Let There Be Dark! Bitcoin Dark Wallet

[HostFat]

RE: bitcoin-security mailing list:  bottom line is I don't trust you.

Is there someone (even just one) on the darkwallet "team" that you trust more and enough than genjix ?

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[David M]

Donated.

Get coding fellas and good luck.

[genjix]

Gavin, anyway it's good you support other implementations. Thanks for the positive words.

[Kouye]

I think you have made irresponsible decisions in the past, and I don't trust that you would handle sensitive security issues responsibly.

Care to share some links to back this up, for us newbies, please?

[Gavin Andresen]

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=204 - the projects there were incomplete implementations and mostly recent.

You're right, I apologize. I just added libbitcoin to that list.

[cheech300]

Anyway, i donated 0.5 btc earlier that day. It's an interesting tool.... Letz see what happens next!

[go1111111]

Care to share some links to back this up, for us newbies, please?

I think it may stem from this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/10/3233711/second-bitcoin-lawsuit-is-filed-in-california

TL;DR: genjix was involved in Bitcoinica, a former exchange that shut down and lost a bunch of customer's money. Some people think that the circumstances around the money being lost were suspicious.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Care to share some links to back this up, for us newbies, please?

I think it may stem from this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/10/3233711/second-bitcoin-lawsuit-is-filed-in-california

TL;DR: genjix was involved in Bitcoinica, a former exchange that shut down and lost a bunch of customer's money. Some people think that the circumstances around the money being lost were suspicious.

Last I heard M. Karpeles of Gox fame is sitting on the stash from Bitcoinica (30, 000btc?) whilst some lawyers from New Zealand(?) were pursuing him for the dough ... on behalf of the injured parties.

Anyway, about this Dark (grey) wallet, is it all donations? Or are there shares for sale as well? GPL license?

And widespread use of CoinJoin theoretically reduces size of UTXO right? So a good thing for the network decentralisation ...

[okie_freemen]

pfft id rather just work on ANC which will accomplish all of this from within the client, and those devs aren't asking for 50k to do it.

[Mike Hearn]

More specifically, after Bitcoinica got hacked Amir (genjix) open sourced the Bitcoinica code without noticing that it had a Mt Gox API key in it. That key was then immediately used to steal what money Bitcoinica had left. Being in such a hurry to open source something that you expose passwords protecting large sums of money is not the kind of behaviour that inspires confidence.

Anyway, as Gavin says, it's no big deal. The bitcoin-security list is used for Bitcoin-Qt stuff (mostly discussion of DoS attacks of various kinds). It's not really relevant to re-implementors. There's no secret backdoor knowledge being exchanged there that would put libbitcoin at a disadvantage.

With regards to being "cuntish", I think that's amazingly hypocritical given the amount of space Amir dedicates on his website to personally attacking Gavin and myself. A big chunk of the Dark Wallet website is not even about technical matters, but is just a giant conspiracy theory about the Foundation, Gavin and me. Apparently we serve "wealthy business interests", or some shit. That's why Gavin chooses to work on the Bitcoin P2P protocol instead of earning 50x more working for a bank.

Then after implying that there's some kind of shadowy, hidden collusion between open source developers and governments he goes to ramble about Bloom filters, for some reason. It "introduced state into the protocol" he says - apparently the rest of the stuff in the CNode class isn't state!

Finally he dumps a giant pile of random links to NSA related stuff, on the grounds that "if Bitcoin developers are allies of these groups, they are not working for Bitcoin users" ... i.e. genjix thinks giving a presentation to the CIA is the same as being employed by them.

The technical side isn't much better. Amir and Cody claim to represent the common user and the spirit of decentralisation, but their technical architecture is just a re-run of the Electrum design where he re-invents the P2P protocol badly, forcing his wallet users to rely on custom trusted servers. It even says this at the bottom

How will you ensure privacy of blockchain queries?
New versions of ZeroMQ support encryption between endpoints. We can go further too, but this will require more research. What is clear however, is that blockchain servers are the future of usable Bitcoin wallets where the user owns their keys. We have to innovate around the reality.

So they take a giant dump on Bloom filtering - which I proposed and partly designed to solve this very problem - then it turns out that their "Obelisk server" doesn't have any alternative solution. It has a cool name but no solutions to difficult privacy problems. So in fact your privacy is much better protected by using the regular P2P protocol, talking to the regular P2P network and uploading a noisy Bloom filter (or sharded set of noisy filters). Too bad Amir regards that scheme as impure, rushed and a "debasement", otherwise he could just use it in Dark Wallet.

Oh yeah, last thing - he says that his preferred design is "the future" and "the reality", despite that the wallet Amir praises most for its usability (Hive) uses the P2P network with Bloom filtering. That seems to contradict his own point. You can easily build usable wallets, today, that talk directly to the P2P network with no special servers required, and it's more decentralised and gives better privacy to do so.

