December 2013 Journal

87 minute read

WORDS is a monthly journal of Bitcoin commentary. This issue collects the December 2013 writing in the WORDS archive. For the uninitiated, getting up to speed on Bitcoin can seem daunting. Content is scattered across the internet, in some cases behind paywalls, and content has been lost forever. That’s why we made this journal, to preserve and further the understanding of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Volatility

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 2, 2013

Some people say that volatility of Bitcoin prices makes it poor “store of value”. You never know how much exactly do you have today: $10500, $9600 or $11201. When you pay for something you may pay 5% more than what it was just a minute ago. Or, if you are a merchant, you may receive 5% less than what you expected. That could be a problem.

We asked experts and got some evidence that it is not quite correct. Bitcoin has been a great store of value over the past 4 years. Almost everyone who invested in Bitcoin and kept it for more than a year enjoyed gains from 200% to 4000%. This means that 10% daily volatility is no longer a problem. When you pay with Bitcoin you enjoy more than 90% discount. Who cares if it’s one day 91% instead of 93%?

Similarly, merchants who consistently accept bitcoins and keep most of them around are compensated for small losses on volatility with big gains on their savings. For the past two months I was paying for bagels nearby with bitcoins and half of the time the price was going slightly down one hour after the payment. However, in overall, the guy accepting them finally made more than three times what he would receive in euros. Of course, last two months were better than in average, but over a one-two year period everyone was better off no matter when they invested.

Those merchants who do not want to invest in Bitcoin, but wish to enjoy zero-fee transactions without fraud, can use BitPay or Coinbase.

Bitcoin is both volatile and is a great store of value so far.

PS. This is not an endorsement to buy Bitcoin. You should not do that based only on the price history. If it was a Ponzi scheme or a huge bubble, the price would look the same. You should only invest if you study what Bitcoin is and how important it may (or may not) become in the future. Otherwise, do not put more than a dollar in it.

Gary North is clueless about Bitcoin

By Peter Surda

Posted December 4, 2013

Introduction

In the last couple of days, Gary North has made posts about Bitcoin on his blog:

The posts have already been addressed, but I thought I’d add my take.

My major irritation is that North makes two fundamental mistakes that a researcher shouldn’t do. He did not review existing Austrian literature on Bitcoin, and he did not collect empirical data. Instead, he repeated long refuted fallacies, and he made up his own fictional history of Bitcoin. This is why I have said in the past that the people associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute have become lazy and stupid. There has been progress in the meantime, however. Mark Thornton, for example, has become a fan, and the LvMI actually started accepting both donations and payments for their webshop in Bitcoin. But then Gary North pops up.

To a small extent, I am familiar with North’s work. I quote him in my master’s thesis, and I read his chapter from the

Theory of Money and Fiduciary Media

(more on that later, when I quote North based on the notes I made when I read it).

Inability to classify Bitcoin

North repeatedly argued that Bitcoin is not used in market exchanges. This is empirically false. I buy goods with Bitcoin all the time. And I was told that even Walter Block (whom I argued earlier to be clueless about Bitcoin) sold his book for bitcoins once. I don’t know why North makes claims to the contrary. However, this allows him to perform a methodological trick: because he denies that Bitcoin is used in exchanges, he can avoid having to classify it within the Misesian framework for classification of goods (into consumer goods, producer goods, and media of exchange).

Instead of classifying Bitcoin as a good then, North classifies it as a ponzi scheme.

Ponzi scheme

North provides his own definition of a Ponzi scheme and a reason why it causes problems. I submit my own definition, which is in my opinion more economically useful.

A ponzi scheme is a hierarchical system of fractionally backed claims. By putting an amount of money into the system, the participant gains a claim for a larger amount of money than he put in. In order for the settlement of claims to work at the beginning, the system is built hierarchically, so that earlier participants can get money from later participants. The reason why a system like this collapses is that as the amount of debt increases, so does the risk of triggering a settlement of claims. A full settlement at any particular time is impossible: the system is insolvent. Once there are too many triggered claims, this causes a cascading wave of defaults, and the claims thus become unclaimable and worthless. In a ponzi scheme, the trigger typically happens when not enough new people enter the system on time as the old claims mature, but this is merely a special case of trigger. All kinds of other triggers can hypothetically cause the cascade.

Bitcoin is not a system of claims. Bitcoin is a pseudo-commodity, not a claim. People who purchase Bitcoins do not have a claim on anybody, nor does anybody have a claim on them. There is no debt to settle, and no default that makes Bitcoin unclaimable. The mechanism that makes a ponzi scheme to collapse is absent with Bitcoin. Whatever reasons are there for Bitcoin to succeed or to fail, the analogy to ponzi schemes is invalid.

The necessity to classify Bitcoin as a claim, in the absence of the ability to classify it as a good, follows directly from the Misesian framework for classification of goods. The difference between a good and a claim is explained by Mises several times as relevant for determinant of their price: the price of claims is derived from the price of the underlying good. Sometimes, there are other factors influencing the price of a claim, but the price of the underlying good is a necessary component at least at the beginning.

The connection between the price of a good and a claim has been expanded upon by Malavika Nair, who also has a chapter in Theory of Money and Fiduciary Media, actually precisely about this topic. I exchanged some emails with professor Nair and this is what she wrote in respect to the classification of Bitcoin:

“I agree that Bitcoin is not a money substitute [i.e. not a claim, ed.], I think of it as closer to commodity money, just not a kind of commodity most people are used to. I know Selgin has come up with the term “synthetic money” but I’m not sure if that helps clear things up or confuses them. If anything, it’s a quasi-money or secondary money, which benefits greatly from its liquidity and the ease with which it can be sold for dollars”.

In other words, Bitcoin is not a claim, but a good. It is priced for its own sake, not based on a price of another good it refers to. And since it is held in order to buy goods, it is a medium of exchange.

But even if we disregard the methodological nonsense and stick with North’s own empirical description of the beginnings of Bitcoin:

“The money was siphoned off from the beginning. Somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits. Then, by telling his story, this individual created demand for all of the digits. The dollar-value of his share of the Bitcoins appreciates with the other digits.”

even then the description is false. Almost all of Satoshi’s Bitcoin are unspent, still where they were mined. As Bitcoin didn’t even have a price for almost nine months, if Satoshi had attempted to sell his coins, he would have made a revenue of … nothing. If he had tried to sell them when the price first formed on the market, he would have earned … 932.68 USD. There’s no typo, the value of all Bitcoin in existence at the time when the price emerged was less than a grand. If he waited until Mt. Gox started operating, he would have earned … 171,517.5 USD (assuming he actually had all of the bitcoins himself). These sums are not even profit, only revenue, as they don’t consider costs. Sounds like a real opportunity, doesn’t it?

The theoretical explanation of the purchasing power of Bitcoin is missing, and the empirical one is contradicted by the empirical data. Now I’ll proceed to explain why North cannot provide a valid theoretical explanation of Bitcoin.

Lack of a theory of liquidity

North refers to the chapter “The Regression Theorem As Conjectural History”. Luckily, I made some notes when I read the book. North quotes Menger as writing:

“The theory of money necessarily presupposes a theory of the saleableness [nowadays we use the term liquidity, ed.] of goods. If we grasp this, we shall be able to understand how the almost unlimited saleableness of money is only a special case, – presenting only a difference of degree – of a generic phenomenon of economic life – namely, the difference in the saleableness of commodities in general.”

This is precisely where and why North fails. He does not have a theory of liquidity. He has a theory of “stability of prices” instead. While Menger did claim that precious metals have a higher price stability than other goods, he argued that this is not a prerequisite for how the market participants treat it. In fact, with respect to the unit of account function, in Principles of Economics, Menger actually wrote this:

“The function of serving as a measure of price is therefore not necessarily an attribute of commodities that have attained money character. And if it is not a necessary consequence of the fact that a commodity has become money, it is still less a prerequisite or cause of a commodity becoming money.” [emphasis added]

If the unit of account function is not a prerequisite for a commodity to become money, then it shouldn’t matter how stable it is. Liquidity is not price stability. Liquidity is, in Menger’s own words:

“A commodity is more or less saleable according as we are able, with more or less prospect of success, to dispose of it at prices corresponding to the general economic situation, at economic prices.”

Apples have a relatively stable price. Yet apples are illiquid: they cannot be sold easily at the market price. Bitcoin does not have a stable price, yet Bitcoin is liquid. It’s not as liquid as money, and it’s probably not as liquid as gold. But it it is liquid and this satisfies the prerequisite for it acting as a medium of exchange. North’s grasp of Menger’s insights fails.

