Comment by jmfayard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmfayard | Hacker News Reader

Does Grin do something concrete and useful?

I ask this question because someone on HN reminded me of this great 2001 article from Joel "Nostramdamus" Spolsky on Blockchain Astronauts:

> Don't let Architecture Astronauts Scare You https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all.

> These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts

> The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: “Can you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?” Then they’ll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it — the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.

What's the equivalent for Grin of "that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it" ?

The product is anonymous/private payments at a distance, without a central trusted party — ie the holy grail of the cypherpunks, although grin only approaches this ideal.

The reason Napster made more sense than a single central server is that what it was doing was explicitly violating copyright law. At the time, there was no real possibility of licensing music for distribution online, even in a pay per song model. The only reason RIAA/etc caved and allowed both download services and streaming services was the success of early private services.

This is like questioning why Silk Road needed all the infrastructure when you could just list your illegal drugs for sale on eBay.

I wouldn’t call anonymous payments “the holy grail of the cypherpunks”. If anything that probably has more to do with secure anonymous communication generally than something specific like payments which only a subset of the cypherpunk space ever cared about.

Money is speech, but financial transactions are the primary communications which actually affect the world, and the only kind which governments have gone completely insane to try to restrict at any scale historically, as well as the only kind which were particularly challenging to accomplish with non cryptographic means, but at a distance, in 1988-1992 (and on to today.). All other communications can be a subset of financial transactions.

> All other communications can be a subset of financial transactions.

Sending personal letters, or photos of a dissident demonstration are financial transactions?

If you can send a payment instruction, you could send a 0-value transaction textual message. Ability to do true anonymous electronic cash implies the ability to do everything else.

Grin leaves no room for adding any publicly visible message to your transaction.

I'd say if u can send Grin via email/mobile easily cause of no scripting and it is truly digital cash that is private censoroship-resistant/decentralized p2p distributed ledger then this is big

Beam is incorporating a BBS system that presumably could be used for secure communications as well (ow how could it be secure for setting up a tx?).

Won't Grin have to do something similar that would support secure messaging in order for users to build txs in a secure and easy way?

I think it's incredibly naive to believe that the main problem of cryptocurrency today is the lack of privacy. The ease of which you can launder crypto is the main obstacle against it's widespread integration into the financial system. Sure, a Bitcoin transaction might leak an address, an amount or an IP. So what? Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks, so if cryptocurrency is to become just as good as "money in the bank", then he is home free. Grin proposes to optimize that further and provide similar levels of anonymity to average users who don't really ask for it - talk about missing the point.

The wholly grail of cryptocurrency today is not optimizing anonymity but gaining legitimacy and working as a payment system parallel to national currencies while complying with the complex regulations around KYC and criminal and terrorist financing. These are vigorously enforced in any first world nation, for sound, historic reasons.

The wholly grail is to opt out of government surveillance while maintaining social responsibility and capacity to root out bad actors. This will probably require a mixed, technological, institutional and regulatory response if it is ever to be realized.

Abstracting the real world away and hiding in your little cryptographic fantasy governed only by math and not people will leave you with speculative playmoney in the best case and a dangerous can of worms in the worst.

Well Bitcoin is completely unsuitable for handling transactions for many reasons (transaction time, energy consumption, just to name a few). Btw. until you are going through internet devices (routers) with your transactions government surveillance is there, so it does not solve that either. The reason why even security aware people think that cryptocurrency guys are nuts is exactly this reason, you think that you can outsmart an adversary that has unlimited resources (at least compare to you). If you look at recent developments in Australia you would understand that you cannot do anything against a government than vote the right people into power and apply pressure to politicians to end unlimited surveillance that is granted with laws like the Patriot Act.

"Coupling Tor with a trusted coin tumbler, any serious criminal can hide his tracks"

They absolutely cannot. Their tracks are in the the NSA database in Utah. Tor is great for one thing mark yourself suspicious so it is easier to track you down.

https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/interview-in-german-maga...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzemvg/dont-just-...

https://boingboing.net/2016/07/01/researchers-find-over-100-...

