Entirely traceable money is easier to trace than borderline untraceable money? Great.
> Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
- Satoshi
The reality is that Satoshi envisioned bitcoin very differently from how things are currently implemented. They envisioned public keys being rotated, single use addresses, etc.
The current systems don't provide any of the privacy that the original paper sought.
> It is high time for blockchain enthusiasts to ask this question: Have the primary principals underlying bitcoin’s design — privacy, fraud proof, non-inflationary— been completely destroyed by today’s blockchain operators?
You can pick apart this Medium post if you'd like but I think it's really an excellent question. Read the original paper and ask yourself if what we're seeing in the market is really the "Satoshi vision".
Yesterday the average transaction cost was 0.7 USD. That’s pretty cheap as far as money transfers go, definitely beats most banks.
If everyone in the world tried to use bitcoin as a replacement for bank transfers, etc. then the fees would be astronomical
That's actually how the majority of Bitcoin wallets operate. I'm not sure what you mean here.
That’s literally how all wallets work in 2022, no?
Public keys are constantly rotated, addresses are single use.
Not to my knowledge? I believe Coinbase lets you manage any number of public keys but there's nothing enforcing a "burn on use". Also, obviously, there's a central authority that has your name, government id, and keys.
This technique, is so simple it should not be even be considered a technology, it is just a technique. A myriad of technologies can use this technique to add some additional properties, to an already existing technology. For example, in the IOT world, an oven connected to the internet, could be used only by a particular key in the blockchain, thus proving ownership to control the oven. One microtransaction can turn on the oven, or turn it off.
The most important aspect of bitcoin, is of course spam prevention. Gmail servers just block any unknown mail provider, just in case they are spammers. When spam was limited to email messages, that was a viable solution for the internet. This however is gonna change.
Synthetic data, i.e. deepfakes, are really gonna take off right now. Synthetic faces of people can be uploaded by the tens of millions to facebook each day. Synthetic photographs of places can be uploaded to Insta. Synthetic conversations can can be uploaded to twitter by the billions. Synthetic songs can be uploaded to bandcamp, terabytes of them every day. Synthetic videos can be uploaded to youtube, or tik-tok, petabytes every day.
The advertisement based free model of posting information on the internet, will go down in flames in less than 4 years.
A new technique is going to emerge, in which we send value to the hosting providers, for our information they are willing to host for us. That value, trillions and quadrillions of microtransactions, less than a cent each per day, it is difficult to track, but it can be done, the question which arises is, what can someone gain doing that?
Ironically, a version of this was in private fiat currency - the coins in the John Wick movies were used this way.
For an example, most cryptonote networks function this way unless they have explicitly damaged or disabled the functions responsible, like in the case of Electroneum.
What's stored in the blockchain that makes it work are public keys, and how you can talk to nodes who can append to the blockchain have to work over a network. You can always walk the whole chain at any time and account for all the activity of all public keys, and that is actually required because it's the primary way that the network knows "who" has what.
So what connects the public key to a person?
If:
- private keys are never in the hands of a third party (public keys don't matter), and
- transaction processors/miners are only available over secure channels that somehow dissociate the involved keys from loggable networky things like IP address, and
- information like IP address is not stored in the blockchain,
then a blockchain would be untraceable to anyone who does not have a complete view of all Internet activity between all the participants.
Anyone with your private keys (which you can make more up any time you want) could transact under those keys as long as they can talk to enough processors/miners through any transport method, and alter "your" stuff, that's why you guard those with your life.
- enter the data somewhere
- put a tag on the product
- scan a tag
and where they could, knowingly or not, produce false data?
The issue here is a social/regulatory/legal one. The current international shipping game is a cartel business, and the cartel doesn't want competition - so they can use government, brand recognition, etc to maintain their moat.
It's not that the blockchain version isn't clearly better, it's that the getting there part is a very difficult and tricky process.
I don't understand why even this is sensible. Why not just use a database? The only miners/validators on a produce blockchain are likely to be agri-companies anyway.
Who's gonna run it? Any individual company in the chain has a vested interest in fudging the data, and the technical means to do so. A private third-party lacks oversight (and thus could also be given a vested interest in fudging data). A government agency could do it (assuming one's government is trustworthy, which is often a poor assumption), but that would likely preclude international cooperation unless it's something like the UN running it (and even then).
> The only miners/validators on a produce blockchain are likely to be agri-companies anyway.
Preferably you'd use an existing public blockchain rather than spinning up an entirely new one.
Even if there was such a blockchain solely for tracking produce, the fact that no individual agri-company has control over its data makes it more trustworthy/impartial than some centralized database.
However, that's still missing the point that this is fundamentally a problem about humans in the real world and the technology can't magically change that. The problems with supply chain authenticity aren't a question of record keeping but whether those records are accurate. If my inspector is being paid off, he'll do the same thing for the blockchain record that he was doing with paper. If things are being tampered with in shipping, the same people will do the same things and you'll have the same dodgy goods arriving at their destination except they'd now have valid but inaccurate blockchain records.
As usual, the blockchain solution isn't adding anything except creating a market for the people selling it. It doesn't solve the real problems and if you spend time tackling those, you won't derive any benefit from diverting more your revenue to some VC's yacht fund.
