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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 !
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 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."
Governments not only back money, they also want to control it. For good reason (at least good from their point of view). At the very least they want to control its flow. Money is a tool for control, maybe the easiest. You can incite people, you can convince people, you can inspire people to do your bidding, but the easiest way to make them do it is money. Given enough of it, you will almost certainly find enough people to do what you want to happen.
Now, if you not only control who you can give money, but who anyone else can give money, control is yours. Not only can you make people do your bidding, you can deny others the same.
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
We need a way to move money anonymously, and we need it right this minute.
1. Cash
2. Barter
3. Disposable credit cards purchased with cash
But what about Bitcoin? It allows you to stow away massive amounts of money in an untouchable way... kind of nice but it's not without its problems. Is it in society's interest that people can move huge amounts of money without them or the government knowing? It can be very much to our detriment, such as being unable to stem the proceeds of crime that flow out of a country into another, unable to check the movement of money by foreign government sponsored subversion, and so forth. I know that nobody has been realistically able to stop the illegal transportation of gold, but why should we make the task of money laundering easier than before?
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Bitcoin money transfers are not anonymous. They're pseudonymous - at best.
A good example is wikileaks itself. In order to receive donations, it needs to have a public address. They have, and it's completely transparent - we can see exactly how much Wikileaks has received at that address: 3,795.80380943 bitcoins. They have a balance on it of 1,111.97135027 bitcoins, or roughly a million dollars at today's prices.
Think about it. There's no economy that's more transparent to the public than the bitcoin economy. And that's a good thing. In the conventional economy, banks, credit card companies and governments can see more than we can see in the block chain, but it's completely hidden for us.
Stop trying to fight or deny the transparency of bitcoin. It's a strength, not a weakness. Governments could have effectively stopped bitcoin payments to wikileaks too, by making it a crime to give or receive money from wikileaks. Since everything is so transparent, that would have been really effective. But it would also be bare-faced tyranny. It's much more convenient for them to be able to suppress wikileaks by having private companies make the decision to not offer service, officially on their own.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
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.