Thu Nov 12, 2015 4:43 am

Hi Gary,



Can you explain just how private your Moneta transactions will be from 3rd parties trying to analyze the Moneta blockchain?

How much will they be able to figure out about who is transacting with who?

What is motivating you to build something like this?

decentralized

Hey Roger,As long as people use our privacy-preserving feature found on the wallet, 3rd parties will be completely blocked from any ability to analyze the Moneta blockchain. This is because when you send a transaction with Moneta, the only information seen on the blockchain is "Address A received X Moneta". The address from which "Address A" received Moneta has absolutely no transaction history. This is different from Bitcoin, in which by looking at the blockchain you can see "Address A received X BTC from Address B, who received Y BTC from address C, who we identified as 'Bob' because he posted his bitcoin address publicly with his name on Silk Road". In this manner, with Bitcoin, we could trace back several hundred transactions to find out who "Address A" is associated with.The only way someone could figure out who is transacting with whom is by hacking into someone's computer and finding their private key, and hacking into the personal conversations with whomever they are transacting with.In general, I’m motivated to do anything that will help increase individual liberty. By guaranteeing financial privacy, we hope that Moneta can help ensure freedom of commerce. People should be able to buy whatever they want, as long as it does not infringe on the well-being or individual liberty of others.The current status quo is that the government has the power to violate due process rights on a mass scale without consequence. In various powerful departments (e.g NSA, IRS, ect) , the government can investigate bank account activity / bitcoin blockchain in an indiscriminate manner and on a mass-scale. We have no choice but to just "take their word on it" that they aren't violating due process. Moneta, when combined with Bitcoin, blocks them from doing so. We can trust the technology itself, rather than having to "trust the government's promises".One particular thing that excites us is the possibility of pairing complete financial privacy with drones. Just imagine being able to send money to anyone completely privately, and then having a drone deliver something to you without Big Brother determining what you can or cannot buy.Another big motivation is to help Bitcoin itself become a lot more private. There are 2 ways this can happen. First, if it becomes socially acceptable to make changes to Bitcoin's underlying protocol, perhaps it can be integrated into Bitcoin at some point in the future ( even if it takes a few decades ). Perhaps a few years down, it could also become a sidechain. Second, interestingly enough, we can make Bitcoin itself more private right now, even without any changes to Bitcoin's underlying protocol. This can theoretically be done today with atomic cross-chain swaps ( although it hasn't been implemented robustly yet ). So let's say you are a Bitcoin user that wants to keep your privacy. Then you could do aswap with Moneta, and then exchange that Moneta for a different set of Bitcoin again in a completely decentralized manner, thereby cutting off a link between you and your Bitcoin address. Note that this is different from a swap requiring a third party in which a centralized server could possibly be subpoenaed / hacked.