Edward Snowden Final Warning for Bitcoin

[dkbit98]

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1786170805728039127

Edwards Snowden just made a tweet with final warning for everyone that privacy for Bitcoin is needed on protocol level.
I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.
Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this  
The clock is ticking...

[ABCbits]

Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this 

It wouldn't be surprising. Aside from potentially hindering Bitcoin adaption, privacy feature usually leads to higher TX size or longer verification time. In addition, gmaxwell propose Confidental Transaction back on 2015[1], but it was never added into Bitcoin protocol and added into Monero protocol (as part of RingCT) on 2017.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.0

[Catenaccio]

Edwards Snowden just made a tweet with final warning for everyone that privacy for Bitcoin is needed on protocol level.
I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.
Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this  
The clock is ticking...

Is privacy good for Bitcoin?

I am skeptical that Bitcoin only give us completely control of our bitcoins but with privacy, only pseudoprivacy, not completely privacy. If turning to complete privacy can cause more anti Bitcoin regulations, I will not want it to happen.

If people want superb privacy, they can go with Monero.

[Davidvictorson]

Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this  
The clock is ticking...

What is Jameson implying by that statement. Does he mean that Bitcoin developers don't see eye to eye on this?

[CODE200]

What is Jameson implying by that statement. Does he mean that Bitcoin developers don't see eye to eye on this?

Most likely reason because if they've been seeing eye to eye, this would've been done a long time ago right? I'm not a programmer but I think that with the slew of developers that are updating bitcoin, this would've been done a long time ago right? I don't get the part where this isn't implemented yet though, privacy is what bitcoin advocates right? Then how come they're not yet putting this in yet? What's holding them up besides the speculation that devs aren't seeing eye to eye on this thing.

[mk4]

Edwards Snowden just made a tweet with final warning for everyone that privacy for Bitcoin is needed on protocol level.
I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.

I'm definitely not skilled enough to be called a 'developer', but I think you're just totally underestimating how difficult it is to achieve this without potentially fucking up the entire protocol. Bitcoin is already gigantic enough that we can't afford to move fast and try to just push upgrades under the sun.

Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this  
The clock is ticking...

What is Jameson implying by that statement. Does he mean that Bitcoin developers don't see eye to eye on this?

He's implying that things look far more difficult and complicated than most people think.

[AprilioMP]

Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this 

It wouldn't be surprising. Aside from potentially hindering Bitcoin adaption, privacy feature usually leads to higher TX size or longer verification time. In addition, gmaxwell propose Confidental Transaction back on 2015[1], but it was never added into Bitcoin protocol and added into Monero protocol (as part of RingCT) on 2017.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.0

Is it possible some commented that Monerro is better than Bitcoin in the context in question?

I will save the topic of Confidential Transactions, Content privacy for Bitcoin transactions that are posted by gmaxwell for me to read because the contents of the topic are very long and need a quiet atmosphere for me to try to absorb slowly in the learning process of more technical things.

In the topic of confidential transactions, he mentioned Borromean Ringsig. Really, it is very important for me to learn.

[franky1]

bitcoin is a public ledger on purpose so the network can audit that the value transfer is real to avoid new/fake/unruled currency unit injection and avoid double spending and other financial security failures which can happen in other systems of lax financial security

tricks like gmax/a.backs' CT are not true privacy of the users involved. but just appearance of randomising the amounts within the group of who received what within a small set group, and done in a bloated wasteful data way, thus not really achieving anything, because child transactions upon leaving the set group later reveal how the amounts are then distributed.. it only works if the group stay together and keep spending within the group.. for outsiders to not know who received what(research 'federated transactions'/multisig groups). as soon as they leave the group to take their shares it then undoes all the effort and outsiders then see who took what.
in short it only hides the spend amount of that moment not the end net result of who gets what when they go their own way outside the spending event

the funny part is you dont need anything complicated at protocol level to achieve CT, it can be done at a groups own wallet level of agreeing to use a agreed signing process. without needing all the added bloat

hence why CT didnt go far
bitcoin already doesnt request human identifiers to move value.. and if we start messing with the auditability of the value itself where its no longer easy to see value being spent did originate from a real blockreward. or which address authorised value transfer it owned.. it then breaks financial security, thus breaking the purpose of bitcoin as a whole.
id rather have sound money, not mumbled deaf money

