I created this post in order to express my opinion, about the additions of some features in BitShares. I know that a lot of people won’t like what I’ll say, but I think that adding the stealth feature on BitShares is a very bad idea. Same goes for the on ‘’chain backups’’ and sidechains.
As some well-known community members pointed out, stealth has a few problems. The main one is the metadata. Shadowcash’s chain was denonymized because they hadn’t applied something appropriately. Dash and Shadowcash sold and are still selling fake promises that their finances are private. However in the near future even a small adversary will be able to analyse their chain. Is this a thing that the BitShares community wants to do? Sell fake promises to raise the market cap? NXT added CoinShuffle many months ago and nothing really changed. It isn’t just the damage that will be done by all the imminent problems, but also in terms of labor costs etc.
There are so many more things that will have to be done to the GUI and the chances of people losing funds is huge. Think of the efforts svk will have to put in making everything bug free. Also the backup feature as good as it might seem, it sounds very dangerous to me. New users will be storing online backups with poor passwords which will be easily cracked.
Want anonymity? Wash your coins appropriately before buying BitShares and spread them into random accounts and use TOR to stay anonymous.
Want a secure backup of your files? Try Sia or Storj after their full release, or another encrypted provider. The whole point of the blockchain is that you hold your private keys and not anybody else.
Also don’t forget about the fact that if you hide your balance you won’t be able to vote afterwards. That is quite worrying especially if you wanna hide a big amount. At least Yunbi won’t be hiding it’s balance, so it will be a big blow to how people receive funding.
Finally I wanted to add a side note on sidechains. Honestly that would be even worse than adding stealth. Doom scenario for sidechains : Bitcoins worth 2M USD are held by the Bitshares Blockchain.
- All witnesses collude to steal all coins or all witnesses are hacked and have no control, 2. Someone takes control over big proxies or stakes and votes witnesses his/her own (Hacking proxies or exchanges) 3. Big proxies/holders/exchanges collude to steal funds
Bytemaster said that it wouldn’t make sense for someone do so. But did he consider the fact that BitShares are a lot less liquid that Bitcoin? Even if Bitshares were worth 20M USD the fact that they are illiquid makes them worth a lot less than they actually are.
For example if someone controls a big stake, he can then open a big short position on Bitshares, take all Bitcoins and then sell the rest of the shares if he managed to steal any. After the hack there will be a panic sell of BitShares, not of Bitcoins though. 2M USD worth of Bitcoin’s can be hacked and nobody cares. If 2M USD of BitShares were hacked, the panic would be over the roof and the price of BitShares below the floor. His short position would make him huge profits, plus he could make the price go down even more by selling his shares. Currently someone needs to either control all the voting shares (about ¼ of the total supply) or 1/3 to ½ of the non voting BitShares.
In conclusion I would like to point that all these features as good as might seem, are very dangerous. The BitShares community should focus on more practical stuff, especially in the following :
Rate limited fees, Autobridging, Maker/Taker, Negative Fees, Smartcoin Park rates, Bond Market, MetaTrader Integration, Trading Bots. All these would add a lot of potential and value to BitShares, they don’t have any hidden dangers for the BitShares platform and their cost is relatively low. At current rates they could be done in 1 year.
PS I do want privacy, but stealth isn’t the answer. I know a lot of time has been spent on this feature, but we need to move forward without it.