Looking for thought on Zerocoin
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My personal view is that of Jeremiel and the 3 letter agencies, while I agree more features are a good thing, they could also be a bad thing, having the option to switch on/off within the client (if at all possible) would be a really good thing, but singling us out with a Belisha Beacon saying; shut this one down first, may not be so. :-\
Another view I have is that I don’t totally believe a digital paper trail will ever really offer total anonymity anyway, no mater how obfuscated it may appear to be, if the 3 letter agencies want you they will find you, and if they can’t then back to my first point above. Having read the Zerocoin paper I notice they state; “A new destination address is [i]preferred[/i] for each transaction”.
But at the end of the day [s]it goes dark[/s] it is up to the community to decide. 8)
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Q: What 2 things contributed the most to the rise of Bitcoin?
A: Silk Road and Cyprus
It is my belief that we are fast approaching a time when people will quickly learn the importance of having an anonymous store of value outside of the traditional financial system. Silk Road is not just about drugs. Silk Road is about the freedom to buy whatever the hell you want with YOUR money anonymously. Cyprus was not about wealthy depositors taking a haircut. Cyrpus was about governments showing their hand - they believe it isn’t YOUR money in the bank, it’s theirs.
By adding the Zerocoin protocol to Feathercoin, people will feel empowered knowing that they and they alone are in control of their money, free to spend it however they see fit, shielded from the greedy eyes of people who believe that what’s yours is actually theirs.
One just needs to look at the public outrage over all the spying scandals to realize that ANONYMITY is a huge concern for people all over the planet. TOR brought anonymity to the Web, and I sincerely hope that we adopt Zerocoin so that Feathercoin can bring anonymity to money.
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Zerocoin is a brilliant piece of technology and a great extension to the existing protocol. It suffers from a severe problem though, and that’s “how and when to use it”, which will leave most users out of it’s potential.
Therefore, Zerocoin makes the most sense when it’s mandatory, when the coins are mixed preemptively as a function of the normal behavior of the client. This was proposed in the Bitcoin2 proposal, and it makes the most sense from a privacy perspective because when it’s done compulsively it eliminates the potential for suspicion, and no one will be left out of it’s protection. Doing so would complete the promise of a truly anonymous payment system.
The down side to such a suggestion is that it eliminates the public nature of the transaction log, unlinking receiver from spender, and making forensic analysis of your spending habits impossible. Some would argue that this is in fact only a good thing, but I know many advertising firms which would beg to differ. The argument goes that by analyzing your spending habits, services can be better tailored to suit your needs and desires. My counter argument to that is such analytics should be opt-in, not inherent in the nature of my payment system and value store. It depends on your goal: Want a currency that makes forensic analysis of the flow of coins within the network trivial or impossible? Personally I vote for impossible, which is why I’m a fan of compulsory Zerocoin mixing, and would support such an implementation, but ultimately the community needs to decide for itself what the larger goals of the currency is.
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[quote name=“Kevlar” post=“24042” timestamp=“1375393137”]
Personally I vote for impossible, which is why I’m a fan of compulsory Zerocoin mixing, and would support such an implementation, but ultimately the community needs to decide for itself what the larger goals of the currency is.
[/quote]Well, if Bushstar doesn’t implement it, I’m downloading your forked version with zerocoin protocol.
;D
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[quote name=“d2” post=“24060” timestamp=“1375400703”]
[quote author=ftcguy link=topic=3136.msg24028#msg24028 date=1375386239]
Q: What 2 things contributed the most to the rise of Bitcoin?A: Silk Road and Cyprus
It is my belief that we are fast approaching a time when people will quickly learn the importance of having an anonymous store of value outside of the traditional financial system. Silk Road is not just about drugs. Silk Road is about the freedom to buy whatever the hell you want with YOUR money anonymously. Cyprus was not about wealthy depositors taking a haircut. Cyrpus was about governments showing their hand - they believe it isn’t YOUR money in the bank, it’s theirs.
By adding the Zerocoin protocol to Feathercoin, people will feel empowered knowing that they and they alone are in control of their money, free to spend it however they see fit, shielded from the greedy eyes of people who believe that what’s yours is actually theirs.
One just needs to look at the public outrage over all the spying scandals to realize that ANONYMITY is a huge concern for people all over the planet. TOR brought anonymity to the Web, and I sincerely hope that we adopt Zerocoin so that Feathercoin can bring anonymity to money.
