And putting the non-anonymous funds at-risk with the fast to verify hash-based signature (3 million verifications per second on an 8 core CPU!), solves the DDoS attack issue.

Alternatively it may be possible to mint the one-time hash signatures in such a way that the anonymous coins are forfeited when doing a DDoS attack, but are still not non-anonymously linked to the hash based public key, instead of needing to use a separate non-anonymous basecoin.

So thus unlike RingCT, no CoinShuffle (mixnet) would be needed. Unlike Cryptonote (and RingCT), Zerocash hides everything because the inputs to the NIZKP are never revealed! This is the advantage zk-SNARKs because it proves that a program compared the inputs in the desired way, without revealing what the inputs were. Whereas in CN and RingCT, we all see the input public key addresses and the proof of which public address is spending is obscured by the mix, but correlating the IP address across mixes can correlate which of those addresses were in both mixes. For CN and RingCT to be as anonymous as Zerocash would require they mix with all known (and future!) public key addresses.

Note that zk-SNARKs are very slow to verify (roughly 300ms for a Zerocash transaction) and consume more bandwidth so this can't be used for all transactions. It would be a mixer that you mint non-anonymous coins into when the slow verification and its higher fees are justified.

Even though I haven't thoroughly understood every technical aspect of it, the other problem with Zerocash appears to be that it can't merge the entirely opaque block chains, e.g. if there are two major chains fork due to a network split. Transparent block chains can be re-merged to the extent that double-spends are not intertwined. The major fault for Zerocash (that is not present for transparent block chains) being that I believe it is not possible to prove which coins were double-spent on both of the block chains. Normally this isn't a problem for an orphaned chain because you just throw away the orphans, but this is perhaps a problem in a major network split.

Apparently I am mistaken. Zerocash coins have serial numbers, so it should be possible to know which serial numbers have been double spent on both forks.

ayy Ill be going to the Philippines next year to get some tattos should hangout

[minor-transgression]

Ever wanted rid of all those government forms that ask irrelevant questions?
That red tape that stops the right things from being done? What about getting
some legislation that means that anyone can bypass the regulations and
overrule the bureucrats - sounds just the thing doesn't it. Well, the UK is well
on its way to heaping everything since Magna Carta onto the bonfire. There's
just one precondition: _No Growth_

If you can put up a case that you are promoting "growth" that get-out-of-jail-free
card is all yours!

http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2014-15/deregulation.html
http://www.lowimpact.org/how-ttip-fits-perfectly-with-the-deregulation-act-which-can-overrule-all-other-laws-if-they-affect-growth-or-corporate-interests
"The Deregulation Bill, proposed by Tory privatiser Oliver Letwin, slipped into law at the end of the last Parliament. It can change all other law, according to criteria of "growth" ie business interests. It fits perfectly with the EU's deregulatory agenda, and that of TTIP and the other new "trade" agreements, which have largely come out of the City of London via the UK government anyway."

If you believe that KYC and AML regulations are now part of bitcoin's history,
maybe I can offer you another bridge for your collection :-)

[trollercoaster]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28633-resistance-to-last-resort-antibiotic-has-now-spread-across-globe/

[OROBTC]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28633-resistance-to-last-resort-antibiotic-has-now-spread-across-globe/

Well, that's not good news.  We are just back from some three weeks in India and Nepal.  Those places have just about every germ in existence...  And even staying at the "five star" hotels and fancy tours, you can still get sick!  I did.  But, it was not too bad in my case.  Cipro took care of it within three days.  About 60% of our tour group did come down with something or other.

Re the article, it will be of great interest to see how this all develops.  In many cases of severe gut disease, merely staying hydrated and taking in salt & sugar (like they give to people with cholera), may be enough in that the human body usually will get around to killing off almost anything given time.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

*  *  *

minor-transgression

I have found that usually almost every "change" brought on by .gov usually makes things worse...  The Hopey-Changey guy running things here (USA) is Exhibit A.

[suda123]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28633-resistance-to-last-resort-antibiotic-has-now-spread-across-globe/

Well, that's not good news.  We are just back from some three weeks in India and Nepal.  Those places have just about every germ in existence...  And even staying at the "five star" hotels and fancy tours, you can still get sick!  I did.  But, it was not too bad in my case.  Cipro took care of it within three days.  About 60% of our tour group did come down with something or other.

Re the article, it will be of great interest to see how this all develops.  In many cases of severe gut disease, merely staying hydrated and taking in salt & sugar (like they give to people with cholera), may be enough in that the human body usually will get around to killing off almost anything given time.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

*  *  *

minor-transgression

I have found that usually almost every "change" brought on by .gov usually makes things worse...  The Hopey-Changey guy running things here (USA) is Exhibit A.

LOOK AT ALL THESE FUCKING YOUTUBE CHANNELS BEING MAde to sell gold BULLION!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsuY_v9tceWY27M-6fxI5SA/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwA8PV6c0sc9D4lLGUSAFsg/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQoIcy1Sd3J_BopCXtdIQbA/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCynputKKCiyVJOKxSsXTUwA/videos

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrhOLQRoqVgVqhHFm9V5MXw/videos

Bitcoin goes up gold goes down ITS A FUCKING CONSPIRACY

Videos being uploaded per hour minutes apart wtf is going on why do they wanna sell gold so badly?

when they lead you to the official pages like finance for liberty or fabian for liberty and alex jones they have gold bullion adds, Why sell gold if its going to shoot up to 10k+ from what they claim?