Why not just a website that runs like Paypal to do instant payments between its users - exactly like Mt Gox.
Sure, that's an option too. But PayPal knows if Bob pays at a sex toy store with PayPal. So what I'm saying is: If you do go for a centralized component, then you might as well push it as far as possible and use the existing technology in this field - like blind signatures to protect privacy.
Hi all,
Open Transactions does not aim to be a "centralized server".
Rather, Open-Transactions aims to become a
loosely-affiliated federation of low-trust servers, wherein the server cannot forge your receipt, and the server cannot change your balance--nor the issuer's--without signed permission, (and the server also cannot disappear and abscond with your funds.)
Since your account IS your receipt, and since you must sign the receipt before the server can countersign it, and since the server cannot forge your signature,
this means the server can never issue a receipt that you haven't first authorized.-----
One gaping hole is this: Though the server is on the hook for the issuer's receipt, and is also on the hook for all of the users' receipts, this by itself doesn't prevent the server from creating additional, illicit accounts, and false-signing their counterfeit withdrawals. (Meaning the classical Chaumian implementation requires trusting the server... which was always a big problem, and for good reason.)
AUDITS
However, if those counterfeit funds are to be spent, they will necessarily flow into known accounts and thus be discovered upon the next audit. (Therefore regular audits are necessary whenever issuers are involved.)
When an audit happens, the users can send in their receipts (which their wallets should store between audits.) The issuer is thus able to re-issue the same currency onto a different transaction server, and no one has lost any funds!
I've got a protocol worked out for this, as well as a Bitcoin version for
BTC-backed accounts on OT that I've been working on with one of you. (Meaning: if the server is hacked, they
still can't steal your bitcoin. If the server is malicious, they
still can't steal your bitcoin. Etc)
Think of it like the department of Pre-Crime.
Folks, we need to design the future such that you can process instruments
even on an anonymous server you don't trust. Anyone who is not moving in that direction is misallocating their resources, IMO. What happens when thugs bust in to your server operation?
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And same thing with your social networking:
Some Diaspora-style solution, with some kind of Tahoe-LAFS storage and I2P sort of communications. That's how it needs to go, if you don't want to end up in a police state. You should not have to trust your Facebook. You should have a federated system.
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Same thing with your router: WHY are we all paying ISPs?
All of our routers should just talk to each other and eliminate the ISP entirely, replacing it with a mesh network. (A network where nodes connect to each other, and pop in and out of the network unexpectedly.) If you think about it, this is coming soon, anyway, due to robotics.
You should not have to trust your ISP. You should not even
have an ISP.
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Same thing with your
cell phones. Can't they just go on the same mesh network? Why is everyone paying AT&T $300 per month? Has anyone donated to the Serval project recently?
Why is everyone giving AT&T, Apple, Google, Uncle Sam, Chinese Govt Hackers, and God Knows Who Else searchable access to our location and movements, our text messages, and our voice calls?
Tell me: How long until your own personal deadline, until
you have an entirely open-source, open-hardware, meshed, Jitsi'd, cell phone? (Network communicator device?) How long are you willing to wait before you will go down to Best Buy and put together the hardware yourself, and download the experimental protocol from MIT?
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I commit to you now, not to purchase another router unless it has mesh capability. Consider it my
civic duty.
How about you guys?
Poll
