Bitcoin’s lack of privacy is not an accident & it’s not the result of negligence.

It’s a deliberate choice, as cowardly devs & sellout community members deliberately ignore a decade of research & experimentation.

This is why I’m making a magazine about privacy. To change the culture, remind readers that there’s still a chapter 10 in the Bitcoin whitepaper, and explain how we can learn from projects such as Monero, Zcash, Litecoin, Nym, Firo, Zano, and more.

I’m not doing this alone: more than a dozen of writers are joining me to explain to you why privacy is important, why you should desire it, and how you can currently use it.

I expect this magazine to get launched on time for nostr:npub1j0yy96lj8cye7wu9ycezudnng363ymtguwc0t97xvvw8xlss25jstf0hd9 next month. So stay tuned! And if you want to sponsor the project, DM me and you’ll get a full page ad.

Hope you like this front cover: it combines the origins of a popular meme with the realities of Bitcoin privacy. Pepe cheers for the pumper in chief, but surrenders his privacy and cypherpunk ethos for some NGU.

And before you jump at me and say that adding privacy to Bitcoin is premature and might lead to hidden inflation, remember that even Dandelion++ (a protocol which hides your wallet’s IP address from the rest of the network, which was built for BTC but adopted by Monero) is currently not part of the software client.

Think about it! And watch out for this magazine next month when it gets released!

“Bitcoin’s lack of privacy is not an accident & it’s not the result of negligence.

It’s a deliberate choice, as cowardly devs & sellout community members deliberately ignore a decade of research & experimentation.”

Nothing says “world's reserve currency ” like research and experimentation....

Given that Zcash and Monero have all had multiple inflation exploits that could have killed them completely, I'm happy to be called a coward for ensuring that our best chance at a digital currency doesn't get killed by a simple exploit.

And yes, this choice is not due to negligence! Quite the opposite in fact.

nostr:nevent1qqsrygggyvutgv99fy0seg04q4vlhqywsv0p4dm8c6fvhwpwdp0xvnqpz4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezummcw3ezuer9wchsygzsq4xs0ckd7v43qdth00vu7uue9f9wytu3c998vtha4fdlv86825psgqqqqqqs0hstxr

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OK but you didn't address Dandelion+

There also good reasons why Dandelion isn't in Bitcoin Core (yet). But why do a simple google search to learn why if you can score engagement by complaining?

This doesn't give me too confidence in the new publication, though of course I'm happy to be wrong.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81503/what-is-the-tradeoff-between-privacy-and-implementation-complexity-of-dandelion

Thx for sharing that. I wonder if this was the source of the DoS attacks on the Monero blockchain a few years ago.

Either way seems those wrinkles have been ironed out, so not sure if this old stack exchange answer still applies.

1. I suspect Monero's mempool works differently from the Bitcoin Core implementation.

2. A lack of attacks does not mean the problem is solved.

1. Makes sense

2. Yeah but that's life. Sha256 is not provably secure. But because there are no known attacks we trust it

There's a massive gap between the confidence you can have in sha256 and that of the mempool of Bitcoin, let alone that of Monero (which has fewer incentives to be attacked, e.g. no second layer protocol that relies on it).

Monero has fewer incentives to attack it? Are you even serious? Hace you been sleeping under a rock for the last 5 years?

I'm smelling a strawman

On bitcoin you could literally steal money with a good mempool attack, by closing a lightning channel with a previous state in your favor and censoring your peer to broadcast the real final state. There's good money to be made.

On Monero the only financial incentive is your government sponsored wage to de-anonymize users. It's motivating if got the job, but it's not like there's a sea of APT actors continuously looking on how to steal the cake, like North Korean Lazarus Group did on a bunch of ethereum L2 bridges (which I admit are much lower hanging fruits, but I'm sure one day they'll take a look into bitcoin L2s).

You can't spend unconfirmed transactions in Monero, so the mempool is much simpler.

Notably, Monero has much simpler transactions and mempool policies than Bitcoin. So implementing Dandelion correctly is quite a bit easier.

But the sudden fall in the price of Monero(XMR) is alarming

The sudden fall is probably due to Kraken delisting it.

Thanks for the explanation, Sjors! I was wondering: why don’t you join my show to explain why Bitcoin doesn’t have better privacy to provide fungibility to the monetary asset?