[summonerrk]

Bitcoin does not have to be completely anonymous. I know that solutions have been proposed before, but I think the anonymity of Bitcoin is enough. If someone wants to hide, they can use mixers and Monero. But I believe that all anonymous tokens will be banned by the authorities.
I understand that anonymity is one of the rules of cryptocurrencies, but personally I do not use Monero and I think that I have no reason to hide, because I do not do anything forbidden. And if Bitcoin also becomes anonymous, then there is a chance that regulators will make even more problems for Bitcoin.
It is also likely that the situation with the already busy Bitcoin network will become even worse than it used to be in the days of Ordinals.

[pooya87]

privacy at protocol level

That is simply impossible because Bitcoin was not designed that way. If we add privacy features into the existing protocol (eg. though some weird soft fork) that won't fix anything because opt-in privacy is not improving the whole system.

The alternative is a hard fork that fundamentally changes a lot of things about the Bitcoin protocol. Why break what is already working fine and risk the whole system crumbling down? Most importantly why do it when something like Monero already exists?

A better solution is to work on privacy improving techniques that are more decentralized and get people to use them more. But solutions that are built on top of Bitcoin (like decentralized CoinJoin). It would still be opt-in and won't improve the whole system but at the same time it won't require any kind of fork and change in the protocol that could break things.

[davis196]

Turning Bitcoin into a privacy coin would lead to a mass government ban of BTC around the world.
The BTC price would most likely go back to the levels before 2015. I'm sure that 90% of the Bitcoin investors don't want this to happen.
They prefer big profits over privacy. I kinda understand them. Bitcoin being a speculative financial asset with a potential future price of 100K USD(or even more) is way more exciting than BTC being a privacy coin used only by shady people and criminals, with a price in the range of 100USD-1000USD. Achieving full privacy in the modern day internet is almost impossible.

[dkbit98]

It wouldn't be surprising. Aside from potentially hindering Bitcoin adaption, privacy feature usually leads to higher TX size or longer verification time. In addition, gmaxwell propose Confidental Transaction back on 2015[1], but it was never added into Bitcoin protocol and added into Monero protocol (as part of RingCT) on 2017.

Monero is cool and has better privacy, but we need something that is easier to implement in Bitcoin protocol, maybe privacy sidechain would work great for this, without increasing TX size.

I'm definitely not skilled enough to be called a 'developer', but I think you're just totally underestimating how difficult it is to achieve this without potentially fucking up the entire protocol. Bitcoin is already gigantic enough that we can't afford to move fast and try to just push upgrades under the sun.

No.
Real problem is that certain someone doesn't want to have any privacy on bitcoin, and on anything else that people use for that matter.
There are other coins that have much better privacy, so it's possible to do it and we don't need a century to do that.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.

It is intentional. "We" want to make it into the system. And, to make it into the system means to have tradeoffs. Trading privacy kind of tradeoffs.

That is simply impossible because Bitcoin was not designed that way. If we add privacy features into the existing protocol (eg. though some weird soft fork) that won't fix anything because opt-in privacy is not improving the whole system.

Why not? RingCT in Monero wasn't a thing back in 2016, and it got implemented in January 2017. XMR amounts hidden, boom. More privacy gained. Bitcoin could have optional privacy with softforking to confidential transactions and ring signatures. It's just that we want it to enter the system like a trojan horse, therefore we can't risk with stuff like that.

[kryptqnick]

Honestly, I don't consider Snowden an authority, considering that he's been living in Russia for over a decade now, and got Russian citizenship, awarded personally and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by an internationally recognized war criminal Putin.
I support leaks in the interest of civil society, and I respect privacy, but that's not the same as what Snowden's been up to for a while now.
For me, Bitcoin is private enough, with the pseudonymity and non-custodial wallets requiring no private information.

