Libertarians and Governments will swap what they think about bitcoin, in future!

[serenitys]

I think the people who have hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in btc have long since opted for offline wallets with strong security so the only thing that tracking the transactions will accomplish for the sketchy feds trying to follow the big money is that they slam head first into the dead end wall - offline storage and they can't do anything from there.

They can't (legally) just get a blanket warrant on an exchange, and even a federal warrant has to be specific about what they're looking for. So a blanket search is illegal and infringing on the privacy of everyone else not involved in their particular investigation and would almost certainly get tossed out in court. If the feds are already following someone/people in particular and learn about them doing business in bitcoin, they'd have to seek it out the hard way.

The more security protocols are implemented it'll just make the feds jobs that much more difficult to pursue. What we can expect is the same sort of thing that happened with Napster...they'll clamp down on 2 or 3 people, make scapegoats out of a couple of 13 year olds, the media will start fear mongering, and then it'll settle down because they can't do squat about p2p and they know it.

This is a reality: you can combine every single federal enforcement agency and every police and sheriff's departments in this entire country and you still would not have the manpower required to even put a dent in stopping p2p. They cannot devote all their resources to pissing in the dark...there are still other actual crimes going on that they are going to be more focused on.

Don't sweat it. Mass adoption doesn't even need to be 100% to make it insanely difficult for any given government agency to disrupt bitcoin. Even another 1% would be about the thresold before they're simply overtaxed.

[LostDutchman]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/05/21/marc-andreessen-in-20-years-well-talk-about-bitcoin-like-we-talk-about-the-internet-today/



 Investor and Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen explains..

"Anybody who thinks Bitcoin makes it easier to do transactions that aren't tracked by the government is 100 percent wrong. The transactions all happen in public view. Anybody can look at the entire ledger and verify who owns what. So if you're a law enforcement agency or an intelligence agency, this is a much easier way to track the flow of money than cash. So I think actually law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to wind up being pro-Bitcoin, and libertarians are going to wind up being anti-Bitcoin."


Do you agree?

No.

[Ragnarly]

I tweeted Andressen, "@pmarka If anonymity blacklist-proof features are built into the protocol or most wallets, will #libertarians go back to liking #Bitcoin?"

His response, "@Ragnarly Maybe, but a lot of the same data mining techniques that work on email and IP addresses also work on the blockchain."

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/469880753229033472

[LostDutchman]

I tweeted Andressen, "@pmarka If anonymity blacklist-proof features are built into the protocol or most wallets, will #libertarians go back to liking #Bitcoin?"

His response, "@Ragnarly Maybe, but a lot of the same data mining techniques that work on email and IP addresses also work on the blockchain."

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/469880753229033472

Care to translate that?

[Bit_Happy]

I tweeted Andressen, "@pmarka If anonymity blacklist-proof features are built into the protocol or most wallets, will #libertarians go back to liking #Bitcoin?"

His response, "@Ragnarly Maybe, but a lot of the same data mining techniques that work on email and IP addresses also work on the blockchain."

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/469880753229033472

Care to translate that?

Translation:
Perhaps Andressen is not aware of how effective and secure Dark Wallet is supposed to be....?

[justusranvier]

Perhaps Andressen is not aware of how effective and secure Dark Wallet is supposed to be....?

Perhaps Andressen is personally funding startups that will do everything they can to datamine the blockchain, and believes the resources they have at their disposal will defeat anything Dark Wallet can do.

Maybe Andressen has reason to believe that they can block any changes to Bitcoin that would make data mining less effective by having an understanding with key developers.

[Bit_Happy]

Perhaps Andressen is not aware of how effective and secure Dark Wallet is supposed to be....?

Perhaps Andressen is personally funding startups that will do everything they can to datamine the blockchain, and believes the resources they have at their disposal will defeat anything Dark Wallet can do.

Maybe Andressen has reason to believe that they can block any changes to Bitcoin that would make data mining less effective by having an understanding with key developers.

Good point, justusranvier. Sounds to me like an epic, high stakes battle with tons of wealth on the line.
Also, early users of Dark Wallet will not know for certain if they are completely secure. Perhaps in the future: Libertarians and Governments really will swap what they think about bitcoin.

[neofelis]

If you create a new public address and somebody sends bitcoin to it, there is NO WAY for anybody to determine who owns that. Could be anybody in the world.