[/quote]^^
[quote author=Kevlar link=topic=3136.msg24042#msg24042 date=1375393137]
The down side to such a suggestion is that it eliminates the public nature of the transaction log, unlinking receiver from spender, and making forensic analysis of your spending habits impossible. Some would argue that this is in fact only a good thing, but I know many advertising firms which would beg to differ. The argument goes that by analyzing your spending habits, services can be better tailored to suit your needs and desires. My counter argument to that is such analytics should be opt-in, not inherent in the nature of my payment system and value store.
[/quote]Exactly. If people want their transactions tracked, they can publicly post them on their own. I don’t think crypto currencies should be motivated to promote public knowledge of everyones transactions as this does tie us right back into regulation concerns of your money.
[/quote]Yeah… I designed that protocol already. I call it the iPrefer protocol, and it’s designed to tear down the walled gardens of our preferences. I think I still own ipref.org too… Here I’ll just post the brief for your reading pleasure:
Preface: The following proposal outlines a protocol for expressing personal preferences in a potentially very open and unprivate way. It’s designed to be an opt-in protocol where users choose to express themselves, but it can also be used to learn facts about people which some would prefer not to have so readily available. A very likely initial reaction to this protocol is, “Well now big brother really does know everything about me.â€, which is a completely fair statement.
The author proposes that we already do this with walled gardens of information and that we can vastly improve upon this opportunity by standardizing the way in which we share this preference information and in doing so regain control of the underlying data and take back ownership of our personal information. Sometimes the path to freedom requires a bold step forward into the chaos of change.
The following is in no way “completeâ€, simply a brief outline of the idea being suggested with many pieces left as exercises to the implementer.
IPref Protocol Proposal
By Travis SavoI listen to music. I often use Pandora or Slacker Radio to discover new music. When a friend comes over or is in my car, I often say, “Hey, what’s your favorite band/song?†and punch it into Pandora, creating a custom playlist for the visit or ride that’s tailored to their taste. I do this so often I thought about ways to automate the task of remembering people’s preferences so I could pull up playlists by name, but I realized that this was just shifting the problem around. What was really needed was a way for my friends to publish their musical preferences to me in the same way they sent me a picture or text over SMS or email.
And that’s when I started thinking: What if my phone was doing it all the time for me? My friends could walk in the door, and their presence could trigger a shift in the music automatically, adding their musical preferences to the ongoing playlist. But why just at home? At a club, the musical style could be shifted away from trance and more towards hip-hop by a group vote, enacted simply by the presence of the crowd and the things they’ve been listening to on Pandora or their IPhone… no interaction required.
I quickly realized that this should not be limited to music. When go to sit at on my couch, or at the bar, the TV on the wall should switch to the baseball game, or Mythbusters, because that’s what I’ve been watching recently on my TiVo and NetFlix. When presented with a digital billboard, it should show me Alienware gaming rigs, not dresses on sale at Macy’s.
In really advanced scenarios, there’s no limit to the preferences which can be expressed: The bartender knows your favorite drink before you walk in the door. The chef knows you’re allergic to shellfish and walnuts even though you didn’t mention it. The taxi driver knows how to get you home even though you’re too drunk to tell him. The voting machine knows your political preference and highlights it for you to manually select. The party invitation knows your best friend AND your ex girlfriend is coming. The emergency room knows your diabetic before the ambulance arrives. Your iPhone becomes a big Like/Dislike button for your world. Hear a song on the radio and hate it? Get out your phone and press the Down arrow and the musical notes: The phone will Shazam the song it hears and add it to your list of dislikes. Love a restaurant or product? Get out your phone and press the Up arrow and the camera and take a picture: The phone will google goggles or amazon the product and figure out what you’re saying and add it to your preferences.
The problem with the current way we do these things is we do them in walled gardens of information: Netflix and Amazon have no idea that you Tivo’ed Burning Saddles and watched it 20 times, so they can’t suggest Life of Brian to you even though you’ve never seen it and would love it. The voting machine really has no business visiting your Facebook page to find out that you’re a fan of Obama, or then making that leap to suggesting you vote for a democrat based on that information. It’s just wrong on many levels to think of tying preferences together in such a way where each nuanced service holds the preferences for it’s usage, and each nuanced device has to go hunt it down in these walled gardens of information.
Which exposes a further problem with the current walled garden implementation, which is that each preference is expressed in a nuanced way: Facebook: Like or Fans Of. Reddit and Digg: Upvote and Downvote (or digg/bury respectively). Netflix and Amazon: 5 stars. Other systems: 1-10, both integer and floating point numbers, or -1 to +1, with 0 being neutral. Or 1 to 100. Or something else not mentioned here or conceived of in this time.
So in order to solve this problem, what’s needed is a new protocol for expressing preferences: The iPref Protocol.
