Quote from: Mike Hearn on January 24, 2014, 12:29:53 AM

Quote from: Peter Todd on January 24, 2014, 12:22:59 AM

People are worried that we'd find out in a few years for Snowden Jr. that the (three-letter-acronym) had been making up fake passports for the purpose of running Tor nodes

But they can run fake Tor nodes today, without doing any work at all. And as I pointed out, nothing stops you from picking nodes run out of different countries. The NSA might be able to fake US passports just fine. If they can get the Russian and Chinese private keys, well .... at least all the incentives are right to make that hard.

It really can't make anything worse. You can easily run multiple nodes off one passport. Just don't expect the same wallet app to connect to more than one of them. Tor has the notion of families, it maps naturally to that.

Tor's got a structure that makes running fake Tor nodes not quite as trivial as it sounds. Remember that Tor node operators are not anonymous, and Tor on the other hand is a semi-centralized service.

In any case, my personal objection isn't so much the passports for Tor idea - that's a genuinely hard problem - it's the application of that to zeroconf and fee estimation where there's much better ways to do it by not relying on trusting third parties. That's an example of lazily resorting to centralization when there's better solutions out there.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen you advocate a genuinely decentralized solution to something. It's just not how you think, and the community recognizes this. I'll bet you had I advocated that passport idea people would have chalked it up as just another cool idea from Peter Todd, but I can do that because unlike you I seem to have a generally good reputation for honestly promoting decentralization - among other things I get the sense that people generally trust me not to gloss over the flaws.