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Dash needs to implement Shadowcash technology and truly be anonymous.

Do you think Dash fungibility / anonymity is a critical feature?


  • Total voters
    45
That is not correct. Shadowcash is not necessary to be implemented. I recommended it for reasons outlined in this thread (it is already built). However, if Dash wants to implement their own, then that is no problem either. The point is, it needs to be an actual anonymizing feature and not a weak, problemantic, insecure, exploitable coinjoin implementation. What people are upset about is that Dash's "anonymity" is not good enough (for reasons outlined in this thread) and that Dash is not making it a first priority which is why I stated "critical" in the poll question.

That means 29 people think it is CRITICAL, not just nice to have, important, etc, but absolutely critical.

I still think it's misleading. If you ask if the governance system is critical or if security is critical or if vendor adoption is critical or if instant/secure transactions are critical you will get a sea of yes votes. Asking if anonymity and fungibility is critical is not the same thing as asking if it should be the number one priority out of all other possible things. It is also definitely not the same thing as asking if people are dissatisfied with the current team's efforts and the direction of the project with respect to anonymity.
 
It's not a conspiracy. If Dash is ever going to become widely adopted, companies like Coinfirm are an inevitability. It would be naive to think that Dash can somehow squeak by and gain mass adoption while all the merchants who adopt Dash will suddenly stop caring about regulatory compliance and covering their own ass. The difference between mixed coins and unmixed coins in Dash is not the cataclysmic gap that some people are blowing it up to be, threatening the fabric of the currency and undermining everything we all hold dear. Especially when mixing is easy to do and relatively common, the risk assessment is not something that I am concerned about. If Coinfirm can help merchants be more likely to accept Dash than to not accept it at all, then I'm for it.

Yep, add yourself to the list of people that are not helping with this. Fuck coinfirm and anyone that wants to defend them. It's one thing that companies like Coinfirm exist, entirely another that people such as yourself are willing to defend them. The fact is, dash core are actively assisting coinfirm - to the point of actually supplying hardware! - and not one MNO agreed to this "relationship".

Let's just say, for example, that we put this same poll question as a formal proposal, would you accept the result?

@xdashguy maybe you could do this as a formal proposal? - I will reimburse you. I think it's time the core team put up or shut up. Let's be absolutely clear here; Evan loves to highlight how dash MNOs agreed to a 2MB block increase, this is no different; both proposals (Evan vs Shadowcash) are functionally possible, but will the core team act on it? - or will the core team do as they please regardless?
 
This thread has shown more than the failure of anonymity in Dash but the failure of the governance system. We can see from this poll that community highly values privacy / anonymity / fungibility (all related concepts). However, this concept is not being taken seriously by the governing body (core). This indicates a large failure in the governance system where actual direction of the project is not being reflected by the community desires but instead by a totalitarian few.
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This thread/poll is not a governance system, it's just another (interesting) discussion on the forum. If you want governance - create a proposal and fund implementing smth you think worth implementing. Start with masternode blinding if you think it's that easy. If your team can implement such changes without breaking Dash - good, we can talk about accepting this. If you think that every idea and even every implementation core team member had was always accepted - you are wrong. If you think that not accepting everything is totalitarian - you are wrong again.

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Listen to the community or fall off into irrelevance. ...
The community is trying to signal this with the poll results but I fear that no one is listening.
I followed this discussion from the beginning and already pointed out pros and cons of some proposed techs and I thought it was clear that we follow most current anonymity techs and analyze if they are applicable to Dash. No additional new tech info was provided that I could respond to. The fact that "I want this!" thread does not make "this" magically appear in code doesn't mean that no one is listening.
 
Yep, add yourself to the list of people that are not helping with this. Fuck coinfirm and anyone that wants to defend them. It's one thing that companies like Coinfirm exist, entirely another that people such as yourself are willing to defend them. The fact is, dash core are actively assisting coinfirm - to the point of actually supplying hardware! - and not one MNO agreed to this "relationship".

