Executive Director of Bitcoin Foundation is incompetent and dangerous to Bitcoin

[sunnankar]

In order to be anonymous using Bitcoin, you need to use Tor...thats a very true statement.

Tor is ancillary and overboard when it comes to Bitcoin privacy.

It is pretty easy to both create wallet addresses and generate transactions completely offline. Then all you need to do is push a transaction and if done with a site where minimal if any logs are kept then use is completely anonymous. Just make sure it is not a honeypot. Pandora's box has been opened.

Plus, Matonis being on the board is going to be a big loud and mean privacy pitbull with both bark and bite.

[BkkCoins]

It is pretty easy to both create wallet addresses and generate transactions completely offline. Then all you need to do is push a transaction and if done with a site where minimal if any logs are kept then use is completely anonymous. Just make sure it is not a honeypot. Pandora's box has been opened.

Not entirely true. You need to also be very careful about how you use your addresses. Any time you pay to or receive from another person you need to be aware they could be identified and queried about the transaction. Any cross-links between your own addresses will tie them to such a possibly known transaction as well. Right now most clients don't provide a good indication of address connectedness. You have to manage this yourself.

As an example, the std client will send change back to one of your addresses when you pay someone. So if you want to be anonymous you need to ensure the change doesn't get returned to an address that was used in some other identifiable transaction. Advanced users previously used coin-control for this (not in the std client), or blockchain.info has features for address selection as well.

Being careless with addresses can lead to identity leakage.

Plus, Matonis being on the board is going to be a big loud and mean privacy pitbull with both bark and bite.

I really hope he is.

[DeathAndTaxes]

The OP is an idiot and don't really care to participate in the rantings and ravings of loos.

Still I thought I would correct a factual mistake by BkkCoin.  The Satoshi client doesn't send change back to an existing address, it always sends change to an unused address from the address pool.

[jgarzik]

WRT Tor and anonymity, it is still not easy:

1) Protocol fingerprint shows you are using the bitcoin protocol

2) If coins are not mixed perfectly, you can be vulnerable to network analysis.

[the joint]

What's the big deal about anonymity, anyway?  If you're so concerned about anonymity, then you're going to have a problem when you go to...oh, I don't know...the store?  

Do you know what I do when a Bitcoin transaction gets complicated or shady?  I call the person.  We talk.  We work things out.  It's fine.

The 'anonymity' side of Bitcoin isn't really about anonymity at all --  it's about making sure that you're in control of your financial identity instead of a 3rd party controlling it for you.

[BkkCoins]

What's the big deal about anonymity, anyway?  If you're so concerned about anonymity, then you're going to have a problem when you go to...oh, I don't know...the store?  

Do you know what I do when a Bitcoin transaction gets complicated or shady?  I call the person.  We talk.  We work things out.  It's fine.

The 'anonymity' side of Bitcoin isn't really about anonymity at all --  it's about making sure that you're in control of your financial identity instead of a 3rd party controlling it for you.

Anonymity is important to many users. Some perhaps for legality reasons but also in many cases because of political reasons or cases where something shouldn't be illegal. Contributing to organizations that are blacklisted, eg. wikileaks is only one such example. Trading in places like Argentina or China or Iran. While these may not be very workable in many cases today I think people want Bitcoin to be useful for that in the future. Throwing it away because some group wants to monetize Bitcoin today is something I'm very much against.

Part of the whole reason for Bitcoin was to ensure people could transact without restraint, everywhere. In many places there are no guarantees of freedom to do so and anonymity is the only way to allow it to happen. By not taking it seriously we once again misconstrue the  needs of the general USA user with those of the worldwide Bitcoin users. The comments of the foundation director make it clear he sees Bitcoin thru the needs of Coinbase and US based money transfer. Perhaps the foundation should be called The American Bitcoin Foundation?

[Raize]

Satoshi was actually hugely anti-establishment, anti-bank with libertarian tendencies but noooooo, Bitcoin is somehow non-political regardless of why Satoshi made it.

He did say "attractive to the libertarian perspective" as if he wasn't one, frankly. It could be he only needed the anarchists and libertarians for the early adoption benefit.

[Serith]

The OP is an idiot and don't really care to participate in the rantings and ravings of loos.

If you feel general dissatisfaction about someone's posts but can't or do not want to form coherent argument than you can use "Ignore" button, and so am I.

[Serith]

What's the big deal about anonymity, anyway?  If you're so concerned about anonymity, then you're going to have a problem when you go to...oh, I don't know...the store?  

Do you know what I do when a Bitcoin transaction gets complicated or shady?  I call the person.  We talk.  We work things out.  It's fine.

