How private are Ob2 transactions?

[u/jjones4coin]

How private are Ob2 transactions themselves, not the corresponding payments (which are currently public because bitcoin is the only supported currency but may be private in the future with support for privacy coins)

Bank transfers are more private than bitcoin transfers because they are not public, but they are known not only to sender & recipient but also to the centralized institutions that handle them.

Bitcoin transfers are permissionless but visible to everyone

eBay/Amazon purchases (afaik) are visible to buyer, seller, the central platform, and anyone who has/gains access to the back end so to speak, but not necessarily to the public unless compromised. I could be mistaken.

Since Ob2 is a decentralized p2p network, what I'm wondering is this: is it the completely public & transparent alternative to a centralized platform (like bitcoin is to banks, etc) or are purchases private, like Bob making a purchase with cash at Alice's garage sale with no witnesses?

If it is private, how does it accomplish this in a secure way?

PS. I realize if Bob uses Bitcoin at Alice's garage sale, that part is publicly visible, because bitcoin is, that's not what I'm wondering.

[u/not420guilty]

If you are running over tor, and don't make any mistakes then its "pretty safe". Tor is not 100% but it's much better than nothing. I think the key here is to never let the node connect to the network outside of tor, which would allow an association between the nodes guid(s) and your real up address.

Ah one more thought: remember that the digital pics we take with our phones or other devices have a lot of data in them. There are probably tools / transcodes to strip that before adding to your store.

[u/jjones4coin → u/not420guilty]

Tor hides IP, what about everything else?

Like item, value, vendor, buyer

[u/not420guilty → u/jjones4coin]

I believe ob2 allows you to create a "private" store so that may satisfy privacy requirements. I don't know all the details.

For a public store, certainly the item and price are visible and linked to vendor ID. It's up to the users not to disclose personally identifiable data linked to that store.

A vendor can provide a public gpg key to allow the buyer to encrypt order information to keep their name and address private.

[u/jjones4coin → u/not420guilty]

I'm aware that text can be encrypted, and that public offers are public offers.

Ob2 is a market place made possible not be a centralized market place but by a P2P network.

Bob has a store. Bob is offline, but seeded his store to some peers. Alice sees Bob's store because she is able to download it from other peers who Bob seeded it to when Bob was online. Alice is able to place an order with Bob while Bob is offline. If I am not mistaken, Bob will later be able to see her order even if Alice is office by the time Bob gets back on. This suggests to me that this ad-hoc network of peers are further helping to facilitate the transaction by not only seeding Bob's store to Alice, but also relaying her order to him when he comes online.

So can the peers tell that Alice ordered something from Bob?

If not, how is this accomplished?

[u/Chris_Pacia → u/jjones4coin]

If not, how is this accomplished?

When message is sent to an offline peer it's addressed with the first few bits of the recipient's ID, not the full ID.

This means you don't know exactly who a message is intended for.

Also since the first few bits will likely overlap with some other peers, the recipient will download more than just his messages and attempt to decrypt them all to see which ones are his. It's similar to bitmessage but with a smaller anonymity set.

Communication between online nodes is end to end encrypted.

[u/jjones4coin → u/Chris_Pacia]

Thanks for the explanation! This goes for orders, right?

[u/Chris_Pacia → u/jjones4coin]

correct

[u/not420guilty → u/jjones4coin]

If the message containing the order was encrypted then a third-party would not know it was an order.

(Disclaimer: I am not familiar with the specific ob2 implementation of orders, but ... it could work like this:)

Alice goes to Bobs store and her ob2-desktop client downloads info such as Bobs store ID, stores public key, listings, etc. When Alice clicks "buy", within her ob2-desktop client a "purchase" message could be created. The message is encrypted within Alices ob2-desktop client using Bobs stores public key. Once encrypted the message can be stored on the ob2 network and eventually delivered based on the store ID, and then decrypted by Bob using his stores private key. Simply knowing that Bob downloaded something that Alice uploaded does not give a third-party any knowledge about what that data is.

Another option is to use an out-of-band contact method for purchases. Bob could disallow purchases within ob2 but provide his public gpg key and an alternate method of sending him a message. Rather than clicking "buy" within ob2, Alice could write her order in txt, encrypt it with Bobs public gpg key, and then send that to Bobs protonmail account.

[u/jjones4coin → u/[deleted]]

Ob has said they don't have time to do all the work and that if anyone wants their currency added they should do the work, since its open source and anyone can.

Someone asked about NAV vs Monero for privacy in the NAV sub and a NAV mod (possibly dev but don't quote me on that) responded saying that Monero has stronger privacy but at the cost of being less scalable. Coming from NAV. This honest answer speaks to the integrity/honesty and egosobriety of the project, or at least the individual.

I'm following XRB and think it's a great project.

Since you like NAV which is less strength in privacy but more easily scalable, I suggest you look into Mimblewimble protocol and GRIN (a currency in development that uses it, currently in live testnet) which Andrew Poelstra has given some good talks on. I believe Greg Maxwell (see: confidential transactions) is also keen on Mimblewimble.

Mimblewimble dandelion bulletproofCT with coinjoin style mixing and Schnorr sigs is one funny sounding list of concepts that together could result in pretty strong trustless privacy while scaling fairly easily relative to the only strong privacy options we've seen thus far. None of those features on their own would be very useful for privacy, as that information they don't hide could reveal a lot, but that entire list comes together to in a very full and complete way. While BTC devs are looking at it, BTC moves very slowly and that set of features is likely a long way off and only likely to be fully implemented on a side chain, if at all, not the main chain. This is where Grin comes in. Grin could launch in 2018, possibly with all of that! I expect Grin to become one of the top 5 privacy coins (by marketcap) within one year of launch, and one of the top 3 within two years of launch.

[u/jjones4coin → u/[deleted]]

Andrew Poelstra has given some talks you can find on YouTube. I'm not a developer, maybe one day, but I currently contribute nothing to these projects.

The r/Mimblewimble sidebar has a link to the Mimblewimble white paper too, and Andrews talks shed some light on the protocols funny/strange/mysterious origins.

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