Responding to my post with "fuck coinfirm, and anyone who supports working with them isn't helping" is not a constructive argument. If you want to respond to a post, then point out something I said that you disagree with and why. Throwing out stuff like this sends a message that you aren't interested in having a productive conversation.

Let's just say, for example, that we put this same poll question as a formal proposal, would you accept the result?

@xdashguy maybe you could do this as a formal proposal? - I will reimburse you. I think it's time the core team put up or shut up. Let's be absolutely clear here; Evan loves to highlight how dash MNOs agreed to a 2MB block increase, this is no different; both proposals (Evan vs Shadowcash) are functionally possible, but will the core team act on it? - or will the core team do as they please regardless?

I wouldn't mind seeing such a proposal, but if you're going to do a proposal, make it actually clear what the MNs are saying yes or no to. Don't just throw in a proposal asking "Is anonymity and fungibility a critical feature?", and then expect to interpret that to mean that the MNs disapprove of working with coinfirm or disapprove of the core team's stance on those things - because that doesn't logically follow.

I would absolutely accept the result of a vote if the proposal is clear. But consider for yourself, that if the MNs don't vote your way then are you going to accept the result or will you just say that it only went that way because it's stacked with core votes?
 
Responding to my post with "fuck coinfirm, and anyone who supports working with them isn't helping" is not a constructive argument. If you want to respond to a post, then point out something I said that you disagree with and why. Throwing out stuff like this sends a message that you aren't interested in having a productive conversation.

I wouldn't mind seeing such a proposal, but if you're going to do a proposal, make it actually clear what the MNs are saying yes or no to. Don't just throw in a proposal asking "Is anonymity and fungibility a critical feature?", and then expect to interpret that to mean that the MNs disapprove of working with coinfirm or disapprove of the core team's stance on those things - because that doesn't logically follow.

I would absolutely accept the result of a vote if the proposal is clear. But consider for yourself, that if the MNs don't vote your way then are you going to accept the result or will you just say that it only went that way because it's stacked with core votes?

The point is, first we need to rid this thread and subject of all the people fighting it. I'm not trying to have a "constructive argument", there is no argument. If you don't want greater anonymity then you're basically fighting to retain flaws in dash's privacy model instead of improving it for everyone involved. Why should anyone here be defending the actions of Coinfirm unless they're somehow invested in them? The numbers here (90%+) simply don't reflect your view.

All the proposal has to do is ask MNOs if they want the core team to put more resources into improving dash's anonymity.. and that might very well mean implementing Shadowcash. When Evan asked MNOs to vote for a block size increase, he didn't give technical solutions... the technical solution was known as is Shadowcash. Evan said it was a way to get a clear signal that this was the right direction... well he got what he wanted, and now it's our turn to do likewise. Good enough for him, it's good enough for us.
 
If you don't want greater anonymity then you're basically fighting to retain flaws in dash's privacy model instead of improving it for everyone involved.
There is a distinction between wanting greater anonymity and having a realistic view of what the consequences of certain actions are. I would guess that that most Dash users would like privacy to be an option, not a requirement, in part because they themselves would like to have a choice, and also because having no traceable blockchain might be an impediment to merchant acceptance. I would also guess that completely reworking the protocol to implement a different form of privacy protection would be a serious undertaking that right now is trumped by the development needs we have for the more imminent 12.1 and evolution.

Why should anyone here be defending the actions of Coinfirm unless they're somehow invested in them? The numbers here (90%+) simply don't reflect your view.

No one is supporting or defending Coinfirm. We are supporting merchants who *will not* integrate Dash unless they are confident that they are in compliance with the law, which accounts for the vast majority of merchants and virtually all large merchants. If they can't hire coinfirm to do it, then their only other option is to do it in-house, which would be lower quality and more expensive, which means why bother? The fact is, no large retailer is going to ignore the massive risk of not taking basic reasonable steps to make sure they are not going to have the government up their ass. Specialized companies like coinfirm remove this critical barrier to adoption. Whether or not you or I think that the laws are morally justifiable is entirely irrelevant.

