The problem isn't technical, it's sociological. If you compare the number of people for whom transparency is a priority over those for whom obscurity is a priority, the former dominate the latter into an insignificant minority because as I said earlier, it's the non-holders who support the value, not the holders.
Please do not refer to sociology only when it fits to your arguments. Do you want to mention sociology? Then here you are, this is what sociology dictates: The non-holders support the value of the universal dividend. The non-holders dont care about the transparency as defined in the bitcoin-dash blockchain, as long as this kind of transparency refers to the transactions only and not to which persons owns how many coins. The non-holders the only thing they care about is who is the rich and who is not, and how they became like that. So that , with the help of the governance, to be able to confiscate oneday whatever money has been gained in a time-space assymetric way.
Why do you insist on using personal pronouns when referring to blockchain addresses ? They do not represent people. They represent anonymous addresses to which anyone may hold a key. The address balance exists independently of the key holder, unlike the value held in a bank account. This is where the big flaw is in the obscurity argument - the projection of a record keeping, banking paradigm onto an anonymous asset. Also, what exactly do you mean by "The non-holders require a universal dividend" ? It sounds like you're just throwing random terms around for the sake of it without expressing any coherent base principle. My point about non-holders is that obscurity mitigates the value of an anonymous asset and I don't think I need to defend that point very much since it's tried and tested during thousands of years of precedent. Again - "privacy" is something that everyone addresses in their own way. It isn't the job of the blockchain other than by way of optimising the indistinguishability of each address and you don't do that by toxifying the system with ambiguity. The commercial world is a large and complex network of interdependent systems and assets. Blockchain assets are a tiny dot amongst them - they are not a financial system in their own right the way the banking system is. Maybe thats where you're going wrong.
And my point is that non-holders dont care about privacy or obscurity or transparency of anonymous bank accounts. They only care about who owns how many coins. They only care about what person owns what account and how many accounts. They care who is the rich. The non-holders are obviously against privacy and in favor of transparency. Coinfirm is there to help the non-holders to spot the holders. And for the holders, their interest should be in favor of privacy because the non-holders will do whatever they can to confiscate the money (by taxing it, , ban it e.t.c) especially the money that is gained in an unfair and time-space assymetric way. So if you are rich, if you hold enough Dash and you are wealthy above the average , then your interest is in favor of privacy and obscurity. If you are a rich Dasher and you insist in transparency, then one day they will discover you, and you will be taxed. The innocent vote you are casting right now, it will cost you a lot of Dash in the future.
I don't disagree with you. It's just that your point is irrelevant. The challenge is to create a new form of open, tradeable asset. Not an online personal records database.
There is nothing irrelevant, everything is connected in this universe. And a butterfly may cause a storm elsewhere. Yes, this is your challenge. But If you decide today to follow the road of transparency and you refuse the privacy road then a personal records database will be created inevitably (with the help of Coinfirm and other companies like this). If this is what you want, then do nothing and remain transparent as you are today. If the raining is coming, and you dont take an umbrella, this means that you like to get wet.
That would be the case with any open, tradeable asset. It doesn't have much to do with whether the outputs on the blockchain are auditable or not. It's occuring *because* of the success of Dash as a monetary medium, not in spite of it. Start to worry if nobody's interested in your blockchain. There are countless examples that support the transparency philosophy. Open source is one of them. In the 80's closed source was considered essential to preserving value of intellectual property. Now it's positively suicidal. You try and create a closed monetary system and you'll have your precious privacy but all you'll ever have in terms of value will be speculative. Like it or not, Coinfirm is adoption. You're confusing the priorities of an encrypted record keeping system with those of a tradeable asset/cash base and that is a toxic mix.
Thats why in Tezos, they choosed to write their software in OCaml. They said that Ocaml is suitable for formal verification. But as long as Dash is written is C, there is also Verified C (now called CompCert)
And there are countless examples that support the privacy philosophy. http is one of them. In the 90's http protocol was transparent. Now if you use http instead of https especially in money transactions, this is considered suicidal. The code may becomes more and more open source, but the protocols tend to become more and more secure and private.
What I understand you are trying to say is that you dont care if they will spot you, you dont care if they will tax you or if they will ban your mixed coins, as long as you get adoption by the mass. My point of view is that the mass is controlled , so I dont want adoption by the mass. I want adoption by those few who are capable to inspire the mass, to free the mass and lead it to a new monetary era. Those few require privacy, because if there is no privacy, then the ones who currently control the mass and the today world monetary system, they will attack and destroy those few who are trying to overcome the current world monetary system and create a new one.
