Bitcoins: the evil currency of the new century!

[CryptoFreak33]

Found this online, thought it was interesting. Thoughts?

http://www.thedailybell.com/4311/The-Pure-Fiat-Con-Every-Transaction-Available-for-Official-Scrutiny-and-Thats-Just-the-Point

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[kjj]

Sadly, this guy is missing a dictionary.  It is hard to take someone seriously when they use a word like "fiat" so often, and get it wrong nearly every time.

[benjamindees]

Bitcoin is a psy-op to get you to use a currency that tracks all your transactions, and is somehow connected to LETS and the UN and socialism and anti-semitism.  Bitcoin promoters are "evil people" who are forcing our choice of currency on others using "government power".  And, apparently, the better alternative is gold.

This reeks of desperation.  I wonder why.  Hmm let's see...

Another reason why the Daily Bell, itself an ardent promoter of privately gold-backed currencies, is enraptured with Paul’s unremitting advocacy of the gold standard could be that the directors of the Bell have a vested interest in a return to a gold standard, and more generally a larger role for gold and silver as circulating currencies. Indeed, as Diana Zoppa, an advisor to the Daily Bell, acknowledged in an interview with Kerry Lutz of the Financial Survival Network, Zoppa’s hiring by the Daily Bell was facilitated by the existence of a business partnership between the directors of the Bell and Zoppa’s husband, Shawn Perger, owner of a gold-mining company called Dicon Gold Inc., whose main assets are found in Colombia.

This partnership seems to have been a very close one...

http://realcurrencies.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-daily-bell-hoax/

[Stephen Gornick]

Found this online, thought it was interesting. Thoughts?

http://www.thedailybell.com/4311/The-Pure-Fiat-Con-Every-Transaction-Available-for-Official-Scrutiny-and-Thats-Just-the-Point

There's more discussion on it here:

Bitcoin Could Be An NWO's Conspiracy
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110432.0


[Edited: Corrected title and link to the right article.]

[CryptoFreak33]

You know, I was this close to becoming a reader of the Daily Bell. Until this.

[ralree]

We doubt it. Here's something recently posted at Reddit:

Anything in Tor is completely traceable. This is an important point, so I'll reiterate it in big scary letters:

TOR IS COMPLETELY TRACEABLE

Any low-latency mixnet is. There's no two ways about it. Anyone who can observe a sufficiently large part of the internet over time can correlate your traffic to that of the server and get a pretty good idea that it's you.

I'll observe your IP connecting to an entry node and sending 13981 bytes to it. Then I'll observe an exit node sending exactly 13981 bytes to a server a second later. That's you, with an overwhelming probability. It's a bit of a simplification, but it's really that easy. I just have to be powerful enough to be able to observe large parts of the internet, since Tor nodes are spread around the globe.

I love how they quote "something posted at Reddit."  That's such a credible source of information!

This oversimplified quote basically discredits the entire article since they think this is correct.  Tor is NOT traceable this way.  This is an important point, so I'll reiterate it in big scary letters:

TOR IS NOT COMPLETELY TRACEABLE IN THE WAY PORTRAYED ABOVE

You can't observe the first node in an onion routing network "sending 13981 bytes to it."  These plaintext bytes would be wrapped in 2 layers of encryption (hence, onion), so you might be able to guess with some sort of margin of error how big the decrypted payload might be, and maybe observe it somewhere else in the world and do some timing analysis, but all of that is REALLY hard to do.  The "a second later" part is particularly silly - how do you know it's only going to take 1 second?  What if that exit node is sending out packets ever millisecond (which most are)?  