All the proposal has to do is ask MNOs if they want the core team to put more resources into improving dash's anonymity.. and that might very well mean implementing Shadowcash. When Evan asked MNOs to vote for a block size increase, he didn't give technical solutions... the technical solution was known as is Shadowcash. Evan said it was a way to get a clear signal that this was the right direction... well he got what he wanted, and now it's our turn to do likewise. Good enough for him, it's good enough for us.

Don't ask if people want the core team to put "more resources" into anonymity. People will say yes to put more resources into literally *anything* good, so the meaning of the vote is lost. Make a proposal that says, Yes, we approve of working with coinfirm or No we should not work with coinfirm. That would be a far more meaningful proposal. Or make one that says, should we prioritize improving our privacy features over evolution/DAPI development? Try that. The 90% of votes in this poll are reflecting, yes, privacy is a critical feature. Which is not equivalent to all the claims you are making about it being a bad idea to partner with coinfirm or how the core team is going in the wrong direction.
 
There is a distinction between wanting greater anonymity and having a realistic view of what the consequences of certain actions are. I would guess that that most Dash users would like privacy to be an option, not a requirement, in part because they themselves would like to have a choice, and also because having no traceable blockchain might be an impediment to merchant acceptance. I would also guess that completely reworking the protocol to implement a different form of privacy protection would be a serious undertaking that right now is trumped by the development needs we have for the more imminent 12.1 and evolution.



No one is supporting or defending Coinfirm. We are supporting merchants who *will not* integrate Dash unless they are confident that they are in compliance with the law, which accounts for the vast majority of merchants and virtually all large merchants. If they can't hire coinfirm to do it, then their only other option is to do it in-house, which would be lower quality and more expensive, which means why bother? The fact is, no large retailer is going to ignore the massive risk of not taking basic reasonable steps to make sure they are not going to have the government up their ass. Specialized companies like coinfirm remove this critical barrier to adoption. Whether or not you or I think that the laws are morally justifiable is entirely irrelevant.



Don't ask if people want the core team to put "more resources" into anonymity. People will say yes to put more resources into literally *anything* good, so the meaning of the vote is lost. Make a proposal that says, Yes, we approve of working with coinfirm or No we should not work with coinfirm. That would be a far more meaningful proposal. Or make one that says, should we prioritize improving our privacy features over evolution/DAPI development? Try that. The 90% of votes in this poll are reflecting, yes, privacy is a critical feature. Which is not equivalent to all the claims you are making about it being a bad idea to partner with coinfirm or how the core team is going in the wrong direction.

You should go back to bitcoin, they have more compliance and more merchants to keep you happy. And yes, dash core is actively supporting (and thereby defending) Coinfirm, not just with integration but also hardware.. look in the other threads / proposals / interviews if you need evidence.

In fact, what the hell are you doing here if you wanted a compliant system just like a bank? Can't you go to Ethereum where they are already integrating with banks?

I have no NO IDEA why the hell a few people here are vigorously defending that nothing should be done to improve anonymity. I mean, attack me, that's fine.. but all these anonymity and fungibility arguments were originally started by Evan and continue to this day (when it suits him). Go argue it over with him.

It's not surprising, to me at least, that dash is losing ground to other cryptos. Keep it up guys, keep telling us why stuff can't or shouldn't be done.
 
You should go back to bitcoin, they have more compliance and more merchants to keep you happy. And yes, dash core is actively supporting (and thereby defending) Coinfirm, not just with integration but also hardware.. look in the other threads / proposals / interviews if you need evidence.

In fact, what the hell are you doing here if you wanted a compliant system just like a bank? Can't you go to Ethereum where they are already integrating with banks?

I have no NO IDEA why the hell a few people here are vigorously defending that nothing should be done to improve anonymity. I mean, attack me, that's fine.. but all these anonymity and fungibility arguments were originally started by Evan and continue to this day (when it suits him). Go argue it over with him.

It's not surprising, to me at least, that dash is losing ground to other cryptos. Keep it up guys, keep telling us why stuff can't or shouldn't be done.

I never said that nothing should be done. If you disagree with something that I said, you should articulate what it is that you disagree with and why. The only actual point you just made is that you are disagreeing with my statement about the definition of "supporting" coinfirm, which is a tangential issue in this discussion about whether or not it is a good idea to work with them to integrate Dash into their service.

