Bitcoin Forum

Disclosure: I have a stake in Monero, both in the community and financially.  Despite that, I attempt to impartially start this topic of debate between these two privacy-centric currencies. 
 

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I am interested in anonymous cryptocurrencies, and Monero and Shadowcash both catch my eye (as well as BoolBerry, luv u 2).  Monero we have probably heard a lot about in recent threads, but I will recap some basic stats of both currencies.  I present ShadowCash first as a gesture of good will:

https://i.imgur.com/0nthP9z.png 
 
And Monero's specifications: 
 
https://i.imgur.com/0TXDgMe.png
 

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I am not sure the world is big enough for two totally successful anonymous cryptocurrencies.  Each new ultra-successful crypto will present something fundamentally new and valuable to civilization.  That is the only way they will rise to dominance.  We saw this with Bitcoin already, and I humbly submit (as my personal opinion) that a truly anonymous cryptocurrency will be the next crypto to break and hold the $1-billion dollar marketcap with significant volume. 
 
Of these two, which one has the superior technology, better distribution scheme, fairest launch, and most potential going forward?  I will not be commenting on this thread with my opinions because I have bias and would like to hear some opinions from both sides.  I'm hoping the ShadowCash supporters and developers will take the time to come and discuss their currency with us, and we can have some of the long-time Monero supporters and devs comment as well.

SDC>XMR

\thread

 
 
Please elaborate.

I don't know about the SDC launch, I wasn't there.

The SDC distribution process of 100% of the supply going out in two weeks is terrible.

The Monero launch was fair, and the distribution process of 85% of the base supply going out in 4 years, with a 0.3 XMR (0.9%) disinflationary perpetual reward after about 8 years is a bit fast, but defensible.

Technology-wise they are somewhat comparable as the SDC anonymity scheme is based heavily on cryptonote. The SDC code base is largely based on Bitcoin, via Blackcoin or some other path of forking (I'm not sure of the details), so part of it is more mature than Monero, although the anon part is newly implemented and probably less mature.

The cryptonote alleged improvements on Bitcoin that aren't anon-related such as dynamic blocks sizes are not present in SDC, so that would be a point for Monero if you think those are good.

That SDC has an integrated non-anon portion of the chain could be viewed as a privacy negative since it will pull some of the transactions out of the anonymity set. Monero is going in the other direction pushing all transactions into the anonymity set, although that isn't implemented yet, so Monero also has a non-anon portion of its chain currently.

EDIT: I agree with fluffypony's later point that proof of stake is cryptographically unproven and likely unsound and unfixable.

Where do I begin?

lets see...SDC has been increasing in price constantly overtime while XMR is declining since it was first launched.

SDC has been on first page of trex for as long as I can remember while XMR doesn't want to leave last page

SDC folks don't spam altcoin discussion section while XMR is creating thread in hourly basis and go as far as telling me that it's going to beat BTC (that's a big turn off since I'm early adopter of BTC and honestly don't see comparison)

that's all.

That is false, both have fluctuated up and down. SDC traded early at a peak 38K sat, traded several months later at 15K, had a recent high of about 80K, and is now about about 55K.

Likewise XMR traded early at a peak of 1m sats, for a long time at around 100K, peaked back at 400K and is now around 200K


SDC main exchange is Bittrex, XMR main exchange is Polo. Their relative positions are reversed on the other exchange.

Having met Ryno (sdcdev) and had lunch with him, I can honestly say that he struck me as being a decent guy. 10/10 would have lunch with again.

I guess my three concerns with ShadowCash, in order of importance, are:

1. Proof-of-Stake is cryptographically unsound, in the long run. I know this is a hotly contested topic, and I don't want to flog a proverbial dead horse. Nonetheless, I have seen no cryptographic proofs (or assumptions under cryptographic models) to convince me that Proof-of-Stake is secure.

2. Being forked from Bitcoin is a blessing and a curse. Merging bug and security fixes from upstream Bitcoin (which will remain the target of more powerful proving and attack than any altcoin for the foreseeable future) is great, but it is going to be progressively more difficult to do so. The risk is exceedingly great that (as has just happened over the last few days) Bitcoin will reveal a security hole, and a cryptocurrency forked from it will not have implemented the fix.

3. Bitcoin's use of secp256k1 is...ok, but given that SafeCurves (http://safecurves.cr.yp.to) (Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange) view secp256k1 as unsafe, the use of the same curve is a little bit of a risk (Monero uses Curve25519).

XMR was at 0.004 now (launch) now it's at 0.0019

that's not fluctuation rather free fall

SDC was at 0.00026 (launch) now it's at 0.00058

good times.


XMR seems to be struggling a lot lately. not sure if it's even a good comparison to be honest since SDC has made its name through constant hard work and constant increase in price with little fluctuation...increasing investors while gaining popularity and giving confidence to people so they can hold it for long term without confusion or doubt.

in fact I'm extremely surprise to see it at this price it should be at least 200k and that is still cheap imho.

No, it was at 188K (not 400K, although it did get added to Poloniex at 346K EDIT: about 100k -- see below) when it was first listed on Bittrex, and that is not the same as launch. It traded as OTC and on the small cryptonote.to exchange for a while before polo. The prices for that (starting at 50K and as low as 20K) can be seen here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=578192.0

As I said, both coins had ups and downs. If you bought SDC at 38K early on, you're up a little now, but you had some tough times when it languished at around 15-20K for quite a while.

