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Can you disclose this vulnerability privately to us so we can fix it?

Did you just say to fix this they have to give up their holy anonymity feature .. the core and essence of CN .. or did I read that wrong?  :o

Can you unleash these exploits on Bytecoin please?  It would be lulzy, unlike boring private disclosure.  But it would give XMR the chance to react before all hell broke loose.

And it would show which team is more up to the challenge of fixing critical exploits on their live network.  XMR just beat a very sophisticated attack, now it's BCN's turn to play.

Maybe the Bytecoin Devs will find it and kill Monero, then maybe we can return to a normal Alt coin subforum!!!

This sounds interesting



An assessment that stands in stark contrast to what we're "forced" to read here frequently.



Unfortunately the result might be even more threads...

I confirm that I haven't (ever) hired trolls, am not a scammer, did not expect these developments and am simply trying to build a coin.

R.I.P XMR ?

smart guys make sure to sell step by step into rescue buy orders of rpitilla asap b4 steep crash :D


~CfA~

to say the truth I think this is ridiculous bluffing ::)

if bcx really had a *fatal exploit* he would use it to demonstrate that he does have skills, yet he's just using this lame tactic to make us *fear BCX and sell XMR*  although there is nothing to fear really. I'm actually convinced BCX wants the price to crash to gain a whale position in Monero by buying up the cheap XMR....

It's all just hot air once again, I admit I was worried for a few minutes and asked BCX via PM to privately send the exploits' information to the developers. Now my worries of a few minutes are relieved. Thanks!

I'm buying more.

BCX, have you told exploit to XMR devs yet?

Pic it or it never happens

It's very likely that there is no exploit and it's just a made up story.

If you find a potential coin breaking exploit, you would either exploit the bug or tell/sell it to the devs, but you wouldn't go onto a public forum telling everyone you found a bug, without even providing any evidence.

Some people might say that his reputation is pretty good, BUT he isn't a cryptographer who would find a bug which would allow him to spend money without the privkeys. So far he has relied on timewarping exploits and bots and that's about it ...

I'm not convinced by BCX bullshit. From reading his posts and comments over the past year I have made up my mind about him.

He's a compulsive liar. I really don't think there is any truth in anything he says.

It's not the first time he steps up with claims of being able to destroy XYZ coin by doing this or that.

I think he is a very lonely person that is simply living out his fantasies of grandeur.

When he gets some temporary fleeting confirmation that he is indeed this superhero in the Bitcoin world he will masturbate for atleast a day.

Let's keep that in mind and extend feelings of compassion toward this lost soul.

agree with above post.

ALSO:
lol@BCX

BUYING MORE! Thanks for the cheap XMR

Price dropped ~7% after BCX posted this thread. And so the dump commences....

Thanks for the buying opportunity, whoever you are!

It will even go lower, i hope you got enough btc because most investor/pumper are leaving just as we speak the buy volume dropped after all this mess.

what one can expect from a guy who hold more than 500k LTC or even much more  :P

Could you specify sacrificed? Specifically if it's partly or fully (in your opinion).

LOL look at his history....he doesn't need to demonstrate ANYTHING

He has killed coins in the past

Ah hah.  I was wondering if anybody else would bring this up

Sorry for being a grammar nazi, but I thought you'd like to know it is:

per se

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_se

PS Love you BCX :)

+1 I'm sure this is what BCX himself is thinking too, lol

all smokes and mirrors

You mean smoke and mirrors?

FYI that isn't my account... ::)

monero was forked from bytecoin just like most other cryptonote currencies, none of which have messed with the ring signature algorithms as far as I know. So how come BCX doesn't mention those? I will give you a guess: because he has a financial interest in "killing" monero or wants to buy up the cheap XMR to gain a whale position. there are no exploits. Edit: or if there are, he sure as shit hasn't found em.

Right, you're only interested in posting publicly about a "coin-killer" exploit and then claiming you have "nothing to prove"

sorry, but no.



quote wiki:

But apparently you had an interest to post this, otherwise you would have..idk, swam in a pool, cooked some steaks, watched Breaking Bad. Despite that absolute lack of care you spent some time checking the code, posting your findings, and make everyone freak out.
You seems to be a smart man, so you're probably aware of the fact that you just dropped a FUD-bomb. Can I kindly ask you why? Is that just because some pathetic troll (whom is most likely someone that want XMR to tank) taunted you? You're bored? You want some people to be pissed? Is that some sort of forum's cause?

Someday, if you can find the time, it might be worthwhile treating a union fellow to a beer and asking him why he declines to do other people's fighting for them. ;)

So BCX.. keeping this in mind, if you claim something to be a fact, you need to back it up with something so other people can verify it. If what you are saying is true, then release the details to the public and open up the gates of chaos and see what happens. I have solid faith in the abilities of the XMR dev team, as they have demonstrated in the past that they can deal with issues as they come up. The way they handled the previous CryptoNote exploit speaks for itself.

I think people forget that XMR is like a beta-product, it's not considered a finished version ready for widespread use and adoption. People should rejoice when bugs & problems get discovered as it opens up the possibility of overcoming them and creating something even better. Besides it's not only the XMR devs that have a interest in fixing this if it's true, but all other CN coins too.

The only reason I can see for you to create a thread like this is to create some fud and buy in cheap (Since you specifically targeted XMR out of all CN coins).

Come on, post it for the lulz

The other CN coins aren't worth targeting (BTC value) either way. If someone was going to attack a CN coin and be able to steal people's wallets, it would be XMR wallets wouldn't it?

If someone find an exploit, he doesn't tell everyone on bitcointalk.

No, but he could have a soul and post the details to some respectable dev, like fluffy or smooth...

Never a dull day

How the hell did I get pulled into this somehow? haha.

Why not call BItCoinEXpress's bluff ??
Offer a bounty .. we might as well find out sooner
rather than later if there is an 'exploit' to be had ..

Triff ..

Is this affecting all CN coins?

According to his post yes, it does affect all CN

I think that this sould mean that it must affect to all CN coins, but OP is only refering to Monero.

"bcx scare" made a successful price drop than the the previous attacks (which really happened btw)

bcx...you are something lol

trolls...how about some troll awards here lol

 :D

if you followed bcx closely for the last few years - you'd understand why.  mark my words - if he ever views monero or any other PoW as a threat to LTC god have mercy on it's soul.

In reference to the exploit, without giving the details away for others to exploit the problem, is there anyway to prove your claims?

if there are exploits on CN coins, this should be addressed by the devs with or without the help of bcx or any exploiters..if a coin would have a future it should be tried and tested before more money is put into it.

No:


If they spent all of their time addressing every single unicorn claim lacking any technical detail about some dooming flaw, then they wouldn't really get anywhere. They're not after your money and they're not gonna pander to investors. Anyone buying this knows it's alpha level software and the value could go to zero tomorrow.

If legitimate technical details surface, then they will be shared as anyone would hope. Just as they've done in the past.

this just in. 

bxc has huge holding in popcorn company & is expecting rainfall profits this quarter.

How do you answer to someone that say he found "some specific thing" in your code?

Two options:

1(what you expect): "Well man sorry I just checked my code and I don't see any "specific thing", you were wrong, LOL."
2(what they did): "Could you please be a little more specific about what the specific thing is so I can find it?"

You think we're talking about what? A baby puzzle?

http://www.creativityinstitute.com/images/products/detail/GR2030babyanimalpuzzle3.jpg

If it was as easy as saying "you lost an animal" it wouldn't need any "specific indication" but I'm afraid XMR is a little more vast and complex matter.



"Oh btw, you have a cancer. I wont tell you where it is, but you do have one that might kill you soon. Good luck finding it. Oh btw only very skillful doctors like me can detect its presence."
Now good luck proving you don't have any cancer (or that it is infact an allergy) in a very short time.

+100 & amen brother ... This has to be the most moronic panic dump i've ever seen.... about what? FUD, not even the real attack killed the price so hard. this guy BCX is full of it IMO, so BCX - Put up the proof or GTFO you soul-less, obviously extremely butt-hurt of a person against JUST monero, when you claim this bug affects all CN coins... What a fool...

I'm going to be buying a lot XMR tonight people, oh yeah.. thansk BCX, or I will just call you BS from now on... :D

There is a tiny teapot orbiting the sun. It is too small to see with any telescope, nor can we get close enough to the sun to detect it.

Now, what has me concerned is the lack of any response form any astronomer refuting this. Seems to me if not true they would debunk this asap.

Some people have a bad case of troll fever.

I don't dispute anything BitcoinEXpress said. I can't confirm the existence of the claimed exploits but I can't prove that they don't exist either. The stuff he said about trolls being annoying and not being affiliated with the core team in any way (rpietilla isn't either BTW, he is just a vocal supporter) is absolutely true.

The bullshit part is in bold (well it's all bullshit). There may be an exploit in XMR that may work under some theoretical circumstances, but unless Ronald Rivest and Adi Shamir (the R & S from RSA cryptography) screwed up in a way that has not been detected by everyone in the field of cryptography, there is no need to sacrifice anonymity for "keyrings" (i.e. the ring signature system).

And the part about hijacking addresses is laughable too. Signatures and derivative keys in these systems come from cryptographic one way functions. The implementation of these functions are easy to test using known inputs and reference implementations. So, to reverse engineer a signature or derivative key is impossible with current technology except in cases of weak keys.

BCX probably killed coins, but judging from his assertions, any success is more likely related to the mining power at his disposal than with any specific insight into cryptography.

rpietilla may not be part of the core team but he is heavily vested and has personal ties to someone that is.  As such he has access to insider information and is able to use that information to his advantage.  He might as well be considered part of the team.

It is possible it is not a problem with RSA itself but in the way it was implemented in CN coins, no?

Yeah. So fix the implementation (if broken) and you get anonymity. (Note: RSA is not the same as ring signatures.)

We are obviously working on finding and fixing problems with the code with or without any outside help. We certainly welcome help from anyone who knows of specific problems, but we can't force that to happen.

Understood.

For the record, I have seen BCX make such claims about other cryptos before and never come forward with any information or attack the crypto. I wouldn't put much credence in his claim unless he provides proof. I have always been skeptical when he makes such claims, especially seeing as though nothing ever comes of them.

So how does this get resolved ??
Is BitCoinEXpress willing to prove his point or help Monero devs with a
solution/work around ??

Triff ..

Fuck em up BCX!

If he reports something (or anyone does), we will analyze it and make any necessary fixes.

If someone exploits something, we will analyze it and make any necessary fixes.

If neither happens we will continue our normal development process.

Does no one remember AUR? That shit was fireworks. Don't poke the dragon!

CoinHoarder would love to see him take down Monero ... the ones poking the dragon have a reason  ::)

From what I can tell the cryptonote devs are treating him with more respect than the AUR devs did ... so who knows. 

That is true, I would love to see the demise of Monero. You guys need to get your own forums and stop spamming this subforum, then I will play nice with you. I know someone's going to say.. But.. But.. That's not us, it's some meta reverse trolling, but IMO you guys started it by flooding the subforum with pro-Monero threads and the trolls decided they needed to counter them.

The only way I see it ending is if you guys move most Monero discussion to your own forums. Stop bringing up the only solution to be creating a Monero subforum here, because you and I both know that is never going to happen.

Until you do this I will be rooting for your demise because I am tired of the clusterfuck of Monero propaganda and trolling that has come of it. It is sad you guys make me feel this way, because I actually like Monero and its anon tech.. I just prefer this to subforum to be general discussion about all Alt coins not just Monero, as I am interested in improving crypto coins beyond simply making them more anonymous.

That being said, my post above was not meaning to "poke the dragon". It was my honest assessment of the situation.