Bitcoin doesn't "have" compliance. Compliance is not a feature of the protocol. Compliance is something that merchants HAVE to do in order to obey the law and protect their own interests, regardless of how they are getting paid. Would you be okay if Dash was permanently relegated to only be accepted by the small number of merchants who don't care about the legal risk? That would drop the potential market penetration by orders of magnitude. No matter what Dash does with its protocol, even if it has the best privacy ever built into it, you *can not* stop merchants from requiring basic, reasonable measures to protect themselves from legal risk, whether that comes from a hired company like coinfirm or their own internal analysis. That is just the reality we all need to face.

Stop thinking about this as if Coinfirm would prevent all private transactions. The only thing this would likely do is that if someone is an idiot and forgets to mix the coins they got from ISIS, maybe that transaction would pose a significant legal risk and the merchant might do something about it. The merchant just has to have something to be able to show the government that they have taken reasonable steps to make sure they are not knowingly doing something illegal. If the laws allow them to accept cash then it is unlikely they will have a problem with mixed coins unless there are other risk factors that are more significant than just the mixing. The impact on fungibility is not as extreme as you think it is, and on top of that, all of this is *inevitable* and will happen whether Dash wants it to or not. If it is going to happen anyway we might as well do what we can to accelerate adoption and be ahead of other cryptos in that respect.
 
I never said that nothing should be done. If you disagree with something that I said, you should articulate what it is that you disagree with and why. The only actual point you just made is that you are disagreeing with my statement about the definition of "supporting" coinfirm, which is a tangential issue in this discussion about whether or not it is a good idea to work with them to integrate Dash into their service.

Bitcoin doesn't "have" compliance. Compliance is not a feature of the protocol. Compliance is something that merchants HAVE to do in order to obey the law and protect their own interests, regardless of how they are getting paid. Would you be okay if Dash was permanently relegated to only be accepted by the small number of merchants who don't care about the legal risk? That would drop the potential market penetration by orders of magnitude. No matter what Dash does with its protocol, even if it has the best privacy ever built into it, you *can not* stop merchants from requiring basic, reasonable measures to protect themselves from legal risk, whether that comes from a hired company like coinfirm or their own internal analysis. That is just the reality we all need to face.

Stop thinking about this as if Coinfirm would prevent all private transactions. The only thing this would likely do is that if someone is an idiot and forgets to mix the coins they got from ISIS, maybe that transaction would pose a significant legal risk and the merchant might do something about it. The merchant just has to have something to be able to show the government that they have taken reasonable steps to make sure they are not knowingly doing something illegal. If the laws allow them to accept cash then it is unlikely they will have a problem with mixed coins unless there are other risk factors that are more significant than just the mixing. The impact on fungibility is not as extreme as you think it is, and on top of that, all of this is *inevitable* and will happen whether Dash wants it to or not. If it is going to happen anyway we might as well do what we can to accelerate adoption and be ahead of other cryptos in that respect.

You continued arguments to do nothing about it and bring zero to the solution.

Most people here don't give a shit about your merchant compliance because those that do are already using real cash or bank issued debit cards. What exactly is dash bringing to the table? If you're a merchant and want compliance, go ahead and ask for a driving license or passport.. compliance done.

Companies like Coinfirm go waaaay beyond compliance. Why are you ignoring their two-way partnerships with companies like Vodafone and ShapeShift? You're happy that compliance means every fabric of your daily life is pulled together, mapped and manipulated? - that you are profiled, your data sold, used and abused for a profit. But hey, let's just help them along, right? - because doing something for Coinfirm is betting than improving anonymity and fungibility in our product, right?

But here you go, try these quotes... go ahead, you can ask @eduffield if he's changed his mind....

https://medium.com/@simon/the-bright-side-of-darkcoin-a923facddc3c#.w1boqumbz

"I believe the central problem with Bitcoin is that the public ledger, although a remarkable accomplishment, also allows a gross invasion of personal privacy by permanently listing all transactions the users have ever done publicly. I would imagine many groups are working to tie the addresses used to real identities and then following the money around to see what is happening with it.

