Theoretically a branch of Bitcoin including IP addresses in the blocks

[BenRayfield]

If someone wanted to create a branch of Bitcoin (new network too) which was less anonymous, by including IP addresses in blocks, and verifying the IP addresses haven't changed the same way Bitcoin verifies money is not counterfeited, what would be the technical issues involved?

It is probable that after Bitcoin becomes popular enough, governments would start a War On Decentralization or a War On Peer-To-Peer (like the War On Drugs and War On Terror) and take aggressive action against people using Bitcoin. On a large scale, anonymous movement of money would fund wars, from the masters (against masters and slaves) and the slaves (mostly against the masters), therefore the masters would preemptively start a war against whichever slaves are moving money anonymously. We should consider avoiding that conflict, and decentralizing society slower (still leading to the masters becoming obsolete), by creating a new version of Bitcoin which includes IP addresses in the blocks, so that the masters can observe the process of the masters becoming obsolete, so the masters would allow that process to continue. After the masters are obsolete, they should become part of our decentralized society, as our equals instead of masters, and we can leave the past in the past, because it is usually the corrupt system - not the cogs in the machine - that causes these problems.

The most important thing is to decentralize the economy. If we can do that without escalating conflicts more than is needed to get the job done, then we should consider doing it that way. After we obsolete the masters, we could of course do things in any combination of anonymous and public that we think is best.

I am not proposing that we shut down Bitcoin as it is, just that it may be important to the future of the Human species that a less anonymous version exist too and that people use it.

Now that Bitcoin has proven that a decentralized economy can work, and that people who get in early make a lot of money, new networks would expand much faster, so this will be easier than the first time. While I think, in the end, decentralization will defeat hierarchies (one world government, countries, etc), why fight a war when we can prove the world can be changed without war? What kind of society do you want to build?

I'm asking about 2 subjects here... The technical issues, and the political issues. For example, could people get around it by using the Tor network?

To understand why this is more likely to work on a global scale, see the strategies of Sun Tzu.

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[sakkaku]

For example, could people get around it by using the Tor network?

Yes.  Tor supports sending most TCP streams but some exit nodes have policies against non http / dns traffic.

[BenRayfield]

Its going to be open-source, and I'm not putting any centralized encryption keys into it as a back door or anything like that. Within those constraints....

Is there some process or calculation or strategy that this network could do by default (and reject connections by modified versions which don't do it, like Bitcoin rejects blocks that have even 1 unproven bit), which would force each user to reveal their real IP address and include it in all blocks they add to the network (else the blocks are rejected)? A few extra connections or a few times slower or more memory would be ok if got the real IP. What about multiple simultaneous connections to different parts of the network? Could anything be done with their interaction to verify an IP? I know network timing could statistically be used to detect a proxy network like Tor, but not reliably. You have to give your IP to do anything on the internet, so it knows where to send the response, but with Tor that is modified.

What I'm thinking the problem with Tor may be is you would have to know the IP of the Tor endpoint your packets come from, and it may not be fixed or predictable due to its design as an unpredictable network. Your modified Bitcoin software would have to know the Tor endpoint IP address so it could encode that IP into the packet being sent, secure-hash it, and then send it to Tor, which would send it through (I don't know) a random or chaotic or unpredictable path, and the bitcoin-like network recieves a block with a different IP than Tor gave, as verified by requiring that a few packets go back and forth and be consistent.

I don't expect I can prove its really your IP, but I would at least want somebody to have to design a completely new proxy network (a variation of Tor) to get around my IP recording policy.

These are the kind of ideas I'm looking for.

http/dns are not relevant because you could set up an unrelated computer to convert between Tor and whatever protocol my modified Bitcoin network requires. I want something that would preemptively get the authorities off our back, so it would have to be really hard to fake.

The open-source people are a strange group. We're against DRM, software being controlled by authorities, etc, but we make sure you have the right to build variations of our software which have those qualities. We're more skilled at creating freedom and we're more skilled at spying, if we choose to do it.

