What is the right and fair way to stop Mike Hearn?

[NanoAkron]

I do want to thank Mike Hearn for coming into this thread and clarifying what, without context, sounds very troubling.  So, thanks, Mike.

But realize that supporting measures that break the fungibility of bitcoin (black/redlisting) have made you very untrustworthy to the bitcoin community.  Do you have any clarification of that for us?

And Mike, you do recognise that you've not answered ANY of our concerns regarding externally issued centralised tokens (e.g. passports) - governments running hashes, forgeability, duplication, centralisation, low ownership in MASSIVE parts of the world.

Don't hand wave that 'people can get them if they want', or 'they're just optional'.

Do you recognise that your solution is completely counter to the trustless distributed nature of bitcoin?

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[coinrevo]

In the talk it sounded like Mike is saying: me and Gavin are working on this stuff. ideologically fork becoming official? it should be more than obvious that consensus on this will be entirely negative. it would be helpful if stakeholders would clarify what they think, so that people can make decision whether they want to continue with this kind of development model (secrecy in the foundation, making friends with governments and big corporations). all of this looks like its going to blow up at some point. thought experiment: what would satoshi do? he hasn't cashed out a single dime of his ca. 1 billion US Dollars. that is what I would call integrity.

[erik777]

NanoAkron, nice summary!

[revans]

Reality bites for the Bitcoin cultists. Your brave new world is controlled by 2 CIA stooges (Hearn and Andresen)

[tvbcof]

In the talk it sounded like Mike is saying: me and Gavin are working on this stuff. ideologically fork becoming official? it should be more than obvious that consensus on this will be entirely negative. it would be helpful if stakeholders would clarify what they think, so that people can make decision whether they want to continue with this kind of development model (secrecy in the foundation, making friends with governments and big corporations).

I personally am backing up and keeping an eye on the exit door.  In straight monetary/business terms I put more into BTC than I'd initially intended and always planned to take it back as basic profit, but how, when, and why I do so is driven by this aspect of the project's evolution.

all of this looks like its going to blow up at some point. thought experiment: what would satoshi do? he hasn't cashed out a single dime of his ca. 1 billion US Dollars. that is what I would call integrity.

Mike has convinced me that Satoshi's expectations for the solution are not that far from his own and Gavin's.  It might be a mistake to elevate his memory to some sort of a biblical level, and even more so by the people who are most prone to doing it.

I'll add that it seem a bit non-credible to make a statement about Satoshi's financial statement down to the dime level when so little is otherwise known about him (or them.)  It does not make a lot of sense to assume that the only BTC he/they control are certain ones stored in the early blocks.  Speaking for myself, I tend to cash out value detailed in later blocks and keep the earlier ones in very deep storage.  (I broke up my savings into individual wallet files of a maximum size from the get go for security and distribution reasons.)

[acoindr]

After thinking this through I believe it's a very, very clever idea.

Let's recap the problem: we want to identify the "good guys" in our network but without centralized authority. This is especially useful for lightweight/SPV clients to trust a transaction has occurred before confirmations.

...

Allow me to make a slight correction which may or may not impact your thesis:  The idea is not to identify a 'good guy'.  It's more to identify a 'same guy'.

I don't follow. Do you mean 'same guy' for a Sybil attack, or same guy that identified his node? You do understand it's an anonymous proof in the latter case?

What pass themselves off as multiple separate nodes are actually controlled by the 'same guy.'  

That can be referred to as a Sybil attack... In an anonymous network it's possible to suffer Sybil attacks from more than one source at the same time, so no, you wouldn't know separate nodes were controlled by the 'same guy'.

You got started out on the wrong foot here by mis-stating the problem.  

No I didn't.

Your mistake was recoverable by arguing that 'good' meant simply that it was not a dummy/army node.

You can't positively know dummy or "good" nodes in an anonymous network. What you can do however is recognize data proof which is hard to fake which is "good" or helpful; which when seen over thousands of nodes can give confidence that control over those nodes is distributed to more than a few people.