Yea yea, very funny babyface.jpg  ::)

I am just someone that believes in decentralized cryptocurrencies and wants to see them improved upon for the greater good of mankind. I am not here to get rich. All this propaganda and trolling is affecting the amount of decent conversations going on in this subforum. Anonymity is not the only flaw main stream cryptocurrencies have.

This really pisses me off as it affects all cryptocoin discussion, not just Monero, CN coins, or anon coins.

If sure if something existed you could easily raise a decent sum for the vulnerability via donations.  Not supporting XMR directly but all the CN coins.  

Seems a waste of all that research to just burn it.

Yeah.. you want to see innovation.. just not here. I mean, why should you be personally inconvenienced and forced into looking at thread titles with the word monero in them? Unthinkable! In the meantime, you will hope for its demise until all monero related activity is performed a safe distance away from you.

LOL please CH bless us more with your wants and needs of what this forum should look like.  ::)

I would love it if Monero wanted to innovate in other areas other than anonymity, but I don't see it happening. Most of the Monero supporters (which are mainly long time Bitcoin/Litecoin supporters whom mostly feel the same way) seem to think all innovation that doesn't include improving anonymity is a gimmick. Most of them don't realize PoW mining is hugely flawed and a better alternative needs to be conceived. There are many other issues with cryptocurrencies that the Monero community doesn't seem that bothered by as well that I think are problems affecting mass adoption, sustainability, and utility.

Although Monero is innovating (well... Copying) in terms of anonymity, I am not really interested in it as they aren't interested in fixing other problems with crypto coins. Later down the road if ring signatures ends up being the best solution to anonymity [I speculate it won't be and a better solution(s) will pop up], then there is nothing stopping other coins that are innovating in other areas from implementing ring signatures. I would be infinitely more interested and supportive of those cryptocoins over Monero.

Do you not understand how big of a clusterfuck this subforum would be if every ALT coin used this subforum as their main forums?  ::)

If Monero solved all current problems with cryptocoins, was the most innovative alt coin, made everyone millionaires, achieved world peace, and could shoot gold bullion out of its ass, I would still feel the same way.

Man get over yourself.. If you don't like a topic no one is forcing you to click and participate

So the whole point of the fud post is to get back at people making hype posts?

What a fucking waste of time.

It's somehow not ???

I agree, except that all the proposed alternatives so far have been worse.

My position is that some sort of Satoshi-level breakthrough is needed to move things forward, not yet another attempt to beat on the PoS or Ripple dead horses with minor tweaks. You have 1000 PoS scam coins in the ANN section if that's what you want.

The Monero project is not opposed to pursuing that, but we don't have any such ideas at the present time. We do have ideas to improve other things, such as some aspects of mining (i.e. tweaks on PoW). We certainly don't think that anonymity is the only way we should innovate.

I see... so you think Monero should die because it isn't incorporating every gimmick feature you think is important.


Careful, you're starting to sound like a BCN troll. How many of those "innovative" alts you support happen to be BTC forks? Oh that's right... all of them.

Everytime BCX makes a post like this, the coin has huge troubles.  Just read his history.  It is funny that people with only a few posts "aren't scared" of him. 

To create something out of nothing would violate the first law of thermodynamics. PoW is the only solution because creating value in a decentralized free market depends on the expense of resources.

Please describe how PoW is "flawed" and how an alternative is even possible (hint: it isn't).

Be honest with yourself. You'd feel differently if it could shoot gold bullion out of its ass. We all would.

Johnny Mnemonic, meet the U.S. Treasury, a place where the laws of physics do not apply.

Not quite true, proof of work exists in the electricity and mechanics of printing paper money. Come on man, you should know the earth is a closed system and energy is neither lost or created.......just transferred. This is called proof of work.

There have been several responses from the XMR team, all of them effectively saying, "show us a bug/exploit, and we'll address it." So far BCX has made claims but provided no helpful information whatsoever. This leaves two possibilities:

1) He's full of shit and shouldn't be trusted.
2) He's telling the truth but refusing to help the community in any way, and therefore shouldn't be trusted.

I'm leaning towards #1, but either way he shouldn't be trusted and doesn't have an ounce of credibility left in him. Just to be clear, he's claiming to have an exploit that can kill the coin, but he's not going to use it, nor will he show it to anyone to help fix it. Sounds legit.

Read my post again. Notice I said "decentralized free market". Fiat money is given value by force. That doesn't work in a decentralized market.

BCX could kill monero imo, good fight is over

 
Sanest thing I've seen around bitcointalk in a looong time

C'mon, man, gold bullion is old-style money!  Nobody wants that shit!

This is not about me, the only one trying to make it about me is you.


You cut off the important part of the quote which made my point...  if every ALT coin used this subforum as their main forums. Do I really need to explain this to you guys? wtf.. I estimate there are over 500 Alt coins. If every one of them had only 1 thread and made 1 post per day, each day's posts would go all the way to page 13. That sounds like a clusterfuck to me. If Monero is successful, you can be sure coins in the future will be replicating its marketing techniques a la spamming this subforum.


Not necessarily.. I derailed the thread. BCX may very well have found a vulnerability.. I have no clue.


Worse is a strong statement. PoS and its variants have weaknesses, just like PoW has its weaknesses. However, both are secure enough to have survived this long without any major attacks. Most of the PoS vulnerabilities people harp on it for are just as unlikely as a 51% attack on a well secured PoW network. Both PoW and PoS have their weaknesses, but I just can't get past the amount of energy that is wasted with PoW and see PoS and its variants as better solutions. Whereas some see the PoS variant cup half empty, I see it half full. Imagine if all of the money spent on securing PoW cryptos was spent on improving the infrastructure or investing in the coins themselves.

I am not interested in PoS scam coins, there are just as many PoS scam coins as there are PoW scam coins. I am however interested in coins that tweak and improve upon PoS in some way, as a more secure version of PoS can pop up from all of these different iterations. I am confident it is not "a dead horse", and I have been told by people much smarter than I that there are ways to fix the problems with PoS as it exists today- which as they exist they are still pretty damn secure seeing as though they are still around and thriving today.

Thanks for proving my point about Monero supporters claiming all innovation is gimmicks.

The only two coins I support now are not BTC forks.. BitsharesX and Nxt.. and they are both innovating in more ways than one. Furthermore, they are focused on innovating and improving upon their original innovations. Whereas most mainstream coins consider all innovations as gimmicks, they embrace innovation. It is the innovators that will push cryptocurrencies to the next level, not the naysayers that are fine with cryptocoins just the way they are. Some people might not want more (or improved) features, but on the other hand a lot of people do, otherwise the more innovative coins wouldn't have been able to achieve the market cap and community that they have. It is silly to only cater to one half of the population when you can cater to both and the ones that don't want or need those features/improvements don't have to use them.


You need to be more open minded and hopeful that there is a solution. If everyone thought this way then Satoshi would of never made the huge innovation that was Bitcoin. Everyone thought a trustless decentralized currency was impossible until he came along and did it.

First, there is no reason that consensus has to be reached by mass extreme consumption of electricity and a large waste of processing power, which is one of the major flaws of PoW.

Second, Most PoW zealots can't seem to see into the future like I (and a lot of other people.. the PoS crowd) can in regards to the inevitable centralization of PoW mining. No PoW algorithm can be ASIC proof.. it is not possible. Due to this and economies of scale, all forms of PoW mining will slowly go from decentralized to centralized as large mining conglomerates take over the block chain. The people with the most money to spend and the cheapest power will make all mom and pop miners unprofitable, and at that point they will stop investing/buying ASICs. Over time the block chain will become more and more centralized until it is so centralized that they can do many nefarious things, such as raise transaction fees on a whim by only including transactions into blocks that have X amount of fees, because they decide they are not making enough profit.

Third, once a PoW cryptocurrency exits its inflationary stage of the money supply distribution, it is possible that the transaction fees are not enough to compensate the miners and keep the blockchain secure. We recently saw this with Dogecoin which was one of the first ones in which their emission curve has dramatically stabilized, and they were forced to choose in between death or merge mining with a larger chain. They are still inflationary and can't afford to pay miners enough to secure their chain, imagine how hard of a task that will be for some coins that at some point no more coins will ever be minted. The market caps of PoW currencies and the adoption in the form of every day use will be mandatory for these cryptocurrencies to survive. No one really knows is mass adoption is likely or possible as it is all speculation at this point, but if they don't achieve that then PoW cryptos will be in trouble at some point down the road. Even if they achieve mass adoption, it is still speculation whether or not that will be enough to pay miners to secure the block chains. PoW cryptos may one day be much more expensive to used than PoS cryptos for this reason.

The resources and processing power wasted, the inevitable centralization, and the sustainability are three of the largest issues I see with PoW in the future. I am sure I am forgetting one or two glaring issues as well, but I will leave it here for now.


Lol, OK... I admit that would be pretty damn cool.

"Electricity and mechanics of printing paper money."  :D

What, are you living in the 1870s?

Today they "print money" by adding ledger entries.

You say smart things, but you don't recognize humor.

It is my observation that there are far more PoS scam coins. Just look, almost every single altcoin being launched now is PoS (I include in that the ones described as PoW+PoS because that now almost always means a very short PoS phase): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0


You have also been told by people likely smarter than you are that the problems can't be solved, of if not you shut out those opinions, because they certainly are out there, and not hard to find.

I don't think this is really the right thread to have the debate though.

No one involved with Monero is interested in turning it into PoS but that doesn't mean we only want to work on anonymity and that's it. So if you are saying that because we don't believe in PoS we aren't interested in innovating you are right but wrong. We definitely are interested in what we see are other shortcomings with Bitcoin (using that as an example simply because it is the biggest).

I agree with you that mining centralization is a problem that needs fixing. But PoW cannot be abandoned, because the only way to create value as a measure of GDP must come at the expense of GDP. This truth has been reinforced for thousands of years and I'm doubtful that some clever programming will ever change it. Satoshi's solutions were innovative, but they also didn't violate any rules of the universe.

BTW: AnonyMint hinted that a solution to centralized mining could be to somehow make mining always unprofitable, that way all mining comes from individual nodes contributing miniscule amounts of hashpower while their wallets are open.

I also agree with you 100% that tx fees will not sustain miners when block rewards vanish. I have talked about this a lot in other threads. Again, this is not a problem with PoW, only with bitcoin's implementation of it. It is the myth of the finite money supply. Block rewards don't have to vanish as new coins can be minted on demand as long as GDP is expended in the process. But this is a discussion for another thread.

Regarding innovation: The point I was trying to make was that one coin that devotes all it's resources to perfecting one innovation (i.e. XMR with anonymity) isn't necessarily worse than another coin that tries to tackle several. You and I obviously disagree on what we consider to be "important innovations". However, there's a huge demand for anonymous tech right now, and it's pretty clear that the XMR team wants to get it's flagship feature right before worrying about other bells and whistles.

Perhaps monero seems to be taking over the alt forums because it's been a very hot topic lately. Even if an XMR-specific forum were announced, I doubt XMR related threads and discussion would suddenly go away.

This is basically it. The set of interesting non-scam cryptocoin projects is very small right now. Monero and just a few others pretty much, so the well-deserved attention Monero gets leads to a crowding-out effect. People who are attached to some particular scamcoin or enjoy the scamcoin-of-the-day scene are put off by the reality that a coin that is actually being developed and gaining a following as a genuine open source project gets more lasting attention and discussion than any one particular scam. This makes them resentful and hateful, but nothing we can do about that.  

I think they don't understand that with or without Monero, the scamcoin game is about up and their beloved altcoin community of scammers and willing victims is in the process of destroying itself anyway. We'll just continue pushing forward.

