Whitepaper Wednesday 9: Anonymous Mixing Networks and Loopix

Numerous parties in the Bitcoin ecosystem need an anonymous networking layer to keep financial transactions private. This includes MimbleWimble, which requires sender/receiver negotiation of a blinding key, the Lightning/Raiden networks, and social key management schemes like uPort and Vida. These networks are similar to Tor, but add timing delays and decoy traffic. We have invited David Stainton (https://github.com/david415) of the Least Authority (https://leastauthority.com/) project and Tor contributor down to lead a discussion about mixing networks.

There are two pieces of reading for this meetup: Why I'm not an entropist (https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/entropist.pdf) by Paul Syverson, which is a general, non-technical background on anonymity networks. Then we will move on to discuss a very recent amalgam of designs, The Loopix Anonymity System (https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00536). Please read one or both of these papers before the meeting (and probably bring a printout).

Part of my goal with this meeting is to find people interested in creating a specification for a new mixing network with David, as well as people interested in implementing it.

UPDATE 6/6/2017 David sends along the following:

David will give an introduction to mixnets and help answer these questions:

1. what is Tor and what does it do really well?

2. what are some problems with mixnets and why have they NOT been adopted in the past 36 years.

3. what are some things we can learn from the classical packet switching network literature that apply to mixnets.

For topic #2 I think there's a very relevant paper, called: Obstacles to the Adoption of Secure Communication Tools (http://www.jbonneau.com/doc/ASBDNS17-IEEESP-secure_messaging_obstacles.pdf) and one of the authors of that paper has given a decent talk about it as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aNmbWS--io

Afterwards we will head to Westville (http://westvillenyc.com/locations/hudson/) at 333 Hudson for libations.