[TruckStyling]

Reality bites for the Bitcoin cultists. Your brave new world is controlled by 2 CIA stooges (Hearn and Andresen)

This. Bitcoin is compromised by malicious core devs, who collude with intelligence corps.

We have to learn our lesson, from this bad development and act appropriate in other crypto-currencies projects.

[augustocroppo]

Do you recognise that your solution is completely counter to the trustless distributed nature of bitcoin?

 

Bro, take a break, chill out.

Mike's solutions in no way affect the "trustless distributed nature of bitcoin" because this is laughable nonsense.

There is no such thing as "trustless distributed nature of bitcoin".

Bitcoin is a software which allows users to form a P2P network where they register transactions in a distributed ledger. There is no "nature" being distributed. There is a ledger being distributed. No, it is not "trustless". Unconditional trust is still required to form the P2P network. Each client have to trust each other in order to work. Transmission of the unit of account (a.k.a. BTC or XBT) requires consent by the user signature (private-key). In other words, by using the Bitcoin software a person trust that a bunch of random people using the same software is going to validate his/her transaction.

[augustocroppo]

what would satoshi do?

He would likely point you to https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.

[BigJohn]

Great question! The talk was only 15 minutes (a lot of people were standing the whole time), so there is a bunch of detail that I glossed over.

The proof you present is proof you ran a program correctly. Thus the hash can be salted, memory hard or whatever you want to do. Now I think there is a legitimate issue here which is that the space of valid passports is not very large - even in the best case of 100% ownership it's O(size of country) so even if the hash is salted or whatever a government that wanted really badly to deanonymize its citizens who are running nodes could potentially brute force every single hash. This is especially an issue because a program that's being proved runs much slower than a normal program would. So there's some perhaps some more work to do here.

I'd love it if someone could expand on this a bit more.

If the proof that you present is that you ran a program correctly, then what proof does the verifier have that you ran the program on the "correct" input? (A passport in this case). Is there some standard input there? Meaning, does one version of the input (say a Chinese passport) equal to another (a German passport)?

Also, what if someone wanted to make Bitcoin-specific identification that would be compatible input for this program? Are we saying that only governments should be allowed to issue this input? What if in the future we discover a better solution than government-issued ID? Like say something Biometric-based that can be verifiably shown to give only one-key per person.

[tvbcof]

Your mistake was recoverable by arguing that 'good' meant simply that it was not a dummy/army node.

You can't positively know dummy or "good" nodes in an anonymous network. ...

As I mentioned, you don't really need to.  The problem is effectively one of getting a random sample and has been pointed out many times, there are a variety of ways to do this.

[coinrevo]

Mike has convinced me that Satoshi's expectations for the solution are not that far from his own and Gavin's.  It might be a mistake to elevate his memory to some sort of a biblical level, and even more so by the people who are most prone to doing it.

this has much less to do with the bible, but with impact on society. if you read the cryptoanarchist manifesto you get an idea what this means: http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html I think its more than fair to acknowledge what the original idea of bitcoin was, and how much some are moving away from it (destroying they idea). use of passports is such a complete anti-thesis to the work of cypherpunks, that anyone who doesn't get it, just has nothing to do with that body of work. if that means bitcoin is ideologically dead and becomes a tool of corporate and government power, so be it. then there will be something new to get rid of that corruption.

[tvbcof]

Mike has convinced me that Satoshi's expectations for the solution are not that far from his own and Gavin's.  It might be a mistake to elevate his memory to some sort of a biblical level, and even more so by the people who are most prone to doing it.

this has much less to do with the bible, but with impact on society. if you read the cryptoanarchist manifesto you get an idea what this means: http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html I think its more than fair to acknowledge what the original idea of bitcoin was, and how much some are moving away from it (destroying they idea). use of passports is such a complete anti-thesis to the work of cypherpunks, that anyone who doesn't get it, just has nothing to do with that body of work. if that means bitcoin is ideologically dead and becomes a tool of corporate and government power, so be it. then there will be something new to get rid of that corruption.

