Zerocoin startup revives the dream of truly anonymous money

We've always had anonymous money: Cash and money laundering

Regions like Scandanavia are trying to eliminate anonymous money.

If you eliminate anonymous money, it is unclear how freedom of speech, religion, inquiry etc can be preserved.

Anonymous money is always going to be less convenient that paying in the clear. But it should exist.

Good Luck Electric Coiners

I'd say it's a primary purpose, rather than the primary purpose. I do agree that the downsides to anonymous currency can outweigh the upsides.

A lot of the law is unjust. Anonymous money solve this problem.

I'm the next person and to me you don't seem such a big fan of freedom as I am.

The reason I am for anonymous money is that it is of no one else's business what I do with my money. It's really that simple.

EDIT: David Friedman wrote a good piece on the misuse of "externality" arguments that every Freedom-loving person should know (and I'd be surprised if lisper did not know of it): http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/The%20Mis...

The law isn't good for its own sake.

There are literally billions of people who live in places where the rule of law is unjust, oppressive and corrupt.

Well, no. I can think of a very good use case right now: sending money is a PITA.

Say I want to pay somebody in another country for perfectly legal goods. (Example I've personally done: local food from a friend in Japan)

My options are:

* Bank wire transfers (expensive and annoying to set up, requires paperwork)

* Cash transfer services like Western Union or Moneygram (expensive and inconvenient, requires physical presence at a branch location for both parties, if one exists in the location)

* Electronic cash transfer services like PayPal (awful and opaque CS/policies, expensive, requires linking a physical bank account/credit card, something people in many countries don't have - if they operate in the country at all)

* Currency through the mail (danger of never getting there)

* Something like Bitcoin (annoying to set up.. once)

The last one ticks all the boxes in a way that the previous few do not.

- It's available everywhere with an internet connection without exception

- It's not subject to any middleman fees (though you can splash out a very tiny amount of money to get the transaction processed quicker)

- It's not subject to any middleman misbehavior, the transaction is strictly between you and the other person.

- There's no paperwork or going to a physical location required, it's all electronic

- Once you send a transaction, it will most assuredly reach its destination

- It requires nothing from the sender/receiver other than a piece of software

The (pseudo?)anonymity is just a bonus in this instance. It's none of the GCHQ, NSA, their associated cronies, etc business knowing what I'm buying and why.

I typically agree with that sentiment..... but then I think about all the information that Amazon has about me: e.g. political and religious views, cosmetic and OTC pharmaceuticals....... I'd really rather I could buy things anonymously online. I'm ok with the government seeing these things with a warrant; I just don't want the stores I'm interacting with to have such a thorough profile.

Blockchain currencies make all transactions public. Given that, if they're not anonymous it's kinda like posting everyone's credit card statements online.

That sounds a lot like a "nothing to hide" argument.

Maybe you are living in China and want to donate to a group fighting for freedom of speech. Maybe you are in the US and want to buy medicine for your child that you can't afford to pay the US price for. Maybe you are in Venezuela and want to sell something for what it is really worth given the actual exchange rate. Maybe you want to make an online purchase of something embarrassing that you don't want anyone to know about even if they see your card statement.

In short, those checks and balances are starting to become corrupt and thus people create a means to do away with them.

Non-anonymous payment systems can be blacklisted to deny people rights (most importantly, the ability to publish, travel, and hire legal representation) without due process.

Witness this occurring recently with Wikileaks being banned by Visa, MC, and PayPal without any criminal complaint filed against them, much less a trial.

The government cannot have the ability to censor payments or perform traffic analysis on one's payments and receipts if we are to maintain a free and civil society. The US Supreme Court has ruled several times that free speech is not free speech without anonymous speech.

Dependency chart:

    (anonymous payments) <- (anonymous publishing) <- (freedom to publish unpopular opinions without reprisal) <- (freedom to publish with the intent of changing public opinion and changing society) <- (free and civil society)

Another:

    (anonymous payments) <- (untracked travel) <- (freedom of association with unpopular groups) <- (ability to form new political parties) <- (free and civil society)

Your argument is that exchanging anonymous digital money is like cash, except without the risks to personal safety that exchanging cash requires...and that is a bad thing?

Not just the law but also the powerful.

For instance, it was impossible at one stage to donate to Wikileaks by Credit Card or Paypal due to Senatorial Pressure on private business.