Consider, for a moment, cameras operating in public places for the public good e.g. crime prevention, weather monitoring, tourism and so on. To me, I would say all such cameras that are publicly funded should also be publicly viewable... because this transparency helps to answer the question of who is watching the watchers e.g. preventing abuse from a select few. However, it doesn't work like that because a minority will complain that their face isn't blurred (when they're cheating on their girlfriend), or that their car was seen at a particular time (when they should of been working), and so on. But you see, this is how the public are socially brain washed.. on the one hand they are encouraged to consider their personal info as private.. yet equally, at the same time, they are told, "you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide". Thus, suddenly the only perceived solution is that a privileged few should have full unabated access over the majority (legalised hacking and so on). And so, with a transparent block chain, one half of the above scenario is met, "you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide". Meanwhile, the other half of the problem is executed i.e. we must ring fence some "personal data" (even if it's publicly viewable). Go ahead and ask Coinfirm to make their data publicly available.. no chance of that happening! Suddenly they have licensing agreements in the way, or that cross-data analysis exposes too much personal data (location) etc. A transparency-first block chain simply doesn't help when you're working in such a hostile environment. With a privacy-first block chain, you can have your checks and balances through open source and strong governance.
Think you've been playing too much Game of Thrones. We're talking about a monetary asset, not a planetary conquest. Try succeeding at step1 before moving on to step 101.
(1) If you don't want to be spotted, then mix your coins and only do business with people or businesses who allow people to pay anonymously (if they accept cash, then this is likely not going to be a big problem). It's that simple. (2) They will tax you regardless of whether our chain is privacy first or transparency first. That's just a fact. If you want to commit tax evasion then mix your coins and see (1). (3) I am sure neither of us want to see mixed/private coins banned, but if they were to do this, there is nothing that you or I could do about it regardless of which type of chain we have. At least in a transparency-first chain, such a ban would not affect all coins for all users. And although it would have a severe impact, such a ban would not stop people from using mixed or private funds regardless of which type of chain we have.
Of course not. If the blockchain is privacy first, they cannot tax you because they cannot discover you. If a blockchain has half transparent half mixed/private coins, they can ban the mixed/private coins and give more value to the transparent ones (like it is done in Coinfirm, where mixed coins are stigmatized). If the blockchain is all private, they cannot ban it (simply because they cannot discover it). What they can do is to ban all fiat gateways to the private blockchain. Or to ban any transparent coin that can be exchanged to the private coin and thus used as an indirect fiat gateway. In this worst case senario the private blockchain remains alive, but has no fiat gateways anymore.
With a private chain it will still be required by law to report your capital gain or income transactions, just like it is required by law to report those transactions even if you mix your coins presently, or if you use normal cash. Failing to report reportable income is tax evasion regardless of what the currency is, regardless of whether you mix or use a totally private chain, and regardless of whether or not you get caught. Using a private chain instead of mixing does not significantly increase your chance of getting away with it. What matters in that respect is whether the people you do business with are willing to do business with people anonymously. If those people won't do business with mixed coins then they sure as hell won't do business with privacy first coins. Yeah, and in the worst case for the transparency first chain, all they can do is ban the fiat gateways for mixed coins, but people will still use mixed coins anyway, just like they would still use private coins regardless. Because some people care more about privacy than others. I don't see what the point is here.
No. It is not regardless whether or not you get caught. This tiny detail is very important. If they are unable to catch you, then you cannot be considered as a tax evader. In order to be something, there must always be a witness. This is a fundumental law of the universe, defined in quantum mechanics.
Core will consider to anonymize MNs yet they insist end-usrs must accept a transparency-first block chain! https://dashpay.atlassian.net/wiki/x/CYCHBQ Page 7 "There's an entry point in the [Bitcoin] ecosystem and usually the identity of that person is known at that point and then once you get your money into the ecosystem you have a public ledger and all of the transactions that you do are completely available for anyone to look at. And what we're getting to with technology in the Bitcoin ecosystem is where anyone with enough computing power can go through and try to correlate all these addresses and figure out who's doing what and who's transferring money to who and then eventually sell that data which is a gross invasion of privacy. And I would rather get everyone more privacy rather than take it away from everybody because it's really you can only give it to everybody or you have to take it away from everybody in a system like this. And I know that there are going to be things that happen in the ecosystem that are illegal and this is just part of having rights. We have the right to privacy and some people will abuse that and I think there's a fine line to walk but we have to acknowledge that we want these rights and there's gonna be money like this that is on the Internet where everyone can see everything that's going on and I would rather [want] that money have an attribute of privacy for everybody useful." Page 9 "The challenge of the new cypherpunk movement is to make secure and verified end-to-end encryption accessible to everyone, and turned on by default." A privacy-first MN network "turned on by default"... good enough for MNs then it's good enough for end-users. Vote Yes for privacy-first. Also, some MNOs are using scripts to delay votes so that outsiders can't determine how many MNs an Operator owns. Double standard? Vote Yes for privacy-first.
And how can the dash community prevent them for doing this? I think the community should know how many MNs an operator owns. It does not matter who the operator is, but how many MNs each operator owns, this should be revealed.
And that there is exactly the dilemma they face. At the moment MNOs are the fall guy for end-users privacy; they are complicit in mixing (read "laundering") other people's coins. It's understandable that MNOs want to remain anonymous.. yet equally, core keep telling us they have legal and compliance representations because they want to be above board. Taking such a path has only two outcomes; dash becomes slave to the state, or enemy of the state. The truth is, most MNOs don't want to be publicly named and held accountable, yet they expect end-users to have transparency-first. How can end-users have faith about MN distribution and voting if MNOs are invisible? - I mean, so far, we've been told that a privacy-first block chain would lose public faith because the checks and balances would be gone. It's basically one rule for MNOs and a different rule for end-users. This double standard is a mess. If dash is transparency-first then we need to deal with the fact that some MNOs own tens of MNs.. that even if this is fair, the public should at least know what they are dealing with. Alternatively, if dash goes privacy-first then both MNs and end-users have the right to be anonymous.