TL;DR version for the inpatient

"It all depends on who you are trying to protect yourself from. The biggest forces of surveillance in the world are not governments, but private corporations: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Apple — companies whose core business runs on the surveillance and profiling of every person that comes into contact with their platforms. Everything that you communicate on the Internet gets sucked up and filed away — not by the NSA, but by Google and Facebook. Tor does nothing to protect people from that. Tor does not prevent Google from scanning your emails or recording your search history. Tor does not prevent Google from tracking your location via your Android phone, creating and saving a detailed day by day map of where you go and what you do. Tor works to an extent. If you an individual trying to hide from the NSA or the FBI or the FSB, Tor might give you some measure of protection — if you are very technically savvy — but it is a limited sort of protection. It does not protect users against corporate surveillance. But it does provide a false sense of privacy. That is why Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook support Tor: it sells a version of privacy — privacy from the government — that does not threaten their own surveillance business models."

> gaining legitimacy and working as a payment system parallel to national currencies while complying with the complex regulations

This is an impossible requirement. Every country has different, subjective, fluctuating, and often vague regulatory requirements. Not decentralized platform could ever comply.

The reason crypto hasn't taken hold is simply that it doesn't scale. When enough people use it, the system grinds to a halt. Newer cryptos, like Monero have made some big steps recently, but there's still a long long long way to go for scalability.

> This is an impossible requirement. Every country has different, subjective, fluctuating, and often vague regulatory requirements. Not decentralized platform could ever comply.

We first need to acknowledge the need to comply with the spirit of these regulations and allow some features that national operators can build on to create legal solutions.

There is a commonality here and there is a international convergence towards similar regulations. Sure, some countries with particular draconian legislation could still reject crypto, but there could exist a workable compromise in most other countries.

I reject this idea that we need to go Full Monty: from one end of the spectrum (no privacy, complete state control over money and banks) to the other end, financial anarchy.

You may reject the idea, but I don't see how it can be anything _other_ than what you describe as "financial anarchy".

You either trust national governments and their KYC and AML laws, or you trust the crypto network and _its_ governance. That is the whole point, as stated by Satoshi.

If your crypto complies with some least- or greatest-common-denominator of government laws (as they apply to their national currencies), then what is the point?

The point was not that cryptocurrencies should be state run, rather that the social values embedded in their algorithmic regulation should respect a wider set of social values and accommodate applications that can comply with typical national legislation resulting from those values. See your brother comment for an alternate perspective, cryptocurrency already embed regulatory frameworks that reflect social values, for example, the need to control inflation or the need for financial privacy.

If the decentralized governance rejects on principle that money laundry is a social problem, then society through it's various forms of governance might reject the currency, just as it would reject say, a hyperinflationary currency.

This is what I mean to say by "going full-crypto-Monty": there is a strong tendency in the community to reject some important social values without debate and to try to enforce a political perspective on how society should work by circumventing the legitimate venue where these political debates are fought. The more the problem is asserted, the more crypto people double-down on their utopian narrative and invent new technical measures to circumvent any social control, such as this here.

I respect your position that "going full-crypto-Monty" may cause a crypto currency to be rejected by a society that values some rules, like anti-money-laundering.

But crypto currencies were borne out of a distrust for banks and government money policy, like inflation.

In my view, the fallacy was/is that by putting trust "in the network", these policies could be avoided, not duplicated. But that's impossible: crypto currencies merely shift trust to the network operators (who, for financial gain, become increasingly consolidated), and to the maintainers of the code, who ultimately determine the rules.

Maybe the point is that with a diversity of currencies, there is a diversity of policy choice. But that only increases the exchange problem, which defeats the purpose of a currency (that is, being widely accepted).

Aside from playing with consensus algorithms to get the hash from GPUs rather than FPGA/ASIC, can you point me to innovative thinking in this area?

Which projects (or, rather, their communities) are doing the most interesting stuff around achieving widespread distribution? I agree with you that this is essential for any crypto to truly become viable as money. If Bitcoin has won the store of value battle at least for now, then that leaves the medium of exchange game wide open and it won't be ABC/SV.