To start with, the protocol must be open source so it can be adopted by anyone: Anyone can consume, aggregate, and publish the data as they see fit. No one company need own the data, because the data can be published and consumed in a standardized way that’s owned by nobody. It needs to also be extensible in the way preferences can be expressed along all the important dimensions of information: The meta-data about the object for which a preference is being expressed needs to be completely flexible so arbitrary data can be included, absent, or ignored; The way the rating system is expressed needs to be abstract so multiple rating systems can co exist and even overlap (you Like Terminator 3 but you only gave it 3 out of 5 stars; you dislike tomatoes, and are allergic to walnuts).
In addition to a standardized protocol, a standardized discovery and retrieval mechanism is absolutely critical in order to promote seamless interactions between preference providers and consumers. The discovery mechanism should enable manual publishing as well as automated discovery based upon things like proximity and intended destinations; The TiVo lists your favorite programs first, and the party host knows you’re coming and you’re a fan of football and vodka.
One could envision using a preference aggregation service in which all services published and retrieved their preferences through a single preference mediator, effectively tearing down the walls of the metaphorical garden. That means that when I gave Sex in the City The Movie one star on Netflix, Amazon would stop recommending the sequel, Tivo would not suggest the reruns any more, and the TV at the bar won’t change the channel to E! when you sit down. This preference mediator could be built and operated by anyone using any mechanism since the protocol is open source, allowing users to complete the act of freeing their data by owning 100% of the server and code that stores and makes it available. Facebook would become a portal for such a service, not actually needing to own the information so much as display and link it together.
The protocol needs to be structured in such a way where the preference data can be filtered or optimized prior to publishing by the user and consumption by the consumer. This protocol is absolutely designed to be used in an opt-in fashion, which means users need to be able to opt-in to sending only the data they want shared with a given consumer: Some will prefer that this data is not shared or aggregated in any way, which is fine. Some people will prefer that only their home devices know their preferences but when outside the house they remain silent, or only publish a smaller subset of the data. Other scenarios include sharing preference from one service to another, but not wanting to share “everything†(don’t include the porn in my viewing habits when letting Netflix know what DVD’s I’ve bought from Amazon).
The argument for adoption of such a protocol is that doing so enhances your potential for customizing your user experience: by consuming the users preferences, you can better fit your service to your users expectations. This could eliminate any potential learning curve associated with products and services dealing with new users in which preferences are yet unknown. In turn, publishing that same data is something your customers are likely to start demanding when your competitors are allowing their users to do it somewhere else. The user can choose to share the data only with responsible providers who have things like “no-store policies†which state that they do not capture and store user data themselves, only retrieve and publish the data, potentially aggregating it with other data in doing so.
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[quote name=“Tuck Fheman” post=“24052” timestamp=“1375397601”]
[quote author=Kevlar link=topic=3136.msg24042#msg24042 date=1375393137]
Personally I vote for impossible, which is why I’m a fan of compulsory Zerocoin mixing, and would support such an implementation, but ultimately the community needs to decide for itself what the larger goals of the currency is.
[/quote]Well, if Bushstar doesn’t implement it, I’m downloading your forked version with zerocoin protocol.
;D
[/quote]Lol if people start using that ill fork it and remove the zerocoin, inception style
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I can’t help but think that this thread has contributed to the run up in price… as of right now, Feathercoin is the only cryptocurrency considering Zerocoin adoption.
If the devs decide it’s a go and announce that Zerocoin will at some point be adopted into Feathercoin, I have no doubt that volume and price will skyrocket.
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[quote name=“ftcguy” post=“24181” timestamp=“1375459860”]
I can’t help but think that this thread has contributed to the run up in price… as of right now, Feathercoin is the only cryptocurrency considering Zerocoin adoption.If the devs decide it’s a go and announce that Zerocoin will at some point be adopted into Feathercoin, I have no doubt that volume and price will skyrocket.
[/quote]This thread helps confidence but the price jumps is related to pump and dump era… Everyone get their seatbelts tight. It’s gonna be a long month.
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[quote name=“ftcguy” post=“24181” timestamp=“1375459860”]
I can’t help but think that this thread has contributed to the run up in price… as of right now, Feathercoin is the only cryptocurrency considering Zerocoin adoption.If the devs decide it’s a go and announce that Zerocoin will at some point be adopted into Feathercoin, I have no doubt that volume and price will skyrocket.
[/quote]I’d say that’s a very fair assessment. If Feathercoin said, “In our next release, ALL transactions will become completely anonymous FOREVER” I’m sure the traders would react positively.
