Quote from: Adrian-x on November 14, 2013, 09:55:59 PM

Gregory Maxwell gets it the Foundation should be nothing more than a privately funded public lobby and leave development to the community.

I don't see any problem with the "privately funded public lobby" kicking some funding to development. ... even if, because various political pressures, they can only fund work which is "boring" in certain respects. There is a lot of boring work to get done. All that means that the question of supporting development is not answered by just the foundation.

I think Bitcoin is and must be a big tent that calls to people of all sorts of motivations and politics. We should welcome the confused people who think that privacy is bad to also use our money, but at the same time we should take care of our own values and make sure that their use of Bitcoin doesn't take away the freedom of others who do not share their politics.

The essence of crypto-anarchism is that one does not generally need to fight oppressive systems of social organization directly, instead we use technology to make those modes of organization obsolete. Regulation serves a useful purpose, but it often comes with very high (often indirect) costs: The crypto-anarchist says: One does not need to regulate a bank which cannot steal, and in that statement we side-step a bunch of political mess... we don't need to debate the harms proposed regulation creates when we can use technology to provide the benefits without it. If too much of the Bitcoin ecosystem continues to rely on trusted systems we will be unable to resist being reshaped in the mold of the centralized systems which came before.

Quote from: jedunnigan on November 14, 2013, 11:00:08 PM

We need something with absolute fungibility, blind sigs and homomorphic encryption really is the only way forward now....

I'm not sure I agree, in two respects:

First, systems with absolute fungiblilty have significant technical costs including the risk that the bleeding edge crypto behind them is inescure which probably remove their viability for the time being. Heck. Until two weeks ago we were down to under 4000 reliably reachable bitcoin full nodes (we're up to maybe 5500 now), from over 40k at the peak people have moved to web-wallets and thin clients: It's not clear that _Bitcoin_ is technically viable in the long run, some system with substantially higher operating costs probably isn't.

Second, I don't think we need absolute fungibility to thoroughly break efforts to destroy Bitcoin's fungiblity. We just need enough of it embedded in the common practices to make efforts to break the fungibility swimming up stream every step of the way. Some regulation paranoid bitcoin business will willingly lose 10% of their customers to some stupid blacklisting, but they won't tolerate 95% loss. From things like coinjoin and miners depriortizing address reuse we can make things substantially more private and harder to blacklist/whitelist without scraping the system and replacing it with a much more operationally expensive one.