Speculation with Bitcoin

North argues that Bitcoin is used for speculation. The issue with this argument is that it does not contradict Bitcoin being used as a medium of exchange. The motivations of human actors in this respect are not mutually exclusive. If people hold a good in the expectation of dispensing with it in order to buy something else when they need that something else, it means they are using it as a medium of exchange. If they hold a good with the expectation of dispensing with it at a higher price when the time and place are opportune, they are speculating. But speculation is a normal part of life. A retailer buys, say, clothes wholesale, with the expectation of selling them at a higher price throughout the operating hours of his business, waiting for an opportunity. He speculates on the price of clothes. But that does not mean that clothes are a ponzi scheme or that there’s something wrong about it. It does not refute the validity of other reasons for buying clothes.

People in countries with a high rate of inflation tend to increase the proportion of more foreign fiat monies in their liquidity portfolio. They simultaneously hold the foreign money because it is liquid (and can be used for its purchasing power), and because they expect the purchasing power to be higher than when holding their national, faster inflating, money. This proves that the motivations are not mutually exclusive.

The regression theorem

Regrettably, it turned out that a lot of Austrians do not comprehend the regression theorem. I suspect that this is because of the difference in the approaches of Mises and Menger. Mises spends the majority of his Theory of Money and Credit by analysing the mechanism by which prices form, and the factors influencing this. Based on this, he presents a threefold classification system of goods: consumer goods, producer goods and media of exchange. Mises himself did not invent this classification, he got it from an earlier economists but unfortunately I don’t have my notes on this in a searchable form so I’ll update this post with the proper reference later. Media of exchange, according to Mises, differ from other goods, because they are held for their purchasing power. He then goes on to explain how purchasing power (or “exchange value”, another term he uses) emerges from use value through market exchange due to differences in marketability of goods (nowadays we use the term liquidity rather than marketability). He finishes with the conclusion that there is no other way for the exchange value to emerge than through a former use value and market exchange (catallactics), and theories that do not explain the exchange value of goods, “acatallactic monetary doctrines”, cannot explain the exchange value of media of exchange.

While Mises viewed exchange value and use value as two components of the final price, Menger viewed the concept of liquidity as orthogonal to the concept of price. Their goals were different. Mises’ approach is helpful for the analysis of the economic calculation, and for macroeconomics (business cycle, money supply and so on). Menger’s approach on the other hand is helpful of understanding the microeconomic foundations of media of exchange.

Both Menger and Mises argued that the difference between money and a medium of exchange is quantitative rather than qualitative (“presenting only a difference of degree”, in fact North himself has the same Menger’s quote in his “The Regression Theorem As Conjectural History”). This is why we cannot make praxeological arguments about the origin of money that also do not apply to the origin of a medium of exchange. And this is why it’s evident that some Austrians still don’t understand the regression theorem.

The Mengerian approach to the origin of media of exchange is that media of exchange emerge out of liquid commodities. People recognise that some commodities are liquid (it is possible to”dispose of it at prices corresponding to the general economic situation, at economic prices”), and assisted by this knowledge, they start to hold them for this purpose (to dispose of them at economic prices). This is the moment when the function of a medium of exchange emerges. The Misesian approach is similar, but he uses the term “exchange value” to explain the liquidity premium of liquid goods (which is a more complex issue). This is why the Misesian approach is more helpful when examining prices, but less helpful when examining the motivations of market participants.

As Bitcoin is a medium of exchange (people hold it in order to purchase goods in the future), it must logically adhere to the regression theorem. It must have been a liquid good before it was used as a medium of exchange. And indeed, empirical analysis shows that this is correct. Before people used Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, it was possible to trade it against the US dollars on bitcoin exchanges, which featured visible order books. This made it easier to sell Bitcoin at economic prices. The fact that the exchanges were founded deliberately does not invalidate their economic function. Menger realised that specialised services that help with sales have a beneficiary effect on liquidity:

“The institution of an organized market for an article makes it possible for the producers, or other economizing individuals trading in it, to sell their commodities at any time at economic prices.”

If we go even further chronologically, before Bitcoin exchanges existed, Bitcoin already had a price and was traded sporadically (i.e. was a good). The very early prices appear to have formed based on the variable production costs of Bitcoin at that time. And even further in the past, Bitcoin did not have a price, and while there were signs of using the blockchain, it probably didn’t qualify as a good.

I document the process both in my thesis, and in an earlier blog post Professor Walter Block is clueless about Bitcoin. The origin of the function of a medium of exchange for Bitcoin is right out of the book. Menger’s book, that is. Not North’s book. North needs to deny the purchasing power of Bitcoin, because if he admitted it exists, he’d be left without the ability to explain it, having no catallactic theory of the origin of Bitcoin.

The network effect

North is equally clueless on the network effect (which was brought up by one of his critics). He goes even further:

“I can assure you that Carl Menger, the founder of Austrian school economics, did not use language like this: “money itself replaced non-money as a market network effect good.” No Austrian school economist ever has. Austrian school economists do their best to communicate in something other than programmers’ professional jargon.”

North is wrong yet again. One economist familiar with the Austrian tradition, Mikael Stenukla, wrote a paper Carl Menger and the network theory of money. Many more Austrians are familiar with the network effect and understand that liquidity is a subset of the more generic concept of the network effect. The article was actually pointed out to me by Peter G. Klein, the executive director of the LvMI, who also did research the network effect.

Once you comprehend the network effect, you’ll realise that the issue with respect to media of exchange is the empirical question of the critical mass of liquidity: the threshold below which a potential medium of exchange needs other utility in order for the system to be self-sustaining. Economists (including Austrians), who did not comprehend the concept of liquidity, implied that this threshold can only happen at a very high level of demand (or other auxiliary criteria, such as “price stability” proposed by North). But demand is not the same thing as liquidity. Bitcoin simply shows that liquidity can emerge at a lower level of demand than previously thought.

This is why it also cannot be concluded that Bitcoin cannot become money (the same non-sequitur that already was presented by Patrik Korda earlier this year). Of course it can. It just needs to outcompete other media of exchange. And this can’t be determined apriori: it’s an empirical issue. As I argued in my thesis, transaction costs play a major role in influencing the choice, and Bitcoin has lower transaction costs than anything that existed before that. Even though Austrians typically do not use the term “transaction costs” (I’ve heard Salerno use the term “transactions costs” once though), Menger used the term “economic sacrifices” and it was evident that it’s the same phenomenon. It is also evident from Menger’s writing that transaction costs are heterogeneous, with many influencing factors, and that:

“Economic development tends to reduce these economic sacrifices, with the result that even between the most distant lands more and more economic exchanges become possible which previously could not have taken place.”

Bitcoin is just such an economic development as Menger mentions. It allows a more efficient conduct of market operations. This is why the claim of North that Bitcoin has no utility is absurd.

The utility of Bitcoin

North’s denial of utility is filled with nonsense and lacks fundamental economic analysis. It has been repeated too often by others, but it’s strange that reputable researchers like North come up with this too. In order to understand the utility of Bitcoin, I recommend the recent video by Stephan Molyneux. If you don’t have the time to watch, I’ll just provide some points which I consider important or interesting.

The True Value of Bitcoin by Stephan Molyneux:

Bitcoin can partially or fully replace the following services by more efficient ones:

Proof of ownership (obsoletes notaries)
Dispute resolution (obsoletes mediators)
Record auditing (obsoletes accountants)
Smart property (obsoletes the police)
Decentralised stock exchange (obsoletes centralised stock exchanges)
Highly efficient payments (obsoletes banks, debit cards, money transmitters)
Full control over your money (obsoletes central banks and banking regulators)
Conditional payments (obsoletes lawyers)
No inflation
No business cycle

And now, here’s the kicker: points 1-5 does not require that Bitcoin is a medium of exchange (because they do not require Bitcoin to have purchasing power) and points 6-8 do not require that Bitcoin is money (because they do not require that Bitcoin is used as a unit of account). Only points 9 and 10 require that Bitcoin is a unit of account. If that ever happens, that’s just the cherry on the top. Some, for example

Michael Suede

, even come to the conclusion that without the ability to steal money, states couldn’t exist.

The claim that Bitcoin has no utility is ridiculous. North really should have done some research.

Conclusion

It looks like I still have a lot of work to do. I thought that the research that Austrians (and semi-Austrians) did with respect to Bitcoin (in particular John Paul Koning, Konrad S. Graf, Daniel Krawisz, and of course me) would be sufficient for the other Austrians to move on and continue contributing more new interesting things. Sadly, this didn’t happen yet. There are still many Austrians that are lazy, ignorant, or sadly, outright fraudulent, as they fabricate a fictional history and present it as facts. This is in particular saddening as North is a historian.

I’m not an expert in North’s writings. I did find his “Mises on Money” helpful and informative (I highlighted 35 passages into my research catalogue), while his “The Regression Theorem as Conjectural History” somewhat weak. I know he has something against George Selgin, but I don’t care about that. However, his attempts to address Bicoin are just annoying. I attempted to address several core problems of his articles. I hope this helps people to understand Bitcoin, and Austrian economists to finally move on beyond long refuted nonsense, and produce something new and helpful.