I guess you are right, it is the new fad for scam coins, but I think it says something that they think their scam will be more successful by choosing PoS over PoW. They must think there is more demand for PoS coins than PoW coins.. that goes to show how little people in general really care about the "insecurities" of PoS coins. Honestly it is mostly long time Bitcoin/crypto people that are really against PoS.. I'm not sure what to make of that or if there is some underlying reason other than the insecurities.

Also, I was referring to about a year ago when all the scam coins were PoW clone coins. There was something like one a day being released for a long time!


You are right, there are a lot of people smarter than me saying that PoS is broken and a dead end too. I'm not honestly sure what or who to believe. However, the ones that aren't saying that give me hope that there is an answer to the solution. I don't even see the modern PoS variants as being too bad or insecure. Like I said, both PoW and PoS have their pros and cons, but I think PoS will continue to be improved upon.


I agree, feel free to join us in the main PoW/PoS debate thread here! :)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770591.0


That's good to know, I am looking forward to whatever you guys may come up with. My understanding was that you guys were focused on only anonymity. I know from debating some of your "hero" member supporters in the past they really hate innovation and call any improvements or added features gimmicks.. so I guess I assumed you guys weren't planning on doing much else since they were supporting Monero (not going to name names.) Anyways.. I will take your word that Monero has other plans and leave it at that.

I also invite you to our PoW vs PoS/alternate consensus thread. It is ironic that my last post addressed exactly this. I believe PoS coins to come at the expense of GDP: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770591.msg8869805#msg8869805

This sounds like a clever idea, and I think it could work if the logistics were figured out.

Good point that this is not an issue with PoW, but the implementation. Sadly though many PoW Alt cryptocurrencies have followed a similar path of implementation when it comes to emission curves. It is odd that this issue hasn't been thoroughly addressed in the Alt coin subforum and new coins haven't adopted their implementation. I guess everyone just hates inflation, which I can't really blame them.

That is all understandable, everyone has their own opinion on what innovations are more or less important. I try to look at all innovation as being equally important in the long run. Maybe this or that innovation may be somewhat gimmicky, but it can give someone a good idea for a future innovation that is not gimmicky, and give them a head start on the coding of it. I see any changes/experiments/innovation as being for the greater good of the future of cryptocurrencies. I know not everyone agrees on that, so we will agree to disagree.

I'm not budging on my point that you guys have caused some of the backlash yourselves though by creating so many Monero threads. I really do feel that is the reason the trolls decided to start their FUD campaign and reverse trolling against you guys. You were getting too much good press and exposure for their liking. Maybe tone it down a bit, or consolidate your threads into only a few. It will afterall give you more time to pick up more cheap Monero if you truly believe in its future.

I'm pretty sure the reason most alts launch as PoS (including PoW->PoS in that) is simply that it is much easier to monopolize more of the supply which means your return on investment of doing a pump-and-dump is much higher. With mined coins you can't really monopolize the mining and even when you do monopolize the early mining in some sort of instamine to get a lot of coins, it becomes much harder to pump the coin later because you have the natural sellers (miners) brining new coins onto the maket.

That itself says nothing about the merits of PoS though, and I won't engage in proof by association (i.e. it doesn't prove that PoS is bad just because many scam coins use PoS), it is just a comment about the state of the altcoin market.


One-a-day would likely be a vast reduction of the current rate of scamcoin production.

Lol, since they moved them to the announcement subforum I can kind of block them out. I don't research coins anymore unless someone brings it to my attention or I see someone mention it being the new best thing. Even then half the time they are still scam coins haha!

Anyways.. I am glad we were able to come to somewhat of an understanding. You see, I am not such a bad guy.. I just care very deeply about this stuff and get worked up easily. I often speak/type without thinking and that leads to me saying things I probably shouldn't say.. but all of it is honest for the most part... as honest as humanly possible considering personal bias. Again I don't care about this stuff for monetary reasons, but for political reasons, the well being of humanity's financial future, and privacy etc.... I basically want to decentralize everything. :)

I guess we've derailed this thread enough.. I'll let BCX get back to his soap opera.

Cheers

I had always thought that there was an inherent flaw in PoW mining as it is in Bitcion and that Satoshi knew it from the get go, but buy making mining profitable the network would be sustained and the blockchain would live on and prove in theory that this whole blockchain decentralization thing is real and can solve a lot of problems.  I think he built a faulty system from the start knowing it was faulty but also knowing it would be a good test case and proof that it could work. 

Now that has been proven and I am waiting for something better.  I have been looking into PoS and maybe NEM PoI, but listening to AnonyMint's suggestion that also seems really interesting.  Basically, if lots and lots of uses were miners, that any time a wallet was open it was mining, then the network could be supported.  His solution makes a lot of sense. 

I always considered Anonymint kind of like a mad genius.  He is very rough with social skills but very tight with in depth and detailed knowledge.  I wanted to find more about this theory and I checked into it but couldn't find anything and apparently he has checked out and no longer logs in. 

@Coinhoarder.  You are apparently the voice of reason and common sense in this thread so I will direct this question at you.  You have been around longer than me so I figure you might know.   BCX apparently comes out with these statements against coins every so often and as you mentioned earlier in the thread sometimes backs it up with real facts, but sometimes seemingly keeps everything secret leaving people to doubt him.  But ultimately, has any coin ever been slandered by BCX and gone on to eventually be successful?  

Edit: I already know the Litecoin story and how things exploded there but eventually turned out for the good. 

Interesting thoughts, I like your theory regarding Satoshi and it seems plausible. Anonymint is still around, although he may of dropped that idea.. I don't know. I do agree that is a good idea that needs more attention.. I haven't heard it before. I'm guessing it is hard to implement fairly and securely though, which would be the only thing holding it back. Yet, it could possibly be made to work.


I wouldn't go that far... but thanks. :)


I know BCX is rumored to have killed several coins before, but most of the ones he has killed were before my time and I'm not sure of the details. I think at least one of them was just a plain 51% attack, and not through a vulnerability.. possibly more. On the other hand, I am fairly certain he has made claims that coins are vulnerable before and nothing ever happened.

I'm going to do some digging around now and I'll get back to you, as I am interested in that myself.

BTW, I posted this idea earlier than the post I saw from AM that described it the way JM did. I don't know if AM got it from me, in reality he and I probably just think in similar directions so I won't claim plagiarism or anything of the sort. In fact he might have posted something earlier than mine, but I never read a lot of his posts so I can't say.

The problem is, this tells you the goal but not how to get there, and even more importantly stay there. Remember, Bitcoin started with a miner in a wallet. Eventually mining become professionalized and the wallet miner was ripped out because no one used it. Although a wallet miner is pretty pointless with ASICs, the miner was ripped out earlier, during the GPU era. Another option could have been to add GPU support to it.

I wonder if possibly the fact that Satoshi expected mining to become professionalized helped push things in this direction, in a sort of self-fulfilling way. The fact that we have seen how Bitcoin has become not only professionalized but highly centralized might be enough to nudge successor projects in a different direction. Centralization is certainly one of the things (besides anonymity) that does interest the Monero developers.

I'd be interested in reading your explanation of the idea, as AM's posts are intentionally vague as to not give away the secret sauce.

I was also thinking another possible solution could be to somehow eliminate the need for pools altogether. This may be achievable with a multi-level GHOST PoW, where stale blocks could be mined at various difficulties with corresponding profitability.

And what would keep them from creating a wallet that saved electricity by not mining? And how do you prevent someone from writing a malicious wallet when all the others have adopted the cheaper non-miner that they can run on their phones?

People are stuck on the question of value, and come to the conclusion that value is derived from expenditure of resources. But that's simply not the case. Value is derived from utility. In other words, the question of value is related to usefulness, not expenditure.

Expenditure is required to help ensure honesty. If a reward requires resources, but cheating jeopardizes the reward, then the incentive is to be honest when expending those resources. That's the PoW model. This model has absolutely nothing to do with imparting value on a commodity. The utility of the commodity takes care of the value.

You've basically supported the argument you were attempting to refute. If expenditure is required to ensure honesty then the expenditure is required to derive the value, because otherwise it will be cheated out of existence. You can't wish away the honesty part. Cheaters exist.

It seems BCX mostly did 51% attacks, with only 1 time travel exploit which was found by Artforz. Allegedly BCX got someone to edit the code for him, as BCX apparently can't code (his words, not mine). Seeing as though BCX can't code.. unless he learned in the past few years, I doubt he fund an exploit. It seems the only code exploit he did was found by someone else and coded for him to use, and he mainly used a large hash rate to attack alt coins.

Admitting he can't code:


Here is a summary of his early alleged attacks:


Then he attacked Solidcoin2 with a ddos of its insecure "trusted node", possibly performed other attacks against solidcoin2.. there is too much to go over and I'm getting tired: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=48975.msg582404#msg582404

Apparently he 51%ed Litecoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=96186

Claimed he will 51% Digicoin, but didn't: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=236630.msg2501414#msg2501414

Time travel exploit against Spots: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=259764.msg2772289#msg2772289

I'm refuting the notion that there exists some causal relationship between expenditure and value. That relationship is correlation in some cases, but not causation. Plenty of coins have been mined with great expenditure of resources yet are worthless now. The inverse is also true. Some coins have been mined quickly and without much expenditure, but are highly valued.

It seems lot of people have invested too much in XMR and are now scared.

http://media2.giphy.com/media/zNCvzRDgkYQU0/200.gif

That was a lot of good information.  So basically this guy has basically been the reaper for many a coin, but usually via raw power.  He hasn't said he was going to attack XMR (the exact opposite).  The worrisome thing is that he said he found an exploit in CN.  I am wondering if what he really means is "somebody showed him a fatal flaw".  The XMR trolls have pissed a lot of people off.  I can imagine another developer knows about a flaw and just hasn't done much but is considering it now.  Also, if somebody knew about a flaw and wanted to kill a coin but didn't have the resources themselves, then BCX is hands down the most obvious choice to contact.  He has destroyed so many coins; he apparently kind of likes it.  Even if I am wrong about this theory, I think there is something to what he is saying about flaws in the code.  He has a pretty bad ass reputation and apparently a high ego.  I am sure he would hate to get shamed and be wrong.   

I'm still digging... there was a lot to go over and BCX has deleted a lot of his posts, most of which contain evidence I would assume.

Apparently he has also repeatedly used the time travel exploit. What kind of difficulty adjustment algo does Monero use??? As I think that is how the time travel exploit is utilized.

It is possible I guess someone tipped him off to an exploit in CN. It would be interesting checking other CN's Githubs for recent commits.. maybe in this case, the one that is in the know would have fixed the exploit recently.

I agree it is certainly possible to spend resources and get nothing for it, but I doubt the reverse.

You point to coins that have no resources behind them, and as things stand today you are correct, but as you will know if you are reading this thread, I believe these are virtually all if not all scamcoins headed for zero (some faster than others), restoring the balance. Of course, I may be proven wrong.

I'm done researching BCX's exploits.. I am tired. If someone wants to pick up where I left off that would be cool, I am interested in what he has done.. or allegedly done. I pretty much checked his posting history from pages 115 to 170.

@Smooth and tx42

Not sure if you read my link up thread, but I was debating the same thing you guys are in the other thread I was referring to. This is my opinion:

You don't get it, and for a while BCX didn't get it, but eventually he figured it out.

There are no "XMR trolls."

Of course there are always a few unbalanced people who will act up on a forum at any opportunity (probably more than a few here), but I'm not talking about them, I'm talking about actual, active supporters of XMR. I know pretty much all of them. They are not going around trolling. We're too busy trying to develop a useful coin.

