MAVE: Digital Signature Protocol for Massive bulk verifications

[gmaxwell]

No. I specifically left Total anonymization out of the MAVEPAY paper, since anonymization gos against performance in every protocol I´ve seen. MAVEPAY aim is to have the best performance, and so pseudo-anonymous transactions are more expensive in MAVEPAY and total anonymization is not granted by the protocol.

Anonymity and privacy are two different but somewhat related things.   Banks are very private in a conventional sense.  Bitcoin (and MAVEPAY as described) can not have that kind of privacy— but what bitcoin does is uses weak pseudo-anonymity to provide the privacy that was lost.

This is fairly effective—  although it's not strong enough by itself to hide my activities from concerted attackers it can successfully prevent awkward questions from snoopy inlaws who are angry about you buying contraception when they want grandchildren— and in Bitcoin as as designed it's largely free, and the account level historical summarization that the related design precludes could only shrink the stored data by some constant factor.

I don't particularly think that anonymity is all that important a property, but I think that privacy certainly is — perhaps you can come up with some clever way to regain some privacy in your system.

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[marcus_of_augustus]

I don't particularly think that anonymity is all that important a property

I'm inclined to disagree. Anonymity, in the context of money, is strongly correlated to fungibility, e.g. "I don't want those dirty coins from XYZ terrorists, pornographers, bogey-man, etc." Already Mt. Gox and others are using "green-list" btc addresses, demonstrating how fungibility is lacking on bitcoin. Good money is fungible, therefore in the digital realm it needs anonymity to fulfill that important property.

Unless you want to argue that fungibility is not related to anonymity of digital tokens, or that fungibility is not an important property of money.

[Gavin Andresen]

Unless you want to argue that fungibility is not related to anonymity of digital tokens, or that fungibility is not an important property of money.

Of course fungibility is important.

But fungibility isn't all-or-nothing, and, in my humble opinion, it isn't all-important. Refusing to accept dollar bills or bitcoins that you believe were obtained illegally makes them less fungible, but so what?  It's the right thing to do.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Unless you want to argue that fungibility is not related to anonymity of digital tokens, or that fungibility is not an important property of money.

Of course fungibility is important.

But fungibility isn't all-or-nothing, and, in my humble opinion, it isn't all-important. Refusing to accept dollar bills or bitcoins that you believe were obtained illegally makes them less fungible, but so what?  It's the right thing to do.

As far as singular transactions go, one on one you are right, it is the right and moral thing to do, but the overall effect on the currency system itself will ultimately be fatal. I. e, how many transaction steps down the chain do you think it is appropriate to re-integrate tainted coins? You cannot hold every person who uses those coins from then on responsible for the sins of the the previous users of the coins. After a certain number of transaction cycles, any digital token system that has endless tracing trails will end up with money that was at any point involved in "illegal activities" contaminating the whole system, locking it up. Much like we are witnessing with the current central bank fiat digital chits that have recently implemented detailed tracking maybe?

In the end, money is an information technology and like any other technology, amoral, bitcoin cannot be held responsible for the activities of the users of the technology. In my opinion, it is not a function of the money to know if it has been involved in "illegal activities", you obviously disagree. But it is well known that good money is fungible and you would be going against all evidence to the contrary to implement successfully something that wasn't. The free market will decide as soon as we get a truly anonymous (digitally fungible) competitor unit into the marketplace, it maybe a spectrum of anonymity is acceptable and it comes at a range of pricing as Segio is suggesting.

Out of interest, given the choice and all others things being equal, which would you rather hold a pseudo-anonymous digital currency or a totally anonymous currency?

[justusranvier]

Unless you want to argue that fungibility is not related to anonymity of digital tokens, or that fungibility is not an important property of money.

Of course fungibility is important.

But fungibility isn't all-or-nothing, and, in my humble opinion, it isn't all-important. Refusing to accept dollar bills or bitcoins that you believe were obtained illegally makes them less fungible, but so what?  It's the right thing to do.

As far as singular transactions go, one on one you are right, it is the right and moral thing to do, but the overall effect on the currency system itself will ultimately be fatal. I. e, how many transaction steps down the chain do you think it is appropriate to re-integrate tainted coins? You cannot hold every person who uses those coins from then on responsible for the sins of the the previous users of the coins. After a certain number of transaction cycles, any digital token system that has endless tracing trails will end up with money that was at any point involved in "illegal activities" contaminating the whole system, locking it up. Much like we are witnessing with the current central bank fiat digital chits that have recently implemented detailed tracking maybe?

In the end, money is an information technology and like any other technology, amoral, bitcoin cannot be held responsible for the activities of the users of the technology. In my opinion, it is not a function of the money to know if it has been involved in "illegal activities", you obviously disagree. But it is well known that good money is fungible and you would be going against all evidence to the contrary to implement successfully something that wasn't. The free market will decide as soon as we get a truly anonymous (digitally fungible) competitor unit into the marketplace, it maybe a spectrum of anonymity is acceptable and it comes at a range of pricing as Segio is suggesting.

Out of interest, given the choice and all others things being equal, which would you rather hold a pseudo-anonymous digital currency or a totally anonymous currency?

Two years later, Gavin still won't answer this question:

https://twitter.com/anonymouscoin/status/471177928097554433

https://twitter.com/anonymouscoin/status/471748516323528705

[cypherdoc]

Marcus is right.

[Gavin Andresen]

Two years later, Gavin still won't answer this question:

https://twitter.com/anonymouscoin/status/471177928097554433

https://twitter.com/anonymouscoin/status/471748516323528705

I'll break my "don't feed the trolls" rule:

You need two things to get private bitcoin transactions:

1) An anonymous connection to the Internet.  Bitcoin Core does a good job of this, working nicely through Tor and/or as a hidden service (thanks to Pieter Wuille for writing that code).

2) A privacy-aware wallet.

The Bitcoin Core wallet needs to be completely rewritten, not just for privacy but to get rid of the Berkeley DB dependency, implement HD keys, implement multisig, CoinJoin, etc etc etc....

Nobody has stepped up to do that, so it hasn't happened; in fact, we are going in the opposite direction, moving wallet functionality out of Core (and we might eventually drop wallet functionality entirely to concentrate on transaction validation and blockchain handling).

Why do you ask?

[justusranvier]

Why do you ask?

I haven't asked any questions.

marcus_of_augustus asked one, and Kristov Atlas asked another.

[cypherdoc]

The definition of a  true money is that's its widely accepted and is a unit of account. For the latter to happen, we have to think in Bitcoin and the former must happen. The former can't happen until or unless even the black markets can privately accept Bitcoin, as they are markets that exist in the trillions of USD. Note that I already believe that Bitcoin has become a medium of exchange and a store of value.

Note that the US gov't understands this principle completely otherwise they'd be working to ban the USD for all the problems it causes in money laundering, drugs, child porn, and terrorism.

If Gavin wants Bitcoin to expand to the tune of tens of thousands transactions per second, it won't happen without privacy as even no corporation or consumer wants their private finances monitored, let alone entities in the black markets.

[cypherdoc]

To get a better sense of the worldwide fallout that has occurred at a real economic level to companies in Silicon Valley as a result of the NSA's and gov'ts desire to "track" everything, watch this video from 2 days ago:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmware/tag/melissa-lee

I think the conclusions can be extrapolated to Bitcoin.

Edit : watch the first panel discussion with Andreesen.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Another "Troll" here:

On the minus side of the ledger, Gavin omitted to mention the X.509 privacy-destroying functionality for the unaware that has been implemented as the default behavior of the "payment protocol" in 0.9 clients.