"John Dillon" We can leak things too you trolling piece of shit

[dancingnancy]

Can someone easily explain what is going on here?

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[hivewallet]

Why is the hive guy there ?

Because, regardless of who he is, we can appreciate some of the positions of John Dillon.

Sorry to shift the tide of this drama but we still want to discuss what should be in a so-called Dark Wallet. Hopefully the leaked chain doesn't cause much of a fuss among what we assume are relatively tough-skinned individuals. We'd like to get on with this business already.

[justusranvier]

Very intrigued by the revelations about libbitcoin, always was concerned about that just didn't know why. They have the chance to turn the tides but it seems they are getting on the wrong train. That's a shame.

My guess is that Conformal Systems does have what it takes to create a proper reimplementation. They just lack the PR that Dark Wallet is getting.

That project needs a lot more attention.

[LightRider]

Not following, to be honest.

[aninterestedparty]

Would probably help if you/someone quoted the relevant parts.

Or maybe I'm the only lazy one here.

No you're not, this is impossible to read and comprehend in its current state...

That's a releif, I thought I was lazy/incompetent

[jedunnigan]

Very intrigued by the revelations about libbitcoin, always was concerned about that just didn't know why. They have the chance to turn the tides but it seems they are getting on the wrong train. That's a shame.

That text about libbitcoin was posted by myself on the foundation forums; I just thought jdillon would find it interesting.

Thank you for the clarification. I haven't felt comfortable supporting the BF so I never signed up. I guess I have to now...

Very intrigued by the revelations about libbitcoin, always was concerned about that just didn't know why. They have the chance to turn the tides but it seems they are getting on the wrong train. That's a shame.

My guess is that Conformal Systems does have what it takes to create a proper reimplementation. They just lack the PR that Dark Wallet is getting.

That project needs a lot more attention.

Yes, keeping a close eye on that. You mentioned Bits of Proof earlier, I support that effort as well. Seems to have a strong(er) code base, although don't take my word for it. Modular nodes ftw.

[tvbcof]

...
Who who knows, maybe this is more to do with him than anything else. Regardless I'm taking it as a sign that we need to be more careful about our computer security - though I dunno, I always had the impression that John was a very smart man who understood crypto and computer security well, yet he still got hacked.

The fact that Dillon would write something like that makes me kind of suspicious that it is not true to be honest.  I figure that such guys are better trained about releasing information than that.  In my admittedly limited exposure to the spook types this is not something I would expect.

I don't think it is excessively paranoid to believe that Bitcoin and related developments are important enough that there will be a lot of subterfuge and targeted interest in the primary players.  I figure that a smallish group of people involved in the U.S. intelligence apparatus took a significant interest in Bitcoin about the time that it proved useful to Wikileaks.  My basis for believing that is that the null hypothesis seems unlikely.

Further, a lot of the early interest in Bitcoin was from people who had some problems that it solves, and not always for especially pure reasons.

And that there has been a growing interest from curious geeks, intelligent criminals, bored financial services types, etc.

All of these groups of people are likely to have had the potential to see where Bitcoin could go in 'favorable' scenario, and it seems like it might be starting to happen.

I do not think it is a bad idea to expend some effort thinking about possible unpleasant scenarios and how they might be dealt with.  If the Winklevoss guys and other speculators are even close to being right about certain things then the stakes in the game could get quite high.  That is, I think, more a sober analysis than some form of hysteria.

[Peter Todd]

...
Who who knows, maybe this is more to do with him than anything else. Regardless I'm taking it as a sign that we need to be more careful about our computer security - though I dunno, I always had the impression that John was a very smart man who understood crypto and computer security well, yet he still got hacked.

The fact that Dillon would write something like that makes me kind of suspicious that it is not true to be honest.  I figure that such guys are better trained about releasing information than that.  In my admittedly limited exposure to the spook types this is not something I would expect.

See, my exposure has been that like the rest of us, they're humans too.

One of the more interesting comments about the downfall of the Silk Road was that the social environment of being DPR is incredibly unhealthy - who could DPR have as a friend to talk too after work? jdillon and I often talked on OTR real-time chat - AFAIK the only person he did that with - and it's certainly easy to imagine wanting to open up a bit about who you are. Just human nature to want to connect with like-minded people and communicate.

You could be right of course, but I don't see anything suspicious about it myself.

[tvbcof]

...
You could be right of course, but I don't see anything suspicious about it myself.

I hope that you are right and the text is accurate.  I mused about the probability of demoralization in spook-land a while ago on this forum (pre-Snowden), and I hold out a fair amount of hope that the actions of some of them will have a strongly positive effect on our society.

I am an unhealthily open person for the most part, but I would never commit something like the Dillon comment to media and send it outside of my control.  The reasons for this should be rapidly becoming clear.  I've met you in person and have studied much of your work and have no reason to believe that you are anything but the real McCoy, but I cannot know this.  And even if you are, and are obviously well capable of performing data security, everyone slips up and certain people are much more likely to be under attack.

[justusranvier]

Yes, keeping a close eye on that. You mentioned Bits of Proof earlier, I support that effort as well. Seems to have a strong(er) code base, although don't take my word for it. Modular nodes ftw.

Bits of Proof was first, I think, but I'm not as familiar with it.

Also the Conformal guys live in the same city as I and show up at the local Bitcoin Meetups sometimes, so that's probably biasing me in their favour since I never met Grau in person.

