gwern comments on Bitcoins are not digital greenbacks - Less Wrong

6 Post author: lsparrish 19 April 2013 06:13PM

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Comment author: gwern 19 April 2013 07:28:14PM 9 points [-]

It's not anonymous currency, but pseudonymous.

I realize this is one of the current meta-contrarian points about Bitcoin contrarianism, but it's still wrong: the pseudonymity is only partial and doesn't matter:

  1. No one has ever been busted on Silk Road due to Bitcoin or Tor
  2. Exchanges can be located anywhere and be informal (eg #bitcoin-otc); hawala still exists despite substantial US interest and effort into crackdowns
  3. Exchanges can collect all the info they want, because you can always use a laundry/mix to eliminate connections between your bitcoins and contaminated bitcoins
  4. No laundry/mix has been successfully attacked so far that I know of.
  5. Secure laundry/mixes can and have been done using secure multi-party computation
  6. There is no reason that stronger anonymity cannot be built into Bitcoin; the very recent Zerocoin proposal is a reminder of this fact even if it ultimately does not prove to be secure or go live.
Comment author: ChristianKl 28 April 2013 03:35:18PM 0 points [-]

There is no reason that stronger anonymity cannot be built into Bitcoin; the very recent Zerocoin proposal is a reminder of this fact even if it ultimately does not prove to be secure or go live.

There are political reasons. The Bitcoin Foundation is lead by people who have a business interest to avoid upsetting the US authorities.

Comment author: gwern 28 April 2013 04:54:30PM 0 points [-]

The Bitcoin Foundation is lead by people who have a business interest to avoid upsetting the US authorities.

Not much of one. They have yet to apparently delay any noxious-to-US-authorities features or bugfixes, and Gavin's past actions indicate he feels more beholden to the miners than the authorities (witness him giving away something like $70k to the people who contributed to the recent 0.8 blockchain fork).

Besides the absence of evidence that this is an issue, the Satoshi client can be forked easily, and refusing to incorporate a usable Zerocoin - which is something a lot of people want even if they don't use SR - would be an excellent incentive to do so.

Comment author: ChristianKl 28 April 2013 05:05:35PM *  0 points [-]

Not much of one. They have yet to apparently delay any noxious-to-US-authorities features or bugfixes, and Gavin's past actions indicate he feels more beholden to the miners than the authorities

But the miners aren't on the Bitcoin Foundation board. MtGox, BitInstant and CoinLab have their representatives on the board.

Gavin also acted under immense timepressure in the 0.8 fork case.

Comment author: gwern 28 April 2013 05:57:36PM 0 points [-]

But the miners aren't on the Bitcoin Foundation board.

And yet.

Gavin also acted under immense timepressure in the 0.8 fork case.

His recompense was done afterwards, where he could repent at leisure; during the fork, of course, he was quite busy.

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