Also, the histories are not really comparable because when XMR traded at 50k or 20k or 188k or 346K, the nature of mining and gradual distribution is such that there were very few coins even in existence at the time. So very few of the coins in todays investors' holdings could possibly have traded at those prices, it is literally impossible. The majority of currently-outstanding coins were probably mined when prices were around 100k-200k, and have only ever traded in the range of 100k-400k, although someone could actually calculate that I suppose.

I've always viewed shadowcash as a scam. Not only that but it's complete bloatware and the coding is corrupted. That alone makes me question it's security.

Monero (XMR) is flawless in every sense, and fully anonymous... Everyone loves monero, especially the deepwebs.

I'm nearly 100% certain I made the first sale on Polo; here is my trading history for part of that day. After the typical high orders of new markets, prices were just above 0.001. I was extremely surprised when they rose so much over the coming weeks, as they'd been trading in that lower range for a while on the other exchange.

https://i.imgur.com/4Klu1TQ.png

Can we keep this discussion/debate technical? Market prices should be irrelevant.

BooBerry is best, Count Chocula and Franken Berry can suck it

It is odd that Polo's "all time" chart shows a starting price of 346k but your numbers are more in line with what Bittrex shows at about the same time period, so it makes sense.

I have nothing against BBR but this is off topic. Please don't spam.

1. Developers are capable of changing to PoW if a vulnerability in PoSv2 presents itself, yes?

2. Is this in regards to the vulnerability that BIP66 fixed w/ DER signatures?

3. Gonna check this out.

Anyone have any opinions on the anonymous tokens that Shadowcash uses to destroy and mint new coins and conduct ring signature transactions?

Not really. It is a huge change to the social contract to do that. The overall community could do it with sufficient consensus, but good luck.


The anonymous tokens are just coins. They have two different signature styles on the blockchain, Bitcoin-style and Cryptonote-style. The latter are what they call tokens.

No, not without ruining their social contract and destroying any trust in the cryptocurrency's emission.


'Twas just a recent example, coming off the back of Namecoin having to deal with it.

smooth I am quoting the OP just to prove I am not spamming. americanpegasus mentioned boolberry by name

Does Monero intend to develop an i2p market as well? I'm not familiar with the plans. If it intends to solely cater to the TOR-based DNMs, well, ok... TOR is not what it used to be thanks to the NSA, and centralized markets are going to be a dying breed, thanks to exit scams, and the NSA.

Having a fully integrated system is one of the major reasons the shadow project could be so revolutionary, not just in the crypto space. Convenience carries a major value and decreases the barriers to entry=mass market adoption. 

Yes it is


- Switching to PoW is possible as (1) a hybrid PoS/PoW or (2) straight PoW if the security of PoS was indeed an issue.
- If SDC moved to PoW they'd have to increase money supply and (like mentioned above) the social contract and community trust will be greatly impacted even if successful.
- Other coin projects have gone from PoW to PoS, nobody has gone from PoS to PoW.

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Other thoughts:
- I agree 100% XMR distribution is better than SDC. Shadow is very top heavy 1 year into the project.
- Both Dev teams have at least one in-house cryptographer.
- Shadow is currently testing a new ring-sig algo that makes it ~40% leaner
- Monero doesn't have a core GUI but has at least 5 independent wallet GUIs.
- Shadow has a core GUI that also has encrypted chat built in (+ ultimately a marketplace)

Debatable topic: Monero's single token (100% private) system to Shadow's dual token (public & 100% private) system.
- Which is better and do you really need 2 coins to do what 1 can do flawlessly?

It isn't on our project agenda, but you should keep in mind that the nature of Monero is that a lot of projects get done by third parties (this is not just a bold theory but is already reality with projects like xmr.to, moneroaddress.com, monerowallet.com, etc.), so someone else may well do one.

IMO POS on mobile devices ftw. Shit will get more efficient. Add a marketplace and boom full economic solution. I think most of the world is still waiting for someone to actually audit the process of sdc>sdt and whether that transition is definitively needed for true zk anon. But I am a fan of SDC because of regular dev updates and an obvious progression in development so I am biased. But you do get the same from all these monero devs that are present in this thread.

I like Monero too. I have held some but I did not see a direction for application IRL so I bailed. I think that, personally, what it boils down to for me is this; "where are things going?". I think SDC is on the right track and will fill an AIO gap that should push crazy volume.  But that assumes it launches the marketplace and audit. Without those two things SDC is just like Monero... A good coin without a target audience except for dm. Everyone is waiting so a thread like this is really premature unless it solely focuses on the sdc>sdt transition to be a thread of substance instead of dev fud. Someone should like... audit them both or something instead of saying what their opinion is. This is very easy to break down key points.

Either a coin is capable of zk-anon or it is not.
Either a coin has real world application or it does not.
Either a coin is capable of scaling with technology and social awareness in an efficient way or it does not.

both are shit coins and both bagholders are going mental meltdowns

The most efficient thing is a fully centralised banking system.

Everyone using cryptocurrencies (at this stage of the game) should reallyyyyyy understand that "efficient" does not correlate with "secure", "trustless", "cryptographically secure", or "decentralised". It saddens me that proponents of Proof-of-Stake systems are incapable of understanding how much risk they're offloading on to users, the very same users that are trusting the system to look after so much of their wealth.


I think most of the world has no idea what most of those words mean, and don't care about any of this;)


You sound like someone selling Network21 or Amway.

Bitcoin is doing just fine, in spite of it not having a "real world use" or "industrial use-case" or whatever the hipsters are blaming nowadays. Instead of looking for a killer application to "push crazy volume" (a pump-and-dump term if I ever saw one), I think the focus should be on creating a truly fungible cryptocurrency that defends and aggressively protects user's rights and privacy.

