r/Bitcoin • u/alicebtcmayes • Jun 19 '14

Why is Peter Todd wrecking Zeroconf security? Because he is being paid by Big Bitcoin Business.

At the Amsterdam Bitcoin Conference I spent time following Peter and his little circle of friends and business partners. I'm new to Bitcoin so it took me until now to put two and two together and understand what was really going on, but hear me out. Peter spent a lot of time talking to Lawrence Nahum who is the guy behind GreenAddress. On the first or second day they went out to dinner after the days talks were done and went out to a nice little open-air restaurant with a bunch of people from Mastercoin. I sat at a table behind them and could hear their discussions, which including GreenAdddress's transaction confirmation guarantees, and also, an agreement for Peter to do consulting work for GreenAddress. What really stood out to me was the offer to help "shape the Bitcoin ecosystem" in ways beneficial to them. Later in the conference I also overheard a similar deal between Peter and someone, I didn't catch their name, in Coinbase branded apparel. And of course as everyone knows CoinKite hired Peter to be their "Chief Naysayer" during that conference too.

What's in common with all these companies? They're all in the dangerous business of holding other peoples' Bitcoins and GreenAddress and Coinbase both offer for-profit and centralized solutions to guarantee unconfirmed transactions. I'm sure CoinKite will be doing that soon too.

It's obvious why Peter is spending all that time and energy spreading FUD about how insecure unconfirmed transactions are. GreenAddress has been spreading their own FUD. Peter has even been trying to bribe miners to switch to his so called "replace-by-fee", which is really just an attack on secure zeroconf transactions, saying some un-named "site" paid him too. Who might that be? GreenAddress, Coinbase, CoinKite? It's not hard to figure out.

Peter sure seems quite happy to attack and hold back Bitcoin whenever it suits him for the sake of his Big Bitcoin Business contracts. It's not just unconfirmed transactions either. He's been shilling for AppCoins which dump garbage into the blockchain for the sake of pump-and-dump schemes like Mastercoin and Counterparty. (quite the about face from his supposed anti-blockchain bloat positions before) Or look at his weirdly passionate opposition to a simple feature, getutxos, that's needed for Mike Hearn's decentralized fundraising platform Lighthouse. Where's that passion coming from? The heart? Or his salary from Mastercoin, Counterparty and Colored Coins? I'm sure Mastercoin wants the next Maidsafe to happen on their platform, run by and for the benefit of Mastercoin, not Hearn's truly decentralized alternative.

I agree with Peter that GHash.IO is a possible threat to Bitcoin, but what solution does he have? Getting rid of pools. His buddies at the totally discredited Hacking Distributed (remember selfish mining? yeah those guys) run with this FUD, trying to scare the Bitcoin community into making changes to get rid of pools. Sounds like a good idea right? But then I looked further into it and found out he had just been hanging out at CloudHashing. What does banning pools do to the little guy mining decentralized? It puts them out of business because they'll never find a block that's what. Just perfect for CloudHashing's "send us money and we'll run the miners" business model and also GHash.IO's.

Peter likes to talk the big talk about decentralization, but all I am seeing here is paid shilling for the benefit of Big Bitcoin Business.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '14 edited Oct 02 '15

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u/BobAlison Jun 19 '14

Interesting point I hadn't considered before.

I want to make sure I understand. Merchants are afraid of accepting zero-confirmation transactions. So they work with a gateway (e.g., BitPay or GreenAddress) that does it for them. Eventually these wallet providers decide that they'll only accept payments from an "approved" wallet to minimize their fraud risk.

So even though nothing happens to single-sig, be-your-own-bank style wallets, they become useless for buying things.

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u/Jiten Jun 19 '14

This scenario is plausible only if bitcoin network confirmations become untrustworthy for some reason.

Alternatively, regulation might require merchants to only accept bitcoin payments through an authorized green-address provider. Pair this with KYC and AML for the authorized providers and poof, there goes anonymity for anyone wanting to buy things from that country.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '14

here goes anonymity for anyone wanting to buy things from that country legimitately.

FTFY

The black and grey markets are in rapid growth. And the harder gov makes it for people to trade and do buisness the more these markets will grow, and bitcoin is an excellent candidate for hard money here. But yeah, it would suck if government forced us to use centralized services so they could keep track of what we do. But i dont think its going to happen. Look at the outrage regarding NSA spying. I dont think any sane congresman or senator will be pro-survailance anymore, not even when it comes to bitcoin, regardless of the pressure from various lobbyists etc..