NXT :: descendant of Bitcoin - Updated Information

[kunibopl]

do you all like it? not even started ... plenty more to come I hope i don't kill the coin

Can you post a image of your account, proving that you own what you claim.

he should just register the alias EmuleIsDumpingHarderThanHisBallsAre
and give us the account#

otherwise he's a troll, which he is anyway.

[1714639700]

1714639700

[1714639700]

1714639700

[QBTC]

There's a lot that could be done to help with communication. Instead of just a traditional forum (section -> thread -> post), there could additionally be support for the following, e.g.
 
-instead of giant quote pyramids, there could be slashdot/reddit tree-style threads.
-people like salsa, pin and joefox are making regular aggregator link posts, which is great. Even better if these could be stickied. Better still imo, if the most important links and their description could be displayed directly, instead of having to go into the stickied post to find them. Basically, the more important and/or the more people it involves, the more visible it should be.
-more options to customize what you want to follow than just a watchlist. Maybe a reddit style way of assembling favourite subreddits. Maybe topic tags for threads and posts.
- I've mentioned summary and definitions of technical terms before. Maybe a small, fixed frame/window for summary of the ongoing discussion (update permissions decided by topic starter say?) Mouseover technical terms/acronyms to get definitions (maybe these could be databased in our wiki? What do you think joe?)
- maybe integration of real-time communication tools like gdocs or the old Google Wave, or at least a chatbox.
- personally, I'd love LaTeX support so that I can write math using less English

Lots of possibilities. But most importantly, the site admins and devs need to experiment with ideas like this and interfaces. Find out what works best for most folks.

nxtcrypto, are you guys (or anyone else) up for this? I don't know web coding, so even though I suggest all this, I can't help with the implementation I can do interface mockups though. And the LaTeX support part, if you guys are interested in adding that, I can help. Let me know.

www.nxtcrypto.org here. Trying to understand exactly what you are wanting? We do have a forum and wiki going on. Give me more specifics about what you're thinking before I can say yes or no.

Hey QBTC, great work with the site It'll take a lot of time for me to expand on all of this (and other ideas). I'll slowly post about them in the nxtcrypto form META section over the next few days. But for starters, I'll talk a bit about LaTeX support (the last item):

LaTeX is a markup language, like HTML and wiki markup, it's used to format rather than to program. It's mainly used for typesetting. It does a fantastic job of displaying math expressions, so it's used by a lot of scientists, mathematicians and CS people. Compare for instance, the math expressions in here vs the math in this post I just made.

Wikipedia, Wordpress and some forums support LaTeX. joefox says he's going to try to support it in the wiki too.

The links I've shown support LaTeX by converting the expressions in LaTeX syntax into image files. There are scripts that do this. (Don't have links to them handy, ask me if you want them.) It's commonly used, so you can find a lot of help with getting it set up. But this approach has some drawbacks: expressions can't be copied, and the size of images messes up the separation between lines. All this may not be a big deal. Another much more slick approach is MathJax which renders expressions using fonts! This requires Javascript to be activated though.


EDIT: I've just replied to ~5 posts from across dozens of pages in this megathread, all the while going back through the thread (and all the quote pyramids and different convos...) to reference stuff. That's the current communications burden...

The possibility to use LaTeX with JavaScript could be put into the www site. I'm not sure of the purpose. As of now the site is not open for contributors other than myself. It might serve your goals better on the forums or wiki where contributors may want to share mathematical expressions. It's a great idea for the right place. I look forward to hearing more!

[PeercoinEnthusiast]

Team,

It's time to let the exchanges know it's time to add Nxt. Please do the following:


1. Visit the Google Doc for a list of exchanges and their respective email addresses

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuputZyRQ5-5dFY4RlBTdFJWWnhTRUp3SWdiMlBpb3c&usp=sharing#gid=0


2. Email each exchange

- Let them know why you think they should add Nxt (marketcap, features, community etc..)
- You could easily use the same email for each exchange


3. Record your results here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuputZyRQ5-5dFY4RlBTdFJWWnhTRUp3SWdiMlBpb3c&usp=sharing#gid=0


Don't wait for someone else to do the work, let's show the exchanges we're serious about Nxt.

Let's do this!

[mczarnek]

AE = asset exchange.. gotcha!  Oh beating Nxt to asset exchange was the one thing I though Emunie really had going for it, though the price smoothing could be nice in the long run, even though I doubt necessary.. glad they can't include the asset exchange anymore anyway, I'm hoping Nxt wins over all anyway.