Can you explain in terms a non coder can understand why POS is without doubt far more risky than pow. I would really like to know why ?  This argument seems to have been going every since ppc came along.

Some devs of some pretty important coins seem to refute this claim.

Is there some chart showing the possible attack vectors for each and the resulting outcome and damage.

POS+POW was thought to be more risky thann just POS.

There is really only one "important" coin and that's Bitcoin, maybe. It has something like 95% market cap share (though it only a minuscule near-zero market cap share compared to fiat banking). Its developers have certainly not refuted the claim that PoS is a sham when it comes to any sort of real long-term decentralized security.

The rest are long-shot attempts to become important, with varying degrees of scamminess and developers who are varying degrees of full of shit in promoting their coin/agenda/sham. That certainly includes both of the coins being discussed here.

1 reason. Why I like ShadowCash and respect it.


http://aboutshadow.com/index.php/bug-and-bounty-program

Important in terms of alt coins i should have said.

So POS is a sham? it's as clear cut as that? can you explain why?  does it not help mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of POW only?

Why are coins like PPC and blackcoin etc not attacked more regularly? or will it be more of a long term issue they are facing?

You are talking about complex systems with complex analysis. This is complicated by the fact that every PoS system is slightly different and PoS supporters can, and do, make subtle changes to their systems when presented with flaws, or order to "fix" the flaws. In formal and security analysis, any change, however subtle, means the analysis needs to be completely redone. Obviously you can see how this might make it infeasible to keep up with every new variation and show how each and every one of them are broken in specific detail.

Nevertheless it is possible to analyze these systems in broad terms and reach conclusions in terms of general principles, such as needing to consume some external resource (i.e. proof of "work", broadly) in order to reach a decentralized consensus.

This is explained by a Bitcoin developer here:

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf

"We showed that by depending only on resources within the system, proof of stake cannot be used to form a distributed consensus, since it depends on the very history it is trying to form to enforce loss of value"

What happens to PoW-based coins that one day reach a point where it is no longer profitable for miners to continue to mine due to the required resources? Could very well be the case with LTC at some point for example (unless I am mistaken).

Also, you have some groups like 21e6 who are pushing the limits of computing for mining purposes (the ASIC manufacturer deal), just a handful of these types and you would have 3-4 individual "groups" that control 90% of the mining power of the market -- How is that good for a system that is intended for and relies on decentralization?

Just curious.

You raise real questions and indeed PoW may fail. That doesn't make PoS a success, it just makes it the other fail.

Exactly! pow is going to get to the point where people don't even want to mess around with it because they would rather have a wallet staking built into their glasses or some shit (future be crazy).

And damn you flufy, amway is a straight up ponzi scheme and I am nowhere near a peddler nor am I a thief. I usually try to warn people against scams. This whole entire thread is basically you and smooth shitting on SDC from afar with no real data to back what you think your opinions might probably be. Of course you two are partial to your own coin. And I don't give a shit about BTC as I am sure most of the people reading this feel the same way. I was not talking about BTC real world use, I was talking about Monero and how Monero has no direction in terms of where it wants to be in a year and how it wants to be used. SDC's plans are clear cut... was my point. WHAT IS MONERO's plans to push volume?

There is no proof that POW is superior to POS. If there was then people wouldnt use adjectives like "I think" and "probably". Hybrid POW launch and POS to sustain the network for the fucking win.

Also, I have an open mind and will throw money at Monero if you guys can tell me where you will be in a year and why you think POS is teh suck. But if you respond with "just cuz" like you have been, then you wont get a dime.

We have zero plans to "push" volume, although some in the community might do so. For example there is someone running around trying to actively promote XMR to China investors now. I wish him the best.

But for the project itself to push anything like that is antithetical to our whole approach, which basically comes down to building and supporting the code and the community and then getting out of the way.

You need to find a target market for your crypto imo. That is what so many people have realized over the past 2 years. PPC is a good example of that. You as a dev could program gold but who would know if you didn't tell them. The Satoshi effect can only work once. I respect your opinion to create and let people decide but that only goes so far.

Really what we need is someone that isn't scared of having their life ripped apart stand up publicly for an anon crypto. Someone with gumption and intelligence. Not a team that sits back and hopes for the best. IMO noone is covering that base right now and it's about to get stolen by eth and no one wants that.

It sounds like the monero devs are just having fun coding, building a strong piece of software and increasing their professional portfolios. It's pretty admirable: coding to code. I like to believe the SDC devs are doing the same. Ryno and TV aren't funded and have no sponsorships.

Totally admirable.  But it is also a non-sequitur for this convo.

Completely relevant if their motivation is putting out a solid product instead of making a quick dollar.

In the title of the thread it says unbiased (which is odd because most of the posts are from monero devs) should negate any opinion based arguments as well as intentions.

I think the shadow devs are too busy working to be spending time browsing btt. Every minute counts. Its an arms race at the end of the day, whether people will admit it or not. 

Monero counters this by having a minimum block reward (ie. it is permanently disinflationary), so there will be no reliance on fees. I would imagine that, in the face of global adoption, the hashrate will tend towards some technological ceiling (let's call that supply) with the equlibrium being curbed by "mining profit" incentives (let's call that demand). General mining decline is staved off by Monero's Smart Mining system, whereby users (including those using lightweight wallets) mine in the background to a threshold when not on battery power and when the system is idle (enabled-by-default-but-optional).


