Dark Wallet Will Make Bitcoin Accessible For All — Except the Feds

Daniel_Stuckey writes "The group, called UnSystem, are self-proclaimed crypto-anarchists led by Cody Wilson—who you may remember as the creator of the controversial 3D-printed gun. After getting himself in hot water with the government for making the digital files to print an unregulated weapon freely available on the internet, Wilson's now endeavoring to bring Bitcoin back to its anarchist roots. Like other Bitcoin wallets, you'll be able to store, send, and receive coins, and interact with block chain, the Bitcoin public ledger. But Dark Wallet will include extra protections to make sure transactions are secure, anonymous, and hard to trace—including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."

Comments

Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors? Without the necessary passwords, what happens to the BitCoins? Are they removed from the system?

Re:Deceased owners

[Wonko the Sane]

Are they removed from the system?

No, the just remain in the blockchain as unspent outputs.

Re:Deceased owners

[kajsocc]

They are not removed, but they become inaccessible. It's quite like an encrypted message that you've lost the passphrase to. Everyone can see the coins in the ledger but nobody has the keys to access them.

(Note that it won't be obvious to everyone else that nobody has the key. It could just as easily be the case that the owner just hasn't made any transactions. They will just sit in the blockchain forever.)

Re:Deceased owners

[gringer]

Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors?

Until someone can work out what the password / key is, the bitcoins will be unable to be used by anyone else -- the value of the remaining bitcoins will probably increase. If someone *is* able to work out what that password / key is, then the value of all bitcoins will drop.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it inevitable that the total pool of BitCoins would be reduced to nothing as owners die off without passing on their wallets? That was the intent of my original question.

Re:Deceased owners

[pla]

Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors? Without the necessary passwords, what happens to the BitCoins? Are they removed from the system?

At present, every 5-10 years, the Bitcoin protocol will necessarily upgrade its encryption an d hashing routines to keep pace with processor (whether CPU or GPU or "other") speeds.

Dead people will, of course, not ever transfer their balances to the newest version, and as a result, after 10-20 years, their BTC will become trivially crackable.

You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks

Note as an aside, when you see block-0 spent, you can presume the NSA can easily read your old encrypted email.

Re:Deceased owners

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I've never heard of this. Source?

As far as I'm aware, once the blocks are found and claimed, the only cryptography that happens in bitcoin is signing messages using your wallet keys.

Old coins in somebody's derelict wallet won't be in "blocks" either (that would be like saying all of the dollar bills in your wallet automatically gain sequential serial numbers once they become yours.)

The original bitcoin creators have said that when it becomes necessary, we can collectively decide to increase the number of bitcoins available. It wouldn't be up to them to unilaterally decide that though (they can't,) rather there would have to be enough actual owners of bitcoins who decide to do so. Not quite sure how exactly it is supposed to work, but it sounds akin to amending the US constitution.

Re:Deceased owners

[Austrian Anarchy]

Isn't it inevitable that the total pool of BitCoins would be reduced to nothing as owners die off without passing on their wallets? That was the intent of my original question.

No more inevitable than people having stashed away money that gets destroyed in fires (or other) will result in all money being reduced to nothing.

Personal example (I was not there, my dad was) an old relative died at home after extended illness. He kept saying something about the mattress, but could not speak well. Dad and his brothers took the mattress to the side of the railroad tracks and burned it. That is when they discovered it was stuffed full of cash and they had no way to put it out before it was all gone. Similar stuff happens all the time, but it is the amount of money remaining in circulation that has the impact on prices, etc. Also, since BitCoin can be made into such small change, losses of sizable chunks should not be devastating.

Re:Deceased owners

[Your.Master]

That would be deflation, since it's the money supply being reduced.

Re:Deceased owners

[PRMan]

I don't see any way the number of Bitcoins could be increased (they don't need to be as they are divisible to 8 decimal places already).

Re:Deceased owners

[girlintraining]

You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks

Actually, that ordinarily would be a problem. However, you're not understanding that bitcoin isn't encrypting anything. It's hashing it. The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.

Think of it this way: It will always be hard (hopefully too hard) to undo, invalidate, or duplicate a transaction; The older it is, the more secure it becomes. But let's remove the idea of a bitcoin for the moment and instead say that everyone has a user account in this 'BT' system, and after supplying their login and password, can trade any coins they have with anyone else. Any transaction made is secure; until and unless you lose your password or someone else gets it. Then whatever bitcoins you have are now theirs, the end. But they cannot unspend your coins; they cannot change the transactions. They can only spend what's in your wallet now.

So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.

The bit coin system is not secured against theft of coins. That's your job (either to steal or to protect)... all it guarantees is that transactions are permanent (and public).

Re:Deceased owners

[Your.Master]

It's absolutely more inevitable than that. Non-bitcoin money gets created and destroyed constantly. Part of the point of bitcoin was a limited supply -- just under 21 million can ever be in the supply at most. If you burn the mattress full of USB keys with bitcoin wallets, they will never be replaced (once the last coin is mined, anyway).

Apparently the current limitation on divisibility of bitcoins can technically be worked around, but nobody cares to because it's already divisible to fractions of pennies. That will become worthwhile as the currency deflates from ever-decreasing supply.

Though I'm skeptical of bitcoin lasting nearly long enough to have that kind of problem.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

No more inevitable than people having stashed away money that gets destroyed in fires (or other) will result in all money being reduced to nothing.

Yes and no, there is an upper limit of 21 million BTCs whereas governments can, within reason, simply print more regular money. So the cash burned in your relative's mattress doesn't matter cause much more has been added into the system. If access to a wallet with 1 million bitcoins is lost, the upper limit is reduced to 20 million forever.

Re:Deceased owners

[hibiki_r]

Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.

Imagine keeping money in your pocket was a good investment, because we had an 8% yearly deflation. You'd need very strong reasons to spend the money. Imagine the problems of loans when not loaning the money at all provides such a great rate of return.

The only way to get a working economy using the system Bitcoin has would be to have said economy grow extremely slowly. In essence, Bitcoin only has a chance of working if it's unpopular.

Re:Deceased owners

[philip.paradis]

Factor in eight decimal places worth of divisibility to that 20 million limit. I hope you understand why that's significant.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy. You just need to change the protocol to accept different numbers as Bitcoins.

But why would anyone accept that change to give you money at the expense of everyone else?

They would if you had the power to compel them. It'll happen like this - you'll hand out invalid extended bitcoins as tax returns and food stamps. People will try to spend them, and sue in the courts you control if they're not accepted.

Re:Deceased owners

[pla]

I've never heard of this. Source?

No real "source" required - If you can spoof an arbitrary SHA256 hash, you can "own" any Bitcoin block you want.

Over time, the need to future-proof the protocol against that possibility makes for an obvious upgrade path. But until someone moves "their"coins to a new wallet, the security of the original hash they used provides an upper limit to the CPU time needed to steal their coins.

With current CPUs and algorithms, that amounts to centuries or even millennia. Much like with MD5, however, if you don't think that will drop exponentially... Let me hold on to your BTC wallet for a decade or so. :)

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Factor in eight decimal places worth of divisibility to that 20 million limit. I hope you understand why that's significant.

It's like you just said deflation isn't a big deal because a dollar can be cut into eight decimal places worth of divisibility.

The point, you've missed it.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell sets their trash on fire on someone else's property?

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Gypsies. Not a judgement, I've seen it happen.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

its called a living will people... MAKE ONE NOW, take your hand off the mouse and start writing...

Re:Deceased owners

[whistlingtony]

Or maybe he's saying that just because there's a finite number of bitcoins, that doesn't mean you can't split them a bajillion ways.

Everyone seems to think that bitcoins can't have inflation.... Every value is based on perception and trust. If I can buy a candy bar for .5 bitcoins today (I made that up), the market may shift and tomorrow it will be 1 bitcoin. Who knows?

Same thing with gold. I listen to all my conservative friends ramble on about gold as if there'd be no inflation if we used it... but it's STILL just perception and trust. The value of gold can shift. It went up when Obama became president, and not because the supply magically went down..... Heh.

Anyway, perception of value can change. And just because you can't make more bitcoins, doesn't mean you can't split them forever. It's kind of the same thing really. People don't seem to get that. Or, perhaps I completely misunderstood what he was trying to say.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that BitCoin needs a longer tail so mining would have been more productive.

Even with this new "dark wallet" and their vague claims, blockchains are still public, and it isn't hard for a LEO to put two and two together when there is one place that obviously is laundering money. Once there is enough proof to get FinCEN and other places, they will shut it down posthaste.

So, this "dark wallet" is a nice try, but realistically, it doesn't help a fundamental architecture decision of BitCoin which makes every single transaction public and traceable.

Re:Deceased owners

[Zemran]

"an old relative died at home after extended illness."

This does not tell us about bitcoins but about preparing for the inevitable. We should all prepare for our death as we will all die. My oldest son knows how to access my money and how to deal with my demise. You need someone you trust in life and your old relative obviously lacked that. I give a copy of all my keys etc. to my son and I know that the trust is 2 way in that I have access to his. If I had a stock of bitcoins he would have a copy of the keys. When he asks for money I tell him to get it from the account himself... My online banking is set up with a direct link to his account. I know that not everyone can trust someone else and that in that way I am lucky. I think that it is sad that many people do not have someone.

Re:Deceased owners

[wvmarle]

This dividing in ever smaller units is not a solution, it doesn't increase the number of bitcoins in existence. It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.

This until so many bitcoins are lost and being hoarded that there is not enough liquidity left to make it a viable currency.

Re:Deceased owners

[osu-neko]

I think you're confused about what exactly pla was saying. As you say, any transaction is secure until someone else gets your password (actually, your private key), then whatever bitcoins you have are now theirs, they can spend what's in your wallet now. So in the future, as pla suggested, a strategy for recovering bitcoins from wallets of dead people will be to capitalize on the fact they haven't been keeping up to date on their encryption, being dead and all, and so you can now figure out their keys (pla's premise being that what was a secure public/private key pair today won't be a decade or two from now, and you'll just determine the private key from the public one). At which point, as you say, whatever bitcoins they had are now yours.

Re: Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

But why would anyone accept that change to give you money at the expense of everyone else?

It doesn't take force. A similar thing happened when bitcoin first started - the originator had lots of coin, and managed to convince people that it should be worth something.

For that matter, as a Bordon buyer today, you're freely choosing to assign value to something that objectively doesn't have it, to your own immediate detriment and to the benefit of people who already have bitcoin.

Re: Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

A similar thing happened when bitcoin first started - the originator had lots of coin, and managed to convince people that it should be worth something.

Yeah, I think that's just an assumption since nobody knows who the originator actually is.

Re:Deceased owners

[lxs]

Food shelter and heat are very strong reasons to spend money, at least they are to me.

Re:Deceased owners

[gl4ss]

all you need is to get 50+% of the clients to switch over to your new version with some mechanism or another for added coins.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

You can trust me. Please send me your banking details to joseph.nboko@modalities.com.ni

Re:Deceased owners

[Joce640k]

Dad and his brothers took the mattress to the side of the railroad tracks and burned it.

And that seems like normal behavior...?

Re:Deceased owners

[FireFury03]

Isn't it inevitable that the total pool of BitCoins would be reduced to nothing as owners die off without passing on their wallets? That was the intent of my original question.

No more inevitable than people having stashed away money that gets destroyed in fires (or other) will result in all money being reduced to nothing.

The difference is that with a fiat currency, the controlling government just prints more money to replace that which is lost. In fact, in general the controlling governments print *more* than was lost, which leads to inflation (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable - certainly too much inflation is bad, but it can be argued that a small amount of inflation increases liquidity and is therefore good).

Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a hard limit whereupon no more bitcoins will ever be produced. This has 2 problems: firstly, in your example where some coins are lost the number of coins in circulation will inevitably decrease over the long term, leading to deflation and reduced liquidity. Secondly, economies are not a fixed size and (in general) tend to grow - in the case of bitcoins, at some point the economy will likely be growing faster than the total number of bitcoins in circulation, and when that happens we get deflation. Very few people would argue that deflation wasn't a very bad thing.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

...and what happened to all those money lost on that Boeing 727 ? Nothing... They just wait for someone who'll find them. There is no real difference.

Re:Deceased owners

[gl4ss]

who the hell bothers taking a mattress - a mattress that someone made mentions about - to the tracks to burn it?

the whole story makes no sense at all except as a "don't burn stuff without checking first" warning story.

oh and who does that too? usa army with burn pits.

Re:Deceased owners

[FireFury03]

The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.

So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.

Lets assume for a minute that someone dies and their wallet is destroyed. Cracking the encryption on their *wallet* isn't possible because the wallet has been destroyed. But, their bitcoins still "exist" by virtue of the global ledger showing that they were transferred to that wallet and were never transferred from that wallet to anywhere else. It's just that without that wallet, no one can create new entries on the ledger regarding those coins.

[Many years pass.]

So now, with enough computational grunt, you could forge a transaction on the ledger that shows a transfer happening *now*, of the coins from the destroyed wallet to your wallet. You now own these coins - you never needed to have access to the old wallet or crack it's password; you just needed to spoof a transaction on the ledger. That transaction isn't protected by the whole "the older it is, the more secure it is" thing, because you're not trying to make it look like a transaction happened many years ago, you're trying to make it look like a transaction happened *now*. As far as anyone else can see, the coins were transferred to you from a wallet that hasn't been used in many years, but no one was to know that the wallet had actually been destroyed.

Now, whether or not we will ever have enough compute power to make that feasible is another question.

Re:Deceased owners

[Kijori]

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't there a bit of a problem with relying on the divisibility of the bitcoin to deal with bitcoins having dropped out of circulation (as opposed to having been definitively destroyed)?

Imagine that a large proportion of bitcoins have stopped circulating. Isn't there a risk that lots of them could suddenly resurface, make some enormous purchases and increase the monetary supply significantly overnight?

Re:Deceased owners

[peragrin]

I would like to point out Gold goes up whenever the stock market goes down hard. in every recession there is a spike in gold. Smart investors buy gold when the economy is booming and gold is cheap and sell towards the end of a recession when stocks are cheap and gold is high.

But your correct. Cash currency is always being created and destroyed. a destroyed(lost) bit coin is gone forever. In the short term lost bit coins increase the value of the remaining ones, but at one point the amount of bit coins lost will be greater than the remaining ones and the value will plummet.

Re:Deceased owners

[IamTheRealMike]

No real "source" required - If you can spoof an arbitrary SHA256 hash, you can "own" any Bitcoin block you want. Over time, the need to future-proof the protocol against that possibility makes for an obvious upgrade path.

In other words, you don't understand SHA256.

I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that kind of stealing? How many years must pass for this to be legal, pending legality of bitcoins itself?
Can someone do this to my wallet (if I had one) and get away with it?

The deflationary model of BTC seems to be more like a pyramid scheme, than a real currency. Somewhere, someone who made this up is cackling with insane glee how much "money" the world owes them (of course ,they can never sell it all at once, or risk collapsing the price).

Captcha: presents

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

120 years ago you could buy a nice suit for an ounce of gold. Today you can buy a nice suit for an ounce of gold. What your conservative friends are saying is that the value of gold versus goods hasn't changed much if at all in that span of time. The value of your fiat currency has and that is where your perception is focused.

Re:Deceased owners

[fractoid]

The term used was "grave robbing", that kinda suggests legality isn't an issue.

Re:Deceased owners

[trout007]

I don't think you are correct. A bitcoin address has an associated public and private key. The hashing algorithm is a part of the standard. So someone could theoretically take a bitcoin address on the block chain and try to brute force solve for the private key. Right now it costs more to break than to generate a new coin so why do it? Also in the future the encryption will get more difficult. Finally you can always break up the amount you store in any address which makes it not cost effective to break.

Re:Deceased owners

[Soluzar]

Can you, though? Is there a vendor of the suit in question who will accept an ounce of gold in payment? It strikes me that one would need to convert the gold to an amount of the local fiat currency before spending it.

Re:Deceased owners

[XcepticZP]

Imagine that a large proportion of bitcoins have stopped circulating. Isn't there a risk that lots of them could suddenly resurface, make some enormous purchases and increase the monetary supply significantly overnight?

Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss. The system will regulate itself. As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.

Please can you honestly tell me your reasoning for wanting to control the money supply? You do realize that by controlling the money supply, you are effectively devaluing other peoples' money, that they earned. I say that, because no one will want or suggest for us to decrease the money supply. Frankly, I think a lot of people are just obsessed with it from years of listening to the Fed and politicians talking about influencing the economy, purchasing power, consumer spending, and who-knows-what-other-fancy-measure of the economy that they can pander to the public with.

Re:Deceased owners

[pla]

I am a Bitcoin developer and have been for years. Your entire theory is garbage.

Okay, fellow Bitcoin dev - Explain to me what happens when (not "if") someone can generate a given SHA256 hash, and why that doesn't let an attacker write arbitrary transactions into the block chain?

Not talking about actually cracking the ECDSA pair here (though that would certainly satisfy my claim, and it too will eventually become possible) - I just mean the ability to spoof the hash on the PaytoPubkeyHash transaction to match the provided PK. Bam, transaction validates, done.

Or do you base your assertion on merely trusting an NSA-designed hash to remain uncrackable forever? If so, I can't help but notice that not all in the BTC dev community share your optimism, judging by how often the topic "should we switch to SHA3 yet" comes up.

Re:Deceased owners

[Xylantiel]

As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.

No, as hoarding grows, value grows and the incentive to spend DECREASES. It is startling how clueless about macroeconomics most bitcoin proponents are.

Hoarding currency is bad because currency itself has no value, it is only valuable as a means of exchange. Monetary policy exists to prevent individuals from hoarding so much in aggregate that it hurts the overall economy (including them). Excessive hoarding causes currency instability. If nobody can buy/sell goods, including food, because the value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month or year to year, everyone starves, including the "rich" (i.e. the hoarders).

Re:Deceased owners

[Kijori]

Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss. The system will regulate itself. As hoarding grows, the value of the currency grows, and so incentive to spend increases.

I don't think this really answers my question. I understand that people are free not to spend their money.

However, if the value of bitcoins grows a great deal, in part due to the money supply shrinking, shouldn't we be worried that some of that money could suddenly come back?

The reason could be completely benign or it could be intentional manipulation. Either way, isn't it a danger of the "divisibility rather than expansion" approach?

Please can you honestly tell me your reasoning for wanting to control the money supply? You do realize that by controlling the money supply, you are effectively devaluing other peoples' money, that they earned. I say that, because no one will want or suggest for us to decrease the money supply. Frankly, I think a lot of people are just obsessed with it from years of listening to the Fed and politicians talking about influencing the economy, purchasing power, consumer spending, and who-knows-what-other-fancy-measure of the economy that they can pander to the public with.

I don't understand this. That I worry about one aspect of bitcoins doesn't mean I automatically support everything about the alternative.

I don't accept your assertions, but I'd rather not get sidetracked since I don't see the connection to my question about bitcoins.

Re:Deceased owners

[Austrian Anarchy]

In the 1950s it seemed to be not abnormal. And the point was about money "disappearing."

Re:Deceased owners

[JesseMcDonald]

... at one point the amount of bit coins lost will be greater than the remaining ones and the value will plummet.

Care to explain your reasoning here? Scarcity would make the value rise, not plummet. And due to unlimited divisibility (assuming appropriate adjustments to the protocol to allow more than eight decimal places) there will always be enough bitcoins to go around, no matter how many are lost.

Re:Deceased owners

[mozkill]

The interesting thing about the divisibility of bitcoins is that the need for divisibility arises from scarcity, or in other words, arises from deflation. So, the currency is not designed to inflate like fractional currency, but rather to DEFLATE . This is a huge difference between Bitcoins and other archaic currency systems. Also, Bitcoin already has built-in protocols to transfer money if you die and don't respond to deadman switch emails. Also, if you keep a copy of your bitcoin wallet in a safe, then beneficiaries can access your coins. There are probably other ways as well. So, I don't see it as a problem. Whatever future Bitcoin banking service that you use would obviously set up these precautionary measures for you.

Re:Deceased owners

[ultranova]

It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.

Actually, I think Bitcoin has conclusively disproven this myth about deflation: even when Bitcoins were gaining hundreds of percents the economy get going as usual.

The concept of a deflationary spiral is based on a false assumption: specifically, that people prefer long-term gain over short-term one. That's simply not true. And it's pretty obviously untrue, since otherwise no one would buy a computer, pad or smartphone today since you can get a better one tomorrow - technology has a constant deflation, yet that doesn't seem to result in a halt to sales.

Mind you, this has a lot of implications outside of Bitcoin economy, too.

Re:Deceased owners

[ultranova]

Secondly, economies are not a fixed size and (in general) tend to grow - in the case of bitcoins, at some point the economy will likely be growing faster than the total number of bitcoins in circulation, and when that happens we get deflation. Very few people would argue that deflation wasn't a very bad thing.

Bitcoin economy has grown faster than the amount of coins in circulation for most of its existence, as shown by the price going up, yet the bad things don't seem to be manifesting. So I guess the very few people are right on this one.

Re:Deceased owners

[XcepticZP]

However, if the value of bitcoins grows a great deal, in part due to the money supply shrinking, shouldn't we be worried that some of that money could suddenly come back?

The reason could be completely benign or it could be intentional manipulation. Either way, isn't it a danger of the "divisibility rather than expansion" approach?

The divisibility only comes into play because there are fewer bitcoins, or a greater need/demand for them. As the value of the bitcoin grows, certain commodities/services will cost a whole lot less in terms of bitcoins. As far as I know, the divisibility only means I send you 0.0001 for something that used to cost 0.01 bitcoins. Perhaps at some stage, people will even come up with different "names" for the divisions. Kind of like a cent is 0.01 of a dollar.

But I can't really answer your question without knowing why you think this sudden jump in money supply is bad. These things happen, have happened, and could happen to a lot of the commodities and currencies out there. The question is, why must there be some sort of mechanism in place to dampen the effects of a sudden increase in money supply. That's why I asked, and eventually went off on a tangent.

On a side note. The "expansion" approach you suggested as an alternative has the major downside that only a specific subset of people get the influx of currency. They get the most 'benefit' out of it as the prices have not taken into account the extra currency in the market, and as the currency diffuses into the system, each subsequent entity gets less of that benefit until the prices stabilize. In the "division" approach as you call it, the benefits are first given to the hoarder. But remember, that hoarder lost the utility of that currency for all that time he hoarded it in order to somehow drive up the value, when he could have spent it in exchange for tangible goods/services.

Re:Deceased owners

[peragrin]

When it becomes harder and harder to acquire something it values only increases to a point(a ridiculously high point ) however bit coins have a finite shelf life. when all the coins have been mined, and nothing new is really being added, the amount of lost coins will overtake the value of the remaining coins. Cash currency works because new cash is being generated continuously. Even if the Fed cut back on bond buying, etc. they would still be printing new cash to offset losses of broken. Bitcoins have a finite limit as to how much new can be created.

