you're here since 2015, you should know the next steps for the decentralized exchange.

Yeah, and getting BTS delisted from centralized exchanges isn't it.

Anyway, without confidential transactions I really don't see this taking off, at least with BTC people have the vague false perception that the whole world can't track their financial activity (slowly realizing this is not so, http://shouldhaveusedmonero.xyz/), with Bitshares there is no such illusion with the named accounts.

It's a shame really, with Smartcoins and some actual privacy, we could have easily been the USDT of the interwebz, add more fiat gateways to the equation and we could have been the people's bank, but even average joe is smart enough to stay away if his full financial history is available for everyone to snatch.

For those of us who have been around for a few years, it seems all but certain that blockchain technology is set to revolutionize the financial sector.

While the rest of the world hasn't quite caught up to this, for anyone remotely involved in this movement, the advantages and technological supremacy of this technology are, quite frankly, patently obvious.


HOWEVER.

Especially since the events of September 11, 16 years ago already, we as a society have been on the fast lane to a mass-surveillance society, where if certain forces in society had their way, ordinary people would have next to no privacy in their day to day lives.

Anything they do on the internet, cataloged and stored in a database somewhere.

Everything they buy online, sold to some company to build a database.

Wherever they go, with their trustworthy personal tracking device (I believe they call it a cellphone), their location tracked, to say nothing of built-in cameras and microphones, and untrusted baseband firmware.

Their closed-source software, phoning home and betraying their privacy online.

Voluntarily signing up for services provided by companies more than happy to make the user their product.

"I have nothing to hide", most of them say, without really realizing what they're losing.


Against all of that, there is nothing that blockchain can do.

However, in the field of financial privacy, this technology can either level the playing field once again, by putting financial privacy in the hands of the people, or it can greatly accelerate the trend towards a totalitarian all-knowing state, by not protecting the users' privacy.

https://shouldhaveusedmonero.xyz/

I strongly believe that a society where private purchases are made public for the whole world to see is a dystopian society, where people will self-censor, in much the same way that people self-censor when they know that  they are being watched.

Fortunately cryptography was developed, and savvy people have that last line of defense against powers that be hellbent on knowing everything about as many people as possible, "just in case" -- how this is not self-evidently a terrible and unfortunate idea, I truly cannot understand, because even before the days of Utah datacenters and bombastic Snowden revelations, all of this was pretty obvious already.

And thus users of cryptographic technologies are free to engage in as much thought crime as they desire, safe in the knowledge that the mathematics shields them from the intruding nature of Big Brother. Imagine that, being able to read whatever you want without being tracked..

Unless this concept is carried forward to the blockchain revolution, as far as I'm concerned, we're really just enslaving ourselves with pretty fancy bleeding edge technology.

The ability to transact private has always been present, for THOUSANDS of years. We live in a time now that is an EXCEPTION, where slowly it is becoming accepted that unless some banker or politician or figure of authority can see what you are up to, then you must be up to no good -- this must be resisted and fought against, not celebrated and embraced, for it is our very freedom that is at stake here.

Relevant YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-7lzt3als

Relevant propaganda: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

Final words

Monero is the only cryptocurrency, that in my analysis, has the right ideas about what a widely used cryptocurrency should be designed like. It is what Bitcoin was meant to be.  True digital cash, anonymous, untraceable, just like cash has been for thousands of years.



Now, I see the big potential for Bitshares, or I would not be around still (though frankly I retain only about 10% of my position since this summer, as it became clearer and clearer than privacy does not seem to be a big concern in the project roadmap -- indeed, if it wasn't for TITAN (flawed though it was), I probably would have never even joined the community).

I would like to "hear" everyones' opinions on this very important topic, let me know what you think.

I know a lot of exchanges are threatened by the movement toward transparent order books on decentralized exchanges - likely to be embraced when TXSRB.org finishes its negotiations with the American SEC.

It does bother me to see this sort of thing being normalized, when did full transparency and the death of financial privacy become a good thing?

If you ask me, not only should all transactions be private by default with optional opt-out, but also market orders should be anonymous, revealing who the trader is , is a significant leak of privacy, that's internal information that the whole internet from order being placed to eternity should have no business knowing about.


Why not work with it on the other side, and have convenient in-wallet functions for exporting trading data, in a non automated manner, to make tax reporting easier .. instead of setting up a system where everyone is guilty by default and the government tracks everything everyone does.

Damn.

If someone is in contact with @kenCode through other channels, I believe his input to the points I raised a couple of weeks ago would be very relevant.

@kenCode, I come out of my slumber after having filled about 30 captchas to train some google AI against my will (cloudfart still going strong here on the forum it seems) to express my concern about the latest update.

It appears to me that having considered libsnark at all, given it's need for a trusted setup a la zcash (endless source of rumors, contention and distrust, wasn't the idea trusting less parties, not more?) was a grave mistake. Unless something has changed in the last few months, libsnark is horribly slow too.

But perhaps even more concerning is that so late in the game your team is still, if I got the gist right, wondering which cryptographic fundamentals to use for the system.

Cryptography isn't "just math", it's some of the most complex maths around, very hard to get right, and few who attempt to "do their own math" ever get it right.

This uncertainty about at least 3 cryptographic options leads me to believe that the architecture of this feature has not been very well thought at all. Contrast with Monero for instance, where there has always been a clear roadmap, an understanding of the limitations of the present evolution of the system, and a precise and targeted plan to address them.

So that's one aspect of it where I would like your clarifications if possible.

Something else I'd like to bring us, is clarification on the following points:

We're also doing our own coin tumbling and extra layer of coin/address mixing and if all goes as planned (...)

1. Why is any extra tumbling necessary?
2. How would it work?

(...) we should be able to keep almost all of it on-chain.

Who is "we", what is "it", and why and how some of "it" would have to go off-chain ?

C-IPFS is mostly ready now for the automated backups too:

1. Can C-IPFS be made to work with a tor transparent proxy?
2. Why is there a necessity to backup extra information? No other coin that I know of has this requirement (most notably, Monero).
3. Cryptographically, how is the backup protected?
4. Does a compromise of the backup result in compromise of funds without the wallet password?


As usual, forgive my bluntness, I don't mean to devalue the ongoing work that you & your team put into bitshares, nor do I question your dedication. Perhaps I should have said something earlier (months ago) when I first read about libsnark and c-ipfs, but as they say, better late than never.

Glad I sold at $0.34 

Sure, rub it in our faces

Quote from: CoinHoarder on July 10, 2017, 06:48:41 am

A black swan would be a death blow to Bitshares... even if the market recovers. Just like it was to Nubits.

strange how bitshares is still alive even after bitrub black swan some years ago.

black swan only implies a dead and illiquid market, not the worst thing to shut them down for the time being, if you ask me.

Nobody cares about bitRUR though.

If it happened in bitUSD (and correct me if I'm wrong, not sure if this still applies to bitshares 2.0, but it could happen if the BTS price freefalls by >60% in a short amount of time) it would be a completely different story then.


I guess i'm just surprised this is not discussed more often, it's a real (small) risk, but it's there.