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RMS Calls For "Truly Anonymous" Payment Alternative To Bitcoin
BitVulture writes "Richard Stallman took time to air his views on the crypto-currency that has become virtually as valuable as gold. In an interview with Russian media giant RT, Stallman praised Bitcoin for allowing people to 'send money to someone without getting the permission of a payment company'. But he also warned against a major weakness of Bitcoin and called for the development of 'a system for truly anonymous payment' online."
Zerocoin is an extension to Bitcoin. It has been implemented in some altcoin(s) already IIRC.
http://zerocoin.org/
RMS wants a totally anonymous payment system but never offer us a clue on how to achieve it.
Give us some clues, RMS. At the very least, show us where to look for the clues, please !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There are so many kinds of altcoins that they are no longer funny.
From litecons to worldcoins to feathrecoins to bbq to your "zerocoins" ... which one of them will survive, and worse, which one of them are pure scams ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Zerocoin is an *extension* to Bitcoin - if it is accepted as part of Bitcoin then it will be part of Bitcoin. Because it has been developed as a library (and documented) altcoins can use it too. TLDR: it doesn't matter which coin comes out on top because they can all use it.
There is another altcoin with the name of "Bitcoin 2".
Yep, they TOO claim to be the extension/I to Bitcoin
But when you talk to people who do serious mining, they'd laughed at that thought.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
So RMS wants the same thing as everyone else in the Crypto-Currency community. Good for him (If only he would contribute something other than a desire...). I only know of one design that gives both anonymity and decentralization, and thats ZeroCoin which has major performance problems (it is not currently scaleable in any practical sense). In my opinion bitcoin does not scale well either, but at least it scales drastically further than ZeroCoin.
David Chaum's Digital Cash provides anonymity without decentralization, and bitcoin provides decentralization without anonymity.
Reminds me of how RMS wants Emacs to become WYSIWG, but seems opposed to using existing solutions, or implementing it himself, or actually making a feature list or design for it himself. RMS is good at taking positions on issues, and does a good job representing his particular viewpoint, but I wouldn't expect much more out of him.
The price of eggs?
Bitcoin has been around for quite a while, and nothing special seemed to be happening with it. Then along came the Wikileaks release of information that genuinely infuriated the United States. All of a sudden, PayPal, several imitators and all the major credit card companies decided not to process donations to the organization.
Time passes, and people who might not want the United States to have final say over their financial arrangements were just starting to move lazily toward some form of anonymous money transfer.
Then the Snowden situation arose, and those people got their noses rubbed in the fact that the kind of spying and control they were worried about in a vague way was on-going, comprehensive, and aimed at everybody from heads of state to some granny who attended an Occupy demonstration.
So they got the message: We need a way to move money anonymously, and we need it right this minute.
Enter Bitcoin. (dramatic music)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The size Bitcoin blockchain is quite problematic. The size is huge. What is really needed is a system where coins outside of circulation lose value so that the length of the blockchain can be easily kept to a manageable size because lost coins will disappear and the amount of history you have to keep (and verify) will be much smaller.
I think the emunie project had an interesting approach to making verification quick and efficient but I can't remember the specifics.
It already exists, it's called bank note and coins, especially the US Dollars. Why try to re-invent the wheel ? It is the main way to exchange goods anonymously in the whole world. As long as enough people believe in and trust its value, it will continue to run. While some anarchist might argue that there is no place for a state controlled money, this argument is not really valid here. That argument has more to do with the fact that too much rely on it. What we are trying to assert here is the level of anonymity of the currency.
There - I said it - PRON coin - thats why we're all here
Isn't paysafe 100% anonymous? ...
Private Online Reserve Notes!
I have no idea how to implement it, but good things should have good names!
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
"But then criminals will have a way to transfer money completely anonymously, too"
Newsflash: They already do. Their "problem" is just that it's costly. They need to employ quite a few mules and split the money. That's fine and dandy if you're getting money from blackmail where it doesn't matter whether you get 90% or 70% of the illegal assets you squeeze out of your patsy, less so if you are trying to run a legitimate business.
