Tor network

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Edward Snowden worked at the National Security Agency of the USA and whistleblowed about the rampant unauthorized worldwide spying going on.

People began to realize that "big brother" was already watching over all of us.

Phones are basically tracking devices that can make phone calls. Because even the poorest person has a phone, NSA is able to collected information on where you are, what you do and say, and who you communicate with.

NSA is surveilling everyone in the world that they can track.

The US Office of Naval Intelligence developed Tor for its own protection and for securely transmitting diplomatic traffic for the US State Department.

The US government promotes its use for oppressed populations that they support because the Tor network not only protects the identity of dissenters, it also allows them to reach sites on the internet that are censored and blocked.

Messages from a sender to a receiver on the Tor network are encrypted by using the public key of the receiver to lock messages to make them unreadable to anyone without the receiver's private key. The public key is like a lock that can only be opened by its corresponding private key.

Anonymity loves a crowd, especially when it is diverse. 

Tor network is used by whistleblowers,

criminals, and

activists to protect their privacy, investigative journalists to protect their sources and

the military, police and businesses to protect their communication networks.

It is used by people to allow them to circumvent censorship and/or to voice their opinions anonymously without the fear of reprisals from repressive governments and to have access to censored and blocked sites.

If you want to anonymously carry a secret packet from one place to another without getting caught, you best

zigzag thru a crowd without taking a direct route and leave no trace behind.

You need also to hide the packet so that it cannot be easily found. The very same criteria are needed to remain anonymous on the internet. Fortunately Tor network provides all those criterion.

Tor network protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by a crowd of volunteers all around the world. By using proxies and encryption, it prevents anyone watching your  connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

The software that allows any computer to use the Tor network is freely available. Its open source code ensures that it stays free of any centralized control, free of any back-doors used to compromise the network, and free of any cost to the user. It has no accounts with passwords and user names. It keeps no logs and has neither central repository nor registry of addresses.

Tor encrypts the data, including the destination IP address, multiple times and sends it through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays. Each relay decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal only the next relay in the circuit in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the innermost layer of encryption and sends the original data to its destination without revealing, or even knowing, the source IP address. Because the routing of the communication is concealed at every hop in the Tor circuit, this method eliminates any single point at which the communicating peers can be determined through network surveillance.

Servers configured to receive inbound connections only through Tor are called “hidden services” and allow users to publish web sites and other services without needing to reveal the location of the site. Rather than revealing a hidden server's IP address, and thus its network location, a hidden service is accessed through its "hidden service descriptors". The descriptor changes every 10 minutes and specifies 3 randomly picked volunteer proxy nodes in the Tor network. onion address.

The hidden services "onion addresses" are based on public keys of the hidden servers. The Tor network understands these addresses and can route data to and from hidden services, while preserving the anonymity of both clients and servers. These onion addresses are generated and stored in a onion address database that stores the hidden service descriptors. Other than the onion address database, Tor is decentralized by design.

A hidden service wanting to set up a connection to communicate with another node randomly chooses 3 nodes among the thousands of nodes that volunteer and agree to play the role of proxies.

The nodes are listed by a special node called the directory node. The 3 nodes are called the entry node, the relay node and the exit node. The hidden service exchanges public keys with each of the 3 nodes and messages are repeatedly encrypted as they are sent through the 3 nodes.

Each of the 3 nodes removes a layer of encryption to uncover routing instructions, and sends the message to the next router where this is repeated. This prevents these intermediary nodes from knowing the origin, destination, and contents of the message. The circuit thru the 3 nodes is broken after 10 minutes and a new one is built to thwart any attempts of attack or spying.

The hidden server then publishes a descriptor containing its public key and the addresses of its 3 introduction points and receives an onion address. In effect the hidden server advertises its service and introduction points and its anonymous name it will use for the next 10 minutes.

If a client wants to contact hidden services, it finds the descriptor of the hidden service and the introduction points of the 3 proxies it will use for the next 10 minutes. 

It chooses a randomly picked node in the Tor network and asks it to act as a rendezvous point by telling it a one-time secret. Then it assembles an introduction message that includes the address of the rendezvous point and the one-time secret. 

