3 ms·

There are other approaches for laundering which do not rely on insurance contracts, such as http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocoin.org/

by a3_nm 13y ago

oleganza 13y ago
Zerocoin is interesting, but Bitcoin in its current form has two practical advantages: 1. Cryptographic primitives used in Bitcoin are old and well-tested. There's no crypto code in Bitcoin that was invented by Satoshi and could have been badly broken in a subtle manner. Zerocoin's commitment scheme requires years of testing, attempts to crack it and fixing may be impossible. If the problem is discovered, the whole thing may lose all value overnight. 2. Bitcoin is more friendly in the eyes of the law enforcement. Bitcoin looks like a traceable, compatible with "tracking all citizens" policy. It gives it a green light from the governments. Of course, in reality, you can launder bitcoins and hide yourself quite well, but that's extra work and complexity. Meanwhile, like a Trojan horse, Bitcoin comes to the legal scene as a nice instrument that allows to track "bad" guys. Not relevant in the long term, but important in the short term to get legality and massive adoption.
- nwh 13y ago
  > There's no crypto code in Bitcoin that was invited by Satoshi and could have been badly broken in a subtle manner. Read up on the history of the client. Satoshi was innovative but could certainly not code securely to save themselves. Most of the script OP codes are still disabled because they introduced huge vulnerabilities. You could spend anybodies coins in Satoshi's client, or create integer overflows that created billions of coins in a transaction. The client is a lot better now, but to say it's perfect because it was there from inception is a huge mistake.
  - oleganza 13y ago
    Which only proves my point. It's really hard to make it right in v0.1 and you have to make it right, otherwise the whole thing is forever broken. Even then, there were two huge bugs: one with integer overflow that created billions of bitcoins in one transaction. Another was with OP_RETURN that allowed to spend bitcoins from any transactions without any effort. Bitcoin wins over more complex schemes because it has less moving parts. Fortunately, the parts that were enabled work fine and give us awesome possibilities. Otherwise, they'd be disabled too.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ricardobeat 13y ago
He does mention Zerocoin. His argument is that when using it, your intent to hide your transaction history is explicit, while with the proposed "mixing" you supposedly can't tell it from regular transactions.

There are other approaches for laundering which do not rely on insurance contracts, such as http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocoin.org/

by a3_nm 13y ago

There are other approaches for laundering which do not rely on insurance contracts, such as http://zerocoin.org/ http://zerocoin.org/

oleganza 13y ago

Zerocoin is interesting, but Bitcoin in its current form has two practical advantages: 1. Cryptographic primitives used in Bitcoin are old and well-tested. There's no crypto code in Bitcoin that was invented by Satoshi and could have been badly broken in a subtle manner. Zerocoin's commitment scheme requires years of testing, attempts to crack it and fixing may be impossible. If the problem is discovered, the whole thing may lose all value overnight. 2. Bitcoin is more friendly in the eyes of the law enforcement. Bitcoin looks like a traceable, compatible with "tracking all citizens" policy. It gives it a green light from the governments. Of course, in reality, you can launder bitcoins and hide yourself quite well, but that's extra work and complexity. Meanwhile, like a Trojan horse, Bitcoin comes to the legal scene as a nice instrument that allows to track "bad" guys. Not relevant in the long term, but important in the short term to get legality and massive adoption.

nwh 13y ago
> There's no crypto code in Bitcoin that was invited by Satoshi and could have been badly broken in a subtle manner. Read up on the history of the client. Satoshi was innovative but could certainly not code securely to save themselves. Most of the script OP codes are still disabled because they introduced huge vulnerabilities. You could spend anybodies coins in Satoshi's client, or create integer overflows that created billions of coins in a transaction. The client is a lot better now, but to say it's perfect because it was there from inception is a huge mistake.
- oleganza 13y ago
  Which only proves my point. It's really hard to make it right in v0.1 and you have to make it right, otherwise the whole thing is forever broken. Even then, there were two huge bugs: one with integer overflow that created billions of bitcoins in one transaction. Another was with OP_RETURN that allowed to spend bitcoins from any transactions without any effort. Bitcoin wins over more complex schemes because it has less moving parts. Fortunately, the parts that were enabled work fine and give us awesome possibilities. Otherwise, they'd be disabled too.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

ricardobeat 13y ago

He does mention Zerocoin. His argument is that when using it, your intent to hide your transaction history is explicit, while with the proposed "mixing" you supposedly can't tell it from regular transactions.