
Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging - ianso
http://twister.net.co/
======
nashashmi
Doesn't that make this service website independent? It is like twitter without
the downtime, or twitter with multiple twitter networks all being able to
collaborate with one another, or twitter without legal BS.

And those are beautiful ramifications. Flaws anyone?

~~~
toyg
It's also twitter without "delete" and twitter without private accounts, from
what I can see skimming the whitepaper.

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Touche
Read the whitepaper and it sounds pretty amazing. The one downside is the spam
messages, which they say are important to the security of the network, and
that clients cannot hide them, but don't explain a method to prevent clients
from hiding them. If they really are essential to the security of the network
then there needs to be more than shaming, right?

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VLM
"send text posts limited to 140 characters"

That's just weird. Like putting horses reins on an early automobile, or
putting a hopper in the front of the car to pour oats into.

"Bitcoin, in the sense of the digital currency, is not used at all"

I had to LOL at this. BTC is popular enough to try to piggyback completely
unrelated things using the term as a lure. I've lived thru the "turbo" era,
the "e-" and "i-" era and now we're entering the BTC era, where we can soon
expect shampoos and hamburgers to be "BTC shampoo" and "BTC hamburgers" as a
marketing gimmick.

~~~
Touche
The project is a fork of bitcoin, uses bitcoin blockchains, but because it
doesn't use bitcoin currency they shouldn't mention the lineage?

~~~
VLM
Yes, at least not as a marketing scheme.

So this is a competitor of coinbase? Oh you mean its a miner. Oh no wait OK
its like paypal but for BTC.

So... they copied some general source code concepts? Thats it? What a scam.
Thats not real bitcoin support at all.

Its like saying a new game is internet compatible, in that if you install it
on an internet connected computer its not incompatible with the OS. I actually
saw this kind of thing during the early years of mass adoption of the
internet. And now we'll see it in BTC.

~~~
Touche
You misunderstand, this project is literally a fork of the bitcoin repo. They
didn't just "copy general source code concepts". It's right there on their
about page.

~~~
VLM
"the implementation of the neat idea of block chain is on the basis of
twister."

MS Excel uses do...while loops, my latest project uses do...while loops,
therefore my project is based on Excel. I was reading it as algorithm use not
literally forking the codebase as appears to be the case. Not everything using
Quicksort is a kissing cousin of everything else using Quicksort, for example.

Its still cheesy as a marketing scheme. This thing's bitcoin, that means its a
currency, right, or a funds storage system, or a psuedobank, or .. oh its a
microblog service. LAME.

From a tech perspective I think its cool as an unusual use of the algorithm
and technology.

~~~
girvo
Bitcoins block chain implementation and idea is innovative and revolutionary.
Your do... while example is not. Also, the blockchain is sort of the most
important bit of bitcoin. I struggle to see how you're missing this...

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alpinesol
The incentive to 'mine' in this scheme is the possibility of winning the
ability to send a sponsored message to all users. These sponsored messages
could easily be filtered by users, making them worthless. Even if users
collectively agree not to filter the sponsored messages, the average cost of
winning the proof-of-work race must be less than the average value of the
sponsored messages, which is unlikely.

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Groxx
> _No IP recording

The IP address you use to access twister is not recorded on any server. Your
online presence is not announced._

Can you really make that claim with a distributed protocol? Your IP address is
visible to whoever you send data to, they could easily keep logs (heck my
router does by default).

~~~
dionyziz
Your peers cannot know if the data originated from you or you're simply
relaying traffic. Thus, your IP address cannot be associated with tweets.

~~~
TheLoneWolfling
Untrue. An (for example) ISP could very easily determine if you were an
originator simply by if someone relayed it to you.

Similarly, a Sybil attack can probabilistically figure out the originator,
simply be seeing which peer first relayed the communication.

~~~
Groxx
This is about what I was thinking. Tor avoids some of the ISP-problems by re-
encrypting at every step (so you can't correlate input and output, except by
time/size, which is hard on a busy node).

After poking through the FAQ the claim softens quite a bit, into that "normal"
users can't detect such things. This I'll grant is true. And they even mention
that, if hiding from adversaries who can observe _lots_ of traffic, you should
probably use Tor.

That said, the FAQ does say:

> _However if one entity is capable of recording the entire internet traffic,
> he will probably be able to at least statistically sort out where you are
> connecting from (your IP address)._

which I think I'll still disagree with, unless this is provided by DHT (I
don't know DHT, sadly. I'll remedy this some day). Unless you run through Tor,
it seems(?) like all messages are essentially plaintext across the internet,
so they _would_ know _exactly_ where a message originated, if you're within
their view.

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gasull
You can accomplish the same with Bitmessage broadcast addresses, and it solves
the spam issue with proof of work.

[https://bitmessage.org/](https://bitmessage.org/)

