I've talked to Smooth a lot about anonymity telling him it's not useful unless you can fix scaling first. If you only have enough TPS for a clearing mechanism between banks, on-chain anonymity doesn't do anything when most transactions will be done off-chain anyway. Since you seem to have the exact same viewpoint, how exactly would this design even help Monero? Does it at least reduce overhead to Bitcoin level?
My opinion is that collateral bid systems using PoS where the top 100/500/1000 wallet addresses that choose to lock stake and act as deterministic nodes is the easiest way to solve scalability at the moment. Larimer thinks you can have anonymity in such a system already:
Without achieving the scaling part first, won't this purchase be kind of useless when it will inevitably be overun by some kind of second tier anonymity system latched on top of a deterministic PoS network?
My opinion is that collateral bid systems using PoS where the top 100/500/1000 wallet addresses that choose to lock stake and act as deterministic nodes is the easiest way to solve scalability at the moment. Larimer thinks you can have anonymity in such a system already:
Quote
Confidential Transfers hide the amounts being transfered while still allowing those who validate the blockchain to verify that the balances transfered sum to 0 and are not negative. Stealth transfers are used to automatically generate a unique key for every transfer. The combination of these two features means that it becomes pratically impossible for a 3rd party to identify how much you have sent or received or who is sending money to whom.
Without achieving the scaling part first, won't this purchase be kind of useless when it will inevitably be overun by some kind of second tier anonymity system latched on top of a deterministic PoS network?
For once I agree with you, if most transactions take place off chain/ledger/whatever then the majority of transactions are "anonymous" as they are not publicly recorded.
Its kind of a catch-22 though I feel, as high anon + scaling to high load is very difficult and I don't think concealing the value of a transaction is going to play nice with scalability.
I'm betting on decoupling the sender from the receiver being the best workable solution to achieving high anon + high scalability, where the sender is unable to discover where exactly the payment ended up in the ledger nor discover any information about the receivers account (balance, historic transactions).
TPTB no disrespect to the work you are doing, its important nonetheless, just my thoughts. Its good to see at least something tangible coming out from your end finally
I have a query though, in your abstract "...and the payer isnt revealed to the payee" Shouldn't the payee know who the payer is? What if someone sends me a payment without me expecting it, how do I know who its from? I don't see any real purpose for not revealing the payer to the payee :|