Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 10X: Replace Transaction Fees with Data, Discussion Draft 0.2.9

[Ahmed Zsales <ahmedzsales18@gmail.com>]

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Adam,

Thank you for your comments. We will address them in the next update.

Privacy is an area you have been championing for many years and your input
in this area has created the environment for Bitcoin to exist. Anonymity is
not something we would be willing to compromise, despite the general
public's endless willingness to give away their intimate life histories and
contact details to Facebook and other social media.

If you have the will to read a longish response, we have tried to expand a
little on the rationale for the type of data we believe will be useful and
valuable, in addition to broadly addressing the privacy issues.

Arguably, the greater the cryptographic protections on the ownership of a
transaction, the more value will be placed on the nature of transactions.
Without wishing to frame the conversation on specifics or particular
sectors, here are some distinctions to address some of the previously noted
Orwellian fears on attaching identity markers to Bitcoin transactions.

* We have no desire to create tools that can analyze which brand of baked
beans Bob may prefer compared to Alice. That is a matter of extreme detail
for supermarkets, their suppliers and internal point of sale systems.  When
you make a store purchase, your basket of goods are wrapped up in a single
payment which appears on your credit card or bank statement. Knowing on an
aggregated basis that people spend around $120 / week on retail shopping
and that Saturday is the busiest period for that activity is more valuable
for payment processors than knowing the contents of Bob's basket of goods.

As a retailer or supplier, I would buy that data in order to plan
inventory, marketing budgets, promotional activity, staffing levels,
logistics, factory production, bank borrowing, store expansion planning,
etc.

* Now consider petrol. Bitcoin is very well suited for fuel purchases,
especially for small independent petrol filling stations. Aggregated data
would help the entire supply chain that serves the consumer, if businesses
at the front end had access to data for when demand was at peaks and
troughs. Extend that from individual petrol stations to regional, national
and international consumer purchases and you have the basis of the market
pricing oil based on demand per period and per country. Again, we don't
care that it is actually Bob who fills up every Sunday so he has enough
fuel to last him the week or to track him along his driving holiday.

* Now consider remittances. While the global headlines are that it is a
$500bn a year industry. Few people know that remittances are based on a
relatively small number of remittance corridors that make up the bulk of
the market.  These corridors are based around people leaving small towns
and villages in poor areas and travelling to work in locations based on
knowing someone or a family member who used to live in their area and are
doing well in xyz location because they can see the beneficial impact on
the recipients quality of life. At the coal face, remittances are a word of
mouth grey market sector and part of the reason that WU and the like can
charge so much is because the last mile of remittances are in areas where
monetary infrastructure and logistics are difficult to serve and they can
get away with setting high prices. They prosper because they use data to
organise themselves better. Banks have no desire to serve this market
because you end up clogging up branches every Friday or Saturday with
people that transact relatively small sums compared to those that are
banked and get annoyed waiting. Having access to Bitcoin transaction data
on this sector would help Bitcoin businesses to understand the end points
of this market and serve it better and focus their promotional activities.
We have no desire to identify that Bob's cousin José is working illegally
in Texas.

These are three sectors where there are millions of small businesses that
would, for the first time, be able to access global, national and regional
industry data figures typically reserved for large businesses due to the
high cost of acquiring or commissioning research.

While increasing anonymity or having zero knowledge proofs in transactions
is desirable so that I can keep my Bitcoin salary payments private and my
membership of Ashley Madison out of the news, it would be helpful to know
that when I want to spend my salary that the world around me is organised
enough to serve my needs.

The block chain is ledger. It will contain a global data set that could end
up being one of the most valuable databases in the world. Why not use it to
fund Bitcoin's security infrastructure and growing bandwidth challenges?

Regards,

Ahmed






On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org> wrote:

> Some comments:
>
> "(i) remove any possibility of free transactions unless
>
> associated with basic transaction data;"
>
> I believe it is not possible to prevent free transactions for the
> reason that people can pay out of band (via existing banking transfers
> to miners) or make payments to addresses belonging to miners (that are
> contingent on the requested user transaction being processed via input
> dependency) .
>
>
> I am not sure I fully understand the way you see monetisation working,
> and you do indicate this is quite far future what-if stage idea, and
> you do identify a conflict with fungibility - but I think this is
> probably quite badly in conflict with fungibility to the point of
> conflicting with many planned Bitcoin improvements?  And mid term
> technical directions.
>
> I would say the long term idealised requirements are that the
> transaction itself would have cryptographic fungibility, and policy
> relating to identity for authorisation, approval in regulated
> transactions would take place at the payment protocol layer.  The
> payment protocol is already seeing some use.
>
> Lightning protocol sees more of the data going point to point and so
> not broadcast nor visible for big data analytic monetisation.
>
> Adam
>
> On 22 August 2015 at 23:51, Jorge Timón
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > Again, did you got a bip number asigned or did you self-assigned it
> yourself?
> >
> > On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 1:01 PM, Ahmed Zsales via bitcoin-dev
> > <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> In response to public and private comments and feedback, we have updated
> >> this working draft.
> >>
> >>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwEbhrQ4ELzBOUVtOHJQdlhvUmc/view?usp=sharing
> >>
> >> Update highlights:
> >>
> >> 1. Specific clarifications on replacing the Coinbase subsidy and
> >> supplementing and not replacing transaction fees.
> >>
> >> 2. Clarification on block chain overhead. The value of data mining is
> on a
> >> bell curve, so year six data will be removed every year.
> >>
> >> 3. Added references to an ability to create global, national and
> regional
> >> Bitcoin Price Indices for popular baskets of goods transacted with
> Bitcoin.
> >>
> >> 4. Added references for an ability to use structured block chain data
> for
> >> Bitcoin capacity and fork planning.
> >>
> >> 5. Removed references to price speculation.
> >>
> >> 6. Added preferences for deployment dates of January 2017 or January
> 2018.
> >>
> >> 7. Moving towards BIP format after discussion and evaluation period.
> >> Technical content will increase in due course and discussion content
> will be
> >> removed.
> >>
> >> Further views and feedback welcome.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Ahmed
> >>
> >>
> >> On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 5:23 PM, Ahmed Zsales <ahmedzsales18@gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hello,
> >>>
> >>> Here we propose a long-term solution to replace mining rewards and
> >>> transactions fees.
> >>>
> >>> BIP 104 is currently a discussion draft only.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwEbhrQ4ELzBSXpoUjRkc01QUGc/view?usp=sharing
> >>>
> >>> Views and feedback welcome.
> >>>
> >>> Regards,
> >>>
> >>> Ahmed
> >>>
> >>
> >>
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> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
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>

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