Slashdot Mirror
Richard Stallman Criticizes Bitcoin, Touts a GNU Project Alternative (coindesk.com)
Richard Stallman doesn't like bitcoin, and has never used it, reports CoinDesk:
To Stallman, bitcoin isn't suitable as a digital payment system. His biggest complaint: bitcoin's poor privacy protections. He told CoinDesk, "What I'd really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible for me with bitcoin." Using a crypto exchange would allow that company and ultimately the government to identify him, he said.... Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he'd gotten an expert to assess their potential, and "for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability." And speaking broadly, Stallman continued: "If bitcoin protected privacy, I'd probably have found a way to use it by now."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.
Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....
Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.
Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....
Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
The GNU Foundation plans to release Taler alongside Hurd 1.0.
#DeleteChrome
The funny thing about them, is they're even WORSE than existing crypto algorithms. We have a hard deadline of 2023 before quantum computers can break pre-quantum algorithms with vary slightly modified versions of Shor's algorithm based on a decade-old linear trend in qubit count. That means we are looking at just a few years to get everyone switched over to post-quantum algorithms. Post quantum algorithms are largely shit because they have at absolute best (smallest) signature sizes of 31KB, which has it's own set of issues (specifically, about 4-8TB/year of signatures on transactions which you can never delete without voiding the integrity of the blockchain, which from a logistical standpoint will lead to centralization.) Post quantum algorithms have another MAJOR failing: there is no such thing as a post-quantum algorithm which supports blind signing. It can't be done in a provably secure manner, there is some (very sketchy) research suggesting lattice based cryptographic algorithms MIGHT get there, but there is no proof those are even secure against traditional computers at the current level of development.
TL;DR: This is FUD, there are no post-quantum blind signature algorithms known at this time, at least systems not relying upon blind signing have some (terrible) methods available to them to patch the system and make it post-quantum safe, something based on blind signatures doesn't even have a roadmap beyond the next 4 years.
Its private, supposedly, but by design it requires a centralized authority and also by design it can easily be controlled and shutdown on the merchant end anytime the powers that be want. So in other words we have a boondoggle johnny come lately with the worst of both worlds neither the governments or the antigovernment side wants or needs. Maybe Stallman fried his brain some years back toking MJ and thats why he's changed from OS pioneer to jumping on and trying to split the difference on every hipster and SJW tech trend these days.
If you think Bitcoin as a payment system, you are missing the point. Bitcoin is a store of value; 'Lightning' is the payment system of Bitcoin and 'Lightning' can scale without issue. 'Layers' are the answer.
Wait so Stallman wants privacy, but also wants the State to be able to investigate crimes? That sounds suspiciously like "privacy for my use case and noone else's". Furthermore, being able to send money anonymously STILL allows money laundering: "Yeah I sent that money to my restaurant chain, employees paid in cash. Why no I don't own any banks in the Caribbean, why do you ask?"
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
ummm I think you somehow misread that. It is that bitcoin completely LACKS privacy.
Crypto is a hipster tech trend. Claiming you don't want a CoC and then putting up one (not as bad as Linus but still) which demands gender neutral pronouns is an SJW techtrend. Stallman has done both more and more over recent years.
You are missing the point of this. It's about preventing companies like Visa and Mastercaard monitoring all your transactions, and about making sure that the government has to follow legal process to get that information.
In other words it's like cash. Semi-anonymous, but the shops you spend it in can be regulated.
Admitted TFA isn't very good, but come on, SJW nonsense? You could at least try to understand it before throwing in such ridiculous claims.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
You don't need to do _perfect_ blind signing.
Ah, yeah, ya do. Crypto is all-or-nothing. "Good enough" only qualifies up to a given window of time, when you're talking about securing a currency a 1/1000 chance is a 100% chance.
You are missing the point of this. It's about preventing companies like Visa and Mastercaard monitoring all your transactions, and about making sure that the government has to follow legal process to get that information.
Have a National Security Letter. We'll take everything please, and kindly remember the part that says you're not allowed to tell anyone.
Seems nobody who's into alternative currencies, whether "blockchain" based or not, understands the principle by which money gets and retains its value, even though it's perfectly simple. No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area. Any alternative currency needs to be widely established and used in production, commerce and the payment of wages, before it gets such an ability, or the value needs to be fixed to an existing 'real' currency with an institution that can reliably guarantee the exchange into that currency.
You expect too much from AC. That information is in the second line of the summary.
No sig today...
So, Monero/Dash/ZCash/dozens others are not enough according to Stallman and thus he intends to create the 4000th cryptocurrency which will be the "best" among all of them instead of fixing the existing ones which have nodes/users/miners behind them.
That will certainly work out.
You are missing the point of this. It's about preventing companies like Visa and Mastercaard monitoring all your transactions, and about making sure that the government has to follow legal process to get that information.
It doesn't do either of those things. It will wind up in the hands of a massive payment processor immediately, and they will share the data with the government. The government is supposed to have to follow legal process to sniff your internet traffic and phone calls, but they do it to all of us without that anyway.
In other words it's like cash.
It's nothing like cash, except that it's serialized.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stallman is absolutely right to draw attention to the privacy-stripping nature of crypto-currency, but this is far from the only challenge that this type of model can experience.
As we saw in Bitcoin trading in early 2018, an even greater threat may be speculation. Earlier this year, investors and speculators all "piled in" to Bitcoin, driving up the value of coins as demand far out-stripped supply. Now, less than a year later, the value of Bitcoins is tumbling to about $3,750, roughly 20% of the value it held at the beginning of the year. That's a shocking rate of loss.
It is worth mentioning the "speculation risk" with respect to crypto-currency, because there is nothing that Mr Stallman has said which gives any indication that his GNU Project Alternative would in any way mitigate the risk of speculative trading. An only slightly smaller annoyance than the speculators would have to be the conversion fees charged by the so-called "Exchanges".
As this MSNBC report from last December shows, some exchanges were charging an average of $28 per transaction. There are examples of people being charged $15 to send $100 in value - which is ridiculous.
This is frustrating for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that Bitcoin briefly had the potential to be something that could bring down the banking hegemony on currency conversions: you convert some of your local currency to Bitcoin for next-to-no overhead... you fly to another country... you convert your Bitcoins to local currency for next-to-no overhead. This, had it come to pass, would have allowed Bitcoin to become quickly established in the world and to also force established financial institutions to offer fairly-priced products instead of creaming fat profits off of travellers.
So even though I'm sure that Mr Stallman and his colleagues will have done some excellent work on enhancing the privacy of their alternative crypto-currency, the simple fact remains that privacy is just one of a multi-faceted problem. In fact, it's entirely possible that different exchanges, working in concert, could price this new offering out of the market by demanding even higher transaction fees (on the basis that they are not getting marketing information out of their users).
The entire "marketplace" looks to be increasingly rigged by "establishment middlemen". Sadly, I don't think that there is any way of circumventing that, at least not within the scope proposed here.
How will it end up in the hands of a payment processor? It's specifically designed to prevent that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
nt
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
My grievances with traditional money supplies are:
Taler does not appear to address these problems. I don't see the appeal.