Richard Stallman Criticizes Bitcoin, Touts a GNU Project Alternative (coindesk.com) 289
Richard Stallman doesn't like bitcoin, and has never used it, reports CoinDesk:
To Stallman, bitcoin isn't suitable as a digital payment system. His biggest complaint: bitcoin's poor privacy protections. He told CoinDesk, "What I'd really like is a way to make purchases anonymously from various kinds of stores, and unfortunately it wouldn't be feasible for me with bitcoin." Using a crypto exchange would allow that company and ultimately the government to identify him, he said.... Asked what he thought about so-called privacy coins, Stallman said he'd gotten an expert to assess their potential, and "for each one he would point out some serious problems, perhaps in its security or its scalability." And speaking broadly, Stallman continued: "If bitcoin protected privacy, I'd probably have found a way to use it by now."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.
Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....
Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
Fortunately, Stallman's GNU Project has a better answer: The GNU Project, which Stallman founded, is working on an alternative digital payments system called Taler, which is based on cryptography but is not -- forgive the hair-splitting -- a cryptocurrency. The Taler project's maintainer Christian Grothoff told CoinDesk that the system is, rather, designed for a "post-blockchain" world.... It's based on blind signatures, a cryptographic technique invented by David Chaum, whose DigiCash was among the first attempts at creating secure electronic money. Plus, Taler's attempt to create a digital money that resists surveillance by governments and payments companies aligns it with many cryptocurrency projects.
Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." Indeed, in a break with the anti-government ethos that has tended to characterize bitcoin and some of its peers, Taler's design explicitly tries to block opportunities for tax evasion.... Privacy in the Taler system, then, is limited to users spending their digital cash. They are shielded from surveillance because, Grothoff said, "the exchange, when coins are being redeemed, cannot tell if it was customer A or customer B or customer C who received the coin, because they all look identical from the exchange. Nobody," he added, "exactly knows who has how many tokens." Merchants (or anyone) receiving payments, on the other hand, do so visibly and in the open, making it possible for governments to assess taxes on their income -- not to mention harder for the recipients to participate in money laundering....
Currently, Taler is in talks with European banks to allow withdrawal into the Taler wallet and also re-deposit from the Taler system back into the traditional banking system.
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
It’s coming really, really soon (Score:5, Funny)
The GNU Foundation plans to release Taler alongside Hurd 1.0.
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Stupid choice of name, since there already was an actual coin called a Taler.
Toejam would have been much better.
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Stupid choice of name, since there already was an actual coin called a Taler.
a) No, it was the "Thaler"
b) The American word "dollar" is derived from that name.
c) Wasn't that the point, re-use a name of an old coin?
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So my implementation in Apple's Open Source language should be called Tayler + Swift?
lol...Blind Signatures (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:lol...Blind Signatures (Score:5, Insightful)
me thinks you are highly optimistic over quantum computers.
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But an estimate is not a hard deadline.
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But an estimate is not a hard deadline.
Semantics. Wether it takes four or six years matters little. We must still attend to reality.
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If you have decent estimates, and aren't preparing for that estimate to become reality, then you're setting yourself up for massive failure.
See: the entire argument around climate change.
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But an estimate is not a hard deadline.
The bound of the estimate is a hard deadline for all practical purposes.
My 2 - 2 - 10 rule for projects: No matter the estimate, it wil take twice as long, cost twice as much and ten percent of the planned capablity will not be delivered
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3-4-50 when dealing with Oracle.
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3-4-50 when dealing with Oracle.
Only 4x as much? Who gave you that discount?
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So, not actually a hard deadline then?
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I'm not sure what number of qubits you're using as a target to run Shor's algorithm on a practical cryptographic factoring problem, but I suspect you're leaving out error correction. The expert estimates I've heard range from 5000 to 50000 qubits required... assuming reasonable connectivity, which has been a challenge in the larger architectures.
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You do have a talent for making sweeping oversimplifications and wild assumptions based thereon, don't you?
