Namecoin Forum

How anonymous it is depends upon how skilled the user is at opsec.

Users can make it more difficult to identify themselves but there will always be a trail in the blockchain that ultimately can attach a person to the coins spent.

It is "anonymous enough" for my use, and I suspect the same is true for most people.

Sudoquai,

Bitcoin is not anonymous, therefore Namecoin, which is based on Bitcoin is also not anonymous. As others pointed out, in addition to the blockchain data, there are also IP/DNS and ICANN domain registration details that could potentially be used to link groups of Namecoin addresses. All experts agree on this, and we have explained this to you explicitly several times. Just because you want something to be true doesn't make it so.

I once successfully tracked someone down by noticing that that the address I was interested in was solely funded by a single address which was in turn primarily funded by mining pool rewards. This person had an email address with the pool. I ended up with his real name and address. I will not elaborate further on the details here, so you'll have to take my word for it.

There have been people who have come on IRC over Tor to ask for help. I'll often look at the blockchain for recent activity, and due to low transaction volume I find out which name is theirs, as can anyone else sitting idle on IRC. I guarantee you there loggers there run by intelligence agencies.

Please freeze this thread. The two experts on this subject JeremyRand (who handles Tor integration) and Ryan (who works with fucking Kaminsky) have already weighed in on this and the answer is a definitive no.

Jeremy had an 1:1 encounter with someone who lived in a country with a repressive regime who wanted to use Namecoin. This use case must be our definition of anonymous because people's lives are at stake. Tor devs have given talks in which they had users report about people using non-Tor anonymity solutions who died because they oversold their anonymity features.

Ryan has personally deanonymized a scammer based on his public records and Jeremy has found proxy leaks in Namecoin. What more do you need to answer this question?

indolering wrote:Please freeze this thread. The two experts on this subject JeremyRand (who handles Tor integration) and Ryan (who works with fucking Kaminsky) have already weighed in on this and the answer is a definitive no.

Indo, while I agree that Namecoin is not anonymous and should not be marketed as such, please note that IMHO "because two supposedly experts say so" is not a valid reason to shut off discussions. This is not in the name of free speech and an open community, which Namecoin is all about (in my opinion at least). The points about putting people in danger are valid, but I don't think that free discussions in this thread are a particular danger to them - aggressive marketing is the most dangerous thing.

EDIT: Just to make this clear - I don't doubt the expertise of Jeremy or Ryan on this. But I also believe that just saying "because they say so and they should know" is not a valid reason to force-close a free discussion.

indolering wrote:Ryan has personally deanonymized a scammer based on his public records and Jeremy has found proxy leaks in Namecoin. What more do you need to answer this question?

You have mentioned that already several times - I probably missed it. I'm interested in that - can you please point me to the commit fixing the leak?

domob wrote:

indolering wrote:Please freeze this thread. The two experts on this subject JeremyRand (who handles Tor integration) and Ryan (who works with fucking Kaminsky) have already weighed in on this and the answer is a definitive no.

Indo, while I agree that Namecoin is not anonymous and should not be marketed as such, please note that IMHO "because two supposedly experts say so" is not a valid reason to shut off discussions. This is not in the name of free speech and an open community, which Namecoin is all about (in my opinion at least). The points about putting people in danger are valid, but I don't think that free discussions in this thread are a particular danger to them - aggressive marketing is the most dangerous thing.

EDIT: Just to make this clear - I don't doubt the expertise of Jeremy or Ryan on this. But I also believe that just saying "because they say so and they should know" is not a valid reason to force-close a free discussion.

this

indolering wrote:Ryan has personally deanonymized a scammer based on his public records and Jeremy has found proxy leaks in Namecoin. What more do you need to answer this question?

You have mentioned that already several times - I probably missed it. I'm interested in that - can you please point me to the commit fixing the leak?

+?

I would like to believe in Free Speech to be true.

domob wrote:

indolering wrote:Please freeze this thread. The two experts on this subject JeremyRand (who handles Tor integration) and Ryan (who works with fucking Kaminsky) have already weighed in on this and the answer is a definitive no.

Indo, while I agree that Namecoin is not anonymous and should not be marketed as such, please note that IMHO "because two supposedly experts say so" is not a valid reason to shut off discussions. This is not in the name of free speech and an open community, which Namecoin is all about (in my opinion at least). The points about putting people in danger are valid, but I don't think that free discussions in this thread are a particular danger to them - aggressive marketing is the most dangerous thing.

EDIT: Just to make this clear - I don't doubt the expertise of Jeremy or Ryan on this. But I also believe that just saying "because they say so and they should know" is not a valid reason to force-close a free discussion.

indolering wrote:Ryan has personally deanonymized a scammer based on his public records and Jeremy has found proxy leaks in Namecoin. What more do you need to answer this question?

You have mentioned that already several times - I probably missed it. I'm interested in that - can you please point me to the commit fixing the leak?

There was a bug in Namecoin-Qt where it wouldn't properly save the proxy settings between sessions, so users would think the proxy was enabled when it wasn't. I don't recall exactly when it was fixed. To my knowledge, that particular bug didn't affect namecoind.

I have deanonymized a second person now, fwiw. The way Namecoin constructs transactions make it really easy.