One thing that I think would be extremely useful is if one of the teams that has done a reimplementation would start pushing code upstream to the Satoshi client, adding unit tests and documenting all the quirks they had to replicate to reduce the possible scope of an undocumented incompatibility that could cause a fork.

Maybe we could even pay for their time via a crowdfunding campaign.

[hivewallet]

Jdillon seems to have pure interests regarding protecting and strengthening bitcoin. After reading that long block of text, I strongly respect what I perceive to be his intent. That is quite unfortunate if his personal computer was actually infiltrated.

Exactly the same feeling on this side... Hopefully we're not being played. Who the hell could the hacker/leaker be?

[r3wt]

nothing to see here but played out bullshit.

[Peter Todd]

Jdillon seems to have pure interests regarding protecting and strengthening bitcoin. After reading that long block of text, I strongly respect what I perceive to be his intent. That is quite unfortunate if his personal computer was actually infiltrated.

Exactly the same feeling on this side... Hopefully we're not being played. Who the hell could the hacker/leaker be?

Well... who hacked the bitcointalk forum? inputs.io? etc. etc. etc. Lots of unknowns, and that's on both sides of the we are or aren't being played thing.

[Rez]

P.S. can anyone explain this pixel tracking stuff?

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

[alp]

Yes, keeping a close eye on that. You mentioned Bits of Proof earlier, I support that effort as well. Seems to have a strong(er) code base, although don't take my word for it. Modular nodes ftw.

Bits of Proof was first, I think, but I'm not as familiar with it.

Also the Conformal guys live in the same city as I and show up at the local Bitcoin Meetups sometimes, so that's probably biasing me in their favour since I never met Grau in person.

One thing that I think would be extremely useful is if one of the teams that has done a reimplementation would start pushing code upstream to the Satoshi client, adding unit tests and documenting all the quirks they had to replicate to reduce the possible scope of an undocumented incompatibility that could cause a fork.

Maybe we could even pay for their time via a crowdfunding campaign.

When btcd presented, it sounded like they aren't quite complete yet.  Maybe they have finished it in the last month.  It sounds promising, I liked their architecture quite a bit.  I'm not as familiar with Go, so I didn't dig into the source, but the Conformal guys definitely get it and I wish their project could get more traction.

I've also looked into Bits Of Proof, not super close, but close enough, and like that a lot too.  I need to get more up to speed on JMS to really play with it more, but it has promise.  That's the stack I am planning on looking at most closely going forward.

[justusranvier]

When btcd presented, it sounded like they aren't quite complete yet.  Maybe they have finished it in the last month.  It sounds promising, I liked their architecture quite a bit.  I'm not as familiar with Go, so I didn't dig into the source, but the Conformal guys definitely get it and I wish their project could get more traction.

They don't have a wallet or GUI code finished yet, but what they do have will download the blockchain and relay transactions and blocks, which as far as I'm concerned is all that a full node should do anyway.

I'm running an instance of btcd right now and it's doing a fine job of achieving consensus with the rest of the network.

[alp]

When btcd presented, it sounded like they aren't quite complete yet.  Maybe they have finished it in the last month.  It sounds promising, I liked their architecture quite a bit.  I'm not as familiar with Go, so I didn't dig into the source, but the Conformal guys definitely get it and I wish their project could get more traction.

They don't have a wallet or GUI code finished yet, but what they do have will download the blockchain and relay transactions and blocks, which as far as I'm concerned is all that a full node should do anyway.

I'm running an instance of btcd right now and it's doing a fine job of achieving consensus with the rest of the network.

I remember they had severe performance problems early, maybe they have been fixed.  If they have a way to query about the block chain, relay and hold the blockchain, that's good enough for a full node IMO.  Glad to see it's working.  I liked their talk.

[justusranvier]

I remember they had severe performance problems early, maybe they have been fixed.

Not fixed yet, but it's fast enough to be usable (for certain values of "usable")

It took over 10 hours to synchronize with the blockchain, downloading from a bitcoind node on 127.0.0.1 on a storage setup that was not IO bound. It looked like it was only utilizing 2 out of 8 cores during the process. Now that it's caught up it takes about a minute to verify a block.

[Mike Hearn]

It's disappointing to read that Dillon and others were thinking about actually doing a real DoS attack on the Bitcoin network, rather than write code to improve bitcoind's resource scheduling and DoS handling. That's fantastically irresponsible, but also entirely unsurprising given his track record.

[tvbcof]

It's disappointing to read that Dillon and others were thinking about actually doing a real DoS attack on the Bitcoin network, rather than write code to improve bitcoind's resource scheduling and DoS handling. That's fantastically irresponsible, but also entirely unsurprising given his track record.

In my observation, all of his 'attacks' have been to prove some point or another, and have been relatively effective at doing so.

I wish he would have pulled off a semi-effective DoS attack.  It would perhaps have produced several useful outcomes:

 - Re-focused priorities from bells/whistles and 'grow fast at all costs' mentality toward a more full 'harden first' one.

 - Demonstrated that Bitcoin has a robust enough structure that it can go down for periods of time without necessarily meaning that there is full value loss to Bitcoin holders.  I am afraid that many people don't recognize this since the solution is marketed as a pure exchange currency.

I've vastly rather have someone like Dillon be the driving force behind a successful attack since he clearly feels strongly about the importance of Bitcoin and has it's best interests in mind.  To be fair, though, I say that because his interests and my own seem to align.