Mike Hearn, London 2014 [video presentation]

[pollen_bit]

London, Tuesday, 21st January at Club Workspace, Clerkenwell.  Coinscrum host an informal evening with presentations from Circle’s CEO, Jeremy Allaire, and CTO, Sean Neville. Also core Bitcoin developer, Mike Hearn, will be joining Jeremy and Sean and will also be taking to the stage.

http://www.iamsatoshi.com/coinscrum-networking-evening-circle-london/

BobAlison (summary):

What's ahead for Bitcoin? Here are some highlights from the video:

    HD Wallets, used by Trezor and others
    Time to scrap addresses. They are too limited and problematic.
    The Payment Protocol to replace addresses. Supports refunds, memos, receipts, proof-of-purchase, and digital signature.
    Minimum fee will float. Payment Protocol to allow receiver to pay fee.
    TOR by default (ambitious goal). Encryption for free and other advantages.
    WiFi hacking countermeasures. How do you know you're connected to the real network and not a spoof? Localbitcoins seller can trick you into connecting to his/her own wifi network at a cafe and cheating you.
    TOR disadvantages. Tor hides node IP addresses. How do you know you haven't connected to 10 different nodes that area actually all the same computer?
    Proof of Sacrifice. Node burns coins to make it costly to spoof the network.
    Proof of Passport. Goal is to make network spoofing harder. Goverment-issued passports contain an NFC chip. Data digitally signed by governments and can be read with standard hardware. Didn't understand the rest.

[dewdeded]

"Proof of Passport" WTF WTF WTF
He can't be serious.

[simondlr]

"Proof of Passport" WTF WTF WTF
He can't be serious.

Before people go on another witch hunt.

It's a zero-knowledge proof. Doesn't reveal anything.

In order to run honest nodes, you either needs to make it expensive (and slightly prohibitive), ie proof-of-sacrifice, or cheap (using other forms of identification that is expensive to forge), ie proof-of-passport. With zk-snarks, you can prove you own a passport, but reveal nothing. This isn't the best way, due to possible government intervention, but it is a practical, cheap, anonymous alternative.

There could be other ways to establish identity, OR to establish honest nodes.

[dewdeded]

Come on, there is zero problems with dishonest nodes. Sybil attacks are very hard to pull off and there are other easy ways to compete against it. (e.g. just using the hard coded seed nodes or downloaded lists of trusted nodes on insecure network connections)

Maybe now "Proof of passport" is zero-knowledge proof. But who gonna guarantees it stays this way. Nobody! As it will be be changed for sure sooner or later.

This is BS. This would have no chance if Satoshi would be still here. It's a big disgrace to his invention.


If Mike Hearn stays Bitcoin coder, we will get a Paypal-version of bitcoin for sure.

First: he pushes for blacklisting
Second: he pushes for SSL and extern CAs
Third: he pushes for everybody to proof of identity by showing their passport

I have no imagine what fourth or fifth will be.

This is ill.

[franky1]

proof of passport is anonymous to individuals as the serial numbers are not names/addresses and individuals do not have access to the government databases. but governments can use their database to identify people.

this is also going to make bitcoin harder to use for individuals. imagine it this way. would you sign up to pay pal if they asked you to not just make a username and password, but to also input your passport numbers.

i know my parents and a few other relatives don't have passports. so even if they wanted to sign up to a payment gateway, they cant because it asks for info they do not have.

and also, who verifies that the passport is valid.... this would involve a government agency controlling user accounts.. by them veryifying passports to allow or disallow people from having bitcoin accounts.

mike hearn and luke jr are not good people when it comes to anonymity and ease of use for the individual.

[Mr. Gabu]

I have a database dump here with 200.000 complete german data records of real people (name, address, date of birth, place of birth, ....) with correct passport number and issuer office.
I will instant release this anywhere, if this proof of identity becomes part for Bitcoin.

[simondlr]

You guys CLEARLY didn't even watch the video. So quick to jump to conclusions. Typical.

It's not required. AT ALL.

If you have an SPV client (ie Android Wallet, or MultiBit), it has to trust the nodes they are connected to (for 0-conf transactions). If you have an Android wallet, there are usually 2 ways to improve this: increasing trust-less interactions (although I'm not sure how) for SPV clients, OR improve the trusted-ness of the SPV clients you are connecting to. As Mike states, spoofing this isn't difficult. To make sure spoofing is decreased you have submit a proof that's expensive or hard to forge. A passport is only 1 such implementation. Thanks to wonderfully complicated maths of zk-snarks, it is ANONYMOUS. And you don't HAVE to use this method, then you'll just have to be content to possibly be defrauded OR you just have to more precautions to make sure you are connected to 'right' Bitcoin network: waiting for confirmations, and shuffling networks (wifi, 3g)/nodes. It's up to you.

