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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.
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.
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.
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.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349198.0 and here is how it works: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=353971
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
and
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.