I'm even willing to consider the chaos-theory of network timing of a grid of modified Bitcoin programs doing artificial intelligence to detect if the statistical imprint of a Tor network is there, like audio processing of the wave-interference of the network timing, if that would work, but probably that couldn't be explained in a Court Of Law when they ask me how they can be sure a million dollars really went from one country to another on a certain day followed by a million dollar drug deal. I need a good legal defense.

First make the alternative Bitcoin accountable, it grows for years, and then we make the Federal Reserve accountable.

[Sukrim]

Things to consider:

• IP addresses are regarded private/personal information by many
• IP addresses can be used by many people at once
• You can only verify an IP address by "going there yourself", like a real address. Only because it shows up on google mps or whatever doesn't mean it's really MY address

In the end:
No, IP addresses are NOT a good way to fight anonymity in a Bitcoin-style block chain. They cannot be verified after some time, they are not unique and you would see much hatin' (and low adoption) for implementing something like that - and in the end people would just use TOR/VPNs to mine.

[JoelKatz]

I don't understand what you mean by verifying the IP address has not changed. Are you suggesting that if my ISP goes out of business, I should lose all my money?

And how will IP addresses be verified? If you say you got something from 1.2.3.4, how do I confirm or deny that? And what happens when two different clients see a site as having a different IP address? Say it uses different IP addresses on different networks. And what of nodes that have no IPv4 connectivity?

Honestly, it seems to cause way more problems than it solves.

[Sukrim]

By the way:
Many ISPs assign new IP adresses every 24 hours to their users, mobile internet users are often behind an ISP proxy and if someone's IP address is part of transactions or accounts, that would seriously hinder/harm people that have a mobile phone for example...


Sorry, but in the end IP addresses are in no way useful for what you would like to see. (No judgement from me about your motives/ideas)

[BenRayfield]

IP addresses are regarded private/personal information by many

Some forums, including Wikipedia, record IP addresses that anyone can look up.

I would not deceive anyone. The main program window would say "All transactions are recorded with your IP address into the peer-to-peer network for all to see, which makes it more likely that businesses will choose to connect their payment systems and makes governments oppose it less. If you want anonymous, use Bitcoin."

IP addresses can be used by many people at once

I understand the NAT system.

You can only verify an IP address by "going there yourself", like a real address. Only because it shows up on google mps or whatever doesn't mean it's really MY address

That just means you can't know for sure, but there must be ways to be more sure about it.

Of course someone who wanted to pay a lot of money to fund crimes would do it from a computer far from where she lives, but at least we would know the general area. Governments would see the benefit of usually knowing how money is flowing between countries based on the IPs. How would people feel about recording only the first half of the IP address, or the first 3/4 of it?

In the end:
No, IP addresses are NOT a good way to fight anonymity in a Bitcoin-style block chain. They cannot be verified after some time, they are not unique and you would see much hatin' (and low adoption) for implementing something like that - and in the end people would just use TOR/VPNs to mine.

I have some more features in mind that will make this system much more attractive than Bitcoin, a tree of Bitcoins as a decentralized stock market and where stock symbols are any string you type, and logic rules for how they can be combined and split and bought/sold, and an associative search engine using the same network shape (based on substrings recursively, weighted intelligently by the free market), so to censor anyone you would have to destroy their money in the whole peer-to-peer network. You know how hard they fought Wikileaks? They don't like free speech. But this speech, they won't be able to censor, since its backed by cryptocurrency proportional to the importance people assign to each text (the amount of stock they buy in that string and substrings/superstrings). While I'm not offering any leaked documents, think of this system like a hybrid of Bitcoin and Wikileaks (a very low storage version, like whole network less than 1 megabyte of text, so it really couldn't do what Wikileaks did on such a large scale), and the recording of IP addresses will work against people putting illegal documents on it, but in the end its free speech, people have the right to free speech, and I'm giving them an important tool. That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

The reason it would have such low storage ability is many addresses can each own part of each string, and each string must remember which substrings it was created from, and there must be n such substrings for a string length n where the substrings overlap and you save money on the free market by finding longer overlapping substrings each starting at chars 0 to n-1. For each substring, you have a choice of "", "a", "ab", "abx", etc, if that char is "a". For the "b", you could use "", "b", "bx", etc. The longer the substrings you find, the cheaper they will tend to be, and I have some economic logic to make that happen naturally instead of using different calculations for different lengths of strings. The root of the tree, the empty string "", is the same as Bitcoin.