Educate yourself, please. You also seem to miss Mike's Tor proposal. Or his proposal on merge avoidance, both INCREASING privacy.

P.S. If I'm wrong on the technical implementations, please correct me, that's how I understand it.

[MPOE-PR]

Hearn is a run down government whore. Nobody cares what he has to say on any topic. No project associated with him will ever get anywhere.

End of story, really.

[gendal]

Hi everybody,

I was at the event at which Mike spoke and the proposal seemed pretty clear to me.  Here's my recollection of how he laid it out.

1) We need to improve protection against certain classes of Sybil attacks.  That is: we need to make it harder for one "actor" (person, entity, whatever) to masquerade as multiple "actors".   e.g. if I am connecting to eight peers, I'd like some reassurance that they are controlled by different people and not actually the same person pretending to be eight different people

2) There are some interesting ways of achieving this.

3) One way is "proof of sacrifice":  you could devise a scheme whereby creation of a unique "node identity" (my loose term - Mike didn't use this phrase) requires visible destruction of some small number of satoshis.  This is easy for you to do if you only want to present one such identity to the world but very expensive if you wanted to create 10,000 different identities.  So.... if you had this system, a client could make sure to connect to nodes with different identities and they could be more sure that they were controlled by different actors.  Not perfect but it would probably be OK.   Big problem though:  nobody wants to throw away their money!

4) So is there another way?

5) Mike's insight:  why don't we ask ourselves this question:  "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of?"   I guess some answers might be a house or a car or something like that... but Mike added the additional condition: "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of and *which they can prove they have over the internet*?"

6) He then pointed out that the spec of most modern passports calls for them to have an embedded chip and for the chip to have the option of including a private key that can be used to sign arbitrary challenge messages.

7) A ha!  So we already have a widely-deployed infrastructure that maps (roughly - not perfectly) one person to one private key.

8 ) So.....   you could come up with a crypto scheme that allowed you to create a node identity that everybody could see could only have been created by the holder of a passport... and which would be different for each person.... but it would not reveal anything about the person or their passport... just that the controller of that node *has* a passport.

9) Unfortunately, most passports don't implement the signing function so it looked like the idea was dead in the water

10) However, a paper presented at the May BTC conference showed that it may be possible to work around this problem and still achieve the same ends (the details are complicated and I didn't understand them).

Bottom line:  this part of the talk was all about a really interesting approach to preventing a particular type of sybil attack.   

[gendal]

To be clear... when I talk about node identities and the like, I'm not talking about real-world identities of individuals... just some random token associated with a node that is the same for all nodes controlled by the same actor and different for nodes controlled by different actors.

[Qoheleth]

It's funny. Five years later, and we're back to the ancient issue of Sybil resistance. Nakamoto managed to solve that for "voting on the history" applications, but now the gossip network itself is at risk.

Isn't that odd? Proof of work works. Is it really that difficult to say something like, okay, if you can hit a target that's some preset fraction of the network difficulty, you get to play? Or is there some other issue there, that would prevent that approach from working?

I watched the whole video and he did say it was required. So I doubt you watched the video. Also it is anonymous not one is saying different, we are just saying why do we need government ids to use our nodes. He didn't say at all that you will be content to be defrauded, he is saying use it or don't use bitcoinj or bitcoin-qt. You clearly need to use your listening skills much more, he used that as example he never said you can use one or the other.

So the thing about these proposals is that they're all about the gossip network, not the blockchain. And the thing about the gossip network is that mediators and intermediaries are easy to create. A Bitcoin gossip network that only allows people with passports to be a full node is worrisome to me too. But - and this is key - all it takes is one authenticated network user who then allows non-passported connections for anyone to avoid this. And there will be plenty of people (you are one example!) who will be unable/unwilling to create a passport proof, so that gossip network will have plenty of peers and we can continue as before.

His tor proposal was to stick in tor in his bitcoinj, guess what I already use tor in the way he describes so he is just making it easier for people that probably have no clue what tor is or how it protects you on the bitcoin network/internet.

Good. Anything that can increase the default anonymity of the system is a win anyway, as far as I'm concerned. If these people don't even know what is a "Tor", they'd never have used it, and the whole network suffers from the leak of their information. Tor by default is herd immunity. Not revolutionary, but a good idea.