Maybe someone should start to analyze the masternodes behavior, similar to what coinfirm is doing to the behavior of the end-user wallets. Technically I think it is much more easy to reveal the operators of the MNs, than reveal the dash wallet end-users. All masternodes have a static public IPs, which means that with a little social enginearing, with a little IPwhois e.t.c they can all be revealed. Either all anonymous (both masternodes and endusers) or all transparents. The double standard, on the one hand protecting the masternodes big data and on the other hand revealing end-users with the help of coinfirm, this is a bad sign for the future of Dash. The masternodes big data is here in front of us, (ex. in http://dashninja.pl) . It is a matter of time before someone starts analyzing the MNs big data and reveal how many operators are hiding behind the typical voting behavior of the MNs.
Of course the above was a rhetorical question. The answer to this question is to force all masternodes to pass the proof of individuality test. http://proofofindividuality.online/ How ? Through person-to-person verification. Masternodes are grouped together by random in groups of 5 or so, and every group does a video hangout at the exact same time, that lasts around 10 minutes or so. Masternodes check so that the others in their group aren't doing another hangout at the same time. Of course the masternodes owners are allowed to appear masked, thus preserve their anonymity . They then sign each other's POIs and verify them. Once the hangouts are finished and all POIs have been verified, everyone will know that each POI represents a unique human being. further reading: http://www.the-blockchain.com/2016/...bil-protocol-using-virtual-pseudonym-parties/ www.brynosaurus.com/log/2007/0327-PseudonymParties.pdf All masternodes that didnt pass the proof of individuality test (they didnt appear in their group in the exact time), they should be binded to a proved individual if they want to preserve their voting rights. It this case all delay vote scripts are useless as long as, delayed or not, everybody knows who binds to who. That way we will know how many masternodes every operator has while preserving the operator's anonymity at the same time. The above is the sofisticated solution. But there is also the quick and dirty solution of the CAPTCHA.
Well, for example, as a merchant, I can't enforce the receiving of mixed coins, it's purely at the discretion / trust of the customer. I'd suggest that fungibility is when all coins are equal at the point of receiving, not after the transaction when complicity might already be established..
It seems to me, there is a dichotomy of opinion between what Masternode Operators want for themselves and what they want for their end-users. It is my assertion that the majority of MNOs would like to attain a level of privacy that is not granted by default to end-users. How would MNOs respond to scrutiny if companies like Coinfirm sought to uncover their identities and holdings? Or, perhaps, to map ownership of MNs and their voting behaviour? With this in mind, some MNOs are already using scripts to perform delayed voting in order to obfuscate the number of MNs associated to an Operator. Additionally, there has been some research to further anonymize the MN netowrk. As you may know, dash has both legal and compliance partnerships. How does that work when MNOs are complicit in coin mixing (read "coin laundering")? Ah, good job they are working to further anonymize the MN network. But end-users, the little guys, they are expected to be transparent first. Companies like Coinfirm come along, they build two-way partnerships with companies like Vodafone and ShapeShift, and they fill in the gaps like the pieces of a puzzle, gradually stripping away any privacy and then selling that data on to other companies and government agencies. That's fine, but let's do that to MNs too and see what happens. Private Send is fundamentally flawed because mixing can only occur _after_ the coins are received, thereby potentially implicating the recipient. As a merchant, I can't guarantee that incoming coins are clear or tainted, I can only launder them... oops, sorry, I meant mix them. Is this what we want, a network running on double standards? Vote yes, vote privacy-first. -- Perhaps the next vote will be to analyse, to uncover and to profile each and every Masternode Operator...
Right now, some masternode operators take extra steps to protect their privacy like staggering their votes. And some Dash users are using PrivateSend to anonymize their coins. Both of these things are optional. People who value privacy take steps to protect their privacy, I am shocked. The double standard is just overwhelming... Also, you realize this quote is not from the core team? Anything you might have heard about having a mandatory anonymizing layer for masternodes is speculation at this point. Not to mention that having masternodes behind an anonymizing layer would not exempt them from the exact same situation as everyone else when it comes to actually sending or receiving coins.
If that's so, go right ahead and create a thread asking MNOs to identify themselves and their stake, let's see who takes up your offer.
That doesn't follow. Nothing that I said would imply that either MNOs or any Dash users for that matter would voluntarily disclose their financial transactions to the public. Again, some Dash users are more careful than others when it comes to their privacy. And some Masternode operators are more careful than others when it comes to their privacy. Some people fail to protect their privacy through apathy or ignorance. If coinfirm or other blockchain analysis companies start coming more into play, then you will see more MNOs who care about privacy, taking extra measures to protect privacy, and you will see more end users who care about privacy, using PrivateSend.