“I, Broken Economist”: An Analysis of Gary North’s economics of Bitcoin

By Peter Surda

Posted December 7, 2013

Conceited arrogance

There is one thing that becomes apparent when reading Gary North’s articles. He knows a lot. But there is also another thing that becomes apparent sometimes, in particular in his latest article on Bitcoin. He thinks he knows more than he actually knows. I can’t address his article in full detail now as I’m at the Latin American Bitcoin Conference, but I thought I’d mention some core issues with his article.

Heterogeneity of a monetary system

He writes that money enables economic calculation, and thus division of labour. He writes that Bitcoin couldn’t exist if money did not already exist. He writes that you cannot buy everything with Bitcoin (yet). He writes that without goods being priced in Bitcoin, it can’t be money.

I agree with all of this (or let’s just assume I do). I also claim that it’s irrelevant. Because North does not have a general theory of liquidity, and a general theory of transaction costs. Which is very sad, because Menger was very eloquent on explaining both of these categories and made profound discoveries. People who claim that their arguments are based on Menger, yet do not have either a theory of liquidity or a theory of transaction costs do not really understand Menger.

North only has a partial theory of liquidity (a theory of stable prices) and a partial theory of transaction costs (division of labour). But Menger was very elaborate on explaining why both liquidity and transaction costs are heterogenous and cannot be summed up to a particular activity. The implied error of the homogeneity of a monetary system is visible when North writes:

“You cannot have a monetary system that does not apply across the board, yet still defend the concept of the division of labour through competitive pricing”.

It is visible also in other partial implications of the alleged homogeneity, for example assuming that liquidity is a final means of payment. This already has been erroneously claimed by Smiling Dave. Final means of payment is merely one of the factors that influence liquidity. Liquidity is also not a unit of account. Unit of account and liquidity influence each other, but again are merely one of the factors.

In other words, North’s critique of Bitcoin misses that there are components of liquidity and transaction costs other than those he mentions. The total mix of all these influences the choice of a medium of exchange. The weight of the result is not only different based on the evolutionary stage of Bitcoin, but also on the particular circumstances of a particular user. This is why some people in some situations will find Bitcoin more advantageous, and other people or even the same people in a different situation disadvantageous. It is also why it cannot be apriori concluded what the future of Bitcoin will be, we can only make educated guesses. The only thing we can do as praxeologists is to conclude that Bitcoin might expand in those areas where its advantages are assessed as subjectively the most important with respect to other media of exchange. It might never develop into “money”, but it would be erroneous to conclude that that’s the only relevant issue (the good old “money or nothing” fallacy).

The problem that North thinks he knows more than he actually does is exacerbated by his misapplication of the system of property rights and social frameworks to Bitcoin (or the lack thereof). North does not understand that Bitcoin is a social framework. It is a more efficient social framework. Contractual relationships that are currently expensive or impossible (have high transaction costs) are now profitable and/or possible with Bitcoin. Payments are merely the first, easiest, type of a contract, on which Bitcoin demonstrates its advantages. Rather than being an “implicit denial” of contracts, Bitcoin provides a more efficient framework for them. I think that we can all agree that Bitcoin is not perfect. But there are no perfect goods. There is always the subjective assessment, imperfect information, and opportunity costs.

Bitcoin is at a very early stage, and the basis for the framework is still expecting human actors to fill it with their own activities. Contrary to North’s claim that Bitcoin “put the cart before the horse”, it’s the opposite. Bitcoin first created a framework, and then this was incrementally use for payments.

This is also, paradoxically, why North is clueless. He understands how social institutions evolve in theory, yet he cannot connect empirical data (when it happens right under his nose) with the theory.

Conclusion

North complains that people who criticise his position of Bitcoin do not understand the Austrian school. Well, I know for sure that North does not understand certain aspects of it (in particular Menger’s approach to liquidity and transaction costs), and on other aspects he can’t connect the theory with empirical data. He’s also lazy (because he did not read Austrian literature on Bitcoin and he did not gather empirical data on Bitcoin), and conceited (because he thinks his credentials give him immunity from errors).

As I wrote before, the future of Bitcoin does not depend on the understanding of economists. It depends on human action. I don’t care about North’s opinion. But as a researcher I see it as important that I address errors. Others than can read both, make up their own mind, and build on top of it. The Austrian school did not end with Menger, it began with him.

Merge avoidance

By Mike Hearn

Posted December 11, 2013

A note on privacy-enhancing techniques in the Bitcoin protocol

In this article I am going to briefly discuss some Bitcoin privacy leaks, and a new technique that does not currently have a name but in this article I will call merge avoidance. I will compare and contrast it to CoinJoin.

Introduction

It is an unfortunate fact that despite Bitcoin’s reputation in the press, its users currently leak large amounts of personal information. It is distressingly easy for someone to learn about your balance, trading history and more. Protecting this information is a basic function of any useful financial system.

Here are a handful of leaks that crop up in daily usage.

Address reuse

Many privacy problems in Bitcoin are caused by an adversary learning which outputs are owned by the same wallet. If you can calculate this, you can discover the wallets balance and possibly who it traded with. The most common way this happens is when addresses are reused. This is easily understood because popular sites like blockchain.info index outputs and transactions by address, allowing you to quickly look up all the transactions that reference any given address.

Address reuse has many different root causes. Here are a sampling:

End-user wallet problems. The bitcoinj library always reuses addresses by policy, thus leaking a lot of private information. There are two reasons for this. One is that prior to the development of HD wallets, constantly using up keys would result in invalidation of old wallet backups. Bitcoin-Qt has a “key pool” to try and address this, but it only puts the problem off: the key pool can be silently exhausted giving the same problem. Invalidating backups can cause people to lose money. Once HD wallets are implemented (which is in progress) this problem will go away, leaving only the second problem of memory pressure on low end phones. Address re-use may still be required on such devices, but higher end phones and desktops/laptops shouldn’t encounter any issues.
Server wallet problems. There are no public, open source wallet implementations that scale to wallets with very large numbers of keys. As far as I know exchanges and major payment processors have all had to implement lots of custom code to work around the lack of scalability of Bitcoin-Qt (and bitcoinj). This puts pressure on receivers to reuse addresses.
Social conventions.Putting static addresses into forum signatures, qrcodes, etc.

Over time, we will need to make progress with all these issues to reduce address reuse. HD wallets and the payment protocol are important tools to help us achieve this.

Change outputs

One of the most irritating privacy leaks in Bitcoin is people learning lower bounds on your balance. How this works is intuitively understandable via the analogy to cash. With paper money, if you hand over a 500 CHF note to pay for a drink costing only 5 CHF the bar tender learns that your balance is at least 495 CHF. It may well be higher of course, but it’s at least not lower. Bitcoin has the same issue.

The root cause of this problem is a mismatch between the size of a payment you wish to make and the coins (outputs) available to you. If the mismatch is in one direction, you have a lot of tiny outputs and making payments for any non-tiny amounts starts to cost a lot in fees, because the transactions you generate are huge. If the mismatch is in the other direction then to pay for a small thing requires the usage of a big coin, and the change output leaks valuable data about how rich you are.

Network traffic

Bitcoin P2P connections are unencrypted. One reason is that most of the data flowing across the P2P network is public, thus encrypting it seems pointless. Another reason is that by its very nature, when you connect to a P2P network your peers could be absolutely anyone and do absolutely anything — for instance they could be nodes run by the NSA. And that’s not even a bad thing! Why should the NSA not run nodes? If someone were to tell them not to, that would imply some kind of central authority who was dictating who gets to run Bitcoin and who doesn’t. We don’t want that.

So encrypting data is useful when you have a clear idea of who should see it and who shouldn’t. Encrypting public data to random people whom you know nothing about — not quite so useful.

Despite all that, there are still four reasons why it would help to encrypt connections.

The first reason is for Bloom filters. These are compact representations of what’s relevant to your wallet: typically, what addresses/keys are in it. A filter is one way and can be noisy, that is, you can’t read out addresses directly from a filter, you can only apply it to the block chain and see what it matches. And filters can have false positives, so a node can never be sure if an address is really yours or not. That’s pretty good, but even with a high false positive rate it still narrows down what coins you might own pretty massively. Bloom filters are not public information, they’re just shared between a client and the node it connects to. So it would be good to hide those against passive eavesdroppers, like people sharing your wifi hotspot.

The second reason is that even though transactions are public, their origin IP address is not (or it’s not supposed to be). But an adversary who can observe lots of internet links could fairly reliably decide where a transaction started by precisely recording the times when a transaction was first seen and examining the first moment it transited a fibre link. It seems like some intelligence agencies could do this kind of analysis. Encrypting links doesn’t guarantee a fix for this because timing analysis may still be possible, but it certainly makes it harder.