The people you are referring to are sock puppets who are being run by someone (we could get into who but that's a whole other discussion), using a variety of strategies to undermine Monero. One of those strategies is appearing to be pro-Monero, but doing it in such a loud, obnoxious and offensive way as to turn people against Monero.

This fake pro-Monero trolling started in June or July, and at the time it was new and obvious, but fairly limited and easy to identify. This has exploded in volume and scope. Probably this includes the trolls, copycats, and possibly other organized groups who now see Monero as a threat and see this reverse-psychology method as being effective.

It has nothing to do with the Monero project and there is nothing we can do to stop it except perhaps exactly what the trolls want, which is abandon the project. Though even then, if the current devs did abandon the project, and others took over, the trolls would likely continue their efforts.

So if anyone is being "pissed off" by the XMR trolls and takes action against Monero as a result, they are taking exactly the action these so-called Monero trolls are trying to encourage.

That's what I've been trying to explain for days but I'm afraid it's too complicated for most people that got no time to read all over the threads to decide between trolling and not. I can't blame them really. All they see is a bunch of XMR threads all over the place with aggressive shilling and offensive behaviors. It's very difficult to convince them that these threads are actually made by people that want to provoke and tarnish with reverse-psychology. If only we could ask the moderation to forbid any new monero-themed thread on this board, but It's probably out of reach.
I guess we just have to accept all that hate as a proof of disruption and move on. People will figure it out eventually.

Summarizing my view in a nutshell.

You give people WAY too much credit. There is no pre-planned anti-monero campaign whose agenda is to disrupt its progress.

And it will continue. As the coin gains popularity, it will attract all types of characters that want to jump on the bandwagon.

Actually there is. There may also be people who simply enjoy the attention or are otherwise unbalanced who do it without any coordination (or who jump on the bandwagon, as you say in your later post), and that is true for every coin, but there is at least one if not more organized planned, and consistent campaign against Monero intended to disrupt its progress.

If you want to send or receive, you'd have to mine a bit? Dunno if that would be enough to secure the network though. Maybe when everyone in the world would be using this coin it would.

If someone knew of such an exploit, he would probably want to wait in case the coin becomes worth more so the reward of the attack would be worth the effort.

Yes the funny thing is no such exploit exists, it's a huge fairytale of BCX

I'm not disputing whether or not such an exploit does or does not exist.

I guess the same could be said about monero-pro campaigns to elevate its status.

I challenge you to tell me with a straight face that "AltcoinHimmler" from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=786537.0 that come with a nazi name, newb account, poll with "ban monero" in it, insults and retarded shilling, isn't a troll that makes any normal human-being hate whatever he's associated with without even having to go through any mental process.

And what about that one? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=778863.msg8778520#msg8778520

I could easily link you a dozen of threads that looks the same. And that are just the obvious ones. Moneroman88 is less obvious, you need a whole pack of five minutes to debunk him..

There might be pro-Monero campaigns, but there is no such campaign that is run by the Monero project or developers or affiliated with either in any way. Nor do we have any knowledge of such a campaign.

So no, the same can't be said, unless you have more knowledge on the matter than we do, which I doubt.

Just because you have no knowledge of it, doesn't mean there isnt. Right?

The best campaign is rpietila official pro Monero campaign, it completely kills all the haters' newbie attempts at disrupting Monero's premium position. Makes me facepalm at all those paid shills and contra-Monero assholes around here that can't do shit against XMR.

Just FYI rpietila is not affiliated with the project at all, and if he calls anything "official" it is official to him, not us.

He is an independent investor who decided on his own to invest in the coin (we were quite surprised by his decision I have to say) and now supports it, sometimes quite vocally.

You're really disloyal to Risto now smooth, I find this a sad move of yours

We all know who he is

The campaign "let's act as a retard supporter of XMR to actually discredit it" is still going on...

Moneroman88 is just kindly reminding us that there is an ignore button on this forum.

Indeed. I clicked it, and it worked magic.

To say he is quite vocal would be the understatement of the year.

"Ignorance is bliss" <-- oldest story in the book.

Isn't there a forum that duplicates everything from here so it's documented even if deleted?

https://bitcointa.lk/

I'm still not making sense of this situation, these are my current scenarios about what is currently going on, am I close?

1-You're telling the truth about there being a fundamental flaw and don't want to tell the Monero core team because you want to see Monero fail, however, this leaves Monero open to attack and invites FUD, so you're essentially committing an economical attack on Monero, contradicting your statement that you won't attack Monero.

2-Your attack requires you to have between 20% - 50% of the hashrate to be successful, your FUD will mean the total network hashrate of Monero falls allowing such an attack to be more realistic.

3-You're simply lying, hence not telling the Monero team about the flaw.

4-You're telling the truth and have disclosed the flaw to the Monero core team.

you forgot

5-You're a fucking ego-retard wannabe-Terminator bitch who thinks she can make Monero fail with FUD and LIE, asshole

Mate, you really need to log off and never log on again, something is wrong with you. Let me guess, you're on medication?

No need to guess, he's trolling. Ignore button can help.

Please everyone. Just do it.

I think he's actually OFF medication...hence the problem.  Wow.

moneroman is retarded, the fact that you are unwilling to accept that a fatal flaw could even exist is the entire reason no one will ever take you seriously.

holy f***** shit

I also herd someone ate a 10,000 BTC pizza.

so BCX had a net worth of 20 pizzas? (just playin)

But that was "the" pizza.

Yes. What a relief. Most annoying bastard I have even seen on this forum.

You are probably thinking of the Shamir transform which converts an interactive Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) into an non-interactive one (NIZKP) by employing a one-way cryptographic hash function. Or you are thinking of their separate invention of ring signatures.

That doesn't necessarily apply to CN's one-time ring signatures because these are a novel merging of NIZKP and ring-signatures to make them one-time use.

My wild guess without studying the math again in the CN whitepaper, is any exploit (if any) has something to do with finding collisions or preimages in the NIZKP that makes it possible to forge a one-time ring signature under certain conditions. I had intuitions to look at potential weaknesses such as this but didn't have time to pursue it. Afaik, CN's one-time ring signature invention was not vetted by significant cryptanalysis.

My question to smooth and other Monero developers is, "Has BCX revealed any exploit to any of you?", because the posts I've read from smooth seem to be wordsmithed in such a way as to avoid definitively answering that question.

P.S. I am AnonyMint.


Who is the person he has personal ties to?


True all the existing PoW coins suffer these. But it is possible to fix this. I will not tell you how though. Well actually I already told everyone but they can't wrap their mind around AnonyMint's posts, so nevermind.


Kudos to you sir.


One logistic was getting the PoW right. I first did a PoW in November 2013 which is essentially what CN ended up with independently, although mine was orders-of-magnitude faster by exploiting AVX2 which also provided botnet resistance. Then I realized fighting against ASICs was futile so I had to embrace them.


I am trying to not to post. But since I decided to correct that misunderstanding about Rivest and Shamir's relevance to CN's one-time ring signatures, I might as well reply to these comments.

Agreed the details of widespread mining are difficult to achieve.

Edit: I am not often reading the forum any more (no time for it). I just happened to read this thread because I was looking at a particular user's latest posts for an unrelated reason and they had posted in this thread.

No. You are reading into wordsmithing that doesn't exist.


I don't know what "personal ties" refers to exactly, but he certainly is friendly with several of the developers and I think David was going to be staying at his castle for a while. I'm not sure if that is still the plan, but regardless it has nothing to do with Risto's relationship to the project or (non) position in it.

But the part about "insider information" and "might as well be considered part of the team" is complete bullshit.

I confirm. The core team is a fixed group of seven people, and they are not looking for new members.

There is/soon-will-be a separate group MEW, Monero Economy Workgroup, similar to foundation that some coins have. The group has tentatively 17 members, including me, and some but not all of the members of the core team.

As for inside information, MEW has a chat where Monero-specific news are quickly announced. If this sounds interesting to you, the membership of the group is open for all, as soon as we get some paperwork done.

Okay thanks for confirming.

So ball in is BCX's court now. I will be ignoring this until then, because there is nothing that can be done (to prove or disprove the allegation) short of you guys hiring some cryptanalysis.

Maybe the original CN was a honeypot made by the FBI who fabricated the story of a 2 year old dark web coin so they could lure criminals and terrorists to use it. And now BCX's friend found one of their backdoors.

Concur on both points. But there is a technological paradigm to always drive the price higher for PoW. The first to launch such is going to rock the world. Whale or no whale doesn't matter.

That's already been done, although their work is not complete. If he found something it is something they didn't find on their first pass, which simply means it isn't obvious, not that it doesn't exist.

Maybe it was developed by extraterrestrials. I did read that after all. Is it true ?

Dunno, which do you think is more likely?

I had the idea since 2013. I had some posts in rpietila's earlier threads alluding to it. But I don't care who had the idea first. I care who is first to achieve it in a real coin. And put strong, scalable anonymity in it too.


Getting the PoW correct was an essential requirement, but not sufficient by itself to get everyone to mine.

P.S. I edited my prior posts in this thread.

Since I'm virtually certainly the FBI did not fabricate the 2 year story, I'd have to go with the extraterrestrials. Or lizard people, or the like.

If CryptoNote were an intel agency honeypot, Bytecoin would have shipped with a polished GUI and a built-in marketplace for 3d-printed guns, illegal drugs, and child pornography.

That is a very astute point. The value of a coin other than as an investor pump has been the value of a currency, which is related to the number of goods and services it can be spent on and moreover the number of people who use it as their unit-of-account. Bitcoin has done only moderate inroads on the former and failed miserably on the latter (Peter Thiel's Bitpay actively works to not make it a unit-of-account).

The only prayer of attaining unit-of-account status is to put the coin in a 100 - 1000 million spenders' hands such that both the former and latter are synergistic. Apple Pay is going to lock up 200 million within a year or so. Time is running out, but there is still the developing world, yet I see Bangladesh has threatened to jail users of crypto-currency and Ecuador is also hostile.

I've had my mind on bigger issues than just anonymity. Anonymity is personally important to me, but not to vast majority of consumers. A coins design has to factor these realities in.

I'm not familiar with what will hold in court in the states, but can they sell you drugs and then arrest you because you bought? In the movies they show police often trying to buy drugs from a dealer and if he sells, he's busted, so I guess that will stand. But the other way around?

We're drifting off topic, but take a look at this and draw your own conclusions about the direction of American jurisprudence: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120430/02112518698/nytimes-realizes-that-fbi-keeps-celebrating-breaking-up-its-own-terrorist-plots.shtml

Weird how happy I am to see again the enlightening posts from a Prophet of Doom (paradox?), especially in these dark days lately...

David (latapie I think is his last name) works for him.  One day while chatting in the troll box, he had someone offer to sell him a motorcycle and risto ask this guy to send David the details addressed to his castle.  You have someone that is/was (idk which right now) part of the team working for the guy that tries hard to control the monero market.


Why is he constantly saying things that supports this?  Most recently during both recent monero attacks.  He comes out and says things that contradicts this statement.  Sure you can officially say he is not part of the team but you cannot deny the fact that he has more access to the team than just about anyone else here. 

You would have to ask him. Perhaps he is a bit overenthusiastic, or perhaps just enthusiastic because he strongly supports and believes in the project (is that a bad thing?), and maybe that comes across as something other than what it is. It certainly does rub some people the wrong way, but that's life on the Internet. Get used to it.


I 100% deny it. Anyone here is free to contact the team through posting, PM, and IRC (#monero and #monero-dev channels, as appropriate). We answer promptly and candidly to anyone. I have a hard time understanding how the team could possible be any more accessible. Someone from the team (often most of us) is available to anyone virtually 24 hours every single day.

