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- Privacy. Yes the blockchain might be public, but good luck tying transactions to identities for selling my purchasing habits, or most other purposes outside o

- Privacy. Yes the blockchain might be public, but good luck tying transactions to identities for selling my purchasing habits, or most other purposes outside of state actor law enforcement. (And even that is arguable with attention to opsec) - Uncensorability. I can pay whoever I want whatever I want, with no third party able to insert themselves between me and the recipient (or dictate who can send or receive money) for any purpose. - Irreversibility. Yes, often held up as a weakness, but has its uses. Not all transactions are physical merchandise where a third party enforcing refunds is useful.

nradov 8y ago
The government is perfectly capable of sending men with guns to forcibly censor or reverse your transactions. Blockchain technology can't stop that.
- chii 8y ago
  only if you let them. An address could be kept anonymous with good op-sec. If you know that your actions are going to attract the ire of some people with guns, you will practise op-sec.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Whatever you say Mr. Secret Agent Man. I'm sure you're a real expert on "op-sec", much better than the FBI or Treasury Department.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      Because government agencies would never mislead the public as to the nature and capabilities of their technical offensive capability?
- Karunamon 8y ago
  I'd be willing to wager my life on the fact that the government, any government, lacks the ability, resource, and desire to muster the compute power necessary to reverse a single bitcoin transaction more than a few hours old.
  - nradov 8y ago
    The government doesn't need to waste time manipulating blockchains. They can simply seize your assets by force.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      Our government can't even stop people from distributing files containing data they don't like - what makes you think they can magically seize every single copy of a wallet that exists?
badge 8y ago
Each of those marketing claims of Bitcoin are not true. -Privacy: See the recent example where the state sponsored espionage involving sophisticated hackers had their activity traced though Bitcoin's blocktchain transaction log. Even Monero's XMR is prone to statistical analysis to unmask users: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/article-p143.xml https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/arti... https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/ A more serious question will be what happens when the laws catch up with users using a system designed for money laundering, tax evasion, and enabling black markets? -Uncensorability The software which enables blockchains and proof of work is susceptible to attacks by motivated state level attackers, so far only smaller blockchains have been targeted (presumably by rival groups with expendable mining resources). A much easier censorship attack occurs at lower network levels. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017. In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking information on all holders with balances >$20,000. Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini coefficient would mean that a government would only need to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with it the ability to tank the price. With that said, two points. First, while one would not want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as then only one person would have all of the digital currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost the network), in practice it appears that a very high level of wealth centralization is still compatible with the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of arbitrarily choosing a threshold. ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it does not directly measure the number of individuals or entities required to compromise a system. Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck. Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in >51% of mining being compromised. - Irreversibility Again, PoW is not immune to "Irreversibility" it actually constantly has a known attack surface for reversing transactions and double spending. The only thing preventing it is so far no only a limited amount of attacks on smaller blockchains have taken place.
CaptainZapp 8y ago
- Privacy Well, what's wrong with cash? - Uncensorability Well, what's wrong with cash? - Irreversibility Well, what's wrong with cash? Except for the fact that cash is issued by the "evil" government your points provide zero reasons why I should prefer crypto "currencies" over cash. And that's a purely ideological stance.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  Cash doesn't work beyond a range of a few inches? Carrying bitcoin isn't likely to get me stopped by law enforcement? The nature of bitcoin makes seizing it very difficult (given more than one person with the same wallet?)

nradov 8y ago

The government is perfectly capable of sending men with guns to forcibly censor or reverse your transactions. Blockchain technology can't stop that.

chii 8y ago
only if you let them. An address could be kept anonymous with good op-sec. If you know that your actions are going to attract the ire of some people with guns, you will practise op-sec.
- nradov 8y ago
  Whatever you say Mr. Secret Agent Man. I'm sure you're a real expert on "op-sec", much better than the FBI or Treasury Department.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    Because government agencies would never mislead the public as to the nature and capabilities of their technical offensive capability?
Karunamon 8y ago
I'd be willing to wager my life on the fact that the government, any government, lacks the ability, resource, and desire to muster the compute power necessary to reverse a single bitcoin transaction more than a few hours old.
- nradov 8y ago
  The government doesn't need to waste time manipulating blockchains. They can simply seize your assets by force.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    Our government can't even stop people from distributing files containing data they don't like - what makes you think they can magically seize every single copy of a wallet that exists?