The third reason is that if encryption was combined with “trust on first use” (TOFU) authentication, it would make it harder even for active MITMs to perform sybil attacks on wallets and feed them bad data. This is more important for SPV clients than full nodes, but both could benefit.

The final reason is that properly implemented, using SSL for P2P connections would make them harder to identify and block using deep packet inspection devices.

CoinJoin

Of the above problems, the solution to leaking data via change outputs is one of the most hotly debated (although a lot of people don’t realise they’re debating it). The CoinJoin proposal has received a lot of attention and some initial implementations. Some people see this primarily as a privacy tool, and others as a way to try and break coin tracing. When used for privacy, it can best be described as a way to try and delete information that has already been leaked.

The Sheep Marketplace reddit seems to show some of the limits of coin mixing

However, CoinJoin has a number of serious problems that make an alternative desirable. It is deeply complex to implement well, vulnerable to sybil/DoS attacks (they’re often the same thing in this context), legally questionable and it’s not clear that the obfuscation even works. The Sheep Marketplace theft has seen someone claim to trace coins through tumblers and mixers, and apparently with a modicum of success. One of the tracer’s tools was sybil/DoS attacks on mixing services so those are not a theoretical concern. Whilst toy implementations are not too hard to put together, robust real-world implementations with proper timeout handling, security checks, good wallet UI integration etc are a lot more effort. So far only blockchain.info has managed to create one (at sharedcoin.com), and you just have to trust that it doesn’t keep logs. Otherwise anyone with the logs could unmix.

Perhaps the least discussed issue is user experience. A CoinJoin transaction requires other people to take part. The more people who take part, the better. But Bitcoin only peaks at about one transaction per second currently. Even if all transactions were CoinJoined, and all rendezvoused at a single point (ack, centralisation!), you would still have to wait 10-15 seconds to get a good set of participants to mix with. That’s just to start the protocol. Then those participants would all have to retrieve the candidate transaction and sign. If any time out, the whole thing has to start again. In poor conditions it could easily take a minute or more to complete this process, especially if some participants have flaky networks (i.e. phones) and are using Tor. Given that we’re trying to improve performance rather than reduce it, that seems like a big problem all by itself.

Whilst increasing traffic and usage would help reduce this issue, even if traffic doubled, splitting the single central rendezvous point would immediately put waiting times back to square one.

One might solve this problem by doing CoinJoins in the background, unrelated to an actual spend that’s taking place. That solves the problem of waiting in line at the coffee shop, but then fees must be paid on those transactions, and it may be difficult to explain to people why their balance suddenly dropped overnight due to an unexpected privacy tax. That sort of nasty surprise would make Bitcoin rather unappealing to ordinary users. It also raises the question of when and how often it is done.

Merge avoidance

As a common root cause of privacy leaks is a mismatch in the sizes of available coins vs what is required, it seems we could approach the problem from another angle: by avoiding creating any information leaks that need to be erased in the first place.

Consider the case of Alice, a coffee shop worker who gets paid a salary. Alice does a great job and her boss recognises that with a higher than normal pay packet. Her coworker Bob suspects he doesn’t get paid as much as Alice and wants to know, so convinces Alice to make a small payment to him just after pay day (perhaps they make a bet and Bob wins).

With regular Bitcoin, Alice’s wallet will probably use her salary output and the change will reveal what she gets paid. Even if she made several payments already, Bob can follow the chain of transactions backwards until he finds a reasonably round looking number on the right date and conclude that’s most likely her salary payment.

Plain CoinJoin also doesn’t help her. She would put in one large input to the mix, and get back one large output. She could request lots of smaller outputs, but the input will still be salary-sized and on the right date. Unless lots of people who earn coffee-shop-sized salaries all happen to share the same CoinJoin transaction, the leak hasn’t been fixed.

What she really needs is to avoid ever having such a large single output in the first place. Let’s call this merge avoidance. When she submits her BIP 70 payment request to her employer, she requests a nice mix of denominations, just like as if she was buying cash at a foreign exchange desk. The request also specifies a unique address for each output. The payment protocol does not specify how a wallet should satisfy this request, but it does allow the possibility that the senders wallet submits multiple independent transactions in order to satisfy the desired outputs.

If her employer uses an old wallet that doesn’t understand merge avoidance, it will generate and submit to her a single giant transaction that has many inputs (from all the coffees) and all her requested outputs. It will look much like a CoinJoin transaction would, but it only has a single participant. However there is no way to know this from looking at the block chain.

If her employer uses a newer wallet that does understand merge avoidance, then something better happens — she will receive a number of different, smaller transactions, each one of which creates one or two of the outputs she requested. There is nothing to link any of them together. Because she trusts her employer not to double spend, she can spread out the broadcast so not even timing gives them away.

If the selection of outputs is chosen smartly, she will never be in a situation whereby she has outputs awkwardly large or small for a particular payment. Bob will simply see a small transaction that yields a small change output, and no matter how far he traces back he will never find any salary-sized output. Alice wins!

Change outputs can leak data in another way. Bob failed in his attempt to learn Alice’s salary by tracing backwards through the block chain, but he can still watch the change output of the payment he received to see what happens to it. If the change is later combined with many others to create a huge payment, suddenly he knows that Alice must have owned at least that much money. Here CoinJoin seems like it should work — if the change goes into a mix, who can say who owns the outputs? But it’s fragile. Even if the outputs are randomly sized, in the absence of merge avoidance they will be recombined again to make a large payment. If Alice happens to mention in passing that she’s going on holiday with her boyfriend, Bob can look at the outputs of the mix her change went into and wait for some of the outputs to be recombined. If a third of the outputs sit there unspent, a third are spent without being combined in any significant way and a third get combined into a $5000 payment the evening before Alice mentions her holiday, it’s a pretty good bet that the trip is costing her $5k.

Implementation properties

This scheme has several things that make it nice to implement:

It can be written incrementally — a simple and not very smart algorithm can nevertheless still improve someone’s privacy. Later, a better algorithm can be developed and deployed, but it doesn’t require any complicated global upgrades. This is a good fit for the volunteer driven fits-and-spurts, competing-wallets development model that Bitcoin has.
It is very simple and has no moving parts or big state machines. You don’t have to worry about a random mobile phone the other side of the world driving into a tunnel at the wrong moment, or running a buggy reimplementation of the software.
There is no centralisation, not even any transient rendezvous servers.
There are no legal risks, because you’re not relying on any services that could be considered money laundering tools.
It is robust. Above, I gave examples of how CoinJoin can appear to work but still leak in the presence of very little additional information. Merge avoidance doesn’t have that problem.

There are also some downsides:

How good your privacy is depends heavily on how smartly the people sending you money craft transactions. Thus your privacy relies on people who may not have much incentive to do anything about it. Hopefully common wallet software would do the right thing by default.
It increases the number of transactions, although the overhead is not as high as you might think — a transaction is merely a list of inputs, outputs and a two-field header (version and lock time). Inputs and outputs are not really changed over a good CoinJoin implementation, and version/locktime could easily be compressed/varint encoded to save space. The difference would be on the order of bytes rather than kilobytes.
It relies on the payment protocol. But many things rely on that, and the payment protocol is critical to cracking down on address reuse, which is needed for all proposed privacy schemes to work anyway. It’s important that we make BIP70 as easy and widespread as possible.

Merge avoidance doesn’t interfere with coin tracing. Some people may wish to implement CoinJoin systems for that reason alone. However, I can’t imagine that becoming widespread. If people’s privacy is being protected via other means, then CoinJoin becomes a “help thieves hide their stolen money” system which reduces incentive to take part, increases legal risk even further and would make people wonder why their wallet apps were asking them to pay fees simply in order to shield people whom they most likely think are bad. Besides, the Sheep Marketplace incident shows that decentralised crime fighting as a technique is sometimes the only option: nobody is going to ask the police to help recover their stolen drug money, and no government would bother helping if they did.

Bitcoin Value Proposition

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 13, 2013

More people are willing to “invest in Bitcoin”. Before doing that they need to understand what it is and what it isn’t. Someone asked me if it’s okay to “invest in BTC for a year at current prices”. This way to put it is to admit that you do not understand the value of Bitcoin. You will buy at $1000 and sell all at $800 during a sharp reaction to some piece of bad news. Don’t do that.

Bitcoin is a great bet. If most people own a little bit of Bitcoin, we will wake up tomorrow in a new world. If they don’t and everyone goes home, your investment is fundamentally worthless. Bitcoin is as pure as money can ever get: it’s either a global standard, or it’s purely an object of art valued by few. You do not invest in Bitcoin, you switch into it.

If Bitcoin becomes the world money, people will massively sell off their currencies, gold, silver and some low-risk investments (like bonds or extra real estate). Rough calculations give us a figure higher than $10M of today’s dollars per bitcoin.

