[Cryptography] Drop Zone: P2P E-commerce paper

[17Q4MX2hmktmpuUKHFuoRmS5MfB5XPbhod at mail2tor.com]

>
> 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.
>
> 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


With all due respect Mr. Dilinger, it is clear to me that you did not read
the paper.

The rebooting of the testnet is irrelevant.  These messages do not need to
persist for longer than ten minutes.  In the case of a testnet reset, the
devices would immediately detect a new genesis block, and re-submit
unacknoledged messages.  These communications do not use mainnet, so as
take advantage of the free communication that testnet allows.

Moreover, my reading of your critique would lead me to believe that you do
not believe Bitcoin provides any level of anonymity.  The criticism is
uninteresting to me since it is wrong.  Not to mention that no project for
which anonymity is a prerequisite would hold your interest.  Regarding the
communications, the protocol specifically calls for an encrypted
communications channel.  Obscuring the locations of those communications
will be up to the reference client.  If a wallet that routes through tor
were to implement the Drop Zone protocol, then the location of the
transaction location would be sufficiently obscured.  Insofar as the
testnet communications are encrypted, the content of those communications
is not relevant.  If you believe that all encryption is compromised
because of NSA backdoors, then, again, none of any of what we do matters
and all hope is lost anyway.