Monero's PoW closes the performance gap between CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs, so whilst this is entirely possible it still means that (in the far future) CPU miners could be a measurable part of the hashrate. Couple this with Smart Mining, and for-profit mining farms, and it seems unlikely that a small number will be able to exercise control over a significant portion of the hashrate.


Isn't that the whole point of 21, building PoW mining into IoT devices? That provides a much more secure network than nothing-at-stake PoS.


If people don't care about BTC they're deluding themselves. None of this would exist without BTC, and when 99.9% of the altcoins / scamcoins / crapcoins here are but a whisper of a memory BTC will still be around.


We aren't trying to push volume. We are trying to build a truly secure platform that defends our user's right to privacy. Our plans have been clear cut for some time, and don't involve us defining use-cases: https://getmonero.org/design-goals/


I want to preface my response by stating that I absolutely am interested in alternate proof systems, as long as they are cryptographically sound and the model remains viable even if an attacker is exceptionally motivated and extremely resourceful. I would love - LOVE - for PoS to be that system, as at first glance it appears to be an excellent solution. If you are not used to thinking adversarially you may intuitively feel that PoS is secure because of the (directly measurable) "cost" of attacking the network, but cryptographically speaking that is not the case (see, for eg., stake grinding attacks).

There is unfortunately no proof (empirical or mathematical) that PoS is secure. There is not a single cryptographic model that demonstrates its viability under attack. A lot of the reasoning around PoS being a "success" is because it has been used on cryptocurrencies that are generally not "worth" very much (in the grand scheme of things, no insult to those cryptocurrencies, almost all PoW currencies are equally worthless) and are thus not interesting targets for a motivated attacker.

I think the biggest evidence of PoS being an abject failure can be found in the Vericoin / Mintpal hack (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/mintpal-gets-hacked-pos-vericoin-fork-result/). If PoS were able to be used in a truly fungible cryptocurrency, then the hack would have resulted in the thieves initially getting away with their stash, and just like a cash heist the affected users would have had to rely on regular ol' policing to find the criminals and bring them to justice. Rolling back the blockchain for theft is unprecedented, and it means that the participants wilfully violated the social contract for that currency, knowingly destroyed its fungibility, set a dangerous precedent, and would never have needed to happen if the theft hadn't presented a huge security risk.


Don't buy Monero. It's not an investment, and throwing money at it would only be for your own self-enrichment. There is a much greater chance that Monero fails completely than that it succeeds. If you purchase any Monero (beyond purchasing some to use as a currency) you do so at an incredible risk, and with the likelihood that your "investment" will be worthless. Don't investment more than you're willing to lose. Don't buy Monero unless you absolutely know why you're buying it and to what end.

both are shit, since their only way to advertise for is through bct, cus they know nobody gives a shit outside.

Well this thread was disappointing,I thought there was going to be some actual technical comparison but guess i was wrong

But the same is true for any other project including XMR.


Been bought up before and you can see response here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380482.msg4083612#msg4083612

roundabouts and swings ... PoW does not guarantee better distribution.
We are not talking about Bitcoin v.s. SDC/XMR here ... the SDC/XMR user base is small (just as bitcoin was years ago).

What guarantee do you have that a large % of the mining hash is not one group or individual? both from start and today?
People mine new coins, to dump them on the exchange as soon as they can (I know people who mined chunks of XMR and SDC and did that) .. therefore those coins only made it into the hands of people who generally wanted to Buy SDC or XMR ...

Whether you mine or buy is irrelevant at the small user base and market caps both these currencies have.

Thank you for the great contribution to the thread ... /s


Could not have sad it better myself ... They are doing what they do best .. "developing a privacy platform" ...

Mine or buy is irrelevant, I agree, but coins being distributed over a longer vs. a shorter period of time supports wider distribution by keeping liquidity high and not allowing a few people to corner the supply.

Nothing to see here. Just monero sc(p)am.

Of course this thread is disappointing, half the posts are from Monero Devs in what is supposedly an unbiased thread.

Wait a minute, if half the posts are pro-Monaro then the thread is completely balanced. My initial post even said some positive things about SDC, and so did fluffypony.

PoS is nowhere close to PoW in terms of research. At this point the economic incentives to attack most PoS coins have not been high enough to prove worthwhile.

I am not saying that PoS has no chance to succeed or that PoW is perfect. I am saying that at this point the chances of an existential threat to PoS are far greater than to PoW.

Ignoring all of that PoS distribution models including very brief PoW periods prior to PoS as employed by SDC frequently lead to unhealthy coin distribution.  As you can tell from my Twitter feed I have said some positive things about SDC in the past. However I have much more trust in XMR and BBR.  

I am also not a fan of the in wallet decentralized exchange plans of SDC. Besides believing it should be separate from the coin itself for many reasons (like Open Bazaar model), it reminds me of vaporware based on photoshop promotion by CLOAK and other coins.

I am sticking to CryptoNote coins without fastmines, premines or PoS issues.  If Zerocoin ever comes along I will support that as well.

Why are you talking about balance? The thread is meant to be unbiased, being part of the dev team usually means you have a bias towards your own coin.

A debate being unbiased does not mean that each participant is unbiased.

Just want you to think about this for a moment.

You, being a developer of XMR, are likely to be more biased towards XMR than anyone else. In any given comparison between XMR and nearly anything else you will always think of XMR as being superior, because it has what you'd like to see in a coin due to you developing it. As such you will always (whether you mean to or not) put your coin in a favorable light.