Re: lol...Blind Signatures (Score:2)
Re: lol...Blind Signatures (Score:2)
Re: lol...Blind Signatures (Score:2)
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Unless there's a fundamental limit, which there very well may be. Errors very well could be exponentially likely as quibits increase. State of the art right now is 20 quibits. The sort of discrete log and factoring problem needed to break modern crypto you need well over a 1000 quibits. Even assuming a doubling every 5 years, it's still 30 years off.
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Looks more like 50 or 72 is the highest tested, but even a doubling every 3 years, still 10 years off, but that's only ignoring decoherence, and noise issues.
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They have sets of 6 in with some communication between them. The commercial IBM availible w/20 is only coherent for fractions of a microsecond.
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I know he's not really serious about his prediction, so he won't take you up on that, but for anyone who actually wants to make a bet like this, http://longbets.org/ [longbets.org] was set up for exactly this kind of situation.
There are other alternative (Score:2)
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You don't need to do _perfect_ blind signing.
Ah, yeah, ya do. Crypto is all-or-nothing. "Good enough" only qualifies up to a given window of time, when you're talking about securing a currency a 1/1000 chance is a 100% chance.
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Even extrapolation, it does not really work that way. There were decades of little progress, then a brief bump of interesting but not economic p
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Right, they only have 6 in a coherent set at any given time. The algorithms cryptography is afraid of take several hundreds - thousands.
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And D-Wave is architected to a specific type of problem, and can not be generalized to problems that can't be translated to simulated annealing.
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Again only a handful are superimposed in a rank, the rest are interconnected with possibly quantum effects. It performs a single set algorithm.
And they certain aren't all superimposed in the sort of way needed for the quantum algorithms that are known to be able to solve factoring and discrete logs.
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We have a hard deadline of 2023 before quantum computers can break pre-quantum algorithms with vary slightly modified versions of Shor's algorithm based on a decade-old linear trend in qubit count.
Remember what happens when you extrapolate trends linearly? You fail. It's getting steeply harder to add more qubits, which is why we're not hearing about it happening every month or two.
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We have a hard deadline of 2023 before quantum computers can break pre-quantum algorithms with vary slightly modified versions of Shor's algorithm based on a decade-old linear trend in qubit count.
Remember what happens when you extrapolate trends linearly? You fail. It's getting steeply harder to add more qubits, which is why we're not hearing about it happening every month or two.
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
Discoveries on a Schedule (Score:2)
We have a hard deadline of 2023 before quantum computers can break pre-quantum algorithms
Really? Wow! I'll have to tell my colleagues working on Quantum Computer research that they might as well research something else for a few years since they are not going to make any breakthroughs until 2023. Perhaps you could also tell me the hard deadline for when we are scheduled to discover the nature of Dark Matter so I too can avoid wasting my time researching it before it is due to be found?
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>which from a logistical standpoint will lead to centralization.
I get the impression he's not trying to avoid centralization - so that doesn't seem like that would present a problem.
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Perhaps so, I'm not versed in that aspect, so won't comment.
But hey, once we go "post quantum" practically the entire cryptographic infrastructure of the world is going to be in shambles - we'll have bigger problems on our hands than some fringe cryptocurrency no longer being trustworthy.
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Sure, everything you own (inclusive of castrating your ballsack off) vs $5.
That's absurd. Everyone knows you don't have the $5.
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You first objection is trivially easy to solve, put the greenhouses next to the data center. And to your second, governments are reposible for 1/4 billion deaths in the twentieth century alone, and anything that avoids enabling them is ultimately good.
A private currency designed to be easily shutdown (Score:3, Insightful)
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You are missing the point of this. It's about preventing companies like Visa and Mastercaard monitoring all your transactions, and about making sure that the government has to follow legal process to get that information.
In other words it's like cash. Semi-anonymous, but the shops you spend it in can be regulated.
Admitted TFA isn't very good, but come on, SJW nonsense? You could at least try to understand it before throwing in such ridiculous claims.
Re:A private currency designed to be easily shutdo (Score:4, Insightful)
You are missing the point of this. It's about preventing companies like Visa and Mastercaard monitoring all your transactions, and about making sure that the government has to follow legal process to get that information.
Have a National Security Letter. We'll take everything please, and kindly remember the part that says you're not allowed to tell anyone.