~~~
Joeboy
I don't know much about Bitmessage, but aren't messages dropped after two
days? So a new follower / visitor would only see two days' worth of my
microblog?

~~~
salient
Yes. I would disregard comparisons with BitMessage. I don't think they really
target the same market. BitMessage wants to be more of a _private_ snooping-
free e-mail system. Twister wants to be more of a _public_ decentralized
social network (resistant to censorship).

There may be some technical overlap and functionality overlap, but I think
they are more different than similar. It's like saying Gmail is the same as
Twitter, since you can also broadcast messages with Gmail, and you can also
send private messages with Twitter. But the two really aren't the same.

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foobarqux
This isn't the right problem to be fixing: The right problem is a distributed
data store.

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lcasela
Nice, how secure is it though?

~~~
nashashmi
From an anonymity perspective, it is just as secure as current bitcoin
protocols. Public anonymity at the sacrifice of privacy. In which case, if
your 'twister' info is out there, you can theoretically be identified.

~~~
betterunix
In other words, the security is poorly defined and based on the honest parties
devoting at least as much energy to defending the system as the attacker
devotes to attacking it.

What I want to know is this: What does Bitcoin have to do with this? You can
have peer to peer, anonymous, encrypted messaging without any of the nonsense
that Bitcoin entails.

~~~
sln
Basically, if you have anonymous, P2P, encrypted messaging you need to solve
the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys. There
are several approaches to this, but one of the most compelling right now is
using the exact same mechanism that bitcoin uses to prevent double spending.
Twister has absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin, they are only similar in
that double-spending a bitcoin is analogous to identity theft in Twister.

~~~
betterunix
"the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys"

What is the point of that ledger? Public keys identify users on their own.

~~~
sln
Yes they do but 1) most people are more comfortable dealing with usernames
compared to public keys, and 2) distributing the public keys themselves can be
tricky if you don't already have a trusted connection set up (just look at
past abuses of Certificate Authorities for examples of this).

~~~
betterunix
I do not see how distributing keys is "tricky" in this context. If you do not
know who you are communicating with, then a man in the middle attack works if
the attack occurs during your first attempt to communicate (think SSH); this
would seem to be true regardless of the existence of a ledger, since you need
to figure out which username you want to communicate with. If you do know who
you are communicating with, you can distribute keys offline (e.g. "contact me
with $key") or establish keys via some existing communication channel (OTR,
PGP, whatever), just as you would have to distribute your username offline or
via another channel given the ledger.

So sure, I can grant people are more comfortable dealing with usernames than
with public keys, but that sounds more like a UI problem than a technology
problem. People are certainly capable of dealing with Tor hidden service
addresses, and I suspect that is because they are already using a UI they know
well (their web browser).

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robgibbons
I need at least one more /buzzword in the title before I use it.

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mrcactu5
are there other open source versions of Twitter? I could gladly use this one
if I could embed mathematical equations in it - e.g. with mathJax
[http://www.mathjax.org/](http://www.mathjax.org/) \- and possibly lift the
140 character limit.

------
codezero
Is there any follow model or does every participant receive all messages sent
by everyone else?

~~~
quack
Everyone gets every message. There is no solution here to the data bloat
problem. Other than that the project forks bitcoin to make a namecoin clone
(distributed authorization), which I dont see the need for since a private key
already identifies me.

The reason something like namecoin is to allow people to update their identity
in the event the first identity was compromised/blocked.

Finally this was posted yesterday
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6987396](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6987396)

~~~
sln
This is not true. Followers are established by connecting to bittorrent
swarms. From the paper: "The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint
“swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for
efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users."

Furthermore, not all clients need to store and reseed all messages they
receive. More seeders is obviously better for network health, but it's not
always a reasonable option. The paper suggests that clients can choose to be
"achivists" which means that they keep messages and seed them to others (so
it's optional). Clients like mobile phones could easily disable this behavior.

Also Twister can't use Namecoin because the incentives are wrong. In Namecoin,
miners get to create domains. It would be horrible if only Twister miners
could make accounts. Instead they get to make promoted posts, so it has to be
a separate implementation.

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math0ne
Cool, but why not make the first client a web based one so we can all it work?

~~~
Joeboy
Isn't that what [https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-
html/](https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-html/) is?

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davepeck
I couldn't find the whitepaper link. Anyone?

~~~
jjsz
[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf)

>[http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/1u1x56/](http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/comments/1u1x56/)

~~~
davepeck
Thanks.

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dionyziz
Another win against Zooko's conjecture!