badge 8y ago

Each of those marketing claims of Bitcoin are not true. -Privacy: See the recent example where the state sponsored espionage involving sophisticated hackers had their activity traced though Bitcoin's blocktchain transaction log. Even Monero's XMR is prone to statistical analysis to unmask users: https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/article-p143.xml https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/popets/2018/3/arti... https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/ A more serious question will be what happens when the laws catch up with users using a system designed for money laundering, tax evasion, and enabling black markets? -Uncensorability The software which enables blockchains and proof of work is susceptible to attacks by motivated state level attackers, so far only smaller blockchains have been targeted (presumably by rival groups with expendable mining resources). A much easier censorship attack occurs at lower network levels. One important point: if we actually include all 7 billion people on the earth, most of whom have zero BTC or Ethereum, the Gini coefficient is essentially 0.99+. And if we just include all balances, we include many dust balances which would again put the Gini coefficient at 0.99+. Thus, we need some kind of threshold here. The imperfect threshold we picked was the Gini coefficient among accounts with ≥185 BTC per address, and ≥2477 ETH per address. So this is the distribution of ownership among the Bitcoin and Ethereum rich with $500k as of July 2017. In what kind of situation would a thresholded metric like this be interesting? Perhaps in a scenario similar to the ongoing IRS Coinbase issue, where the IRS is seeking information on all holders with balances >$20,000. Conceptualized in terms of an attack, a high Gini coefficient would mean that a government would only need to round up a few large holders in order to acquire a large percentage of outstanding cryptocurrency — and with it the ability to tank the price. With that said, two points. First, while one would not want a Gini coefficient of exactly 1.0 for BTC or ETH (as then only one person would have all of the digital currency, and no one would have an incentive to help boost the network), in practice it appears that a very high level of wealth centralization is still compatible with the operation of a decentralized protocol. Second, as we show below, we think the Nakamoto coefficient is a better metric than the Gini coefficient for measuring holder concentration in particular as it obviates the issue of arbitrarily choosing a threshold. ...However, the maximum Gini coefficient has one obvious issue: while a high value tracks with our intuitive notion of a “more centralized” system, the fact that each Gini coefficient is restricted to a 0–1 scale means that it does not directly measure the number of individuals or entities required to compromise a system. Specifically, for a given blockchain suppose you have a subsystem of exchanges with 1000 actors with a Gini coefficient of 0.8, and another subsystem of 10 miners with a Gini coefficient of 0.7. It may turn out that compromising only 3 miners rather than 57 exchanges may be sufficient to compromise this system, which would mean the maximum Gini coefficient would have pointed to exchanges rather than miners as the decentralization bottleneck. Conversely, if one considers “number of distinct countries with substantial mining capacity” an essential subsystem, then the minimum Nakamoto coefficient for Bitcoin would again be 1, as the compromise of China (in the sense of a Chinese government crackdown on mining) would result in >51% of mining being compromised. - Irreversibility Again, PoW is not immune to "Irreversibility" it actually constantly has a known attack surface for reversing transactions and double spending. The only thing preventing it is so far no only a limited amount of attacks on smaller blockchains have taken place.

CaptainZapp 8y ago

- Privacy Well, what's wrong with cash? - Uncensorability Well, what's wrong with cash? - Irreversibility Well, what's wrong with cash? Except for the fact that cash is issued by the "evil" government your points provide zero reasons why I should prefer crypto "currencies" over cash. And that's a purely ideological stance.

Karunamon 8y ago
Cash doesn't work beyond a range of a few inches? Carrying bitcoin isn't likely to get me stopped by law enforcement? The nature of bitcoin makes seizing it very difficult (given more than one person with the same wallet?)