Ever used a vending machine? Did it take your photo before dispensing your purchase? If not, congratulations; you enjoyed a completely legal, completely anonymous transaction.

If you have never read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, it is a 20-minutes-from-now sci-fi story that briefly explored the consequences involved in making people physically unable to break the law. Go ahead and read it. It's considered by some to be a classic in the same vein as 1984.

I consider it vitally important that there be some avenue by which a person can choose to break the law, even if there is only a miniscule likelihood of subsequently escaping punishment for it. Otherwise, the law becomes the iron collar around our necks, and those at the other end of the chain are able to drag us wherever they choose, just by rewriting the statutes.

  "One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." --M.L. King Jr.
  "Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it." --H. Zinn
  "It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen." --Aristotle
  "An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so." --M. Gandhi
  "...if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law." -- H.D. Thoreau

How then will you engage in nonviolent civil disobedience when you find that you cannot break the law, even when throwing your whole strength against it? What will happen when every person who stands in protest vanishes into an oubliette the instant after they rise to their feet?

The impulse to stamp out crime so thoroughly as to make it practically impossible is an open invitation to the tyranny of the totalitarian police state. I much prefer the sort of society where people can choose between doing good and doing evil, by the measure of their own moral standard, over one where people are forced to obey the commandments of others.

> I really don't understand why anyone thinks that anonymous money is a good idea. I'm as big a fan of freedom as the next person, but it seems to me that the primary purpose of anonymous money is to do an end-run around the law.

To be perfectly honest, that's exactly the reason I think anonymous money is a good idea. In a world where laws for huge nations are made by corporations, overthrow of government is impossible, and change within the system is too slow to solve problems now, breaking the law and getting away with it is one of the few remaining recourses an individual wishing to exercise their freedoms has.

The kinds of crimes this enables are exactly the kinds of crimes I don't think should be crimes: drug use, prostitution.

Yes, it also enables tax evasion. However, I would argue that it's merely leveling the playing field in this respect: the ultra-rich already have legal means of avoiding taxes which aren't available to most people. Anonymous currency just makes it possible for average-to-poor people to avoid taxes. And ultimate, I'm not entirely against tax evasion: I like my roads, schools and libraries, but the US has spends more on the military than the next 7 top spenders combined to kill people for economic reasons, and I don't have any way of preventing my tax money from going to that.

The kinds of crimes I do care about leave behind lots more evidence besides a money trail: murder leaves behind bodies, rape leaves behind witnesses (victims). Typically money trails have little to do with investigations on these kinds of things.

In the end, though, I don't think talking about the upsides and downsides of anonymous money makes any difference. Bitcoin isn't really anonymous, but it's only a matter of time before easily anonymous money exists, and there's really nothing that can be done to stop that.

What would happen to transactions on Monero in a post-quantum world? Would all of the transactions become transparent to the 3/4 letter agencies?

Does the 'mixing' of coins happen on a server (so you trust the server not to log anything) or does it happen p2p so said agencies can analyze the network?

All anonymity is not created equal: you're better off if we can only figure out that one out of 6 billion people bought a Nickelback album, then if we know it was either you or one guy in Tristan da Cunha. The size of you're anonymity set matters and Cryptonote provides a rather small one in comparison to Zerocash. This is not to say Cryptonote is worthless, there are tradeoffs between the two, but Zerocash has a distinct advantage in terms of anonymity and I think it matters.

Cryptonote's ring signatures scale linearly in the number of people your transactions are mixed with. As a result, you can't mix an individual transaction with that many people without it getting too big and too computationally costly(chaining transactions doesn't solve this). In contrast, Zerocash mixes every transaction with every other transaction ever[1].

If you are worried about maintaining privacy given repeated interactions with merchants or others who already have some partial information about you, the size of the anonymity set matters considerably. Longterm intersectional attacks are a major problem with anonymity systems. The smaller the set you mix with on any given transaction, the easier it is for some third party to use outside information to eliminate everyone else in the mixing set (e.g because she knows no one else in the set was online at the time of the transaction or was in your approximate geographic area), and determine the true spender. One of the few effective defenses we have for this is to simply include as many people as possible in the anonymity set. If you want to avoid companies building financial profiles of users from the blockchain, this is precisely the type of attack you need to thwart.

[1] Technically, up to 2^64 transactions and the networks ability to handle the spent serial number list. So there is a limit, but it's rather large.