The 'anonymity' side of Bitcoin isn't really about anonymity at all --  it's about making sure that you're in control of your financial identity instead of a 3rd party controlling it for you.

Anonymity is important to many users. Some perhaps for legality reasons but also in many cases because of political reasons or cases where something shouldn't be illegal. Contributing to organizations that are blacklisted, eg. wikileaks is only one such example. Trading in places like Argentina or China or Iran. While these may not be very workable in many cases today I think people want Bitcoin to be useful for that in the future. Throwing it away because some group wants to monetize Bitcoin today is something I'm very much against.

Part of the whole reason for Bitcoin was to ensure people could transact without restraint, everywhere. In many places there are no guarantees of freedom to do so and anonymity is the only way to allow it to happen. By not taking it seriously we once again misconstrue the  needs of the general USA user with those of the worldwide Bitcoin users. The comments of the foundation director make it clear he sees Bitcoin thru the needs of Coinbase and US based money transfer. Perhaps the foundation should be called The American Bitcoin Foundation?

You beat me to answer this, and your post is better then was mine.

[alexanderanon]

What's the big deal about anonymity, anyway?  If you're so concerned about anonymity, then you're going to have a problem when you go to...oh, I don't know...the store?  

Do you know what I do when a Bitcoin transaction gets complicated or shady?  I call the person.  We talk.  We work things out.  It's fine.

The 'anonymity' side of Bitcoin isn't really about anonymity at all --  it's about making sure that you're in control of your financial identity instead of a 3rd party controlling it for you.

I think THIS is the disturbing sentiment that the OP was initially responding to, not whether Vessenes believes bitcoin is anonymous or not, but the sense that he doesn't CARE about anonymity.

I remember arguing with MNW once about anonymity with regards to bitcoin, and he kept pushing this whole transparancy/openness mantra. This attitude seems extremely prevalent on the west coast (Vessenes's coinabul is Seattle based), with the whole San Fran tech scene throwing a party over social networking and posting every personal tidbit about your life on the internet for all to see. This is a recent phenomena stemming from the social networking trend of late --- this is not the original intellectual foundation of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was founded on the cypherpunk tradition, which itself traces back to the early days of cryptography. "Openness" and "transparency" are silly key words that the california tech media loves to bandy about, and as we are increasingly seeing with Facebook, are in fact VERY dangerous. We ought to have the CHOICE whether or not to disclose information in an open and transparent manner, and the key to that is ANONYMITY.

Bitcoiners: Treating the issue of anonymity in such a casual, careless manner is effectively shitting on the very foundations that gave rise to this technology and this community. The Bitcoin Foundation has, in my eyes, expressed a strong desire to further Bitcoin in a positive direction and this I believe is worthy of commendation. With that said, it MUST affirm its commitment to this principal ideal.

[the joint]

What's the big deal about anonymity, anyway?  If you're so concerned about anonymity, then you're going to have a problem when you go to...oh, I don't know...the store?  

Do you know what I do when a Bitcoin transaction gets complicated or shady?  I call the person.  We talk.  We work things out.  It's fine.

The 'anonymity' side of Bitcoin isn't really about anonymity at all --  it's about making sure that you're in control of your financial identity instead of a 3rd party controlling it for you.

I think THIS is the disturbing sentiment that the OP was initially responding to, not whether Vessenes believes bitcoin is anonymous or not, but the sense that he doesn't CARE about anonymity.

I remember arguing with MNW once about anonymity with regards to bitcoin, and he kept pushing this whole transparancy/openness mantra. This attitude seems extremely prevalent on the west coast (Vessenes's coinabul is Seattle based), with the whole San Fran tech scene throwing a party over social networking and posting every personal tidbit about your life on the internet for all to see. This is a recent phenomena stemming from the social networking trend of late --- this is not the original intellectual foundation of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was founded on the cypherpunk tradition, which itself traces back to the early days of cryptography. "Openness" and "transparency" are silly key words that the california tech media loves to bandy about, and as we are increasingly seeing with Facebook, are in fact VERY dangerous. We ought to have the CHOICE whether or not to disclose information in an open and transparent manner, and the key to that is ANONYMITY.

Bitcoiners: Treating the issue of anonymity in such a casual, careless manner is effectively shitting on the very foundations that gave rise to this technology and this community. The Bitcoin Foundation has, in my eyes, expressed a strong desire to further Bitcoin in a positive direction and this I believe is worthy of commendation. With that said, it MUST affirm its commitment to this principal ideal.

