On Friday 17 December 2010 14:02:31 xor wrote: > Hi, > > I have just read the following Wikipedia articles: > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_internet_banking > [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin > > I am not certain whether Freenet can meet the requirements for the mechanism > which is proposed in the article [1].
Completely out of scope IMHO. > I am also not certain whether Bitcoin provides mechanisms for anonymous > transactions. Bitcoin is not anonymous. However, anonymity can be layered over BitCoin, at a cost - using mixes to prevent following the money, and using Tor to connect. Basically a traditional digicash system uses a central spend tracker to identify whether a coin has been spent. Bitcoin replicates the tracker across all online nodes, but does not provide anonymity. > > However, if we could combine Bitcoin with the mechanism in [1] and implement > it in plugins called "Freepay" and "Freebank" this would for sure be a > killer > application: Blind signatures are not relevant to Freenet. > > Consider Freepay being an implementation of Bitcoins on top of Freenet. > Consider Freebank being a framework for anonymous transactions over a bank > provider who runs Freebank. > > Let the FPI (Freenet-foundation) provide a bank X by running Freebank. Have a > transaction fee of a certain percentage. Allow both conversion of real money > into bitcoins and bitcoins into real money. There are lots of bitcoin exchanges. > > Now, if someone wants an anonymous person to insert a certain content, he > asks > for that content on Freetalk and offers a payment of N bitcoins. This is feasible today, provided there is a safe bootstrapping mechanism, and provided you can use bitcoin anonymously. > If anyone uploads the content, the requester pays to the anonymous bitcoin > account of the uploader. The transaction is non-anonymous as with current > bitcoin-system. The uploader then does an anonymous transaction to his non- > anonymous account in the Freebank. > The Freebank then pays out money in real currency to the owner of the account. > > Nobody in reallife can punish the inserter for uploading the content because > the transaction from his anonymous account to his realmoney-account was > anonymous. > > The FPI uses the transaction fees for financing the Freenet project and it's > bank services. > Anyone else can also provide a bank by running Freebank. That would make sense if we were providing some sort of value-add. But we're not. > > People who do not pay for inserts are punished by a web of trust on top of > the > banking system. Malicious trust values can be proved wrong automatically > because the payer can just show the cryptographic signature of the payment - > the payments between the anonymous entities are public as said above. Right. > > And for creating a Freetalk/WebOfTrust identity, you have to pay bitcoins > anonymously to the seed identities, which come from the FPI. > Because bitcoins are worth real money, spamming can made so expensive that it > will not happen. Right. We *could* use bitcoins for bootstrapping. The problem with that is: 1. People will NOT give us real money just to get started! And we can't make it low either because of credit card fees. 2. On many slower systems (especially those without a modern GPU) generating bitcoins will take a long time. 3. It might not solve bootstrapping without trusted parties such as the seednodes - "insert a coin to URI X" would not work, for instance (because there is no way to verify it at the node level), and nor would coin-protected inserts (because nodes would multiply to increase their payment). > As a bonus, the FPI earns money for funding the project. > > In general, publishing good content to Freenet or Freetalk is encouraged > because there will be a "Pay a small amount"-button next to each Freetalk > post, etc. > > This sounds AWESOME. I hope it is possible. > If we implement this, it will cause an literal earthquake in IT news and fund > the project for ever. I doubt it. > > I will definitely help with implementing this after Freetalk. > But someone needs to do the maths, I cannot. > So please, somone figure out whether this is mathematically possible. It is not a matter of mathematics. Tying Freenet to any sort of digicash system does not solve any problems, and increases the political cost of installing Freenet for no good end. Plus, bitcoin relies on a CPU arms race, eventually stabilising at: Total energy cost = (inflation * currency supply) / cost of a unit of electricity Which gives some pretty scary figures if it was ever really popular. Unless the bitcoin folks' claim that supply inflation will stick to the preordained path is taken seriously. The catch is that results (assuming economic growth) in a deflationary economy, which is generally catastrophic... OTOH IMHO darknet-based scarcity will be usable for bootstrapping and might eventually form the basis for an anonymous currency that doesn't end up being a significant percentage of the world's electricity usage. Whether that would be anything to do with Freenet is another question. It would probably end up with everyone connected to everyone to maximise their coin generation! Notes on darknet coins here (bitcoin folks won't mind the log, they have their own public logs): http://amphibian.dyndns.org/darknet-coins.txt
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