Companies like Apple build in privacy tools that 99% of people don’t use. Advanced Data Protection, Contact Key Verification, and Lockdown Mode both come to mind. Lockdown mode is actually specifically built for a handful of people (in the hundreds), but is optional to every user. 99% of users never even hear of these powerful tools. But they exist. Why?
But let’s step away from privacy, let’s go to accessibility. Why do companies build accessibility tools for the >1% of the population that actually would use them? Answer that question for me, then explain why it should be different for BCH.
Simple. Some companies want their products to be desired by both the 1% and the 99%.
People who want privacy are also valuable customers who buy products.
Generally it shouldn’t, but BCH is a decentralized ecosystem with multiple moving parts (like especially multiple variants of node software). So
-
Implementing such a complicated mechanism for BCH, while the mechanism is mandatory to use would basically take 10-20 years, including sorting out all bugs.
-
It is highly probable that what we arrive at will be still inferior to TOR/I2P/VPN/Yggdrasil, because these technologies have decades of development and bugs have been probably sorted out in them.
-
Other alternatives have massively bigger anonymity pools (crowd to hide in), so even if we make our tech as good as TOR/I2P/Yggdrasil, it will be still inferior because the crowd will be too small.
Unless, you implement it, but make the mechanism optional, which means only 1% will use it, but with 1% using it, the anonymity pool (crowd size) will be too small, which creates actual danger for anybody using the tech, because he will be uncovered and snooped on by TLA agencies.
So in this scenario using this tech will not provide privacy, but only false sense of security, which is super dangerous.
Basically, this tech not only will not achieve anything, it is actually dangerous to do, kind of.
I see this as a purely academic-level entertainment, nothing great can be achieved in this field, just use alternatives which are already battle-tested and proven.
CashFusion only works on BCH itself. Not CashTokens.
@bitjson, would these privacy features being discussed also apply to CashTokens to some extent? I’m not keenly familiar with the details of all being discussed, but if it does, that strikes me as another potentially massive use case.
This is not the same category as CashFusion.
Here bitjson is proposing Network-Layer privacy, which means basically hiding who and when is interacting with the network. This is the same category as technologies such as TOR, I2P, Yggdrasil, VPN. It’s independent from mixing technologies like CashShuffle, CashFusion or ZK-Snarks.
To answer your question: Yes, it would apply to CashTokens, CashFusion and pretty much any interaction with BCH P2P network you are having at any time.
Then this here alone @tom would make this research valuable. CashFusion is not enough for this as CashFusion is not compatible with CashTokens (at least as it stands).
2 Likes
Research is indeed always valuable.
But forcing whole ecosystem (all node and wallet software) to implement it, would add massive complexity to the underlying system and be probably detrimental in the long run (technical debt).
…and essentially you will not achieve anything, because alternative is just to use TOR, VPN or other existing tech, which is and will remain superior anyway.
1 Like
Research is free. As long as it is permissionless.
BitcoinCash is a platform, for people to build on top of. And that allows massive permissionless innovation. The tag this post gets “protocol” shows that they are not using the platform, they are changing the platform. Massive massive difference. Protocol changes stop all other innovation, they are known to stop companies even CONSIDERING bitcoin cash because we upgrade too often and that creates insecurities and risks.
This is incorrect.
First of all, CashFusion is permissionless innovation. Any changes and improvements there only add to the community, they do not in any way take away from others.
So if you want to add more features to CashFusion, you can do so without asking here. You just do it. (that’s why its called permissionless).
Second, CashFusion can start a new server with minimal changes to mix tokens. This is basically possible tomorrow.
The reason we haven’d seen any is because it is pointless. There is not enough demand to for it to have any use.
This is, btw, the same problem with ALL mixing services. Including monero, including any proposed zero-knowledge protocols for our chain. They all suffer from the same problem that has lead tokens to not see any mixers.
See, you can mix with your 2 other buddies and the result isn’t much anonimity. The pool is 3. 
What you need is thousands or more people mixing their funds. And CF is the best because it has a massive set (I recall a statistic from some years ago that 80% of all BCH has been fused at one point or another).
If you want to mix tokens, you likely want the exact same tokens to come out, no? You don’t to pay tokenA and you receiving tokenB, now do you? So, the set is automatically tiny. And thus the mixing is pointless because there simply are not enough people mixing tokenA.
Do please be aware that any and all systems suffer from this exact same problem. Suggesting ZK based protocols doesn’t solve this basic problem. It’s trying to find a different car in hopes that this one can cross the ocean. No, the problem isn’t the mixing protocol.
CashFusion is by far the best mixing protocol that exists. It is permissionless, it is cheap and it is simple. Both in usage and in design (math) complexity.
Proposing any new one is advertising you don’t think the existing one is good enough. Never mind that this belief is based on misinformation, people will stop trusting the one that works. And that makes the “research” here a net negative.