The client sends this message to entry node for the hidden server and requests that the message be delivered to the hidden server via the relay and exit nodes. The encrypted message from the client to the hidden server is “please meet me at my rendezvous point and identify yourself with my one-time secret”.

The hidden server creates a circuit to the rendezvous point and identifies itself by sending the one-time secret allowing client and hidden service to communicate with each other. The rendezvous point simply relays end-to-end encrypted messages between the client and the hidden server.

The Tor network, with hidden black marketplace services like Silk Road can be combined with the electronic currency called 

which is as anonymous as cash. With this combination, what you buy and who you buy from can be kept private. 

National postal facilities are at present prohibited from opening your letters and parcels that originate within your country. This combination of Tor, Bitcoin and post office privacy allows you to buy goods, whether legal or not, anonymously and have them discretely and securely delivered to your home.

THE END

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Evolution of banks

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The rich had lots of gold and were able to buy with their gold whatever they wanted to buy. 

For example, they used some gold to buy a year supply of bread from the baker. 

The baker then gave a piece of his piece of gold to the miller for a year's supply of flour. 

The miller gave some of his gold to the farmer for a year's supply of wheat. 

The farmer was then able to buy his ploughs, shovels and horseshoes needed for his farming from the blacksmith. 

Eventually the miner got some of this gold for selling the iron ore that he mined. 

With this gold, the baker, miller, farmer, blacksmith and miner were all able to pay the carpenters for building their houses and 

the shoe makers and tailors for making their shoes and clothes. Carpenters, shoemakers and tailors were also able to pay the tanners, weavers and lumberjacks for leather, cloth and wood they needed to make their products. 

Most of the gold eventually returned back to the rich in the form of taxes that were paid by everyone for paying soldiers to ensure that the economy ran smoothly and securely. 

In order to protect gold from being stolen, the rich paid people called "bankers" to store it for them. The bankers felt good about what they were doing. They were helping circulate wealth from where it was, from the rich, to where it needed to be, to the poor. 

The bankers gave out receipts that were used by the rich to retrieve their gold whenever they needed some for buying something. Some rich people started to pay for the things that they bought with their receipts to make it more convenient for all concerned. People adopted the idea of using these receipts to buy things with instead of using the actual gold. 

The banks, seeing that their receipts moved around much more and easier than the gold they were guarding, they started to print more receipts for gold than they had gold. They put pictures of their kings on these receipts and called them "money". The kings liked this idea very much and so did the banks. 

The banksters eventually got out of the business of storing gold and got into the business of printing money. They realized that with money they can enslave people easier than with whips and chains.

They build schools to indoctrinate children. They were put in "kindergartens" at a very early age to be cultivated and prepared for schools for the next 13 years to be trained as obedient and useful slaves. The rich used mass media to brainwash the slaves to be complacent. Hundreds of entertainment channels were made freely available for them to passively watch. 

• They built the slaves factories to work in and to earn money to put into the banks for the rich to borrow. 
• They built the slaves trains and gave them work to dig coal mines to make the trains run and to carry them to new lands to exploit. 
• They built the slaves roads and sold them cars and gave them work to dig oil mines to make their cars run. 

                          

And the slaves rejoiced and felt free as they drove around and crashed into each other killing and injuring themselves. 

Once they had the people enslaved, the bansters financed "politicians" that the slaves elected, believing that the politicians would represent their interests. 

They got the military industrial complex and the politicians together, and brainwashed the people to chose security over freedom. Then they developed technologies that were tested out in war.

Great profits were made in selling weapons to destroy, and equipment and materials to rebuild. The thankful survivors were then given the technologies developed for the wars. In time the people forgot and began to feel that the war was all worth it.

To increase profits, the banksters started to gamble with money.  Whenever they made bad speculative investments and ended up losing their investments, they convinced the governments that they were too important to be allowed to fail and got bailed out. The governments just asked the banks to print more and more money to pay for their ever increasing debts. The governments fell deeper and deeper in debt to the banksters. In time the governments became as well enslaved to the banks.  

Then fortunately some very clever slaves devised a system of finance that did not need banks and their banksters at all. They used theories of mathematics dealing with cryptology that allowed numbers to be coded in such a way as to make it impossible to break the code and falsify. 

