The Bitcoin Forum

kristovatlas

Thanks for your thoughts, Ben! With someone with your deep technical background and experience in Bitcoin, I'm really interested in your take on this. A few follow-up questions:

I don't think this is the biggest problem holding the average user back from Bitcoin. But, aside from scalability, I ...

kristovatlas

There's been a steady influx of companies and funding for blockchain analytics in the last year or two. Meanwhile, the data trail that software is leaving on the blockchain hasn't changed much in the last few years -- the only advancement has been the introduction of HD wallets to help avoid address ...

kristovatlas

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 ...

kristovatlas

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 ...

kristovatlas

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 ...

kristovatlas

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 ...

kristovatlas

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.

kristovatlas

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.

kristovatlas

How important is user privacy to Xapo?

What privacy protections have you put in place to protect users' transaction info on the blockchain?

kristovatlas

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 ...

kristovatlas

Hi Kristov

What do you think about Monero or Cryptonote in general?

getmonero.org
https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf

Monero is awesome. Nicholas van Saberhagen is a pretty epic person (or group, or alien AI).

With altcoins in general I mentally separate them into two categories ...

kristovatlas

Other than bitcoin, what technology do you think poses the greatest risk to the current nationstate power paradigm?

1. Censorship-resistant marketplaces.
2. Smart-contracts that award damages regardless of legal outcomes.
3. Possibly censorship-resistant prediction markets? Need to ponder and ...

kristovatlas

What's your take on Blockstream/Core/rBitcoin censorship?

Censorship sucks. Glad to see a variety of communication tools popping up -- may the best win!

Have you been part of the blockchain.info team when the RNG issue hit?

I started working at BCI toward the very end of last December ...

kristovatlas

How much backdooring are being done, and what is being done to warn general consumers about these practices?

Hard to say. Some pretty important software projects have been confirmed or heavily suspected of backdoors, including NIST crypto algorithms, OpenSSL, various Linux distributions, Mirosoft ...

kristovatlas

how are you storing your bitcoin?

I have a few stashes. Some is difficult-to-access cold storage, some on hardware wallets, and some spending monies on hot wallets. How about you?

kristovatlas

Any interest in submitting some of your published work (if it can be revised a bit) to the new journal Ledger?

I have a couple lines of research that might be suitable for inclusion in such a journal, if only I can find the time to hone them to a proper standard of quality and formatting.

kristovatlas

I'm a huge fan of your work. Your consistent and principled defense of privacy are an inspiration to many.

High praise, thanks.

What do you think of "Confidential Transactions", the elements-alpha sidechain feature for privacy?

CT is a great technology. Allowing it to influence the average ...

kristovatlas

how do you see the future of hashing algorithms and cryptography in general?
We still have A LOT OF government influence when it comes to how hashing algorithms are chosen, analyzed and deemed "acceptable" for worldwide use.

How could we reduce the amount of influence that government agencies ...

kristovatlas

Speaking in the now , what are the best ways to keep your bitcoin transactions private currently? Do you use SharedCoin or some sort of CoinJoin implementation, or another mixer?

As part of a "privacy in depth" strategy, I advocate using a chain of mixers, including SharedCoin. Bitcoin Fog is an ...

kristovatlas

Can you tell us a bit about what initially motivated you to get involved with bitcoin, and if those same reasons are still driving you today?

I've been really interested in the philosophy of liberty and infosec. Bitcoin is an intersection between those two, so it's a great topic to study and work ...

kristovatlas

Do you feel, as the Rat does, that the recent upsurge in interest in creating a "Blockchain without bitcoin" that is coming from the Banks and Financial Incumbents has huge opportunities for bitcoiners.

Put simply, all they will really create is an Intranet of self selecting permissioned gate ...

kristovatlas

I've been a follower of yours on Twitter for a while. I really appreciate the work you're doing to improve privacy in the Bitcoin space.

Thanks a lot!

I like hardware wallets, but it seems that users must take an extra step to achieve privacy with hardware wallets. Paper wallets can be good for ...

kristovatlas

1.- Will there be a new OBPP privacy report anytime soon?

Yes, very soon. The next report will contain around 20 different wallet clients and include a significantly improved threat model, scoring system, and testing methodology. We've been working hard on it since the last report.

2.- Is there ...

kristovatlas

Twitter verification: https://twitter.com/kristovatlas/status/661553562653171712

A few things about myself for anyone unfamiliar:

I’m a security engineer at Blockchain.info by day and privacy researcher by night.

I won’t be chatting about my work at Blockchain.info due to company policies, so ...

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Re: I'm Ben Davenport, co-founder & CTO of BitGo. Ask me anything!

Re: I'm Ben Davenport, co-founder & CTO of BitGo. Ask me anything!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: I am Wences Casares, co-founder & CEO of Xapo, Ask Me Anything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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