Saturday, July 12, 2014

Could Cody Wilson and Amir Taaki's Dark Wallet help fulfill Second Realm Strategy?



If you are not familiar with these characters and their project, Dark Wallet, read this excellent Wired article.

"Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity’s shadow—without switching to a niche alternative coin or trusting any shady middleman.
Every coin spent through the program, an add-on to Google’s Chrome browser, gets matched up and merged with another transaction in a process called CoinJoin. The trick is a bit like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, who agree to murder each other’s victims: When Dark Wallet combines two transactions on behalf of two users, their coins are spent simultaneously. The blockchain only records one movement of money, and since the CoinJoin negotiation is encrypted, there’s no way to tell whose coins end up where. As Dark Wallet’s user base grows—today it’s already in the low thousands despite still being in development—those CoinJoins will grow to combine three or even more transactions. Add enough users and the system becomes “a magnificent layer of uncertainty” over “a massive confusion of addresses,” as one early tester describes it.
Dark Wallet also offers what it calls “stealth addresses” that allow a user to receive bitcoins at an encrypted address, where only he or she can retrieve them using a private key. When a coin passes through either a CoinJoin transaction or a stealth address, it becomes vastly more difficult to track, making taxation, regulation, and prosecution virtually impossible. “We want a bitcoin that laughs at the regulatory pageantry,” Wilson says. “We’re going to permanently problematize bitcoin’s reputation.”"

Seriously, though, read the whole thing because it is excellent. With this article and the implications of Dark Wallet in mind, read(or re-read) the Second Realm Strategy paper.

Wilson and Taaki may have developed the tool to bring about crypto-anarchists' greatest wish.


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