Lastly bit coins are funny. they start at 21 million coins and keep making them smaller and smaller which is possible but really screws with pricing. you sell a service for 1 bit coin and then 1/2 a coin and 1/4 etc. Trying to price out a service and one week later your either charging double, or triple the rate.

Don't get me wrong bit coins won't devalue overnight. they have many years left. Then a new version will come out and bit coins will crash a couple of years later.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

[No, as hoarding grows, value grows and the incentive to spend DECREASES.]

And you know that for a fact how?

[It is startling how clueless about macroeconomics most bitcoin proponents are.]

And you don't seem to know any better.

[Hoarding currency is bad because currency itself has no value, it is only valuable as a means of exchange.]

Yes, government fiat currency has no intrinsic value.

[Monetary policy exists to prevent individuals from hoarding so much in aggregate that it hurts the overall economy (including them).]

Monetary policy exists because bankers had a plan to stay in control of the world's money supply and protect themselves against their own excesses. Keynes (and later on Milton Friedman) were just convenient to their cause.

[Excessive hoarding causes currency instability.]

Really? Excessive currency printing causes instability.

[ If nobody can buy/sell goods, including food, because the value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month or year to year, everyone starves, including the "rich" (i.e. the hoarders).]

Firstly, "hoarding" does not necessarily cause volatile short-term currency fluctuations. Quick changes to interest rates, however, do do that. And where is your scientific research that unequivocally equates the "rich" with "hoarders?"

Re:Deceased owners

[Gonoff]

To complexify it for you then...

120 years ago, you could take one ounce of gold, convert it at the "going rate" to your currency of choice and buy a nice suit.

Today, you can take an ounce of gold and convert it at the current rate to your currency of choice and buy a nice suit.

How's that?

Re:Deceased owners

[ultranova]

Those coins still belong to someone. If that person/group chose to not use those coins and have them sit idly and uselessly by, then that's their choice and their loss.

The problem is that if someone controls, say, 1/10th of the buying power in the entire economy, any move they make will have an effect on me and thus becomes my problem. The current worldwide economic crisis is an excellent example: most of the people getting hurt had nothing to do with the whole affair but got to suffer the results all the same. And of course that makes them angry, which in turn is causing social instability.

Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility. That's why financial regulations exist, and that's why removing them results in the rich behaving like cartoon supervillains. You get to choose whether you buy bread from supermarket; you don't get to choose whether you buy all the bread from a country and tell the residents to eat cake. The only question is whether you're stopped by regulation or by a guillotine.

tl;dr civil society stops being civil when you start throwing enough weight around.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you being too hasty with generalizations? Currently whole Bitcoin economy is on the scale of a few Walmart stores ($50-100M in transactions daily - Walmart Inc., for comparison, has ~$1.3bln of daily revenue) with huge parts, 20-50%, some days up to 70%, of it concentrated in currency exchanges - of course it will be booming especially in periods of huge rate changes when half of its users are very much aiming for short-term profits from currency speculation.

And obviously, people _are_ interested in long term profits, otherwise there wouldn't be long-term investments and all these Bitcoin thread wouldn't be full of people crying over 2% yearly inflation eating in their under-mattress savings.

Re:Deceased owners

[Kijori]

The divisibility only comes into play because there are fewer bitcoins, or a greater need/demand for them. As the value of the bitcoin grows, certain commodities/services will cost a whole lot less in terms of bitcoins. As far as I know, the divisibility only means I send you 0.0001 for something that used to cost 0.01 bitcoins. Perhaps at some stage, people will even come up with different "names" for the divisions. Kind of like a cent is 0.01 of a dollar.

But I can't really answer your question without knowing why you think this sudden jump in money supply is bad. These things happen, have happened, and could happen to a lot of the commodities and currencies out there. The question is, why must there be some sort of mechanism in place to dampen the effects of a sudden increase in money supply. That's why I asked, and eventually went off on a tangent.

I suppose it depends on what role you are imagining for Bitcoins. If they are a way to move money from one currency to another - broadly the role they have now - then maybe it doesn't matter. If your transactions are instantaneous then the value of your "exchange medium" isn't important.

If you are trying to design a currency, however, it's very important.

The direct problems are to things like futures, options and really any investments. Currency volatility makes all these unattractive. I'm sure it's possible to design around the problems, but you're still going to have increased complexity and uncertainty; both of those translate into higher charges. As an example, if I want to issue bonds in Bitcoins against a backdrop of possible swings in the value of Bitcoins, then I'm going to have to pay a higher rate on them as a result. That's a big problem.

The indirect problem is that uncertainty, in general, is bad for business. If you want to pay me in bitcoins, I'm going to charge you more, because the more bitcoins I have the more exposed I am to the risk of a sudden increase in the monetary base. For something very big the uncertainty might be completely fatal: if there are eventually 5 million "shadow" Bitcoins that aren't circulating, every transaction is made against the risk that someone controls a large number of them and can manipulate the price of the currency. Not a big problem for buying groceries, perhaps, but a very big problem if you're buying a chain of grocery stores.

On a side note. The "expansion" approach you suggested as an alternative has the major downside that only a specific subset of people get the influx of currency. They get the most 'benefit' out of it as the prices have not taken into account the extra currency in the market, and as the currency diffuses into the system, each subsequent entity gets less of that benefit until the prices stabilize. In the "division" approach as you call it, the benefits are first given to the hoarder. But remember, that hoarder lost the utility of that currency for all that time he hoarded it in order to somehow drive up the value, when he could have spent it in exchange for tangible goods/services.

You make it sound like they will just give money out - that's obviously not what happens. I accept though that it's not perfect; again I'm not claiming that Bitcoins are necessarily worse, just asking about what seems a disadvantage of their design.

Do note, though, that if someone has a pile of "shadow" Bitcoins then they can add to the money supply in exactly the same way. I may not like every decision made by central Governments, but a world where an investment bank controlled the money supply would be worse.

Re:Deceased owners

[FireFury03]

Bitcoin economy has grown faster than the amount of coins in circulation for most of its existence, as shown by the price going up, yet the bad things don't seem to be manifesting. So I guess the very few people are right on this one.

Bitcoin is not really being used as a currency - it's largely being used as a security (much the same as shares). The Bitcoin advocates seem to want it to be an actual currency - when you have an entire country using it for every day transactions, using bitcoin wallets instead of a chequing account, etc. rather than continually converting back and forth between bitcoins and a real currency, deflation will become a big problem, just as it has with other real currencies that have suffered deflation.

Re:Deceased owners

[JesseMcDonald]

Maybe I'm just dense, but I still don't see anything in your comment to support the idea that increasing scarcity will render bitcoins less valuable. If the divisibility were limited, sure, then I could buy that argument. It would work for gold, for example, because it's hard to handle small quantities (and there is an ultimate limit at one atom). But bitcoins can adjust to work no matter how many or how few there are. For that matter, the idea that the limit is 21 million BTC rather than 1 BTC or 1 uBTC is just a matter of definition. All the bitcoins in circulation will always have a combined value equal to the total Bitcoin economy. What matters is how many you have relative to the total number in circulation—your fraction of the economy.

... when all the coins have been mined, and nothing new is really being added, the amount of lost coins will overtake the value of the remaining coins.

Lost coins have no value. No one can use them. The fact that some coins are lost makes the remaining ones more valuable, not less. There is a finite limit to the number of bitcoins in existence, but there is no limit to their potential value. One uBTC could be worth the planetary GDP and there would still be plenty of bitcoins to go around (though we would have to adjust the protocol to support more decimal places).

Lastly bit coins are funny. they start at 21 million coins and keep making them smaller and smaller which is possible but really screws with pricing. you sell a service for 1 bit coin and then 1/2 a coin and 1/4 etc. Trying to price out a service and one week later your either charging double, or triple the rate.

It doesn't change that quickly. To get a doubling or tripling of prices you'd need to assume that 1/2 or 2/3 of all the coins in existence are lost in the course of a week. That just isn't going to happen. The change would be gradual, and no more difficult to adjust prices for than the current rate of inflation.

Re: Deceased owners

[peragrin]

It seems you don't understand scarcity. Understandable like quantum mechanics it appears normal until you hit edge cases were everything goes backwards.

Let's say the Mona Lisa is the last surviving piece of DA Vinci's work. No notes, books, or stories are left. How valuable is it? The answer is in reality nothing. There is no more DA Vinci, so there is no value in a random old painting. Since we don't know who or what he was the result is the value plummets.

Bitcoin has a finite life. After all the coins are mined. There is no way to inject more into the system. Take cash. When cash was based on gold the value only increased as governments hoarded gold. However it took centuries for value to increase. As we slowly moved away from physical currency to perceived value(banks no longer had to keep your Cash on hand plus interest). The perceived value has rocketed upwards. More value, currency was created in the last 100 years than in the previous 1000.

Bitcoin though unlike cash has a real world limit. 21 million to the 8th power. However as coins are no longer usable(passwords lost, files lost,) the short term value goes up but at one point the number of coins lost will be worth more than the coins in circulation. Shortly after that, bitcoins will crash in value.

Re:Deceased owners

[Austrian Anarchy]

Isn't it inevitable that the total pool of BitCoins would be reduced to nothing as owners die off without passing on their wallets? That was the intent of my original question.

Okay, how about this example. Many a ship sank to the bottom of the sea with loads of mined, processed, assayed gold and silver, yet it did not result in the end of those metals being used as money. Not everybody is keeping the access to their bitcoin with them to their grave, and the ones who do give a modest bit of deflation to this version of money. Another note, people change what they like to use for money from time to time. Sometimes it is salt, other times it is gold, and a not insignificant group likes bitcoin right now. There is no reason to believe that something else might replace bitcoin as a liked electronic based means of exchange.

Re:Deceased owners

[Austrian Anarchy]

This dividing in ever smaller units is not a solution, it doesn't increase the number of bitcoins in existence. It just means that the bitcoins that are still there increase in value - possibly rapidly - making it more interesting for people to hold them instead of spending them, amplifying the problem.

This until so many bitcoins are lost and being hoarded that there is not enough liquidity left to make it a viable currency.

It avoids the problem of one unit of Bitcoin growing in value to the point that hardly anything can be purchased with one or 1/100th of a bitcoin in the case of bitcoin deflation.

Re:Deceased owners

[XcepticZP]

The problem is that if someone controls, say, 1/10th of the buying power in the entire economy, any move they make will have an effect on me and thus becomes my problem.

It's their money, period. Assuming they earned it fairly, in a free and just society you should have no say in how/where/if any person should spend their money, or any of their property for that matter. It matters not how their actions affect the market, and as a consequence you. Because you're drawing an arbitrary and magical line somewhere between "participating in the market" and "affecting the market such that it is detrimental to me somehow, somewhere".

The current worldwide economic crisis is an excellent example: most of the people getting hurt had nothing to do with the whole affair but got to suffer the results all the same. And of course that makes them angry, which in turn is causing social instability.

They sure did have a whole lot to do with it, and they should be the ones to blame most of all. They voted for, and continued to vote for the governments/politicians that caused the mess in the first place. We'd all be way better off if there was no government meddling going on, period. Further down, you speak of great responsibility. Well, the population has great power through the politicians/government, thus it is their responsibility to make sure the politicians/government play nice towards the greater good of society, and as a consequence should share all the blame for the ills that arose from the financial crises.

Money is power, and with great power comes great responsibility. That's why financial regulations exist, and that's why removing them results in the rich behaving like cartoon supervillains. You get to choose whether you buy bread from supermarket; you don't get to choose whether you buy all the bread from a country and tell the residents to eat cake.

