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MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

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Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#131
post #25

To repeat an earlier comment, this scheme encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers. You might say that by integrating SGX mechanisms into your security model, you create a set of 'feudal lords' [1] who can wield their power over you. A manufacturer may 'legitimately' establish an enclave in your most trusted hardware which you may not audit or even measure. And if tha…

I still think it's an interesting approach. If you want to be more efficient and less wasteful than Bitcoin, at some point trust has to come into play. And reducing your trust to the manufacturers of secure enclaves (whose products can also be audited to a degree) is surely an improvement still, even if it doesn't have the radical threat model of conventional cryptocurrencies (which inevitably run into scaling proble…

> If you want to be more efficient and less wasteful than Bitcoin, at some point trust has to come into play.

In that case, one might as well go with any of the permissioned blockchains (such as Interplanetary database where the nodes are run by reputed non-profits for a minimal fee).

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#132
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is secondary to there being no benefit to the average user for transacting in crypto vs Visa. What incentive is there for an end user to use even a hypothetically optimal crypto system? Then is that incentive sufficient to overcome network effects? The appropriate and interesting applications of crypto seem to be totally leaving p2p cash behind - it just doesn't seem like a good fit.

Pseudonymity/anonymity, for one. You can freely transact across borders, for another.

That's really only useful to a small number of users, relative to the overall size of the economy, and many of them are doing things that aren't legal. Not a market I'd probably target if I was going for mass adoption.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#133
Isn't SGX not so secure ? [1]

Specifically this claim

"In a semi-synchronous attack, we extract 96% of an RSA private key from a single trace. We extract the full RSA private key in an automated attack from 11 traces within 5 minutes."

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/using_intels_...

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#134
post #30

I feel like the real appeal of Bitcoin is the decentralized aspect. I am not totally intrigued at the idea of having a controlled system, even if it offers complete privacy and faster transaction speed.

If it works like Stellar (which it sounds like it does), it's still a decentralized network of nodes, but each individual user isn't a node. They pick a node to work with, and that node is then connected to a set of other nodes. Anyone can run a node, but there's just not any point to it for most users.

How is that better or different from Bitcoin users trusting CoinBase?

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#135

Stellar is run by a set of trusted third parties, which makes it permissioned. If it gains any sort of traction, it will undoubtedly come under the control of any number of governments, thus negating the "peer-to-peer" part of cryptocurrency, and making usage conditioned on approval from some set of intermediaries.

It's not run by "a set of trusted third parties". It's run by SETS of trusted third parties, where each individual node specifies what set of nodes it trusts to not collude against it. You don't need any ones permission to run a node, but it is up to other nodes if they want to trust you

If your set is not the same as everyone else's set, you risk being forked off. Trusted third party based schemes have a tendency toward centralization, making them less resilient than ones based on cryptoeconomic incentives. Inevitability it will mean TTP based ledgers will be permissioned, with the TTPs acting as gatekeepers, rather than p2p.

This isn't just theoretical either. Stellar has co-authored a paper arguing for regulations against anonymous cryptocurrencies:

http://www.lhoft.com/assets/uploads/images/WhitePaper_LHoFT_...

It's clear that it's positioning itself as a gatekeeper-based ledger that stays on the good side of regulatory agencies.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#136

MobileCoin is backed by XLM/Stellar, which is not decentralized, and so I feel I should note here that I signed up during Stripe's giveaway of Stellar Lumens years ago - and I did indeed get my wallet credited. https://stripe.com/blog/stellar I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet,…

This has also been my experience with Stellar's support: radio silence.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin uses proof-of-work for its consensus system, but not all cryptocurrencies do. Bitcoin is a technological wonder, but it's ultimately not as advanced as its younger brethren. The Stellar Consensus Protocol, which MobileCoin say they're using, uses something more akin to a web of trust rather than proof-of-work. You do not need the SGX to get rid of proof-of-work.

> Bitcoin is a technological wonder Oh, dear lord. > ultimately not as advanced as its younger brethren. These must then be simply out of this world. Superwonder technologies. Double digit transactions per second!! /$ The hype around this piece of software is getting out of hand.

Perhaps you do not understand it's revolutionary aspects.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#138
I'm not sure using Stellar is wise as the majority is owned by a small group of people, much smaller than Bitcoin, which creates conflict of interest and not future SEC proof.

on a side rant: So...many...coins...I too have something called BrowserCoin.com but still haven't figured out what problems to solve. Too many people just go implement a pseudo-academic blockchain tech with fancy dials without vetting the problem....virtually zero adoption other than from pumpers and owner...that is something I'd like to avoid altogether, for once some cryptocurrency based business that delivers and benefits people who don't need to expensive rigs to mine or jack resources (browser based blockchains etc).

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#139

MobileCoin is backed by XLM/Stellar, which is not decentralized, and so I feel I should note here that I signed up during Stripe's giveaway of Stellar Lumens years ago - and I did indeed get my wallet credited. https://stripe.com/blog/stellar I was given 6000 XLM and I left it in their official wallet for years. On May 12th, 2017 I wrote them an email asking why my wallet, now converted to some newer official wallet,…

Too bad you are having this issue. But since you are airing it here on HN then my own anecdotal experience is I went through the same signup as you did. Forgot about it for three years. Found my multi-word password. Loaded it into the website. Received a message I'd been upgraded to the new system. I downloaded a stellar desktop client, transferred the coins to my desktop wallet, all problem free.

I think it is easy for nearly all of us to agree the most likely cause of your own issues is operator error. Now that the price is shooting up on these coins, it's not rational to expect STR to chase down every 6K STR givaway grievance that they receive.

Re: MobileCoin: A New Cryptocurrency from Moxie Marlinspike

#140
I think this is going in the right direction. You take a bunch of tamper-proof hardware devices from different manufacturers and then model attack costs to compromise them as part of a proof-of-stake scheme. Now you can build consensus algorithms on top of them that are highly secure and scalable compared to anything that exists today.

I'm not convinced that Stellar consensus here is the right algorithm for doing this, but I think SGX is promising technology that has been somewhat overlooked in the blockchain space (not by everyone.) SGX has a lot of potential. You can use SGX as a way to expand the consensus rules of any blockchain by using it as a blackbox obfuscation construct. Everything and more that Vitalik wrote in his article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation is possible with SGX today.

Want to create a specialized oracle that only signs certain transaction formats, even on untrusted hosts? Yep - use SGX. Now you can have agents that run in a cluster that will only move assets between blockchains based on a user's prior agreements, allowing for more complex cross-blockchain smart contracts to be written in high-level languages. What about having a nice way to do transaction commitments to scale any blockchain without having GB zero-knowledge proofs? SGX again. It could be used for privacy preserving protocols... It could be used for solving data availability problems in sharding / decentralized storage systems. The list goes on.

Some of the biggest trust problems are solvable with this technology - but like others have already said - you still have to trust the hardware manufacturer. In this case, my thoughts are that you already have to trust the hardware manufacturer anyway (nobody is going to inspect every chip with an electron microscope...) My bet is that a non-trivial portion of full nodes today are already running chips with backdoors like the Intel Management Engine anyway...

The point here is that you can't fully remove trust from any system without introducing vast inefficiencies, but you can at least formalize the risks in a system and design so that a compromise is too expensive to be worthwhile, and for me I think that's where the potential lies with this tech. Cryptoeconomic systems based on tamper-proof hardware where individually a component may be compromised, but where it is simply infeasible to compromise each and every device. You build a network out of these components and you have yourself the first on-chain scalable blockchain bound by physical hardware encumberments instead of computational difficulty.

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