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I think zerocoin is definitely a good project…
I already integrated it, I’ve now a wallet with zero coin haha, first day it worked so why are you guys still talking about it :P
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[quote name=“ftcguy” post=“24181” timestamp=“1375459860”]
I can’t help but think that this thread has contributed to the run up in price… as of right now, Feathercoin is the only cryptocurrency considering Zerocoin adoption.If the devs decide it’s a go and announce that Zerocoin will at some point be adopted into Feathercoin, I have no doubt that volume and price will skyrocket.
[/quote]Today is all about “consolidation”. ::)
Also, zerocoin protocol has been discussed here and on bitcointalk, regarding feathercoin, before with no reaction from the market.
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As Tuck has pointed out, Zerocoin is top of the feedback ideas. The response here has been largely positive.
Zerocoin is still in alpha stage and I believe that there are a lot of optimizations to be made. There is some cost implementing Zerocoin on the network and we need to make sure that these are as light as possible. I have spoken to the Zerocoin team and they have already made a lot of progress since their paper.
I will keep everyone up-to-date on developments. There is going to need to be a fair bit of community discussion on Zerocoin.
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Voting = short form of discussion
After all is talkes about - all scenarios/advantages/disadvantages have been weight against each other, lets decide by voting …
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Can I be VERY negativeagainst prioritising Zerocoin?
There is too much dev to do as it is, without trying to implement something that’s not yet good enough for Litecoin. Prioritising that development, seems perverse. Haven’t we all learned the lesson of pre announcing? We called it Vapourware. If your gonna do it just get on with it and announce it when its done.
The last thing Feathercoin should do is pander to exchanges (manipulated gambling), I thought we were supposed to be a wide use currency. It is anonymous enough for that. What happened to that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it now? When your choosing to fix something that isn’t broken, whilst network variability and attacks are broken, for us and our partners?, very disappointed.
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[quote name=“wrapper0feather” post=“24372” timestamp=“1375570221”]
Can I be VERY negativeagainst prioritising Zerocoin?There is too much dev to do as it is, without trying to implement something that’s not yet good enough for Litecoin. Prioritising that development, seems perverse. Haven’t we all learned the lesson of pre announcing? We called it Vapourware. If your gonna do it just get on with it and announce it when its done.
The last thing Feathercoin should do is pander to exchanges (manipulated gambling), I thought we were supposed to be a wide use currency. It is anonymous enough for that. What happened to that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it now? When your choosing to fix something that isn’t broken, whilst network variability and attacks are broken, for us and our partners?, very disappointed.
[/quote]Even though I like the idea of zerocoin I agree this should be something down the road. Security first then zerocoin.
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[quote name=“wrapper0feather” post=“24372” timestamp=“1375570221”]
Can I be VERY negativeagainst prioritising Zerocoin?There is too much dev to do as it is…[/quote]
Orly? Where exactly is the prioritized backlog that the developers are working from that’s so long a feature can’t be added to the bottom of it?
Oh, right. There isn’t one. Hell, there isn’t even a list of what changes are being worked on, details on how they’re being implemented, voting by the community on what the priorities should be, or really any transparency whatsoever. What we do have is one developer on a personal quest to centralize the blockchain around whatever block he happens to see first, working without a design document on a protocol which hasn’t been published, reviewed, or ratified by the community.
[quote]
…without trying to implement something that’s not yet good enough for Litecoin.
[/quote]That’s not a valid argument against it. Litecoin has it’s own community and it’s own set of values and priorities which may or may not be in line with ours. Just because someone else has said they’re not interested doesn’t mean we should be not interested. Herd mentality just leads to stagnation. Innovation is the future of crypto-currencies.
[quote]Prioritising that development, seems perverse.[/quote]
No it doesn’t. What does seem perverse is how the leadership is being organized. No transparency, no community voting, a hierarchy of responsibility designed to segregate areas of expertise yet leave no one actually accountable to anyone, missed deadlines, propaganda and hype, a lack of consistent moderation (the post with someone saying “F you” got locked (?!?!), not actually removed), total lack of formal processes, and now a lack of credibility in the public perception as a result, which is going completely unaddressed.
It should be prioritized, by the community, along with ALL the other features that the community wants. Should it be lower on the list than fixing 51% attacks at the protocol level? Sure. Should it not even make the prioritization list? No, it DEFINITELY should.
[quote]Haven’t we all learned the lesson of pre announcing? We called it Vapourware. If your gonna do it just get on with it and announce it when its done.
[/quote]Yes, companies have learned that lesson repeatedly throughout the years. Develop it, test it, have a plan for adoption in place, THEN announce it. That should be obvious to everyone, and I know we’re all flabbergasted that the Feathercoin leadership took us down a different path. UNOCS Bridge is the new Duke Nukem. Now there’s a title I’d wish upon no one.
