RMS Calls For "Truly Anonymous" Payment Alternative To Bitcoin 287
BitVulture writes "Richard Stallman took time to air his views on the crypto-currency that has become virtually as valuable as gold. In an interview with Russian media giant RT, Stallman praised Bitcoin for allowing people to 'send money to someone without getting the permission of a payment company'. But he also warned against a major weakness of Bitcoin and called for the development of 'a system for truly anonymous payment' online."
RMS calls for Zerocoin (Score:5, Interesting)
http://zerocoin.org/ [zerocoin.org]
What RMS has in mind ? (Score:3, Interesting)
RMS wants a totally anonymous payment system but never offer us a clue on how to achieve it.
Give us some clues, RMS. At the very least, show us where to look for the clues, please !
ZeroCoin (Score:3, Interesting)
So RMS wants the same thing as everyone else in the Crypto-Currency community. Good for him (If only he would contribute something other than a desire...). I only know of one design that gives both anonymity and decentralization, and thats ZeroCoin [zerocoin.org] which has major performance problems (it is not currently scaleable in any practical sense). In my opinion bitcoin does not scale well either, but at least it scales drastically further than ZeroCoin.
David Chaum's Digital Cash [wikipedia.org] provides anonymity without decentralization, and bitcoin provides decentralization without anonymity.
Reminds me of how RMS wants Emacs to become WYSIWG [gnu.org], but seems opposed to using existing solutions, or implementing it himself, or actually making a feature list or design for it himself. RMS is good at taking positions on issues, and does a good job representing his particular viewpoint, but I wouldn't expect much more out of him.
Blockchain (Score:5, Interesting)
The size Bitcoin blockchain is quite problematic. The size is huge. What is really needed is a system where coins outside of circulation lose value so that the length of the blockchain can be easily kept to a manageable size because lost coins will disappear and the amount of history you have to keep (and verify) will be much smaller.
I think the emunie project had an interesting approach to making verification quick and efficient but I can't remember the specifics.
Re:Paper money (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I have a thought about where this all came from (Score:5, Interesting)
Governments not only back money, they also want to control it. For good reason (at least good from their point of view). At the very least they want to control its flow. Money is a tool for control, maybe the easiest. You can incite people, you can convince people, you can inspire people to do your bidding, but the easiest way to make them do it is money. Given enough of it, you will almost certainly find enough people to do what you want to happen.
Now, if you not only control who you can give money, but who anyone else can give money, control is yours. Not only can you make people do your bidding, you can deny others the same.
Re:ZeroCoin (Score:5, Interesting)
It's disappointing that Stallman buys into this pipe dream.
Bitcoin worked (works) because it's not anonymous. Fundamentally, if you have dirty coin, you need someone with clean coins to help you. There's no reason people with clean coins should help you.
The zerocoin proposal is akin to an agreement that everyone should trade their bikes one for one upon request. Sure, that'd be great for bike thieves - that hot bike you just stole you can just trade for some else's clean bike!
Would that work? Sure, it would work. It would make bikes anonymous, and overcome the problem that they are identifiable (with serial numbers, colors, etc.). The question is what the hell would be in in for legitimate bike owners?
Stallman should accept that sharing and modifying software is one thing, sharing and modifying information that is used as a token of agreement (passwords, signatures, contracts, licenses, "written by Richard Stallman" notices etc.) quite another.
Transfer of property claims are not a private matter - not if you want everyone else to respect those property claims.
From a practical perspective, anonymous payment would legalise corruption, legalise money laundering (to the disadvantage of everyone having more money in the legitimate economy than in the criminal one), and legalise tax evasion. You got to be a pretty kooky libertarian type to think that's a good idea.
Re:Blockchain (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes the size of the blockchain is fast becoming a problem, especially now that enthusiasm about Bitcoins is growing much faster than the technological means to store the blockchain. Also, the size of every block is going to grow explosively as soon as online services everywhere start accepting bitcoins as payment option, and THAt will be much more problematic.
But then, it'll just drive some more division of labor, with people storing the blockchain and verifying transactions getting paid for the service, much like what is happening now in the mining part. There will definitely be growing pains and I can foresee a near-term future where transactions get a LONG time to validate because miners are swamped with transaction volume.
As for your suggestion, it cannot apply to Bitcoin in any way or shape. Reducing the size of the blockchain means making a "summary" of it where all the wallets that are now zero get short-circuited in the transaction history. i.e 'wallet A sends 1 BTC to wallet B which then sends it to wallet C', you shorten it as 'Wallet A sends 1 BTC to wallet C'. But that eschews the hashing process entirely, so it cannot be done trustfully AFAIK.
Re:I have a thought about where this all came from (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitcoin money transfers are not anonymous. They're pseudonymous - at best.
A good example is wikileaks itself. In order to receive donations, it needs to have a public address. They have, and it's completely transparent - we can see exactly how much Wikileaks has received at that address: 3,795.80380943 bitcoins. They have a balance on it of 1,111.97135027 bitcoins, or roughly a million dollars at today's prices.
Think about it. There's no economy that's more transparent to the public than the bitcoin economy. And that's a good thing. In the conventional economy, banks, credit card companies and governments can see more than we can see in the block chain, but it's completely hidden for us.
Stop trying to fight or deny the transparency of bitcoin. It's a strength, not a weakness. Governments could have effectively stopped bitcoin payments to wikileaks too, by making it a crime to give or receive money from wikileaks. Since everything is so transparent, that would have been really effective. But it would also be bare-faced tyranny. It's much more convenient for them to be able to suppress wikileaks by having private companies make the decision to not offer service, officially on their own.
As valuable as gold (Score:4, Interesting)
Pretty sure that however many electrons it takes to encode it, Bitcoin's price by mass is a few orders of magnitude more than gold.
Of course, 1 BTC is roughly 9E-8 of the overall supply (4.8E-9 of the theoretical cap); one ounce of gold is about 1.81E-10 (assuming 171,300 tons of gold in total). As a fraction of world supply, that makes gold still about 1000 times more valuable than BTC.
Re:What RMS has in mind ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Officially this is to crack down on crime and money laundering, but unofficially this is so that it is less likely there will be runs on banks and because electronic transactions are much easier to track.
Re:What RMS has in mind ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even withdrawing an amount in cash is restricted in most countries.
Mostly for practical reasons. Banks don't like keeping enough cash on hand all the time for customers to make large withdrawals, so they put a reasonable limit on what each customer can withdraw in a day. You can usually get more with advance notice.