Can you really have an unbiased debate when you are quite possibly the most biased towards one of the stances?

As I understand the concept of a debate you have advocates for a position who present their views. The advocates are not unbiased, the process is.

Except that if one is trying to have as unbiased debate as possible it is typically seen as more appropriate to present information from a neutral point of view, of course this is a very tricky way to present information if one is biased.

When 2 Monero devs make up nearly 1/3rd of the total posts while an SDC team member only makes up 1/20th it becomes hard to claim that this debate is actually unbiased.

But the bias in the arguments they form is transparent. We knew they're monero devs.

What do you expect? The people that know the most about the coin would probably be the developers of the coin. They're also the best voice to represent the technology that they developed and implemented.

The bias argument you bring up detracts from the purpose of this thread.

Is it possible to break this down and try to simplify the differences?  I am just trying to make a simplified summary here.

Monero is POW
Shadowcash is POS

Monero is building new protocol
Shadowcash is building on top of bitcoin protocol

Monero uses viewkeys to make wanted tx public
Shadowcash uses public and private tx

Am I missing anything?

What is shadowcash again? I heard that new.

Monero for the win!

Well of-course it is not .. ~90% of the crypto market cap is held by a PoW coin ...
The chaps over at NeuCoin have done extensive research on it .. you should read it : http://www.neucoin.org/en/whitepaper/

How are they any more unhealthy than PoW coins that have premines, fastmines? or coins with low PoW network hash that anyone can mine a decent chunk? or coins with low market caps that anyone can buy a decent chunk?

It is decentralised so why should it be separate? since you mentioned "decentralized exchange plans", I assume you are referring to the "decentralised market" since there is no exchange plans.
You do not tell someone to come buy a car from your showroom and then tell them to go buy the tyres from across the road and the headlights from another country? It is called a "package".

Lastly if you took time to look into Shadow you would notice it is one of a few to deliver new technology again and again ... nothing we promised has not been delivered. If you are going to make those accusation then at-least back them up. If you think Shadow is your run of the mill scam coin from bitcointalk then there really is not much else to talk about.

.. and I had a good laugh at "Open Bazaar model"; model of selling themselves to VCs? yeah that is great for privacy.

Monero is built on top of cryptonote, they are not building something from scratch.

Monero and Shadow have private transactions, you can use a view key to show the transactions only to the persons you want (it's not the same name for shadow, but works the same)
Shadow also has public transactions.

This leads to the question asked by litebit



This is a serious advantage for Shadow.

Why having two types of tx instead of one ?
Look at monero blockchain size. The private tx are way bigger than the public one

By keeping the two types of tx, you can avoid to surcharge the blockchain with private ones when they are not needed.
You can also imagine a lot of applications using that possibility of having both private and public tx.

Monero blockchain size might become a huge problem if it become really successful

I'm not sure about this. The cryptonote protocol allows both mixed and unmixed transactions, and unmixed transactions are smaller than Bitcoin-style transactions. That is by design and is discussed in section 2.5 of the cryptonote white paper.

Furthermore, many, perhaps most, of the transactions on the Monero blockchain are unmixed (though we do expect this to change in the future).

I think the reason the Monero blockchain is larger is just more usage (from being a higher profile coin that has been traded more actively on exchanges for a longer period of time).

Take a look for yourself. You can scroll pages and pages at http://explorer.shadow.cash and see hardly any non-empty blocks. Looking at http://chainradar.com/xmr/blocks, there are only about 30% empty blocks on Monero. Both coins have the same one-minute block time so this is a valid comparison.

Another contributing factor to the Monero chain size was a temporary bug in the pool implementation (which at the time was brand new -- we sponsored its development) that created a lot of extra transactions on the Monero chain for the first few months. It is annoying that made the chain bigger, but it isn't ongoing growth, so it doesn't present a concern for the future.

Chain size is a concern for every coin. Just look at the current debate over raising Bitcoin's block size. Allowing the chain to grow too much is a huge issue.

Shadowcash is a scam.

Saying it doesn't make it true. Shit isn't like Beetlejuice.

I think the beggar came here for a handout, has a donation address in his sig -- suck lack of self respect. lol

As more or less an outsider to all this stuff, I'd say seems like a pretty good TL;DR you've put there, LOL.

For ME personally I've put a little money into both Monero AND Shadowcash just on theory that the only possible alt-coin that MIGHT be able to approach BTC is simply gonna HAVE TO be one of the ANON coins.  

Nothing else besides anonymity is ever gonna be enough to ever match (or unseat) bitcoin.

For ME, Monero seems like it has better technology but (so far) lousy marketing.
(Sorry to say it, Fluffy etc, but just callin' it as I sees it...)

Shadow OTOH has more impressive graphics, website, video, etc.  Slick marketing IOW.  
(But, yeah, from some comments by people way smarter than ME, seems like maybe not the best tech underlying its crypto and etc.  Sorry to say it, shadow-folks: but "just callin' it" again...)

$64,000 question: IS the underlying tech more important that snazzy marketing and image?  

In a perfect world it ought to be, of course, but we know that's not always enough.  Sometimes the lesser tech DOES still win larger market share (i.e. see Windows vs Mac).  Sad but still true.

So...? What to do??

Personally, I'm just gonna HODL a little of BOTH on the off chance that a hedge on BITCOIN may be needed someday.  

And may the best man win :)

What marketing plans do you suggest for Monero? I also believe that Monero has the best tech but could benefit from more effective promotion

I think posting a lot in competitors' threads in the forums could be a worthy marketing plan. And create a lot of new threads as well. Not sure how effective though, but would get people to talk about Monero at least. You could nominate Icebreaker as your Chief Marketing Officer. Just an idea.