[Etlase2]

I am totally out of my element when it comes to Tor, but symmetric encryption does not affect the size of the payload, so unless Tor uses some kind of padding scheme (which it certainly might), that is not protection to just say "it's encrypted." However, I believe if someone happens to be watching both ends they can make some very educated guesses about where data is going to and from. But unless it's a honeypot site, they won't know what that data is. However, since most bitcoin data is very similar in bandwidth, I don't think they will ever be able to make a strong correlation in this scenario. Again, I am not a Tor expert, take it with a grain of salt. Some of this may depend on whether or not it's an onion site or in the clearnet, but I think we're talking about onion sites here.

[kokojie]

I am totally out of my element when it comes to Tor, but symmetric encryption does not affect the size of the payload, so unless Tor uses some kind of padding scheme (which it certainly might), that is not protection to just say "it's encrypted." However, I believe if someone happens to be watching both ends they can make some very educated guesses about where data is going to and from. But unless it's a honeypot site, they won't know what that data is. However, since most bitcoin data is very similar in bandwidth, I don't think they will ever be able to make a strong correlation in this scenario. Again, I am not a Tor expert, take it with a grain of salt. Some of this may depend on whether or not it's an onion site or in the clearnet, but I think we're talking about onion sites here.

What about in my case, I use a SSH tunnel to a server that serves hundreds of other SSH tunnel users, and my SSH tunnel is what I use to connect to TOR, I think this set up is 100% untraceable, as even if somehow the government cracked TOR and traced to my SSH server, they still have to determine who am I among hundreds of users.

[kjj]

I am totally out of my element when it comes to Tor, but symmetric encryption does not affect the size of the payload, so unless Tor uses some kind of padding scheme (which it certainly might), that is not protection to just say "it's encrypted." However, I believe if someone happens to be watching both ends they can make some very educated guesses about where data is going to and from. But unless it's a honeypot site, they won't know what that data is. However, since most bitcoin data is very similar in bandwidth, I don't think they will ever be able to make a strong correlation in this scenario. Again, I am not a Tor expert, take it with a grain of salt. Some of this may depend on whether or not it's an onion site or in the clearnet, but I think we're talking about onion sites here.

What about in my case, I use a SSH tunnel to a server that serves hundreds of other SSH tunnel users, and my SSH tunnel is what I use to connect to TOR, I think this set up is 100% untraceable, as even if somehow the government cracked TOR and traced to my SSH server, they still have to determine who am I among hundreds of users.

Is TCP port 113 open on that shell box?  Are there logs?

[Come-from-Beyond]

We doubt it. Here's something recently posted at Reddit:

Anything in Tor is completely traceable. This is an important point, so I'll reiterate it in big scary letters:

TOR IS COMPLETELY TRACEABLE

Any low-latency mixnet is. There's no two ways about it. Anyone who can observe a sufficiently large part of the internet over time can correlate your traffic to that of the server and get a pretty good idea that it's you.

I'll observe your IP connecting to an entry node and sending 13981 bytes to it. Then I'll observe an exit node sending exactly 13981 bytes to a server a second later. That's you, with an overwhelming probability. It's a bit of a simplification, but it's really that easy. I just have to be powerful enough to be able to observe large parts of the internet, since Tor nodes are spread around the globe.

I love how they quote "something posted at Reddit."  That's such a credible source of information!

This oversimplified quote basically discredits the entire article since they think this is correct.  Tor is NOT traceable this way.  This is an important point, so I'll reiterate it in big scary letters:

TOR IS NOT COMPLETELY TRACEABLE IN THE WAY PORTRAYED ABOVE

You can't observe the first node in an onion routing network "sending 13981 bytes to it."  These plaintext bytes would be wrapped in 2 layers of encryption (hence, onion), so you might be able to guess with some sort of margin of error how big the decrypted payload might be, and maybe observe it somewhere else in the world and do some timing analysis, but all of that is REALLY hard to do.  The "a second later" part is particularly silly - how do you know it's only going to take 1 second?  What if that exit node is sending out packets ever millisecond (which most are)?  

Care to explain this:
http://prisms.cs.umass.edu/brian/pubs/wright-tissec.pdf (page #13)