Look, I'm not going to debate government vs liberty with you, as you obviously don't believe people should have liberty judging by your views on currency, regulations and the use of "guillotines" to solve societal problems. If you don't leave people alone to do their own peaceful thing, then you're a tyrant and have no moral standing when it comes to "social responsibility" and "civil society".

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

As a bitcoin proponent, I have to ask you to shut up. You make no valid points and only make us all look bad.

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

They just become useless and the price of bitcoins go up since there is less in the pool to use.

Re: Deceased owners

[JesseMcDonald]

Let's say the Mona Lisa is the last surviving piece of DA Vinci's work. No notes, books, or stories are left. How valuable is it? The answer is in reality nothing. There is no more DA Vinci, so there is no value in a random old painting. Since we don't know who or what he was the result is the value plummets.

And you say I don't understand scarcity? That's rich. You're assuming that the Mona Lisa only has value because it was made by Leonardo da Vinci. I'm no art historian, but I'm sure plenty of people would consider that crazy. Sometimes a "random old painting" is just a "random old painting", but sometimes a work of art commands a price for the art itself regardless of who made it. Museums hold plenty of very expensive works of art with unknown authors. The Mona Lisa would probably be in that class even if its author's name were lost to history.

Obviously value depends on both supply and demand. Limited supply won't result in a high price if demand is zero. However, you haven't presented any argument to support the idea that the demand for bitcoins will fall, as a result of diminishing supply or otherwise.

Bitcoin has a finite life. After all the coins are mined. There is no way to inject more into the system.

Bitcoin has a finite time during which more currency is created, after which the amount of currency will remain steady or decline asymptotically. There is no need to inject more into the system. The only reason to have any quantity growth at all, rather than simply fixing the total at 21 million from the start, was to bootstrap the system and ensure the initial distribution was provably fair. (Or at least more fair than starting with all bitcoins owned by the developers—not everyone approves of the way those who were lucky or prescient enough to get involved early on were able to scoop up sizable chunks of bitcoins while they were still cheap.)

Take cash. When cash was based on gold the value only increased as governments hoarded gold. However it took centuries for value to increase. As we slowly moved away from physical currency to perceived value.... The perceived value has rocketed upwards.

You've got this backward. Gold was a stable currency, unlike Bitcoin which is just getting started. That means its value increases or decreases based on the demand for currency; if the supply of a good is constant, as it was for gold, then the price becomes proportional to demand. Changes in the purchasing power of stable currencies reflect the growth (or decay) of the overall economy.

Since the switch away from gold, the quantity of currency has increased enormously, but its value has dropped like a rock. According to the BLS inflation calculator, a good which cost $1.00 in 1913 would cost $23.65 today. That's a 95.8% loss in perceived value over the past century—hardly "rocketing upward".

The economy has grown significantly over that period, of course, but that's due to technological progress—particularly the invention of computers, and widespread automation—and has nothing to do with switching away from gold.

... at one point the number of coins lost will be worth more than the coins in circulation. Shortly after that, bitcoins will crash in value.

You keep repeating this, but what you don't give is any model or reasoning which would explain this miraculous reversal. For that matter, you're trying to compare a unitless scalar quantity (number of bitcoins lost) with an economic value (the worth of the coins in circulation), so your units don't even make sense.

What does the number of lost coins have to do with anything? They're lost, out of the picture. It's as if they never existed. We keep going with the coins that are left, which are worth a bit more than they used to be since they're no longer competing for goods and services with the ones that were lost. Nothing changes significantly. There

Re:Deceased owners

[Maritz]

Even with this new "dark wallet" and their vague claims, blockchains are still public, and it isn't hard for a LEO to put two and two together when there is one place that obviously is laundering money.

I don't pretend to know much about this so forgive me if it's stupid, but couldn't this be trivially circumvented by having lots of smaller wallets?

I imagine some ingenuity could be used in this or other ways to reduce any 'obviousness'...

Re:Deceased owners

[Maritz]

Look, he's a bitcoin developer and he says your theory is garbage, if that doesn't satisfy you nothing will. ;)

Re:Deceased owners

[ultranova]

It's their money, period. Assuming they earned it fairly, in a free and just society you should have no say in how/where/if any person should spend their money, or any of their property for that matter.

And France was Louis XVI's kingdom, but that didn't stop the peasants from revolting, now did it?

They sure did have a whole lot to do with it, and they should be the ones to blame most of all. They voted for, and continued to vote for the governments/politicians that caused the mess in the first place.

Except, of course, most people hurt were not eligible to vote in US elections. I'd also question why you blame the actions of businessmen on politicians, but I figure it's a matter of ideology to you, the same as Soviet Union being a paradise on Earth was a matter of faith for the useful idiots of old. Time will tell whether you of the new era can let go of it before this house of cards collapses.

We'd all be way better off if there was no government meddling going on, period.

Sure thing. Let's repeal all meddlesome laws and see how long your property stays yours without them. Because surely you don't mean it's only meddling if you don't approve of it?

Look, I'm not going to debate government vs liberty with you, as you obviously don't believe people should have liberty judging by your views on currency, regulations and the use of "guillotines" to solve societal problems.

What views? Guillotine - without the quotation marks - is what people resort to as means of curbing abuses when the law fails. It's not "my view", it's what history has shown over and over again.

If you don't leave people alone to do their own peaceful thing, then you're a tyrant and have no moral standing when it comes to "social responsibility" and "civil society".

Indeed. So why do you assert it's okay when tyranny is enabled by economic power?

Re:Deceased owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine keeping money in your pocket was a good investment, because we had an 8% yearly deflation. You'd need very strong reasons to spend the money

Not partcularly... assuming I don't spend ALL the money I have, I can spend some of it today and still be able to afford things tomorrow because the remainder of my money has increased in value.

And if you save the money as an investment, when is the "right" time to spend it if you can expect its value to keep going up? That day will never arrive. Inflation or deflation, people spend when they NEED to spend, and if they can afford it, when they WANT to spend.

Re:Deceased owners

[XcepticZP]

Indeed. So why do you assert it's okay when tyranny is enabled by economic power?

Lol... I don't. You're such a little troll, good day.

Re:Deceased owners

[wvmarle]

If so, it'd truly be the only currency in existence, or that has ever existed, that has seen this problem. And that by itself should be a massive red flag.

Just looking for donations

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a donation ware, riding on the heels of the announcement of "Dark Mail". Nothing to see here

So....

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole project is secretly run by the feds?

Re:So....

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole project is secretly run by the feds?

Shush! We aren't supposed to talk about that!

Re:So....

[F34nor]

No it is run my the illumina arrrrgh.... askldfjgieh

Re:So....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just couldn't help yourself, could ya? Sheesh.

Re:So....

[Maritz]

I admire the determination it takes to click preview then submit whilst being murdered by agents of a shadowy world-government cult. Bravo. Consider the mis-typing forgiven.

Re:So....

[F34nor]

It was death twitches and a tap to click gesture pad.

Nice scam

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how they have no explanation how it's going to work, that the "technical info" link goes to something completely unrelated, and that "trustless mixing" isn't even a real thing in the bitcoin protocol. It's all very Bitcoin.

I'll just assume "trustless mixing" means "donate money to the developer's Pina Colada fund", just like the "contribute now" button.

Re:Nice scam

[kajsocc]

I haven't RTFA--this is Slashdot, after all--but I'm pretty sure that "trustless mixing" is the very same method as described here. This method requires no changes to the bitcoin protocol and I'm fairly certain is in at least limited use today, given that there's been software released to facilitate it.

Re:Nice scam

[Beavertank]

It's more "Cody Wilson" than "Bitcoin". The guy is a shameless attention whore who claims odd political beliefs but is actually doing the things he's doing for the payday.

Re:Nice scam

[osu-neko]

So, your typical bitcoin fan then...

Re:Nice scam

[Wonko the Sane]

I'm pretty sure that "trustless mixing" is the very same method as described here. This method requires no changes to the bitcoin protocol and I'm fairly certain is in at least limited use today, given that there's been software released to facilitate it.

You're ruining someone's troll post by bringing facts into the conversation.

Re:Nice scam

[Maritz]

I'll just assume "trustless mixing" means "donate money to the developer's Pina Colada fund", just like the "contribute now" button.

You'll assume many things over the course of your life; most of them will be wrong, but you will never accept or recognise this fact.

Does it come with Dark Helmet?

[zenlessyank]

It Should.

Re:Does it come with Dark Helmet?

[Austrian Anarchy]

It Should.

At this point it seems to run on dark matter, so that helmet would be a good fit.

Re:Does it come with Dark Helmet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dark Helmet is a person, albeit fictional except in the minds of many 'Spaceballs" fans.. You can google it. It's ok. NSA said A.O.K.

zenlessyank was here but from somewhere else

Money Laundering

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I know that what I was really wanting before getting into buttcoins was a built-in money-laundering scheme. It's important to me that I do the drug lords work for them.

Plus technologically speaking, I don't see how this could work- there has to be some record of who put in what and who gets out what, that record by virtue of existing and needing to be accessed (and thus decrypted) in order for the system to work means that that record makes all the obfuscation meaningless. It's as if a bunch of bank robbers took all their known-serial bills and threw them in a big pit mixed with people's savings accounts, then took out the exact same amount of money. It's irrelevant that the currency they took out aren't the "same ones" they put in, what matters is they stole X amount of dollars and they still have X amount of dollars. Good christ you're dealing with people here, not a fucking computer algorithm that's just going to go "Oh ok well as long as the serials are different carry on then".

Re:Money Laundering

[Anonymous Coward]

More like butthurt that you didn't get in when these were actually worthless

Re:Money Laundering

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a philosophical question, really. Were Enron stocks ever not worthless?
You sure could get a lot of money for them at one point, though.

Re:Money Laundering

[Agent ME]

You have everyone put the same amount of money in, and they all take it out into brand new addresses. Anyone trying to trace the money will see X bitcoins go into the pool along with N-1 other people's X bitcoins, and then N new addresses each take X bitcoins out. Now you have to investigate N addresses instead of 1 address to figure out which owner used to own the original X bitcoins you were tracing.

Bitcoin's transaction history across addresses is very public, so this isn't just about privacy from law enforcement. It's about basic privacy from regular people too.

Re:Money Laundering

[osu-neko]

It's as if a bunch of bank robbers took all their known-serial bills and threw them in a big pit mixed with people's savings accounts, then took out the exact same amount of money.

No. The first important point is that the one taking the money out isn't the same person (or, in this case, bitcoin address) as the one putting it in. If one bank robber throws his money in a bit, and his accomplice comes by later and takes it out, it's really easy for Mr. Police Detective watching the hole to see who the accomplice is. But if the bank robber and a hundred other people throw money into the pit, then a hundred and one completely different people come by and take money out... who's the accomplice? This is what the mixing accomplishes.

Re:Money Laundering

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I'm probably one of the few people on slashdot who have never actually done any illegal drugs in my life (it's extremely rare that I even drink) yet I think drugs of any kind should be legal.

That said, even if bitcoin were created just for the drug folks, more power to them, and more power to bitcoin. Drugs being exchanged for real dollars can and have resulted in decapitations, sometimes with innocent bystanders being hit. With bitcoins the buyer and seller never meet, so it is much safer.

Indeed, bitcoins are the peaceful solution to the violence that the US government has created. Really, do we have to throw people in prison just because some derp who is already useless anyways wants to get high? This is coming from somebody who is generally in favor of stricter punishment against lawbreakers.

Re:Money Laundering

[Maritz]

If you genuinely can't see how it makes the job of tracing the transactions exponentially harder, I don't think anyone will be able to explain it to you.

