[Cryptography] Drop Zone: P2P E-commerce paper

Ray Dillinger bear at sonic.net
Fri Mar 27 20:55:49 EDT 2015



On 03/26/2015 12:00 PM, 17Q4MX2hmktmpuUKHFuoRmS5MfB5XPbhod at mail2tor.com
wrote:
> Testnet is an agnostic platform for the purpose of persisting messages
> without value. 

Your first mistake is in thinking that testnet is for the purpose of
persisting messages; it is not.  Testnet gets rebooted from time to
time - most recently when it came to the attention of the devs that
people were buying and selling Testnet coins.

Right now most of the Bitcoin devs are trying to avoid activities
that make them look shady, and testnet is much more closely associated
with the devs than bitcoin itself. if a type of business starts
being done via testnet that threatens the legal status of Bitcoin,
you may expect them to gimp testnet immediately.

Your second mistake is in thinking that nobody's monitoring bitcoin
or testnet to see exactly where each transaction originates, how
combining coins reveals the other coins in the wallet, what goes in
and out of mixers, and how all of these clues correlate them with
real-world identities.  Trust me when I say there are well funded
people doing exactly that.  In fact it would behoove you to assume
that a lot of the Tor nodes and coin tumblers are run by such
people strictly for the purpose of information gathering. Bitcoin
and testnet are by no stretch of the imagination anonymous.

Your third mistake is in thinking that anything which is visible
to random people who want to participate in it, is invisible to
law enforcement.  You must know that some fraction of the people
who participate in this, will be law enforcement people specifically
looking for people to arrest.

> There is absolutely no system in place to solve this problem. If there
> were, centralized contraband markets disappearing with user's funds would
> not be a concern. Additionally, all of your cited protocols only exist
> online. This solution would be intended for use in low-latency offline
> transactions within a short radius from a user's geographic location.

If you want a short radius from a user's geographic location that isn't
closely monitored, you should be using encrypted packet radio rather
than the Internet.  With packet radio they at least have to send
a human to triangulate to see where you're originating.  But be aware
that the FCC frowns on encrypted radio channels.  Maybe you could work
over bluetooth or wi-fi?  They're not nearly as heavily monitored
as the Internet itself.

				Bear



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