Silk Road forums

Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: morningRain on March 06, 2012, 11:58 pm

Title: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: morningRain on March 06, 2012, 11:58 pm
These are progressively difficult to build, from Option 1 to Option 5.
Options 1 - 4 require trust of the owner/administrator of the hardware.
Option 5 could be very robust but a bit like the borg.

Definition of Bureaucratic Democracy:

* “Bureaucracy” here means rational-legal authority. Described by Max Weber as:

1. Any legal norm can be established by agreement or imposition on the basis of expediency or morality, and at least the members of the organization must obey.

2. Every body of law is conceived to be a consistent system of abstract rules which have been intentionally and formally created to be consistent.

3. Even officials within the staff are subject to those universal legal norms. Everyone is subject to the rule established by legal authority.

4. A person who obeys authority does so as a member of the organization. And what is obeyed is not a superior, but “the law”.

5. Members of bureaucratic organizations obey superiors solely as placeholders in an impersonal order. It is not based on personal loyalties, but rather on a clear hierarchical chain of command and one’s position within it.

The language is a bit dated. LMAO@"superior"

* “Democracy” in the egalitarian sense that the rules are universal. The human-based computation system I have in mind might be more specifically described as a dynamic meritocracy.
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: kmfkewm on March 07, 2012, 12:01 am
Decentralized system with no hierarchy at all. You should be the admin of only your own perspective of the forum. Want to delete a thread? You delete it from your own view. Don't like a poster? Block them. Everyone should be free to do whatever they want and the only possible censorship should be of your own perception. The entire thing should be distributed over a network of volunteer servers, encryption operations should take place entirely client side so servers only store ciphertext. Throw in multi-latency mixing, so people can opt for fast load times or high anonymity using the same set of nodes. Should also have built in bitcoin support with mixing, webs of trust and easy compartmentalization of communications. It should also be entirely independent of browsers, and all encryption operations should be automated and transparent to the user.
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: morningRain on March 07, 2012, 12:49 am
Decentralized system with no hierarchy at all. You should be the admin of only your own perspective of the forum. Want to delete a thread? You delete it from your own view. Don't like a poster? Block them. Everyone should be free to do whatever they want and the only possible censorship should be of your own perception. The entire thing should be distributed over a network of volunteer servers, encryption operations should take place entirely client side so servers only store ciphertext. Throw in multi-latency mixing, so people can opt for fast load times or high anonymity using the same set of nodes. Should also have built in bitcoin support with mixing, webs of trust and easy compartmentalization of communications. It should also be entirely independent of browsers, and all encryption operations should be automated and transparent to the user.

Yes! Complete agreement. What about the coordination/exchange of resources (information & effort) between an individual and the whole? How would you keep this rational/balanced/fair? How about system level management, maintenance & extension?
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: kmfkewm on March 07, 2012, 02:32 am
You are going to need to ask more specific questions to get a good reply :P
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: Nemo on March 07, 2012, 04:20 am
Near term design: Compartmentalize the major subsystems and prepare to distribute them to a few remote servers to reduce network traffic to any one server. Keep command and control at the top. Use an email interface rather than a web interface. Be prepared to go dark at all times. Have alternative modes of contact and contingency plans for the most probable scenarios. Focus on core business logic and data analysis.
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: Crisis on March 07, 2012, 10:20 am
Decentralized system with no hierarchy at all. You should be the admin of only your own perspective of the forum. Want to delete a thread? You delete it from your own view. Don't like a poster? Block them. Everyone should be free to do whatever they want and the only possible censorship should be of your own perception. The entire thing should be distributed over a network of volunteer servers, encryption operations should take place entirely client side so servers only store ciphertext. Throw in multi-latency mixing, so people can opt for fast load times or high anonymity using the same set of nodes. Should also have built in bitcoin support with mixing, webs of trust and easy compartmentalization of communications. It should also be entirely independent of browsers, and all encryption operations should be automated and transparent to the user.

Kmf,

I hope this isn't a stupid question(s).

Is what you're suggesting similar (I know not entirely) to how ebay is run with seperate vendors maintaining their own shops using ebay as a centralized market like a bazaar, as opposed to how Amazon operates with local vendors absorbed into the framework of its site? Which to me is the system SR has adopted, without it's own wares being sold alongside of course.

I understand (I think) about the decentralization prospect that you propose which, if I'm not confused, is close in concept to how bitcoins or torrents operate. Would an app, instead of a browser, be the point of convergence? Would vendor magnets found on search sites be the form of links?

I'm in way over my head but I find the ideals proposed in this thread to be fascinating. Feel free to ignore my questions if they make no sense.
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: DeoNonFortuna on March 07, 2012, 04:34 pm
Decentralized system with no hierarchy at all. You should be the admin of only your own perspective of the forum. Want to delete a thread? You delete it from your own view. Don't like a poster? Block them. Everyone should be free to do whatever they want and the only possible censorship should be of your own perception. The entire thing should be distributed over a network of volunteer servers, . ..
... webs of trust and easy compartmentalization of communications. It should also be entirely independent of browsers, and all encryption operations should be automated and transparent to the user.

kmfkewm, if you are primarily interested in the Forum form of interaction, NNTP news servers might meet all of your criteria. Each person (or deep web entity) with a news server running can design and administer the groups on their server. They can also choose to connect to other servers and share/sync their groups. Users of this forum network connect to the servers that host the groups they like and make their posts there. It's old tech but that isn't necessarily a bad thing; it might do what you want and the software & standards are well known and widely available.
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: kmfkewm on March 08, 2012, 03:53 am
you can use mixminion with usenet groups too for very strong anonymity. And Tor / PIR to obtain messages. Membership concealment is where the weakest spot is going to be in our idealized system. Tor bridges + obfsproxy could be promising, if they are greatly expanded on / touched up on.

But I would rather make a new remailer all together. Mixminion is outdated, there are much cooler mix designs today and I want to implement one of them :P. And the requirement to have external email accounts / usenet accounts etc just make it too big of a hassle for it to ever catch on. The system needs to be designed so that it is fully contained from the get go, instead of compartmentalized message transport / anonymity away from message storage and retrieval.

I think high latency solutions are largely being disregarded today on the assumption that people need low latency. And it is true that you need low latency to do a lot of things. But the things we are doing don't really quire low latency, and it seems almost retarded to limit ourselves to it. Of course any solution needs a lot of users for it to be anonymous, but I think a mutli-latency messaging system would get a significant amount of usage, especially if people don't need to be bothered about managing SURBs and figuring out usenet etc.

The technology to do this is already there in parts that can be pieced together by people with the technical know how (and there are some groups using these systems), but the designs for systems that can do it much better are out there too.
Title: Re: Ideal structure for an anonymous cryptospace marketplace
Post by: DeoNonFortuna on March 08, 2012, 04:36 am
Setting up a stand-alone NNTP (news) server as a TOR hidden service is [probably] trivial. Setting up a stand-alone POP3 (mail) server as a TOR hidden service on the same machine might also be simple. Here, stand-alone means the NNTP server is not connected to other NNTP servers. The only way news comes in is when users connect their news client (e.g. Thunderbird) to port 119 and read/post. And the stand-alone mail server would not be connected to the mail network. Messages can only be sent/received by users who have an account on this server. Users connect their mail client (e.g. Thunderbird) to port 110 and send/receive messages [only] to other users who have an account on this server. This is a single machine on the TOR network with many users accessing it through TOR.