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Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

orchidprotocol.com

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Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#141

Post by dmitrygr »

davidsalamon wrote: post #139
dmitrygr wrote: post #136

Ok, I wasted a few hours reading the whitepaper. It was just as idiotic as you'd expect. Here are a few notes: It seems like this takes Bitcoin and Ethereum electrical power waste to a whole new level To produce a medallion, a peer takes a public key K , and the most recent Ethereum block hash E , then (iteratively or in parallel) locates a salt S such that H ( K, E, S ) ≥ N , where N is some difficulty scaling facto…

(Note I'm David Salamon, one of the white paper authors.) I agree with your payment analysis. As you point out, we explicitly disclose that payments need modification before they will be at the level of anonymity required for Orchid. Anonymous payments for the Ethereum platform are being worked on right now by very talented teams. As we don't believe we have anything substantial to add to that conversation, we are de…

> Maybe next draft? :p

Looking forward to it :)

Also, what about the other half of my points? ;)

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#142

Post by saurik »

tlrobinson wrote: post #137
saurik wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I don't know your mother, and can't say what kind of extreme technical needs she might have as part of her lifestyle or job; but, I guess I will presume you asked this question from the depressingly stereotypical perspective of "assuming peoples' mothers are not very technically skilled as they are older women, how would a mother use it" and answer your question anyway :(. So, she might not use the first version,…

So the reasons she might use it are: * you install it on her computer * it has a simple user interface * it has a non-technical sounding name Is that correct? What if you reinterpret "my mother" to be "average internet user, in a country with average internet freedoms, who doesn't read HN etc"?

You could make that same argument about VPNs in general, which happens to be a 25-30 billion dollar industry. While I may or may not have reasons why a random "average" person might use this service, I find the question confusing... is the product not capable of being a success if people exist who don't want to use the service?

This kind of question always comes up for just about every service ever developed, and as the discussion continues the goalposts tend to shift and the user gets less and less sophisticated and more and more stubborn until at some point you demonstrate a user exists for which I can't prove they want it, and then victory is somehow declared. It is a sport I don't see much interest in playing.

To flip the question: we are providing a replacement for a service that already exists which is used by people worldwide and makes up a sizable market; our replacement is more secure and likely to cost less. Given that beachhead, you can now ask "who else would want to use this service if only it were cheaper and more secure?", and have a really fun brainstorming session.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#143

Post by saurik »

paradite wrote: post #133
saurik wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To "win" here means "win a battle on the road to an Internet free of surveillance". I (personally) firmly believe that if China were to do that, that the people would not stand for it; any form of "half solution" or "compromise position" where the Chinese govnerment can block just enough to remove access to material that bothers them while only minority inconveniencing users, is a world in which this form of freedom…

I think you might have misunderstood what I mean by "taking care of your potential users". It is not a short-term definition. On the contrary, I want a long-term solution, where users trust the platform that your company provides, trust that your company will be there for the users when Chinese government bans your software, instead of celebrating the ban as a success and call it a day (like what Google did). To cele…

What you are asking for--somehow being immune to China deciding to ban the entire Internet--is an apology for China's behavior and fundamentally, plain and simple.

After all, what is the alternative? In the case of Google, the other option you seem to think is reasonable is for them to censor themselves... but that is a loss... that is in fact the primary loss condition.

That said, was Google leaving China the same kind of win for the Internet as what I am even talking about? No, because Google is but one company. My win condition is "China is forced to block some incredibly large percentage of the entire Western Internet", not "they block us" or "they block a few websites".

Google gave up long before I would say they won: their next step should have been to start doing exactly what we are now doing, shipping it as part of Google Chrome, and figuring out ways to distribute copies of the software in China.

There is a big difference between "celebrating being banned" and "celebrating your opponent being forced to make the difficult decision between salting their own earth to keep you from invading or accepting defeat".

This is all particularly the case given that my argument is rather consistent here that that won't happen: that China can't do that, as that is just too drastic of a move and it will cost them the support of businesses, citizens, and governments.

As for your final paragraph, every single decision made about Cydia was made within this moral framework... one which you do not support. You either should not be thanking me for what I did while working on it if you fundamentally refuse to support my methods and goals.

Honestly: it sounds like you would have preferred a world where I built a centralized Cydia and allowed Apple's censors access to the catalog... that completely misses the point of Cydia, so I don't know what you possibly wanted. With this attitude I not only don't feel the need to have you support Orchid, I would like to hand you back your false gratitude for Cydia :(.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#144

Post by [deleted] »

dmitrygr wrote: post #141
davidsalamon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Note I'm David Salamon, one of the white paper authors.) I agree with your payment analysis. As you point out, we explicitly disclose that payments need modification before they will be at the level of anonymity required for Orchid. Anonymous payments for the Ethereum platform are being worked on right now by very talented teams. As we don't believe we have anything substantial to add to that conversation, we are de…

> Maybe next draft? :p Looking forward to it :) Also, what about the other half of my points? ;)

[deleted]

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#145

Post by [deleted] »

dmitrygr wrote: post #141
davidsalamon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Note I'm David Salamon, one of the white paper authors.) I agree with your payment analysis. As you point out, we explicitly disclose that payments need modification before they will be at the level of anonymity required for Orchid. Anonymous payments for the Ethereum platform are being worked on right now by very talented teams. As we don't believe we have anything substantial to add to that conversation, we are de…