If BCX does have the "coin-killer" exploit he claims, and assuming his goal is to protect the users (the point of the clean out the shitcoins thread he is involved with), then he would not reveal this to the developers because they would then have an advantage over the users of Monero (and other CN coins such as BBR) in dumping the coin first. Thus I believe he has decided the fairest option at his disposal is to warn everyone of what will eventually come (someone will find and exploit it because of the anger that feels Monero hijacked the intent of Cryptonote to be a standard amongst many competing coins{*}) and let the users make their own decisions.

The clearest indication or hint of BCX's intent is in the following quote:


Clearly BCX is seeing an unfortunate confluence that has trapped many innocent parties. And he is trying to be as fair as he can in terms of how this will all unwind.

I am trying to figure out the exploit, if I can quickly. I don't have much time to devote to this, so I may have to abandon my attempt.

I don't want to cause a stampede run on the price of CN coins. I don't have any knowledge that the exploit exists, other than BCX's allegation. I know what I would do if I owned any CN coins at this time, which would be to make sure my exposed risk was a small % of my net worth at least until more clarity is obtained. BCX has a strong reputation and seems to have upstanding motives. He wants to see real innovation in crypto-currency. He has no strong aversion against CN, but apparently thinks it is sufficiently flawed thus isn't investing.

Given the scams alleged against the original Bytecoin developers, perhaps they were aware of the exploit all along and was planted as a Trojan horse. Of course that is wild speculation on the order of tooth fairies except we have BCX's reputation at stake on this allegation.


{*}

Where did I lose you?  Someone close to the monero inner circle has close ties to someone that tries hard to control and manipulate the monero market.  This gives him inside access to monero.  It would be a little different if he didn't have so much control over it.  You think this is a good thing?  Any other P.O.S. altcoin would be burned at the stake for supporting such things.  


What does a vote in a meaningless troll poll have to do with anything?  I'm not the only one.  The majority of others have voted the same way.


If its no secret, why does smooth act like he doesn't know what's going on?


You should also link this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=786130.0

Congratz!! on being the most annoying coin community. ahhaha

Because I don't particularly pay attention to where people live nor their day jobs (you know we all have day jobs of sorts right?), and also because, as I said, the plan was a bit on-again off-again for a while, and at this very moment (aside from what has been said on this thread) I really have no idea what he is doing (nor do I particularly care, other than being friendly with David and generally supporting his decisions about how to live his own life).

David is a very intelligent and independent-minded person, and I have no doubt he can keep his living arrangements and day job (if he is indeed working for Risto, which I don't know) separate from his role on the Monero team. And even if he can't 100% do that, he's only 1/7 of the team, so any (entirely hypothetical) undue influence is extremely muted.

And on top of that, I don't really think Risto is a bad guy anyway. He simply seems to support the coin. I guess maybe its hard for you to believe that the coin has sincere supporters, but it does. He appears to be one of them.

There is nothing here, it is simply more FUD and smear tactics.

Unfortunately, he timed his post right on schedule with the bi-weekly FUD/attacks XMR has been receiving. This will cool down and in two more weeks there will yet again be more bad news for monero. I'm not particularly familiar with BCX but his timing couldn't be more precise.

Interesting observation that I hadn't seen before. It does indeed line up with the price chart reasonably well.

Maybe you are correct and you should buy these dips. Or just maybe BCX loves to play on overconfidence and figures those who should be harmed most will be. I dunno. This is bizarre.

Obviously it could be a complete coincidence as well.

I can't believe you guys have managed to turn this into another Monero speculation thread!  ;D

Welcome. What do you think of today's candles?

I guess I could of worded that a bit differently.  I was only trying to show Nekomata that David and Risto working together is not common knowledge for everyone.  I didn't know it until he said that in the trollbox.

David may be intelligent and independent-minded person.  Never said he wasn't.  But having no doubt about what he can and cannot do carries very little weight here.  You have no control over the situation and in no way can you speak to the certainty of this.  Neither can I.  I'm only expressing my concern about the control he tries to put on the monero market and having someone closely tied to monero working for you is not a good situation.

I never really said he was a bad guy either but he does more than simply try to support a coin.  You have no idea what I believe therefore you have no room to comment on my beliefs of sincere supporters.

I am too sleepy to work through the math of my intuitive hunch. But looking again at the NIZKP in the CN whitepaper, I am suspecting that when the same rings are used by all or some of the members in the ring, then maybe 'x' the private key can be determined from a system of equations.  Then if one had sufficient hashrate to fork (rewind) the blockchain, they could double-spend these wallets to other destination addresses.

Perhaps have your cryptanalysis guy look at this, if I don't get a change to come back to it.

Let's keep this simple. If David is working with Risto and living in his castle I couldn't care less. If you think that being the case is going to make any real difference to people thinking critically about the value of the coin and the success of the project, then we will simply have to agree to disagree.

If we do indeed disagree, I'd suggest you should get out of this FUD echo chamber a bit more and talk to some real people. Find out what they really think is important or not important about open source projects when they aren't obsessed with playing "shit on the other altcoin" game that is so popular here.

I've talked to a lot of people about Monero who cared enough to examine it in detail and ask me critical questions, sometimes many such questions. Some decided they didn't like it at all, some decided they did. Not once can I think of did the question of Risto's (non) involvement come up, except in public posts on this forum. Obviously those are playing to an audience. Whether you are doing that deliberately or just caught up in the "shit on other altcoins" game, I have no idea, but either way you are doing it.

This thread is hilarious, thanks guys haha. Especially that Moneroman guy LOL, what a twat.  ;D

Anyway yeah I've never been sure about CN coins and haven't invested in them. Purely because of the fact that ByteCoin first popped up claiming to have been being used on the Darknet for years prior to it's BitcoinTalk announcement. Which, let me tell you is absolute trollop. I always just assumed the creators were mining it themselves and sending it around wallets to make it seem plausible so everyone here thinks they're investing in an already established "oooh top secret" coin or some shit. Then all the clones like Monero and whatnot I haven't even bothered checking out.

Happy I made the right decision to stay away from these tbh.

If he is not bluffing, my hunch is probably correct. CN was never analyzed from the standpoint of the mathematical correlation of multiple intersecting rings. Rather the proof of security was for one ring in isolation.

I bet you will quickly find his exploit if you pursue my hunch.

I agree with you, and I'm not being misquoted here.

But let's be real here, the entire market cap is like 5.5 million USD. That just isn't "large sums of money" when divided among a large number of participants. Its a very low speculative value fairly consistent with the risks involved balanced against what might be significant upside if the risks can be overcome.

Of course what is large to one person is small to another. Certainly no one should invest more than he or she can afford to lose in any speculative investment, and that includes not only any altcoin but any cryptocoin at all, in my view.

Is there anyway for you to post some proof of these issues without giving them away?  I bet there isn't but it would be great if you could.

In a way there is. He could write up a description (or use some existing one he probably already has) and post a hash of it. After it is discovered by someone else, he can disclose his original writeup, and the hash can be verified.

Just out of curiosity, why the change of name to TheFascistMind?

BCX, most people that are interested in crypto know absolutely nothing about the underlying technology. We can read white papers and nod our heads in agreement.... feigning a sliver of understanding, then those tiny bits of knowledge are deleted from all thought almost immediately. We are fundamentally helpless to evaluate the true stability and safety of any coin we own.

The reason I say this, is because it is a waste of time for the crypto community and for individual investors to bother with coins that are flawed. They should be exploited and destroyed the moment they are proven vulnerable. Coins would be much more careful about launching, there would be a cost to launching a coin that is weak, today there is no such cost and the investor is left to simply gamble.

I would call upon you and your similarly capable friends to take it upon yourself to ALWAYS destroy a coin that is vulnerable, this includes low-hash coins, because 51% is a vulnerability that cannot be ignored. Someone has to be the police, we have police for a reason, to protect the innocent.

Please destroy Monero and any other coin that cannot withstand the force of your hashing resources, a two week notice should be all you provide, then execution, quick and painless. Slowly you can change this landscape full of scamming and thievery and lies.

Your dependence on those you fear is a touching example of human weakness.

@BCX (and or AnonyMint)

Regarding #1 and #3, is the BBR code base with its different PoW and other core changes already resistant to the same exploit?

Edit: https://github.com/cryptozoidberg/boolberry

Isn't that a bit arrogant. Bitcoin = "some coin"  ;D

I think there are other coins with foundations or similar groups? (I don't really know.)

BlackCoin.

I like you am too busy to pursue this. And if my hunch is correct, one needs significant hashing power to exploit it, which I don't have. Plus I don't want to create animosity with the developers, because I am hoping they will work with me in the future. I do appreciate your efforts and hope to be the beneficiary of your audit in the future.

Note he didn't confirm my hunch. There is also a possible antithetical meaning to the above post.


I intended to leave the forum for a while to get some work done, so the AnonyMint account was closed and I am happy for that. Because talk is cheap. And the silly arguing we were doing wasn't productive or had reached diminishing returns, especially compared to possible value I could create by coding and not talking. Or at least I wanted to not throw my reputation around because I am in support of the notion that the best code should win, not the best control over public opinion (yeah I wee bit annoyed that Monero tries to win with control over public opinion rather than not bashing the other CN coins and simply out innovating them and let their code speak for itself. And also a little bit annoyed that animorex and rpietila annoint the winner of altcoin innovation without seeing all the innovation and also with their limited understanding of the detailed issues involved. I am also guilty somewhat which is another reason to terminate AnonyMint. At the end of the day, we all need any innovations any one can do, and simply buying or earning bounties on that coin which is the most innovative will make us all rich so we don't need to get too overly aggressive on the public opinion battles.). I am in full support of any innovation that any altcoins can accomplish because I believe there are ominous threats to our human freedom on the near-term horizon which outweigh any of my personal desires for gain. For example, I am very interested in any exploit against one-time ring signatures, since I contemplated using them in an anonymity toolset. Notwithstanding though I would also like to make some money in this space and I trust myself to bring about the necessary innovations more than I trust any other developer or group of developers that I am aware of in this space. But if another development group leaps forward and proves me wrong, I might just have to join them. However, honestly I don't know too well TacoTime's (at al) capabilities or what they have in mind for the near-term future.  I am enticed back to this thread because some people who I think would be my angel investors (even if they don't know it) are also investors in XMR and BBR, thus I don't want them to lose the money that I am hoping they will invest on my efforts if ever I get there. Thus I want to try to ascertain whether there is any risk here on BCX's allegation. In short, if something is really important for the future of altcoins, I am drawn back to post.

Note I continue to get further evidence that jl777 doesn't have a deep grasp of the technology. Or at least some areas are not within his realm of expertise. I haven't looked at his code, and prolific coders can be extremely helpful if you keep them away from core things they don't understand well. Note I don't claim to be omniscient or to not make mistakes. And I don't claim to be better at cryptography than gmaxell and other core Bitcoin developers. I am a recent autodidact on cryptography and I am a generalist. So I have some distinct disadvantages, but I also have some creative freedom they may not have.

I learned in this thread that gmaxell (and Adam Beck?) semi-regularly communicate with the Monero developers. Well he thinks I am an idiot, so you have a strong ally I would probably never attain. Closing AnonyMint and stop fighting with the smart developers is a wise step on my part.

And thus the battles for public opinion. And even we developers aren't 100% sure which technological innovations are superior and must wait for the market and exploits to tell us.

Once the technological innovation settles down a bit, I and others can pursue education of laymen. I enjoy that actually. I used to tutor my engineering friends in college in physics, math, etc..