What? Oh, why someone would like to buy anonymously even if it's legit what he buys? Well, maybe because he doesn't want anyone to know that he's buying porn or (legal) drugs, that he buys information certain entities do not want him to have. There's plenty of stuff that is perfectly legal to buy, sell and possess, but embarrassing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A truly anonymous currency will only enable the one percent to even more thoroughly hide their money. How will the great the the good acquire the means to do the good work of Government when the money is hidden?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349198.0 and here is how it works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=353971
Depreciation isn't really the right word. You can keep value indefinitely - as long as you move the money periodically. You don't have to actually spend it. Perhaps you could mark some addresses as being "storage" addresses so that people can keep cold wallets without worrying... But that runs the danger of being confusing or people just marking every address and cold storage (perhaps increased transaction fees could discourage this).
Stopped reading right there
I salute the idea of bitcoin but I don't feel like having my life savings pillaged overnight. Also, it's not like gold as some people make out. Gold is a bubble that can never truly burst as it has intrinsic value and thousands of years of use. Gold can and does get manipulated but is never cheap. Bitcoin can be worse than the Zimbabwe dollar in its fluctuations (already shown) and that's no good for sensible economics - it's far too easily manipulated - in the hands of far too few, dependent on a centralized, and increasingly unsecure internet. If I was wealthy, I'd have some bitcoins in my arsenal, but for the average joe, there's really no point. They're not liquid enough, easily exchangeable enough (in reality) for staple goods etc. ,dependable enough, or intrinsically valuable enough. Really, I'm not surprised the Feds legalized them. They're a mobs wet dream - easily pillaged, easily manipulated and ultimately useless. We've gone from the gold standard, silver and bronze to zinc, copper, and then to paper, then to plastic, and now we're finally headed to unsecure monoply money grade bits on a computer. It's pathetic.
But no matter how many times you go on about this, there will be bitcoin pedants that say it's changing and becoming more accepted. That's fine if you're not one of the people that lost 100,000 in the last theft. It's play dough and always will be imo. It's no different to exchanging D&D cards, missions etc. Not for grown ups, or people that live above ground, i.e not in basements.
Ultimately, communists want to take everything from you, and leave you without the clothes on your back. So, there may not be a solution, but real tangible things are the stuff they try to contain. They could give a crap about crapcoins in circulation as they seem to own them already. I mean come on, processing power for scarcity. Talk about playing directly into their hands.
Would that work? Sure, it would work. It would make bikes anonymous, and overcome the problem that they are identifiable (with serial numbers, colors, etc.). The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?
There is a difference between short-term and long-term benefits. In the short term, there is no benefit for someone "swapping bikes". In the case of digital currency, there is no short-term benefit for swapping coins, but there is no loss either.
In the long term however, having anonymous currency removes opportunities for oppression and corruption in government, manipulation and injustice. The bike-swappers enjoy a stronger, more robust government which has less opportunity to screw with their lives.
Of course, every change must be considered in the context of alternatives. Digital currency removes opportunity for manipulation by bad people, but also allows for bad usage. People will buy guns without being traced, people will buy contraband without being caught, and people will buy magazines with unapproved content. We'll have to transition away from "thought crime" ("conspiricy to grow marijuana" is my favourite) to a more "action oriented" crime: people will be jailed not for planning to do things or for researching how to do things, rather they will be jailed for actually doing things.
Whether society is better by big brother guessing our intent or judging our actions is a question worthy of debate. ...but swapping money to achieve anonymity is valuable in its own right.
RMS, I watched the interview on youtube, and I don't think that he understood the anonymity issues of Bitcoin. He's not on top of the issues or the technology.