So Monero is going with that knapsack stuff with mixing block wise?

You don't know your own code, lol. Cyptonote uses Ed25519 for EdDSA, not Curve25519. It is an understandable mistake because Ed25519 is very similar and related to Curve25519. But that you don't know the difference, shows you are not the low-level cryptographer for Monero. And we all knew that any way. You are the server and networking guy correct? So no offense intended.  :P

Afaik, the main improvement that Bernstein achieved was to eliminate side channel timing attacks because his formulation of ECC is constant time (if implemented correctly). But some have argued that attribute isn't necessary in Bitcoin's application of ECC (ECDSA).

Well it is pointless (for Shadow and Monero) if it is based on I2P because I2P is no protection against the NSA. It has worse flaws than Tor. And when the NSA decides it is time to bust up I2P hidden services, they can easily do it.

There is a fundamental flaw in the way these anonymity networks publish the route to the hidden service. Await a future white paper for details and a proposed solution.

Edit: I just read at Shadow's Market place FAQ that it will reply on Tor or I2P. So the claim of it being anonymous (against the NSA) is bullshit.

Edit#2: putting one marketplace on an entire coin is really STOOPID. You are killing network effects by taking away what you should allow lots of others to innovate on. For example, one set of rules on how decentralized voting can make sure that a "car" isn't in the "clothes" category.


http://aboutshadow.com/index.php/shadowmarket/q-a



P.S. I knew when I saw all the fancy flash graphics at the Shadow site last year, that it would end up be another loser. That is how I can always distinguish the losers from the winners. Google won with its text interface. Monero is winning with formerly a very simple website. I am not invested in either of these coins. I am invested in my own anonymous coin effort which is vaporware at the moment. I am just noting that correlation seems to always be true. Fluff instead of stuff. The n00bs always fall for the fluff, bells, and whistles and other circus paraphernalia.

I2P traffic and IP addresses are encrypted 4? times. How exactly is it unsecure?

You're completely misunderstanding. I'm ONLY talking about the curve, and Ed25519 uses the same underlying curve as Curve25519, albeit with different representations. That is why SafeCurves doesn't need a separate Ed25519 section, as Curve25519 covers it. That also explains why you can trivially convert Ed25519 public keys to Curve25519.

In fact, the IETF Ed25519 draft (https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-josefsson-eddsa-ed25519-02) qualifies this by saying "For Ed25519, the curve used is equivalent to Curve25519 [CURVE25519], under a change of coordinates, which means that the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem is the same as for Curve25519."

It would be difficult for me to reference SafeCurves, but then talk about Ed25519, without going into great detail explaining this relationship. As the relationship is obvious to anyone (such as yourself) it is sufficient for me to merely state that I'm talking about the curve.

I'm not the "server and networking guy" - Monero is an open source project with a great many contributors. You can learn more here: https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/people

Sorry I am not going to be able to teach you the exhaustive reasons in a forum thread. This issue will be explained more in depth in a future white paper.

I understand it is very difficult for n00bs to understand.

Not my misunderstanding at all.

It would be better to say curve 25519 than Curve25519, because afaik the latter refers to a white paper for a ECC Diffie-Helman key exchange, which is a different purpose and more optimized than EdDSA which is for public/private key signing. Much more than a minor distinction (thanks to DJB for such premature optimization on the naming and confusion):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19147619/what-implementions-of-ed25519-exist

Also for other readers and the original point of discussion, here is more on the advantages of EdDSA vs. Bitcoin ECDSA:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/50878/ecdsa-vs-ecdh-vs-ed25519-vs-curve25519

Well, I suppose for starters maybe the Monero team could recruit or steal away whoever did Shadow's website and graphic design co-ordination.  

Shadow's videos and images, logo, graphics, color scheme etc all totally kicks ass, very slick, very professional and clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into it.  All other anon coins...? Not so much.

Honestly, I bought the little bit of ShadowCoin that I own on Polo pretty much on a whim, totally based only on how polished their website and videos are, even before I bothered to look into who actually has the best crypto and etc.  I think it was the promo link they ran on preev for a while that caught my eye at first.

OTOH, in Monero's defense it's still true that IF you're gonna short change one side or the other at first, i.e. either the technology or the marketing, it's probably better to cut corners on the marketing at first because if your tech is solid but your image sucks, you can always fix the image stuff later... but if your tech foundation is weak and image/marketing strong, eventually (probably) the "lipstick on a pig" reality will come back and bite you on the ass.

But, look... let's be honest here, really.  
Biggest problem in ALL cryptocurrency is that the NAMES of all of 'em totally SUCK.  

"ShadowCash" sucks.  Kinda cool maybe for some people but "shadow" still too illegal for most.
"Monero" sucks.  Nobody cares about esperanto.  Too phony-baloney pseudo intellectual.
"MaidSafe".  Srsly?  Great project, great idea, great tech honestly but... really? Maid?

All names for all these coins suck.  The entire field is still just too nerdy and zero design-sense.

The ONLY NAME that doesn't suck, actually, is "BITCOIN".  

It's perfect: even better than BitGold would've been. Among SO many other things... Satoshi NAMED bitcoin absolutely perfectly.

Any other project with any hope to become even a small fraction of what bitcoin is, really needs to pay attention to this... but it's really hard to change your name later on down the line.  Gotta choose it well at the beginning and IMHO none of 'em have really done that right...