Regarding the mixing service

1 million Nxt very high for the mixing service, especially for something that doesn't get 100% of the coins into the account you are trying to send to.  I would be willing to do it for significantly cheaper and you don't have to pay me until you see the final product, as long as I have CfB's promise that I would get paid for it.. or something escrow like.  Would it be a problem is I made a small profit off the mixer as well?

My first thought regarding the mixer is don't use a pool so people can't make any money that passed through certain accounts known to be mixing pools as tainted.  

Here's how I would approach it:
Person 1 wants to send 250 Nxt to Address A

They get to the main page and see a simple form that let's them tell us they want to send 250 Nxt to Address A

They are told, ok, send 79 Nxt to Address B,  11 to Address C, and 165 to Address D. Once that is done and verified by checking the blockchain, then their account is added to the list of accounts that need funding, and when Person 2 comes along who needs to mix his/her money comes along, they are told, send 211 Nxt to Address A, 19 to Address C,  Person 3 is told to send 39 Nxt to Address A and 52 Nxt to Address D.. and so on.

If you add up those numbers you'll notice that it works out to 255, this is because we'd also have to direct some money back to our own account, as they'd all have to pay an extra 1% or so transaction fee for using our service and we'd also have to pay the forgers.  Paying a little bit extra for high priority could bump you up the list to be paid off faster and you could optionally say you want to be paid all at once instead of splitting it up but splitting it up seems like it may be slightly more anonymous and you wouldn't have a long list of transactions for the same amounts that could be traced to the prices of whatever item(s) you are paying off this way.  For large enough amounts, you'd tell them tough, you have to split it up.

The only thing you would need to keep track of is which accounts need to receive Nxt and how much.  Just randomly pick one of the first accounts off that list and a random amount that is less than or equal the amount they need, making sure it's split as many times as they would like it to be.  No central pool needed or way of telling that a person ever used a mixer, and as soon as an account is paid off, delete it from the list of accounts that need to receive money.  Maybe also give them an option of getting a receipt so they can tell the person who owns Address A that they money being sent was sent from Address B and Address C and they can check that it adds up to the correct total.

That's how I'd approach it anyway in order to avoid those central mixing pools.  The way to get around it of course is to mix your own money and set-up receiving accounts, then you'd know someone with a certain address was sending money to a mixing pool, because he'd sent you money..  you'd have consider how big of an issue that actually is though, especially if using mixing pools isn't illegal.

Anyway just throwing out an idea to consider, that last point may kill it.  I'd be willing to implement it for significantly lower than 1 million Nxt.

A part of me does wonder though whether integrating this in is good for Nextcoin.. seems to me like a lot of people may wonder why you are being shady about it and trying to obscure the transactions. Just Bitcoin mixers always strike me as the shady side of Bitcoin, that part that allows easy money laundering.  I mean why else would you use one?  The one part of crypto's I could see being made illegal.

[salsacz]

After a month of almost daily work I can present you a full text version of the NxtMyths:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwAGADgnQcrtM3g1cU1VSHZtTGM/edit?usp=sharing

New still unpublished chapters - 7. Rich get richer and 8. (no) Innovations over Bitcoin start at the page 25 (actually 8th chapter is only one known table..). There are also some new tables you probably didn't see on previous pages.

Comments are enabled for grammar mistakes. Facts and wrong ideas can be discussed here...

If you think it's worth any donations, feel free to send them to: 15003961341330858247  


Now I can finally switch to the infographics stage   (infographics will mention the NxtMyths paper as a source...)

[jl777]

A part of me does wonder though whether integrating this in is good for Nextcoin.. seems to me like a lot of people may wonder why you are being shady about it and trying to obscure the transactions. Just Bitcoin mixers always strike me as the shady side of Bitcoin, that part that allows easy money laundering.  I mean why else would you use one?  The one part of crypto's I could see being made illegal.

Because it protects people from corruption and tyranny..

Because it recreates the functionality of cash.
If everybody who uses cash is a criminal, then we all are
We are talking about having money that can be used like cash
Being able to spend money without EVERYBODY knowing exactly how you spend all your money.

There is nothing wrong with this.

[gradis]

Any UK Nxt holders? We need to position ourselves to get on Bittylicious to increase liquidity. The ability to purchase Nxt without Bitcoin is a big deal and one we should put some energy towards.