But what fascinates me personally about Bitcoin is not a nice monetary reward, but a transformation in our society that comes as a side effect. Even if me and you put no money in Bitcoin today, our lives will be so much better if Bitcoin wins.

Real Bitcoin value proposition is in removal of large-scale destruction and giving an unseen before amount of economic freedom.

As an example, the total debt of the U.S. government is $17 trillion and growing [1]. This debt is owned by the banks that create dollars in exchange for that debt. Government simply promises to pay off this debt with the same money (plus interest) that it is supposed to extract from the taxpayers later. It’s not only impossible economically, but it’s logically invalid. To return more debt-based currency, they’d need to issue even more debt.

You may think these numbers do not affect you personally, but consider what this money is being spent on. Total cost of the war in Iraq since 2003 is an astonishing $6 trillion [2]. Almost one third of today’s total debt. During this war more than 1 million people were killed [3]. In other words, folks working in military earned $6 million per one person murdered.

Ask yourself, who gave these trillions for the war? What investors thought it might be a good idea to invade Iraq, lose a bunch of money and have people hate you? The answer is that there are no investors. All this money is being made up by the central bank in exchange for more government debt. And due to tons of laws, regulations and taxation people have to accept this funny money for their work.

Bitcoin does not allow this. It’s a single, absolutely transparent ledger where anyone can see how money is being created. There’s a fixed supply which cannot be increased overnight by a single man. If people adopt Bitcoin as their standard money, governments would have to pay for their wars from taxes. And people will feel how their taxes actually work. Not even mentioning that taxes will be much harder to extract if peaceful citizens decide to oppose their government. By simply being a world money, Bitcoin will prevent massive murder and destruction. This alone is worth making a bet on, in my opinion.

After removing disastrous wars, people will find themselves not only in a safer world, but also with even more opportunities. Anyone can trade with anyone else on the entire planet, absolutely safely, anonymously or publicly. Every teenager can join the global market whenever he wants. Every person can save money for a rainy day without Paul Krugman telling him why it’s good that his savings lose in value. Every business is more protected against racket by having secure cash as an ultimate insurance against temporary losses. Programmable contracts [4] allow incredible new business models that are otherwise impossible, lowering the cost of lawyers and auditors. The entire internet will shift from advertisement to more directly funded services as micropayments become viable.

If you understand all of this, you should desire these changes and participate in them. If you don’t agree with me, you should not invest in Bitcoin at all. You can’t have just a cute payment protocol without all global consequences that necessarily follow. Bitcoin is a single package: either it completely fails, or it turns all people into wealthy peaceful anarchists.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts

Why the quoted price of Bitcoin doesn’t matter

By Beautyon

Posted December 16, 2013

What the “Double Spending Problem” means, why Bitcoin price fluctuation doesn’t matter, and the new thinking you need to embrace to absorb the Bitcoin paradigm shift.

Bitcoin is a very new technology, even though the concept that it brings to life is decades old. The double spending problem has been solved; this means that it is possible to use a digital certificate to stand in the place of money and be sure that no one else can spend that certificate other than you as long as you hold it. This is an unprecedented paradigm shift, the implications of which are not yet fully understood, and for which the tools do not yet exist to fully take advantage of this new idea.

This new technology requires some new thinking when it comes to developing businesses that are built upon it. In the same way that the pioneer providers of email did not correctly understand the service they were selling for many years, new and correct thinking about Bitcoin is needed, and will emerge, so that it reaches its full potential and becomes ubiquitous.

The original Hotmail Interface

Hotmail used familiar technologies (the browser, email) to create a better way of accessing and delivering email; the idea of using an email client like Outlook Express has been superseded by web interfaces and email ‘in the cloud’ that provides many advantages over a dedicated client with your mail in your own local storage.

Bitcoin, which will transform the way you transfer money, needs to be understood on its own terms, and not just as an online form of money. Thinking about Bitcoin as money is as absurd as thinking about email as another form of sending letters by post; one not only replaces the other but it profoundly changes the way people send and consume messages. It is not a simple substitution or one dimensional improvement of an existing idea or service.

As I have explained previously, Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a protocol. If you treat it in this way, with the correct assumptions, you can start the process of putting Bitcoin in a proper context, allowing you to make rational suggestions about the sort of services that might be profitable based on it.

Every part of Bitcoin is text. It is always text, and never at any point ceases to be text. This is a fact, and as text, it is protected under the free speech provisions of the constitutions of civilized nations with guaranteed, irrevocable rights.

If Bitcoin is a protocol and not money, then setting up currency exchanges that mimic real world money, stock and commodity exchanges to trade in it doesn’t make any sense. You would not set up an email exchange to buy and sell email, and the same thing applies to Bitcoin.

Staying with this train of thought, when you type in an email on your Gmail account, you are inputting your ‘letter’. You press send, it goes through your ISP, over the internets, into the ISP of your recipient and then it is outputted on your recipient’s machine. The same is true of Bitcoin; you input money on one end through a service and then send the Bitcoin to your recipient, without an intermediary to handle the transfer. Once Bitcoin does its job of moving your value across the globe to its recipient it needs to be ‘read out’, i.e. turned back into money, in the same way that your letter is displayed to its recipient in an email.

In the email scenario, once the transfer happens and the email you have received conveys its information to you, it has no use other than to be a record of the information that was sent (accounting), and you archive that information. Bitcoin does this accounting in the block chain for you, and a good service built on it will store extended transaction details for you locally, but what you need to have as the recipient of Bitcoin is money or _goods_not Bitcoin itself.

Bitcoin’s true nature is as an instant way to transmit money anywhere in the world. It is not an investment, or money itself, and holding on to it in the hopes that it will become valuable is like holding on to an email or a PDF in the hopes it will be come valuable in the future; it doesn’t make any sense.

Despite the fact that you cannot double spend them and each one is unique, Bitcoins have no inherent value, unlike a book or any physical object. They cannot appreciate in value. Mistaken thinking about Bitcoin has spread because it behaves like money, due to the fact it cannot be double spent. This fact however has masked Bitcoin’s dual nature of being digital, duplicable and not double spendable.

Razzles. They start as a candy, and then end as a gum. Before you chew them, which are they? A candy, or a gum?

Bitcoin is digital, with all the qualities of information that make information non scarce. It sits in a new place that oscillates between the goods of the physical world and the infinitely abundant digital world of information, belonging exclusively to the digital world but having the characteristics of both. This is why it has been widely misunderstood and why a new approach is needed to design businesses around it.

All of this goes some way to explain why the price of buying Bitcoins at the exchanges doesn’t matter. If the cost of buying a Bitcoin goes to 1¢ This does not change the amount of money that comes out at the other end of a transfer. As long as you redeem your Bitcoins immediately after the transfer into either goods or currency, the same value comes out at the other end no matter what you paid for the Bitcoins when you started the process.

Think about it this way. Let us suppose that you want to send a long text file to another person. You can either send it as it is, or you can compress it with zip. The size of a document file when it is zipped can be up to 87% smaller than the original. When we transpose this idea to Bitcoin, the compression ratio is the price of Bitcoin at an exchange. If a Bitcoin is $100, and you want to buy something from someone in India for $100 you need to buy 1 Bitcoin to get that $100 to india. If the price of Bitcoin is 1¢ then you need 10,000 Bitcoins to send $100 dollars to India. These would be expressed as compression ratios of 1:1 and 10,000:1 respectively.

The same $100 value is sent to India, wether you use 10,000 or 1 Bitcoin. The price of Bitcoins is irrelevant to the value that is being transmitted, in the same way that zip files do not ‘care’ what is inside them; Bitcoin and zip are dumb protocols that do a job.

As long as the value of Bitcoins does not go to zero, it will have the same utility as if the value were very ‘high’.

Bearing all of this in mind, its clear that new services to facilitate the rapid, frictionless conversion into and out of Bitcoin are needed to allow it to function in a manner that is true to its nature.

The current business models of exchanges are not addressing Bitcoin’s nature correctly. They are using the Twentieth Century model of stock, commodity and currency exchanges and superimposing this onto Bitcoin. Interfacing with these exchanges is non-trivial, and for the ordinary user a daunting prospect. In some cases, you have to wait up to seven days to receive a transfer of your fiat currency after it has been cashed out of your account from Bitcoins. Whilst this is not a fault of the exchanges, it represents a very real impediment to Bitcoin acting in its nature and providing its complete value.

The very idea is completely absurd, and yet, this is exactly what is happening with Bitcoin, for no technical reason whatsoever.

It is clear that there needs to be a re-think of the services that are growing around Bitcoin, along with a re-think of what the true nature of Bitcoin is. Rethinking services is a normal part of entrepreneurialism and we should expect business models to fail and early entrants to fall by the wayside as the ceaseless iterations and pivoting progress.