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Okay, but how is that worse than cash?
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It's a kind of virtue signalling, except that most of the people who read it think you are an idiot.
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Actually, cash makes tax evasion a lot easier than this system. That's why some businesses like cash.
Personally, not being a criminal, I'm with Stallman: privacy to prevent companies from building and selling profiles of customers is good, but privacy for tax evasion is bad and I'm happy for the government to have the ability to round up those bastards. Technically illegal purchases are private under this system, b
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You are missing the point of this. It's about preventing companies like Visa and Mastercaard monitoring all your transactions, and about making sure that the government has to follow legal process to get that information.
It doesn't do either of those things. It will wind up in the hands of a massive payment processor immediately, and they will share the data with the government. The government is supposed to have to follow legal process to sniff your internet traffic and phone calls, but they do it to all of us without that anyway.
In other words it's like cash.
It's nothing like cash, except that it's serialized.
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How will it end up in the hands of a payment processor? It's specifically designed to prevent that.
Re:A private currency designed to be easily shutdo (Score:4, Interesting)
Bitcoin is not a payment system. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: Bitcoin is not a payment system. (Score:5, Funny)
I believe "buzzwords" are the answer. It doesn't really matter what the question is.
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Bitcoin is not a store of value.
Lightning network is a toy implementation that has already shown (predictable) flaws. It won't scale, it won't work. Unless you count that it might work in a couple of years when the number of users has dwindled to insignificance, alongside the value of a bitcoin. Then it might 'scale'.
Blockchain is not a revolutionary technology.
No matter how many buzzwords you use, that won't change.
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"bitcoin is a store of value"
Dude - the title of the whitepaper is literally "Peer-to-Peer Digital Cash".
This sToRe oF vALuE talk is why the BTC price volatility is so insane and the small-blockers think a future with $1500 fees is a feature.
BTC is a dead-end technologically. Come over to the BCH chain where the blocks are 32MB and growing, fees are half a cent, and everybody is driven to make it peer-to-peer digital cash. There are two billion people in the world who are unbanked and have smartphones.
Re:Bitcoin is not a payment system. (Score:4, Funny)
Bitcoin is a store of value
Bitcoin is a store of value in the same way that /dev/null is a place to store all your data.
What's the title of the Satoshi whitepaper again? (Score:2)
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^ this guy knows what's going on.
Why Use It? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait so Stallman wants privacy, but also wants the State to be able to investigate crimes? That sounds suspiciously like "privacy for my use case and noone else's". Furthermore, being able to send money anonymously STILL allows money laundering: "Yeah I sent that money to my restaurant chain, employees paid in cash. Why no I don't own any banks in the Caribbean, why do you ask?"
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The more I read about this stuff, the more I like Japans cash only for everything society. This tracking is turning into absurd levels.
Re:Why Use It? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, that sounds like cash. What Stallman objects to is people like Visa and Mastercard getting to monitor all your transactions. It's privacy from payment processors and from the kind of "automatic" surveillance that comes with it.
Cash is semi-anonymous. You don't have to reveal your ID for a lot of transactions with it, but sometimes do if you need stuff like delivery or are buying certain services. There are systems in place to make sure merchants don't cheat the system to avoid taxes or launder money too, although they might not be that effective. Bitcoin doesn't really improve on that, and neither does Taler.
What Taler does is scale and integrates with the law enough to be widely adopted by legitimate businesses, especially financial services like banks. It's also not tied to mining so doesn't waste vast amount of energy or act as a scam for early adopters.
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"What Stallman objects to is people like Visa and Mastercard getting to monitor all your transactions. It's privacy from payment processors and from the kind of "automatic" surveillance that comes with it."
Then this project has failed already. If you create a single point at which the system can be monitored, then it will be. Remember qwest?
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The whole point of this design is that the transaction processor can't determine who is paying for what, only how much money they need to give to the merchant.
Have you even read the summary?
Re:Why Use It? (Score:5, Interesting)
As for it not being peer-to-peer: most people don't give a rat's arse about that: they want to be able to spend anonymously using a mechanism that allows for instant and cheap transactions. Likewise, banks like the idea of an easy, fast, cheap mechanism for settlement. The real question is: can it deliver on that score?
