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Author here. Seeing some of the discussion go down on Twitter, I feel maybe I should explain further the "white supremacist" example in the post. (one tweet at

Author here. Seeing some of the discussion go down on Twitter, I feel maybe I should explain further the "white supremacist" example in the post. (one tweet at me: "So now you can hide the fact that white supremacists are sending you money? F!@#ing weird example.") When I shared a draft post with some friends, a lot of them had an ah-ha moment, so I was hoping for the same from others. I was trying to illustrate 2 privacy concerns around the graph Bitcoin exposes: (1) accidental associations and (2) exposing the people you transact with to each other. In the blog's hypothetical, you're not receiving money from some asshole because you're collecting Klan dues from him. Rather, you performed some public transaction with a stranger. For example, maybe you sold him some tickets. An external observer of the graph who knows he's a dangerous character may start applying high odds that you, too, are a dangerous character, since they don't know why he sent you money. This would suck. And, second, this character who sent you money may also be learning things about you. Since you sold tickets to a local show and mailed them to him, (1) he's likely to live near you, and (2) he knows your return address. You really don't want him seeing that you're sending money to causes he opposes. If so, he might show up at your door. The goal was to clear up this misconception that a private cryptocurrency is there to protect criminals. This is especially important if you'd like to post a static address on a profile.

exstudent2 10y ago
Thank you for your post (and Keybase!). I thought the example was a good one. Buying a book creates a permanent transaction record with the seller who's ethics you may not share. Humorous as well with the tongue and cheek reference to Atlas Shrugged :) We're sadly living in a society where people search high and low for grievances to publicly virtual signal over. Hopefully the Twitter-sphere will realize there's value in your example and not just clutch pearls.
zapu 10y ago
That's an important example. Person A can make a perfectly legal transaction with Person B who is involved in illegal activities, without Person A knowing that. Then, external observer, not knowing the transaction details, might as well associate Person A with the same illegal activities. A false positive in metadata analysis. Thank you for explanation.
StavrosK 10y ago
Just as a data point, I found the example perfectly clear, although I do wish you had added Monero instead of Zcash, just because it looks more legitimate to my uninformed eyes.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  This. Can someone chime in here and give me an argument for why Zcash is better than Monero? Because everybody I've talked to thinks Monero is better. I'm not saying it is, but Monero came out far earlier than Zcash, and unless there is a substantial argument for using it over Monero, I'm not convinced of the argument to standardize on it. The only striking difference I can see between Monero and Zcash is that Zcash was premined by investors. I just did some digging and also found this: http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-monero-privacy-and-security-compare-to-zcash http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-monero...
  - Taek 10y ago
    I do not understand all of the details behind Monero, but basically the privacy is incomplete. When you spend money, you basically say "I am one of X people", where X is usually fairly small. It's a lot better than Bitcoin where X=1, but it's still something that advanced algorithms can get though, and it still collapses if enough people have their identities and transactions revealed. In Zcash on the other hand, your anonymity set is everyone who holds Zcash. It's a lot nicer, and there isn't really the same collapsing effect as can happen with Monero. That said, Monero crypto is simpler, doesn't have trusted setup, and overall I would advocate that people treat Zcash as hemorrhaging-edge experimental, while Monero is somewhere between cutting-edge and bleeding-edge.
    - pero 10y ago