There was also a lot of talk recently about tainting coins to check and see if they’re “clean” (note: he means colored coins). I believe that all coins should be considered equal and you shouldn’t mess with the fungibility of the coins themselves."
https://www.coingecko.com/buzz/interview-evan-duffield-dash

"How do you make a stable environment for it without losing fungibility of the individual coins? How do they expose users to privacy-invasive situations and things like that. I was watching and waiting for the Bitcoin team to do something about the fungibility issue but it never happened.
....
With Bitcoin, every transaction is traceable back to the coinbase transaction. What that means is that the coinbase is where the actual coins were created - that's when the miner mined them originally and then they start this path through the network from user to user. You can follow this procession and if at any point a user is identified as owning a specific address it suddenly means that anything they do after that is traceable. If you can identify one of the other addresses after it, you know that they did business with that person. The closer that those two transactions are, the more likely this happened.

Eventually a lot of these addresses and users are going to be identified. There will be companies selling these data, which is an invasion of privacy and no one wants a system that is susceptible to those types of attacks especially with a global ledger on the internet."
 
You continued arguments to do nothing about it and bring zero to the solution.

Most people here don't give a shit about your merchant compliance because those that do are already using real cash or bank issued debit cards. What exactly is dash bringing to the table? If you're a merchant and want compliance, go ahead and ask for a driving license or passport.. compliance done.

Companies like Coinfirm go waaaay beyond compliance. Why are you ignoring their two-way partnerships with companies like Vodafone and ShapeShift? You're happy that compliance means every fabric of your daily life is pulled together, mapped and manipulated? - that you are profiled, your data sold, used and abused for a profit. But hey, let's just help them along, right? - because doing something for Coinfirm is betting than improving anonymity and fungibility in our product, right?

But here you go, try these quotes... go ahead, you can ask @eduffield if he's changed his mind....

https://medium.com/@simon/the-bright-side-of-darkcoin-a923facddc3c#.w1boqumbz

"I believe the central problem with Bitcoin is that the public ledger, although a remarkable accomplishment, also allows a gross invasion of personal privacy by permanently listing all transactions the users have ever done publicly. I would imagine many groups are working to tie the addresses used to real identities and then following the money around to see what is happening with it.

There was also a lot of talk recently about tainting coins to check and see if they’re “clean” (note: he means colored coins). I believe that all coins should be considered equal and you shouldn’t mess with the fungibility of the coins themselves."
https://www.coingecko.com/buzz/interview-evan-duffield-dash

"How do you make a stable environment for it without losing fungibility of the individual coins? How do they expose users to privacy-invasive situations and things like that. I was watching and waiting for the Bitcoin team to do something about the fungibility issue but it never happened.
....
With Bitcoin, every transaction is traceable back to the coinbase transaction. What that means is that the coinbase is where the actual coins were created - that's when the miner mined them originally and then they start this path through the network from user to user. You can follow this procession and if at any point a user is identified as owning a specific address it suddenly means that anything they do after that is traceable. If you can identify one of the other addresses after it, you know that they did business with that person. The closer that those two transactions are, the more likely this happened.

Eventually a lot of these addresses and users are going to be identified. There will be companies selling these data, which is an invasion of privacy and no one wants a system that is susceptible to those types of attacks especially with a global ledger on the internet."

If you mix your coins, the source of those coins when you spend them still won't be able to get traced. That is still true with or without coinfirm.

It's not about whether I or merchants want compliance. It's about what may be *required by law* for businesses that are thinking about potentially accepting Dash. This is for people who would not otherwise accept Dash, to give them a way to accept it. Nobody enjoys complying with regulations but I am not going to expect Walmarts and Amazons to decide to allow payments by Dash without thinking about it.

I think I've mostly exhausted all I have to offer on this topic. It seems we just have different perspectives on the extent of the threat to fungibility that coinfirm represents, and where the priorities of the project should be. If you want to put in a proposal, where you make a simple yes/no vote on whether the MNs approve or disapprove of the partnership with coinfirm (and reference to this thread), it might help clarify for both of us where the community is at.
 
