Author: Daniel Lidstrom 2013-03-07 21:31:10
Published on: 2013-03-07T21:31:10+00:00
The author expresses concerns about censorship resistance in the face of scaling for Bitcoin. They emphasize the importance of preserving privacy when using Bitcoin to avoid being censored by miners, which can be achieved through anonymous connections, not reusing addresses, and mixing coins. The author expects privacy preservation to become more automatic in the future. They also argue that anonymity systems should scale to accommodate Bitcoin full nodes, rather than Bitcoin staying small to avoid putting pressure on anonymity systems. If mining in a pool becomes necessary due to limitations with anonymity systems, the author suggests that there will always be countries that allow mining pools to operate, and miners in countries that ban Bitcoin can connect to these pools anonymously. The email also contains an aside where the author mentions a paper coming out about providing Chaum-style privacy integrated with Bitcoin using zero knowledge proofs. However, the technique is too slow and complicated to integrate practically. The author proposed regulating miners to freeze certain outputs two years ago but concluded it was not a real risk because mining and transactions can be done anonymously. The argument rests on the assumption that large blocks cannot be mined anonymously because Tor does not scale, but the author suggests taking up its inability to move data fast enough with the developers.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:23:10.893422+00:00