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

[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

[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

[Your.Master]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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:So....

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole project is secretly run by the feds?

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

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?

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:So....

[F34nor]

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