I expect its main function to be a system where people vote on ideas (by investing in related strings they choose from all possible short strings) and how those ideas fit together, without such ideas getting censored. It would allow large groups of people to organize and communicate without the normal 150-person monkeysphere limit (branching factor limiting how many people you can understand), since you would be understanding a continuous flow of ideas instead of individual people. It would be a collective mind, a stock market, an associative search engine, all backed by cryptocurrency in whatever proportion people invest in. Its a democracy algorithm.

Actually it may work better as a statistical distribution of text and money on them with only a very high certainty of not losing money but a certainty of not losing large amounts, because if its proven that nothing will be lost then it has to have a low total storage capacity, while if a little error is allowed then less funded strings would come and go unreliably but still be in there sometimes and in some places, waiting to be funded more.

Does that sound attractive enough for people to get past the IP address recording?

I don't understand what you mean by verifying the IP address has not changed. Are you suggesting that if my ISP goes out of business, I should lose all my money?

And how will IP addresses be verified? If you say you got something from 1.2.3.4, how do I confirm or deny that? And what happens when two different clients see a site as having a different IP address? Say it uses different IP addresses on different networks. And what of nodes that have no IPv4 connectivity?

Honestly, it seems to cause way more problems than it solves.

You do not lose your money if your IP address goes away. You would have a wallet file like in Bitcoin.

I mean the integrity of the data in the network is not broken. If the IP goes into the network, nobody can modify the network's data later, same as the money amounts can't be modified except by certain rules.

I don't know how to verify the IP addresses. That's why I'm asking.

It could support IP4 and IP6, with some extra testing effort.

Many ISPs assign new IP adresses every 24 hours to their users, mobile internet users are often behind an ISP proxy and if someone's IP address is part of transactions or accounts, that would seriously hinder/harm people that have a mobile phone for example...

That's ok. The IP addresses won't be used for network routing, just as data to remember. It would still use public keys as addresses like Bitcoin does. You can use a different IP for each transaction if you want.

[FreddyFender]

Lots of info exists on this subject:

Open-Transactions
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions

Theymos/Nanotube:
http://privwiki.dreamhosters.com/wiki/Bitcoin_DNS_System_Proposal

The full speak:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0

Satoshi's comments:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.222

[FreddyFender]

Lots of info exists on this subject:

Open-Transactions
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions

Theymos/Nanotube:
http://privwiki.dreamhosters.com/wiki/Bitcoin_DNS_System_Proposal

The full speak:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.0

Satoshi's comments:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.222

Forgot this one about why bitcoin's structure is important:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko

[JoelKatz]

I mean the integrity of the data in the network is not broken. If the IP goes into the network, nobody can modify the network's data later, same as the money amounts can't be modified except by certain rules.

I don't know how to verify the IP addresses. That's why I'm asking.

What would the benefit be? Given things like NAT and dynamic IP addresses, it doesn't seem like there's any point at all. Yes, it could be done. But unless there's at least some benefit, why bother?

[BenRayfield]

The point of making it less anonymous (if it can be done without using centralized strategies), as quoted from the first post...

It is probable that after Bitcoin becomes popular enough, governments would start a War On Decentralization or a War On Peer-To-Peer (like the War On Drugs and War On Terror) and take aggressive action against people using Bitcoin. On a large scale, anonymous movement of money would fund wars, from the masters (against masters and slaves) and the slaves (mostly against the masters), therefore the masters would preemptively start a war against whichever slaves are moving money anonymously. We should consider avoiding that conflict, and decentralizing society slower (still leading to the masters becoming obsolete), by creating a new version of Bitcoin which includes IP addresses in the blocks, so that the masters can observe the process of the masters becoming obsolete, so the masters would allow that process to continue. After the masters are obsolete, they should become part of our decentralized society, as our equals instead of masters, and we can leave the past in the past, because it is usually the corrupt system - not the cogs in the machine - that causes these problems.