I like what I'm seeing in terms of governance experimentation with DCR's Politeia, Dash (failure but they had some good ideas) and XTZ. The BTS/EOS world (especially EOSForce in Asia) has some interesting stuff too.

I'm naturally "full crypto-Monty" and find it hard to connect with people who identify more with today's political model.

Can you point me to some thinking you respect about how to blend various governance venues (crypto and physical/political)? Thanks ahead

> I reject this idea that we need to go Full Monty: from one end of the spectrum (no privacy, complete state control over money and banks) to the other end, financial anarchy.

It's not going towards "anarchy" unless you're defining it to mean "there is no one from a government agency involved."

A market is a regulatory mechanism: prices via arbitrage transmit information about supply and demand directing actors to devote their efforts to alleviate scarcity. And cryptocurrencies by design have mechanisms that help enforce contracts which is directly regulatory.

Beam allows for both - fully transparency and auditability of tx's by revealing a certain audit key (not sure if this is the jargon for it). So merchants can use it to allow a government agency or their accountant to audit their books.

And excellent anonymity, privacy and fungibility of its token, enabled by the large set of txs that do not reveal their audit key.

“Dangerous can of worms” is the goal, although understates the level of danger and utility. https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

I disagree with his almost completely. When you pay someone with Bitcoin, the receiver knows your wallet and can look up your balance and every transaction you have ever made. That’s crazy. People may not realize the implication at first but they will. Imagine mainstream scenario and vendor behavior: you pay once, they know you are rich and adjust the price next time around. Or your insurer trawls your purchase history and adjusts your premiums because you eat fast food. etc. A certain amount of privacy when paying is absolutely essential for mainstream adoption.

As for legitimacy. If people used crypto for payments without ever converting to fiat, absolutely no “on high” institution or state can confer legitimacy. It’s irrelevant.

And as for money laundering and terrorism. Give me a break. The existing financial system is gamed all the time by nation states, the wealthy with shell companies and tax havens and the biggest ‘coin’ in all these activities is the USD. These laws are vigorously enforced entirely selectively and usually politically. I’d rather it was simply impossible.

As for bad actors, these exist now and always will, that doesn’t mean you stop the rest of the world having access to tools to move value how they want and avoid state run monetary policy. The world’s elites and mega corps do this now already.

> The wholly grail of cryptocurrency today is not optimizing anonymity but... complying with the complex regulations around KYC and criminal and terrorist financing.

What the... That’s not the goal of cryptocurrency according to its creators. The goal is, as you stated later, “to opt out of government surveillance”, which is incompatible with the former. You’re contradicting yourself.

There is a contradiction between privacy and law enforcement only if you think in rudimentary, white/black extremes.

Why don't you allow for shades of gray, workable anonymity that protects most regular people yet can be lifted by law enforcement in a auditable and costly process that rules out mass surveillance? Why can't we have crypto-banks that know you identity yet can't freeze your assets, only atest to them when compelled so by law? Can you mathematically prove such constructs are not possible? Is there a possibility they could serve society's needs better than either the current banking system or the Bitcoin-style hodge-podge?

Please explain how you can have anonimity if it can be lifted by law enforcement.

The selling point of cryptocurrencies is not being beholden to the whims of a government.

You can have limited anonymity and the option of hiding into the crowds.

To give a very crude example, a FBI backdoor key established in the genesis block could allow them to publish into the blockchain a personal information fetch request that is public and has a public field that the agency is expected to populate with relevant court order number. They could of course issue requests without that field, but in that case everyone could see their behavior and laws could be passed to make it illegal.

A further refinement would be to request a financial bond before the operation is executed. This bond could increase exponentially, guaranteeing the backdoor cannot be abused for mass surveillance and is employed for limited, high profile cases.

The "whims of a government" are often the expression of strong social forces that exist for a reason. Rejecting any form of social governance is an Utopian political construction at it's core, masquerading here as technology.

There are so many problems with your proposal it's hard to know where to begin.