Bearing all of this in mind, focussing on the price of Bitcoin at exchanges using a business model that is inappropriate for this technology simply is not rational; its like putting a methane breathing canary in a mine full of oxygen breathing humans as a detector. The bird dies even though nothing is wrong with the air; the miners rush to evacuate, leaving the exposed gold seams behind, thinking that they are all about to be wiped out, when all is actually fine.

Day traders speculating on Bitcoin from home cause the price to oscillate. Its an artificial signal that has nothing to do with demand for Bitcoin and its circulation as an economic tool to facilitate commerce.

Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it are here to stay. As the number of people downloading the client and using it increases, like Hotmail, it will eventually reach critical mass and then spread exponentially through the internet. When that happens, the correct business models will spontaneously emerge, as they will become obvious, in the same way that Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, cellular phones and instant messaging seem like second nature.

In the future. I imagine that very few people will speculate on the value of Bitcoin, because even though that might be possible, and even profitable, there will be more money to be made in providing easy to use Bitcoin services that take full advantages of what Bitcoin is.

One thing is for sure; speed will be of the essence in any future Bitcoin business model. The startups that provide instant satisfaction on both ends of the transaction are the ones that are going to succeed. Even though the volatility of the price of Bitcoin is bound to stabilise, since it has no use in and of itself, getting back to money or goods instantly will be a sought after characteristic of any business built on Bitcoin.

The needs of Bitcoin businesses provide many challenges in terms of performance, security and new thinking. Out of these challenges will come new practices and software that we can only just imagine as they come over the horizon.

Bacon double cheeseburger, chocolate shake, chilli fries, onion rings.↴

Why Bitcoin Can’t Crash

By Beautyon

Posted December 18, 2013

Bitcoin cannot “crash”. It’s price doesn’t matter. What you can do with Bitcoin is the only thing that matters.

Bitcoin, which will transform the way you transfer money, needs to be understood on its own terms, and not as an on-line form of money. Thinking about Bitcoin as money is as absurd as thinking about email as another form of sending letters by post; one not only replaces the other but it profoundly changes the way people send and consume messages. It is not a simple substitution or one dimensional improvement of an existing idea or service.

As I have explained previously, Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a protocol. If you treat it in this way, with the correct assumptions, you can start the process of putting Bitcoin in a proper context, allowing you to make rational suggestions about the sort of services that might be profitable based on it.

Bitcoin’s true nature is as an instant way to transmit money anywhere in the world. It is not an investment, or money itself, and holding on to it in the hopes that it will become valuable is like holding on to an email or a PDF in the hopes it will be come valuable in the future; it doesn’t make any sense.

Despite the fact that you cannot double spend them and each one is unique, Bitcoins have no inherent value, unlike a book or any physical object. They cannot appreciate in value. Mistaken thinking about Bitcoin has spread because it behaves like money, due to the fact it cannot be double spent. This fact however has masked Bitcoin’s dual nature of being digital, duplicable and not double spendable.

As long as the value of Bitcoins does not go to zero, it will have the same utility as if the value were very ‘high’.

Imagine this; you receive an email from across the world, and are notified of the fact by being displayed the subject line in your browser. You then apply to your ISP to have this email delivered to you, and you have to wait seven days for it to arrive in your physical mail box. The very idea is completely absurd, and yet, this is exactly what is happening with Bitcoin, for no technical reason whatsoever.

If you like the content and feel so obliged to send some love via BTC donations you can do so at the address below:↴

Save Us From the Lawyers and the Luddites

By Beautyon

Posted December 23, 2013

Violent people are hell bent on destroying the usefulness of the internet. They stoop to using force to protect their broken business models. They are immoral, and doomed simultaneously.

John Matonis has an excellent post on his ‘Monetary Future’ blog. In it, he logically goes through some of the issues surrounding Bitcoin. It is well worth reading. One section however, spurred this post. It’s the part about Vili Lehdonvirta’s ideas on ‘virtual goods’:

I am worried that Bitcoin is a step too far as it leaves no possibility for even democratic governments to enforce their laws. This is a topic I would love to debate with the community and hear opposing views. I think the end result could be a better understanding for me, but also a better understanding for the Bitcoin community on how to live in harmony with democratic authority.

Absolutely astonishing. A ‘step too far’? Towards or away from what exactly? We do not want to live in harmony with “democratic authority”. Democratic authority, to us, is inherently illegitimate, evil, immoral and completely unjustifiable. There are people who are attracted to Bitcoin precisely because it is beyond the control of “democratic authority”. As for it being a step too far, we must bear in mind that no one is forcing anyone to use Bitcoin. You decide on your own to use it, and if it succeeds or fails, you take the benefit or profit or losses respectively. Violent Statists are of course, vehemently opposed to free trade, voluntary exchange and liberty. Bitcoin is to the Statist as sunrise is to Dracula.

Matonis chimes in with…

For the most part, I respect Vili Lehdonvirta’s academic work on virtual goods ownership, but he harbors confused thoughts on the broader acceptance of bitcoin through dilution of its most beneficial properties, because he mistakenly extends the notion of virtual goods legal recognition to virtual currency legal recognition.

Fascinating. The Statists from the legal profession class are described by Murray Rothbard in ‘For a New Liberty’ as follows:

We see clearly why the State needs the intellectuals; but why do the intellectuals need the State? Put simply, the intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is generally none too secure; for the intellectual, like everyone else on the market, must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is characteristic of these masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual concerns. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a warm, secure, and permanent berth in its apparatus, a secure income, and the panoply of prestige.

[…] since the early origins of the State, its rulers have always turned, as a necessary bolster to their rule, to an alliance with society’s class of intellectuals. The masses do not create their own abstract ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and promulgated by the body of intellectuals, who become the effective “opinion moulders” in society. And since it is precisely a moulding of opinion on behalf of the rulers that the State almost desperately needs, this forms a firm basis for the age-old alliance of the intellectuals and the ruling classes of the State. The alliance is based on a quid pro quo: on the one hand, the intellectuals spread among the masses the idea that the State and its rulers are wise, good, sometimes divine, and at the very least inevitable and better than any conceivable alternatives. In return for this panoply of ideology, the State incorporates the intellectuals as part of the ruling elite, granting them power, status, prestige, and material security. Furthermore, intellectuals are needed to staff the bureaucracy and to “plan” the economy and society.

[…]

In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas. Now, throughout history, as we shall see further below, despots and ruling elites of States have had far more need of the services of intellectuals than have peaceful citizens in a free society.

[…]

For States have always needed opinion-moulding intellectuals to con the public into believing that its rule is wise, good, and inevitable; into believing that the “emperor has clothes.” Until the modern world, such intellectuals were inevitably churchmen (or witch doctors), the guardians of religion. It was a cozy alliance, this age-old partnership between Church and State; the Church informed its deluded charges that the king ruled by divine command and therefore must be obeyed; in return, the king funneled numerous tax revenues into the coffers of the Church. Hence, the great importance for the libertarian classical liberals of their success at separating Church and State.

For a New Liberty

The whole idea of ‘Digital Goods’ is a fallacy, created by Statist professionals in order to gain a foothold in the emerging digital economy that threatens to disrupt their authority and completely replace the old world economy in many areas, specifically the delivery of films, books and music, and now through Bitcoin, the process of moving money around the globe.

The fallacious notion of ‘Digital Goods’ is pyramided on the idea that copyright (an artificial concept of the State) is legitimate and logical. As is the case with copyright, the idea of Digital Goods conflates the correct idea of property rights in real-world physical goods with a false right in intangible pure information, which can be infinitely copied, transmitted and transformed without loss.

An idea can have a human originator, but once that idea is conveyed to another man, it resides in the mind of that man. The only way that you can prevent that second man, the receiver, from using this idea is to initiate force against him. On this basis alone copyright as a legitimate idea falls, since it violates the non aggression axiom. I will leave it to you to explore the rest of this idea at your leisure. I also strongly recommend that you read ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘.

Bitcoin is an extraordinary and important innovation. It is the first system where a ‘Digital Good’ cannot be double spent. That means Bitcoins can be duplicated perfectly an infinite number of times, but they cannot be spent more than one transaction at a time between two people.

Bitcoins retain all the qualities of information (near zero cost transmission, infinite transformability, infinite lossless replicability), but the Bitcoin ecosystem changes them into something that has some of the qualities of physical property, whilst retaining all of the advantages of pure information. You can actually own a Bitcoin secure in the knowledge that even though everyone can read your Bitcoin, make copies of it, and see it in the Block Chain, they cannot steal it from you and spend it. You can copy Bitcoins ad infinitum, but inside the system is the only place where they have value or more accurately, utility. Bitcoin is the first instance of a digital representation that has some of the scarcity properties of a physical good.

Interestingly, this idea if transposed onto a music file, picture or film, could not work to prevent people using (double spending) those things, because there is no inherent value in owning a digital copy of a music file, film or book.

