Don't see that anyone has posted this (?) Its long, but super super interesting. I just posted some excerpts below.
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/inside-dark-wallet/
On Amir Taaki and Cody Wilson, two anarchists with a history of creating controversial software, and their dream of an economy based on untraceable, uncontrollable money.
Excerpts:
The programming provocation they released a few hours ago is called Dark Wallet, a piece of software designed to allow untraceable, anonymous online payments using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Taaki and Wilson see in bitcoin's stateless transactions the potential for a new economy that fulfills the crypto-anarchist dream of truly uncontrollable money. .... "Ladies and gentlemen, the problem with Silk Road was that it was centralized," Wilson continued. "One man ran it and they found a server. People were back at the drawing board on day two. There are going to be peer-to-peer Silk Roads not managed by one man."If bitcoin means anything, it means a thousand Silk Roads," he said, to rising applause. "It means, fuck your law!"
Six months later, that prophecy has already begun to come true. Even before Wilson's appearance in London, "Silk Road 2.0" had launched, dealers and users swarming the site by the thousands to trade bitcoins for everything from black tar heroin to forged passports. A mini industry of anonymous copycats has followed, sprouting up overnight like psychedelic mushrooms on cow patties: 1776, Agora, Alpaca Marketplace, Andromeda, BlackBank, Bluesky, Cannabis Road, Cloud-Nine, Evolution, Hydra, Majestic Garden, the Marketplace, Mr. Nice Guy, the Onion Market, Outlaw Market, Pandora, Pirate Market, Silk Street, Silkkitie, Tor Bazaar, Tortuga, Underground Marketplace--and likely more that have kept their names better hidden from nosy reporters. According to a study published in May by the nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance, more than 40,000 mostly illegal products are now listed for sale on the obscured corner of the Internet known as the dark web, more than twice as many as before the Silk Road bust.
New sites equivalent to Google and Yelp for the online underground allow users to sort through the multiplying outlets. Many of the next-generation contraband sales sites have implemented a clever mechanism known as multisignature transactions, designed to prevent users from losing any funds stored by the vendor if its administrators disappear or the site is seized by law enforcement. And as Wilson predicted, the next generation of anarcho-enterprises already promise to make the feds' next seizure vastly more difficult: Taaki's DarkMarket and a project spun off from it called OpenBazaar are intended to function without any central server or administrator. Anyone can buy or sell directly to anyone else in these flat, peer-to-peer systems, so that snooping cops would have to collar users one-by-one to take the market down. ........... Matonis warns that if governments push too hard to control cryptocurrencies, more than they do with old-fashioned cash, bitcoiners will turn to more anonymous payment tools or even integrate their features directly into the bitcoin protocol. "For regulators, this is not a consequence-free zone," Matonis says. "Every measure is met with a countermeasure." Shine too strong a light on the inner workings of the crypto economy, in other words, and it may retreat into the dark altogether.
Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity's shadow--without switching to a niche alternative coin or trusting any shady middleman.
Every coin spent through the program, an add-on to Google's Chrome browser, gets matched up and merged with another transaction in a process called CoinJoin. The trick is a bit like Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, who agree to murder each other's victims: When Dark Wallet combines two transactions on behalf of two users, their coins are spent simultaneously. The blockchain only records one movement of money, and since the CoinJoin negotiation is encrypted, there's no way to tell whose coins end up where. As Dark Wallet's user base grows--today it's already in the low thousands despite still being in development--those CoinJoins will grow to combine three or even more transactions. Add enough users and the system becomes "a magnificent layer of uncertainty" over "a massive confusion of addresses," as one early tester describes it.
Dark Wallet also offers what it calls "stealth addresses" that allow a user to receive bitcoins at an encrypted address, where only he or she can retrieve them using a private key. When a coin passes through either a CoinJoin transaction or a stealth address, it becomes vastly more difficult to track, making taxation, regulation, and prosecution virtually impossible. "We want a bitcoin that laughs at the regulatory pageantry," Wilson says. "We're going to permanently problematize bitcoin's reputation."
Bitcoin's reputation is hardly spotless now. It's already being used for darker purposes than drug markets: The International Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that several major child pornography sites accept bitcoin. Late last year a site called Assassination Market attempted to use bitcoin to crowdfund the murder of political figures. Fans donated more than $50,000 for anyone who killed then-Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke--a bĂȘte noire of the cryptolibertarian crowd--though there haven't been any known attempts to claim its bounties.
Good article thanks for posting..dark wallet looks good on paper well have to keep an eye on it