My point is that it might be a mistake to assume that 'Satoshi' had the same sentiments as your average hard-core cryptoanarchist.  (And I'm rarely shy about exposing my blasphemous ways...)

Going conspiratorial, it is worth note that a common gardening practice is to plant radishes.  The are tasty to pests and grow quickly so they are among the first thing that a pest attaches to.  They are also easy to pull up and throw into the composts.

I don't believe that Bitcoin was some grand conspiracy to round up the cryptoanachist malcontents and along with drug dealers and the like...but it's a fun thought experiment...

My best guess is that the primary developer(s) known as 'Satoshi' had some very good ideas associated generally with balance of powers, freedom of expression, etc, but this does NOT in and of itself make them 'cryptoanarchists'.  Other generally clever and clued in people from various political stripes and walks of life joined in this effort and it was successful.  There are room for a lot of view about how best to leverage this success.  Mike's (apparent) view about having it work on conjunction with certain state powers is not, in my opinion, invalid.  I consider it dangerous because I see Bitcoin's real promise as being a potential utility to empower non-corp/state actors, but that's a personal opinion.  It is possible that Bitcoin would induce better behavior at the corp/state level BY interacting with it.  I personally think it is to risky a gamble.

[acoindr]

Maybe I'm missing something, but what's preventing a government from running the hash function on all the passports and de-anonymizing all the hashes? They own the passports database after all.

Great question! The talk was only 15 minutes (a lot of people were standing the whole time), so there is a bunch of detail that I glossed over.

The proof you present is proof you ran a program correctly. Thus the hash can be salted, memory hard or whatever you want to do. Now I think there is a legitimate issue here which is that the space of valid passports is not very large - even in the best case of 100% ownership it's O(size of country) so even if the hash is salted or whatever a government that wanted really badly to deanonymize its citizens who are running nodes could potentially brute force every single hash. This is especially an issue because a program that's being proved runs much slower than a normal program would. So there's some perhaps some more work to do here.

Of course it is not any different to the situation we have today where a government can just find every IP in their country that's running a node and go look the owners up via telcos. Even if you assume all nodes run via Tor it's not clear you can stop a government de-anonymizing you, because of things like traffic flooding attacks. And frankly the Bitcoin P2P network is quite latency sensitive, new blocks need to be flooded as fast as possible to minimize miner losses to orphan blocks, so it's unclear to me that the entire Bitcoin network will ever run behind Tor 100%. I certainly wouldn't predict it as a no-brainer future.

In short, whilst a dedicated government might be able to reverse the hash somehow, they already have other options that are unlikely to go away, and the hash does stop everyone else from learning who you are which is still pretty useful (indeed, a basic requirement).

For the sake of completeness I'd point out users wishing to remain anonymous could run their normal use wallet behind Tor with a node to help the network on a hosted server, paid anonymously with BTC, outside their country if needed. So it's possible to evade govt. detection. I do think the passport proof can be useful in many cases, though. We always prefer more not less options.

[coinrevo]

Mike's (apparent) view about having it work on conjunction with certain state powers is not, in my opinion, invalid.

Luckily, its not Mike or Gavin who gets to decide. This kind of thinking has to be thoroughly rejected, on a matter of principle. Even if you for one second assume that there should be "work on conjunction with state powers" what state? Whatever satoshi himself might have believed, I would very much doubt cooperating with government is one of them. why otherwise spend many years working on something that fundamentally subverts government?

[coinrevo]

For the sake of completeness I'd point out users wishing to remain anonymous could run their normal use wallet behind Tor with a node to help the network on a hosted server, paid anonymously with BTC, outside their country if needed. So it's possible to evade govt. detection. I do think the passport proof can be useful in many cases, though. We always prefer more not less options.