I was hoping somebody else would step up to the plate on this one, but since they haven't. here's my two cents, er, shillings worth.  I have a UK Barclays bank account I use to fund my online poker adventures.  It's a totally legal one in my own name, no funny business; I've filed the correct paperwork on it with the IRS and Department of the Treasury here in the US and even voluntarily gave up the number for it during my last security clearance interview.  I go thru a proxy and look like I'm in London since the online poker sites block me otherwise coming from an American IP address block.  All of these gyrations are due to the 2006 UIEGA anti-online-poker act that was passed here in America, land of the free; but I digress...

Bottom line, I've got the UK bank account but I have no desire to sell any of the NXT I've accumulated.  However, I understand the importance of getting NXT hooked up to Bittylicious so I'm willing to try and help.  If I've got enough public trust built up here, maybe people could dump NXT they wanted to sell into one of my toy NXT accounts, Bittilocious could take it out of that account to give to a buyer, send GBP to my Barclays account, and I could send that back to the original NXT holders via Moneybookers/Skrill (I've also got accounts there, too.)

This would require me to be a trusted middleman, which I'm OK with if you are.  

If we really want to pursue this, let me know, I'll do my part to get NXT rolling in the UK.

I have a UK account but wouldn't use it. Banks really don't like unusual transactions (which these would be, although you could explain what they are for, a person in the bank would have no idea) and will block your account pretty quick. Mine was blocked just because I went on a online shopping spree. Had a phone call claiming to be the fraud team at the bank and I was yeah right "fuck off". Phoned up the bank on their number and yep it was genuine. Though it would depend on volume and amount banks are very paranoid at the moment.

[abctc]

The world is rapidly drifting into a global electronic police state, where anything and everything we do is recorded, analyzed, scrutinized, etc. We used to be able to use normal cash to buy things. Now, cash transactions are prohibited for most things in america. Soon all cash will become illegal. This is normal cash. Without a crypto replacement for cash, the world will be controlled by people who know what everybody else is doing with their money.

- very well said, James!

[mczarnek]

The world is rapidly drifting into a global electronic police state, where anything and everything we do is recorded, analyzed, scrutinized, etc. We used to be able to use normal cash to buy things. Now, cash transactions are prohibited for most things in america. Soon all cash will become illegal. This is normal cash. Without a crypto replacement for cash, the world will be controlled by people who know what everybody else is doing with their money.

- very well said, James!

And I can see that and agree with jl777's thought, it is well said... but would a government agent who supported the NSA agree with that?  Just seems to me like I could see them being unhappy about it and arguing that people who use them have criminal intent or something along those lines.  Can you name some legitimate reasons you'd want some transactions to remain anonymous though?

I don't know.. I guess I'm just not in such a hurry to implement it until we've been around for a while.  Basically until we're big enough to be able to lobby that mixing stay legal.  Though even if it isn't built in, they'll probably always be mixers around for the bigger cryptos as long as they are around for those who do want to use them.

One more thing to throw in is I'm currently in the process of getting a mortgage and one question they asked was for me to trace where my Bitcoins came from and how they flowed around my accounts since they were worried about money laundering.

[Come-from-Beyond]

in other news, MULTIPLE folks over on NXTCrypto Forums are reporting that after brand new client install of 0.5.10 and downloading the blockchain from scratch that it is stopping at block 22000.

https://forums.nxtcrypto.org/viewtopic.php?style=1&f=15&t=693#p3255

Maybe someone used published sources to create a fake client. The published source stops at 22K.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I would be willing to do it for significantly cheaper and you don't have to pay me until you see the final product, as long as I have CfB's promise that I would get paid for it.

We need a trustless solution.

[jl777]

The world is rapidly drifting into a global electronic police state, where anything and everything we do is recorded, analyzed, scrutinized, etc. We used to be able to use normal cash to buy things. Now, cash transactions are prohibited for most things in america. Soon all cash will become illegal. This is normal cash. Without a crypto replacement for cash, the world will be controlled by people who know what everybody else is doing with their money.

- very well said, James!

And I can see that and agree with jl777's thought, it is well said... but would a government agent who supported the NSA agree with that?  Just seems to me like I could see them being unhappy about it and arguing that people who use them have criminal intent or something along those lines.  Can you name some legitimate reasons you'd want some transactions to remain anonymous though?

I don't know.. I guess I'm just not in such a hurry to implement it until we've been around for a while.  Basically until we're big enough to be able to lobby that mixing stay legal.  Though even if it isn't built in, they'll probably always be mixers around for the bigger cryptos as long as they are around for those who do want to use them.

One more thing to throw in is I'm currently in the process of getting a mortgage and one question they asked was for me to trace where my Bitcoins came from and how they flowed around my accounts since they were worried about money laundering.

