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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 10:31 pm

1. What is your opinion about CISA / CISPA?
It's unfortunately, but probably inevitable that the government will attempt to shield companies from justice when it suits them. We'll have to other ways to achieve accountability outside of the legal system. Smart contracts are an interesting if non-trivial way to approach this.

2. What about the UK attempt to ban end-to-end encryption? If Cameron's proposal passes, what is the following scenario for UK?
Considering how many products already have this form of encryption, it would be pretty incredible it this were to be passed and enforced. The devastation this would inflict on the UK software economy would be tremendous.
3. If you wanted to give 3-5 simple advise on protecting privacy and online security to my mom, what would you tell her?
1. Lots of people who demand your personal info online should not have it. Make sure that giving away your personal info, such as your name address, information about your friends and family, your preferences, hobbies, and purchases, etc. are necessary and appropriate for the party you're interacting with online.
2. Get a cheap VPN service and leave it on.
3. Clear your browser history completely from time to time.
4. Don't open spam email.

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Patel
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 10:49 pm

Hi Kristov,

First, thanks for being a big privacy advocate. The work on privacy is appreciated.

Question: Do you know if blockchain.info sells information to compliance or intelligence companies regarding user information (IP's, useragent, etc) when doing address or transaction lookups?
Last edited by Patel on Tue Nov 03, 2015 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 10:51 pm

Do you know if blockchain.info sells information to compliance or intelligence companies regarding user information (IP's, useragent, etc) when doing address or transaction lookups?
If I had any knowledge of this, I would not work for the company.

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 10:58 pm

Who do you think has more privacy, Bitcoin or DASH and why?

Do you see this trend changing?

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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 11:06 pm

Who do you think has more privacy, Bitcoin or DASH and why?

Do you see this trend changing?
Dash does. However, there's no reason why the protections in Dash can't implemented in Bitcoin. As long as Bitcoin has more transaction volume, it will have a higher ceiling on privacy.

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 11:17 pm

Ok, here's another one.

There seems to be a clear conflict between KYC and AML compliance, two anti-privacy compliance processes that banks and dentralized financial institutions are subject to. And The need to privacy in Bitcoin for reasons of fungibility.

Aka, all money needs to be equal, and KYC and AML enforcements can break that in Bitcoin. Do you agree with this?

If so, then Bitcoin and the regulatory frameworks of today are on a collision course, (and the collision has already begun you could argue). How do you see this conflict playing out?

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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Nov 03, 2015 11:34 pm

There seems to be a clear conflict between KYC and AML compliance, two anti-privacy compliance processes that banks and dentralized financial institutions are subject to. And The need to privacy in Bitcoin for reasons of fungibility.

Aka, all money needs to be equal, and KYC and AML enforcements can break that in Bitcoin. Do you agree with this?
The needs for fungibility are somewhat unclear, in my opinion. I did a presentation about this in Prague a few weeks ago; hopefully a recording will be available soon so I can get some feedback. Privacy advocates have been talking up fungibility for a while without providing a lot of evidence to back it. Perhaps this is why it has made such a dull impression on people.

What can I say with confidence is that, as fungibility decreases for a currency, costs to deal with that problem will increase for users of the currency.
If so, then Bitcoin and the regulatory frameworks of today are on a collision course, (and the collision has already begun you could argue). How do you see this conflict playing out?
I expect that businesses that engage in KYC practices will be subject to ever-increasing and burdensome regulations that will make their products less useful.

If that comes to pass, entrepreneurs will have to make a tough choice. They will have to take a longer term, more expensive approach and design their business around regulations, or they will have to accept a pre-signed death certificate for their company's innovation. Some entrepreneurs may have already made this choice, whether they are aware of it, or not.

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Nov 04, 2015 12:01 am

Hrm, interesting.

As a privacy advocate my self, I recognize the value of privacy, but have struggled to define and justify it. Fungibility seems to me a a pretty powerful argument, but you have a point that evidence for what happens to a currency when its fungibility is broken is not easy to find. Atleast in my research.

All I have is an abstract argument that I think people understand but that could be flawed.

As a privacy advocate and or researcher your self, what do you see as the purpose and or moral high ground if any of privacy?


On a side topic, privacy can be losely defined as a human's property claims over information about their personhood. Right? How do you define privacy and how does it interact with questions about intellectual property rights or the ownership of information?

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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Nov 04, 2015 12:21 am

As a privacy advocate and or researcher your self, what do you see as the purpose and or moral high ground if any of privacy?
Studying privacy is like studying Defense Against the Dark Arts in the Harry Potter series. If you refuse to look away from injustice in the world, then the natural result is privacy advocacy. These injustices take place at many levels -- interpersonal, familial, societal, governmental, corporate. The Internet is a powerful tool for the oppressed to reclaim freedom.
On a side topic, privacy can be losely defined as a human's property claims over information about their personhood. Right? How do you define privacy and how does it interact with questions about intellectual property rights or the ownership of information?
I don't have a good answer to this. I will defer to this thought-provoking article by Christopher Allen: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2015/04 ... ivacy.html

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Nov 04, 2015 2:45 am

Hello Kristov,

Address reuse is very common in the bitcoin space as shown by this graph https://i.imgur.com/BrmFaBZ.png which is damaging to privacy.

What do you think the bitcoin ecosystem should be doing to reduce the amount of reuse? I've heard extreme suggestions to rename 'addresses' into something like 'invoice code' where the name makes it slightly more obvious that this string should be used only once.