Here is a scenario. In a small country with a brutal dictator inflation is rampant. People switch to cryptocurrencies to avoid confiscation of their wealth. As they don't know any better they use government ID's in conjunction with the system. Some day the mechanism is compromised and the government obtains all records of people using bitcoin in the country. the people are arrested and thrown into jail.

better to think more about what the consequences of actions are. would bitcoin developers compromise security in poor nations to get some added benefits in rich nations? the world is a pretty big place.

[augustocroppo]

Here is a scenario. In a small country with a brutal dictator inflation is rampant. People switch to cryptocurrencies to avoid confiscation of their wealth. As they don't know any better they use government ID's in conjunction with the system. Some day the mechanism is compromised and the government obtains all records of people using bitcoin in the country. the people are arrested and thrown into jail.

better to think more about what the consequences of actions are. would bitcoin developers compromise security in poor nations to get some added benefits in rich nations? the world is a pretty big place.

 

Bro, no one cares about your role playing game scenarios. We are not playing Shadowrun here, we are discussing technical solutions for a security issue in the Bitcoin P2P network.

[qwk]

Here is a scenario. In a small country with a brutal dictator inflation is rampant. People switch to cryptocurrencies to avoid confiscation of their wealth. As they don't know any better they use government ID's in conjunction with the system. Some day the mechanism is compromised and the government obtains all records of people using bitcoin in the country. the people are arrested and thrown into jail.

better to think more about what the consequences of actions are. would bitcoin developers compromise security in poor nations to get some added benefits in rich nations? the world is a pretty big place.

Bro, no one cares about your role playing game scenarios. We are not playing Shadowrun here, we are discussing technical solutions for a security issue in the Bitcoin P2P network.

This.

+ it's not the users being affected, but people running a service for those users (see bolded part).
I doubt that under the given circumstances in the outlined scenario, there'd be any. People would offer those services from outside.

[colour]

 

Bro, no one cares about your role playing game scenarios. We are not playing Shadowrun here, we are discussing technical solutions for a security issue in the Bitcoin P2P network.

 

Bro, take a break, chill out.

Mike's solutions in no way affect the "trustless distributed nature of bitcoin" because this is laughable nonsense.

There is no such thing as "trustless distributed nature of bitcoin".

[Carlton Banks]

I think there's a big misunderstanding with all of this.

What's happened here is that Mike's used a typical Mike Hearn example of one specific thing you can do with these tools. It's not the only use, though. Keep that in mind. If he was suggesting some appalling blanket bitcoin ID system, I'd be upset too, but that's not what's happened.

Sometimes ID'ing yourself is kind of useful, but systematic ID schemes can be used against you. But if ID was inherently an immoral thing, we'd all be walking around in masks, disguising our voices, never wearing the same clothes, refusing to use any name, attempting to disguise our gait or the shadow we cast etc. Being identifiable is a two way street.

So choose your ID methods wisely, few people would dispute that. I would suggest that the bitcoin ID scheme is the best one I've heard of. After all, you can choose to use 1 ID, or more than 1, or none, in whatever situation. If someone forces you into any of these options, that's between you and them. The system itself allows any option, and forces nothing.


And as I'm alluding to, just because someone's suggesting you use a bitcoin ID to sign your electronic passport data with, that doesn't mean that's the best way of identifying yourself. Think of all these BitCloud ideas currently being touted. If you had a reliable, uncensorable online storage facility with other documentary evidence to prove who you are, why not sign that with your bitcoin ID to use? The bitcoin ID itself is as non-personal as bitcoin receiving address is right now, it's what you associate with it by signing that data with it that creates the actual identification. That's a powerful thing, becasue we're in charge of how we structure the whole thing.

We can create real passports, that are actually more valid than a government produced effort. I don't know why anyone would trust government passports anyway, it proves that either it's real, or that you had the money and means to get a fake. Not really much use as an ID in the 21st century anyway.