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Chinese Researchers Propose Tor-Inspired Overhaul of Bitcoin
Patrick O'Neill writes: Although Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous, many of its users have used it as if it were. Now, two prominent Chinese researchers are proposing a system that encrypts all new Bitcoin transactions layer by layer to beat network analysis that can unmask Bitcoin users. The new research is inspired by the Tor anonymity network. The researchers' paper is at arXiv. (Also covered by The Stack.)
It was, however, written by an unknown Chinese author. How much of the paper is truly original, and how much of it was copy-pasted or downright stolen, remains to be seen.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
"Chinese researchers devise method by which clandestine Chinese intelligence operations may be funded"
Tor is not anonymous
Anonymity is an illusion. Given enough resources, everything you do is traceable, back to you.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As long as you use HTTPS and don't get MITM'd by false certificates or use some other secure protocol, the exit node is not the worry. That security is as good as SSH or any other crypto. It's that an adversary with enough resources can do correlation/traffic analysis or even just be the whole chain from start to finish.
If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over public links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity.
If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over private links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity. Because if you're the NSA there's no "private".
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm guessing you mean on the internet, because that surely doesn't apply in real life!
On the internet, your statement isn't true either. I suppose you could say that given enough resources anything you do *might* be traced to you. Whether it actually could be depends on a lot of things like what logs various systems keep, whether you repeatedly engage in the same behaviour, and what exactly you mean by "enough resources". Like does managing impossible feats like controlling foreign hostile computers constitute "resources"?
"Because if you're the NSA there's no "private"."
Depends what country you're in and/or what countries the links pass over. The NSA doesn't (quite!) control the whole internet.
Yes and no. It's about as private as an email address. Everyone can always see which email address send a message (or which account purchased something with which bitcoin), but it's not easily traceable back to a real person. Then again if you're actually buying physical things with bitcoin then you probably had to supply a shipping address, so that's pretty easily traceable right there. Or they'd have to trace your internet traffic back to your computer. If they really want to find you they can.
The big draws to bitcoin were that:
1) It's not controlled by a government (so they can't intentionally inflate it)
2) your 'account' is not controlled by a third party (like a bank) which makes it harder for governments to shut down illegal activities because instead of simply requiring that the banks freeze all payments to $website they actually have to track down and shut off the physical servers in question (and for the more paranoid, it's also impossible for the government to simply freeze / steal your money, a la Cyprus)
3) there are no chargebacks, a spent bitcoin stays spent, so you can't buy something, wait for it to be shipped, and then dispute the charge like you can for credit cards (making bitcoins safer for merchants)
4) bitcoin transactions don't require any secret information (like for example your credit card number), making them safer for customers because you don't have to worry about identity theft
5) nerds liked that you could mine it using your spare cpu cycles and make real money out of nothing more than electricity (not true anymore, the market's been flooded with mining rigs and you are extremely unlikely to make more bitcoin than you're paying in electricity unless you get free electricity).
(of a person) not identified by name; of unknown name.
Given enough resources, you can name anyone who does anything. Anonymity is only as good as the lack of resources allows. Therefore it is an illusion. It may be a practical illusion for many things, but it is still illusion. Same with Privacy.
I am fully aware that my actions are likely being monitored, at least partially, and that I am a known individual for enough things that my actions are neither private nor hidden (anonymous) for most things.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Nope it wasn't designed to be anonymous, it was designed to be uncontrollable and impossible to "counterfeit." Every account's history is fully traceable. Any anonymity has to be between you and the account.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't post as AC when trolling, and I haven't done the cow thing in a long time because I got bored of it.
I've always posted it under my own name.
HTTPS doesn't hide the fact that you're making a connection from host A to host B.
People think tor does that, but it doesn't (and it can't).
That's what anonymity is about. Encryption of the actual traffic is a separate issue (and cert based encryption is absolutely not secure, even with PFS - the governments of the world and the "trusted" root authorities are absolutely untrustworthy).
Let me know when you can operate at the quantum level. Mkay?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
And if you had the fist idea what you are talking about, you would not make such bogus statements.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Anonymity is quite real, you just need to make tacking harder than the enemy can afford to do.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
No. Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous. It is sort-of pseudonymous only, but even that is mostly history.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
One should add that nobody that bothered to find out was ever in doubt about the lack of anonymity. People just assumed it was anonymous without good reason.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Only really if the data exiting the exit node is unencrypted.
If it goes over HTTPS then all the exit knows is someone tried to access a website on a specific IP.
If that IP is say a Google IP then all you know is someone on Tor wants to use Google which gives you nothing.
"NSA was down there with submarines patching."
If you say so. They can't patch every link though.
So untraceable internet transaction, I wonder how long it will be before three letter investigatory agencies start offering free stays in their resort facilities, where entrance is not voluntary and you stay as long as they want you to. You can imagine all sorts of stuff going on offer and all sorts of services being advertised, buy at your peril (pushing the bounds of entrapment but not so much if they use an informant middle person even when they are on commission). Using the currency pretty much puts a bullseye on you for investigatory agencies. Only reason it is still going is 'Spies 'r' U.S.' are hoping to use it to a greater degree for their criminal enterprises.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If Uber were to adopt a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi mining nodes with TOR encryption on the blockchain, while Elon Musk sat in a self driving car that he hacked with a garage door opener, you might have my attention.