Imagine that instead of digital signatures, the Bitcoin block chain was used to control signed MP3 files. You could then have an ecosystem where unique copies of tracks (unique in that they were digitally signed, could not be forged and ownership was verifiable) could circulate for payment. The problem with this is that in this scenario music has two uses, one when it is stored in a file, and another when it is played in a music player, as well as being a string of numbers stored somewhere. There is also the ‘problem’ of the intent of music creators being that the same music is available to many people all at once.

Bitcoins do not have any use other than to confirm that they are owned by someone. This is why they can be used to transmit money over the internet. A digression, but interesting nonetheless, because this is the sort of thinking the large media companies should be doing or paying to have done for them, if they want to survive in any form over the next decade.

Apart from the revolutionary and singular case of Bitcoin in the Bitcoin ecosystem, all digital representations of ideas have zero intrinsic value, because they can be copied at a cost that approaches zero. In fact, the more copies there are, the lower the cost of obtaining a copy becomes because there are more storage locations to get them from and the cost of your time to search for them decreases. On some level, the law industry understands this, as they put pressure on Google to remove search results that point to files they claim contain ‘intellectual property’ belonging to their clients.

Digital technology has changed the way the world handles information forever. Trying to superimpose the outmoded, ridiculous and erroneous 19th century ways of thinking about property and business on people living today is a fruitless and anti-human endeavour. What’s more, it does not make everyone more honest and make business more efficient. Look at the dispute resolution mechanisms in eBay and Amazon, and you get a glimpse of how the free market works to protect everyone and benefit everyone. The State does not poke its snotty nose into the dispute resolution systems of these online services and the vast majority of transactions happen without any problems, and where there are problems, they are resolved within the mechanisms of the services to everyone’s satisfaction.

Just as the buggy whip makers, the lake ice industry and all superseded industries were eliminated by progress, the notion that music, books and any work that can be digitised should remain scarce, by force, is an astonishingly evil idea. The difference in people today as compared to those living in the age of the horse and cart it seems, is that this generation of men is not sufficiently agile, and a subset of them is unwilling to pivot and change business models to deal with the new reality. This is probably due to the very rapid pace of change, and the fact that there appears to be no future whatsoever for the people in the business of hoarding and supplying scarce information distributed in physical containers. They are squeezing this model for every drop of blood they can get before it becomes untenable to ask for money in exchange for physical discs or files.

Ill informed and self interested cronies and Statists are trying to keep man in horses and carts when the internal combustion engine car is in the garage of every home. It simply doesn’t make any sense on any level, is immoral, and the only reason why they can get away with it is they have an agent with the monopoly of violence to back them up: the State. In absentia of this force, no one would listen to the Statists, the MPAA/RIAA, the luddites, the lawyers, or the buggy whip manufacturers. Since they offer nothing of value, they would simply be ignored.

I predict that there will come a time when none of these people are taken seriously, and they are all ignored and sidelined. The world simply will not be held down to the level of Stone Age Man to suit the needs of a vanishingly small number of venal, violent and ignorant men and their blinkered apologists. The dispute resolution systems that are an emergent property of sites like Amazon and eBay will spread out into the real world, making the State and its proponents redundant. It would be a fascinating project to try and separate these arbitration services and generalise them so that the public could use them instead of the courts of the State.

The fact of the matter is that lawyers have no right to tell anyone how to voluntarily exchange goods and under what terms those goods are to be exchanged. Their role is to arbitrate in disputes where both parties agree to be subject to the rules of the arbitrator, and nothing more. Because the vast majority of humans can exchange without disputes, they must create conflict in this area to maintain their social status and incomes, with the help of the State. This is why lawyers support the fallacious idea of copyright, and why they want to extend this sickness to Bitcoin, and all areas online.

The Statists refuse to accept reality, or cannot understand it, or understand it and actively fight to control it with violence. Lawyers especially have the most to gain from keeping the immoral, illogical and absurd copyright laws in force.

Or do they?

The fact of the matter is that once copyright laws are removed from all statute books, the amount of work for lawyers will not decrease, but will in fact increase, as creative people adapt to the new business models.

For example, no one has the right to steal a physical disk from anyone. If a musical work is created and stored in a fixed medium, and the right to be the first to sell it is sold to someone, a person who steals that disc and releases what is stored on it could be held liable for the damage caused to both contracting parties.

A disc of an unreleased highly anticipated pre-sold masterpiece would have an agreed value that is set out in a contract, and a value in pre-sales. Once it is leaked by theft and no one will pay for it, losses have been imposed upon the creative party, since exclusivity has been broken by the thief. In this scenario, damages are not calculated by how many copies are in the wild but by the fact that a physical disc has been stolen, its contents leaked and sales potential has been destroyed through cancellations. This is of course, completely separate from a work that is released on a disc, sold to a person, and that person making a copy for whatever reason. This is entirely legitimate, for reasons laid out clearly in Against Intellectual Monopoly.

This scenario is the same as someone breaking into a jewellery store and stealing a diamond necklace. Once that necklace has been stolen, it cannot be sold to someone else. The scenario of a pre-release disc being stolen and released is even worse, because the irreplaceable, unique first use opportunity has been destroyed forever. This is the true nature of the damage and theft done to both parties by this sort of act; the value of such a theft can be estimated and a valid moral claim made against a thief. Once again, this has nothing to do with the _subsequent_copies made by people who got a hold of the data by whatever means.

I use the example of the theft of a necklace deliberately, because it is used by the copyright monopoly to justify everyone being forbidden from making copies of what they own. Note how I am separating the act of copying what you have legitimately purchased from the destruction of potential by an unauthorised pre-release of a stolen disc.

There are many other circumstances where fault can be placed in this scenario. For example, if one party fails to maintain security and this is the cause of the leak, someone is at fault and has to pay. This can be laid out explicitly in a contract. These byzantine details are the job of lawyers to sort out, set terms for and organise. It is for lawyers to define these agreements, fix the agreed penalties, pursue the wrong doers in case of a breach of information. This would be a huge amount of complex work, worth an enormous amount of money. Lawyers are major beneficiaries of a world without copyright.

Of course, once a suite of music or book or other information is released, it can be copied ad infinitum, but then the next thrill is the thing that is valuable, and the public has an insatiable appetite for the new; this is just one possible model for the creative to explore, and of course, since they are the creative, its up to them to think of new ways of approaching the market in a reality where every idea can be copied and can spread world-wide in a matter of hours, if you hit exactly the right note.

The ignorant, imagination-less Statists want to prevent this astonishing world of the super abundance business model from fully emerging. They are doing everything they can to wreck the exponential growth of tools, contracts and technology that will unarguably benefit the entire planet, for the sake of a handful of ignorant, comfortable, computer illiterates.

Unfortunately for them, the harder they push against the internet, the stronger it becomes. Every service they have tried to cripple has either resulted in that service strengthening or spawning new services. Bulletin Board Systems, IRC DCC channels, Napster, Gnutella, Bittorrent are all examples in chronological order of how software outpaces the luddites, and of course, that list excludes the peripheral discoveries like MP3 that fuel the creation of new services.

This is a battle that they cannot win and which they should not win, because they have no case or moral foundation whatsoever.

Two Madelines, and a hot chocolate ⤵

Real Crypto-Anarchy Without Anonymity

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 28, 2013

Crypto-anarchy is not some crazy utopian ideology, but a very viable thing that unfolds in front of our eyes this very moment. The Internet and Bitcoin will soon allow people solve social problems in a novel way: instead of ancient formula “the strongest wins and beats the shit out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.

But first, lets start with some history.

Cypherpunk movement started as a mailing list in 1992. In 1993 Eric Hughes publishes a “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto”. In 1994 Timothy C. May publishes “Cypherpunks FAQ”.

Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ:

2.3. “What’s the ‘Big Picture’?”

Strong crypto is here. It is widely available. It implies many changes in the way the world works. Private channels between parties who have never met and who never will meet are possible. Totally anonymous, unsinkable, untraceable communications and exchanges are possible.

Transactions can only be voluntary, since the parties are untraceable and unknown and can withdraw at any time. This has profound implications for the conventional approach of using the threat of force, directed against parties by governments or by others. In particular, threats of force will fail.

What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “crypto anarchy.” (Voluntary communications only, with no third parties butting in.)

In 1998 Wei Dai publishes a proposal of “b-money”, a practical way to enforce contractual agreements between anonymous actors. He captured the essence of the movement in an immortal quote:

I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.

In 2005 Nick Szabo publishes a proposal for “Bit gold”, a purely digital collectible based on a proof-of-work algorithm borrowing ideas from RPOW server (“Reusable proof of work”) by Hal Finney. Proposal does not mention contract enforcement mechanism, but Nick Szabo himself already proposed several ideas about smart contracts back in the nineties.

In late 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto publishes an overview of Bitcoin and on January 3rd, 2009 releases the code and begins the blockchain.

