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.