[prof7bit]

very expensive if you wanted to create 10,000 different identities

The problem is you need only 4 and not 10000 because Android Wallet and MultiBit connect to only 4 nodes. Someone who wants (and is technically skilled enough) to rip of people with fake nodes during large zero confirmation cash transactions (what a stupid example anyways, who on earth is doing large cash-for-bitcoin transactions with zero confirmation anyways?) can easily have 3 (or 7 or 11) friends in his gang with (anonymous!) passports to help him.

This idea is so ridiculous.

And on top of that the most dangerous and most likely enemy, the government itself, can easily fake 100,000s of passports.

Proof of work is done by miners, the problem does not exist in the frst place, thats why global consensus is established by the miners, thats what confirmations are meant for.

[waxwing]

5) Mike's insight:  why don't we ask ourselves this question:  "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of?"   I guess some answers might be a house or a car or something like that... but Mike added the additional condition: "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of and *which they can prove they have over the internet*?"

To be fair to those of us on the more sceptical side (but who remain civil), this is not really a matter of insight. It's not as if no one else who is thinking about identity management understands that governments have pre-existing databases (although Mike's investigation into NFC obviously raises the value of his argument). It's that we consider it a really bad fit with decentralized cryptocurrency. What some people are afraid of, rightly or wrongly, is that the use of such an identify would become de facto if not de jure required.

[prof7bit]

just some random token associated with a node that is the same for all nodes controlled by the same actor and different for nodes controlled by different actors.

This is not possible. Its not even possible to **define** this problem because you cannot come up with a definition for "actor" or "controlled". And its not needed anyways because Satoshi invented the block chain.

[gendal]

5) Mike's insight:  why don't we ask ourselves this question:  "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of?"   I guess some answers might be a house or a car or something like that... but Mike added the additional condition: "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of and *which they can prove they have over the internet*?"

To be fair to those of us on the more sceptical side (but who remain civil), this is not really a matter of insight.

Sorry - not my intent to imply a lack of insight elsewhere!

And I'm acutely aware that my write-up is based on two-day-old recollections so apologies for the sketchiness of some of it.

[waxwing]

just some random token associated with a node that is the same for all nodes controlled by the same actor and different for nodes controlled by different actors.

This is not possible. Its not even possible to **define** this problem because you cannot come up with a definition for "actor" or "controlled". And its not needed anyways because Satoshi invented the block chain.

I have to agree. It might look, superficially, as if such a system should work, but I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.

[waxwing]

5) Mike's insight:  why don't we ask ourselves this question:  "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of?"   I guess some answers might be a house or a car or something like that... but Mike added the additional condition: "what do most people have one of and would find exceedingly difficult to have 10,000 of and *which they can prove they have over the internet*?"

To be fair to those of us on the more sceptical side (but who remain civil), this is not really a matter of insight.

Sorry - not my intent to imply a lack of insight elsewhere!

It's not about attribution of an idea, I'm not worried about that (nor is anyone else, I'm sure), it's about whether the idea has merit. Trusting government issued identities is potentially very dangerous (because of both counterfeiting - the technical concern, and corruption - the political concern).

[Apocalyptic]

And on top of that the most dangerous and most likely enemy, the government itself, can easily fake 100,000s of passports.

Exactly.

And if bad nodes actually become a problem, you can simply... force-add a few people you trust (and no, it won't split the network).

Yeah, that's the right way to protect from a Sybil attack.

[porcupine87]

Sybil attack:
Can somebody explain me, how a person can go into a cafe and connects to a not trusted WIFI, buys the bitcoin and leaves without one confirmation? Do people nowerdays not have internet access without WIFI everywhere (except maybe, when you are in a foreign country. There you pay a few cents for one MB)?

I don't really know, if this scenario is realistic.

Anyhow, if someone what's to prroof with his passport, that he is a trusted node, where is the problem? This is not required...

[dewdeded]

Sybil attack:
Can somebody explain me, how a person can go into a cafe and connects to a not trusted WIFI, buys the bitcoin and leaves without one confirmation? Do people nowerdays not have internet access without WIFI everywhere (except maybe, when you are in a foreign country. There you pay a few cents for one MB)?

I don't really know, if this scenario is realistic.

It's unrealistic and stupid, it's made up just for pushing this anti-privacy technique.

Anyhow, if someone what's to prroof with his passport, that he is a trusted node, where is the problem? This is not required...

The problem is Mike Hearns mindset. How can he think about such stuff, given the history and origins of bitcoin and that the vast majority of the community doesn't want that.