He has in mind markets with one-sided-anonymity in which the seller is known (a big cooperation) to the buyer while the buyer is anonymous to the seller. Basically he's thinking about online shopping with Walmart on one side and an anonymous buyer on the buyers side. Bitcoin provides anonymity in both directions seller-buyer, which he did not seem to appreciate. Bitcoin allows for anonymous markets and not simply anonymous buying. Bitcoin has the potential to change how we conduct commerce and not simply to facilitate privacy in exiting market structures.
Also, I simply could not understand his statement that "we have had the anonymity technology (his kind of anonymity) for decades". I really don't think that he was thinking of zerocoin.
No system can guarantee anonymity. Bitcoin transactions are completely traceable. On contrast, DigiCash transactions were completely untraceable. However, neither of these statements tells us about how much anonymity one can achieve using them.
When you buy Bitcoin from a company by identifying yourself to them, and then directly transfer the money to, say, a publicly known donation address of Wikileaks, you surely are perfectly identifiable. However, anything slightly more complicated than this quickly becomes impractical to analyze. Even with a considerable amount of data, scientists who claim they can trace identities screw up:
http://www.businessinsider.com/silk-road-satoshi-paper-retraction-2013-11
Sure, they can use the system to try to gather some statistics about usage or try to infiltrate Bitcoin services to accumulate as much personal data as possible, but it's quite easy to fool these systems and people who have something to worry about can figure these out easily.
Let's begin seeing Bitcoin for what it is: A distributed decentralized notarization system. That's all there is to it. You can build all sorts of features on top of this. There are already implemented anonymization solutions, both third party and protocol-level, that work on top of Bitcoin. Or, maybe, what you want is some payment system that supports chargebacks? Sure, that is easy to implement on top of an irreversible payment system; Bitcoin supports different signature schemes at the protocol level. Maybe you don't need a payment system, but want to notarize a document? Sure, you can even use the blockchain to copyright your work. So an and so forth.
It's not that costly if the drug dealer actually work for (or in) the government. It is also not costly if the big banks cooperate with drug dealers. Sure, if the banks get caught, the relevant people will be sent to jail ..... ha haa haaaa, as if.
There should be a sciencecoin attached to a bounty for processing scientific information.
Anoncoin allows the transactions to take place over darknets. You could, theoretically, buy Bitcoins, trade them into Anoncoins, send those Anoncoins to an address over a darknet, then that person could turn those Anoncoins back into Bitcoins and then back into fiat. Much more difficult to trace. It's the only altcoin I actually believe in other than Litecoin. Anoncoin has a unique purpose that people will actually use, unlike say, BBQCoin.
...we call it GNU/Bitcoin?
Stallman needs a new hobby after having run out of people to remind that it's actually GNU/Linux (just ask him!)... plus, he can puff and wheeze about how much better his version is, because it's all free and GNU and stuff.
You forgot to add that Anoncoin uses i2p to implement darknet transfers.
Also, the devs seem to be actually competent.
https://anoncoin.net/
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
> Bitcoin virtually as valuable as gold
Let me translate such new-speak to plain old bardian english: tulip bud frenzy.
To be more verbose: place a vessel full of lead grains onto a six-core, multiple-GPU computer running Bitcoin calculations and wait until the lead melts. Drop some genuine black dutch tulip buds into the vial, while reciting the ten coloumns of the Sephirot in reverse and making sure NOT to think of the white elephant. If you do this while the Moon is in the seventh house and don't forget to add the blood of an unshaven ram, the result will be pure gold.
What? Oh, why someone would like to buy anonymously even if it's legit what he buys? Well, maybe because he doesn't want anyone to know that he's buying porn or (legal) drugs, that he buys information certain entities do not want him to have. There's plenty of stuff that is perfectly legal to buy, sell and possess, but embarrassing.
There's also plenty of stuff that is perfectly illegal to buy, sell and possess, and some for very good reasons. For the embarrassing stuff, complete anonymity doesn't help you hiding stuff from your wife, because she still sees money disappearing from bank accounts and you have to explain that. If she doesn't notice that, then your bank will sell you a credit-card like thing where you have to pay in money and then can use it without anyone else knowing.