Disagree. The website even doesn't function correctly in my Chromium browser on Linux.

All that circus stuff (dog & pony show, clowns jugging flaming objects, etc) is for n00bs who want to lose money.

Android with its cruder looks kicked ass on iPhone so resolutely that in a few years it went from 0% to 80% global market share.

What is actually most important is network effects. ShadowCash is following the Steve Jobs philosophy of a walled garden that is optimized. If they can do everything themselves they can make it more perfect, more complete, and better. Wrong! Network effects trumps all.

If you want to facilitate SilkRoad, then you need to fix I2P and/or Tor (or replace them with a fixed network)! Thus enabling 1000s of flowers (sites as hidden services) to bloom.

Building some proprietary market place on top of broken anonymity networks is masturbation.

Actually I do agree with you: see what I said above re: fixing image vs. fixing flawed tech later on.

BUT you have to admit that sooner or later (probably later) this "fluff" or "image" stuff eventually DOES matter.

None of these coins (even bitcoin) is really ever gonna go mainstream without a good IMAGE behind 'em.  

It may be a sad fact or "unfortunate truth" that we don't LIKE, but "image" does still matter and it does contribute a lot to eventual success, that is IF we want any of these coins to ever be anything more than just a fun niche for nerds to play with...

I agree the website needs to be professional and most of all, it needs to actually teach n00bs. I love to teach people. I get great joy from making complex things easy for everyone to understand.

That is how you win.

It's the same branding trap that Darkcoin fell into. Label it a suitably dark/scary/shadowy name that will no doubt get the hormones rushing of any teenage misunderstood pot-advocating cinema shooter... and all of his pocket money. It might sound nice as you jerk off, but no-one with any serious money is going to want to touch it.

One of the reasons I got into Monero was because of the somewhat ludicrously ingenious stealthy name. Broke from the yadayada-coin syntax while providing minimal "crap" that could otherwise potentially link it to the evils of the darkweb.

Sooner or later the anonymous sector will be attacked by Sean Hannity and his friends. Why do their job for them?

As someone who's only requirement is to throw large amounts of money across the globe anonymously, it's a mess I would want no part in.

Cryptonote ring sigs are not fully zero knowledge. The values of the transactions forces some correlations that wouldn't be there if the values were hidden. For one thing values requires smaller anonymity sets as for example noted in section 3.3.3 of the ShadowCash white paper (and similarly for Monero/Cryptonote):

http://shadow.cash/downloads/shadowcash-anon.pdf


Smooth and I recently discussed this issue (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1136638.msg12096543#msg12096543) when I pointed out that Blockstream's Confidential Transactions hide values (but they don't provide untraceability).

Additionally we can't predict the types of sophisticated combinatorial analysis research that could come out against the data provided by revealing the values. As I said to smooth in that recent discussion:


P.S. How does ShadowCash justify trying to obscure that it copied Cryptonote and doesn't even cite Cryptonote in its white paper? It looks to me they were trying to fool n00bs into thinking they had created something different or superior to the pre-existing Cryptonote?

There seems to be a lot of that going around.

They did include Cryptonote in their list of references BTW, but they never mentioned it anywhere in the paper.

My white paper conspicuously cites Cryptonote ;)

Apologies I did miss the entry at the end. They did put it in the References section.

If you can't back up an argument with evidence, don't make it?

It is not a simple argument to support. I have already supported in a document I have not yet published. I am not ready to publish it yet. But if you go to I2P's website, they readily admit what I've stated.

I2P was not designed to be robust against three letter agencies. It was designed to provide some privacy against normal adversaries.

I explained this is more detail in the "Economic Totalitarianism" thread. I'll try to dig up a link for you...wait...

Fair enough, noted for next time.

Yeah, not asking you to pull out all the stops in regards to supporting your arguments, but directing curious minds to the proper resources to do their own research is helpful.

Thanks

I started discussing I2P on page 21 and the discussion continued until at least page 24 of the thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1049048.msg11842826#msg11842826

---

Also I don't know where to find a technical description of ShadowCash's private messaging anonymity algorithm?? You can see my analysis of similar attempts on the prior linked and following linked post, and I very much doubt that ShadowCash is doing it correctly:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1049048.msg11844778#msg11844778

I am nearly certain that ShadowCash will have a flaw in it and that is probably why they are not detailing it in a white paper. They are hiding details.

Edit: Okay I found the ShadowChat white paper. I didn't know what to google for until just recently.

http://www.shadow.cash/downloads/shadowcoin-p2p-em.pdf

Section 3.3 Message Propagation makes it clear that is a Bitmessage-like clone. They are sending every encrypted message to every peer on the network, except grouped by 1 hour channels. So that means they send out a list of all messages to all peers, then peers only request an hourly channel which contains a message intended for them.

That is indeed Information Theoretic Security (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security) anonymity.

So thus I will give ShadowChat a thumbs up. This is the first proposal I've seen which is a potential alternative to Bitmessage.

From that description it may be feature incomplete from my perspective of what is really needed out by the market. And I will not detail now the other features I would like to see. They probably have many plans for the ShadowChat which I am not aware of.

However, I don't know if it can scale. That is one of the problems with Bitmessage. Imagine you have 1 million peers and you have to send a message digest to all of them. You can of course shrink the anonymity sets to the desired sizes by decreasing the channel width in time, but the digests still need to be sent to every peer. There are alternative ways to design the channels so digests are not sent to all peers. Appears they haven't done that yet.

Also there is no discussion of the spam resistance.