The most important thing is to decentralize the economy. If we can do that without escalating conflicts more than is needed to get the job done, then we should consider doing it that way. After we obsolete the masters, we could of course do things in any combination of anonymous and public that we think is best.

[JoelKatz]

The point of making it less anonymous (if it can be done without using centralized strategies), as quoted from the first post...

But it won't actually do that, since IP addresses don't usefully identify people and the people who want anonymity can easily make their requests appear to come from an IP address that has no connection to them (with TOR, for example).

[BenRayfield]

JoelKatz if that is true then I'll do it ("I have some more features in mind that will make this system much more attractive than Bitcoin") without storing IP addresses in the blocks (same as normal Bitcoin), but I'm looking for an exploration of all possibilities of how to interact with IP addresses and a proof that no combination of those with any decentralized system would work (make it less anonymous in my new network). This is a search for technical information, not a democracy of counting how many people say it can and can't be done. The world needs this theoretical system (see description above, search for that quote), and if there are no other options, I will risk getting a "War On Peer-To-Peer" started against this software and many others in a gamble to enforce freedom of speech for everyone, freedom to communicate anything, not just what is reasonable, because... That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. If anyone thinks the gamble is not worth the risk, since everyone is involved here, then I would be willing to debate it with people who understand the subject, but where would I find such people?

[JoelKatz]

This is a search for technical information, not a democracy of counting how many people say it can and can't be done.

I'm saying it won't do what it claims to do and therefore has no technical merit. I'm not voting against it.

[BenRayfield]

I know IP addresses don't normally do that, and I can think of no way to change that, but I don't know everything about IP addresses or the systems they are built on.

[wumpus]

You can embed anything in the block chain. But in this case it does mean that relaying of transactions is disabled, because the miners need to accept the transactions directly from the source to verify the IP for inclusion into the block chain. This burdens the network in non-trivial ways, as every client will need to connect to as many miners as possible.

Also, a rogue miner could decide to include fake IP addresses or not check them at all, and AFAIK there's nothing you can do against it.

Apart from that, hackers have shown to have no problem getting as many IP addresses as needed. Anonymous proxies, shell servers, compromised servers, botnets, etc...

This is a measure that will only burden the honest folks (expose their IP for hacking?), people that want to do bad can easily get around it. A bit like DRM schemes.

[BenRayfield]

Bitcoin is DRM. It's just implemented in the blocks instead of the source code. The DRM enforces that nobody can counterfeit or falsify transaction records. Open source isn't about the lack of DRM. Its about the freedom to modify the software to remove the DRM, in this case requiring a new network.

[JoelKatz]

I know IP addresses don't normally do that, and I can think of no way to change that, but I don't know everything about IP addresses or the systems they are built on.

If you're looking for ways to make something like BitCoins but less anonymous and have no idea how to do it, ask for suggestions in that direction. But IP addresses won't help you in any way. One idea would be to permit the sender to embed a short comment in the transaction and to allow (or even require) the recipient to formally 'accept' the BitCoins and include a short embedded comment. That way, people who specifically didn't want anonymity would be readily accommodated.

[Sukrim]

You can only verify an IP address by "going there yourself", like a real address. Only because it shows up on google mps or whatever doesn't mean it's really MY address

That just means you can't know for sure, but there must be ways to be more sure about it.

I wrote about the only way, and I meant it.

Sorry, but to make Bitcoin less anonymous, recording IP addresses in Transactions + Blocks are not the way to go.

[gigitrix]

It would work, but it would be pretty useless. Spoofing IPs is an absolute triviality. Nothing on the internet uniquely identifies you if you choose to prevent being uniquely identified.

