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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/
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.
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.
It's disappointing that Stallman buys into this pipe dream.
Bitcoin worked (works) because it's not anonymous. Fundamentally, if you have dirty coin, you need someone with clean coins to help you. There's no reason people with clean coins should help you.
The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike!
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?
Stallman should accept that sharing and modifying software is one thing, sharing and modifying information that is used as a token of agreement (passwords, signatures, contracts, licenses, "written by Richard Stallman" notices etc.) quite another.
Transfer of property claims are not a private matter - not if you want everyone else to respect those property claims.
From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
Paper money still exist and it is anonymous by design, cheap and accessible to everybody on earth, not just the tech-haves. Technology is not always the answer.
Tomorrow is another day...
In many countries, it's illegal to make paper money transactions over a certain amount of money.
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...).
...
Reminds me of how RMS wants Emacs to become WYSIWG [gnu.org], but seems opposed to using existing solutions, or implementing it himself, or actually making a feature list or design for it himself.
Maybe you missed that whole GNU project thing. He contributed so much he can barely type without a special low pressure keyboard anymore because his hands are ruined from all the contributing ungrateful fucks like you ignore. Now he contributes the best way he can via public awareness, speeches, etc. When he's dead I bet you'll be bitching about how his corpse doesn't even advocate for free software anymore.
When I was a teen I only new a little ASM and some BASIC. I wanted to make games with smooth scrolling graphics, but BASIC was too slow. I complained on local a BBS's BASIC board about the predicament and the sarcastic response was, "If BASIC is too slow, make your own damn language." So, with only a rudimentary knowledge of x86 assembly, and not a single programming lesson, I did just that. I had wasted months of fighting to increase performance of my BASIC program: It only took a couple of weeks to make an interpretor and then a simple compiler for my language and it faster than BASIC (didn't need a runtime.exe either). It had just never occurred to me that I could make my own programming language -- or anything wholly in ASM for that matter. My sarcastic friend was impressed and surprised that I had heeded his bad advice, and we both sold software on Compuserve built with my language for years afterwards, no expensive C compiler / license required. The point is that making a suggestion, or getting the idea out there is sometimes all it takes to cause something to spring into existence.
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.
So, he's good at what he does, and though he doesn't claim to do the grunt work of implementing or designing stuff anymore, we shouldn't expect him to? Gotcha. Additionally: You're essentially in agreement with RMS if you think that we need a workable anonymous crypto currency -- You essentially said so yourself by mentioning that Zerocoin has performance problems. Hey, maybe a protocol that was built for anonymity from the ground up wouldn't suffer such performance problems? His advice when re-implementing a UNIX tool is to aim for different goals. If theirs is fast, aim for less memory consumption instead; If theirs is processor intensive, aim for stability instead; or vise versa -- This way the implementations will be very different even if they serve the same ends. In other words, what RMS and I know is that just because Zerocoin or BASIC exists doesn't mean there's only one way to skin the cat.
In many countries, it's illegal to make paper money transactions over a certain amount of money.
In other countries; the US included -- it is illegal to make paper money transactions over a certain amount: without filing a Cash Transaction Report (CTR), or under other conditions (e.g. A transaction $0.01 less than the reporting threshold; or multiple transactions suspected to be a structured transfer), a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), with the feds.
"In the case of digital currency, there is no short-term benefit for swapping coins, but there is no loss either."
Are you kidding? There's a major loss; making theft virtually untraceable and thus making theft considerably more attractive. Now even the not-so-clever criminals in western easy-to-reach-by-the-law countries can get in on the online theft game. Not just those that are good at hiding their tracks or are in countries that won't cooperate with your own country's police.
If someone steals your digital coins, they may end up virtually (ha!) anywhere, with little or no chance of ever find them again.
This is what we had with a cash-only economy, except much, much worse, since the thieves don't have to be physically close to you or your money. For most people, moving away from a cash-only economy has had the great benefit that their accumulated wealth is much better protected.
Also, corruption (which anonymous currency is fantastic for) is hardly a "friendly thought-crime which doesn't affect others".
The same applies for cash, but people dont hesitate to use it. They dont really see it as clean cash and dirty cash. Cash is cash.
In the [banana?] republic of Italy.
No personal, or business transaction (no matter if invoiced or not, no matter if you are doing transaction with the State itself) in paper money over 999 euro is allowed, and if you own a no profit the limit IIRC is 516 euro. It is possible to deposit whatever amount to banks and let them do the transaction.
Officially to combat crime and fiscal evasion.
Electronic money is more anonymous faster and more dangerous than paper money, once those handling it are powerful enough to trade internationally. Nothing has been done on that front. Therefore I guess the measure was to benefit the banking system in the short term, and the effects till now seems to confirm it. Those who could have been hampered by tracing have enough resources to resort to middlemen, obviously.
In the UK, and probably across the EU, it is not illegal, but there are laws that make it practically impossible.
Over a threshold (10k GBP, 15k euros I think), there are additional reporting and documentation requirements for cash transactions. It's enough hassle, and risk, for the recipient that you will struggle to find anyone (legitimate) that will take that much in cash. You could insist that you think it's your legal right to pay that way, but then you risk them calling the police who will simply confiscate the cash, because anything over the same limits they can assume is "proceeds of crime". Sure, you can go to court and try and get it back, and some have succeeded, makes your lawyer a lot richer though, and is not exactly anonymous...
In theory, you can still carry cash, and make transactions, over the threshold level, but in practice you risk being considered a criminal for doing it, and effectively you cannot do it anonymously [which was the aim of the laws].
In the Netherlands, a man was recently controlled by police ( routine identity control, the police need not even give a reason for the control, but that is another chapter of the nascent-police-state discussion ). He carried € 30,000 in a plastic bag with him, and could not provide immediate proof for the money's origin. He was arrested. Only after a couple of day, when nobody could prove the money's illegal origin, he was released. Without the money, which remained at the police precincts. Injustice ? Yes. Police state ? Yes. But this anecdote adds another bit of momentum to Stallman's plea.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
But cash is hard to automate. Washing $100 you stole from someone's wallet clean is easy, you just go shopping. But washing $1 mio. you picked up in a drug deal or bank robbery isn't that easy anymore.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Besides, who will accept so much cash if he's not allowed to put it on a bank account afterwards?
I'll gladly accept it.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Cash transactions and deposits attract immediate suspicion. Even withdrawing an amount in cash is restricted in most countries.
Officially this is to crack down on crime and money laundering, but unofficially this is so that it is less likely there will be runs on banks and because electronic transactions are much easier to track.
Even withdrawing an amount in cash is restricted in most countries.
Mostly for practical reasons. Banks don't like keeping enough cash on hand all the time for customers to make large withdrawals, so they put a reasonable limit on what each customer can withdraw in a day. You can usually get more with advance notice.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That is one of the classic tradeoffs when it comes to freedom. There are all sorts of activities that people both want for personal freedom but are also used by bad people to do, well, bad things. Sometimes it makes sense for the general population to have a freedom restricted in order to make it more difficult for a minority to use that same freedom to hurt people. Other times it doesn't.. and while people will often site extreme examples one way or the other, usually it is a non-trivial trade off.
What I find sad is how many people fight the middle grounds, attempts to find a balance between people keeping their general freedom while still trying to do something to reign in the bad actors. Much of the debate around CTRs is like that, something that disproportionately makes things more difficult for criminals but people still fight it on philosophical personal freedom grounds.