Right now we are so busy actually trying to innovate, do not have sufficient time to educate and we don't have sufficient unifying understanding to educate optimally. It is more a piecemeal process at this juncture.


Killing innovation too early though also has a cost. And it appears to me BCX is too busy and was asked by his confidents to make a decision on XMR (and CN) and took his investigation only as far as finding the answer he wanted.

And doesn't interest him (economically) to expend more effort on it. Of he could be bluffing for some reason such as deciding he wants to be in XMR and thus wants to buy it cheaper.

Or he had a hunch and wanted to entice someone to do his work for him.

You have articulated my belief that a coin which has its act together on making laymen knowledgeable (in a non-confrontational manner) will have an advantage.

Apparently you have- your words were attack enough- no need to actually do anything.

Should he instead say nothing and then when the exploit is active (assuming he isn't bluffing), no one had a chance to get out. But not promising to publish the exploit after some time is very suspicious.

If you review the history, he received private messages urging him to look at "the shitcoin Monero" about 2 - 3 months ago. As he investigated he found some flaws and his initial enthusiasm in Monero changed to "I think the price will decline". He was then challenged to justify that and thus the OP of this thread.

If he is bluffing, my comment could feed the selloff. So I am torn what to post, but I do want logic to prevail here.

No- he shouldn't not say anything. But he can't say in the same breath that he isn't attacking it . I know he means actually using the flaw- but if people believe he is right then he doesn't have to actually do it- it's the same result.

Ideally he should promise to publish the exploit after a certain time, so there is more at stake on his reputation. The entire thing is bizarre. Has created a lot of confusion and doubt for investors. Maybe that is what he is trying to accomplish. Perhaps he wants investors to be more afraid of new altcoins. In that regard, he might up to ante on the layman education new coins need to do.

There are so many ways of looking at this. Well I need to go back to work. See ya.

Edit: I see BCX and I were composing posts at the same time, I basically read his mind. ;)

Edit#2: he could also be trying to leave the altcoin space open for more competition by blowing some holes in the "arrogance" that some believe the Monero group exhibits. This may also be a way of spanking, "don't piss on the community".

Okay sorry.

I didn't leave it out because I'm putting my head in the sand..just wanted to keep it short and to the point.
Of course it's risky to invest in any coin. Also Gavin states all the time that its risky to invest in bitcoin that is years ahead of xmr and most coins.

If that is true, it will affect all CN coins. Since Boolberry just places some restrictions to
the set of possible anon transactions it would not be resistant.

However

I will not be joining any coin that has a foundation, the exception being a foundation that has the very limited role of holding the domain names (and any other assets that can't be held anonymously) for compliance with law.

I observe throughout all examples in human history all collective trust is corruption directed (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984). The best intentions of mice and men won't change this, e.g. I was banned at least once from their Cryptocrypt forum. They could have learned a lot of information from me a lot sooner, but their top-down perspective won (unwittingly a manifestation of gestapo).

PoW solved the bottom-up consensus without trust problem (although we discussed upthread that the trend towards centralization hasn't been solved yet and if I am correct BCX will need to find a new vocation and abandon his pools). Google Paul Brody at IBM to see how fundamental this paradigm shift is.

The most useful activity those with large capital can do is to angel invest in startups which proliferate the use of crypto-currencies to hopefully drive adoption as a unit-of-account. For as long as crypto-currencies are just a pass-through mechanism (e.g. Bitpay) then we've accomplished nothing against the coming global consolidation of fiat power (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg8871381#msg8871381).

Every new coin will have low hash. If a "low-hash coin" takes off i.e. becomes popular, the low-hash issue goes away. Whereas a fundamental technological flaw will not.

How it is implemented could possibly mean how rings intersect (my hunch) which would thus implicate all CN coins. He may be saying that the encryption of one ring is not breakable, but the correlation of multiple rings leads to a discovery of the 'x' private key in the NIZKP. I shouldn't be so lazy and should actually try to do the math to see if my hunch is correct. There are other probably other possibilities as well. I can't be sure my hunch is the correct one, as I haven't done the math (yet).

Sorry for the deviation from the topic and my bad English.
Does this topic not just the opposite effect.
I see that there are many people willing to buy Monero and Boolbarry than people want to sell.

BCX is buying? He said he wouldn't but he didn't say his friends wouldn't. Rpietilla is doubling-down?

Messy thread. I am signing out. Can't make confirmed sense of it, unless I confirm an exploit.

I do not understand a lot of speculation, but I see two walls of purchase for Monero and Boolberry

Then why not disclose it?

If you're not selling it, and only you and one other person are capable of executing it, then why not simply tell us what it is? The only reason I can possibly think of is that there is no exploit in the first place.

As a simple mechanic, my first instinct is to check the generation
of random bytes. Can these be tampered with?

if bcx won't share it..my say is attack it and see if it survives, we don't want XMR to be exploited when it is more or less than 100$ a piece, do we? besides what if somebody discovers it or learned how to do it besides bcx.

but allow some time for bug hunters to find it..with bounty  ;)

It is better to be attacked now than when the market capitalization of $10b. But if the bug is in the ring, then it is quite fundamental.

This Monero Economic Workgroup aka "foundation" (?) is somewhat different in scope and direction than say the Bitcoin foundation or some of the other coin foundations.

It doesn't exist to hold on to a premine or employ the developers (but does intend to donate to development) and doesn't hold any position of authority over the project itself. Its is something more like an industry association and will serve as a mechanism for those in the user/merchant community to work together to build the economy. Of course there is no real "industry" or economy to associate or build at this point but there are certainly people who want to change that.

?

Monero is the money of people.
No hierarchy, no rules, no restrictions.
Get it ?

No, actually I don't

Also could you please explain the contradiction I quoted in the above post? Thanks

The monero economy workgroup (MEW) is not a foundation.
See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=776479.0

So basically it's a foundation but not called foundation

Something being risky doesn't mean it is a mistake or that you shouldn't it. That is a question of price, and ultimately, individual judgement. Just be aware of the risks.

Call it whatever the hell you want. The people running it aren't calling it a foundation, and the role that it serves is certainly different from some of the other coin foundations that exist. But if you want to say it is "basically a foundation" go right ahead. I'm not sure anyone actually cares. I sure don't.

I don't care either (have 0 XMR), I just find it pretty funny

If Bitcoinexpress has an exploit, just use it already. The Monero and anti-Monero trolling has become an all out war. At this moment anybody winning is good for us.

He who pays the bills, makes the rules.

As much as practical I resist control (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4555) in order to maximize creative freedom.



Ignore. I don't want to see that.

The feelings are really excessive in this Monero pro and against battle.

This was about #1 and #3 and not addressed to you (for a good reason).

There is no "lead developer" in Monero. There are developers and some also happen to be core members.
We are trying hard to avoid hierarchy, please respect that.

Stricto censu, a foundation is a legally-registered body, sometimes with tax-deduction (when it is a charitable foundation, unlike the Gates Foundation). So MEW is not a foundation per se. Also, foundation usually govern the orientation of a project (this is not mandatory, though, just very common). Again, this is not what MEW will do. Under the French law, it would be called a "non-registered association" and there is probably something similar in any democracy (de facto association).
MEW is a collective. Period.

One thing I have learned from the Monero example is, "tread softly and carry a really big stick".

Action speaks louder than words.

That would be true if there was some plan to have this group pay the bills, or channel all/most funding through the group (there isn't). In reality the envisioned donations from such a group don't come close to being adequate to do so. It will just be one funding source among others, not at all unlike the members of such a group donating individually.

One purpose for the group making donations, in fact, is internal to the group itself: to discourage membership by those who would seek to undermine the project. Since the group is open and anyone can join, that would be a risk. But anyone doing that will have a portion of his membership dues directed to donations to support the project, directly undermining his own interests. So think of it as a form of anti-spam/abuse.

smooth and rpietila, this is a good experiment so we can contrast what works and doesn't. I hope you can continue with your bureaucracy. I am headed the opposite direction, which is small lone teams self-funded by tiny (insignificant) premine to reach it to the launchpad stage. Let's see what works better.

I wish I could offer a suggestion on how to alleviate the strong emotions at play. It seems some users really resent any hint of hierarchy and coaxing of investors. Perhaps it is the comments against NXT and BBR that really pushed it to the extreme. I have also made some comments that disparaged for example the PoS in NXT, the lack of true decentralization in jl777's gateway, the lack of analysis on the entropy of BBR's PoW, etc.. I guess best is to shut up about everyone else's work and focus on one's own.

I think you are right to an extent, but I think you are missing that simply any project that gets any degree of success or traction in this environment is brutally attacked. Monero has come out of nowhere to recently being a top 10 market cap coin (its fallen slightly out of that group; #10-15 are very close to being tied). Other projects have been similarly attacked. Monero is just the current installment.

So yes some of it is a reaction to rpietila directly and other aspects of the project, but much of it comes from people who find something to attack regardless. If not one thing it would be another.

I don't much care what people attack though. So yes the vitriol and FUD and shills and personal attacks are disgusting and sad, as you have seen, but ultimately meaningless.

Maybe not if they can all find a way to profit on its rise. That is my hope any way. I know such vitriol would affect me emotionally. Perhaps I better just not read anything on the forum if that time ever comes.

smooth, you have turned into a full blown arrogant retard. You weren't this way when BitMonero was launched. XMR was the community CN coin. Brushing it as a coin that gets hated due to success is incorrect. There are a ton of reasons it gets hated and success is just a minor reason (just check few pages ago). If XMR market were a 10th of the current market and rest of the things around it were same, it would still get attacked, just like Bytecoin gets called out for their misgivings.

The success excuse is the same breath as the other tiring rhetoric that we use here "they hate us for our freedoms". They don't.

Odds of that happening is probably about the same as him(?) not being full of hot air. 9 to 1 against or so.

People hate for any number of reasons, I can't account for all of them. Honestly though, I think hate is pervasive in this environment. Its a contagious disease, and this "community" (tough word to even use any more) is being consumed by it.

Not one of the top 10 coins has escaped a barrage of attacks, certainly not any of the newer ones (one might exclude say NMC -- no one seems to care much about that one either way). I see hatred against every one of them constantly.

In the case of XMR in particular, much of the hatred is in response to actions by trolls that have nothing to do with us, some strategic, and some who just want to stir shit up for their own amusement. That further creates more trolls, particularly in the later group, who create more and more problems in a repeating and escalating cycle of attacks. As I said, the culture here is just sick and disgusting. Or maybe it is a just a few who are spoiling it for everyone and I shouldn't paint with such a broad brush. But the effect is the same.

No one said you are accountable for all of them. What I did say was stop trying to pin the hatred on fake market success inducing jealousy. It is a convenient excuse that is not applicable here if you start introspection given several other reasons that have been mentioned by now. 

I didn't say jealousy at all. You projected that. I said the hate gets spewed around on everyone and being a high profile target means you necessarily catch a lot of it.

Now you know how I felt when you guys were discussing spin-off as altcoin killer.

You guys? I find the spin-off concept interesting and a worthy experiment. I'm sure there are some people who want it to kill off altcoins (same with side-chains for example, an idea I've been far more critical of than spin-offs). I doubt you can find anywhere that I said I wanted to kill off altcoins. Again, it is easy to fall into projection.

It was implied and wasn't the crux of the argument. You running in stubborn circles around the arguments is not going to help you identify those or rectify those. It has very little to do with high profile or success.

Please be kind to list those "other reasons" which have been mentioned by now as a reminder !

