Author Topic: Privacy / anonymity of Bitshares Stealth feature vs Monero?  (Read 4323 times)

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Offline karnal

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Offline R

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The bitshares development and deployment process is pretty opaque to me--is someone already on incorporating the Stealth UI into the main codebase?  If not, who would need to do that?

Raise an issue on bitshares-ui github: https://github.com/bitshares/bitshares-ui/issues

Offline chamber

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I'm sympathetic to your concerns, karnal.   FWIW, Ken Code says the UI for blinded transactions is complete, and needs to be incorporated by a Bitshares core dev:

"minimal security Blinded transactions, yes. true Stealth as defined on the Agorise steemit blog, no.
 
the ui and ux for blinded transactions was finished about a month or so ago. a bitshares core dev just needs to grab our code from the Agorise repos and implement it (github.com/Agorise).
 
the testnet and roadmap is almost always pinned up at the top in the group chat: @Agorise 
 
As for the additional Stealth features that we want, the Stealth core dev is having a baby right now and will return to work on that as soon as is comfortable."

The bitshares development and deployment process is pretty opaque to me--is someone already on incorporating the Stealth UI into the main codebase?  If not, who would need to do that? 
« Last Edit: February 01, 2018, 07:54:24 pm by chamber »

Offline karnal

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One more step
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First of all, allow me to share my frustration by pasting the oh-so-familiar intrusive cloudflare prompt that users who care about anonymity and privacy are lambasted with whenever they visit this forum.

Which, actually, is a good indicator of how much privacy and anonymity are (unfortunately, not) valued in this otherwise great community.


The elementary problem, besides the apparent decision to move to a platform (Telegram) where your real phone number is necessary to participate (beginning to see a trend regarding privacy here?) and which automatically excludes people who care about privacy and anonymity, is simple.

In monero everything is obscured by default, whether it be the addresses involved, or the amounts involved.

The proposed (or actual, I guess, altough it's essentially next to useless, as no official GUI was ever developed for the stealth feature that already exists, thus essentially guaranteeing it will never see wide adoption, thus essentially guaranteeing that it's next to useless) and actual privacy solutions for Bitshares (and indeed, every other "crypto"currency out there; this is **precisely** what makes monero stand out) is that privacy is **optional**.

This not only dramatically decreases the anonymity set, it also makes anyone and anything using private transactions stand out.


I tried to bring this to the community's attention for literally years and was met with mostly indifference. Same with the usage of Cloudflare on the forum (you better not be reusing your password on the forum with other things, or you better *really* trust cloudflare).

Although I'm happy to see that the BTS/USD price has risen considerably since I detached from here (mostly due to the aforementioned reasons), as plenty of people here have stuck around for years, believed in this project and helped it moved forward, and they deserve a reward for their loyalty ...

I simply don't see Bitshares ever taking off, when the basic premise is that **anyone anywhere** can see **everything** that **anyone** does.

With bitcoin and similar "cryptos", at least there is an illusion of privacy because of the multiple addresses that a wallet will typically use.
With bitshares there is no illusion, you can snoop on anyone's entire bitshares career simply by knowing their account name.

Couple this with other poor security decisions like the newer wallet versions querying every public node on the planet on startup, bake it together with the fact that to this day there is no proxying support in the wallet (thus ensuring that all but the most technically sophisticated users will be connecting from their real IPs to all these nodes, which may or may not be logging your IP and account name).

See the pattern? Privacy has simply never been a major drive around here. In fact, to my dismay, I've seen it repeatedly argued that it's actually a good thing™ that everything is visible.

My only hope is that the people who are too blind to understand the implications of the widespread usage of such a system, don't forcibly drag the rest of us down with them.

Offline xeroc

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A public testnet with new Stealth was promised by December .... 2016
:-(

Offline killuminati

wtf, when is stealth going to be released, its been over 2 years now...

Offline KenMonkey

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Offline chamber

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Thanks!  I guess such a comparison doesn't exist yet. 

Offline ebit

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« Last Edit: December 13, 2016, 01:05:03 am by ebit »
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Offline chamber

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Has anyone done a detailed analysis comparing the Bitshares Stealth feature with Monero?  Thoughts on using Bitshares Stealth for transactions that might attract state actor attention?  For example, is Bitshares Stealth something that would protect someone trying to operate a black market in Cuba or Venezuela?