Author Topic: Privacy in Bitshares  (Read 2778 times)

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Offline karnal

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I wrote an article about this - https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@karnal/privacy-in-the-digital-age

Offline paliboy

Recruite a team of developers able to implement your ideas and create a worker proposal...then the real discussion will start ;)

Offline karnal

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I wish this would've generated more discussion.. just doesn't seem to be such a big issue, which baffles me completely.

Offline chamber

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Hear hear!  I would love to see Bitshares adopt the same privacy protections as Monero, for the same reasons.  From my perspective, privacy should be the default (with view keys) and as transparent to the user as possible. 

Offline Stan

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Hats off to Toni Lane Casserley - she contacted some of her friends at several exchanges and discovered that even though the blockchain itself has been up 99.9999% of the time, individual nodes at individual exchanges may disconnect.   This looks to them like the network has hung.

The bug was fixed on Steemit and Peerplays but no one ever told the BitShares witnesses about it.  So now they are grabbing the fix from Steemit and perhaps eliminating a latent issue that may have been lying in there since the Dawn of Time.
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline fav

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I believe that exchanges that achieve transparency in their operations while preserving privacy for their customers will have a huge competitive edge.


 +5%

Offline Stan

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I believe that the ability to have privacy in our transactions is one of the cornerstones of freedom.
Another building block that has it's place is to achieve voluntary transparency when needed.

I believe that exchanges that achieve transparency in their operations while preserving privacy for their customers will have a huge competitive edge.

I believe that exchanges that can operate in jurisdictions which restrict freedom will have deeper markets than those who can not serve the needs of those poor, imprisoned populations.

Find a way to do all that all, and you've got a winner.

We plan to be a winner.
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract of any kind.   These are merely my opinions which I reserve the right to change at any time.

Offline karnal

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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.
« Last Edit: October 06, 2017, 12:48:23 pm by karnal »