Stealth address with SX (anonymous payments)

[waxwing]

My thoughts on my why stealth addresses should be called stealth addresses:
<snipped>

Yes, I've just been reading and thinking about this. It is closely related to what I was just discussing with fellowtraveler; are we going to try to hide the fact that Bitcoin can be relatively anonymous? I know the core idea here is just to give some privacy in a certain context, but especially when combined with coinjoin and other techs, what we're doing here is really exploring how close we can get to proper anonymity. I find it really disingenuous when I hear a certain brand of Bitcoin advocate constantly parrot the line "oh, it's nowhere near as anonymous as cash, it's traceable, the blockchain is completely public". This line was trotted out by everyone at the Senate hearings too. To me it's some kind of wishful thinking going on here by many in the bitcoin community (including core devs) that don't wan't to pay attention to the inevitable political consequences of what they're doing. "It's neutral, it's just tech, it's not a challenge to the status quo". This is head-in-the-sand stuff.

I'm sorry if that seems like a bit of a tangent to your point. But I don't think it is. I think the whole reason people leapt into the naming debate is because they're determined not to paint Bitcoin as what it actually is - money independent of external control.

By the way, thanks for your work on this.

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[spooderman]

subscribing

[genjix]

[johnyj]

Cool 

If I understand it correct, the sender must know the stealth address from the receiver and the receiver must know the nonce from the sender, so information need to be exchanged both way, comparing with the standard way of only providing a receiving address?

[oakpacific]

Cool 

If I understand it correct, the sender must know the stealth address from the receiver and the receiver must know the nonce from the sender, so information need to be exchanged both way, comparing with the standard way of only providing a receiving address?

Yes

[asherp]

Cool 

If I understand it correct, the sender must know the stealth address from the receiver and the receiver must know the nonce from the sender, so information need to be exchanged both way, comparing with the standard way of only providing a receiving address?

This creates a strong use-case for Twister adoption: Put your stealth address in your twister profile. When you send a payment, send a direct message with the nonce to the receiver. DM's are encrypted in twister. Take it a step further: bake this feature into every bitcoin-twister client so the user never even sees their stealth address. Then, all bitcoin payments reduce to "1.5mB @bob". It takes all the centralization out of the current tipping schemes and makes them forward-anonymous by default.

[genjix]

Cool  

If I understand it correct, the sender must know the stealth address from the receiver and the receiver must know the nonce from the sender, so information need to be exchanged both way, comparing with the standard way of only providing a receiving address?

This creates a strong use-case for Twister adoption: Put your stealth address in your twister profile. When you send a payment, send a direct message with the nonce to the receiver. DM's are encrypted in twister. Take it a step further: bake this feature into every bitcoin-twister client so the user never even sees their stealth address. Then, all bitcoin payments reduce to "1.5mB @bob". It takes all the centralization out of the current tipping schemes and makes them forward-anonymous by default.

ssshhhh you're giving away my secrets

[ssshhh]

Cool  

If I understand it correct, the sender must know the stealth address from the receiver and the receiver must know the nonce from the sender, so information need to be exchanged both way, comparing with the standard way of only providing a receiving address?

This creates a strong use-case for Twister adoption: Put your stealth address in your twister profile. When you send a payment, send a direct message with the nonce to the receiver. DM's are encrypted in twister. Take it a step further: bake this feature into every bitcoin-twister client so the user never even sees their stealth address. Then, all bitcoin payments reduce to "1.5mB @bob". It takes all the centralization out of the current tipping schemes and makes them forward-anonymous by default.

ssshhhh you're giving away my secrets

I said nothing 

[minimalB]

I said nothing 

LOL 

BTW: Thanks so much for this development, it really is GREAT!

[JoeChmoe]

This is a huge development, gotta love the community.

[asherp]

Cool  

If I understand it correct, the sender must know the stealth address from the receiver and the receiver must know the nonce from the sender, so information need to be exchanged both way, comparing with the standard way of only providing a receiving address?

This creates a strong use-case for Twister adoption: Put your stealth address in your twister profile. When you send a payment, send a direct message with the nonce to the receiver. DM's are encrypted in twister. Take it a step further: bake this feature into every bitcoin-twister client so the user never even sees their stealth address. Then, all bitcoin payments reduce to "1.5mB @bob". It takes all the centralization out of the current tipping schemes and makes them forward-anonymous by default.

ssshhhh you're giving away my secrets

Sorry. I just can't help myself. Haven't even been sleeping since my mind exploded over this. What I just realized is that your client could by default display your balance in your local currency based on geolocation data. This means users wouldn't even know they're using bitcoin!

Alice: +$5.00 @bob
Bob sees his account balance is now 66.35 pesos
Carol: Hey @Alice, @Bob have you heard of bitcoin?
Bob and Alice: wtf is bitcoin?
Carol: it's what made your transaction possible!
Bob: yeah.. And?
Alice: @Carol stop being a smartass

[AsymmetricInformation]

In a separate post I describe thoughts on how stealth addresses can be used to prevent third parties from learning BOTH the recipient address and the payment amount.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=419097.0

[alp]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

[asherp]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

The way things are going with twister integration, it won't even matter whether we call them "stealth" addresses at all, because the average user won't even know they exist! When they make a payment it'll be to an identity - a person - not to some incomprehensible string of numbers. From that perspective, call them whatever you want.