[quote]
The last thing Feathercoin should do is pander to exchanges (manipulated gambling), I thought we were supposed to be a wide use currency. It is anonymous enough for that. What happened to that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it now? When your choosing to fix something that isn’t broken, whilst network variability and attacks are broken, for us and our partners?, very disappointed.
[/quote]Yes, that too should be obvious at this point. It should be lower in priority than fixing time travel difficulty attacks. But the community should be able to decide that for themselves, and formalize that decision IN SPITE OF the leadership’s opinion on the matter.
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People are free to do and invest as they please. If you want to contribute code, I’m sure Bush would love the assistance.
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Kevlar, Used my post to prove his points. Some of which are valid. I have tried to be as positive as I can with my posts
e.g. “Prioritising Zerocoin to me” means giving a priority to making Feathercoin more anonymous - This Feature is more a Litecoin Feature, where retaining the “criminal” launderable compatibilty is seen as a positive.
We are NOT doing that, so WHY even mention Zerocoin when it is not developed enough for Litecoin (who actually want it to make their coin more launder-able)
We are joining Feathecoin because it has the chance to be the FIRST - NON outright criminal currency, I found the discussion of Zerocoin disturbingly positives, an unneeded complex implementation with unknown consequences, particularly, positive reaction to the idea of pre-announcing that we are a better criminal coin, by people I think should know better.
This is especially, after my non complex, proveably required modifications, with predictable effects were negatively received.
I don’t necessarily disagree with Zerocoin, per say, we’re your friends!!! I’m trying to help you, get the basics right first (PLEASE).
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I guess a question that comes out of this is do we need a website or some place visible to understand feathercoin’s development process? This might encourage other developers to jump on board and get projects moving. A forum post saying “coming along” does not do it, though it is better then nothing.
My development skills are minimal(scripts) but I can offer to setup a site to do this and what do we want?
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[quote name=“Justabitoftime” post=“24400” timestamp=“1375590111”]
People are free to do and invest as they please. If you want to contribute code, I’m sure Bush would love the assistance.
[/quote]No, I assure you, I -really- don’t want to contribute code. I do not like cowboy coding, I do not approve of the direction the development is taking, I do not work well with a lack of transparency, I do not have any sort of specification to code from, I do not accept ad-hoc design as a valid practice that leads to quality software, I absolutely hate the QT client code base because it’s the brain child of one super-genius and reads like it and I am NOT a super genius, I do not like coding in C++ because it’s a very verbose language that requires me to think about the hardware and I’ve done it for 10 years years professionally and I never want to look at another pointer to a pointer to a const structure which dereferences a const pointer to a const void pointer and have my brain implode, and frankly I just have better things to do with my time that make me much happier like writing trading bots that reward me for my efforts and having sex with a beautiful woman, who also rewards me for my efforts.
Instead I want to contribute good ideas, solid solutions to real problems, technical oversight, transparency, good design, and a bias against herd mentality. I see these things in Bitcoin. There’s a wonderful process called the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal process that Gavin and the rest of them follow that provides all these things. I see these things in XChange, and BitcoinJ, which is why I DO write code for them. I’m a committer on JCS, the Apache project for the Java Caching System, because they do a great job of organizing their development efforts and promoting good code to the community at an acceptable rate and in a transparent way. I’m even happy to contribute my business writing/editing skills, because that’s been handled in a transparent and efficient manner.
And I’ve tried really hard to do that too. I’ve championed so many feature improvements that I’m starting to lose track of them. I’ve relentlessly tried to point out holes in the design and thinking of the design of the currency so that bad ideas don’t make their way into the code base out of ignorance, or worse, malevolence. I’ve been encouraging to anyone with a good idea, and critical of those who do not live up to the standards becoming of their positions. I’ve tried to be the voice of discontent when all I could hear around me was blind adoration, and the voice of enthusiasm when someone has done something to earn my adulation.
For my efforts, I’ve been demonized by members of the community and accused of being unreliable, a profit hunter, a dirty capitalist, a politician, a liar, a conspirator, an attacker of the currency itself (you know, 51% style?) by the lead developer no less (that was a moment for me when I realized what type of people I was really dealing with here), and an ass, despite the fact that no one has actually been able to point out what it is I’m saying that isn’t demonstrably true.
So, thank you, but no. I don’t want to write code under these conditions. I’ll stick with writing code for the communities who value my contribution. But don’t feel bad Justabit, you’ve been solid. You can’t help the hand you were dealt with some of these clowns in it that ruin it for the rest of the otherwise perfectly good people here.