I'm going to guess you're American. It might be news to you, but the rest of the world (and many Americans) don't want to be subjected to the United States government and its inane laws. You might love your government and think it does no wrong, but we don't. And it has a terrible track record.

Moreover, what are you going to do when the inevitable happens and this "supersecret backdoor key" is leaked? Your system is a ticking time bomb.

> They could of course issue requests without that field

Your "field" is useless then.

> but in that case everyone could see their behavior and laws could be passed to make it illegal.

Then what would be the point of allowing it in the first place?

> The "whims of a government" are often the expression of strong social forces that exist for a reason.

"Strong social forces" doesn't mean "good social forces". You have an incredibly naive view of how governments work if you think otherwise.

Those are straw-men against a conceptual example intended to show that a trade-off is possible. All the problems you rise have solutions in a practical system, you could issue the key to an international organization such as the INTERPOL, treaties could be set-up beforehand so only lawful use of the field is permitted, key revocation is a thing etc.

Or you could move away from a centralised governance altogether and have a stake voting system where the actual users decide to de-annonimize a particularly user. Or we can imagine a weak form of privacy where cooperation among your trading partners can reveal more and more information, a al e-cash with blind signatures, where a double spend reveals your identity.

In short, the question is if "absolutely private money transfers" are something we need and want, not if there are technical ways to gradually weaken privacy in a socially controlled fashion.

> All the problems you rise have solutions in a practical system

Hand-waving is not a valid way to address fundamental problems with your proposal.

> you could issue the key to an international organization such as the INTERPOL

Interpol? Haha, no thanks [1]. You also haven't addressed the key being leaked, which would destroy your proposed system.

> treaties could be set-up beforehand so only lawful use of the field is permitted

Yeah, that tends to work very well in the real world.

> key revocation is a thing

So who can revoke this supersecret magic key, and under what conditions? If you don't specify that, this statement is as good as meaningless.

> a stake voting system where the actual users decide to de-annonimize a particularly user

Which “actual users”? Literally everyone?

You're going to have to explain the details of your proposed deanonimization system because as it stands it's completely vague.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpol#Criticism

I'm not proposing a practical system, I'm asserting that such a system is reasonable to exist. Unless, of course, you can prove there are fundamental issues that preclude it. The imperfect nature of international law and institutions is not such an issue, but again a way stick one's head in the sand and abstract the real world away: "see, human institutions are always corrupted, so let's circumvent them and algorithmically dictate our worldview that rejects money laundry is a real problem". What could possibly go wrong?

> I'm asserting that such a system is reasonable to exist.

When every known system that meets your criteria fails, the onus is on you to show that such a system can succeed.

> The imperfect nature of international law and institutions is not such an issue

Relying on a demonstrably unreliable system, particularly where enormous power is concerned, is absolutely a fundamental issue.

> our worldview that rejects money laundry is a real problem

This is a straw man. It's like saying that anyone who doesn't believe the government should have cameras in people's homes rejects terrorism as a real problem. We're talking about tradeoffs.

I'm the one talking about trade-offs, you are of the position that any algorithmic feature designed to weaken anonymity in certain well defined scenarios is tantamount to "cameras in people's homes".

Well, Bitcoin is more traceable than Monero or Grin so there you go, a handy example of an (unintentional) trade-off that seems to work without the sky falling. It's absolutely reasonable that an intentionally designed system could achieve a more favorable trade-off, with better privacy for regular folk and less for well defined, exceptional circumstances.

What you're proposing (giving a government entity a "backdoor key") goes far beyond anything Bitcoin does.

Dusk is trying to walk this line

This is exactly my thought process. Specailized frameworks - like Napster as specifically a song sharing platform in your example was successful because it coupled architecture with a real life usecase. Architect/Engineers see this and think a generic version is far supieror from a mechanical point. On paper, that is true (e.g. scaling or market reach) but it presents a viability-of-use problem that you end up constantly trying to adjust to the massive wide variety of usecases.

According to some other comments that wee little feature is the act of actually transferring money. Apparently you can't just send and receive money easily, you have to do it by sending files to the other person. Sounds insane, doesn't it? But your comment about the song name typing really made me laugh and think about this.

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