Sorry, I don't agree with you that it is possible to avoid or even significantly reduce hatred, trolls, FUD and hatred in this environment. It would be running in circles to try, so I won't and nor will the project.

Did you hear the recent Let's Talk Bitcoin that covered Monero? It was interesting and informative in general. Andreas gave a good perspective toward the end about how every single high profile person (and I would add project) in this environment has been attacked, trolled, insulted, slandered, etc. Relentlessly and repeatedly and brutally. I agree with him.

If you want to play here, get used to it. It is disgusting and sad, but it is also reality. End of story.

FTFY

To which I would add Exhibit A. Spot the hate.

Why dont u post in ur own munerotalk? why here? why annoy the hell out of us all? really plz tell me.

plz just go to ur own forum u were asked 2598295 times already and in a polite manner. what do u expect? ppl keep kissing rpietila's shoes like u ?  we wont, no matter how hard u try dude

just go to ur own forum and post as much as u want its alright there

~CfA~

Did I take a wrong turn? Let me take a look....


Oh, alright, I guess I'm in the right place after all.


No thank you.

You are certainly free to head on up to the all-Bitcoin-all-the-time subforums above this one though. Very little Monero there, you should greatly prefer it.

Yup proud of my timing and my analysis of the direction in which the Board of Directors, management and employees of Monero Corporation were headed. Despite all of that at least I thought you weren't part of the problem. Now you will see how others will also evaluate you personally since you are playing the Monero figurehead too.

There are a lot of things that you will need to get used to yourself with that stubbornness and arrogance. Playing victim is definitely going to one of them.

You are like a 5 year old who got his lollipop stolen.

Send me your address, i buy you a whole package of chupa chups.

But then you fags have been asking for donations. Is that why you are begging for money these days or is it because Vertcoin didn't work out and Pietila can only have one slave at a time in the headquarters?

I, for one would like to invest in your vision.. How do us small guys become apart of it?

I can´t see the link between lollipops and donations but if you want to become the first slave of Malla i am sure we can sort that out - for free.

The monero core team is looking for donations. Sell you lollipops and donate the proceeds to their cause. See it was simple to link the connection.

Do you have a resume or a linked in profile since I believe you are playing core team too right? What exactly is your educational background or any business/entrepreneurship experience? 

typical tough guy keyboard warrior. go outside neckbeard

Is there, or was there a relationship between Monero and Vertcoin?

I studied computer science and economics, thats my background.
I am self employed since over 10 years.


And no, i dont have linkedin, in germany we use Xing.


If you want to meet with me in Person, fly to Hannover (Hanover) airport, i take you from there and we can discuss this like real men.
We can also meet at Malla, i wanted to visit that anyway sooner or later.



No; besides the fact that i contributed to booth and several other open source projects.

I think othe worked on Vertcoin? But no there is no official relationship that I know about. Personally, I've never even looked at Vertcoin, and couldn't tell you anything about it.

Post you Xing profile.

Post your Xing profile.

But how much do you bench?

Only the market doesn't trust me with $6 million. You are being touted as a shining star or one of the 7 reasons to like about devs of Monero. Too bad nothing can be done about false advertisement (or maybe that is what is going on ....)

I'm German and I have a LinkedIn profile only ;D

Thanks! That comment literally made my week!

PS: 1 rep max 155kg bench

I don´t know in kg but i am able to lift 3 crates of beer from the supermarket to my car.

Now we know you're being untruthful, everyone knows all of Germany has beer pipes direct to the house. Even the cars run on beer.

Now that's a benchmark that means something! ;D

Bench warriors are pussies.  Power clean is a much better test of real strength.

Feel free to post a video of you doing a Power clean of three crates of beer kk?

You guys look great in gray sweats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxjCJxfECD8

Maybe a farmer's walk. 

Oh, and I just re-read...155kg ain't no joke for a 1RM bench.  I hereby officially retract the "bench warriors are pussies" comment.  Just promise me you can squat at least 200.

Can a small guy get involved?

I heard that decentralized cyrptocurrencies are the answer to all of mankind's problems :)

Back on topic.  It's not how much can you bench, it's how much can you squat.

Nothing illustrates the doomed Monero Echo Chamber better than this.

VTC has been a Top 10-20 coin for many months now...
And they've done some things very well like build a classy, mature community (unlike XMR)...
And a very reliable, fast network that's fun to use (unlike XMR)...
But they've also done things very badly like their idiotic, losing war on multipools and botnets.

So you learn nothing from the "Evil Competition"...
And are stuck in 2013 talking about "revolutionary wallets" in the age if NXT.

Yes, I totally agree with you. Fuckwit.

This is in direct contradiction to your original claim that it cannot be fixed without giving up on anonymity. I call bullshit.

Oh my.

http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/th_popcorncat.gif

discuss the Bitcoin Core developer opinion vs. BCX incompetent exploit lie
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788885.0

1RM 220kg Squat and 240kg deadlifts.. I tried for weeks to hit that 160kg bench but felt like a mountain considering I weigh 75kg (yea, i'm not tall :P)

If you haven't watched this, just about everyone would find this funny (both gym go'ers and couch potatoes alike) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNf606dfCb0

https://i.imgur.com/SXPkTnC.gif

Epic nerd fight.  Dis gon b gud?

where is the contradiction ? I cant see it.

~CfA~

Just guessing here, but I read that to mean that if the purported exploit is not a "break down in the encryption but in how it is implemented," then it can be fixed without giving up on anonymity.  

Assuming that is correct, then the primary source of value in CN would be preserved once the purported exploit is fixed.

If it was an implementation issue then the maths / cryptography would be fine, and all we'd have to do to patch the exploit is fix the implementation so it correctly reflects the cryptography in the whitepaper. This would not require us to give up anonymity, since we would still meet the anonymity-set as dictated by the whitepaper.

If, instead, the problem is in the cryptography, then the only way to fix it would be to throw out the incorrect maths / cryptography, "giving up" some or all of the anonymity.

Not bad.

Someone caught Moneroman88 pumping iron at the local gym: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDBP_xdzyxI

In the quote he is talking about encryption.  

In your response you are talking about anonymity.  

On the Original post he says, "To fix this, anonymity will need to be sacrificed..."

Isn't anonymity and encryption two different things?  Where is the contradiction?





This comment is in response to some other forum members questions and accusations.  Im not sure if it is in direct response to the original post.

The anonymity is expressed in the whitepaper - if anonymity has to be sacrificed then it would be because the maths / crypto in the whitepaper is wrong.

Ok but where is the contradiction?  Whales are trying to pump XMR from this one message from gmaxwell.  Id like some further clarification on the comment.

I think the answer to your question in bold is no, here the anonymity and encryption are not two different things.

You think...  Not good enough.  Fluffpony basically ignored the questions.  Can we have someone that knows what they are talking about respond please.

I'd hazard that he misspoke when he said encryption, and he meant "cryptography" instead. Otherwise it makes no sense - there's a keyring flaw and we have to sacrifice anonymity, but the breakdown is not in the encryption but in the implementation thereof? Confused.

Lol.  Whales are not pumping anything.

Really?  What do you call 100 btc in additional walls showing up.  Pushing monero over 389k, walls being removed and getting dumped back to 360k.  Over 100btc were bought and sold within about an hour.  Sounds like a suckers pump and dump to me.

Leave kuriso alone.  He has one thing in life - his obsession with XMR and Risto

Kuriso has two things in life, his obsessions with XMR, Risto, and delusions of authority.

Among kuriso's many obsessions are XMR, Risto, and his own deluded sense of authority.

When will you delete this post due to hollow threats?

lol

GM's words are entirely clear; there was no equivocating, hedging, or ambiguity. 

He said you don't know WTF you are talking about and are FOS.  No vacillating 'maybes' or 'conditional ifs' about it.

I think there was a tone of 'Put up or STFU' as well, but may be reading too much into it.

Just post the exploits.

Yes.  Post em so we can all be done with this and I can finally stop checking the price every 5 minutes.

I give shit about the nerd fight between GMX and BCX - I want them to compete in a power lift competition!

 :D

Everyone will try to buy Monero as cheap as possible. And sell as high as possible.

You said will be worth on 31.12.2015  0.01 USD, but you have no guts to bet even 1 penny on it.


But since you know, then you exactly know when to buy.   ;D

Guys if you seriously even bother discussing the matter with BitcoinEXpress I'm laughing my ass off.

It has been confirmed so many times now that there is *No Exploit* and there has been *No Exploit*, the only matter of fact is that BCX made it all up and is entirely debunked now.

I repeat, for all those that still respected BCX for some reason (totally incomprehensible) have now all the reasons in the world to realize that he's just Mr. Fat Mouth without anything behind his claims whatsoever.

What a fucking fail, BCX. You fail on all levels, the only thing you might have succeeded in is the crash you initiated to buy in Monero as low as possible. Congratulations for being the #1 fail in the crypto world, BCX. Thanks for entertaining us by being an utter asshat.

Time to carry on, Monero doesn't need all of this BCX-wannabe-FUD waste of time...

I think this guy is unstable.

PUT UP OR SHUT UP.  :-*

Please could you try to avoid quoting that troll if possible? He's on everyone's ignore-list. Thanks you.

he aint on my ignore list cause dem bullshit he writes is hilariously delusional

~CfA~

He is clearly taunting and trying to provoke BCX into demonstrating the exploit.

Well BCX did offer to show a live chain demonstration to Maxwell.

that monero man can try provoke the BCX all day long.  bcx aint no man to be played with... it was demonstrated so many times.  if he wants to exploit hes gonna go and exploit independent of moneromans or any other monero shill accs  delusional writings or beliefs. if u believe there is no exploit then go ahead, aint gonna change things

~CfA~

what do u have to lose ?

~CfA~

Is it just me or is it only bullshitting dooshrags that have to put their nickname initials at the end of each of their posts? Like we can't just look to the left and see who's posting. 

~JwM~

What's worse, he's leaving one out.  It should be

~CofA~

for "came on from above"

Nice!

~EMn~

It's just u. I have 1424 posts signed with my CfA brand. U have 1. BCX has 3400.

~CfA~

fail by CertifiedFailAccumulator

I've seen the Nxt wallet. The one under development for Monero is revolutionary.

Re. Vertcoin, it is currently #40 on coinmarketcap. I don't spent my time studying every one of the top 40 coins.

Could you please elaborate on that? What will be revolutionary?

I found a leaked screenshot of the Monero wallet.  ;D

http://aiafrontlines.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/empty-wallet.jpg

In terms of ease of use that would indeed be a vast improvement. But we're not quite able to accomplish that yet.

read the signature my dear troll u may need to triple read it to let it get into ur brains

~CfA~

This thread is reminding me of the tussles with my childhood friends.

Well to you young studs, I am 49 and at least I can still lift my 5kg dick.

49 old ??
He's still a pup !!
62 here ..

Triff ..

Careful. Encryption could mean the one-time ring signature is not broken, rather the way it is implemented perhaps referring to having multiple intersecting ring signatures simultaneously. Afaics the whitepaper did not address the math of such an intersection.



As I wrote upthread, it might be possible using multiple intersecting rings to use a system of simultaneous equations to find the 'x' private keys that are supposed to be hidden by the non-interactive Zero Knowledge Proof. However, I didn't work through the math to see if my hunch is true.

However by that time, the coins are already spent on the blockchain (unless you can intercept before), so you need the hashrate and or Time Warp Attack to backup the blockchain and double-spend them to yourself.

This wouldn't be the first time I had an insight that gmaxell didn't although he has returned the favor of me a few times too.

I am lazy to do the math because I don't see anyone offering me some considerable amount of money and I doubt I could use the exploit if I found it. If someone puts up a big bounty, I will investigate.