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Nov 04, 2015 5:51 am

For building a wallet site where is my time better spent. Libbitcoin, Pycoin, Core Client, Bitcore? I feel like Libbitcoin and/or Bitcore are my best choices... but would be nice to get your opinion.

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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Nov 04, 2015 11:47 pm

Address reuse is very common in the bitcoin space as shown by this graph https://i.imgur.com/BrmFaBZ.png which is damaging to privacy.

What do you think the bitcoin ecosystem should be doing to reduce the amount of reuse? I've heard extreme suggestions to rename 'addresses' into something like 'invoice code' where the name makes it slightly more obvious that this string should be used only once.
Great question! I'm working on getting a better sense of where our software is going wrong exactly, but I think we already know a few things.

The worst offenders of address reuse are all of the big, high volume services who are well-funded. So a lack of funding is probably not at issue. That's good, because it means we already have a lot of the resources that we need to fix things. It's bad, because it means that a lot of decision makers are demonstrably apathetic to this issue. I'm not sure how to get them up to speed other than to shine a giant spotlight on them.

Software obviously has to avoid reusing addresses by default. I know at least some of the holdovers in this area are working on addressing this, but I'm not so sure about the others (paging Bitpay?).

We should guide users to make smart decisions about how they handle addresses. Warn them about the risks of address reuse; new users in particular should not be expected to know this already. Gently warn them when they are about to reuse an address in your software. OBPP includes these as countermeasures that BItcoin wallets can very easily deploy today.

Lastly, I've been thinking for a while that perhaps it's time to move on from Bitcoin addresses. Bitcoin addresses are one step removed from public keys, and we know that users should not be left to their own devices when it comes to handling cryptographic keys. It's time to look for alternative ways for users to designate who they want to send money to. Currently, my favorite proposal is BIP47 Reusable Payment Codes. These are identifiers that we can safely hand off to users -- and in fact, which we can wrap in a human-friendly identifier. What if instead of sending money to 14DCGUoQ14hFhcSNZ8JFkrN46V92J718TQ (a random address I selected from the latest confirmed block), you sent it to 'kristovatlas' or selected me from your wallet's address book?

I think it's time for Bitcoin to grow up and stop exposing the guts of the protocol that Satoshi invented to new users who, frankly, don't want to have to deal with the protocol's internal addressing schemes. That said, we have do that in an intelligent, carefully engineered way.

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kristovatlas
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Nov 04, 2015 11:54 pm

For building a wallet site where is my time better spent. Libbitcoin, Pycoin, Core Client, Bitcore? I feel like Libbitcoin and/or Bitcore are my best choices... but would be nice to get your opinion.
Traditionally the benefit of Libbitcoin was that multiple projects were going to contribute to it, but its seems like it's just the Airbitz guys these days.

If you want to build a web wallet (which is what I infer from 'wallet site') based on Bitcoin Core, you're going to have to write quite a lot of software between Core and your users. Have you looked into BitcoinJ as a potentially developer-friendlier alternative?

Keep in mind that, as long as you are allowing users to keep their own private keys -- which you should -- you will need at a minimum software to examine the blockchain on the server side and a client-side library to do some thin client stuff for the user.

Bitcore seems like a very interesting library, but I haven't used it as a programmer yet. They actually implemented BIP 69 for privacy recently, which is pretty sweet.

rush
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 12, 2015 8:40 am

Hi kristov, hope you are doing well.

My question is this: How can I create a paper wallet?

There are tons of videos on YouTube with demonstrations, but I don't know who to trust.

Thanks!

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Tue Jan 05, 2016 5:41 pm

Hi Kristov:

My name is John Barrett and I am the host of Bitcoins and Gravy, a popular weekly podcast on the Let's Talk Bitcoin Network with Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murphy and Andreas Antonopoulos.

I am writing to request an interview with you for one of my upcoming shows. I've heard great things about you and I think my listeners would love hearing you talk about your ongoing and upcoming projects regarding privacy among other things.

A bit about my show:

Bitcoins and Gravy just passed the 300,000 mark on Soundcloud, with listeners tuning in each week from over 100 countries. I've interviewed Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com, Andreas Antonopoulos, the bitcoin guru, cannabis genome scientist Kevin McKernan, Shooter Jennings (the son of Waylon Jennings) and numerous project developers, computer scientists, small business owners and charitable minded folks working in the Bitcoin sphere around the world.

Interviews usually last around 30 minutes and all interviews are conducted via Skype using your smart phone or computer. Interviews are audio only. Interviews are conversational and I usually do my best to let my guests tell their stories and talk about the projects that most interest them. If guests have specific questions they would like me to ask during the interview, I ask that they get those to me a day prior to the interview to give me time to review.

Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to hearing back from you.

All the Best to You!

John Barrett
Host of Bitcoins and Gravy
www.BitcoinsAndGravy.com

firstpageltd
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Wed Dec 20, 2017 2:20 pm

Hello KRISTOV ATLAS,

I found out about your amazing work.. I have a problem with blockchain wallet and i have been struggling to rectify it for months... i am sorry i have to ask these question here.

someone accessed my 12 recovery phrase and i get the below error when trying to send bitcoin from blockchain

BitcoindException(super=com.neemre.btcdcli4j.core.BitcoindException: Error #-25: Missing inputs, code=-25)

CryptoBeans
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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:26 pm

Your project is so awesome.

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Re: I’m Kristov Atlas, Co-Founder of the OBPP. Ask me anything!

Mon Mar 05, 2018 4:47 pm

Cool, thank you for this AMA

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