      I don't think you understand how Monero works _at all_ - let me fix one of your arguments to illustrate: >When you spend money, you basically say "I am one of 2^256 people", where 2^256 is usually fairly small. Disappointing/embarrassing level of insight from a crypto project leader - here's a good layman-friendly video https://youtu.be/GEVm1dMn5Ks?t=14m https://youtu.be/GEVm1dMn5Ks?t=14m to bring you up to speed (the simplified example is continued at 20m).
kobeya 10y ago
Have you considered supporting a stealth address scheme for Bitcoin? The problem is reuse of addresses, period. Bitcoin has solutions for this.
- plasticmachine 10y ago
  How will they pump the ZCash scam if they do?
- AgentME 10y ago
  Zcash's anonymous transactions are much more expensive CPU-wise to verify and aren't pruneable, and the cryptography behind it has been much less reviewed (Bitcoin operates on a bunch of very boring standard already established and long-trusted algorithms in comparison!), so I'd be surprised if an established project like Bitcoin adopted them before they were proven in practice. There's a lot of money tied up in Bitcoin, so the project is going to be pretty conservative in how it chooses to change.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    Stealth addresses don't use any new cryptography, aren't computationally expensive, and require no changes to bitcoin consensus or policy rules.
    - AgentME 10y ago
      Oh, I guess I mixed up some posts with one lamenting that Zcash wasn't incorporated into Bitcoin. Stealth addresses seem like they give much weaker anonymity guarantees than Zcash, unless you only ever send and receive funds through stealth addresses with others who follow the same precautions.
- kristianp 10y ago
  It looks like stealth addresses would be a good solution for bitcoin. There's no widely accepted scheme for it afaik though. http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2r07hu/whats_happening_with_stealth_addresses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2r07hu/whats_happe...
coldpie 10y ago
> In the blog's hypothetical, you're not receiving money from some asshole because you're collecting Klan dues from him. Rather, you performed some public transaction with a stranger. To clear this up, I'd suggest adding the explanatory labels ("Old copy of...") directly adjacent the lines in the image, instead of in a separate key.
Apofis 10y ago
You should probably amend the post with this info as it looks be going over some people's heads.
reflexive 10y ago
So now you can hide the fact that white supremacists are sending you money? F!@#ing weird example. But no one has a problem with the meth cook example??
- ecommerceguy 10y ago
  Im not so sure why it has to be a "white supremacist" as opposed to "career criminal", "wall street husker", "hong kong gangster" or "isis radical". very interesting choice. i can only guess the political affiliation of this author. when i was in my formative years everyone was trying to shake labels and thus the stigmatism associated with them. and thats really what the civil rights leaders of the 60s stood for. its a shame that the movement has been subverted by corporatists and sycophants. you all lost me. and many others.
  - reflexive 10y ago
    Im not so sure why it has to be a "white supremacist" as opposed to "career criminal", "wall street husker", "hong kong gangster" Maybe because those examples are from the 80's? i can only guess the political affiliation of this author. And his drug of choice, I suppose?
godmodus 10y ago
yeah that's how skyline is black listing journalists in conflict zones as terrorists judging from geo data[1]. they do this because they can justify their data derivative, but if there's no trace data to justify semi-justifiable decisions, such disastrous inferential machines would be impossible to justify. it's a tricky case - but it would force law enforcement - and other parties of interest - to actually investigate before pulling triggers. [1]: http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-pr...
samirillian 10y ago
Yeah I get that part, but why would you go out of your way to keep a copy of Atlas Shrugged in circulation?
aminorex 10y ago
choosing zcrash has to be pretty punitive for your users, given the rate of price inflation. For that matter, it must be pretty punitive for you as well.

