ChainAnchor project was criticized by Bitcoin developers, MIT responded that the project has nothing to do with Bitcoin

A blockchain project developed by MIT researchers was harshly criticized this week by Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, although the authenticity of the claims has been denied by participants in the project and the incident has attracted a lot of attention within the Bitcoin community.

It happened on April 21, when Peter Todd published an article on his personal blog about a “leaked manuscript” from the MIT scientific research project ChainAnchor.

In the blog post, Todd condemned the project for what he concluded was a plan to “bribe” bitcoin miners by incentivizing those entities not to process transactions, making the participants unidentifiable.

“We’re talking about miners being coerced into only processing transactions that are already regulated,” Todd told CoinDesk.

However, these comments have also sparked criticism of MIT from members of the Bitcoin community, with some users even trying to encourage miners to ensure that they would not support this type of scheme.

MIT responded to the criticism in a statement today and publicly criticized the blog post for lacking factual basis.

An MIT spokesperson said:

“First, I’m glad people are interested in the project we’re working on. We published it on a public website a month ago and keep it updated on www.mit-trust.org, but the ChainAnchor project is not relevant to the discussion of Bitcoin at all.”

The university provided a link to the ChainAnchor project and an updated white paper dated April 17. In contrast, Todd’s slides and images were dated in February, and while they were similar to the MIT version, there were some major changes.

For example, the ChainAnchor paper positions the project as addressing “the problem of identity and access control in a shared permissioned ledger .”

In addition, the paper shows that although the system was inspired by Bitcoin, it does not run on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Todd's Criticism

The release of the white paper appears to call into question elements of Todd’s criticism, as the project is intended to be used on a public blockchain and is associated with a public mining entity in Todd’s article.

“When you anticipate anti-money laundering (AML) regulation, there is not a good technical reason to put regulated transactions on the bitcoin network,” he told reporters.

He went on to point out that even if the system is intended for a private network, the dangers of such an architecture potentially being used on a public blockchain like Bitcoin are still worth considering.

“It’s a threat worth thinking about. I would probably imagine that if you had some large exchanges sign up to the project, it could cause serious problems,” he said.

He also added:

“If the project doesn’t mention Bitcoin, I’m not going to talk about it.”

MIT's response

As for MIT, the university reiterated its support for the bitcoin network, but the school also said that the nature of ChainAnchor is similar to that of consortiums such as R3 , and that such permissioned blockchain systems may require new ways to establish trust.

“We also research other types of blockchains, including permissioned blockchains, which are what many mainstream companies are implementing,” the university said.

Such a system could serve as a way to make permissioned blockchains more compatible with anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) regulations, the spokesperson said.

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/mit-dismisses-bitcoin-developer-criticism-project-proposal/
By Pete Rizzo
Translation: Overnight porridge
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/mit-chainanchor ‎)