Privacy first vs transparency first

[tungfa]

That's what I thought.. not willing to make public your complete income and expenses.. but it's perfectly okay for Coinfirm to data mine you and sell it on to others.. just like Evan said, not me

coinfirm is doing that anyway - they sell data - with or without us
evan / core is not selling the data - that is coinfirm business model (and many other companies out there)
u will not be able to shut them down

so keep mixing (as said before ) and your data tail is cut in half - and mix mix mix - .... and they can data mine whatever they want

 

[stan.distortion]

That's what I thought.. not willing to make public your complete income and expenses.. but it's perfectly okay for Coinfirm to data mine you and sell it on to others.. just like Evan said, not me

My entire bitcoin transaction history is transparent and amounts to tens of thousands of euros of legitimate business and personal transactions and my only hidden Dash transactions where to test out PrivateSend. Feel free to mine all my dataz and sell it to big brother, I doubt he'll give a shit and I certainly wont. If I did care I'd have taken steps to guard my privacy, just the same as anyone who's aware practically everything they do on the internet can be traced. Evan says a lot of things so what's next on the agenda, the Red Headed League are trying to take over crypto?

 

[GrandMasterDash]

My entire bitcoin transaction history is transparent and amounts to tens of thousands of euros of legitimate business and personal transactions and my only hidden Dash transactions where to test out PrivateSend. Feel free to mine all my dataz and sell it to big brother, I doubt he'll give a shit and I certainly wont. If I did care I'd have taken steps to guard my privacy, just the same as anyone who's aware practically everything they do on the internet can be traced. Evan says a lot of things so what's next on the agenda, the Red Headed League are trying to take over crypto?

Because you are happy for everything to be public by default, everyone else should also be same? For all those people that want to make their transactions public, go ahead and make them public... but they should respect that people should be entitled to privacy first by default. When we buy a camera, should we say it's better to make all pictures public by default and get people to make things private on a picture by picture basis? Why do dash tokens get an exemption to morality?

 

[toknormal]

It's not "for the sake of obfuscation".. the fact is, no one wants their salary visible on the block chain or their private transactions visible on the block chain

So you think your salary's private ?

 

[GrandMasterDash]

So you think your salary's private ?

For me, no, but many people are really quite private about their salary and money in general (often for all the wrong reasons) . For me personally, everything being equal, I could live with transparency on many things.. but in reality nothing is equal, which is exactly why we need privacy-first. When rich kids were busy hiding their money in off-shore accounts, paying less tax than everyone else (and good for them), in their world it was perfectly acceptable because they were within the bounds of (or the edges of) the law. Now we have money sitting on block chains and suddenly governments have gone all morally correct on us. No thanks, if you don't mind, I'll live in a flatter world... privacy makes us equal because when a block chain is privacy-first, it's just zeroes and ones.. no single bit or byte is clean or tainted.

 

[toknormal]

The thing is that you're only looking at the blockchain symbolically. As if it were a record of your own personal finances which you expect to be viewable only by you. There are two problems with this type of simplistic appraisal.

First, this notion of "privacy" doesn't exist. In the credit money system all your transactions are open to all and sundry who work in the banking system. Thats because they are the entity responsible for endorsing their value. Equally they're visible to a whole bunch of people *outside* the banking system. For example I've spent many years building eCommerce systems and they all say "Submit your payment securely here" on the "Send" button in the checkout basket. But I happen to know that at the other end there are about 200 people who can easily access all the details submitted and in fact some of them *have* to access it to process it. The "secure" bit only applies to the wire that connects the customer to the vendor, but the question of whether it's a hacker or a rogue employee that steals the funds is kind of moot.

In crypto, the "backers" are the general public - in particular, the section of the population who do NOT posses private keys or hold any bitcoin (because that's who you're asking to form the other side of the trade you're executing and who you're expecting to endorse your holdings).

There's consequently quite a big step to cover before you even get to worrying about privacy - and that's value. In that regard, nobody cares about your privacy - it isn't their problem or the blockchain's problem to protect your privacy, it's yours and there are plenty of ways to accomplish it without taking a sledgehammer to the very properties that made your funds spendable in the first place.