It's called cash.
Pretty sure that however many electrons it takes to encode it, Bitcoin's price by mass is a few orders of magnitude more than gold.
Of course, 1 BTC is roughly 9E-8 of the overall supply (4.8E-9 of the theoretical cap); one ounce of gold is about 1.81E-10 (assuming 171,300 tons of gold in total). As a fraction of world supply, that makes gold still about 1000 times more valuable than BTC.
As long as any government or criminal has the will and resources to break a security system, it will. This is a 100% certainty. Obfuscation, encryption, and ambiguity merely annoy and inconvenience the bastards. Nothing will stop them except political and/or law enforcement action. Attempts at technical solutions are just bumps in the yellow brick road.
Given the above, we should be skeptical (OK, cynical) enough to see proposals and products that pretend to solve the problem as just marketing crappola. Somebody is trying to sell something. In this case. RMS is proposing a hurricane-proof fart catcher. Good luck with that.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
A lot of the comments here refer to either bip 32 or ZeroCoin, with their supporters giving each as a solution to bitcoin anonymity. Can anyone describe the differences for the non-cryptographer?
Stallman died and was taken to Heaven. He looked around a bit, sniffed, and remarked that it was okay, but there were some things that needed to be changed to suit his tastes.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
"as valuable as gold" - so 1Kg of gold is about as much worth as 1Kg of bitcoins? How many bitcoins would that be? Or do we now compare the two units 'Bitcoin' and 'Kg' directly, as in "1 Kg Gold of gold has the same value as 1 Bitcoin"?
I think somebody hasn't understood the basic principles of comparability.
I assume anyone could run such a service although it would be predominantly used for money laundering and therefore instantly attract the attention of law enforcement. Zero coin sounds like pretty much the same idea but in a more distributed way, to allow people to exchange money for a token and then redeem that token later, separating the transaction chain.
eMunie looks like a good alternative to Bitcoin. It does not only give a solution to the anonymity issue, but solves a number of other issues with Bitcoin, like the huge block chain size, the long time before a transaction is confirmed and waste of electricity through mining. The start of the production network is expected for the end of January. I'm really looking forward to see if it can hold up to all its promises, but the developer is a really capable and motivated guy (he was the owner of the company that developed NFC used in a lot of smartphones today).
Why does money have to be digital? Cash is pretty anonymous.
I love how RMS is worried about anonymous currency, when he doesn't seem to give a damn about anonymity anywhere else on the net
As much as I would love to keep the US government out of my affairs, I don't think a truly untraceable electronic currency is practical. Unscrupulous businesses could claim that they never received payment when they did, and without some kind of trace you couldn't prove otherwise.
If RMS would wear shoes if we could guarantee his anonymity when he went to purchase them.
Unless somebody is going to re-write IP and get the entire planet to implement it, it's a fool's errand to try to implement an anonymous system on an inherently non-anonymous network.
If you want anonymous, use cash.
I don't respond to AC's.
"Everyone should be calling it GNU-bitcoin" wars.
A money where toe-jam is currency.
and
An anonymous, uncontrollable currency that could easily be exchanged for other currencies in any amount would bring about the Crime Singularity. Right now the last part is all that's keeping Bitcoin w/ payment obfuscation systems from fulfilling the role.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Keep at it, Stallman. I'm sure one day the forces of the Perfect will finally defeat the Very Good.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
It is actually quite easy to do, and RMS has been talking about it for a while, this recent article mentions it in passing and links to something a more detailed reference. Think of those VISA debt gift cards that you can buy today. If you are allowed to pay cash for them without showing ID, then they are truly anonymous (unlike bitcoin), and can be used both online and in person. The systems he has in mind are basically refined versions of that basic concept.
Coming up with a solution like this is like solving a never before solved math problem. You never know if or when someone will come up with a solution. Until someone does it you usually dont even know if its possible. Over the decades i wonder how many have figured "hey lets make my very own currency". If you look at the lack of success stories out there it should be painfully obvious that this is a very hard problem.
