(disclaimer - hopefully the below will not be read as "oh this ginger guy is hardcore monero, so he's just pumping blah blah blah. I'm not hardcore monero - I'm hardcore decentralized value exchange, and currently, in my opinion, I think monero foots the bill. Indeed, I am still critical of monero - the use of pools, for instance, pushes the scales towards centralization. Now, back to the topic)
Title updated
(snip)
Satoshi got as close to his vision as he practically could as a 1 man coding machine, and it's revolutionary. But cryptonote is in fact much closer to his vision than what he created. More private. More decentralized. More secure. Untraceable. Unlinkable. Better at being bitcoin than bitcoin.
Yah, I wish I could see an honest discussion or at least some input from the hardcore bitcoin diehards. (no offense, I'm seeing a lot of usual suspects in here). And if I've missed the discussion because I'm late in the game, I'll totally mod my post if someone gives me a good non-trolled discussion about the topic.
In my opinion, bitcoin is here to stay, but its slowly moving towards the equivalent of a centralized financial technology that also functions as currency. I.e., you could purchase your own bitcoins for your economic activity, but the merchant and the merchants bank and your personal bank are already doing all of their communication / remittances / etc on the bitcoin blockchain, so why bother? We've already seen that the regular financial user really wants convenience as opposed to security and/or pseudonymity - whats the proportion of accounts that are originated / hosted / whatever on third party sites? (coinbase, circle, blockchain.info, etc)
Of course, the "currency vs. fintech backbone" could be applied to any cryptocurrency, and its something that only time will tell.
Hrm, actually, I'm scanning over satoshi's whitepaper. It's quite interesting, privacy is not mentioned in the conclusion.
We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust. We started with
the usual framework of coins made from digital signatures, which provides strong control of
ownership, but is incomplete without a way to prevent double-spending. To solve this, we
proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions
that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes
control a majority of CPU power. The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. Nodes
work all at once with little coordination. They do not need to be identified, since messages are
not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis. Nodes can
leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the proof-of-work chain as proof of what
happened while they were gone. They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of
valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on
them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
Indeed, privacy is only mentioned as point #10, which is sandwiched by point 9 "Combining and splitting value" and point 11 "calculations". At this point I can only infer things because I missed the original discussions, but "privacy" seems an afterthought or an emergent property, not necessarily a designed property.
So based on the whitepaper, bitcoin technically does what it set out to do as a technology. It is "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust". Indeed, the concept of decentralization is not explicit in the whitepaper. In fact, the only two instances of the root "central" are:
A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every
transaction for double spending.
This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides
a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them
I think the phrase "cryptonote: more bitcoin than bitcoin" refers to the bitcoin ethos - that is, decentralization of a fundamental component of contemporary civilization: the ability to transfer and store value. In my opinion, privacy is required for a fully functioning value transfer system that properly represents the value that a civilization has for stuff (material goods, thoughts, actions, service, etc).
(I apologize if I missed something in the whitepaper or in my general exposure to the field. This is a hobby after all, and I must make breakfast for my family)