Do you remember the "malleability" crisis that bitcoin had back in 2014 right on the back of the Gox fiasco with uncertainty about double-spends and all sorts of b.s. ? Do you seriously think it would have survived that if every address on the blockchain and every last transaction hadn't been completely and utterly transparent ? It would have easily sunk beneath the waves. The room for speculative torpedoing of confidence would have been massive given the press were in bloodhound mode anyway at that time and I'm sure such a fate awaits all obscured blockchains at some point. It's an attack vector that's as huge as it is inviting - especially from "social media engineering" sources.

For those reasons, Dash has one of the strongest privacy models of any coin as it stands. You've got a massive level of anonymity with no loss of transparency. Despite that, in a mature crypto economy we won't be using blockchain transactions anyway so the whole debate is kind of moot. How many of your exchange trades even show up on the blockchain for example ? None.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

The thing is that you're only looking at the blockchain symbolically. As if it were a record of your own personal finances which you expect to be viewable only by you. There are two problems with this type of simplistic appraisal.

First, this notion of "privacy" doesn't exist. In the credit money system all your transactions are open to all and sundry who work in the banking system. Thats because they are the entity responsible for endorsing their value. Equally they're visible to a whole bunch of people *outside* the banking system. For example I've spent many years building eCommerce systems and they all say "Submit your payment securely here" on the "Send" button in the checkout basket. But I happen to know that at the other end there are about 200 people who can easily access all the details submitted and in fact some of them *have* to access it to process it. The "secure" bit only applies to the wire that connects the customer to the vendor, but the question of whether it's a hacker or a rogue employee that steals the funds is kind of moot.

In crypto, the "backers" are the general public - in particular, the section of the population who do NOT posses private keys or hold any bitcoin (because that's who you're asking to form the other side of the trade you're executing and who you're expecting to endorse your holdings).

There's consequently quite a big step to cover before you even get to worrying about privacy - and that's value. In that regard, nobody cares about your privacy - it isn't their problem or the blockchain's problem to protect your privacy, it's yours and there are plenty of ways to accomplish it without taking a sledgehammer to the very properties that made your funds spendable in the first place.

Do you remember the "malleability" crisis that bitcoin had back in 2014 right on the back of the Gox fiasco with uncertainty about double-spends and all sorts of b.s. ? Do you seriously think it would have survived that if every address on the blockchain and every last transaction hadn't been completely and utterly transparent ? It would have easily sunk beneath the waves. The room for speculative torpedoing of confidence would have been massive given the press were in bloodhound mode anyway at that time and I'm sure such a fate awaits all obscured blockchains at some point. It's an attack vector that's as huge as it is inviting - especially from "social media engineering" sources.

For those reasons, Dash has one of the strongest privacy models of any coin as it stands. You've got a massive level of anonymity with no loss of transparency. Despite that, in a mature crypto economy we won't be using blockchain transactions anyway so the whole debate is kind of moot. How many of your exchange trades show up on the blockchain for example ? None.

What you describe is legacy. Perhaps you've heard something, "bitcoin, be your own bank". You think two hundred people still need to know? If the code is open with strong governance then the blockchain itself does not need to be transparent. Sure, you and I could protect our own privacy but to expect this from the masses is something else. We could issue all tablet dispensers without child-safety caps because, after all, you already know how to keep them out of the reach of children... is that what you want? - crypto without the child-safety caps? There's nothing wrong with transparency, there are times when you will want to be transparent, but that should be at an individual's discretion; empower the end user, that they choose the when and where.. not an expected default immediately after the transaction is made.

Perhaps a more fitting example would be Ethereum's DAO debacle because transparency allowed a hard fork where the very essence of block chain tech was challenged - i.e. immutable state - and all the legally "stolen" ether was undone simply because a privileged few could. Checks and balances can be built around block chain without making every single transaction public. And formal verification would of almost certainly prevented the DAO debacle.

 

[toknormal]

If you're trying to make the case that obscurity is a substitute for safe program logic then I don't agree with you. I also don't agree with your view that it's lack of "privacy" that's inhibiting adoption. I think it's lack of confidence.