[BenRayfield]

You're all probably right that there's no decentralized way to make Bitcoin less anonymous except for people who don't try much to be anonymous. I'll proceed with my program, first building a centralized prototype to try it on a small scale, and if that goes well, expand it to a decentralized network. It will be at http://FreeSpeechJustPayShipping.com

[BenRayfield]

Either way, a cryptocurrency backed forum and associative search engine (all the same network shape, not different systems) will unify money and communication, forcing laws that apply to one to deal with the other, and some big stuff is going to go down as a result. Usually money+communication=advertising, but that is 1 of many things to use Free Speech Just Pay Shipping for. Would governments dare shut down a network used by businesses for advertising? I don't think so, and as a result everyone else can write whatever they want. We need the ability to communicate about the secret bull that is the cause of all these wars and bull out of politician's mouths. Pandora's box is open, and nobody can do anything about it. As we speak, and in increasing amounts all the time, governments are being investigated for why they're causing all these wars, screwing up our society, and forcing us toward extinction. This software will be a reliable storage location where such things can be written for all to see, instead of what governments have been doing to the news and radio. Governments, while I do not mean anything violent by this, the jig is up, and you're caught with your pants down, so I suggest you stop screwing that hooker and apologize. You can't fool us anymore.

[BenRayfield]

Instead of IP addresses, would OpenID work?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openid
http://openid.net

I don't know enough about them to trust their network (which they say is decentralized and not owned by anyone) or to know if their rules are compatible with what I'm planning.

If somehow the OpenID network took control of, or started regulating in an unreasonable way, the Free Speech Just Pay Shipping network I'm planning, then we could simply branch the code and create an anonymous version at that time, and they know that which would motivate them to mind their own business except for authenticating my system through OpenID.

Bitcoin and similar networks are going to meet heavy resistance from some parts of governments, and maybe support from other parts (since they fight eachother even within the same organization), when Bitcoin and such networks become popular enough.

I'm thinking that my new network will have attractive enough features that if I go with the identity system those in power are already using in a decentralized way, they'll accept the network as a legitimate part of their infrastructure and it will give them a tool they need to obsolete the Federal Reserve and replace it with new kinds of money that regulate themselves, making the economy more efficient and adding more flexible ways to define and use money. I think a lot of big players out there want to change the paradigm but don't see any way to do it.

Since all Google and Yahoo (and many others) users can get an OpenID based on their existing accounts, there is a huge group of potential users.

But will it work, can it be trusted, and would OpenID's group of authenticating websites (which is decentralized) have rules that contradict what I'm trying to do with Free Speech Just Pay Shipping, which is to pay cryptocurrency to put any text you want into the network? They would probably have a problem with the free speech part (You can't say certain things against government! That's a coverupxx I mean a secret), but I see no reason they would have a problem with a branch of Bitcoin that did nothing except connect to OpenID and its normal money stuff.

If Google, Yahoo, and other big players are connected to a branch of Bitcoin software even indirectly through OpenID, the Federal Reserve doesn't have a chance. Corporations are the masters of governments. After decentralized economy becomes normal for most people, the completely decentralized kind like Bitcoin is now obsoletes those corporations, and we're left with a decentralized society. Maybe some of you should create such a branch (after looking into the rules of OpenID, which appear to be missing from that website, maybe intentionally since its not owned by anyone they say), while I do Free Speech Just Pay Shipping.

You would still have a wallet file. Controlling the OpenID, if theoretically they could, would not let Google or Yahoo get to your money. OpenID number (or whatever data they use) would just be another part of the bitcoin blocks, and my version of the program would reject any blocks that don't have valid OpenID numbers (verifying them a small number of times and then hashing them into the blocks permanently). We could maybe add some code that allows money not used for long enough (frozen by whoever controls OpenID?) to be used anonymously using those same keys, so if they freeze it it gets unfrozen automatically after some time. Lots of ways such systems may interact, but don't want to reduce the provability of the identification system. What do you think?

[BenRayfield]

I've sent the following message to Venessa Miemis ( http://emergentbydesign.com ), an emergent leader of the underground in a collective intelligence way. I write this here too because there are many who could also help, but I know of none more qualified than her.

I don't know how well they are legally or technically compatible, but if anything can work this is the most probable to work. Otherwise the conflict between underground and governments/corporations is going to escalate toward a huge war. Can you help with the strategic social parts of this, convince people on both sides such an alliance is a good thing and has unique benefits of cryptocurrencies?

More info at http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20320.0  and the part about OpenID, which I just thought of last night, is near the top of the second page on that thread.

I don't know much about the Ven, but I know that to defeat the Federal Reserve and the corruption that comes with it (including the military industrial complex) we need businesses to accept a decentralized currency as part of their infrastructure.

