4 ms·

But of course when I pay you, you’ll have no idea which account is my primary. I’ll tell you it’d FakeMe23 and you’ll accept the money because why wouldn’t you?

• Jtsummers 9y ago
  Per the authors, they want people to use a real peer-to-peer trust network. I have never met you, dpark, and so the only way for you to pay me (or me to pay you) is for there to be a web of trust between you and me. And then we will only be paid with currencies of people who we trust. This also means they have a stake in it, they could end up with 50 dpark-fake coins that no one else will accept so they need to be careful of trusting people they don't know well. You won't pay me with dpark-fake because I don't trust it, instead you'll pay me with pg because I've trusted him and he's trusted you. However, this gets to the fundamental problem of the web of trust: It's really hard to do. Physical key signing parties are impractical to scale. You need systems like keybase which correlate your keys/accounts with each other if we aren't able to meet and communicate in person (which also requires trust, I wouldn't trust you after a single meeting, but would readily trust my friends who I know well but are physically remote from me). Quoting from the paper: This example demonstrates that Bob can only ever receive money that he trusts, and Alice can only ever spend money that other users trust in turn. Even if Alice makes 100 fake accounts and has them all trust each other, she will never be able to spend more than the amount of AliceCoins she has, since that’s the only account that other users will trust. This is why it is crucial that users take direct peer-to-peer trust relationships seriously.
  • dsr_ 9y ago
    Or you could sidestep all those issues by having a single currency which everyone who participated would accept, the same way that dollars and euros work.
    • Jtsummers 9y ago
      Sure, which is what we do now and generally works well. I'm not advocating for this system, merely addressing the question by pointing to their documentation where they answer it.
  • dpark 9y ago
    This whole thing relies on users to essentially enforce the trust web. No way this works in reality. Eve won’t try to establish trust with Bob directly. She’ll establish trust with Bob’s grandmother who doesn’t know any better. She’ll essentially phish her way into the trust network. After convincing Grandma to accept a single EveCoin, Grandma will perform any currency exchange for Eve and let Eve buy whatever she wants with BobCoins. When your premise is that “it is crucial that users take direct peer-to-peer trust relationships seriously”, you are doomed to fail. You cannot expect security to derive from the average person being extremely diligent.
• baddox 9y ago
  Why would I trust your account if it wasn’t, well, trustworthy? Think about the current world we live in. There are some people I would accept a verbal “I owe you” from (namely, my friends) and some people I would not.
  • dpark 9y ago
    Because you’re relying on a web of trust. You obviously won’t trust me directly. But you’ll trust me indirectly because I only need to gain the trust of someone in your web at which point the authors expect me to be able to engage in currency exchange to find a coin you’ll honor. And at the end of the day, it’s unclear why you wouldn’t want my FakeAccount coins. Once I’m in your web of trust, you can spend my coins like any other trusted currency. The authors seem to believe it’s the users’ responsibility to somehow police this when the users in this case just want a medium of exchange and derive little to no value from excluding my fake coins.