It's the nature of the code that Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous.  You can't wish anonymity upon the code just because you feel a certain way (i.e. "sentiment").  Look what's happened on this forum alone...people get scammed and now the SEC is apparently involved in a particular case.  This means that people are tracing Bitcoin transactions as we speak and connecting transactions to various persons.  This all happened before the Bitcoin Foundation; none of this is new.  Any radical change to the protocol would likely require a forking of the blockchain anyway and the success of that fork would be determined by a miner vote, i.e. hashing power.

Besides, look at how many people use Bitcoins and run to file a complaint as soon as they've been scammed.

Moreover, look at the value of Bitcoin itself.  The only reason Bitcoin has the fledgling economy that it does is because of the exchanges.  Without exchanges as centralized value markers, people wouldn't be buying any goods or services.  And yet only a handful of people are shouting for the exchanges to close operations despite the fact that the exchanges go against the "sentiment" of Bitcoin (i.e. they involve 3rd parties that happens to collect your name, address, and several forms of identification). Maybe in the long, distant future we won't need a centralized exchange, just as in the future Bitcoin might not need a "Foundation" so to speak.

The Foundation will bring more organization to the community.  The community needs it now, just as it needs the exchanges now.  In the future, maybe they won't be needed.  But seriously, there are so many other aspects about Bitcoin to highlight than its anonymity factor

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

The thread title is bombastic and poorly chosen. However:

Anonymity is important to many users. Some perhaps for legality reasons but also in many cases because of political reasons or cases where something shouldn't be illegal. Contributing to organizations that are blacklisted, eg. wikileaks is only one such example. Trading in places like Argentina or China or Iran. While these may not be very workable in many cases today I think people want Bitcoin to be useful for that in the future. Throwing it away because some group wants to monetize Bitcoin today is something I'm very much against.

Part of the whole reason for Bitcoin was to ensure people could transact without restraint, everywhere. In many places there are no guarantees of freedom to do so and anonymity is the only way to allow it to happen. By not taking it seriously we once again misconstrue the  needs of the general USA user with those of the worldwide Bitcoin users. The comments of the foundation director make it clear he sees Bitcoin thru the needs of Coinbase and US based money transfer. Perhaps the foundation should be called The American Bitcoin Foundation?

+21000000

Bitcoiners: Treating the issue of anonymity in such a casual, careless manner is effectively shitting on the very foundations that gave rise to this technology and this community. The Bitcoin Foundation has, in my eyes, expressed a strong desire to further Bitcoin in a positive direction and this I believe is worthy of commendation. With that said, it MUST affirm its commitment to this principal ideal.

+21000000

I would have been far more comfortable about the BF if it had been created with additional privacy advocates like Falkvigne on its board, instead of pure business interests.  I trust Jon Matonis, but he will clearly be  outnumbered in any decisions that where market growth is pitted against privacy.  Similarly for USA-centric versus non-USA representation.

If it had simply been called "Bitcoin Chamber of Commerce" instead of "Bitcoin Foundation", and adopted a charter limiting itself to advancing Bitcoin business adoption and nothing else, I think the privacy constituency would feel a lot less threatened.  But the minute you call yourself generically "Bitcoin Foundation", it creates an expectation of balance and fairness.  And certainly, as it stands today, privacy interests and non-USA interests appear to have gotten the short end of the stick, via a less-than-transparent board creation process.

[chmod755]

to make Bitcoin transactions absolutely anonymous

FYI: Being absolutely anonymous is technically impossible on the internet and in real life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity

[BkkCoins]

Still I thought I would correct a factual mistake by BkkCoin.  The Satoshi client doesn't send change back to an existing address, it always sends change to an unused address from the address pool.

I'm sure you're right about that and I didn't think thru my example very well. You would still need to be careful as some time later that change address will get combined into another transaction that may be identifiable. My intent was mainly to make it clear that anonymity isn't as easy as pushing a trx to a site without traceable IP or logs. You have to consider both before and after the transaction in question.

Despite these and other theoretical ways to trace I'm not aware of an example of anyone provably tracking stolen funds to date. Anyone?

[crazy_rabbit]

Oh hay! No scandal this week? Well lets do some Character assassination to keep ourselves busy.

[JoelKatz]

I think THIS is the disturbing sentiment that the OP was initially responding to, not whether Vessenes believes bitcoin is anonymous or not, but the sense that he doesn't CARE about anonymity.

This is a strategic decision. Think about it. Now that the Internet is here, not even the most repressive government can keep their citizens from blogging and reading western media. But that only happened because the Internet got here.