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It was regulation that pushed people to crypto in the first place... what's the point of a crypto that is 100% compliant to regulators? What battle are we going to win by being a slave to government whims? You think we can be both law abiding and sticking it to them at the same time?
 
It's not about whether I or merchants want compliance. It's about what may be *required by law* for businesses that are thinking about potentially accepting Dash. This is for people who would not otherwise accept Dash, to give them a way to accept it. Nobody enjoys complying with regulations but I am not going to expect Walmarts and Amazons to decide to allow payments by Dash without thinking about it.
@TroyDASH, you serve only the *whatever is required by law* cause. It is not about what may be *required by law*. It is mainly about whether the oligarchy is capable to catch you or not if you break their law. Why do you care if something is required by law or if it is not ??? What a freedom advocate really cares is *whether their law can be applied or not*.

The struggle is there. Let the oligarchy decide whatever law they want, let the slaves blindly obey to *whatever is required by law*, and let the freedom fighters fight for *whatever is required by law not to be able to be applied*. Let the freedom fighters fight so that the oligarchy which is trying to apply the law not to be able to punish someone who breaks the law.

@TroyDASH, you do not seem to serve this last cause. @TroyDASH, you seem to be part of the slaves who obey to the law that is decided by the oligarchy, slaves who blindly obey even when there is no possibility of punishment. @TroyDASH, you do not seem to be part of the freedom advocates or the freedom fighters.
 
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@TroyDASH, you serve only the *whatever is required by law* cause. It is not about what may be *required by law*. It is mainly about whether the oligarchy is capable to catch you or not if you break their law. Why do you care if something is required by law or if it is not ??? What a freedom advocate really cares is *whether their law can be applied or not*.

The struggle is there. Let the oligarchy decide whatever law they want, let the slaves blindly obey to *whatever is required by law*, and let the freedom fighters fight for *whatever is required by law not to be able to be applied*. Let the freedom fighters fight so that the oligarchy which is trying to apply the law not to be able to punish someone who breaks the law.

@TroyDASH, you do not seem to serve this last cause. @TroyDASH, you seem to be part of the slaves who obey to the law that is decided by the oligarchy, slaves who blindly obey even when there is no possibility of punishment. @TroyDASH, you do not seem to be part of the freedom advocates or the freedom fighters.

It's not about what I want. It's about the reality that merchants won't integrate Dash if they can't be confident that they are in compliance, and without this piece, Dash has a low ceiling of potential market penetration. Neither of you have even countered this point yet, you just keep going on about how I should be a soldier in your stick-it-to-the-government movement. If you don't like it, then the place to go rallying people to change that reality is somewhere else, not here. What I'm interested in here is a digital currency where people can decide to be private if they want to, and where businesses will accept it as payment. You know, accepting it as payment for things. The thing that makes the currency valuable...
 
It's not about what I want. It's about the reality that merchants won't integrate Dash if they can't be confident that they are in compliance, and without this piece, Dash has a low ceiling of potential market penetration.

The merchants are always in compliance with the most powerfull.

If dash can convince the merchants that they can do their trade without bothering whether the trade is illegal or not (which means they are free to do their trade without being in danger to be arrested by the central government in case the trade is illegal) then the merchants will definitely adopt dash.


 
...what's the point of a crypto that is 100% compliant to regulators? What battle are we going to win by being a slave to government whims?

I can repeat this until your nose bleeds: with Dash I have the choice to be compliant or to be anonymous, whatever suits the task at hand best.

Isn't that great?
 
The merchants are always in compliance with the most powerfull.

If dash can convince the merchants that they can do their trade without bothering whether the trade is illegal or not (which means they are free to do their trade without being in danger to be arrested by the central government in case the trade is illegal) then the merchants will definitely adopt dash.



Good luck with convincing them of that :)
Of course, there will always be some people who will accept Dash regardless, and different merchants have different needs in terms of just how far they want to go to ensure compliance. It's good when everybody has options
 
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