I need at least one more /buzzword in the title before I use it.
Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
You misunderstand, this project is literally a fork of the bitcoin repo. They didn't just "copy general source code concepts". It's right there on their about page.
"the implementation of the neat idea of block chain is on the basis of twister." MS Excel uses do...while loops, my latest project uses do...while loops, therefore my project is based on Excel. I was reading it as algorithm use not literally forking the codebase as appears to be the case. Not everything using Quicksort is a kissing cousin of everything else using Quicksort, for example. Its still cheesy as a marketin…
Bitcoins block chain implementation and idea is innovative and revolutionary. Your do... while example is not. Also, the blockchain is sort of the most important bit of bitcoin. I struggle to see how you're missing this...
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your peers cannot know if the data originated from you or you're simply relaying traffic. Thus, your IP address cannot be associated with tweets.
Untrue. An (for example) ISP could very easily determine if you were an originator simply by if someone relayed it to you. Similarly, a Sybil attack can probabilistically figure out the originator, simply be seeing which peer first relayed the communication.
This is about what I was thinking. Tor avoids some of the ISP-problems by re-encrypting at every step (so you can't correlate input and output, except by time/size, which is hard on a busy node).
After poking through the FAQ the claim softens quite a bit, into that "normal" users can't detect such things. This I'll grant is true. And they even mention that, if hiding from adversaries who can observe lots of traffic, you should probably use Tor.
That said, the FAQ does say:
>However if one entity is capable of recording the entire internet traffic, he will probably be able to at least statistically sort out where you are connecting from (your IP address).
which I think I'll still disagree with, unless this is provided by DHT (I don't know DHT, sadly. I'll remedy this some day). Unless you run through Tor, it seems(?) like all messages are essentially plaintext across the internet, so they would know exactly where a message originated, if you're within their view.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#44The incentive to 'mine' in this scheme is the possibility of winning the ability to send a sponsored message to all users.
These sponsored messages could easily be filtered by users, making them worthless.
Even if users collectively agree not to filter the sponsored messages, the average cost of winning the proof-of-work race must be less than the average value of the sponsored messages, which is unlikely.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 140 characters is probably built-into the spec since there is no transfer fee like in bitcoin, therefore nothing would stop people from sending over large files to abuse the blockchain.
Heres a link to some binary to text encodings to abuse the blockchain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-to-text_encoding With very modest client software modification, you could MIME encode any arbitrary binary file then squirt out one line of base64 per "post". Or the venerable uuencoded format. What would prevent abuse would be some manner of throttling in the protocol to stop both this technique of blockchain a…
Stop spamming up this thread without even reading the damn protocol. The whitepaper is a whopping 12 pages and very explicitly states the mechanism used to prevent this kind of spamming. The post rate is throttled against the blockchain rate where "If a new Block k is produced every 10 minutes this limits the mean post rate of new users, for life, to a maximum of 288 posts/day. Average."
It's cool if you don't understand any of this, but you should try to stick to commenting on things you actually understand.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an anonymity perspective, it is just as secure as current bitcoin protocols. Public anonymity at the sacrifice of privacy. In which case, if your 'twister' info is out there, you can theoretically be identified.
In other words, the security is poorly defined and based on the honest parties devoting at least as much energy to defending the system as the attacker devotes to attacking it. What I want to know is this: What does Bitcoin have to do with this? You can have peer to peer, anonymous, encrypted messaging without any of the nonsense that Bitcoin entails.
Basically, if you have anonymous, P2P, encrypted messaging you need to solve the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys. There are several approaches to this, but one of the most compelling right now is using the exact same mechanism that bitcoin uses to prevent double spending. Twister has absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin, they are only similar in that double-spending a bitcoin is analogous to identity theft in Twister.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#47Is there any follow model or does every participant receive all messages sent by everyone else?
Everyone gets every message. There is no solution here to the data bloat problem. Other than that the project forks bitcoin to make a namecoin clone (distributed authorization), which I dont see the need for since a private key already identifies me. The reason something like namecoin is to allow people to update their identity in the event the first identity was compromised/blocked. Finally this was posted yesterday…
This is not true. Followers are established by connecting to bittorrent swarms. From the paper: "The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users."
Furthermore, not all clients need to store and reseed all messages they receive. More seeders is obviously better for network health, but it's not always a reasonable option. The paper suggests that clients can choose to be "achivists" which means that they keep messages and seed them to others (so it's optional). Clients like mobile phones could easily disable this behavior.
Also Twister can't use Namecoin because the incentives are wrong. In Namecoin, miners get to create domains. It would be horrible if only Twister miners could make accounts. Instead they get to make promoted posts, so it has to be a separate implementation.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#48Is there any follow model or does every participant receive all messages sent by everyone else?
Followers are established by connecting to bittorrent swarms. From the paper: "The last network is a collection of possibly disjoint “swarms” of followers, based on the Bittorrent protocol, which can be used for efficient near-instant notification delivery to many users."
Furthermore, not all clients need to store and reseed all messages they receive. More seeders is obviously better for network health, but it's not always a reasonable option. The paper suggests that clients can choose to be "achivists" which means that they keep messages and seed them to others (so it's optional). Clients like mobile phones could easily disable this behavior.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#49Doesn't that make this service website independent? It is like twitter without the downtime, or twitter with multiple twitter networks all being able to collaborate with one another, or twitter without legal BS. And those are beautiful ramifications. Flaws anyone?
It's also twitter without "delete" and twitter without private accounts, from what I can see skimming the whitepaper.
Re: Twister: Anonymous, private BtC/DHT/Torrent P2P microblogging
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, the security is poorly defined and based on the honest parties devoting at least as much energy to defending the system as the attacker devotes to attacking it. What I want to know is this: What does Bitcoin have to do with this? You can have peer to peer, anonymous, encrypted messaging without any of the nonsense that Bitcoin entails.
Basically, if you have anonymous, P2P, encrypted messaging you need to solve the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys. There are several approaches to this, but one of the most compelling right now is using the exact same mechanism that bitcoin uses to prevent double spending. Twister has absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin, they are only similar in that double-spending a bitcoin is a…
"the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys"
What is the point of that ledger? Public keys identify users on their own.