If the code is open with strong governance then the blockchain itself does not need to be transparent

Yes it most certainly does because you've no guarantee that "the code" you refer to is what's running on your particular desktop. I take your point though that "be your own bank" does imply certain expectations of privacy that involve obscurity, so there is work to be done on reconciling the banking archetype with how the blockchain works.

The main difference between me and the promoters of cryptonote tech is that they put a massive amount of faith in theory. i.e. they basically say that because something works in theory (you can verify a transaction ID) then it works in practice (you can assume an address balance movement occured). This seems to be the argument you're promoting as well.

Where it goes wrong is in the asymmetry in verification methods between the sender and receiver. Thats the huge attack vector I referred to earlier and it isn't acceptable that any monetary system should work like that IMO when there is no 3rd party arbiter.

 

[demo]

If the code is open with strong governance then the blockchain itself does not need to be transparent.

If the protocol is open and with strong governance on what it concerns protocol changes, then the blockchain itself does not need to be transparent.

Yes it most certainly does because you've no guarantee that "the code" you refer to is what's running on your particular desktop.

Who cares about the code? What @GrandMasterDash said about the code was simply wrong. The protocol is what matters. You have full guarantee that the protocol is the same, because if someone uses a different protocol then the communication with the rest is impossible.

<vote history>
Do you want a transparency-first block chain or a privacy-first block chain?
* Yes, I would like to see dash switch to a privacy-first block chain (permissioned transparency) 2 vote(s) 14.3%
No, I want to keep dash's transparency-first block chain (privacy via mixing) 12 vote(s) 85.7%
</vote history>

 

[GrandMasterDash]

If the protocol is open and with strong governance on what it concerns protocol changes, then the blockchain itself does not need to be transparent.


Who cares about the code? What @GrandMasterDash said about the code was simply wrong. The protocol is what matters. You have full guarantee that the protocol is the same, because if someone uses a different protocol then the communication with the rest is impossible.

<vote history>
Do you want a transparency-first block chain or a privacy-first block chain?
* Yes, I would like to see dash switch to a privacy-first block chain (permissioned transparency) 2 vote(s) 14.3%
No, I want to keep dash's transparency-first block chain (privacy via mixing) 12 vote(s) 85.7%
</vote history>

I don't know, maybe, but there needs to be a good methodology that goes from protocol to code to ensure correctness. I'm a big supporter of formal verification and without it I'm convinced dash will not survive in the long term.

 

[toknormal]

If the protocol is open and with strong governance on what it concerns protocol changes, then the blockchain itself does not need to be transparent.

The problem isn't technical, it's sociological. If you compare the number of people for whom transparency is a priority over those for whom obscurity is a priority, the former dominate the latter into an insignificant minority because as I said earlier, it's the non-holders who support the value, not the holders.

 

[demo]

The problem isn't technical, it's sociological. If you compare the number of people for whom transparency is a priority over those for whom obscurity is a priority, the former dominate the latter into an insignificant minority because as I said earlier, it's the non-holders who support the value, not the holders.

Please do not refer to sociology only when it fits to your arguments. Do you want to mention sociology? Then here you are, this is what sociology dictates:

The non-holders support the value of the universal dividend. The non-holders dont care about the transparency as defined in the bitcoin-dash blockchain, as long as this kind of transparency refers to the transactions only and not to which persons owns how many coins. The non-holders the only thing they care about is who is the rich and who is not, and how they became like that. So that , with the help of the governance, to be able to confiscate oneday whatever money has been gained in a time-space assymetric way.

 

[toknormal]

The non-holders require a universal divident. The non-holders dont care about transparency as defined in the bitcoin-dash blockchain, as long as this current transparency refers to the transactions only and not to which person owns how many coins.

Why do you insist on using personal pronouns when referring to blockchain addresses ?

They do not represent people. They represent anonymous addresses to which anyone may hold a key. The address balance exists independently of the key holder, unlike the value held in a bank account. This is where the big flaw is in the obscurity argument - the projection of a record keeping, banking paradigm onto an anonymous asset.

Also, what exactly do you mean by "The non-holders require a universal dividend" ? It sounds like you're just throwing random terms around for the sake of it without expressing any coherent base principle. My point about non-holders is that obscurity mitigates the value of an anonymous asset and I don't think I need to defend that point very much since it's tried and tested during thousands of years of precedent. Again - "privacy" is something that everyone addresses in their own way. It isn't the job of the blockchain other than by way of optimising the indistinguishability of each address and you don't do that by toxifying the system with ambiguity.

