Re: Bitcoin: The dream of Cypherpunks, libertarians and crypto-anarchists
⭐ Merited by GazetaBitcoin (1)
...snip...
If we are to neuter government power still further, removing their controlling grasp on ID systems is essential. While PGP is not perfect, it is highly functional and proven in several important ways, and over a huge stretch of time (essentially since the modern commercialization of the internet in the 1st half of the 1990's). If we are to continue the manifestation of crypto-anarchy and cypher punk culture into the mainstream (in which Bitcoin is the 1st major success), then understanding the need for decentralized IDs, that allow us to prove who we are and that our messages are authentically our own, then PGP (or some successor tech) will be inevitably a part of it.
Already government power is weakening, and that of their self-emancipated neo-serfs increasing (hence their desperate attempts to reassert that power in exploiting the circumstances of the 2020 pandemic). They are clearly afraid of what will happen. Trust between people is being attacked, and cryptographic tools (like Bitcoin or PGP) are among many powerful tools we can use to make sure they cannot attack decentralized power.
If we are to neuter government power still further, removing their controlling grasp on ID systems is essential. While PGP is not perfect, it is highly functional and proven in several important ways, and over a huge stretch of time (essentially since the modern commercialization of the internet in the 1st half of the 1990's). If we are to continue the manifestation of crypto-anarchy and cypher punk culture into the mainstream (in which Bitcoin is the 1st major success), then understanding the need for decentralized IDs, that allow us to prove who we are and that our messages are authentically our own, then PGP (or some successor tech) will be inevitably a part of it.
Already government power is weakening, and that of their self-emancipated neo-serfs increasing (hence their desperate attempts to reassert that power in exploiting the circumstances of the 2020 pandemic). They are clearly afraid of what will happen. Trust between people is being attacked, and cryptographic tools (like Bitcoin or PGP) are among many powerful tools we can use to make sure they cannot attack decentralized power.
How it started?
This is a very interesting topic. If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.
Originally, a coin can be just a chain of signatures. With a timestamp service, the old ones could be dropped eventually before there's too much backtrace fan-out, or coins could be kept individually or in denominations. It's the need to check for the absence of double-spends that requires global knowledge of all transactions.
The challenge is, how do you prove that no other spends exist? It seems a node must know about all transactions to be able to verify that. If it only knows the hash of the in/outpoints, it can't check the signatures to see if an outpoint has been spent before. Do you have any ideas on this?
It's hard to think of how to apply zero-knowledge-proofs in this case.
We're trying to prove the absence of something, which seems to require knowing about all and checking that the something isn't included.
Originally, a coin can be just a chain of signatures. With a timestamp service, the old ones could be dropped eventually before there's too much backtrace fan-out, or coins could be kept individually or in denominations. It's the need to check for the absence of double-spends that requires global knowledge of all transactions.
The challenge is, how do you prove that no other spends exist? It seems a node must know about all transactions to be able to verify that. If it only knows the hash of the in/outpoints, it can't check the signatures to see if an outpoint has been spent before. Do you have any ideas on this?
It's hard to think of how to apply zero-knowledge-proofs in this case.
We're trying to prove the absence of something, which seems to require knowing about all and checking that the something isn't included.
How it's going?
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proof ...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-interactive_zero-knowledge_proof
Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing ...
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DP-3T/documents/master/DP3T%20White%20Paper.pdf
