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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.)
Of your comment, at least, 23/25th ( by word count) or a whopping 92% were copy-pasted or downright stolen.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Wasn't "Satoshi Nakamoto" an unknown author before publishing "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"?
Or am I missing a joke?
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.
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).
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.