Re: nettime Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency
On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:02 AM, Douglas La Rocca douglaro...@gmail.comwrote: There's a distinction between wallets and addresses. Addresses are traceable and can be analyzed in that manner. Wallets are collections of addresses which need not ever be publicly associated. Far from being *worse *than tracing credit/debit cards, because a user can constantly shift identities (frequently used addresses, say), Bitcoin actually makes it possible to avoid the privacy problem. Point taken, but the structural problem remains: That the currency is _intrinsically_ coupled to accounts - accounts out in the open, on top of that - and means of payment. Anonymous payment will always require the complex deflection/circumvention devices you describe. If it's not default behavior (like in cash), anonymity/privacy boils down to an afterthought and a usability hassle. If Bitcoin becomes a popular means of payment, its users would be as unlikely to constantly make and shift new addresses as they are unlikely to shift E-Mail addresses and login identities on Web services right now. (I also have my doubts that shifting identities really solves the problem of reverse identification through computational analytics as it only adds one layer of obfuscation. Live in a small remote village, for example, and these means won't help because the one person buying The New York Times in the local market will always be identifiable no matter what Bitcoin address s/he'll use for payment. You could argue that there's no anonymity of transactions in a village anyway, but it becomes quite a different story if all those transactions become world-readable on the Internet.) -F # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency
On 12/05/2013 01:41 PM, Florian Cramer wrote: (I also have my doubts that shifting identities really solves the problem of reverse identification through computational analytics as it only adds one layer of obfuscation. Live in a small remote village, for example, and these means won't help because the one person buying The New York Times in the local market will always be identifiable no matter what Bitcoin address s/he'll use for payment. You could argue that there's no anonymity of transactions in a village anyway, but it becomes quite a different story if all those transactions become world-readable on the Internet.) No society, no people need rules against things which are impossible. Today I observe a couple fornicating on a roof top in circumstances where I can never know who the couple are. Do they have privacy? The answer is no if your definition of privacy is the absence of observability. The answer is yes if your definition of privacy is the absence of identifiability. Technical progress in image acquisition guarantees observability pretty much everywhere now. Those standoff biometrics are delivering multi-factor identifiability at ever greater distances. We will soon live in a society where identity is not an assertion like My name is Dan, but rather an observable like Sensors confirm that is Dan. With enough sensors, concentration camps don't need to tatoo their inmates. How many sensors are we installing in normal life? If data kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, then what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be mine: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Misrepresentation means paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your identity is not a question unless you work to make it be. The Obama administration's issuance of a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is case-in-point; it calls for the development of interoperable technology standards and policies -- an 'Identity Ecosystem' -- where individuals, organizations, and underlying infrastructure -- such as routers and servers -- can be authoritatively authenticated. If you can trust a digital identity, that is because it can't be faked. Why does the government care about this? It cares because it wants to digitally deliver government services and it wants attribution. Is having a non-fake-able digital identity for government services worth the registration of your remaining secrets with that government? Is there any real difference between a system that permits easy, secure, identity-based services and a surveillance system? Do you trust those who hold surveillance data on you over the long haul by which I mean the indefinite retention of transactional data between government services and you, the individual required to proffer a non-fake-able identity to engage in those transactions? If you are building authentication systems today, then you are playing in this league. --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency
Let me know if I'm wrong: one individual may own two or more bitcoin wallets. And this individual may be a robot or a weird mixture of flesh and silicon, let say a dog which constantly shift its identities and deals its bitcoins with some high frequency trading system. So, obviously cydogs will suck all the bitcoin market at the expense of regular human beings. Bitcoin: a good money for bots, isn't it? On the contrary, openUDC ( http://www.openudc.org/ ), based on the web of trust, ensures that traders are actually humans, not bots. There is no complicated mining system but a distributed mecanism which provides regularly a certain amount of money (a Dividend) to each one and controls the global monetary mass according their average life expectancy. Olivier On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 2:02 AM, Douglas La Rocca douglaro...@gmail.com wrote: it would not require very much ingenuity or computational power to analyze all transactions associated to one Bitcoin wallet and, from the frequencies, quantities and network of its transactions, deduce the identity of its owner with practical certainty. There's a distinction between wallets and addresses. Addresses are traceable and can be analyzed in that manner. Wallets are collections of addresses which need not ever be publicly associated. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency
I don't know how you figure bots will suck all the money. Bots are made by humans necessarily, and I can assure you they are quite difficult to make profitable (unless they directly steal). The beauty of Bitcoin's complicated mining system is that it fixes the quantity of money in circulation to NATURE in a predictable manner. Gold is similarly fixed to nature but the earth is comparably capricious in how much it yields and where. -dl On Dec 4, 2013, at 7:46 AM, olivier auber olivieraub...@gmail.com wrote: Let me know if I'm wrong: one individual may own two or more bitcoin wallets. And this individual may be a robot or a weird mixture of flesh and silicon, let say a dog which constantly shift its identities and deals its bitcoins with some high frequency trading system. So, obviously cydogs will suck all the bitcoin market at the expense of regular human beings. Bitcoin: a good money for bots, isn't it? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency
On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 5:38 PM, Doug La Rocca douglaro...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know how you figure bots will suck all the money. Bots are made by humans necessarily, and I can assure you they are quite difficult to make profitable (unless they directly steal). I guess that as far as the value of bitcoin will increase, more and more big players will be interested and will put financial, mathematical and technical resources to maximize their investments. Will follow a sort of arms race: normal humans will not measure up to their robots. Florian is considering a hell for privacy, I guess instead that will end with what could be the first non-human bubble. The beauty of Bitcoin's complicated mining system is that it fixes the quantity of money in circulation to NATURE in a predictable manner. Gold is similarly fixed to nature but the earth is comparably capricious in how much it yields and where. Of course, bitcoin is very nice as a technical system. This is an excellent proof of concept on the scale of the entire planet. But I do not think we will stop there. Olivier -dl On Dec 4, 2013, at 7:46 AM, olivier auber olivieraub...@gmail.com wrote: Let me know if I'm wrong: one individual may own two or more bitcoin wallets. And this individual may be a robot or a weird mixture of flesh and silicon, let say a dog which constantly shift its identities and deals its bitcoins with some high frequency trading system. So, obviously cydogs will suck all the bitcoin market at the expense of regular human beings. Bitcoin: a good money for bots, isn't it? ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