They used the computer technology along with the internet that allowed world-wide communications possible between any computers. They used peer to peer technology that allowed all computers to become bookkeepers of money transactions so that in the end no one bookkeeper was able to falsify the books. Using mathematics, computers and the internet, they wrote a protocol for decentralized digital money to be transferred as easily as messages in an email. 

Just like email revolutionized the sending and receiving of mail to make it easy, fast, secure and cheap, the new protocol they called "Bitcoin" revolutionized the sending and receiving of money to make it easy, fast, secure and cheap. This allowed people to become their own banks. The slaves were finally freed from their dependence on banks and the banksters. 

THE END

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Evolution of money

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5,000 years ago, communities were small in size. They were very far apart and they had very few people in them. If you needed to trade anything you had for something you wanted, you had to find people in your community who had what you wanted and wanted what you had. 

There were no constraints in what you used to barter with. 

As the communities grew in size, in numbers and in population, bartering got easier. 

You could trade with people even if they did not want or need what you had to trade with. All you had to do was convince them that there were many other people who would eventually want or need what you had, as long as it could be stored without going bad and losing its value and it could be easily transported to the other communities which could be far away. 

Any commodity that was in high demand, like sea shells, herbs and salt, were used to barter with. 

Eventually gold, despite its many disadvantages, became the commodity of choice for bartering. Gold was difficult to divide into very small pieces needed to buy inexpensive items with. It was easy to cheat because the scales used to weigh the small pieces of gold were much too unreliable and inaccurate. It was also insecure because it was too easy to steal. 

Some very clever people called kings realized that gold was very soft and they could cut out small round pieces and stamp their head on it and use it as a barter. 

Once gold items became expensive, some very clever people called bankers realized that they could offer to securely store them for the people and at the same time print receipts for them guaranteeing that they could be redeemed on demand at any time by anyone. People began to use these receipts as a medium of bartering instead of using actual gold items. The receipts became known as "money".

As bankers were very beneficial to society allowing them to conveniently, easily, securely and efficiently trade, people developed a trust and respect for them. Bankers abused this trust and exploited this respect by printing receipts for gold that they did not actually have. They evolved from helping society to helping themselves. 

Some used tally sticks instead of paper receipts to fight against counterfeiting. Sticks were engraved with notches and split in half along their grain to make it impossible to counterfeit. They stored the halves of the split Talley sticks and allowed the other halves to be circulated and used as money. All that was necessary was to trust the person from whom you got your tally stick that they themselves got it from a trusted person and that the sticks had corresponding matching halves as proof that they were not counterfeited. 

The bankers eventually got so greedy that they stopped storing gold and concentrated on the much more lucrative business of storing and printing receipts based on trust only. 

They called their new money "fiat money" and printed as much of it as was needed for trade. Bankers became banksters. 

Because they printed more fiat money than was needed for trade, they used their newly acquired power and their resulting corruption to promote expensive wars that used this excess money to destroy entire cities and then to rebuild them. The banksters eventually got so wealthy and powerful that they began to be regarded as not only too big to fail, but also too big to nail and jail. 

Technology eventually developed to a point where "virtual reality" started to replace reality itself. The world shrank and once more became like the small communities found 5,000 years ago. 

Some very clever people called mathematicians and computer programmers realized that they could exploit the power of the worldwide network of computers called the "internet" to invent a new form of virtual money called "Bitcoin" that had all the necessary attributes that ideal money must have. 

It was impossible to counterfeit and was easy to store and transport securely for as long and as far as needed; anywhere at any time to anyone. It was easy to divide in as small amounts as needed. It allowed anyone to be a bookkeeper to record all Bitcoin transactions. The ledger of all transactions was kept by so many volunteer bookkeepers that it became impossible for any one bookkeeper to falsify it. The amount of Bitcoin issued was defined by a protocol that could not be changed by greedy banksters. For the first time, the control of the people's money was decentralized and freed from the control of the greedy and corrupt banksters. 

The people were finally able to be their own banks and recaptured the control of bartering that they had 5,000 years ago. They bartered with Bitcoin.

THE END

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