And please dont say "look at all the altcoins" - they are just bitcoin copies, differences only in design decisions, not in basic principles. Lets give respect where respect is due, bitcoin is not just a program, its a solution for a very hard problem that has never been solved before. Sure there will be improvements now that there is that first solution out there, but i wouldnt expect some entirely new solution to that same problem any time soon. And for truly anon cryptocurrency you would need a totally new solution.
You cant really build on bitcoin to make it truly anon. Its pseudoanon and if you use it correctly its anonymous enough. Cant really excpect for more because entire system depends on keeping track of every transaction ever - publically. You could centralize the ledger and keep contents secret, but really, that defeats the whole point.
I'd like to propose using the name "CASH". For portability purposes, it should be printed, using ink containing magnetic properties (which should allow easier electronic authentication of it), and on a flexible, durable, flat substance, similar in appearance to common paper, except woven out of more than one type of fiber, preferably with different colors and in a proprietary mixture, so as to give it a distinctive color. Very high-resolution images and security features can be printed onto each individual monetary unit, (which we can call a 'note'), and perhaps even have a specific security feature woven into the fabric of the 'bill' itself, making it more difficult to create fraudulent facsimilies. Serialization of each 'bill' created will further increase the difficulty of creating counterfeits. To conserve the resources necessary to create these 'bills', I propose different designs be created for specific multiples, say multiples of, 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100. This will also allow larger total value to be transported more easily.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
So RMS, How's that kernel going?
You know, the one you and the GNU have been promising for the past 30 years or so.
What a strange world, where on the one hand, people are increasingly paranoid about 'government' or 'corporations' snooping at our private lives, and on the other, the self-same people are mad about iPad, iPhone, Google Glass, etc - all of which are constantly giving away their privacy. And of course, when you point this out in a public forum, you get hit by the mod-censorship. So much for people's love of freedom and the right to speek. Ironic, really.
No. The reporting threshold is completely arbitrary, based upon gross violation of the 4th amendment. Also, purest bullshit including save the children, drug war, "terrists", and so forth. Same with every other government invasion of your papers and finances without probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and backed by a judicially issued warrant.
But hey. It's the US government. Totally out of control, far outside the bounds of legitimate authorization, and way, way more powerful than anyone else. And willing to prove it. On your ass.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If adult entertainment sites accepted it as a way of getting around their endless headaches with credit cards, there'd be a continuous demand for them.
20 years ago RMS would have promised it himself, and you can see what happens there: We have GNU/Linux versus the multiple attempts at an OS collectively dubbed HURD by RMS' folks. Don't get me wrong - the guy was a pioneer with GCC. He did the world a favor with the gnu utilities. But his OS efforts were a failure. By contrast Bitcoin was designed by 1-3 people, tops. Could RMS find some people smart enough to do it and publish it himself? He seems to have punted, and just asked for it to be done. Props to him for knowing where his limitations are.
How do you spend it over the Internet?
Someone in $REPRESSIVECOUNTRY with a stack of unmarked bills can't use it to order the Kindle edition of $BANNEDBOOK. Or to donate to Wikileaks.
For the embarrassing stuff, complete anonymity doesn't help you hiding stuff from your wife, because she still sees money disappearing from bank accounts and you have to explain that.
Did you happen to consider that you might not by trying to hide your payments from your wife, but rather someone else who isn't in a position to expect a full accounting of your finances? Your boss, a coworker, the press, that busybody neighbor... perhaps even a friend or family member you're trying to surprise with a gift.
People have a reasonable expectation of financial privacy, which means mixing services and related protocols have a perfectly legitimate part to play in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Isn't that the guy who went on rant a few years back about how the French government hates open source because he went to France, basically knocked on the front door and said "I'm here to see the prime minister" and when they didn't let him in, he stomped his feet and cried "Don't you know who I am?"
Where I come from RMS means "root mean square".