Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Large-blocks and censorship

From: Mike Hearn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 22:19:24 +0100

As an aside, there's a paper coming out in perhaps a few months that
describes a new way to provide Chaum-style privacy integrated with
Bitcoin, but without the use of blinding and without any need for
banks. It's quite smart, I was reviewing the paper this week.
Unfortunately the technique is too slow and too complicated to
actually integrate, but you'd probably get a kick out of it. It's
based on zero knowledge proofs. You can talk to Ian Miers if you like,
perhaps he'll send you a copy for review.

Back on topic.

This idea is not new. I proposed the idea of regulating miners to
freeze certain outputs two years ago:

   https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=printpage;topic=5979.0

I concluded that it was not a real risk because both mining and
transactions can be done anonymously.

Your argument rests on the assumption that you can't mine large blocks
anonymously because Tor doesn't scale. Even if we go along with the
idea that Tor is the only way to escape regulation (it's not), you
should maybe take up its inability to move data sufficiently fast with
the developers. Given that they routinely push two gigabits/second
today, with an entirely volunteer run network, I think they'll be
surprised to learn that their project is doomed to never be usable by
miners.