Why are stealth transactions valuable to the groups listed?  traders, hedge funds, venture capital, mutual funds

Ask any of them to walk around with a piece of paper in their forehead that says: "I own $gazillion USD in bank account X".

Let's see if they care about privacy or not.

@Chris4210, looking forward to your feedback concerning the latest posts in this thread.

I think private/stealth transactions are heavily discussed, maybe not in this community, but in blockchain in general. When I spoke to merchants, banks, and SME they were very interested in keeping their financial transaction history private. On the other side, all transactions are documented on a blockchain forever and are full publicly visible for everyone because we all love transparency. Especially government and the public sector financial transactions should be more transparent in my point of view.

I agree with you on the government being more transparent, the big difference when compared to private companies and individuals is the tremendous difference in power between the government and these.

Making the government more transparent empowers us the people and lets the government know that obvious corruption will not be tolerated - the power balance gets a bit more balanced.

Forcing private companies and individuals to have total lack of privacy in their financial affairs, on the other hand, further shifts this balance of power in the direction of the government. This, I believe, must be resisted.

In my personal opinion, the bitshares stealth feature should be developed in such a way that it gives individuals the protection they seek for a reasonable small price. On the other side the transaction type "stealth" should be too expensive or "unattractive" for criminal activities so that they look for easier alternatives. In this way, we could keep the balance between the two sides.

I'm in complete disagreement - here's my reasoning.

Criminals (and let's use the term here to mean not just someone who is breaking the law, but someone who is being immoral/evil, or in other words, not committing a victim-less crime) become criminals because they are attracted to the high rewards from this high risk (imprisonment, bodily injury) activity. It won't be a few more cents or even a few dollars that will stop them.

Day to day people, on the other hand, would suffer from absurd fees for transferring value privately with such a fee structure: and this would hit the poorest people (think people who don't live in 1st world countries) disproportionately.

Whether it be sending my buddy 2k, or paying for a coffee, I want my transactions to be private.
Any other way, the system is leaking a lot of data, and it can't be said to be private at all. All stealth transactions automatically become targets of much higher attention if most transactions are not private.

This, I believe, is not the right path.

I want to avoid that the BitShares Platform and our company BitShares Munich is getting into any legal troubles for providing criminals a platform.

You or Bitshares Munich can't be held responsible for criminals using Bitshares.

Criminals use encryption all day long, no cryptographic researchers or open source developers have to answer for that.

The technology itself is neutral. If we begin tailoring it to only cater to the "good" guys, what ends up happening is that it ends up being no good for bad and good guys alike.

The bad guys, however, will find somewhere else.
The good guys stay, and have their privacy compromised.

Stealth is a very sensitive technical feature for the BitShares Platform and is also highly debated. One the one side Stealth can be used to protect the privacy of the users, on the other end it can be used for illegal and criminal activities. Both sides have to be considered and evaluated while developing this feature.

I don't think it is highly debated at all.

This is akin to saying that encryption can be used for illegal and criminal activities, ditto for language, ditto for the internet, and so on.

These would all be true, however, what is the alternative? A world where certain governments have privileged backdoor access ?

I believe we have enough evidence by now (not that it wasn't clear even 15 years ago, but by now it is irrefutable) to know what some have known all along: you cannot trust anyone with that kind of power.

And even if you could, then we would be left with the question of what happens when the privileged few are hacked, and this privileged access is made more broadly accessible.

Even the CIA and the NSA can and have been hacked, I don't see much room for debate here. Backdoor access to cryptographic systems has always been and will always remain a stupendously bad idea.


Thus it is a good thing that the encryption works, in spite of unsavory characters leveraging this same technology to conduct their unsavory business.

There are other ways to catch fish without massive dragnet surveillance, that is a bad habit that is relatively recent (indeed, the technology that makes it possible is itself recent, which only speaks to the nature of the person who feels the desire to control and subject everyone else -- as soon as the technology became available, such systems began spreading like wildfire)


In the crypto space, only the monero team got this right. Privacy in transactions has to exist, and it has to be on by default.

Anything else is not "crypto" at all, and more to the point, continues to facilitate the kind of systems that are eroding so many of our rights away.

More surveillance is not the answer, and transparent blockchains allow for perfect surveillance.

Do we have any Japanese / South Korean members around here?

but I do think the community should take action to claim their piece of the eos pie.

Please clarify?

Bitshares has grown in value by 2500% over three months.

That's really amazing.

It is .. but what are the fundamentals for this astronomical rise?

I think we could easily x50 with STEALTH in the picture from here ..