> Maybe next draft? :p Looking forward to it :) Also, what about the other half of my points? ;)

[deleted]

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#146

Post by davidsalamon »

dmitrygr wrote: post #141
davidsalamon wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Note I'm David Salamon, one of the white paper authors.) I agree with your payment analysis. As you point out, we explicitly disclose that payments need modification before they will be at the level of anonymity required for Orchid. Anonymous payments for the Ethereum platform are being worked on right now by very talented teams. As we don't believe we have anything substantial to add to that conversation, we are de…

> Maybe next draft? :p Looking forward to it :) Also, what about the other half of my points? ;)

> Also, what about the other half of my points? ;)

Oh, sure, sorry about that. Did you edit the post I replied to? It looks like I only missed two points:

> But it gets better. While you can use anyone as a relay, you PREPAY them before they do any work for you. This is claimed to solve the problem of nonpayment, but nobody mentions the opposite problem: I take your money and do no work for you. The money cannot be taken back - I own it now. cool.

Relays are sitting there burning their CPU while they wait for a customer to show up. This is a continual cost, which makes Relay/Proxy operation unprofitable unless they receive a steady stream of transactions. If they "take the money and run" they only pocket the initial payment, maybe as much as a couple kilobytes of bandwidth in tokens. If they "take the money and stay" they get a stream of payments from the customer. Therefore it's economically irrational for them to run -- the PoW's cost makes them boundedly trustworthy if they are economically rational.

(I sort of covered this in the /dev/null attack you proposed, as it's the same case except /dev/null has the attacker also uploading a bit of useless traffic. I should have been more explicit.)

> Oh, and if you thought this will provide INTERNET access, you are mistaken. Apparently HTTP w/ DNS only. As per whitepaper, exit nodes can filter based on domain. I am not even going to mention that running an exit node without a whitelist is idiotic (one user downloads CP, you go to jail). So everyone must have a whitelist? And just how big do you figure a typical "whitelist" of safe domains is? 100GB, 1000GB? Good thing you need to send it as a reply to Get Offers request.

Lol, yeah. Whitelists are dumb, but (as we seem to agree) not having them is dumber. I agree with your analysis. If they do become 100GB, etc we'll add queries to mitigate the size issue ("hey, do you support xyz.com?"), or any of the other relatively well studied solutions here (have I finally found a use for bloom filters? Unlikely.)

More broadly on the whitelist issue, my hope is that paying Proxies will result in actual "Orchid Proxy ISPs" springing up, which will have empty whitelists, actual legal protection as ISPs, etc. That's the beauty of real money being involved. Whitelists are there as a stop-gap while the market is being built.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#147

Post by eleitl »

kpcyrd wrote: post #127
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the tl;dr: a practical encrypted mesh network that can work over the traditional internet protocol (IP) or over real-world links and radio antennas.

Since the parent was deleted and I couldn't comment by the time I finished typing, here's the non-tl;dr: The main advantage is non-hierarchical routing. Your ip address is in fact the fingerprint of your public key, which is used to encrypt all traffic. Because of this the address allocation works a lot different and there's no need for a central authority. The lack of a central authority is usually a problem if you…

There are some issues with cjdns with pure DHT on small footprint devices with poor connectivity. The author is hence currently introducing experimental supernodes, which are stable fat nodes with large memory which can build routes quickly.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#148

Post by eleitl »

tscs37 wrote: post #135
kpcyrd wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the parent was deleted and I couldn't comment by the time I finished typing, here's the non-tl;dr: The main advantage is non-hierarchical routing. Your ip address is in fact the fingerprint of your public key, which is used to encrypt all traffic. Because of this the address allocation works a lot different and there's no need for a central authority. The lack of a central authority is usually a problem if you…

That sounds like a good way to get very inefficient routing. Supposed I have keypair A at a friend and keypair B for me, how is cjdns going to find the fastest route between me and my friend?

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#149

Post by tscs37 »

eleitl wrote: post #148
tscs37 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a good way to get very inefficient routing. Supposed I have keypair A at a friend and keypair B for me, how is cjdns going to find the fastest route between me and my friend?

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...

Tbh, this doesn't look like something that could scale to Tbps Bandwidths... It seems a lot of processing is required to properly route the packet to the next hop and that happens independently of whether the next hop is even remotely an ideal one.

Atleast, as far as I can tell from this page.

Re: Orchid: a new surveillance-free layer on top of the existing Internet

#150

Post by th-ai »

ddevault wrote: post #104
ve55 wrote: post #94

There's a lot of projects that sound exactly like this. What they all have in common is that they all use an Ethereum (ERC20/22) token and all have very large amounts of money flowing into them, from private investors, companies, ICOs, etc. It would be nice to see more projects take routes that projects like tor take, where the founders do not accept millions of dollars of money before they even have a working and co…

Check out cjdns for a less stupid, less blockchain BS take on fixing the internet. https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

Is cjdns more of same address-centric hosting? If y, would not NDN content-addressing be the more smarter internet fix?

http://youtu.be/opKJsVTcofg#t=164 Ask the network for what you want. Not say 'who' you wanna talk to, but say 'what' you want.

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