I don't think Amir will actually do that though, because that might suggest that maybe Gavin and Mike aren't idiots who work for the Illuminati.

[Alpaca Bob]

I'll just add this article to the discussion, for those of you who haven't already read it yet:

Bitcoin is going mainstream. Here is why cypherpunks shouldn’t worry.

As long as Bitcoin remains open and decentralized, cypherpunks and entrepreneurs are not working at cross purposes, no matter how suspicious they may be of each other. The real regulatory threats to Bitcoin are the bonkers bananas proposals to centralize Bitcoin like we saw in the recent WIRED article. Luckily, that article misses the point of not just Bitcoin, but of this moment in history. Decentralization is what makes Bitcoin genius, it’s what attracts both the radicals and the entrepreneurs, and it’s not going away.

[hivewallet]

I'll just add this article to the discussion, for those of you who haven't already read it yet:

Bitcoin is going mainstream. Here is why cypherpunks shouldn’t worry.

As long as Bitcoin remains open and decentralized, cypherpunks and entrepreneurs are not working at cross purposes, no matter how suspicious they may be of each other. The real regulatory threats to Bitcoin are the bonkers bananas proposals to centralize Bitcoin like we saw in the recent WIRED article. Luckily, that article misses the point of not just Bitcoin, but of this moment in history. Decentralization is what makes Bitcoin genius, it’s what attracts both the radicals and the entrepreneurs, and it’s not going away.

Hear, hear!

[Anon136]

0.2btc donated. please dont let us down.

[DarkEmi]

I don't think Amir is a "bad guy", but please dont donate any money to this project.

Just because a video is awesomely produced does not mean that people behind it are trustworthy.

Amir has a clear responsability in the bitcoinica trainwreck, that left several people that commited their ressources to the bitcoin vision financially crippled.

And now, you want to give him funds and trust him with your bitcoins ?

I can tell you what will happen if things go south, you wont have anybody to turn to.

Of course Amir's responsability is completly shared by Zhou tong and others.

But you are here jumping from project from project, why is your ex partner Patrick Strateman blocking the bitcoinica liquidation ? Can you answer that ? Can you try to help handle that instead of jumping to whichever project sounds the coolest ?

It would be great if we, bitcoinica claimants, could at any point in the future get any closure. We are far from that and all responsible protagonnists have left the sinking ship.

My 2 bitcents.

[LiteCoinGuy]

i guess Amir has enough money to do it with his own cash...

[waxwing]

It's a very interesting argument.
Both sides consider the other naive - the 'Foundation' side thinks it naive to think Bitcoin can grow without finding a common ground with the authorities, the 'go dark' side think it naive to think the authorities will ever cede any control voluntarily.

To be honest, whichever side I personally fall on, I'm happier knowing that both sides of the argument exist, and I'd like them both to continue to exist.

[hivewallet]

It's a very interesting argument.
Both sides consider the other naive - the 'Foundation' side thinks it naive to think Bitcoin can grow without finding a common ground with the authorities, the 'go dark' side think it naive to think the authorities will ever cede any control voluntarily.

To be honest, whichever side I personally fall on, I'm happier knowing that both sides of the argument exist, and I'd like them both to continue to exist.

Couldn't agree more.

[mikegogulski]

I don't think Amir will actually do that though, because that might suggest that maybe Gavin and Mike aren't idiots who work for the Illuminati.

For the record, I don't think that Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen are idiots who work for the Illuminati.

Clearly, they are both intelligent people. They could not *possibly* have achieved what they have while being idiots.

However, I do declare, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, that you seem to be complete assholes. And while I won't point at the Illuminati (I am, after all, a card-carrying member for a quarter of your pathetic human centuries), I will say this: Hearn and Andresen, you behave like dyed-in-the-wool statists who either:

a) HATE the idea of taking ANY personal risk to fight the evil fucks who presently own the planet, meaning you're fucking cowards (grow a pair); OR

b) are completely UNCONSCIOUS of the fact that evil who fucks presently own the planet, meaning you're INEDUCABLY IGNORANT of matters you've long been exposed to in the Bitcoin milieu (wake up and take a lesson, Stockholm-syndrome-affected dumbasses); OR

c) are IN BED with the evil fucks who presently own the planet, in which you are traitors to humanity (die screaming, on fire, alone, each in your own separate hole); OR

d) want to BECOME one of the evil fucks who presently own the planet (ditto).

I'll leave it to the sycophantic fanentity audience to choose among the three or... wait for it... scream blue murder at me for uttering uncomfortable truths.