You are uniquely qualified to get people to come to an agreement on these things. The world needs you. Will you help?

I understand how Bitcoin works well enough to know it can be done, but I do not know if an extreme effort on the part of OpenID would be needed to become compatible with the changes I would need to make to the open-source bitcoin code. This would be a new network, not interfering with the existing bitcoin network. The purpose is to make a new currency that is less anonymous so businesses will use it, and for that to lead to more innovation in money systems as people see what is really possible. Its not a question of if its possible. Its a question of how much changes to these 2 systems would be needed. If we can convince both sides (governments/corporations and the underground) that a huge war is the only alternative, they will make the effort.

You know that "anonymous" group which supposedly hacked at Federal Reserve's computers? That's nothing compared to whats coming if we don't bring the underground and authorities together.

This would be backed by the constant threat of the underground creating anonymous networks if the identity-based networks start to be abused by authorities, so that is like a system of "checks and balances" as any government or global organization needs.

The most important part is that its a double key system. You need your wallet file from the modified Bitcoin software AND your OpenID to get to any money. Lose 1 key and the money is frozen forever.

There is a way to design the network so it auto unfreezes after some event, but only if you can define such an event, and I wouldn't know what event a decentralized network could consistently understand, because if the event is OpenID stops letting you into the network for a month, you could simply not log in for a month and get around the identity requirements. It would have to be something based on chaos-theory or something we haven't thought of. Probably best to let OpenID freeze accounts by not letting you log in, but they still don't get the money because both keys are needed and one is decentralized with the private key in your USB stick or computer.

[BenRayfield]

USA used to be a great country, with separation of church and state, democratic elections that really changed things, and more, but the Federal Reserve has turned our government against us and some extremists against our government.

I'm still very happy that I feel safe (not expecting anyone to show up at my door demanding I stop writing these things or lock me up, but maybe later when the conflicts escalate) writing these things, so there is that freedom, but freedom must be constantly protected and expanded.

Wouldn't you like the government to again be something people are excited about, like it was when USA was first formed to get away from a very bad government. The government was their friend. They had thoughts like "What can I do to help my government do its job better, so it can help the people more?" But now that has turned into "What can I do to fight the government politically and economically and sometimes (for some extreme groups) violently?" USA's government has become a parasite because of the Federal Reserve controlling it. Let's give them a second chance, and form this alliance between decentralization and identity verification, and rip out the heart of the parasite - the Federal Reserve - leaving a government that wants to help us because we want to help it, a democracy. USA is not a democracy anymore, but it can be again if we decentralize the global economy with a double key system like I described, one key held by the authorities and one held by each person, both keys needed to access any money.

The Federal Reserve and USA are not the only examples of this, but as far as I know its the strongest example, and when the Federal Reserve goes bankrupt (and it will one way or another), the others will follow. We don't need to have secret meetings, organize rebellions, expand Patriot Acts, torture prisoners of war for information, or hack at the Federal Reserve's computers ("anonymous", you are working against your own goals, and so was wikileaks when they supposedly hacked at various financial systems instead of limiting themselves to distribution of files). Lets all simply agree that the central banking system goes away, build a secure open-source decentralized identity-proving system to replace it, and the Federal Reserve goes away gradually due to market forces (open-source people work for free, and Federal Reserve can't compete, our transaction rates will be paid directly to the network and will be set by market forces, approaching the cost of running the internet hardware, pennies instead of dollars), a revolution where nobody gets hurt or goes to jail.

But which open-source system to use? All of them. Let the free market decide, as long as they use the same identity verification system. Like in Bitcoin, all transactions are public, but public-keys are not people's names and nobody except the authorities need to know who owns what key.

Its as simple as that, and we are going to do it. When we build one, the businesses will line up to get access, and then the competition starts. We're not going to vote on it. We're not going to change laws. We're just going to build it, use it, and later make laws that restrict how it can be used. As it is today, there are no laws about cryptocurrencies. What we do in the next few years will determine what laws are created.

