blind signatures should protect from this. as an analogy, the banks wont be moving your money around directly but rather moving around a locked box full of money that you have given them that only you know the combination to. This way the money that you give to the bank will only be valuable to you and can never be used by the bank.

That's correct.  The bitcoin-denominated tokens issued on OT servers are promises issued by the aforementioned voting pool to redeem for real bitcoins at par.  OT deals with the issue of trust by spreading it out across multiple parties via a multisignature transaction on the blockchain.  What makes me uneasy is there are technical, logistical, and cognitive limits on the total number of parties able to participate in the voting pool, and so the issue of trust ultimately still remains.

Edit: Furthermore, once trust enters the equation, anonymity usually leaves, since most people aren't willing to trust their money to strangers.  Thus, we likely haven't actually attained censorship resistance.

You're preaching to the choir

The tradeoff will be worth it for certain scenarios--currently you already submit much of your personal data to exchange operators, with OT it's possible to provide a level of anonymity that even if government agents manage to obtain the transaction records, they can turn up hardly anything worthwhile.

+1 Very well explained.


Bitcoin is supposed to be a "digital cash". If people are willing to pay a $100 transaction fee to make a transfer, they can just use a wire transfer.

If it truly is win-win then you don't need an artificial limit of 7 transactions per second included in the Bitcoin protocol.

If those merge mined chains, and the off-chain transaction systems such as the ones you develop, really are valuable on their own merits then users will happily adopt them no matter how many transactions per second the Bitcoin network is capable of processing.

Open Transactions is valuable on its own merits, right? It's not that the only way you'll ever get a significant user base is if Bitcoin is artificially limited to a cripplingly low transaction rate, is it?

I think that you miss the point, if you are having small transactions, they SHOULD NOT be audited by everyone in the world (or at least those who use Bitcoin).  The time-importance of small transactions is much lower than of high-powered-money transactions.

For-example, I could make a merge-mined chain that works like Bitcoin, where the value of any coins older 6 weeks is halved. (and forgotten once they get smaller than the smaller unit).  New miners would sell these coins, and people could trade over medium time periods.  (purchasing and selling this temporary currency for bitcoin).  However this is just one option that I made up then.  There is a multitude of possible merge-mined coins that could be developed.

However the key point, is that the whole world should not care about my transaction of going to the corner store and buying a coke.  Only transactions that are significant for everyone should be audited by everyone.  7tps seems like a good rate.


Open Transactions works completely differently to Bitcoin, they are in-fact extremely complementary.  They solve different problems.  Bitcoin solves the 'low-trust, everyone audits, value transfer.'  Open Transaction solves the problem 'anything that is related to something in the world should be able to be traded'.

Not if the lightweight nodes and block header propagation software changes are done.
These are difficult changes, for sure. But if achievable, then all the off-chain, blockchain as backbone solutions become optional. They can succeed on their own merits, not because Bitcoin is crippled to 7tps.

Running 700tps would be prohibitively expensive for anonymous node only (my last post).