[Peter Todd]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

The way things are going with twister integration, it won't even matter whether we call them "stealth" addresses at all, because the average user won't even know they exist! When they make a payment it'll be to an identity - a person - not to some incomprehensible string of numbers. From that perspective, call them whatever you want.

Exactly. Addresses in general are going to be replaced by various payment protocols and identification systems. I think a good analogy is DNS: the vast majority of the time you type a DNS name into your URL bar in your browser. Behind the scenes that gets resolved to an IP address, and the fact that you can type an IP address instead of a DNS name is only possible because sometimes advanced users and developers need to debug things at a lower-level than you normally would use. Just like 95% of users have probably never heard the term "IPv4 address" in the future 95% of users will have never heard the term "stealth address"

As for now, we've got a lot of great press using the term, and changing the name now for vague reasons of "acceptability" will just confuse people when we start rolling out stealth address support in wallets for the early adopters to use.

Anyway, enough with this silly bike-shedding; lets get some work done.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Anyway, enough with this silly bike-shedding; lets get some work done.

I think I just got a glimpse of lead dev in waiting ....

[alp]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

The way things are going with twister integration, it won't even matter whether we call them "stealth" addresses at all, because the average user won't even know they exist! When they make a payment it'll be to an identity - a person - not to some incomprehensible string of numbers. From that perspective, call them whatever you want.

Exactly. Addresses in general are going to be replaced by various payment protocols and identification systems. I think a good analogy is DNS: the vast majority of the time you type a DNS name into your URL bar in your browser. Behind the scenes that gets resolved to an IP address, and the fact that you can type an IP address instead of a DNS name is only possible because sometimes advanced users and developers need to debug things at a lower-level than you normally would use. Just like 95% of users have probably never heard the term "IPv4 address" in the future 95% of users will have never heard the term "stealth address"

As for now, we've got a lot of great press using the term, and changing the name now for vague reasons of "acceptability" will just confuse people when we start rolling out stealth address support in wallets for the early adopters to use.

Anyway, enough with this silly bike-shedding; lets get some work done.

I'm not pleased with any of the alternative names either, and as long as it is transparent to the user, all is well with me!

There still needs to be a name, though, even if it is the default.  Users do know of "web address" to visit their webpage even if they don't know the magic of how it works underneath.  Even something as bland as Payment Identifier could work for this purpose.  Stealth address would be one specific type of such an identifier that could be used for more technical people who want to understand the guts.

Look at how much damage has to be undone because of a poorly named "Bitcoin Address".  Names are far more than bikeshedding and can lead people to make very incorrect assumptions and lead people astray.  My concern is mostly about mainstreaming the Stealth Address feature while not putting it in some pigeonhole of "oooh scary advanced secret stuff only bad people use".  People that care about privacy are not going to be the target here.  It's the people who say "so what" to the privacy claim.  Stealth buys them nothing.  But make it work without them knowing and you could call it ice cream dump truck and it's just as good.

[oakpacific]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

No, everyone cares about privacy, at least to a certain degree. Or maybe you could find me someone who would love to show me his bank transaction history.

[alp]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

No, everyone cares about privacy, at least to a certain degree. Or maybe you could find me someone who would love to show me his bank transaction history.

If this were the case, Edward Snowden wouldn't be hiding in Russia, no one would be using Facebook, and Tor would be standard.  For the vast majority, privacy is simply not valued by most people when it comes down to actually put in any effort.  The Bitcoin community in general is going to have a selection bias towards those who care more than the average person.

[oakpacific]

My concern with the name Stealth Address is that it will end up being a niche feature that most people will not use.  Peter's "Ohh, privacy is good!" argument makes sense among his peers, but will fall flat on most common users.  Most people "Have nothing to hide" and aren't threatened by privacy, even with all the leaks and damage done.  This should be viewed as a standard and non-scary option, and not something for criminals and troublemakers only.  Stealth has those connotations, and I have a feeling it will become put in a corner.  I think he is also a bit biased in that the super-plugged-in people (aka meetup attendees) have heard of this term and it's too late to change it.  I disagree that it's really that well known, even within the Bitcoin community.

Names seem to fall out of describing how something is used or describing what it does.  We should also focus describing traditional addresses as well, to see if there might be a way to relabel them.

No, everyone cares about privacy, at least to a certain degree. Or maybe you could find me someone who would love to show me his bank transaction history.

If this were the case, Edward Snowden wouldn't be hiding in Russia, no one would be using Facebook, and Tor would be standard.  For the vast majority, privacy is simply not valued by most people when it comes down to actually put in any effort.  The Bitcoin community in general is going to have a selection bias towards those who care more than the average person.

Privacy is valued, when people appear to not care about it the threat is usually not tangible, as in your Snowden, FB and Tor case. When your bank/credit card history is out, or you are caught masturbating you will immediately feel how important it really is. Same happens when your friend/wife just saw your bitcoin transaction to a stripper on blockchain.info.

Also the incognito mode seems so important that every browser maker feels the need to put it in.