From each participant's perspective they cost far less, both in terms of implementation and ongoing maintenance, than attempting to build and run a centralized database oneself (and if you're gonna match a blockchain's trustworthiness, every participant would indeed need to run a database oneself).
> and add significant performance reliability problems
1. Nothing beats the performance of /dev/null.
2. They do the precise opposite of adding reliability problems; they're in fact notoriously difficult to bring down given the sheer degree of data replication.
> without adding trust.
The comment to which you replied describes at length how they add considerable degrees of trust. They only "don't add" trust if - again - every participant is running one's own database, at which point - if they're expected to agree with each other - you've got an ad-hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, ludicrously expensive version of half of a blockchain.
> If my inspector is being paid off, he'll do the same thing for the blockchain record that he was doing with paper.
Which would then be public and uncensorable evidence against that inspector.
> If things are being tampered with in shipping, the same people will do the same things and you'll have the same dodgy goods arriving at their destination except they'd now have valid but inaccurate blockchain records.
And that inaccuracy would - upon detection - become public and uncensorable evidence against those tamperers.
This comparison isn’t valid: you’re using a shared blockchain service with high transaction costs but then saying the comparison can’t use a shared service.
> 2. They do the precise opposite of adding reliability problems; they're in fact notoriously difficult to bring down given the sheer degree of data replication.
So you’re saying I can process blockchain transactions without a reliable, high-speed network connection? I never have to worry about fee increases or high volume impacting my clearance time?
> The comment to which you replied describes at length how they add considerable degrees of trust.
It describes a number of distractions from the core problem but doesn’t solve any of the hard ones. The fundamental misunderstanding you and the poster are operating under is that this kind of system is based on anonymity. Since the real world is not, you don’t need anything which PKI doesn’t give you far more efficiently.
> > If my inspector is being paid off, he'll do the same thing for the blockchain record that he was doing with paper.
> Which would then be public and uncensorable evidence against that inspector.
Just like it is currently, except with hefty transaction fees. The problem here is that you need someone to figure out where things are being faked in-person. A blockchain can't solve that because the problem happens in the real world and if you setup an oracle to inject that information you're just renaming that existing trust relationship, not removing it.
> > If things are being tampered with in shipping, the same people will do the same things and you'll have the same dodgy goods arriving at their destination except they'd now have valid but inaccurate blockchain records.
> And that inaccuracy would - upon detection - become public and uncensorable evidence against those tamperers.
Just like it is currently, except with hefty transaction fees. Again, “public” isn't relevant — all of the parties already know each other and if it goes to court they're going to produce records — and “uncensorable” is just meaningless blockchain marketing fluff because that's not a relevant problem or one which a blockchain effectively prevent.
In all of the cases I outlined, the problem requires real world checks to find who is faking the records. Whether those records are paper, actions tracked on a website, PKI signed documents, or transactions recorded on a blockchain is a rounding error on the difficulty of setting up the real world legal system and monitoring which actually prevent cheating. If I have a problem with counterfeit goods showing up, everyone involved is going to say that their records were accurate and the problem must have been somewhere else – all a blockchain tells you is that you paid more to store the receipt, not that it was accurate.
The parenthesized bit immediately following what you quoted (in addition to other parts of the comment and its grandparent) specifically explains why the comparison can't use a shared service: who's going to run it while being trustworthy for all users of it?
> So you’re saying I can process blockchain transactions without a reliable, high-speed network connection?
You need one for any other database, especially a shared one as you suggested above. In fact, it'd need to be more reliable and more high-speed for a non-blockchain solution; even full nodes don't require continuous uptime (that's only needed for mining or staking, neither of which is necessary to query and post transactions), and blockchain transactions tend to be pretty light on bandwidth.
> Just like it is currently, except with hefty transaction fees.
1. Citation needed on "hefty transaction fees". There are blockchains other than Ethereum, in case you weren't aware.
2. You're forgetting (or perhaps deliberately ignoring) that it's considerably easier to "figure out where things are being faked in-person" when the evidence of fakery is permanently in the public record. There's also far less room for plausible deniability on the faker's part.
> “uncensorable” is just meaningless blockchain marketing fluff
You might be surprised to learn that traditional database records, unlike those on blockchains, are trivial to destroy or otherwise tamper with. The inability to cover up fraud by editing transactions after-the-fact is nowhere near as meaningless as you assert.
> Whether those records are paper, actions tracked on a website, PKI signed documents, or transactions recorded on a blockchain is a rounding error on the difficulty of setting up the real world legal system and monitoring which actually prevent cheating.
And setting up said real world legal system and monitoring is considerably easier when the digital records are auditable by pretty much anyone and effectively impossible to modify.
> all a blockchain tells you is that you paid more to store the receipt, not that it was accurate
A blockchain tells you that the receipt was not and will never be modified. If there's an inaccuracy, that makes it much easier to detect it. If there's a pattern of inaccuracies, that makes it even easier to detect it and quantify it. What would've previously taken weeks or months worth of wrangling records from filing cabinets or arbitrary databases can instead be done in minutes or even seconds - freeing up time for the actually-hard parts of such investigations.