Or better yet, explain why nothing out there (including Zcash’s Halo2 and MWEB) is good enough for Bitcoin. So that nobody ever assumes negligence or malevolence when it comes to protocol development, granted that the reasons are purely technical.

> why don’t you join my show

Because of your behavior.

And also because I don't have time to study, for you and for free, a dozen protocols to figure out what trade-offs their marketing team isn't talking about that make it unsuitable for Bitcoin.

That's not to say there's never something useful out there. Information does make it across, e.g. because developers talk to each other - less so through public debates.

Shitcoiners gonna shit

More journalist in this case. Vlad isn't good enough to make a living as a journalist without stirring up drama.

I’m fine, thanks.

🤡

Sir, that’s pee.

You don't care about privacy because you are a FED plant, Bitcoin had a inflation bug without any privacy implementation, you are not a coward you are a puppet of Israeli intelligence. You must be expelled from this community and not touch bitcoin code implementation never again.

https://decrypt.co/39750/184-billion-bitcoin-anonymous-creator

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/09/21/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret/

Oy vey.

Expelled from the "community"? Lol.

I'm being nice when I say expelled btw.

Where do you see *multiple* monero inflations bugs ? Only one were discovered and patched before being used.

Also when bug happens, it happened. A transparent blockchain won't more help you to avoid it.

Remember the day we had 184 Billion Bitcoin?

An exploit that was discovered and fixed extremely quickly, precisely because the chain is transparent.

Indeed, by Satoshi but the exploit happened anyway.

The longer such an exploit goes unnoticed, the harder it is to undo. Think of all the ways the new money poisons innocent people's activities. All that undone, so many losers and for what? Because we didn't realise.

There was another inflation bug on 2018, there's no need to wait for it to be exploited to fix it same for monero.

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/09/21/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret/

Bitcoin was never meant to be private but anonymous. I don't know enough about monero to judge this system but when it comes to fiat, isn't not using banks handing cash under the table private enough?

Read chapter 10 of the Bitcoin whitepaper and Satoshi’s comments on ZK proofs from this Bitcoin Talk thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9074#msg9074

Anonymous not Private

Verified not Trusted

I see your point through Satoshi's comments on ZK proofs, but the White Papers under Privacy section Chapter 10 reads, "by keeping public keys anonymous. The public can see that someone is sending an amount to someone else, but without information linking the transaction to anyone."

Satoshi consciously made bitcoin an anonymous verified system rather than a private banking modeled trusted system. This is the opening of Chapter 10 in the White Papers, "The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party. The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method..."

Nope. The technology was just not there yet. This isn't something you create out of the blue. It takes iterations, experiments and a truly private coin was hard to develop.

You're talking like its some bible with words written on a gospel. This was little more than 16 years ago, you are still on time to understand the facts rather than biblical dogmas.

If you are so big into privacy, why don't you keep your comments private? Is it dogmatic to quote the bitcoin white papers? It is Satoshi's blueprint to his creation, how is that dogmatic? I think I lost what little intelligence I had reading your post.

🤢🤢🤮

Please stop promoting israeli currencies. They aren't even pretending that well to be private.

Please stop opening your mouth with nonsense and promoting Hamas shitcoins. Again, please stay private forever!

Privacy was one of the core goals of cypherpunks that predated and led up to the creation of Bitcoin

As for advantages of using Monero over cash...

-Can't use cash to transact instantly with anyone on the planet.

-Can't carry arbitrarily large amounts.

-More vulnerable to confiscation and theft.

-More difficult to verify authenticity on-the-fly.

-Issuance is centralized, unpredictable, and doesn't require PoW.

-Not as easily divisible (Need to carry specific denominations and change)

-Can't trustlessly exchange for crypto (no atomic swaps)

-Can't have multiple people with simultaneous ownership and control over the same cash (multisig)

note12acrktner7qftvhwnrnsgket3cgywk8dkrkmyfaq6rrlts2vfh5s33l9gh

i like a varied toolbox!

like pry bars of different shapes & sizes .don't use leverage my ass! wisecrackpry

Me too

Wasn't made to be anonymous, it was larped 24/7 by paid agents to pretend it gives you any privacy.

Quite annoying, yet effective when considering that most crypto users are effectively fooled into thinking it "doesn't matter". 😂

Ok Fed.

Vlad is an adolescent.

My guys got a point. If btc fails everything falls.