
Waiting for Dark: Inside Two Anarchists' Quest for Untraceable Money - prostoalex
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/inside-dark-wallet/
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maxerickson
The unstated pretext is that dark money will be useful. I expect the US Gov
would simply make bitcoin illegal if robust anonymity were built on top of it.

It is already (somewhat) difficult to have untraceable property, which is sort
of a prerequisite for the dark economy to be interesting. For example, money
laundering exists because people with, roughly speaking, dark money, want to
use it to purchase legitimate goods.

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fizbin
Why on earth would they do that? Making bitcoin illegal would be the biggest
action the US Government could take to get bitcoin to flourish.

Right now, bitcoin is like a country with a minuscule GDP ( * ) and absolutely
no currency controls (and no possibility of such, ever). As many small
countries have learned the hard way, the worst thing for your economy's and
currency's stability is US and Euro-based foreign currency traders deciding
that your currency is a "hot" one to trade in.

When history looks back on why bitcoin failed, I suspect a big part of it will
be the SEC's decision to allow large Wall Street firms to speculate in BTC as
much as they wanted to.

Now, a robustly anonymous exchange network with value pegged to something
external - say, a cryptocurrency backed by EUR, USD, or actual grams of gold -
that would be something different. That would likely be made illegal, either
explicitly or by having nearly every transaction run the risk of a federal
money laundering charge.

( * ) The GDP of bitcoin-land would be the sum total of all goods and services
bought and sold with bitcoins in the course of a year.

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copsarebastards
> Now, a robustly anonymous exchange network with value pegged to something
> external - say, a cryptocurrency backed by EUR, USD, or actual grams of gold
> - that would be something different.

This statement demonstrates that you have no idea how cryptocurrency works. As
such everything else you say on the subject is pretty suspect.

Also, complaining about speculation-caused instability and then claiming that
pegging the value of Bitcoin to gold would solve it is hilarious. You do
realize that people speculate with gold, right?

And finally, cryptocurrency isn't currency. Making assertions by analogy is at
best an educated guess.

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fizbin
Yes, it is hilarious that even compared to gold, bitcoin manages to look
unstable.

~~~
copsarebastards
That would be a very nice cheap shot if it had responded in any way to my
criticism.

You were describing an idea for minimizing the role of speculation on the
value of cryptocurrency, and your proposal was to peg the value of
cryptocurrency to something which is valued largely on speculation. If you
wanted to say that tying the value of cryptocurrency to gold would stabilize
it, then _you should have said that_ instead of saying the stupid thing you
actually said.

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Trombone12
My most fun objection to this plan is that the feds could get the NSA to find
some exploit in the DarkWallet that makes it remote controlled spyware. This
should be a real concern since the author point out repeatedly they hope its
used for highly illegal activities (tax fraud and drug purchases being lesser
examples), and high value target like IS have declared their interest in it.

Now, two developers defending their software against the NSA: possible if they
are good enough. But two developers defending a large number of decentralized,
very paranoid, and pretty shady users against the NSA? Ehhh

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fweespeech
It isn't really possible. Pretty much anything can be broken given sufficient
time/financial resources.

The NSA has alot of bodies and money to throw at a problem if they want it
gone. Too many to resist effectively unless you are a national actor. It is
why them being effectively off the leash is scary.

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jkot
Gold?

~~~
at-fates-hands
This was my thought.

Considering BTC isn't exactly "untraceable", Gold makes far more sense in
terms of an untraceable commodity with far less fluctuations than BTC. It
already has value, is widely held by people, and can be easily converted to
virtually any kind of currency much easier and without less tracks than BTC.

~~~
knodi123
there are robust techniques for tagging gold with trackable isotopes, so it's
really only fungible if you can avoid drawing the attention of anyone with the
necessary resources to track it. But I guess that's not much of a point, since
the same is true of literally anything.

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TylerE
Couldn't that be defeated by buying small amounts from lots of different
sources, melting them all down, and recasting them?

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knodi123
Sure, but that's an industrial operation.

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antocv
Untraceable money is an oxymoron, the whole point of money is that the whole
network of people using it, can trust it is not forged out of someones ass,
and is instead what its claimed to be.

Imagine a world where every transaction, every penny spent or received by
anyone, corporation, state, person, is open and transparent. No way to hide
that corruption, that drug money or whatever else corporations and states are
up to. No way to just make up money on the spot if you are rich and have a
printer. No way to hide inequalities, at the workplace, between classes in a
country.

~~~
Frozenlock
It's really not.

Take a gold coin for example. You can test it's indeed made of gold without
needing to know where it's from.

Same is true for good money as a general rule. Say you get a US dollar bill.
What you want to know is if it's genuine, not who's been using it.

> "Imagine a world where every transaction (...) is open and transparent. No
> way to hide that corruption, that drug money or whatever else corporations
> and states are up to. No way to just make up money on the spot if you are
> rich and have a printer. No way to hide inequalities, at the workplace,
> between classes in a country."

That's just wishful thinking. Most corruption and inequalities are in plain
sight, wrapped in a web of social power and blackmailing. You think the
farmers will stop getting subsidies? Or military industrial complex will grind
to a halt? And what if you consider that drug money is legit? Plenty of
markets are legit but don't have the support of the government.

What you are talking about is not a way to remove corruption; it's a way to
insure those in power will have even more power. It's also making sure the
politically correct dominates everything. Better not buy something that could
go against the will of the Church, because they'll know it...

No, really, traceable money is it's own kind of hell.

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antocv
Do you know the origin of the gold coin?

Was it mined and forged by payed workers, or was it stolen and forged by
slaves?

I, for one, wouldnt accept a random gold coin given to me by some stranger.

I would like to know that the stranger didnt steal the coin. It doesnt matter
if the gold is real itself.

Its the token of what the gold is supposed to represent, some value, that is
of interest, and that value is not in the gold itself, its like yeah man you
can give me your phone thanks - but barter is not a good foundation to base
your currency and economy on.

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Frozenlock
Replace gold coin by dollar bill.

Do you live by this standard?

In other words, you never accept a dollar bill unless it comes directly from
the printing press or if you can retrace its entire history?