If you SEND bitcoin from an address, you are more easily tracked down as which nodes received the transaction first. It still would be very difficult to find the exact IP address it originated from.

Am I wrong and if so how?

[justusranvier]

Also, early users of Dark Wallet will not know for certain if they are completely secure.

I'm certainly not convinced about CoinJoin.

It clearly works in the case where everybody is joining the exact same amount - but nobody uses that way.

[justusranvier]

If you create a new public address and somebody sends bitcoin to it, there is NO WAY for anybody to determine who owns that. Could be anybody in the world.

If you SEND bitcoin from an address, you are more easily tracked down as which nodes received the transaction first. It still would be very difficult to find the exact IP address it originated from.

Am I wrong and if so how?

If you never reuse addresses, and if you never create transactions with multiple inputs, and if you are careful about making change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends, and if you take proper precautions at the network layer, then you're difficult to track.

[ArticMine]

It all depends on the size of the transactions. For most people Bitcoin can be made very close to anonymous and "dark" can actually work; however for a large drug cartel, let us say a few hundred million or more 2014 USD, Bitcoin will provide very little privacy and no amount of "dark" will help. Furthermore unlike the case of HSBC there is no "too big to fail" bank to protect the cartel.

[knightcoin]

The natural flow of technology tends to move in the direction of making surveillance easier, and the ability of computers to track us doubles every eighteen months ...


http://gigaom.com/2013/08/11/zimmermanns-law-pgp-inventor-and-silent-circle-co-founder-phil-zimmermann-on-the-surveillance-society/


-circle of  

[Ragnarly]

If you never reuse addresses, and if you never create transactions with multiple inputs, and if you are careful about making change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends, and if you take proper precautions at the network layer, then you're difficult to track.

How do you make change addresses difficult to distinguish from your spends?

What do you mean by precautions at the network layer? Tor?

[CoolBliss]

I know 'security through obscurity' isn't safe. But let's not underestimate how very, very messy the ledger is. The government can barely figure our mortgage backed securities; they're not skilled at complex systems. And I'm not sure I could identify what accounts where mine if I didn't have a program telling me.

[CoolBliss]

 Now imagine a world where people are intentionally obscuring things... The problem of solving which physical bodies owns what virtual accounts is going to be an immensley hard problem. I think it would be literally the hardest single problem the government has ever solved. Want to fly to the moon? It's a lot of semi-interdependant systems you can individually test. Want to build a nuke?

[CoolBliss]

 It's some basic algebra that you use computer models to iterate on. Matching a billion one-time-use accounts with tens of millions of people based on transaction clustering, bank statements, internet traffic logs, and spyware as your only guides is a nightmare of complexity.

[cuddaloreappu]

it is interestesting to think about the projects of UNSYSTEM in this scenario headed by Amir taaki and cody wilson...

Those projects like dark wallet really present an opposing view of this topic

[freedombit]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/05/21/marc-andreessen-in-20-years-well-talk-about-bitcoin-like-we-talk-about-the-internet-today/



 Investor and Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen explains..

"Anybody who thinks Bitcoin makes it easier to do transactions that aren't tracked by the government is 100 percent wrong. The transactions all happen in public view. Anybody can look at the entire ledger and verify who owns what. So if you're a law enforcement agency or an intelligence agency, this is a much easier way to track the flow of money than cash. So I think actually law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to wind up being pro-Bitcoin, and libertarians are going to wind up being anti-Bitcoin."


Do you agree?

Libertarian doesn't mean anarchist. Two very different things. Libertarians just like limited law. If you don't want a public camera over your crapper or or someone telling you that you can't eat spinach, then you might be a libertarian. If you want a law and enforcement that prevents others from detonating a nuke 100 yards from your home, you might be a libertarian.

[gtraah]

It's some basic algebra that you use computer models to iterate on. Matching a billion one-time-use accounts with tens of millions of people based on transaction clustering, bank statements, internet traffic logs, and spyware as your only guides is a nightmare of complexity.

And then on-top of that we have Dark wallet .... Making that nightmare literally "Hell"

[gtraah]

If you want a law and enforcement that prevents others from detonating a nuke 100 yards from your home, you might be a libertarian.

Um i don't think anyone would want that