Privacy for law-abiding citizen (Score:2)
What is a good use for anonymous currency anyway? Buying drugs and hookers?
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It's definitely faster for merchants. Bitcoin for instance settles in roughly 10 minutes. Except in extraordinary circumstances which might take two hours. Visa or Mastercard, by contrast, enforce a six-month window where you never know if the payment is finalized or not. That's crazy for merchants, but Bitcoin doesn't have that problem.
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You also misunderstand how VISA works. The settlement time in the VISA network is 7 days. So once I sell something I can expect money in my bank account within 14 days.
VISA allows for 6 month chargeback window for customers. If a customer's bank issues a chargeback then the merchant's bank is legally required to wire money to the customer's bank. But this is a separate transaction, unrelated to the settlement itself.
If you want fast t
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Wait so Stallman wants privacy, but also wants the State to be able to investigate crimes? That sounds suspiciously like "privacy for my use case and noone else's". Furthermore, being able to send money anonymously STILL allows money laundering: "Yeah I sent that money to my restaurant chain, employees paid in cash. Why no I don't own any banks in the Caribbean, why do you ask?"
China, Russia, etc. show why letting government have access to your recorded transactions is a abusive aspect of a panopticon.
Anything our whining law enforcement claims to need for investigations is immediately abused by dictatorship to maintain its power.
Much of our constitution revolves around limiting or forbidding government from doing certain things, including surveillance.
To put it bluntly: money laundering is an evanescent problem for The People compared to loss of freedom, which intrusive surveill
Re:Why Use It? (Score:5, Funny)
Windows license keys.
Perfect privacy? (Score:2)
"I wouldn't want perfect privacy," Stallman says in the interview, "because that would mean it would be impossible to investigate crimes at all. And that's one of the jobs we need the state to do."
You need the state to define and enforce laws [lawsandsausagescomic.com], but can't you hire your own (perfectly) private investigator?
GNU NIH? (Score:2, Redundant)
It seems as if GNU has been infected with NIH.
Have they heard the good news about Open Source? They can take someone else's code and build on it.
M O O N (Score:2)
OMG it's mooning right now and I'm hodl'n onto it for dear life.
Stallman's currency won't be money either (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems nobody who's into alternative currencies, whether "blockchain" based or not, understands the principle by which money gets and retains its value, even though it's perfectly simple. No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area. Any alternative currency needs to be widely established and used in production, commerce and the payment of wages, before it gets such an ability, or the value needs to be fixed to an existing 'real' currency with an institution that can reliably guarantee the exchange into that currency.
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Yes, but the factors you mention ultimately derive [crowdwisers.com] from the rule of law, which means that no crypto-currency will be successful without being government sanctioned.
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This isn't a new currency. Your balance is kept in a traditional currency like Euros or USD. Taler is a digital wallet that you can keep your cash in, and spend it semi-anonymously also just like cash.
The only trust required is not in the value of Euros or USD or whatever stored in the wallet, it's that the wallet itself is secure and you no-one can alter the balance without making a legitimate transaction.
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You theory might apply to investors in foreign currencies but it doesn't explain why people value their own government's currency.
The real reason government currencies have value is that everyone needs them to pay their taxes with.
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One of the primary ways that fiat currency gets and retains value is by the government decree that you must pay your taxes in it.
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I'm not proposing anything.
I'm pointing out that the value of fiat currencies is undergirded by the taxing authority of the sovereign.
It's not magic, it's not mysterious, and it's not faith (clap if you believe in fairies\b\b\b\b\b\b\b bitcoin\b\b\b\b\b\b\b dollars...)
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No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area.
Your claim begs the question. You're saying that the trustworthiness of a currency is a result of the effectiveness of the industry among people who trust the currency. Why do the people in this currency-trusting industry trust the currency? Why do they use it rather than something else?
The truth is the two answers you dismissed as "too simple". But they aren't too simple, they are the real reasons that people trust a currency. Your argument about expected investment profitability is a red herring.