Ignorant and Stupid

[aaronb1138]

Hasn't the trend with government agencies *especially* the NSA been to more closely track those who act like they have something to hide. Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable and shows to me the taxpayer that they are at least trying to do their job, even if the methods aren't reasonable for the average or the peoples of interest.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute... So you support the NSA's activities? I wonder how many are like you.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable

I don't think government thugs harassing people is at all "reasonable."

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

You're the guy who was arguing in the other thread today that government workers are literally subhuman and deserving of death.

Are you positive that that's what I was actually arguing?

And the joke wasn't about government workers in general, but those who violate our rights.

But I am very, very glad to have them monitoring you.

Looks like we have a principled lover of freedom here!

You might find, if you're sufficiently honest with yourself

"Honest" meaning "Anything that artor3 agrees with."

that you're the one who is being "unreasonable".

I'm not even entirely sure what you're talking about. What I think is unreasonable is when government thugs are harassing people; surely you don't object to that? Your reply seems offtopic to me.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[Bob9113]

Frankly, such a disposition on the part of the NSA is reasonable and shows to me the taxpayer that they are at least trying to do their job, even if the methods aren't reasonable for the average or the peoples of interest.

Similarly, understanding the development of the human genome, it is reasonable for 22 year olds to want to sleep with 17 year olds. Being good members of society, however, they do not. It is that restraint of our baser instincts in service of the common good that elevates us above the animals. The NSA has lost that restraint.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[artor3]

Are you positive that that's what I was actually arguing?

Your response to hearing that a man died was to claim he wasn't a person and that he deserved what he got. So yeah, I'm pretty sure you were saying he was subhuman and deserved to die.

I'm sure you'll get modded insightful again here, and I'll be modded troll or whatever. But that's because Slashdot has become a cesspool of hatred and extremism. That story was tagged "hero". A man walks into a crowd and starts shooting, and you people consider him a hero, and talk about how his victims deserve it.

So yeah, I'm glad to have the law enforcement agencies keep an eye on you. That is entirely reasonable. If there was a group of people declaring black people subhuman and celebrating their deaths, surely that group would warrant attention as well.

Please, I know no one ever admits to being wrong on the internet, but just in the privacy of your own mind, think about what you're doing and saying. Think about what you're becoming.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

Your response to hearing that a man died was to claim he wasn't a person and that he deserved what he got.

Really? Was that truly what happened, or will I have to spell it out for you?

And the latter part wasn't even part of my comment; I said that I felt sorry for the six people who got injured, not that the TSA agent "deserved what he got."

So yeah, I'm glad to have the law enforcement agencies keep an eye on you.

Either I was joking, or I was stating an opinion that I have. If you seriously support government thugs violating people's rights because they hold opinions that you find disagreeable or make jokes that you find distasteful, then I think you need to be a bit more principled when it comes to freedom.

I find people who have a complete disregard for freedom, privacy, and the constitution to be a much greater threat than anyone who makes a joke or voices an opinion that some find disagreeable.

If there was a group of people declaring black people subhuman and celebrating their deaths, surely that group would warrant attention as well.

If such imbeciles were merely stating their opinions, then no, I don't think government thugs should harass them.

Please, I know no one ever admits to being wrong on the internet

That would include you.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[artor3]

You said, and I quote:

"I feel for the six people who were injured."

Emphasis yours, and that's the important bit. The implication, clear as day, is that the seventh person, the man who died, doesn't count as a person and doesn't get your sympathy. It seems that you're now ashamed of what you said and unwilling to own up to it, but you DID say it, so stop trying to pretend otherwise.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

The implication, clear as day, is that the seventh person, the man who died, doesn't count as a person and doesn't get your sympathy.

Exactly; I never said anything about him 'deserving' it, just that I didn't care.

The fact that you're taking that comment literally (or trying) and seriously is rather odd to me.

It seems that you're now ashamed of what you said and unwilling to own up to it

I don't think that's a proper interpretation of my reply.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[artor3]

You said he wasn't a person. Do you stand by that?

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

Yes; I think that TSA worker was an alien. Clearly that comment was meant to be taken seriously, and not just a jab at the TSA.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

Being good members of society, however, they do not.

How does that make one a "good" member of society? Abiding by silly, arbitrary rules automatically makes you "good"?

The NSA is garbage, however.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[artor3]

You're just deflecting now. A man died and you went out of your way to refer to him as subhuman.

Exercise your empathy muscle. Think about this man's family, his friends. Think of the blood pouring out of him as he prays, "Please God, just let me see my wife one last time."

Think about that, and try to remember that even people who disagree with you are still people.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The dude is dead, no point in feeling bad for him, he doesn't care.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

You're just deflecting now.

You're just deflecting now. It is easy to make such statements. Now, stop trying to 'rationalize' the garbage you spewed forth and just admit the truth!

A man died and you went out of your way to refer to him as subhuman.

I don't care. The fact that you're taking this seriously is simply amusing. Do you make a habit out of taking everything other people say literally?

And if such a short, silly comment actually offended you (assuming it even did), then I have to say that that's rather... weak.

Think about that, and try to remember that even people who disagree with you are still people.

Really!? I had no idea.

And it's a bit more serious than mere disagreement, I would say.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[artor3]

I asked if you stood by your claim that this man is subhuman. It's apparent now that you have no intention of answering one way or the other, so I'll stop asking.

I really do hope that you think about what you're becoming. Such a cavalier disregard for the lives of people viewed as "other" is at the core of many atrocities, large and small. Just stop and think, next time you're about to dehumanize someone.

Since you've talked with me this long, I'm sure you want the last word. If so, go ahead and take it.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[girlintraining]

I don't think government thugs harassing people is at all "reasonable."

I suppose it all comes down to which people they're harassing. Nobody's going to say too much if a terrorist gets shipped to Gitmo and spends the rest of his years being beaten for information. And maybe that isn't right -- maybe we should be less vindictive as a society. But nevertheless, who the government targets has a great degree of bearing on how much public resistance it encounters.

After 9/11, thousands of Muslims were attacked in public. There have been several mosque burnings and bombings, and the government has never identified the culprits. In New York there was, until very recently, a "stop and frisk" law that had been proven many times over to be excessively discriminatory towards black people. But nobody complained, because it only affected black people. To quote "First they came for the..." and you know the rest. Everybody knows the words by heart.

But they forget that it's human nature to look the other way, or even smile a little, when you see your enemy (actual or perceived) being hurt... and it doesn't much matter how justified it is. It's called the Just World hypothesis in the academic community... but basically; If we see somebody being hurt, we assume the must have done something to deserve it.

And for this reason... the government can harass lots of people -- just as long as they're the right people. And nobody will say anything. Whether it's reasonable or not... well, that really depends on who you ask.

To the NSA... we're all potential terrorists until proven otherwise. Innocent, guilty... doesn't really matter. To them, they're defending freedom. What's a little harassment in the name of freedom? And here's the thing that really pisses most people off: You aren't so different. So don't act like you are. Just like the NSA, you don't care so much about innocence or guilty (oh I know, you believe you do), not nearly as much as watching someone you don't like get their just desserts. It takes a rare kind of conviction to ideals to defend one's enemy; To put adherence to a belief above individual desire for vengeance. A very rare kind indeed; So much so, that only a handful of people have ever been possessed of it. And very often, those people either inspire us... or wind up dead.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

It's apparent now that you have no intention of answering one way or the other, so I'll stop asking.

I did answer, but for some reason, you don't seem to notice such things unless they're explicitly spelled out for you.

I really do hope that you think about what you're becoming. Such a cavalier disregard for the lives of people viewed as "other" is at the core of many atrocities, large and small.

I have to admit... that is impressive.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

And here's the thing that really pisses most people off: You aren't so different.

It's not that that statement makes me angry; it just makes me shrug. Even if it is true, it's utterly irrelevant. You don't give people powers that could easily be abused if you can help it because they will very likely abuse them.

(oh I know, you believe you do)

So... you say that I--someone you don't know--don't care about whether someone is innocent, but then go on to say that some people do care. Even if it didn't refer to me specifically, it still wouldn't make much sense to me.

While we're telling other people how they think or feel, I will say this: You don't really believe what you wrote. You might say you do, but you don't.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[girlintraining]

It's not that that statement makes me angry; it just makes me shrug. Even if it is true, it's utterly irrelevant. You don't give people powers that could easily be abused if you can help it because they will very likely abuse them.

And yet, if you give nobody any power, then you cannot prevent injustice. Government needs to be bigger than any individual or group that can be a source of injustice, or it will be powerless to prevent it. This argument is as old as civilization. Without laws, there would be chaos. So we struggle eternally with finding a way of balancing perfect order -- which is synonymous with tyranny and oppression, and perfect chaos -- which is mob rule and violence.

It's counterintuitive, but for a group of humans to be at their happiest and most content... there must be a measure of both extremes.

While we're telling other people how they think or feel, I will say this: You don't really believe what you wrote. You might say you do, but you don't.

That's the interesting thing about beliefs though. Social reality is like shining a bright flashlight on a rainy night. Wherever you point it, it creates a cone. The rain, which was random and disorganized before, suddenly assumes a specific shape. And this is how society is organized. Why does red mean stop and green mean go? We all agree on it, and thus it has value. If we didn't, then nobody would stop, or go... it would be chaos. Such as it is with much of our 'justice'. We arbitrarily separate things that are naturally in equilibrium so that we can create meaning.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[dbIII]

The example given didn't look arbitrary to me. Get a teenage girl pregnant and that drasticly changes the options of how she's going to live her life, especially if the guy who got her pregnant is not in any sort of position to support her. It's human nature for 14 year old girls to flirt with older guys they think are cool without thinking much about it or consequences. What makes the older guy a "good member of society" is making sure they think about consequences and not let things escalate. I'm pretty amazed I have to spell something so obvious out, even if the ages are different by country (16 in one, 18 in another). The idea is obvious and the line drawn is where that society finds things acceptable - below that line society will fuck up the life of the girl involved if it becomes obvious what is going on. You don't go around fucking what society sees as children without fucking up their lives if society finds out what that child was doing.

Re: Ignorant and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, I hated having to have self control when I was 22. But I did, and didn't sleep with a 17year old until I was 24.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Artor3, people die in horrible circumstances all the time and none of us give two shits. Syria, Iraq and so on.

This is because we do not know them. Not only do we not know them, but we have no desire to know them either. It is sad that people die and we prefer that they don't if we were given a choice. But we don't feel any sympathy for organizations like the Syrian army or the TSA just because they get blown apart or shot. I doubt somebody like you gives a crap if a member of the Mafia gets murdered, but that you also prefer if they don't. It's the same thing here.

We're not all in this together.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

And yet, if you give nobody any power, then you cannot prevent injustice.

And yet, you failed to read the very thing you quoted. "if you can help it" implies that you should only do so when absolutely necessary for society to function.

That's the interesting thing about beliefs though.

What's with this garbage? It doesn't even seem relevant to my original point.

Re: Ignorant and Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

What you fail to grasp is, the only difference between a tsa agent and a nazi soldier is what their commanders instruct them to do. Tsa agents act a-moraly as evidenced by their behavior. Unfortunately, people like you do not realize this until you are being loaded into the boxcar. At which point it is to late and you quietly whisper "how could this have happened". So keep on defending tsa agents as if they are not accomplices to the militarization of a nation.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[sI4shd0rk]

Get a teenage girl pregnant and that drasticly changes the options of how she's going to live her life

You mentioned nothing of pregnancy, and the same is true for people above 17. The mere fact that you sleep with someone does not mean they're going to get pregnant; there are ways to prevent that from happening.