[crazy_rabbit]

The thread title is bombastic and poorly chosen. However:

Anonymity is important to many users. Some perhaps for legality reasons but also in many cases because of political reasons or cases where something shouldn't be illegal. Contributing to organizations that are blacklisted, eg. wikileaks is only one such example. Trading in places like Argentina or China or Iran. While these may not be very workable in many cases today I think people want Bitcoin to be useful for that in the future. Throwing it away because some group wants to monetize Bitcoin today is something I'm very much against.

Part of the whole reason for Bitcoin was to ensure people could transact without restraint, everywhere. In many places there are no guarantees of freedom to do so and anonymity is the only way to allow it to happen. By not taking it seriously we once again misconstrue the  needs of the general USA user with those of the worldwide Bitcoin users. The comments of the foundation director make it clear he sees Bitcoin thru the needs of Coinbase and US based money transfer. Perhaps the foundation should be called The American Bitcoin Foundation?

+21000000

Bitcoiners: Treating the issue of anonymity in such a casual, careless manner is effectively shitting on the very foundations that gave rise to this technology and this community. The Bitcoin Foundation has, in my eyes, expressed a strong desire to further Bitcoin in a positive direction and this I believe is worthy of commendation. With that said, it MUST affirm its commitment to this principal ideal.

+21000000

I would have been far more comfortable about the BF if it had been created with additional privacy advocates like Falkvigne on its board, instead of pure business interests.  I trust Jon Matonis, but he will clearly be  outnumbered in any decisions that where market growth is pitted against privacy.  Similarly for USA-centric versus non-USA representation.

If it had simply been called "Bitcoin Chamber of Commerce" instead of "Bitcoin Foundation", and adopted a charter limiting itself to advancing Bitcoin business adoption and nothing else, I think the privacy constituency would feel a lot less threatened.  But the minute you call yourself generically "Bitcoin Foundation", it creates an expectation of balance and fairness.  And certainly, as it stands today, privacy interests and non-USA interests appear to have gotten the short end of the stick, via a less-than-transparent board creation process.

Obviously people disagree with me, but I don't believe having an infiniteish number of addresses to potentially work with gives anyone real anonymity automatically. You have to work damn hard to stay anonymous and by default bitcoin doesn't give rise to privacy beyond the "numbered bank account" that swiss banks used to have. You're only anonymous as long as you aren't doing anything with your money. The second you spend it your invisibility cloak is chipped away at, no matter how small. The government or anyone else could always honeypot you  and gradually figure out more and more about your real identity over a large amount of time.

Being anonymous is an individuals responsibility and is crazy hard work to really do. Ironically the people who really need anonymity are the ones that have the hardest time really getting it. That said, I think everyone should work hard to be anonymous, if only because it gives even greater safety to the few who really need if it we are all practicing responsibly. I don't think Bitcoin itself lends itself to being anonymous any more then the internet itself lends itself to being anonymous. In theory yes- but when the internet interfaces to the real world: then not so much.

Either way, it seems like a reasonable and practical assumption to work on bitcoin without a focus on anonymity to push it forward. As long as nothing is added to bitcoin that deliberately makes it less anonymous, then no fault, no foul, no?

[kasimir]

...

I think the Bitcoin anonymous thing is overblown and a bit of a myth, by the way. Every bitcoin transaction links two addresses; often people can be determined from those addresses. ...

...

• Incompetent: because Peter Vessenes doesn't know about mixing services https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:Mixing_Services , and have no idea about very real possibility to make Bitcoin transactions absolutely anonymous by default with a feature such as Automatic Coin Mixing Idea or P2P coin mixing

...

I love it when people cannot read.  Let's look at this post a little bit more carefully: "often people can be determined".  This is not only factually correct, but it certainly takes into consideration the case where somebody uses some extra effort to anonymize themselves.

If you don't follow me, please look up the word "often", then read this paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/PASSAT/SocialCom.2011.79

[jgarzik]

Despite these and other theoretical ways to trace I'm not aware of an example of anyone provably tracking stolen funds to date. Anyone?

Well, it is trivial to watch stolen coins move through the blockchain.  You don't know who has them etc.

[axus]

Obviously you can't certify an anonymous business.  The certification is a big goal of the foundation.  The people certifying can't be anonymous either.

The other goal is preventing forks in the Bitcoin network, and designing changes.  The foundation ensures its the authority by paying for development.  I think paying "foundation taxes" and voting don't require giving up anonymity, that's what public key cryptography is for.  Voting is best when it's anonymous.  

Although, that is really plutocracy instead of democracy.  If you think that each person gets one vote, no matter how much money they contribute, then anonymity doesn't work.

Oh, and Satoshi is the most anonymous "person" I know of