Cu
NIH (Score:3)
So, Monero/Dash/ZCash/dozens others are not enough according to Stallman and thus he intends to create the 4000th cryptocurrency which will be the "best" among all of them instead of fixing the existing ones which have nodes/users/miners behind them.
That will certainly work out.
Worthless by design (Score:2)
"Yet, Taler does not attempt to bypass centralized authority. Payments are processed by openly centralized "exchanges" rather than peer-to-peer networks of miners because, Grothoff said, such a system "would again enable dangerous, money laundering kind of practice." "
And this is why it is useless. If it can't be used to do an end run around a fascist government then it can't be used at all.
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And this is why it is useless. If it can't be used to do an end run around a fascist government then it can't be used at all.
I agree, it is useless. That's why I'll continue to use my master card.
Multi-Part Challenge (Score:3)
As we saw in Bitcoin trading in early 2018, an even greater threat may be speculation. Earlier this year, investors and speculators all "piled in" to Bitcoin, driving up the value of coins as demand far out-stripped supply. Now, less than a year later, the value of Bitcoins is tumbling to about $3,750, roughly 20% of the value it held at the beginning of the year. That's a shocking rate of loss.
It is worth mentioning the "speculation risk" with respect to crypto-currency, because there is nothing that Mr Stallman has said which gives any indication that his GNU Project Alternative would in any way mitigate the risk of speculative trading. An only slightly smaller annoyance than the speculators would have to be the conversion fees charged by the so-called "Exchanges".
As this MSNBC report from last December [cnbc.com] shows, some exchanges were charging an average of $28 per transaction. There are examples of people being charged $15 to send $100 in value - which is ridiculous.
This is frustrating for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that Bitcoin briefly had the potential to be something that could bring down the banking hegemony on currency conversions: you convert some of your local currency to Bitcoin for next-to-no overhead... you fly to another country... you convert your Bitcoins to local currency for next-to-no overhead. This, had it come to pass, would have allowed Bitcoin to become quickly established in the world and to also force established financial institutions to offer fairly-priced products instead of creaming fat profits off of travellers.
So even though I'm sure that Mr Stallman and his colleagues will have done some excellent work on enhancing the privacy of their alternative crypto-currency, the simple fact remains that privacy is just one of a multi-faceted problem. In fact, it's entirely possible that different exchanges, working in concert, could price this new offering out of the market by demanding even higher transaction fees (on the basis that they are not getting marketing information out of their users).
The entire "marketplace" looks to be increasingly rigged by "establishment middlemen". Sadly, I don't think that there is any way of circumventing that, at least not within the scope proposed here.
Drawback (Score:2)
Missing the itch: (Score:3)
My grievances with traditional money supplies are:
Taler does not appear to address these problems. I don't see the appeal.
Re:So the problem with Bitcoin, according to RMS, (Score:5, Informative)
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Bitcoin doesn't lack privacy unless you are converting it to some other currency. You at least have anonymous options like conducting business in BTC and cashing out with actual cash. This lacks any privacy at all. What is the point of privacy if you leave it vulnerable to government, the group you most need protection from?
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No actually true, with some care you can use a pseudonym(wallet address) not tied to your legal identity. What you can't do is partially reveal transactions, if the address is associated with a person once, it no longer provides privacy.
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You expect too much from AC. That information is in the second line of the summary.
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As in POW! CRASH! BANG! or as in prisoner-of-war labour?
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The dollar is only legal tender of debt. Nobody is required to accept them for purchases of any particular good or service. And you could avoid the dollar quite a bit via clearing houses and arbitration agreements. Additional options could be options or future contracts to deliver bitcoin.
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Doubling the key length is a potential defense against quantum, but it's a linear defense, doubling the quibits needed, vs squaring the guesses needed in a classical computer. There is likely a point where noise/ the quantum foam put and absolute limit on the number of quibits that can be coherently entangled.
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There is every reason to suspect such a limit exists. There is noise in every environment and at a certain point no matter how much error correction is done, there's a point where the signal is simply lost. Error correction and initial setup is going to introduce energy and hence noise into the system, and even an absolute vacuum simply isn't absolute on the quantum level. Where it's at is unknown at present though.