World War 3 is cancelled. Everybody go home and think about the dumbass thoughts that led you into this, and maybe read some Sun Tzu strategy. Anyone who owns stock in centralized banks or related things would be wise to get out now.

As a child, they had me "pledge allegience to the flag of the United States Of America", and I must take that back. I pledge allegience to the Human species and all life forms. Patriotism just isn't good enough anymore, and if you serve yourself or only some group, you're going to find the economy flows away from you as people learn this fact because new equations for economies will compete the way products and businesses compete today. That's what such a double-key identity-verifying open-source economy will do.

We will design economies, using the same identity-verification system, that automatically influence society toward whatever we want it to do. Money is voting. Its true today and it will continue to be true, but the definition of money will advance until it merges with our brainwaves through devices like the Emotiv Epoc or OpenEEG. I just found a shortcut to this "technology singularity" Kurzweil and others are talking about. We're going to implement it in the economy laws, starting with an identity-verified branch of Bitcoin. We are going to mass-produce intergalactic starships, after we reorganize society using this new paradigm, to build the tools to build the more advanced tools... leading to anything we want. Its an exponential pattern. Its too simple to misunderstand, but it works.

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.

--Barack Obama, 1/21/2009 http://www.whitehouse.gov/open

Looks like Obama may want to help with this. What's more open than open-source? I can't say when this will happen, but I would find it very interesting and ironic if the first black president of USA freed the slaves, since we're all slaves to money. But who knows when such systems would all get connected and make this happen?

Anyone interested in building a working prototype or connecting it to identification systems like OpenID? This thread is in the technical section. Lets talk technical.

[wumpus]

If the goal is simply to make bitcoin less anonymous, what is wrong with a *voluntary* database mapping public bitcoin addresses to OpenID (or some other ID)? Technically this'd be similar to PGP key servers.

Merchants could then require that people sending coins to them are registered in this database.  People sending coins could require that the merchant is registered in this database. As I see it, that's the only free market compliant way to do this and might actually work if marketed right.

Especially for organizations that promote public transparency in how they spend their money, such as charities, this'd make sense.

And it'd only require a few pretty trivial changes to the client.

[BenRayfield]

If its voluntary, then when money goes to fund some criminal activity on a large scale, they will not choose to use the identity system, and based on that fact, governments will fight this system for the same reason they will fight Bitcoin when it becomes popular enough.

The point of the identity system is to make it similar enough to existing financial systems that governments and businesses will accept it as part of their infrastructure. That's not going to happen with Bitcoin as it is now or with that small change you said.

I'm not saying to get rid of Bitcoin, since we need it for the "checks and balances" I said above, but to defeat the Federal Reserve, a system would have to comply with financial laws, and that means authorities can match identities to transactions and freeze accounts. They won't do it too much, because of the "checks and balances". We'll use the identity based system as long as they regulate it in a reasonable way. They already know that's true, since Bitcoin exists for that reason.

The system I described is superior to the current economic system in all ways I can think of, and on the underground side, the double-key system requires a person's permission for every movement of their money. If government wanted to take your money, they couldn't force you to give up your key, since you may delete it or hide it, but they can stop you from using your money by not letting you log into OpenID or whatever system.

Offer businesses an alternative to the Federal Reserve dictatorship and they'll sign up quickly. Offer them an anonymous currency and they'll fear what government will do to them when such currency is used to fund illegal things on a large scale.

I'm ok with giving government control of these things because we're quickly going to use these things to change government into a real democracy that reacts quickly to what the people want. I'm not afraid of a government that is not biased by a dictatorship money system, but as it is now, the military-industrial-complex will get stronger until it destroys us all.

When authorities accept this system, allowing open-source variations of it to connect into the standard identity interface, equations of economies will evolve the way products evolve today. We will have thousands of competing equations for economies, and whichever work best get more people to use them, more invested in them. These equations will become more advanced until they are artificial intelligence. Then the Human species is as powerful as Star Trek's Borg Collective, without the part where they assimilate you and turn you into a machine. We can connect this to Emotiv Epoc ($300, buy it now, really it exists) and OpenEEG mind reading devices, but that would be a different project built on top of this. Right now, lets stick to a simple number, plus, and minus, like Bitcoin.