You don't go around fucking what society sees as children without fucking up their lives if society finds out what that child was doing.

Society has many arbitrary, illogical rules. And by the way you made that sound, it's society that fucks up the lives of the 'children,' not the sex.

I don't care what anyone says; it's not as if people below 18 are innocent little snowflakes and that it's magically 'wrong' to have sexual intercourse with them.

Re:Ignorant and Stupid

[_Sharp'r_]

Except of course, when traffic lights stop working, people still navigate intersections just fine without them. They don't degenerate into car chaos...

What you're missing is that order is a prerequisite for law and government. You can't form a government unless people have already created social order. It's not the other way around.

People create order in society. Society doesn't create order among people. "Society" isn't a thing with an existence and will outside of the individuals within it.

Or the C.I.A. method.

[MRe_nl]

Cash In Advance.

Secure, anonymous, and hard to trace - including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together.

Re:Or the C.I.A. method.

[cultiv8]

Cash isn't that hard to track.

Re:Or the C.I.A. method.

[Anonymous Coward]

...including a protocol called "money laundering" that gets you nailed as an accomplice to whatever was happening with that pool you laundered your money with...

Bad news.

[girlintraining]

including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."

I got some bad news; The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed. But I mean, whadda expect... the government likes getting paid. Kindof a lot. And so they have entire divisions of the government setup to make sure they can track down people who try to hide money from them and, well, make them pay.

But for the moment, let's ignore all that. Some crypto-anarchist hacked something together over the course of a few weekends and that's all solved. Great!

Next question: The NSA is evil and watching everything, except of course this, which is totally impregnable and would be pretty much the terrorist currency of choice... what compelling moral, ethical, or technical arguments can you provide that dropping my "money" into a e-blender and setting it to frappe will result in delicious privacy juices coming out in the same quantity as I put in, and is totally resistant to attack? I've learned in security that you can get either tamper-evident, or tamper-resistant... but trying to get both is enormously difficult. So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on having the necessary robust auditing and controls necessary to ensure that transactions are fair and correctly executed, while at the same time dropping the ledgers into your e-blender... while trusting the now-anonymized agents utilizing such a thing not to find some way to exploit the system... using the system itself to cover their tracks?

Re:Bad news.

[PRMan]

The obvious answer is that it will result in the Feds seizing the entire account just like they did at Silk Road. Anyone who puts their coins into such a mixer is not very smart.

Re:Bad news.

[kajsocc]

So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on...

Supposedly, like this. It has its limitations, of course, but it's pretty neat.

The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed.

Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.

Re:Bad news.

[girlintraining]

Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.

More to the point.. coin mixing did not prevent the Feds from identifying thousands of people who used the service and were able to match realworld transactions to their bitcoin equivalents. In fact, from what I can tell... it wasn't much more than a slight irritation to their forensic accountants.

The fact is that crypto-anarchists may be very good at code, but they're very bad at high level analysis. You (and the crypto people too) need to understand that if you take a hundred people, walk them into a room, and they all empty their pockets and record the cash they throw into a giant bin on a ledger, and when everyone has gone through, they line up again and take money back out... which is effectively what the 'perfect' mixer would do... you aren't improving the anonymity of your cash expenditures by that much.

Your anonymity is not dependent on where you got the money from but rather who you're giving it to. It's the spending of money that destroys your anonymity, not the acquisition of it.

Re:Bad news.

[gman003]

Silk Road failed through secondary methods. The actual mechanism was solid, it's just that DPR was sloppy while setting it up, enabling regular investigative work to find him. I will note that we haven't heard of Silk Road clients being arrested en masse, which means they probably haven't been able to track down many of them. They caught the operator, shut down the site, and seized a large amount of money, but the fact that they haven't been arresting left and right the drug dealers who used it means they aren't getting much information from it.

Basically, all someone needs to do is do the exact same thing Silk Road did, except avoiding leaking information on other bands. Use a secure email, don't even think about the site on unencrypted channels, establish a completely new identity for running the site, etc.

Re:Bad news.

[kajsocc]

You (and the crypto people too) need to understand that if you take a hundred people, walk them into a room, and they all empty their pockets and record the cash they throw into a giant bin on a ledger, and when everyone has gone through, they line up again and take money back out... which is effectively what the 'perfect' mixer would do... you aren't improving the anonymity of your cash expenditures by that much.

You're right. In security parlance that's known as the anonymity set. For bitcoin mixers, this set is usually pretty small--not only are not many people using them anyway, but you also have to find people using them at the approximately the same time. For the silk road, at least some transactions I looked at, the size of this set was basically one. (Oops.) I think the "ideal" for coinjoin would be to have these transactions going on all the time in the background, and for every transaction, so that the set is much larger.

Your anonymity is not dependent on where you got the money from but rather who you're giving it to. It's the spending of money that destroys your anonymity, not the acquisition of it.

Yeah, this is often true. However, there are some counterexamples, e.g. virtual goods and services. The point of the coin mixers is to disassociate all illicit activity from all legitimate activity, such that any real world names, addresses, or other PII are tied purely to legitimate accounts.

Re:Bad news.

[girlintraining]

Yeah, this is often true. However, there are some counterexamples, e.g. virtual goods and services. The point of the coin mixers is to disassociate all illicit activity from all legitimate activity, such that any real world names, addresses, or other PII are tied purely to legitimate accounts.

The accounts were legitimate to begin with. Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex. And real world names, addresses, etc., are all what you need to complete a transaction for virtual goods and services. There is not a lot that you can do online that at some point doesn't require some form of identification. It may just be a username and password, or a cookie, or a data file somewhere that just points to an ip address... but everything you do online leaves a trace of you behind.

It's as Sherlock Holmes said: Nobody can enter and leave a room without taking something with, and leaving something behind. This is the foundation of all forms of forensic analysis... and running your money through a mixer doesn't improve your anonymity.. it actually harms it. It's like trying to go through a forest unseen... if you step on a leaf and crumple it, your attempt to put the it back the way it was before leaves an even bigger footprint than had you simply continued.

If I were to anthropromorphize the NSA, FBI, or [insert big bad here], it would probably grin contentedly at these crypto-anarchists attempt to create anonymity. The very act of attempting to anonymize yourself separates you from others. It provides a unique datapoint. It's like the leaf you stepped on. Find enough, and I can pick up your trail.

Re:Bad news.

[drinkypoo]

I will note that we haven't heard of Silk Road clients being arrested en masse, which means they probably haven't been able to track down many of them.

You're making at least two mistakes. The first is believing that the government really cares about tracking these guys down. That's not the case. They would like to track down enough of them to look like they care. The second mistake is believing that they work that fast. They don't. They work inexorably, but slowly, dire need aside.

Re:Bad news.

[Agent ME]

The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed.

The Silk Road didn't do trustless mixing. They did run a mixing service, though it was successful at that. DPR got caught because he advertised The Silk Road on an account that was publicly linked to his personal email address that had his full name in it.

Re:Bad news.

[kajsocc]

It's like the leaf you stepped on. Find enough, and I can pick up your trail.

I would look at it differently. It's like the leaves are stepped on by many people. If I can identify the exact set of leaves that you stepped on, I can pick up your trail. But if you're mixed in with a lot of other people, identifying that set is much more difficult, and maybe simply economically infeasible.

Now, if I understand you correctly, I believe a significant part of your argument is that there are many "side trails", shall we say, each obviously tied to your persona in some way, and those can all be grouped together which can provide a much more accurate picture than any single data point alone. This is a good point and pretty important for anyone who is looking to stay anonymous for a long time.

However, if each side trail which links to you is obviously you only at the moment it leaves the main trail of heavily trodden leaves, the best I can do as an investigator is to make note that you're (for example) receiving money from many seemingly random sources, and that I should ask you where that's all coming from, since, you know, money laundering is illegal and all, so you're not doing that, right? That's a problem for you in its own right, but it isn't necessarily enough for me to tie you to other stuff.

The accounts were legitimate to begin with. Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex.

Certainly the money itself isn't good or evil, but pretend for the moment you're an investigator who's identified some illicit transaction, and now you're tracing it. You might say informally that some of the money is "tainted" in the sense that it is involved with (or is the same as) the money used in the original transaction. That is what I meant by legitimate/illegitimate accounts.

but everything you do online leaves a trace of you behind.

Yes, but if you take care, that trace is tied only to what you intended it to be tied to. For example, you can create new usernames and passwords at any time; these are not necessarily automatically tied to your other leaves. On top of that, mixers are intended to help untie things. Your point that they also tie together all the people who would use mixers is a good one; ideally, a mixing transaction would be indistinguishable from a regular one so this would be less of a problem.

That said, "taking care" is often incredibly difficult. It is usually enough to sacrifice some security in exchange for some convenience, but it depends on who you are and what you're doing, of course.

Re:Bad news.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed. " Actually, no it didn't. The tumbler employed by Silk Road worked very well, as was mentioned in the FBI indictment.

Re:Bad news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex.

A very vocal part of the bitcoin community would disagree with you there. The idea of calculating a "taint" value for coins (based on whether they were involved in any undesirable/shady activities) and refusing to accept highly tainted coins seems to be a pretty popular idea. This also leads to a strong resistance against mixing services as all they do is spread the taint to previously untainted coins (who have now been involved in transactions with tainted coins), effectively devaluing them (as a subset of the community might no longer accept them as payment).

Re:Bad news.

[girlintraining]

A very vocal part of the bitcoin community would disagree with you there. The idea of calculating a "taint" value for coins (based on whether they were involved in any undesirable/shady activities) and refusing to accept highly tainted coins seems to be a pretty popular idea.

Let us hope then they never discover that almost all of the money they've ever handled contains detectable quantities of cocaine and other drugs. In other words, almost every dollar in circulation has been used to buy drugs.

I love anarchists... they rail against rules but then were they to ever try and live up to their whacky ideas, they'd quickly all die of starvation or similar.

Fungibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like an attempt to improve Fungibility which has potential taint related issues, as well as the related move from pseudonymous to anonymous end points. Mixers aren't perfect, but until we can get the performance and initialization issues with ZeroCoin and related designs sorted out, they are a good tool.

Silk Road fell because it was badly designed, and badly run. It was centralized, and involved too much trust in the central party. With trustless mixers, and decentralized reputation systems, a much more robust and secure direct peer to peer system could be implemented.

Unless you use your real e-mail address

[F34nor]

Or use your real name in the Word file metadata that you attach... I love it when smart people do dumb things.

Re:Unless you use your real e-mail address

[Anonymous Coward]

Word file? I guess we have different definitions of smart people.

Deflationary spiral, oh my!

[Okian Warrior]

Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.

Heavens, what will we do? (Now grasping at pearls and frantically trying to fan my face.)

It's almost as if... dare I say it... the economy would be based on value instead of money!

No, that can't possibly happen. We have to do exactly what we've been doing - anything else would be unthinkable.

(What you've been taught to believe is not logically consistent. Think it through.)

Re:Deflationary spiral, oh my!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not increasing the monetary base, and just using appreciation leaves open a huge hole for a deflationary spiral that stops any exchanges from happening.

Heavens, what will we do? (Now grasping at pearls and frantically trying to fan my face.)

It's almost as if... dare I say it... the economy would be based on value instead of money!

No, that can't possibly happen. We have to do exactly what we've been doing - anything else would be unthinkable.

(What you've been taught to believe is not logically consistent. Think it through.)

Do you even know what deflation IS? Or value... or money??

Re:Deflationary spiral, oh my!

[osu-neko]

(What you've been taught to believe is not logically consistent. Think it through.)