Bitcoin is the exact implementation of the system envisioned by Tim C. May, Wei Dai and Nick Szabo. The only requirement is for transacting parties to remain anonymous. If there’s no trace to physical persons, there is no place for the violent intervention and thus the contracts can only be enforced according to the voluntarily agreed-upon rules between the parties. Bitcoin allows encoding these rules right in the transactions so they are automatically enforced by the whole network.

In practice, we cannot imagine living in full anonymity. Human beings live in a physical world and enjoy a lot of physical things. Anonymity is not something you can easily manage like a single encryption key. It must be maintained via careful dissemination of one’s actions among actions of others. And since the network activity is easily recordable, one mistake is enough to reveal oneself. In other words, the cost of anonymity is rather high compared to the benefits. Does this mean crypto-anarchy is an utopia?

I would argue, it’s far from it. Cypherpunks being rigorous scientists made a much stronger assumption than needed in practice. For transacting parties it is enough to have costs of cheating (e.g. resorting to violent coercion) meaningfully higher than the cost of following the contract (that is, keeping the promise). If that condition holds for the majority of interactions in society, there will be a great incentive for people to protect themselves against remaining rare cases of cheating thus keeping the system sustainable. Anonymity is simply one of the ways to raise the cost of the attack.

Bitcoin raises the cost of many kinds of attacks, going far beyond protecting against central banks meddling with money supply.

First, all sorts of computational services will flourish. Machines never need to disclose their physical locations and can freely automate both payment verification and payments themselves. Denial-of-service and spam can be largely eliminated by simply requiring a smallish payment for every request.

Second, personal services can be protected by peer-to-peer insurance deposits that literally raises the cost of cheating by making both parties agree to a greater sacrifice (“bilateral insurance deposit”).

In a similar manner, crowdfunding can be fully insured by allowing raised funds to be reverted if the majority of shareholders decides to do so.

Finally, systemic predation by the state becomes economically impossible. Most modern states fund themselves by debasing money supply (also known as “bond issuance”, “budget deficit”, “inflation”, “quantitative easing”, “stimulus package”). Bitcoin-based economy simply does not allow this as it is very cheap to store bitcoins and verify transactions yourself and completely avoid all kinds of fraud associated with modern banking. As central banking disappears from the state’s arsenal, federal government activities including wars become unfunded and quickly come to an end.

Local governments may continue their operations funded by local taxes, but that would become increasingly voluntary. Extracting bitcoins costs much more than protecting them. There is no highly centralized and monitored banking network, so it’s much harder to track taxable transactions. Every additional tax evader defunds the local police department and makes it safer for the next person to underreport earnings if he wishes to do so. Considering that the law enforcement is paid only a small portion of the total budget to be extracted (50% goes to bureaucrats and the rest to other public services), consistently extracting bits of information from millions of individuals is unsustainable in the long run. If anyone is good at stealing bitcoins, they are much better off doing it alone and taking all profits for themselves.

Governments, of course, can also tax in kind (like your underreported Ferrari or a house), but this would be even costlier than seizing any kind of money and those costs must be paid by the state in bitcoins that it does not have to start with.

If this speculation does not sound to you like a complete lunacy yet, here is the fun part. Most governments are completely broke already and can only pay with the IOUs they print. When people start a massive run for bitcoins to protect their wealth, everyone will be able to earn bitcoins for their work, except those who work for the government. Policemen, public school teachers and alike will be the first ones to notice prices rising faster than their salaries. They will the first ones to change jobs or become largely corrupt on all levels (like it was in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union). Bureaucrats will smell the approaching panic and, instead of trying to retain control over the employees, will privatize as much public goods as possible, again, exactly like during the fall of the Soviet Union. People will see how all promised public services are either abandoned or stolen, and this time everyone will have a method to protect their own property and do business voluntarily and in an even safer and cheaper way than before. Crypto-anarchy will quickly become a boring reality without the need for anyone to remain fully anonymous.

Real crypto-anarchy

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 28, 2013

Real crypto-anarchy

По-русски: http://bitnovosti.com/2014/01/02/cryptoanarchy-and-anonymity/

But first, lets start with some history.

Cypherpunk movement started as a mailing list in 1992. In 1993 Eric Hughes publishes a “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” [1]. In 1994 Timothy C. May publishes “Cypherpunks FAQ” [2].

Here’s an excerpt from the FAQ:

2.3. “What’s the ‘Big Picture’?”

Strong crypto is here. It is widely available. It implies many changes in the way the world works. Private channels between parties who have never met and who never will meet are possible. Totally anonymous, unsinkable, untraceable communications and exchanges are possible.

Transactions can only be voluntary, since the parties are untraceable and unknown and can withdraw at any time. This has profound implications for the conventional approach of using the threat of force, directed against parties by governments or by others. In particular, threats of force will fail.

What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “crypto anarchy.” (Voluntary communications only, with no third parties butting in.)

In 1994 Nick Szabo coins the term “smart contract” [3] and describes all use case categories that are talking about today: from digital cash to synthetic financial assets and smart property.

In 1998 Wei Dai & Nick Szabo came up with the ideas for “b-money” [4] and “bit gold” [5] during their conversation on the libtech-l mailing list. Wei Dai captured the essence of the movement in an immortal quote:

I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations.

In 1999 Nick Szabo coins term “intrapolynomial cryptography” [6] for the entirety of proof-of-work algorithms and describes what we call now a “private blockchain”, a chain of property ownership enforced by a consensus of “property club” members [7]. The latter article is especially valuable today as it explicitly states that the job of voting in the consensus mechanism is used only for secure execution of the agreed-upon rules and database replication, but not for changing the rules themselves.

In 2004 Hal Finney implements a RPOW server [8] (“Reusable proof of work”) inspired by the bit gold proposal. The RPOW scheme uses a secure processing module that simultaneously acts as a mint and as a custodian for the ledger of proof-of-work tokens.

In late 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto publishes an overview of Bitcoin [9] and on January 3rd, 2009 releases the code and begins the blockchain.

Bitcoin raises the cost of many kinds of attacks, going far beyond protecting against central banks meddling with money supply.

Second, personal services can be protected by peer-to-peer insurance deposits [8] that literally raises the cost of cheating by making both parties agree to a greater sacrifice (“bilateral insurance deposit”).

In a similar manner, crowdfunding can be fully insured by allowing raised funds to be reverted if the majority of shareholders decides to do so.

If this speculation does not sound to you like a complete lunacy yet, here is the fun part. Most governments are completely broke already and can only pay with the IOUs they print. When people start a massive run for bitcoins to protect their wealth, everyone will be able to earn bitcoins for their work, except those who work for the government. Policemen, public school teachers and alike will be the first ones to notice prices rising faster than their salaries. They will be the first ones to switch jobs or become largely corrupt on all levels, like it was in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats will smell the approaching panic and, instead of trying to retain control over the employees, will privatize as much public goods as possible. Again, exactly like during the fall of the Soviet Union. People will see how all promised public services are either abandoned or stolen, and this time everyone will have a method to protect their own property and do business voluntarily and in an even safer and cheaper way than before. Crypto-anarchy will quickly become a boring reality without the need for anyone to remain fully anonymous.

[1] http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

[2] http://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt

[3] http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Economics/SmartContracts.html

[4] http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

[5] http://unenumerated.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/bit-gold.html

[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20011217091748/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20020202165211/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

[8] http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

[9] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

UPDATE on March 22, 2016: correct attribution and timeline for Nick Szabo’s proposals.

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𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗗𝗦

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 2, 2013

By Peter Surda

Posted December 4, 2013

Introduction

Inability to classify Bitcoin

Ponzi scheme

Lack of a theory of liquidity

Speculation with Bitcoin

The regression theorem

The network effect

The utility of Bitcoin

Conclusion

By Peter Surda

Posted December 7, 2013

Conceited arrogance

Heterogeneity of a monetary system

Heterogeneity of social interaction

Conclusion

By Mike Hearn

Posted December 11, 2013

A note on privacy-enhancing techniques in the Bitcoin protocol

Introduction

Address reuse

Change outputs

Network traffic

CoinJoin

Merge avoidance

Implementation properties

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 13, 2013

By Beautyon

Posted December 16, 2013

What the “Double Spending Problem” means, why Bitcoin price fluctuation doesn’t matter, and the new thinking you need to embrace to absorb the Bitcoin paradigm shift.

By Beautyon

Posted December 18, 2013

Bitcoin cannot “crash”. It’s price doesn’t matter. What you can do with Bitcoin is the only thing that matters.

By Beautyon

Posted December 23, 2013

Violent people are hell bent on destroying the usefulness of the internet. They stoop to using force to protect their broken business models. They are immoral, and doomed simultaneously.

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 28, 2013

By Oleg Andreev

Posted December 28, 2013

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