[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[jrzx]

> On 2/7/21 9:12 PM, jrzx wrote:
> > The crisis that bitcoin was designed to address is Ann wants to pay
> > Bob, and wants to be able to prove that she paid Bob.
> > But power does not want Ann to pay Bob.  Nor does power
> > want Bob to be able to spend any money that he has.
> > Power wants Bob deplatformed and demonetized, and in
> > the process fouls up Ann's life.
> > This is the number of the Beast Problem.

On Sunday, February 7, 2021 10:08 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:
> So.... I don't understand what problem you have here.
> Ann and Bob are both users of the system, and presumably
> Bob got his cert before he got in trouble with Power.

And they are both apt to suddenly cease to be users of
the system.

The problem is that Ann's payment gets frozen, and possibly confiscated, and her account gets frozen

As is happening to very large numbers of people right now.

The big recent run up in Bitcoin started when they started demonetizing nazis, which was rapidly followed by them demonetizing "nazis", and at the same time the KYC and the rest of those acronyms was tightened up on international transactions, in the process sweeping up the transactions of very large numbers
of ordinary boring people doing ordinary boring things.


> So.  Ann pays Bob.  The transaction record, in encrypted form,
> is on the history chain of the tokens she paid him with and
> appears nowhere else. 

> Nobody need ever see or have any record of a token
> unless someone else

Which does neither of them any good, if both of their certificates are frozen or cancelled.

You are assuming a nice well behaved certificate authority that does not force itself into the relationship between Ann and Bob.

In the current political and regulatory climate, fat chance.

You cannot have it both ways.  If power can stop bad boys
who double spend, it can stop bad boys who think dangerous
thoughts.

It can stop investors who want to invest overseas in foreign shares that ordinary Americans are not approved to invest in.

It can do all of the many things that have caused the recent runup in Bitcoin.


> spends that token onward to them.  Power is likely never
> to see any record of the transaction before the token is
> melted.

Power does not care about your transactions.  It wants to
stop *people*, not transactions.

Power wants all relationships mediated by power.  Thus,
for example, a big American investment firm can invest in
Rockchip, but an ordinary American investor cannot.

I could list a whole bunch of other considerably more
serious examples, but most of them are politically
sensitive and are likely to result in off topic discussion.

Power is going to yank your certificates for engaging in
activities that indicate relationships not mediated by power,
regardless of whether it sees your transactions or not.
People are getting demonetized for twitter posts.

> If someone sees the token but isn't a counterparty (meaning
> they don't have a private key to any transaction on the
> token) then they
> can't even tell the denomination.
>
> ...
>
> In neither case will they have any way to tell whether
> other tokens were
> also transferred,

Observed behavior is that people are not much worried about the
privacy of transactions.  They are worried about getting their
accounts frozen, frozen indefinitely, or as with Paypal, flat
out confiscated.

Which your certificate authority can do, even if it follows your
proposed protocol, which it probably will not.

If privacy was the big market demand for crypto currency, Monaro
and Zcash would have boomed in response to the escalating
repression.  Instead, Bitcoin boomed.  The hodlers don't care if
everyone knows what their public key is, provided that only they
know their private key.  There is big demand for the ability to
go through an airport carrying the secret key on a hidden scrap
of paper.  Privacy, not so much.  A lot of rich people seem to be
thinking about the possibility that they might have to head off
to the nearest airport in a hurry with nothing but the cash in
their back pocket and crypto secret.  If they were thinking about
their transactions being exposed, they would be buying Monaro.

The trouble is that you are assuming a good guy certificate
authority that does not want to insert itself into every
transaction and every relationship, and good guy courts who give
at least a tinker's dam what the law says.

If we had that, no one would be interested in crypto currency.  Privacy, to the surprise and disappoint of cypherpunks, turns out to be in little demand.

Signal is making money selling privacy, but no one else is, and Signal is small potatoes compared to Bitcoin.

If a maid gets her transaction confiscated and her mother's bank account frozen for sending money back to her family in her home country to dig a well, there are a lot of nazis, terrorists, child pornographers, and tax evaders about.



 or what denomination those other tokens had. Even if
> they get one of those other tokens they can't correlate the spends. 
> They can't tell that any of those transactions was Ann paying Bob. Power
> has no idea what transaction it ought to be objecting to if it doesn't
> want Ann to pay Bob. 
>
> So what happens when Power beats down the door of the
> Trusted Authority?

...

> "Can you give us anything at all?" Power asks, now desperate.
> "Well,
> here's all the ID information we got when he got his cert
> ten years ago," says Trusted Authority.  "And here's his public
> key.  But you didn't need to break my door for that, I publish
> that information at regular intervals."

Power sends the mob to beat the stuffing out of the certificate authority, and the police and courts display a strange lack of interest (again I could list no end of recent bloodstained examples, but that would take us off topic.)  The Certificate Authority yanks Bob's certificate, and now Bob's account, like the account of the mother of that Filipina maid, is frozen.