Again I am giving ShadowMarket a thumbs down.

Curious that the white paper makes no mention of how their system is similar to and/or different from bitmessage.

But then, they did include bitmesssage in the list of references.

It is not scholarly to not discuss prior art and explain the differences. Which is typical of altcoins isn't it.

Also note I edited my post, to point out no discussions of spam resistance and scaling.

Thanks, I'll be taking a look at all of this when I can. Gives me some direction for my personal research :)

...

There is one thing that PoW can do which PoS can't. Distribute coins to new users who own no coins. PoW fails at this in practice because Bitcoin is dominated by ASICs. I think I may have an economic solution that destroys ASICs.


I think I may have a solution to this and solved the 51% attack also. Await white paper.

Both are good. Each has it's strenghs and weaknesses. It is more a religious question in my opinion, which of both is better.

How does a declining block reward to some trickle constitute protection against a 51% attack?


Mining centralization is also due to the rising transaction rate per second (see the current GavinCoin chaos for Bitcoin now) causing the increasing block size to not propagate without some centralization amongst a fewer number of high bandwidth nodes. Solutions such as IBLT are really just obfuscation of mining centralization.

This is a complex discussion from another thread that I am not going to repeat here.

Also afaik, ASICs haven't yet been designed for CryptoNite hash so I don't think you can reliably make that claim.

No there are distinct advantages for PoW:

• You can prove PoW's security. We know the failure points are 51% attack, 25 - 33% for selfish mining attack. Each PoS is adhoc, and can't prove generally/reliably the security nor characterize the entropy of the system. With PoS, generally you have no idea if you are secure or not. which is the antithesis of security.
• PoW can distribute coins, even widely to home users if you realize they will not count the cost of their electricity, but PoS can not distribute.

Whether someone can prove security math for a specific flavor of PoS, is something I am unaware of. Has anyone done it?

I would take TPTB_need_war/Anonymint words over the ones of the most people on this thread, he posted clues about who he is in other threads, Monero Research Labs delivered several worthy academic papers but he is an independent expert.

I read the summary. Will probably read the white paper in detail in the future.

They claim to prove sufficient security for some cases where the entropy of PoS has been attacked, but afaics they haven't proved every genre of attack, because afaics the entropy of PoS can't be characterized so we can't know what all the attacks might be. For example, let's say we took entropy for the modifier from a hash of the transactions for each block. But this hash can be gamed by the participants in the mining.

Their points against PoW I think can be eliminated, but again I will have to say await a white paper.

The basic problem with PoW now is we burden it with too much responsibility. Satoshi forgot to follow the Principle of Least Power and separation-of-concerns. I believe it possible to unburden PoW so that it is not longer an expensive appendage, but rather just a voting mechanism as it was originally intended to be, essentially one vote one computer because PoW won't have the power that it does not. Specifically I think it is possible to entirely filter the 51% attack. But I need to work through all the details formally before I can be sure of this.

I would caution I make mistakes sometimes. I do try to correct and admit when I find an error in my work.

Block chain scaling is a problem even for Bitcoin with no private transactions.

All cryptocoins have scalability problems.

I intend to attempt to solve this.

Public and private coin spaces are a problem, because they can weaken the anonymity for the private coin space. Think about it. If you allow people to spend off to non-anonymous space, then spend back into the anonymous space then anonymity sets break down.

The CN viewkey is superior in that you can give to a trusted party without giving it to the public. Public coin spaces of SDC give the anonymity breakage to everyone.

Logic on this stuff isn't always as obvious as n00bs think it is.

Disagree. I think instant transactions and scaling to microtransaction volume (million transactions per second) will unseat Bitcoin.

Anonymity will become more important, but most people in the world don't care about anonymity. They care about social media and stuff like that. Monetizing that with microtransactions is the huge market.

Anonymity could end up being very important as the bankrupt States of the world start to tax everything that moves. Chicago is going to tax video streaming on the internet.

But these anonymity markets may be much slower to develop than microtransaction markets. I'd pursue both if I did a coin.


I would suggest making it super easy for people to mix BTC. Then try to hook them into using XMR from there.

I would suggest creating new uses for anonymous coins and especially combined with microtransactions.

Without spam resistance, an adversary can flood a channel and lower the anonymity set. Adversary could also drive users away from using the chat due to the spam overhead, thus further reducing the anonymity set.

Appears to me ShadowCash are trying to do too much at one time thus preoccupied away from being thorough in their white papers. See upthread for supporting facts.

Thats for damn sure. Shadow is tackling the crypto end game while most people are just dicking around digging for shit to fling.

Also I do not think instant transactions are feasible. How would you divy out blockchain authority and ensure that a one to one transaction is secure without a vote (can't rely on closest/quickest response time)? But that is a whole nother topic and this thread should stick to the main theme of POS vs. POW and the perceived benefits/flaws of SDT.

Okay I won't go off on that tangent here.

Well... been a while... just bumpin' this thread to see if there's anything else to say here?  LOL

Seems like ALL of my (few) "alts" not doin' too well lately but still gonna hodl 'em just as hedge against any bitcoin catastrophe or whatever "natural evolution" may happen here in crypto-world.  

Fun times  :P



P.S. {Edit} Sig tag says, "formerly AnonyMint, UnunoctiumTesticles, iamback, contagion, TheFascistMind, etc…" and FWIW and IMHO your best coolest screen name by far has always been "AnonyMint" but really, why change accounts so much?  WTF, dude?  LOL

Is SDC anon feature decentralized?

Yes.