One should practice what one preaches.

what makes BitCoin super extra secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where exactly does the extra security come? It all still begins with standard internet protocols right? So, what makes BitCoin super extra secure?

Re:what makes BitCoin super extra secure?

[Agent ME]

Uh, what do you expect them to use online besides internet protocols? Magical protocols?

Re:what makes BitCoin super extra secure?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you don't have an actual answer either. The point is, there's nothing untraceable about BitCoin. The mining might be secure but the user end activities aren't.

Re:what makes BitCoin super extra secure?

[gl4ss]

I think you're mixing up secure with secret.

if you want to keep it secret, then you need to mix up it enough to make it unfeasible to prove that you used some coins that you put into the system... which is sort of the point in this here thing this article is about.

The one problem with this.........

[Anonymous Coward]

.....is that CODY WILSION is a FED.

The "april fools" joke where he fraudulently used insignia of several federal agencies to misrepresent himself is in itself a federal felony. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........I WONDER why he never got slammed with that one, considering he'd been thumbing his nose at the BATFE and others before hand. Trust me, they dont' hesitate when there's a legal foothold, no matter how petty.

Time to Fork Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll make our own Slashdot.
Without all these stupid Bitcoin stories.
Possibly with hookers and blackjack.

Who's in?

Re:Time to Fork Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

blackjack

Online in the US? Good luck doing that without Bitcoins.

Re:Time to Fork Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Option 1: Scroll past the ebil bitcoin story, and don't post in the comments (lol yeah right)

Option 2: Make your own slashdot, maybe with user-contributed stories, voted on by users, a firehose-type setup maybe?

Screw Cody Wilson

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, screw him. He's an attention whoring fool who knows just enough to be dangerous without actually knowing enough to contribute anything useful.

So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[dbIII]

So after trying to fuck up 3D printing by attracting the attention of law enforcement to the possibility of making guns from something with inferior mechanical properties for that purpose than most types of wood, he's trying to get their attention with bitcoin?

How much attention should we really be expending on this guy? Is he just an attention seeker? He obviously knew fuckall about guns or 3D printing, how much does he know about the bitcoin pyramid scam? Does he even spot it as a scam or does he really think it's the fictional currency from Cryptonomicon come to life?

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

can you provide a single source of a gun made from wood firing many live rounds in succession?

i looked... i couldn't find one. i found TONS of 3D printed guns with videos firing live rounds.

are you just an attention seeker? who is "we"? you are NOTHING.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[dbIII]

Please read my post again. The mechanical properties of many types of wood are indeed superior for the purpose than the plastic used in 3D printing. Just because hardly anyone has bothered to make a gun out of wood for the last few hundred years does not change that no matter what your ignorant gut feeling is.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[DNS-and-BIND]

He just wants attention by doing the most outrageous acts he can think of. It worked for PETA and other extremist organizations, the media falls all over them every time. Can't blame him for copying.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[swillden]

The mechanical properties of many types of wood are indeed superior for the purpose than the plastic used in 3D printing.

Cite?

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[dbIII]

If you care at all look up the properties of the plastic used, compare them with hardwood and learn for yourself instead of being lazy. The alternative is me putting up links that you'll never trust because you'll assume I'm biased in some way.
I doubt you'll need to look beyond wikipedia.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[swillden]

Nice evasion.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[dbIII]

Here you are then you lazy person:
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/physical-properties-thermoplastics-d_808.html
Note the yield strength of ABS is around three orders of magnitude lower than the hardwoods here:
http://www.woodworkweb.com/woodwork-topics/wood/146-wood-strengths.html
Got it?
Do you see the massive difference that I'm describing now?

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[swillden]

I'm not sure what numbers you're comparing, but I don't see any comparables between those two pages. You mention yield strength (tensile yield strength), which your first link puts at 7000 psi for ABS, but your second page doesn't have any tensile strength listings.

I googled tensile strength of wood and found some nice charts here. They're expressed in kPa rather than psi, but if I take the highest number I can find on the list for "Tension, perpendicular to the grain", which is 7000 kPa, (for American Beech) and converting to psi, I get a tensile strength of 1015 psi -- nearly an order of magnitude weaker than ABS.

Of course that's tension perpendicular to the grain. I would assume that tensile strength parallel to the grain would be higher, perhaps even higher than ABS (or perhaps not, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt), but the anisotropic nature of wood is a problem. Not only do you have to be very careful about the direction of the grain when engineering high-strength parts, but you also run the risk of hidden flaws which may make it even weaker than you expect, and being a natural product consistency is also going to be a problem.

Clearly, though, plastic is at least in the same ballpark as hardwood for tensile strength.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[dbIII]

The fabrication from powder results in porosity (lots of little holes) which decreases the strength even more, as well as there being directional effects.
However the point I have been attempting to make is that the material is so unsuitable that it is worse than something that nobody has made a serious attempt at using to make guns for several hundred years.
Anyway there are far better sources than the two quick links I found in less than a minute while somewhat angry that a person had spent more time calling me a liar than confirming it for themselves.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[swillden]

And yet... the links you found actually contradicted your point. And I never called you a liar, just asked you for a citation.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read my post again.

Once is enough to see that you've already made your mind up about pretty much everything.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[dbIII]

And now you are. And before you were implying it.
Just look it up for yourself you lazy little shit. I'm sick of annoying tools that spend less than thirty seconds learning about the subject matter before they call somebody else a liar, but this is slashdot - where the Visual Basic beginner tells the Engineer they know nothing about materials. Enjoy your smug ignorance.

Re:So after trying to fuck up 3D printing ...

[GuB-42]

Not the best example but : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_cannon

The US is now irrelevant to Bitcoin

[Animats]

There's been a huge change in the Bitcoin world recently. There are now exchanges in China where you can buy Bitcoins for yuan very easily. This is a big deal, because exchanging yuan for other currencies is tightly restricted by the Peoples Bank of China via the State Administration of Exchange Control. Bitcoin provides a way around those restrictions.

This has caused a huge run-up in the price of Bitcoins. That could change at any moment if the People's Bank of China issues "guidance" on Bitcoin. There are comments from Bitcoin users in China that the acceptance of Bitcoins by a small subunit of Baidu was incorrectly interpreted as a signal from the government of China that buying Bitcoins was now OK.

"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."

Re:The US is now irrelevant to Bitcoin

[wvmarle]

"The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away."

That's a saying typically heard in Guangdong. Didn't know Baidu is from there. I do know there are for a long time already plenty of "underground banks" (more accurately: money exchangers) that make moving money between the mainland and Hong Kong fairly easy. And that's from well before Bitcoin made it possibly even easier.

However the fact that the is quite little liquidity in bitcoin (as proven by the volatile price) means that this bitcoin channel has highly limited capacity.

Re:The US is now irrelevant to Bitcoin

[Anonymous Coward]

Guangdong,shmangdong....
joogle barge is fraudulently floating on the backs of the proletariate and the small-to-mediums-scale "investors".
juST LIKE ODIGO, ONAVO,AMDOCS,AKAMAI, et al, et horribilis.....secrecy in the interest of whom, precisely?
according to us coast guard, "BB" Netanyahu is captaining the barge of bogus benefit,bad bothersome bloodsuckers in the data-tax-investor wormhole called "Tel-Aviv banking.
do not sing to the choir, Yellin!

Re:The US is now irrelevant to Bitcoin

[greg_barton]

Right. China is sure to be fair and even handed when dealing with bitcoin...

Re:The US is now irrelevant to Bitcoin

[Maritz]

There really should be an 'incoherent post of the day' award. Bonus points for tinfoil-hat paranoia.

Logical Flaw in Headline

[ttucker]

The service is accessible to everyone. Federal agents are people. The service is accessible to federal agents.

Now doubt trying to hide revenue

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no doubt that these guys are trying to hide revenue from the government to avoid paying taxes.

Money for the State

[prefec2]

It looks like many of the slashdotters have a problem with the federal state or states in general. They are seen as an unnecessary obstacle to freedom. They seek freedom as in anarchy where there is no government and of course no rules. You could state that people could still agree on rules, but in any case these rules deteriorate over time, as some people do not follow them. Furthermore, rules are not really part of an anarchy. Therefore, losing them is not a problem. But the end would be very unorganized.

We, therefore, invented the state. In history it was pushed on us buy kings and other sorts of dictators, but since the enlightenment, we developed democracy (which really needs more progress). In a real democracy the common rules are defined together and enforced by the state. Furthermore, the state is an organization formed by the people of that state to guarantee human rights. These common interests need funds, therefore the state must be able to collect taxes. A totally untraceable currency would hinder this resulting in a poor state. A poor state cannot protect people and cannot guarantee that common rules are followed, resulting in no rights for people with no money and all the rights for those who can pay for it.

However, I understand that there is a lot of mistrust towards the state. IMHO the solution is not to hide the money from this state, but change it. A good state is controlled by the public. Therefore, the state must guarantee free access to information and it has to ask the people on many key decisions. Switzerland is somewhat a good example for that. Also the Scandinavian countries and to some extend the rest of Western Europe. In reality not the state is the problem, but its corruption. Therefore you have to fight corruption.

Re:Money for the State

[VortexCortex]

What don't you understand? The state can ask for taxes in the state currency. I can keep track of my finances, and pay them. Regardless of what currency or investment my wealth is in. This is the current system. Bitcoin changes nothing. True, the government needs to trust me to file my taxes honestly, but that isn't any different than currently. Audits Exist.

Now, the main problem I have with states and governments in general is that they're fucking bogus! Seriously. No Scientist would agree to be ruled the way governments want to rule: Let's just roll out some country wide plan with zero evidence it'll be successful based on the speculations of ideologues?! Fuck That! Get me a government that incrementally rolls out changes and evaluates the effects at each stage, making adjustments or halting if detrimental. Get me some Scientists and Engineers in power. Then you'll have a legitimate government. Until then, the government is NOT BENEFICIAL. Any who posit otherwise: PROVE IT. Oh, that would require applying science? EXACTLY.

Re:Money for the State

[mellyra]

Seriously. No Scientist would agree to be ruled the way governments want to rule: Let's just roll out some country wide plan with zero evidence it'll be successful based on the speculations of ideologues?! Fuck That! Get me a government that incrementally rolls out changes and evaluates the effects at each stage, making adjustments or halting if detrimental. Get me some Scientists and Engineers in power. Then you'll have a legitimate government. Until then, the government is NOT BENEFICIAL. Any who posit otherwise: PROVE IT. Oh, that would require applying science? EXACTLY.

Beneficial to whom? to the largest number of citizens? to the median citizen? to those who are worst off (Rawls)? ...

Already you are talking ideology - unless you stick to strict Pareto improvements which will not allow you to take any actions in the real world.

Once you allow for trade-offs ("this guy is worse off, but those guys are better off and they clearly outweigh his loss of utility") you enter ideological hell as there is no sound basis for comparing utility between persons. Public economics likes to ignore this issue or pretend that all citizens share the same utility function but everybody is well aware that this is a completely unreasonable assumption (the problem is that the only alternative to sacrificing reason would be to shut up about matters of public economics almost entirely and answer "it is impossible to say" whenever the politicians come asking).
Even trying to employ crutches like Sen's capability sets won't help you as these (while a little less amorphous and more easily measured than utility), too, are way too limited to be of practical use - you can only compare two capability sets when one is a subset of the other (and they don't lend themselves well to mathematical treatment)

Where is the rational (as opposed to ideological) basis that would allow you to decide on matters of public policy that will leave some people better and other people worse off?

The total amount of Bitcoin doesn't decrease

[Taco Cowboy]

Would someone please explain what happens to BitCoins whose owners die without passing on their wallets to successors?