exstudent2 10y ago

Thank you for your post (and Keybase!). I thought the example was a good one. Buying a book creates a permanent transaction record with the seller who's ethics you may not share. Humorous as well with the tongue and cheek reference to Atlas Shrugged :) We're sadly living in a society where people search high and low for grievances to publicly virtual signal over. Hopefully the Twitter-sphere will realize there's value in your example and not just clutch pearls.

zapu 10y ago

That's an important example. Person A can make a perfectly legal transaction with Person B who is involved in illegal activities, without Person A knowing that. Then, external observer, not knowing the transaction details, might as well associate Person A with the same illegal activities. A false positive in metadata analysis. Thank you for explanation.

StavrosK 10y ago

Just as a data point, I found the example perfectly clear, although I do wish you had added Monero instead of Zcash, just because it looks more legitimate to my uninformed eyes.

kyledrake 10y ago
This. Can someone chime in here and give me an argument for why Zcash is better than Monero? Because everybody I've talked to thinks Monero is better. I'm not saying it is, but Monero came out far earlier than Zcash, and unless there is a substantial argument for using it over Monero, I'm not convinced of the argument to standardize on it. The only striking difference I can see between Monero and Zcash is that Zcash was premined by investors. I just did some digging and also found this: http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-monero-privacy-and-security-compare-to-zcash http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/83/how-does-monero...
- Taek 10y ago
  I do not understand all of the details behind Monero, but basically the privacy is incomplete. When you spend money, you basically say "I am one of X people", where X is usually fairly small. It's a lot better than Bitcoin where X=1, but it's still something that advanced algorithms can get though, and it still collapses if enough people have their identities and transactions revealed. In Zcash on the other hand, your anonymity set is everyone who holds Zcash. It's a lot nicer, and there isn't really the same collapsing effect as can happen with Monero. That said, Monero crypto is simpler, doesn't have trusted setup, and overall I would advocate that people treat Zcash as hemorrhaging-edge experimental, while Monero is somewhere between cutting-edge and bleeding-edge.
  - pero 10y ago
    I don't think you understand how Monero works _at all_ - let me fix one of your arguments to illustrate: >When you spend money, you basically say "I am one of 2^256 people", where 2^256 is usually fairly small. Disappointing/embarrassing level of insight from a crypto project leader - here's a good layman-friendly video https://youtu.be/GEVm1dMn5Ks?t=14m https://youtu.be/GEVm1dMn5Ks?t=14m to bring you up to speed (the simplified example is continued at 20m).

kobeya 10y ago

Have you considered supporting a stealth address scheme for Bitcoin? The problem is reuse of addresses, period. Bitcoin has solutions for this.

plasticmachine 10y ago
How will they pump the ZCash scam if they do?
AgentME 10y ago
Zcash's anonymous transactions are much more expensive CPU-wise to verify and aren't pruneable, and the cryptography behind it has been much less reviewed (Bitcoin operates on a bunch of very boring standard already established and long-trusted algorithms in comparison!), so I'd be surprised if an established project like Bitcoin adopted them before they were proven in practice. There's a lot of money tied up in Bitcoin, so the project is going to be pretty conservative in how it chooses to change.
- kobeya 10y ago
  Stealth addresses don't use any new cryptography, aren't computationally expensive, and require no changes to bitcoin consensus or policy rules.
  - AgentME 10y ago
    Oh, I guess I mixed up some posts with one lamenting that Zcash wasn't incorporated into Bitcoin. Stealth addresses seem like they give much weaker anonymity guarantees than Zcash, unless you only ever send and receive funds through stealth addresses with others who follow the same precautions.
kristianp 10y ago
It looks like stealth addresses would be a good solution for bitcoin. There's no widely accepted scheme for it afaik though. http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html http://sx.dyne.org/stealth.html https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2r07hu/whats_happening_with_stealth_addresses/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2r07hu/whats_happe...

coldpie 10y ago

> In the blog's hypothetical, you're not receiving money from some asshole because you're collecting Klan dues from him. Rather, you performed some public transaction with a stranger. To clear this up, I'd suggest adding the explanatory labels ("Old copy of...") directly adjacent the lines in the image, instead of in a separate key.

Apofis 10y ago

You should probably amend the post with this info as it looks be going over some people's heads.

reflexive 10y ago

So now you can hide the fact that white supremacists are sending you money? F!@#ing weird example. But no one has a problem with the meth cook example??

ecommerceguy 10y ago
Im not so sure why it has to be a "white supremacist" as opposed to "career criminal", "wall street husker", "hong kong gangster" or "isis radical". very interesting choice. i can only guess the political affiliation of this author. when i was in my formative years everyone was trying to shake labels and thus the stigmatism associated with them. and thats really what the civil rights leaders of the 60s stood for. its a shame that the movement has been subverted by corporatists and sycophants. you all lost me. and many others.
- reflexive 10y ago
  Im not so sure why it has to be a "white supremacist" as opposed to "career criminal", "wall street husker", "hong kong gangster" Maybe because those examples are from the 80's? i can only guess the political affiliation of this author. And his drug of choice, I suppose?

godmodus 10y ago

yeah that's how skyline is black listing journalists in conflict zones as terrorists judging from geo data[1]. they do this because they can justify their data derivative, but if there's no trace data to justify semi-justifiable decisions, such disastrous inferential machines would be impossible to justify. it's a tricky case - but it would force law enforcement - and other parties of interest - to actually investigate before pulling triggers. [1]: http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-program-may-be-killing-thousands-of-innocent-people/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/02/the-nsas-skynet-pr...

samirillian 10y ago

Yeah I get that part, but why would you go out of your way to keep a copy of Atlas Shrugged in circulation?

aminorex 10y ago

choosing zcrash has to be pretty punitive for your users, given the rate of price inflation. For that matter, it must be pretty punitive for you as well.