[m2017]

Edwards Snowden just made a tweet with final warning for everyone that privacy for Bitcoin is needed on protocol level.

Ok. Let's assume that the majority of bitcoin users agree with this. Should we all get together and come to the BTC-developers and force them to include privacy in the bitcoin protocol?

How should this even be implemented? Including technically.

I tend to agree with him on this and I really don't understand why nothing has been done regarding that for years, unless this was done intentional.

I would ask a little differently: what has been done (significant) over the past ten years?

If this is done (not done) intentionally, then the issue of trust in the developers arises.

Funny comment was made by Jameson that we might take another ten years to do this  
The clock is ticking...

If these developers can't do this, then is there really no replacement for them in the whole world?

In ten years, governments will regulate everything that is possible and not possible, and by that time privacy will already be useless.

[cryptosize]

Turning Bitcoin into a privacy coin would lead to a mass government ban of BTC around the world.
The BTC price would most likely go back to the levels before 2015. I'm sure that 90% of the Bitcoin investors don't want this to happen.
They prefer big profits over privacy. I kinda understand them. Bitcoin being a speculative financial asset with a potential future price of 100K USD(or even more) is way more exciting than BTC being a privacy coin used only by shady people and criminals, with a price in the range of 100USD-1000USD. Achieving full privacy in the modern day internet is almost impossible.

This would lead to a mass exodus of miners, which means way less hashrate, therefore it would take ages to mine a new block before the difficulty readjustment. Do we really want that?

Even Satoshi himself hadn't envisioned such a doomsday scenario... he took it for granted that hashrate would always go up long-term.

Truth be told he had envisioned Monero-like features in Bitcoin:



And no, it's impossible to implement RingCT with a soft fork, you need a hard fork (good luck trying to convince 90% of the miners):

https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2016/12/17/a-problem-with-ringct/

[Faisal2202]

I understand that anonymity is one of the rules of cryptocurrencies, but personally I do not use Monero and I think that I have no reason to hide, because I do not do anything forbidden. And if Bitcoin also becomes anonymous, then there is a chance that regulators will make even more problems for Bitcoin.

People don't seek anonymity because they want to do something that is forbidden, many people want mixer for mainly anonymity. Let's say I just don't want my wallet to be noted by other people like where my funds are going even I am not doing anything wrong with those funds. Well, let's say people just want to attain more privacy which is harder with BTC itself, so we need extra tools to make that happen.

And speaking of regularities, they are already after BTC anonymity providing platforms. And they have banned many and will come after many, like sparrow wallet, etc. This is not good, but I do agree with the fact that bad activities on the BTC is bad thing and should be stopped.

[Helena Yu]

If Bitcoin add the same feature like Monero, it has been banned by most of countries because privacy coins was been delisted by many big exchanges. So far Bitcoin is already very good, it give a freedom to choose whether people need to use privacy tools or not.

Edwards Snowden think he's Satoshi Nakamoto, so he has a huge power to make the developers listen to him, while actually he's just an Average Joe in Bitcoin...

[mk4]

No.
Real problem is that certain someone doesn't want to have any privacy on bitcoin, and on anything else that people use for that matter.
There are other coins that have much better privacy, so it's possible to do it and we don't need a century to do that.

Do you think that we can simply just copy-paste some privacy code from some other project and just slap it onto the Bitcoin network's source code then poof we got privacy on the protocol level? Because it definitely doesn't work that way lmao.

[cryptosize]

Edwards Snowden think he's Satoshi Nakamoto, so he has a huge power to make the developers listen to him, while actually he's just an Average Joe in Bitcoin...

You definitely don't understand Bitcoin if you really think Satoshi Nakamoto has such a power/influence over BTC devs.

Hell, BTC Core devs have zero power/influence over miners... miners have the final word, since they possess the hashrate.