Until someone can work out what the password / key is, the bitcoins will be unable to be used by anyone else -- the value of the remaining bitcoins will probably increase.

The total final amount of Bitcoins will stay at under 21million. At least that's the plan.

No matter how many of those 21 millions Bitcoin got locked inside the ledger, due to lost and/or forgotten keyphrases, the TOTAL AMOUNT of Bitcoin still stands at 21 millions.

The one that is reduced is the amount of Bitcoins in circulation.

To say that Bitcoins will experience a "deflation" is misleading, because although the amount of Bitcoins in circulation might become less and less, the amount in the ledger does not change !

The most likely outcome of Bitcoin is that when the amount in circulation gets down too low, people will abandon Bitcoin and start using other kinds of virtual money - such as Litecoin, or Worldcoin, or Realcoin - for serious transaction purposes.

Re:The total amount of Bitcoin doesn't decrease

[JesseMcDonald]

To say that Bitcoins will experience a "deflation" is misleading, because although the amount of Bitcoins in circulation might become less and less, the amount in the ledger does not change !

When talking about inflation or deflation, it's more appropriate to reference the amount in circulation than the amount in the ledger. Money which isn't in circulation can't impact prices, and money which has become completely inaccessible might as well not exist at all.

The most likely outcome of Bitcoin is that when the amount in circulation gets down too low, people will abandon Bitcoin and start using other kinds of virtual money....

There is no such thing as "too low". Rather than abandoning Bitcoin, people can just use smaller units (mBTC, uBTC). As the amount in circulation decreases, the value of each unit increases to take up the slack. Bitcoin could work equally well with a steady-state limit of 1 BTC rather than 21 million BTC. It's really all just a matter of definition and perspective.

Re:The total amount of Bitcoin doesn't decrease

[Maritz]

I found your posts in this thread much more compelling than those arguing with you; but I feel I should point out - it's not always going to be clear cut what's 'in the ledger' and what's in circulation, surely?

I suppose after a certain amount of time, several years at least, you could provisionally consider them out of circulation. It'd probably work best if broadly agreed by all parties.

Re:The total amount of Bitcoin doesn't decrease

[JesseMcDonald]

it's not always going to be clear cut what's 'in the ledger' and what's in circulation, surely?

Agreed, but so long as it's only in the ledger and not in circulation it shouldn't have any significant influence on prices. The same principle applies whether the funds are permanently lost or merely hoarded temporarily.

Saying that money is in circulation is just another way of saying that it's being used to bid for goods and/or services. Money which is lost or hoarded isn't part of the effective demand. Naturally, vendors still need to find the price which balances supply and effective demand, which takes some time, so there is a period of adjustment whenever the amount of money in circulation changes. However, it's not necessary to know which money is available and which isn't; the normal process of price discovery bypasses all of that in the course of finding the price which maximizes revenues.

Karma

[Radtastic]

Watching a mattress full of cash go up in flames may seems like karma for not disposing of it properly. Burning it (and probably leaving the coils and remnants behind?) Not cool.

Honeypot

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a honeypot to me

Rawls

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the flaw in Rawls' theory of justice. Another way to think of it: for a situation in which triage is necessary, "the worst off" before the triage and the "worst off" after the triage are disjoint and the theory is impossible to apply.

Re:Rawls

[femtobyte]

This is only a flaw with Rawl's theory if you assume the goal is some "perfect" level of equality on the finest-grained scale, which is a silly oversimplification. Someone working from Rawl's "original position" of not knowing where they'll end up in society won't necessarily demand a society with mathematically perfect equality, where no one at all might get a tiny bit ahead by luck --- just one where no one ends up as child slave labor sweatshop workers.

I consider the main flaw with Rawl's approach one of implementation --- in practice, a bunch of rich, white males aren't actually going to be able to set their privileges aside and "neutrally" consider the best outcomes for changing the world for the better. That's why I prefer various feminist and anarchist approaches that, rather than stressing "idealized game theory" solutions, emphasize actually giving the poor and oppressed a voice in the discussion.

trustless mixing?

[Anonymous Coward]

wait, there is no trust in mixing bitcoins? i need to trust people/services before i send them my bitcoins. i'm sticking to the QT client even though i need to download a bunch of data every week. (synchronizing with blockchain)

No thanks.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want shitcoin. It's too volatile, and way too easy for rich people to control the entire market with very little real world money.

Consequences forced by the community

[dbIII]

And by the way you made that sound, it's society that fucks up the lives

You wanted to know why it's OK for a sixteen year old in some places and not in another, where they have to be eighteen, and that's the answer. That's why it's "magically 'wrong'" - the neighbours make it so, and historically the chance of getting pregnant is the driving force behind it because that's when the perceived shame on the community becomes obvious.

There's still a lot of "the scarlet letter" lurking within the minds of many communities, especially in the USA where there was huge outrage over the nipple slip at the superbowl and the one that got the blame was the woman with the exposed nipple and not the guy that ripped her top off. Making a child the brunt of such outrage is wrong no matter what you think of the morality of which birthday is acceptable. That's why I thought the above was a good example - you keep it in your pants even if the hot teen is all over you because society will come down on her like a ton of bricks, even if they think it's perfectly OK at that age the next country over.
Did I explain that well enough? I was trying to put it in terms of possible consequences.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[sI4shd0rk]

You wanted to know why it's OK for a sixteen year old in some places and not in another

I did? I just said that it was arbitrary and silly.

the neighbours make it so

I don't think the neighbors can do any such thing.

That's why I thought the above was a good example

It should take far less restraint to not violate people's rights than to voluntarily sleep with someone under 18.

What I really objected to was the implication that to be a "good" member of society, you have to follow every single silly, arbitrary rule that exists within it, whether or not they're logical.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[dbIII]

I don't think the neighbors can do any such thing.

That's how you get outcasts, sometimes assisted by enforcement of laws and sometimes just people throwing their relatives out on the street with nobody else taking them in.

a "good" member of society

Society decides that and enforces it with sometimes arbitrary rules that may not be logical (like differing ages of consent). That's why I think this is a good example. Getting found out about in a relationship with a 17 year old could mean jail for you and out on the streets (or even dead in some places) for her, or in other places it's not even a big deal since 16 is the age of consent.

Getting back to the original point the NSA is not even coming close to being a "good" member of society. They are going so far from accepted arbitrary rules that with a consent analogy they are doing the equivalent of raping five year olds at gunpoint.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[sI4shd0rk]

That's how you get outcasts

Lots of people really seem to hate things or people that are different, so probably.

Society decides that

Society hardly ever comes to unanimous decisions about anything. Furthermore, what about people who oppose 'unjust' laws that may be 'good' for society in the long run? You're only considering what the current society feels about them.

They are going so far from accepted arbitrary rules that with a consent analogy they are doing the equivalent of raping five year olds at gunpoint.

Those rules may be arbitrary, but they're also very logical.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[dbIII]

You're only considering what the current society feels about them.

Which is because that is the point that I am attempting to convey! Arbitrary lines drawn for rules matter when consequences happen if the arbitrary line is crossed. Drink wine at 18 in one place, 21 in another, not permitted at all in yet another place, OK for kids in moderation at another - all arbitrary but society with the agency of local law enforcement forces the arbitrary line on people that get seen crossing it. Those that don't are seen as "good members of society" as mentioned a very long way above.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[sI4shd0rk]

Which is because that is the point that I am attempting to convey!

But not what I'm talking about, and the guy who I originally replied to never got into specifics. The problem I have is that this line is reasoning is too simplistic.

If you only want to talk about the here-and-now, then you have a point.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[dbIII]

It's not about specifics!
Dealing with the failures due to education cutbacks from Reagan was bad enough but you bunch of failures due to cutbacks under Bush are very difficult to communicate with. I suggest reading a lot instead of being happy with the very poor hand you have been dealt.

Re:Consequences forced by the community

[sI4shd0rk]

It's not about specifics!

Hence why I replied the way I did. That "good members of society" bit was nonsense, as far as I'm conconered.

I suggest reading a lot instead of being happy with the very poor hand you have been dealt.

Now what are you talking about?

Typo

[dbIII]

Stiffness (youngs modulus) has the massive difference and that is an important property for a gun barrel. Strength doesn't vary quite so massively but there is a large difference.

Zerocoin

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to be better option.

Generating arbitrary hash

[DrYak]

Explain to me what happens when (not "if") someone can generate a given SHA256 hash, and why that doesn't let an attacker write arbitrary transactions into the block chain?

Not a bitcoin dev myself, but a few basic knowledge of cryptography due to work in unrelated field.

SHA256 (or more precisely the SHA256^2 form used in bitcoin) is proven to be broken (Like for example MD4 or older).
Meaning that you can instantly (or with very few work) forge any desired hash sum, instead of needing to brute force it (as currently done).

In this case:
* the whole bitcoin network falls completely, be cause it relies on SHA256^2 being non trivial.
The attacker won't be able to write arbitrary transaction in the ledger, because there won't be any ledger to write in, by that point bitcoin will be utterly broken.
* In fact, there would be a lot of problems as SHA256 is used as building blocks in tons of other situations (message authentications use it for example)

Now, the thing is, SHA256 has been around for quite a while. No actual attacks have been found on it despite lots of research.
SHA-3 was called into development, not because the current generation of SHA is broken, but because there's a market for a better hash function with additional features (namely: SHA256 has never ever been resistant to extension).

If SHA256 shows any signs of not being up to the desired security, chances are that it will be progressively abandoned and replaced by something more suitable, long before these signs have time to evolve to actual practical attacks. (Just like got MD5 replaced by SHA-1)
You can therefore presume that SHA-2 will probably get progressively replaced by SHA-3 in most security applications.
And crypto-currency users will probably have long transfered their focus toward Scrypt-based crypto-coins like LiteCoin for example (currently the most popular Scrypt based one).

So, if SHA256^2 gets utterly broken, chance are nobody will be creating arbitrary blocks, because by then people will probably be doing Scrypt-based blocks.

Or do you base your assertion on merely trusting an NSA-designed hash to remain uncrackable forever?

Forever: nope, probably not.
For the forseeable future: probably yes.

SHA256 might have been *approved* by the NSA, but it has been developed/researched/studied by numerous people outside of NSA's reached. And for know, it has stood quite well all this scrutinity.

I'm not saying that SHA is unbreakable for ever, I'm just saying that this proves its quite solid.

(Compare the situation with the controversed "Dual_EC_DRNG": it's quality HAS been questioned for a long time by independent researcher long before the Snowden leaks)

(Compare again with DES. Even if NSA kept it secret on its side, independent research did discover "differential cryptanalysis" too.
NSA *does have* extremely intelligent people on its pay-roll.
*BUT* NSA doesnot have the monopoly on brains. Other big brains are probably working in some scientific gulag for FSB or MSS, or working in a university, etc.)

Also given the current robustness of SHA, it might take quite some time before it gets reduced to shamble.
So very probably we'll have enough advance time to move to SHA-3 (for e-banking and Bitcoin 2.0 thus pissing off all people who bought SHA256^2 specialised hardware), Scrypt (as in LiteCoins and co) or something entirely different (PrimeCoins ?!)

If so, I can't help but notice that not all in the BTC dev community share your optimism, judging by how often the topic "should we switch to SHA3 yet" comes up.

SHA3 was not developed to increase security of SHA256. It was developed to add newer features that SHA256 lacked from day 1 (extension resistence).

I repeat: SHA256 is currently not broken and in desperate need of getting replaced by SHA3.
It's just that SHA-3 is better.
But SHA256 is still safe to use until enough scr