Using this logic, we should just outlaw the use of cash immediately.

Everyone must use a credit card that can be tracked. What if you purchase a prescription for some illness and your insurance company sees this and cancels your insurance policy, or your company finds out and terminates you because they don't want to be liable for your health costs. Privacy? It is important.

The presumption of guilty until proven innocent seems to be a bit backwards from what it used to be.

Do you want your neighbors to know how much you spend on everything? Do you want the local thief ring to know you have valuables in your home, because they figured out your spending pattern?

I could go on and on. Cash is something people have had for thousands of years and it is disappearing. Possibly permanently.

The war on bitcoin and all crypto is in full swing in america. It costs millions of dollars to comply with all the regulations. Only big VC companies like coinbase can possibly afford full compliance.

The feds view is that anybody that has bitcoin is a criminal. It won't matter if we have mixing or NXTcash, so there is no difference on that score if we do get NXTcash implemented. On the gain side, as soon as we get NXTcash, it will have restored to people across the world, cash, like it used to be!

James

[jl777]

I would be willing to do it for significantly cheaper and you don't have to pay me until you see the final product, as long as I have CfB's promise that I would get paid for it.

We need a trustless solution.

did you get a chance to see Matt Green's video? In it he outlined a much more efficient solution than the alpha version. Seems very promising.

[lucky88888]

Team,

It's time to let the exchanges know it's time to add Nxt. Please do the following:


1. Visit the Google Doc for a list of exchanges and their respective email addresses

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuputZyRQ5-5dFY4RlBTdFJWWnhTRUp3SWdiMlBpb3c&usp=sharing#gid=0


2. Email each exchange

- Let them know why you think they should add Nxt (marketcap, features, community etc..)
- You could easily use the same email for each exchange


3. Record your results here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuputZyRQ5-5dFY4RlBTdFJWWnhTRUp3SWdiMlBpb3c&usp=sharing#gid=0


Don't wait for someone else to do the work, let's show the exchanges we're serious about Nxt.

done

[Come-from-Beyond]

did you get a chance to see Matt Green's video?

No, unfortunatelly, video is not for me. I hardly comprehend speech, only written text.

[jl777]

did you get a chance to see Matt Green's video?

No, unfortunatelly, video is not for me. I hardly comprehend speech, only written text.

I found summary transcript, I hope this is useful:

________________

* Bitcoin may not be particularly anonymous
* Zero-coin / Zero-cash to anonymize the bitcoin currency
* transactions recorded in public ledger; nothing sophisticated done with the ledger; people can identify and map your identity; if you're very paranoid you can prevent (maybe), but in general case hard to use bitcoin for privacy;
* this should matter to all of us; the technology behind bitcoin may be with us for a very long time; countermeasures are weak even in the face of unsophisticated attacks
* if we make bitcoin private, can possibly find applications beyond currency

* two approaches for anonymous version of bitcoin
* zerocoin - technique to implement electronic cash in bitcoin protocol
* zerocash - way to make zerocoin practical and deployable and usable as ecash currency