Voluntarily track identities in a database? That's not the point.

[wumpus]

How does that preclude my idea? A government could force its usage by forcing merchants and vendors on their territory to only accept transactions from whitelisted addresses that are in the database.

It must be voluntary because BTC is a global system and it'd be impossible to get all governments of earth to agree on the requirements.

[BenRayfield]

If something calculated from the identity keys (still a lot of details to work out, but it can be done) are not in the Bitcoin-like blocks, then the network could be accessed through a modified open-source program to get around the identity verification while using the same network. Your idea is not identity-secure.

I have nothing against your idea, but it offers little benefit above what Bitcoin already does.

I want it to be voluntary to use one system or another. Use dollars, Bitcoin, or any of the economies that evolve in my system.

Governments don't have to agree on anything since its currently not illegal to build the system I described (except in China and probably a few others), and I don't expect it to start being illegal any time soon because people will notice what I wrote and work toward it.

[BenRayfield]

The implementation....

2 private keys. Authorities have 1. Each person has the other. 2 public keys, go in the blocks, same as Bitcoin already does for 1 key pair.

Its really simple. When digitally-signing a new block, it needs to be signed by both private keys, and both those signatures go in the blocks. The block has to be sent to authorities to be signed, since they're not giving out their key, and the result sent to the Bitcoin-like program, which combines the keys, signatures, and everything else the normal way Bitcoin does it.

There is also a third key pair held by the authorities which is used to sign each of many public keys of the authorities. Based on that, each node in the network will verify that identity signatures really are from authorities instead of made up the same way personal key pairs are.

End of modifications needed to Bitcoin software, until cryptocurrency laws are created, and then a little more code. If you want paperwork, we'll build an automatic printer function. Complete automation.

[Sukrim]

Please stop double/triple/quadruple/multi posting!

Just build a prototype, as you suggested, and present it here. I doubt you will get much help in making a system similar to Bitcoin that can be censored/controlled by "authorities" (Why should they pay for that infrastructure in the first place? What about internationality?) here and you seem to have quite concrete ideas anyways - just go, write code, test and present your findings!

[mathx]

His posts are fine. He's fleshing out ideas. Want longer posts insteaed of many? Whats the diff.

Anyway, I dont understand why allowing identification is going to mitigate a trust issue. We already have a solution in bitcoin to mitigate trust issues. Using another identity one allows people to wear identity badges, like nice little 6 pointed stars that some people were forced to wear in some societies, to grossly detrimental effects.

Anonymity should be a right of the people and every person in this future society - the only difference is that anonymity allows the exploitation or damage of the system in our current society, in the new society there wont be any benefits to this anonymity, just protection from others damaging them. No group will be economically identifiable over any other.

Need a better way than giving up anonymity into the current hegemony to convince bitcoin users to merge into and takeover the existing system.

[srb123]

Isnt IPv4 getting superseeded, you know by IPv6.
Whats stopping IPv6 getting superseeded.
The currency can only be backed by pure math to be futureproof.

[BenRayfield]

Since this isn't about IP addresses anymore (a general identity verifying interface for many economies), we can continue in this thread: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=23054.0 titled "A Compromise To Avoid World War 3".

IPv4 vs IPv6 could be done by using 128 bits for each address in the block and wasting most of them in the case of IPv4, or it could be dynamic size addresses.

Anonymity has the advantage of privacy (of course) and protecting you from unreasonable authorities and allowing you to organize underground societies to peacefully obsolete such authorities, but it has the disadvantage that violent people will use it to fund their wars and political corruption. Anonymity is needed to advance the Human species but where its allowed should be chosen carefully to balance these things. I'm undecided what I think about it, but I'm sure I'll figure it out as demonstrations of these pros and cons occur on global scales. For now I think we should keep identity based and anonymous systems around and use them freely, as an experiment to see what happens and how they interact with eachother.

I will write code when enough people agree with my writing, which I am not limiting to this forum, so I know people will use it. This is more a social thing than a technical thing.

Please post further responses in the thread I linked, or post below about a system of storing IP addresses in blocks, but I have no interest in such an IP address system anymore unless new info is found that lets them be known reliably.