Cryptocurrency:

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 11:28:30PM +0000, other.arkitech wrote:

> In USPS, as long as the network is big, it makes harder -not impossible- to reconstruct the state from recorded transactions because nodes handle only a fraction of the traffic.
> 
> Still, addresses are anonymous,

I don't believe this statement to be correct.


> and nodes mix all of them as they arrive,

Your mixing protocol will need to be well documented at some point, this is not the easiest problem.

For example, can a mixing protocol help to handle rogue clients (CIA writes their own USPS client) which does things it should not do, or does not do things it should do?

Some issues can be handled by protocol - as in, verifiable/ enforced by other clients - some cannot, and so those fail paths must be considered - are they important, do they only matter when predator nodes reach 50%+1, or whatever...


> making the equivalent of a big tx with many inputs-many outputs
> on every consensus cycle.

Mixing may be good, may also have downside (?), but needs analysis by a number of people to assess benefits/problems.



> Still yes, individual tx can be recorded as they arrive with a trivial patch. This would allow to follow the money across anonymous accounts. And this could lead to potential associations with separate events (e.g. I buy something and then I buy other thing; an observer could find a parallelism using time and sequence to narrow or find out  addresses belonging to me).

Also, IPv4 addresses are directly mapped to end users by ISPs therefore governments. ISTM that this mandatory use of IPv4 address actually precludes the possibility of true/proper/possible anonymous transactions - if this view/intuition is true, then this feature would make USPS a non starter for many folks ...



> I have ideas to tackle these cases which are very real theoretically, although only for a minority of people would result of some real concern (to me is a concern))
> 
> To be added in the future, as the concern grows bigger, a mixer implemented as a public algorithm (my name for ~smart contract). With this feature one could use it anytime they can break the potential traceability of their money moves, which is already difficult if the network is big.
> 
> Privacy to me falls more on the ability to do real P2P end2end (real end2end) encrypted trades between 2 nodes without awareness of the rest.

Except for time being, AIUI, you are demanding at the protocol level, an IPv4 address to transact...


Good luck,