Now, I don't mean to say that the two of you go around crushing kittens or such, but look:

- You two CONSTANTLY harp on Amir's fuckup with Bitcoinica. Amir DID fuck up there, bigtime. You seem incapable of entertaining the notion that he learned anything from that, or that it was an honest mistake rather than willful negligence or malice, and you seem to act, therefore, like anything Amir says or is involved with is a pool of liquid shit with anthrax and ricin sprinkles on top.

- Gavin's BOMBASTIC IGNORANT DUMBSHITTERY of historical context in writing (Google+, 20 May 2013):

We're never going to agree on tactics.  I'm a pragmatist, so if putting star patches on my air guitar gives the people in power warm fuzzies, I'm happy to do it. I'll ask them exactly what type of star they'd like me to use and exactly where they'd like me to apply it, and while they were busy figuring that out I'll be busy working hard to get a few million more air guitar users.

Being a majority protects people from assaults.

(...because that worked so well in Warsaw, Godwinbergheimgrad, etc.)

- You tolerate a dangerous, rather-much-extremely-more-extremely-more-mentally-ill-than-Amir-or-me beast like luke-jr

- You continuously promote a "profit over people" line of thinking

- and on and on.

So, get fucked, the both of you. Take Garzik and luke-monster with you. You will be superseded, and your control lost as tears in falling rain.

[go1111111]

However, I do declare, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, that you seem to be complete assholes.

The insults and anger you aim toward Mike and Gavin seems pretty over the top. I read the G+ link you gave, and while it's true that they are less anti-government than you, it looks like they just have a genuine disagreement with you about priorities and tactics.

I'm probably more on your side of the debate about how much priority should be given to making Bitcoin something that can be used to escape government control, but even if Mike and Gavin were the scum that you claim they are, what's the purpose of all the over the top insults? It's definitely not going to help you influence them, and to anyone observing this thread who you want to recruit to your cause it just makes you look like your emotions are controlling you.

By the way, did Amir ever give his account of what happened with Bitcoinica, why, and what he learned? 

[Peter Todd]

So they take a giant dump on Bloom filtering - which I proposed and partly designed to solve this very problem - then it turns out that their "Obelisk server" doesn't have any alternative solution. It has a cool name but no solutions to difficult privacy problems. So in fact your privacy is much better protected by using the regular P2P protocol, talking to the regular P2P network and uploading a noisy Bloom filter (or sharded set of noisy filters). Too bad Amir regards that scheme as impure, rushed and a "debasement", otherwise he could just use it in Dark Wallet.

Oh yeah, last thing - he says that his preferred design is "the future" and "the reality", despite that the wallet Amir praises most for its usability (Hive) uses the P2P network with Bloom filtering. That seems to contradict his own point. You can easily build usable wallets, today, that talk directly to the P2P network with no special servers required, and it's more decentralised and gives better privacy to do so.

Before any users get themselves hurt here by this misinformation, be warned that right now Electrum-based wallets are significantly more private than any of the bloom filter using wallets. No bloom-filtering wallet that I'm aware of supports connections through Tor, so when you send a transaction you immediately reveal what coins are in your wallet. Those wallets also all reuse addresses which links all your transactions together, again making it easy to see how many Bitcoins you have an where you've sent money too. Bloom filters also give statistical information about what coins are in your wallet, and because they don't use fixed servers and because Bitcoin node-to-node connections are unencrypted, they are giving out this information constantly both to anyone monitoring your internet connection as well as any node you happen to connect too. (and you have no idea who you are connecting too)

With Electrum on the other hand right now the main Electrum client supports Tor right out of the box, and there are Electrum servers running as Tor hidden services. Electrum clients don't re-use addresses, ensuring that your transactions aren't linked together, and the set of all people who can learn any of that information is well known and small: whatever Electrum server you decide to use. While Electrum hasn't done this yet AFAIK, it'd be technically very easy for them to add the equivalent of bloom filtering, partial-prefix-queries. (essentially you'd ask the Electrum server for all transactions for addresses starting with 1abcd, a very close cousin to what bloom filters do) They could also choose to support bloom filters directly in their current form.

I'll add that Electrum clients also check transactions fully against block headers these days, so they're just as secure as bloom-filter-using wallets once a transaction is confirmed. When a transaction is unconfirmed in practice they're safer, because who is telling you that the transaction is valid is well known. In addition it's easy to make an Electrum client check that the inputs exist by querying the Electrum server for them, something not yet possible with bloom filters.

Personally I use Armory and have a few full nodes, but if that weren't an option for me I'd be using Electrum without a doubt.

Anyway, as you can see on the dark wallet page, their complaints about bloom filters are because they made serious disk-io-starvation DoS attacks possible that still aren't solved, as well as the complaint that a minority of the development team wants to coerce ever Bitcoin node into supporting them.