The commercial world is a large and complex network of interdependent systems and assets. Blockchain assets are a tiny dot amongst them - they are not a financial system in their own right the way the banking system is. Maybe thats where you're going wrong.

 

[demo]

My point about non-holders is that obscurity mitigates the value of an anonymous asset and I don't think I need to defend that point very much since it's tried and tested during thousands of years of precedent. Again - "privacy" is something that everyone addresses in their own way.

And my point is that non-holders dont care about privacy or obscurity or transparency of anonymous bank accounts. They only care about who owns how many coins. They only care about what person owns what account and how many accounts. They care who is the rich.

The non-holders are obviously against privacy and in favor of transparency. Coinfirm is there to help the non-holders to spot the holders. And for the holders, their interest should be in favor of privacy because the non-holders will do whatever they can to confiscate the money (by taxing it, , ban it e.t.c) especially the money that is gained in an unfair and time-space assymetric way.

So if you are rich, if you hold enough Dash and you are wealthy above the average , then your interest is in favor of privacy and obscurity. If you are a rich Dasher and you insist in transparency, then one day they will discover you, and you will be taxed. The innocent vote you are casting right now, it will cost you a lot of Dash in the future.

 

[toknormal]

They only care about who owns how many coins...The non-holders are obviously against privacy and in favor of transparency

I don't disagree with you. It's just that your point is irrelevant.

The challenge is to create a new form of open, tradeable asset. Not an online personal records database.

 

[demo]

I don't disagree with you. It's just that your point is irrelevant.

There is nothing irrelevant, everything is connected in this universe. And a butterfly may cause a storm elsewhere.

The challenge is to create a new form of open, tradeable asset. Not an online personal records database.

Yes, this is your challenge. But If you decide today to follow the road of transparency and you refuse the privacy road then a personal records database will be created inevitably (with the help of Coinfirm and other companies like this). If this is what you want, then do nothing and remain transparent as you are today. If the raining is coming, and you dont take an umbrella, this means that you like to get wet.

 

[toknormal]

But If you decide today to follow the road of transparency and you refuse the privacy road then a personal records database will be created inevitably (with the help of Coinfirm and other companies like this).

That would be the case with any open, tradeable asset. It doesn't have much to do with whether the outputs on the blockchain are auditable or not. It's occuring *because* of the success of Dash as a monetary medium, not in spite of it. Start to worry if nobody's interested in your blockchain.

There are countless examples that support the transparency philosophy. Open source is one of them. In the 80's closed source was considered essential to preserving value of intellectual property. Now it's positively suicidal.

You try and create a closed monetary system and you'll have your precious privacy but all you'll ever have in terms of value will be speculative. Like it or not, Coinfirm is adoption. You're confusing the priorities of an encrypted record keeping system with those of a tradeable asset/cash base and that is a toxic mix.

 

[demo]

I don't know, maybe, but there needs to be a good methodology that goes from protocol to code to ensure correctness. I'm a big supporter of formal verification and without it I'm convinced dash will not survive in the long term.

Thats why in Tezos, they choosed to write their software in OCaml.
They said that Ocaml is suitable for formal verification.

But as long as Dash is written is C, there is also Verified C (now called CompCert)

 

[demo]

There are countless examples that support the transparency philosophy. Open source is one of them. In the 80's closed source was considered essential to preserving value of intellectual property. Now it's positively suicidal.

And there are countless examples that support the privacy philosophy.
http is one of them. In the 90's http protocol was transparent. Now if you use http instead of https especially in money transactions, this is considered suicidal. The code may becomes more and more open source, but the protocols tend to become more and more secure and private.

 

[GrandMasterDash]

And there are countless examples that support the privacy philosophy.
http is one of them. In the 90's http protocol was transparent. Now if you use http instead of https especially in money transactions, this is considered suicidal. The code may becomes more and more open source, but the protocols tend to become more and more secure and private.

Exactly, open source to implement https but privacy expected for the data being carried.