Won't users have to be cautious about who they are giving telepods to and who they are accepting telepods from, especially with BTC? If someone is careless and ends up getting their transporter linked to something unlawful (money laundering or something), and someone else received & deposits a telepod that originated from that transporter because the transporter they normally use got that telepod from Instantdex, then they would be linked the unlawful originator. I only skimmed over the the privacy implementations in the paper so far so I'm not actually sure if the sender and final receiver (if they withdraw to an address that can be linked to them) are associated in the chain. I'm not sure if this is a real issue because the same thing could happen with regular addresses, but it would sort of blacklist that telepod since no one would want to be linked to the originator.
certainly you need to be careful of who you transact with. Teleport does not remove the need for common sense. However, the vulnerable points are the creator and extractor, these two are linked to each other through a chain of publicly recorded clonings. However there is extreme doubt as to who controlled the cloning, so unless you are the creator or extractor, you wont have to worry too much about being linked to anything, as the question of whether you even participated in any teleports would be in doubt. Note that the extractor can be the creator, in which case the only person linked is the person to himself.
I don't know much about cryptography but is there any worry in the future about broadcasting encrypted telepods to everybody? If someone could crack it (if possible in the future) would they be able to clone and steal the telepod?
yes there is a risk that somebody with an advanced Quantum computer from the future and an equally advanced crypto cracking algo will steal the broadcasted telepods. Two defenses. Limit the broadcasting and only use the point to point onion routing. Unless you get unlucky and route through the guy with the computer from the future, you are ok. Secondly, in most scenarios, BTC will have the most lucractive amounts to crack and anybody with such advanced tech would be more likely to go after satoshi's million BTC, than your telepod, so as soon as the news breaks that Quantum Computers are cracking encryption, we need to go to plan B.
Who actually has ownership of a telepod in a trusted transaction/when a telepod is sent but not instantly cloned? I think the paper says the sender can delete it but the receiver can still clone it, so is it just whoever acts first, even with multiple people? This isn't an issue or anything because they are have to be trusting i'm just curious
The trust relationship transfers ownership the moment of acceptance and the sender should be scrubbing "spent" telepods. In trusted teleports, we leave the punishments to a higher authority that the two parties are both listening to, eg. in a corporation, the finance group, in a family, the scarier parent, etc.
Do you choose if you are sending a trusted/untrusted teleport beforehand so the receiver knows if the telepod has to be cloned immediately?
Trust is at the discretion of the receiver and since in either case the sender will mark the telepod as spent, the only difference is that the sender wont bother waiting for blockchain confirmation, as it wont happen until at least the next transfer.
these are great questions! it shows you are getting to the understanding of Teleport. At first sounds simple, then becomes confusing, then almost simple, but always some extra twists to prevent the feeling of full understanding. I think this is due to knowing that you cant know and this is not normal in crypto or computers or finance.
The privacy level has quite good properties, especially since it increases with overall activity (unique among all anon solutions), but each tx is still done the same. Add in M of N and it eliminates packet sniffers, especially due to the probabilistic routing and random onion layers. I was thinking of randomizing M of N for each telepod, but too messy and so each teleport will use the same M of N for all the telepods of the total transaction. Just when you think it cant get any better, you add in the trusted teleport path, which is basically a wild card. Anything can happen via even the smallest trusted teleport paths. There is really no way (short of actual physical surveillance and taking videos of you on your computer!) to know where the telepods are going via trusted teleport as M of N sends them in a random patter across the network, it bounces around and ends up at the destination (all protected by layers of encryption) and then there is NO cloning event, so the statistical analysis has no data to correlate. Like there not being a permanent blockchain that is vulnerable to future computers, in this case there is no blockchain event. Of course the possibility of double spending is there, and this actually brings to doubt if you really sent a payment or not, even if it was found out!
Does receiving a telepod and not cloning it mean you got payment? Plausible deniability kicks in. where is the money? it is technically in both sender and receiver's, so it is split. Now it can spread from the receiver to others, but maybe it is split into smaller pieces, so the whole things gets very fuzzy very quickly.
I would hate to be the guy tasked with trying to crack Teleport, I bet he will end up hating me
James
