Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Blitcoin? (Black Hat 2011)

From: John Smith <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 13:11:48 +0000

On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 12:58 PM, Christian Decker <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> While I do think that anonymity (or pseudonymity) is a nice feature, I
> don't think it deserves the full focus of the developers. The core of the
> protocol is about making transactions in a secure and fast way, not allowing
> everybody to be anonymous, whether they want to or not. TOR already is a
> good options for those that want to stay anonymous, and there is no need to
> pull support into the main client, if only a few will use it. I think very
> few of the developers actually claimed that Bitcoin is anonymous, and has
> never been a big advertising point from the "official" side of Bitcoin,
> network analysis has been always known to break anonymity.
>

Yes. Optionally layering Bitcoin over Tor/I2P is a much better option than
trying to replicate an onion network in Bitcoin itself. For one,  traffic
analysis is much more difficult if your onion routing network contains
multiple kinds of traffic. Also it would complicate the core algorithm and
waste developer time. Doing anonymity *right* is very hard. So let's leave
it to the Tor/I2P people that know what they're doing.

>
> I see no need for action from the developer side.
>

Except the part about making the client/network more resistant against DDoS.

JS