cash schemes based on computational power have dubious feasibility, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork.pdf
X On 17/12/10 15:29, xor wrote: > On Friday 17 December 2010 16:03:41 Matthew Toseland wrote: >> 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. > > As far as I have understood it and you have stated yourself below, bitcoins > transactions are not anonymous, you can establish that the identities > themselves are anonymous but we would need anonymous transactions to a > neutral > bank to get bitcoins "out of Freenet". > > The ability of getting them out of Freenet would be necessary for people > actually being interested in them... > And [1] was linked from [2] so I thought it might fit. > > (Basically, transactions from anonymous identities to anonymous identities > should be public because it can be used for a web of trust to judge whether > someone is likely to pay or not. > Transactions between bank accounts and anonymous identities have to be > anonymous to guarantee that you can get your money anonymously into/out of > Freenet. > Transactions between bank accounts and other bank accounts have to be public > to guarantee that the bank is not corrupt...) > > >>> 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. > > How do mixes work compared to [1] ? > >> 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. > > Yes, and we do not need anonymity within the anonymous identity and non- > anonymous bank subnets, we would just need anonymous transactions between > them > as mentioned above. > >>> 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. > > Well but they are relevant to getting your money out of it / into it, right? > > >>> 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. > > There might as well be lots of users who provide bank services by running > their own bank via Freebank, to distribute the load and to guarantee that you > find a bank which you trust. > > >>> 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. > > The value-add of the banks would be that they provide the ability to get non- > anonymous real money / non-anonymous bitcoins into anonymous Freenet > identities. > > >>> 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). > > It could be used as an additional bootstrapping mechanism besides captchas, > for users who want to make sure that they do not see spam. > >> >>> 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. > > Well, I was being euphoric, but still an out-of-the-box anonymous payment > system for anonymously published content does not exist yet AFAIK, it would > at > least get some "academic" attention. > > >>> 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. > > It would help the amount of content very much. > - Freenet needs more content. > >> >> Plus, bitcoin relies on a CPU arms race, eventually stabilising at: >> Total energy cost = (inflation * currency supply) / cost of a unit of >> electricity > > At some point in time finding a new bitcoin will be like a million lottery > win, > no? So only maniacs will do it anyway, normal people will just buy them with > normal money because hopefully they are a well-known payment system. > > - As far as I have understood it, the fact that they are computed is just > some > mechanism for distributing them fairly while they are new? > > > > _______________________________________________ > Devl mailing list > Devl@freenetproject.org > http://freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl -- GPG: 4096R/5FBBDBCE _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org http://freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
