A look back and a look forward

A look back and a look forward
2015-01-09 14:00 ` Mike Hearn
  
From: 21E14 @ 2015-01-08 18:36 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: Bitcoin Dev

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1920 bytes --]

Alex Daley recently stated that "one of the problems with Bitcoin is that
it takes us backwards in the transaction chain. Suddenly, you're dealing
with something that's much more cash-like. If Target had been hacked, and
instead of using credit-cards, what was stolen from them were actually
bitcoins, that they have been storing Bitcoin addresses in their systems
and those systems were compromised, Target wouldn't just have a PR
nightmare in their hands. They would be out of business."

Of course, it needn't be Target. The scenario has played out with a number
of exchanges, and is a sword of Damocles hanging over the cryptocurrency
space. The recent Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust SEC filing warns that "the
Trust’s bitcoins may be subject to loss, damage, theft or restriction on
access. There is a risk that part or all of the Trust’s bitcoins could be
lost, stolen or destroyed. The Sponsor believes that the Trust’s bitcoins
held in the Trust Custody Account will be an appealing target to hackers or
malware distributors seeking to destroy, damage or steal the Trust’s
bitcoins. Although the Security System’s design includes various elements,
such as redundancy, segregation and cold storage, to minimize the risk of
loss, damage and theft, neither the Custodian nor the Sponsor can guarantee
that the Security System will prevent such loss, damage or theft..."

This needn't be so, once an optional identity layer, modeled after the
Internet itself, is provided, as proposed in late August of last year on
this mailing list:

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/32737796/
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/32742809/

I hope it is apparent that this is the killer app folks have been searching
for in vain. Like its Internet analogues, BCIs will not be created
overnight and without collaboration - and TNABC is as good a place as any
for it.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2131 bytes --]

 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2015-01-08 18:36 [Bitcoin-development] A look back and a look forward 21E14

  2015-01-09 19:36   ` 21E14
  
From: Mike Hearn @ 2015-01-09 14:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 21E14;  Bitcoin Dev

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1412 bytes --]

>
> This needn't be so, once an optional identity layer, modeled after the
> Internet itself, is provided, as proposed in late August of last year on
> this mailing list
>

I think the observation about Target vs Bitcoin exchanges is a sharp one,
but I'm not sure how your proposal helps. You say it's an optional identity
layer, but obviously any thief is going to opt out of being identified.

For things like the Bitstamp hack, it's not clear how identity can help,
because they were already doing KYC for all their customers. To take that
further at the protocol level would require* all* transactions to have
attached identity info, and that isn't going to happen - it wouldn't be
Bitcoin, at that point.

I think that long term, it's probably possible to defend private keys
adequately, even for large sums of money (maybe not bitstamp-large but
we'll see). You can have very minimalist secure hardware that would have
some additional policies on top, like refusing to sign transactions without
an identity proof of who controls the target address. Very tight hot
wallets that risk analyse the instructions they're receiving have been
proposed years ago.

No such hardware presently exists, but that's mostly because
implementations always lag behind a long way behind ideas rather than any
fundamental technical bottleneck. Perhaps the Bitstamp event will finally
spur development of such things forward.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1767 bytes --]

 permalink raw reply	[|nested]
2015-01-09 14:00 ` Mike Hearn

  
From: 21E14 @ 2015-01-09 19:36 UTC ( / )
  To: Mike Hearn;  Bitcoin Dev



> I think the observation about Target vs Bitcoin exchanges is a sharp one,
> but I'm not sure how your proposal helps. You say it's an optional
identity
> layer, but obviously any thief is going to opt out of being identified.

Let me translate it to this year's vocabulary. Think of BCIs as a
sidechain: let the legacy financial system migrate, to the extent desired,
to a more heavily regulated pegged sidechain with a stronger identity
layer. Let protocol-level rules regulate this nexus between the custodial
(sidechain) and non-custodial address spaces (blockchain). This isn't
entirely unlike the rules currently governing coin issuance i.e. coinbase
transactions. Let the market forces play it out. Iterate as needed. I
suspect that in retrospect it'll seem obvious. Many moons from now the
balance might shift between the two, but it won't matter much. The system
will have means to recover from catastrophic failure modes.

To help internalize such an evolution, please consider the layers the
Bitcoin protocol builds on top of: segment 52:32 ("The Internet is being
upgraded") of the BBC documentary "Inside The Dark Web" (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXajND7BQzk#t=3152). Kaspersky's comments a
few minutes earlier (50:06) aren't entirely out of context here either.
Clearly, the need is acute for Bitcoin to become institutional i.e. for
"billions of dollars of human value" to flow through it, as one Money 20/20
participant put it.


On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:00 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99•net> wrote:

> This needn't be so, once an optional identity layer, modeled after the
>> Internet itself, is provided, as proposed in late August of last year on
>> this mailing list
>>
>
> I think the observation about Target vs Bitcoin exchanges is a sharp one,
> but I'm not sure how your proposal helps. You say it's an optional identity
> layer, but obviously any thief is going to opt out of being identified.
>
> For things like the Bitstamp hack, it's not clear how identity can help,
> because they were already doing KYC for all their customers. To take that
> further at the protocol level would require* all* transactions to have
> attached identity info, and that isn't going to happen - it wouldn't be
> Bitcoin, at that point.
>
> I think that long term, it's probably possible to defend private keys
> adequately, even for large sums of money (maybe not bitstamp-large but
> we'll see). You can have very minimalist secure hardware that would have
> some additional policies on top, like refusing to sign transactions without
> an identity proof of who controls the target address. Very tight hot
> wallets that risk analyse the instructions they're receiving have been
> proposed years ago.
>
> No such hardware presently exists, but that's mostly because
> implementations always lag behind a long way behind ideas rather than any
> fundamental technical bottleneck. Perhaps the Bitstamp event will finally
> spur development of such things forward.
>