* zerocoin - join work with students and colleagues at John Hopkins (JH)
* bitcoin doesn't give us much privacy despite academic thinking from 1980s (esp. David Chong) to build untraceable ecash
* ecash tried to tackle one problem without thinking of all other practical concerns; nobody in the history of academic ecash managed to setup a working, centralized bank; chong's bank attempt failed
* bitcoin solved this problem of a currency take-off and early adoption; but we need a different technique to get rid of a centralized bank
* zerocoin new approach for ecash to get rid of centralized bank; basic idea is public ledger (constructed by bitcoin) blockchain; use this to wash bitcoins that does not require us to trust a centralized party; key ingredient (blockchain) is given by free by the bulletin board;
* zerocoin high-level intuition of original protocol: layer on top of bitcoin; i have some bitcoin; i want to break the link between my current address and a future address; take my bitcoin and turn into zerocoin; they get mixed up; all people making zerocoins will shuffle them together so no linkage with creation and redemption; at some future point, can redeem zerocoins into bitcoins ideally unrelated; breaks graph analysis; when disappearing into the zerocoin network minimizes/removes leakage;
* zerocoins are numbers; digital commitments to a large serial number; viewing the commitment, you should not be able to tell the serial number; once these commitments are minted (easy to create), you put them on the bitcoin blockchain; new instruction in the bitcoin system to produce a transaction that spends a bitcoin for a zerocoin; anybody that sees this transaction sees that this valid zerocoin is worth some money;
* at some point in the future, you redeem; you first reveal the secret serial number to make the first zerocoin and put into transaction; prove that the serial number corresponds to a zerocoin; then prove that the zerocoin is one of the set placed on the blockchain (which somebody paid money);
* zero-knowledge proof; prove statements without using any other information other than that the fact that the statement is true; "there exists some zerocoin in the set of zerocoins placed on the blockchain & the serial number we're revealing is the actual serial number in the coin";
* if the proof is valid, then double-spend is impossible since serial number would have to be revealed again;
* efficiency is important here! the approach used is the accumulator; collect all the zerocoins into the accumulator, then prove that the zerocoin you're trying to spend is contained in the accumulator; proof of knowledge is 4KB; the entire thing is 25KB after optimization; for crypto this is awesome!; but developers hated adding this much to the blockchain; so unlikely to happen in real world
* summary: zerocoin good first approach, libzerocoin; but the problem is that the proofs are just too big; and coins have all the same value; but this means that if you want to spend fractional amounts of bitcoin, then it won't work (have to translate back to bitcoin)
* new solution: zerocash
* presented in May and Bitcoin conference in San Jose; in both conferences with teams working on small zero knowledge proofs aka SNARKS; other cryptographers already had them ready;
* SNARK - Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge; Bryan Harno (MS Research); basic idea is that you can prove arbitrarily complex statements in 288 bytes; in addition to having these efficient proofs, there are compilers that have proofs that the program executed correctly; we should simply take existing libzerocoin code and run through the compiler to produce these proofs; but these compilers produce large circuits; the time to make a small proof takes hours or days;
* co-authors have spent a lot of time optimizing these proofs; the right way is NOT to take existing libzerocoin, but throw away RSA and other cryptographic techniques and replace with components that are easier to prove such as hash functions like SHA256 and Merkle trees; easy to prove hash with small circuits e.g. sha256 in 30K gates
* each coin is really the hash of some randomness and the serial number = commitment. once we have these coins we put in the hash tree; 64-depth key (2^64); when want to redeem; reveal the serial number, and can reveal 64-hashes before in the tree;
* if these proofs are powerful and efficient; why need bitcoin? why not put entire system into zerocoin and make everything anonymous through generation, use, redemption of coins? the only information that makes it into the blockchain is the fact that a transaction occurred. just show that two new coins where the value totals the bitcoin that you're splitting; when we merge we spend two coins we prove that the two = same value of the new coin; transfers can be done completely anonymously without knowing who and how much.
* can encrypt transactions and hash the values
* transaction fees have to be public, but everything else can be anonymous
* name for this process; generic transaction is called "pouring coins"
* is this efficient? one detail - the problem with zerocoin 1.0 was that the proofs were huge and took 0.33s; these results mixed; to merge/make takes 87s-108s on a single core; but on bright-side bitcoin takes up to an hour for each transaction; verification time is in ms; comparable to bitcoin; verification is in the network; the catch is that to verify the proofs you need a large set of public parameters; 1.2GB in size
* best part of this is that you already need 16GB to store the blockchain, so to add this is around 7% increase in storage
* somebody needs to generate these parameters; trusted party; possible to find a dozen people that people trust to set up the parameters;
* system that is efficient; will be separate system released in May; real-world crypto; want to get people to use;
* release an altchain; client that implements all these things; put it out there; hope that nobody puts a lot of money in this because these are new techniques and might break down; idea is to test this in an environment separate from bitcoin so we don't break anything else while trying to make this work
* should we even be doing this research? lots of people criticizing us. this is important research not just because people want to commit crimes, but because when you spend money your transactions are hidden from neighbours, but with bitcoin people can see your transactions; important to get it out there.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I found summary transcript, I hope this is useful...

Thank u, this is very useful.

[bitcoinpaul]

in other news, MULTIPLE folks over on NXTCrypto Forums are reporting that after brand new client install of 0.5.10 and downloading the blockchain from scratch that it is stopping at block 22000.

https://forums.nxtcrypto.org/viewtopic.php?style=1&f=15&t=693#p3255

one guy who speaks for multiple guys.

[jl777]

I found summary transcript, I hope this is useful...

Thank u, this is very useful.

you also have their C++ code?

https://github.com/Zerocoin/libzerocoin

[Come-from-Beyond]

you also have their C++ code?

https://github.com/Zerocoin/libzerocoin

Mom told me to study C++, but I preferred useless stuff like Asm, Basic and Pascal.