Anonymous, Alternative Currencies

[PowerPenguin]

Here's a good web page that could be useful for developing an anonymous, even 'p2p' style electronic and/or physical currency. I know a lot of you are into this, so therefore this post:

URL: http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/tor/AnonymousCurrency (you need Tor to see this site)

Research into theories of digital, anonymous, free-and-open markets may be mature enough to consider building the infrastrusture for anonymous currencies to be used within Tor and other networks, including non-anonymous, real-world ones.

    *

      The infrastructure for an anonymous free market must be completely open and unrestricted for everybody to use. Underground sources must be able to develop and use the resulting system without regard to real-world financial services, monetary policies, patent laws, and taxation. After such an infrastucture is created, the primary goal should be to create value within the system. This value does not necessarily have to be backed by real-world currencies or commodities. Value only has to be worth something to somebody. This value will inevitably transfer into the real-world. An example is the worth of items in online role playing games being marketed on ebay for real currencies.

[aries]

I always have a hard time getting tor to work. Any tips?

Edit: nevermind I got it. Simple problem.
I just had to stop and start vidalia.

Last time I had tor there was no vidalia and I had to manually get privoxy set up. I can see the article now.

[PowerPenguin]

Vidalia is for Win32 only, right? I'm using Privoxy here on Linux. Also, A good free, fast, and reliable DNS system can be found at OpenDNS.org. They have a good privacy policy. Certianly this won't enhance privacy that much, but it's better than nothing, and it is good in terms of speed/reliablity at least.

[aries]

I think vidalia is win32

And tor increases privacy a lot.

More than a normal proxy does

[PowerPenguin]

How? Privoxy supposedly filters out some stuff w/ web sites, but nothing I can't do with the right firefox plug-ins anyway.

[aries]

How? Privoxy supposedly filters out some stuff w/ web sites, but nothing I can't do with the right firefox plug-ins anyway.

Tor sends you through several proxies every time you exchange data with a site. It's slower but you end up going through a secure chain rather than just one link.

[PowerPenguin]

I know dude I wrote some of the docs! I'm talking about Privoxy vs. Vidalia! 8-)

BTW, I just put my own hidden site up at http://qocmzkmpvssifhni.onion/. If you would be so kind, please check it out and let me know if it works ok. It seems like it's a bit slow, so please verify that and I'll try to tweak it if that's the case. Thanks.

[aries]

I know dude I wrote some of the docs! I'm talking about Privoxy vs. Vidalia! 8-)

BTW, I just put my own hidden site up at http://qocmzkmpvssifhni.onion/. If you would be so kind, please check it out and let me know if it works ok. It seems like it's a bit slow, so please verify that and I'll try to tweak it if that's the case. Thanks.

It loaded fine for me, just very slowly.

About 30 seconds but now that it's loaded the page everything else is loading a bit quicker

[aries]

It was going to take 54 minutes to download a 2.4 megabyte file so I cancelled it but if you tweak the speed I'd love to snag some of those things from it.

[PowerPenguin]

OK, so the rate was like 5kbps/second or something like that? My ISP limits upload speeds to 256kbps, so it shouldn't be that bad. I'll check the docs and/or the Tor IRC channel and see what I can do. If you have a hidden site too, I can check yours for you while I'm at it.

[PowerPenguin]

OK I have a temporary fix, which was to eliminate BandwidthRate and BandwidthBurst by commenting them out (both were previously at 50KB). Ideally, I want to keep the general traffic I/O to 50, but full bandwidth to hidden service users, who need it. Ideas? The people on the IRC channel aren't very friendly/helpful!

[aries]

it was like 1.7kbps

Ill try again

[aries]

It started around 45KBps now it's down to 3... everything is taking a wicked long time to transfer with tor... just the nature of the network I think, or do you know of any way to speed it up? I'm running on pretty much the base configuration.

[aries]

the transfer just crapped out on me

[PowerPenguin]

Damnit. It could be a broken node in your chain who knows. It might take a while for my server info to propagate the directory network (?). If you're reading this "tomorrow", try it again. Otherwise just wait till then and try it at that time. I talked to some developers and they said that hidden services were the #1 bug spot right now, but that it would be looked at soon; however, their highest priority is client-side normal routing type stuff. Have you ever used i2p at all? I tried Freenet a long time ago, but it was complicated and I couldn't ever get it to work. BTW, want to try an experiment, aires? PM me because for this to work, we need a controlled environment where there aren't many if any other people accessing my server, etc. Thanks!