I could be way off course. It is just a hunch.

Don't feel too much pity on me...

Seriously I can still bench 120 - 140kg and squat I don't know but in my 20s I did about 250 kg. I am 5'7" (169cm) and about 75 - 80kg.

My athleticism would be much greater if I wasn't suffering from a progressive autoimmune condition (which just might be improving since I started AHCC treatment in May).

Note I was an exceptional athlete most of my life though. For example I ran a sub 4:30 mile, sub 2:00 800 meters. I also ran 4.5 ish 40 meter dash, was a MVP at cornerback, etc..

I still compete with the young guys in basketball full speed. My vertical is still over 24" (just recently improved from 19").

old and young...and they quarrel like children  ::) lol

i guess that's the price of anonymity  :D

Encryption does not mean signature, ring or otherwise. Two different concepts. There is very little encryption in the protocol, arguably none at all.

So I'm not even sure what the original quote means at all, other than a somewhat confused mishmash of "big words."

The only way I see to make sense of it is to interpret encryption as cryptography as fluffypony said and gmaxwell seems to have also inferred. But it could mean something else. When you invent your own definitions for words you can later say you meant just about anything.

I will offer a 5 BTC bounty for a verified vulnerability along these lines as long as it is privately disclosed 2 weeks prior to public announcement so there is time to correct it. Due to the vagueness of the possible attacks and the practical feasibility, I will defer to community's opinion as to whether the exploit is valid.

I hope that Risto will match my 5 BTC bounty

James

I'm used to unsophicated people using "encryption" to mean cryptography. As you note there is no encryption in the protocol _at all_, (not just arguably, but unambiguously).  But no need to hang up on a pretty obvious claim over some pedantic word mincing— the meaning was clear enough to me.  If I misread— I'm sure BCX can comment.

A theft bug that cannot be fixed without breaking the system's privacy must be a cryptographic one. Thats a pretty strong claim which deserves some strong evidence. Other systems are using related cryptosystems, and would benefit greatly from knowing it was broken. BCX should publish his discovery.

James I will sleep first. If anyone can beat me to it, go ahead. Again nothing may come of my hunch.

Smooth and Gmaxell the CN does have encryption because only the receiver can decrypt who the coin was spent to. ;) Perhaps you forgot it is not just a digital signature as in Buttcoin.

https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf#page=7

I'll put up 10 BTC if you prove that such a critical vulnerability exists, and deliver the proof to me privately. Further conditions apply, PM me if you're serious on taking up my offer.

What is there for you to lose? Judging by all these threads, it can't be much.

Either put up or move on.

You write that you have nothing to gain from "attacking monero", but you some how have time to keep up on it's many threads?

That is essentially what I meant by arguably. But cracking that "encryption" wouldn't allow you to steal wallets so even that usage doesn't allow for a consistent interpretation of the quote.

He said the encryption is not the broken part. Hehe, we are playing word games. Hey you started it. Hehe. No problem.

It's all nonsense (meaning trying infer the original usage of encryption as meaningful). The term encryption makes no sense in the original context and was just misused.

The "hehe" was me being nice. His usage is correct. The encryption part is not broken. It appears to the be the NIZKP that is broken when you have ____ ring signatures with the same ____ but I am still trying to prove this.

Appreciate the edit.

100%.  Announcing this with no proof looks a lot more like market manipulation then anything else.  If this is true, then why not publish?

He didn't say that. He said the break down (his term) is "how it is implemented" and by "it" he was referring to the encryption.

It makes no logical sense as gmaxwell pointed out.

Perhaps BCX wants to clarify what he meant so as to avoid being accused of leaving things deliberately ambiguous so he can make up whatever he wants to claim it meant later (even if that is not the case).

Security of ECDH key exchange is trivially provable. The only thing I can think of that *might* be insecure is the ring signatures themselves, though I don't know how.

Thanks, now I'll have to clean all the perfectly good beer off my screen.

Agreed.


No inconsistency.

Novices like you don't seem to understand that anonymity isn't encryption. And the encryption part of CN which hides the one-time destination key doesn't have to be broken for the anonymity to be broken.

My vertical is about 9 inches. Flaccid.

That's not what BCX said. He said the "way it is implemented" (with "it" referring to encryption) is the source of the break down.

His statement makes no sense as gmaxwell correctly pointed out and trying to spin it into something other than a nonsensical statement is not helpful.

That is independent of any other flaws that might exist, which could very well include flaws that BCX does not know about.

The 'it' only makes sense if he lumping the ring-signatures together with ECDH key exchange. Ring-signatures can I guess be considered a form of encryption because they scramble who is the signer. The secret can be decrypted only by someone who has the private key of the signer.

i.e. it doesn't make sense because sentence construction (and even paragraph construction if you read the whole thing).


Something that doesn't occur in this system, so there is no encryption (even broadly defined) in the protocol.

Agreed, it is the common misnomer one-way encryption (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2329582/what-is-currently-the-most-secure-one-way-encryption-algorithm#comment2299765_2329582) because there is no inverse function, so given BCX is not that technical I think it is a reasonable error on his part. Even I could have made that mistake because (I've heard that one-way encryption term from my use in protecting passwords when I've been a programmer before I become an autodidact cryptographer of sorts and) I don't focus too carefully on my words and my brain is more interested in the creativity in any issue.

My understanding is BCX didn't create his exploits (he has admitted he doesn't even know how to code), rather he is a coordinator of resources and depends on people more technical than himself such as ArtForz.

I just awoke. Will now see if I can break the math of the NIZKP. Should have the answer shortly. Perhaps I was incorrect.

Actually one-time pads (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad) are a form of encryption.

So the pedantic and anal lose this time  :P

The underlying psychological reason people are offended by Monero is because the community's idealism is "we are the underdogs fighting the establishment for the greater good" (with copious delusion, naivete, and repressed selfish motives). So anything that smacks of centralization and establishment creates animosity unless it is Bitcoin because Bitcoin has already achieved that ideal (or so the community thinks, but I think we are fooled). The more decentalized an effort is, the less it can be attacked. The key personalities of Monero have put bullseyes on their foreheads.

I wrote upthread that I learned it is best to "tread softly and carry a big stick".

This sums it up perfectly.

That sums up Monero better than just about any other description I could come up with. So perhaps that explains a good measure of its success and popularity in this community.

Your suggestion is that Monero does not exemplify these things does not hold up against the significant popularity it has gained here.


There is no centralization in Monero. It is probably the most decentralized coin project. How can you get any more decentralized than a bunch of people some of whom don't even know each other's names, collaborating on the Internet to work on some code (and a few other resources like a web site, IRC channel, etc.)? That's exactly what it is.

I stand by my belief that what gets a visibility in this environment attracts supporters and detractors, including some very loud and ugly ones. That has been true of every single coin that has become at all popular (with a couple of exceptions I mentioned such as NMC, because no one seems to pay any attention to it at all), and I certainly wouldn't exclude Bitcoin as you did. Bitcoin gets plenty of hate, perhaps the most of all (in line with its profile). I think you have missed some of the threads attacking the Bitcoin Foundation or various individual developers or other people involved with Bitcoin.

Have a listen to Andreas' segment about Monero on Let's Talk Bitcoin. He sums up the disgusting level of attacks that comes out of this community and culture on everything and everyone quite well.

I'm sure you could find something and say "if you got rid of this or change that you would have fewer haters" but it is also likely the case that getting rid of this or changing that would disappoint, disillusion, and drive away some supporters. You simply can't please everyone.

Finally, some of the push back comes in response to statements from our supporters, not us, and to be fair I don't care for some of our supporters either. But we are inclusive, and don't chase anyone away. That includes some polarizing figures.

Perceptions vary. Some apparently see it as that, and others apparently see it as hoodwinked sheep following rpietila. Others such as myself have a technological opinion that it can't possibly achieve the ideal I have.

More saliently, it is that key Monero personalities so vocally (to the point it is perceived as spamming the forum by some) and sometime condescendingly defend the above that annoys further those who have an opposing perspective.

In short, the community wants freedom of opportunity (to dream), not preaching from one blackhole (sucking up everything) perspective. And then wants to respond to results, not preaching a perspective.

Dogecoin got people excited. The results were in proportion to the talk. The amount of talk that goes on about Monero is relatively speaking far out-of-proportion to the lackluster results.

No reply you can make will make it better. The best reply is to STFU and go do some programming. And that STFU applies to me also.
 

I think he understands less well than I do, but STFU and prove it applies here in spades.

People can come up with whatever crazy theories they want. All of the core participants, and many of the active community supporters predate rpietila's involvement at all. I know a number of them from the OTC trading thread I ran, which attracted a lot of BTC "Heros" and many others, when rpietila wasn't involved at all. I'm still in touch with many of them.

It is true that perception matters though, it is just that people will believe what they want to believe even when it is totally dead wrong. Nothing we can do to change that.

I also don't agree that hiding in a hole and coding solves these sorts of problems, at all, especially when you have something already working (sort of). These problems are basically social, not coding. The main thing we will likely to do overcome them is outgrow this cesspool of trolling and hate.

DOGE got, and gets, massive amount of hate, BTW. Nobody escapes it.

Okay my hunch appears to be incorrect.

https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf#page=9

There is no additional information gained from each ring signature even if they all use the same Pi, because the qi and wi are chosen randomly.

So I didn't find any weakness in the math, unless it is something in the modular math.

So BCX may mean the "implementation" has an error not the math of the NIZKP, in which case after the attack it would be fixable and the anonymity going forward would be fixed. BCX may be implying (note he didn't exclude that) the exploit can only break the anonymity up to the point of a fix of the implementation.

I don't have time to go hunting in the implementation. Not even for 50 BTC.

That word "crazy" just incites more animosity.


Irrelevant.


Exactly.


You are inciting animosity again with that. It appears to be a pompous attitude (whether it is or not the best is to STFU and again I am saying to myself too so please don't take it personally).


The distinction was the talk going on about DOGE was the way the coin was being used as a currency. The tipping for posting commentary. Go find that discussion between kbh and Anonymint in rpietila's speculation thread for the details.

In short, let the users of the coin talk. Not a few key personalities over and over again.

Any way I don't have any more time to try to hash out that theory.

Peace.

Agrees with what one of our cryptographers said about q_i and w_i. I think they have a more complete writeup in progress.

I don't blame you about the code. We have people doing that but it is a major task.

Among people preferring to believe crazy theories and unwilling to look at the facts, it likely does. I'm not concerned with them, they are unreachable and unpersuadable.

For people grounded in reality, crazy theories are simply crazy and say more about the people repeating them than anyone else.

I hope you are successful with a coin. I don't wish upon you the hostility (some likely real, and some likely manufactured) that will come with that, but if it happens, you will see how this really works. But perhaps you can simply hide and release it, without any public interaction. No doubt that would be more a more pleasant process.

That sounds like a positive result. It probably doesn't mean much coming from me but that you for taking the time to investigate your hunch.

If you want find out whether or not BCX has uncovered a vulnerability, then just convince realsolid to add Monero to the markets at mcxNOW. ;)

The easiest way to be sure BCX will not attack is for a little brown nosing. Admit we beleive he can attack and we respect him and there will be no attack forthcoming. I don't know for sure what would happen if the opposite were to be true. No need to find out. Auroracoin and the other crapcoins were an easier target, but the attitude did not do them any favors.

I'm not sure what will be harder, convincing RS to add XMR (never will happen) or waiting for some much-needed elaboration on such lofty claims...  ::) yawn. Unlikely to see either.  I'm slowly accumulating whilst there is few nosebleeds on the sidewalks..

I am with Cryptobro. Thank you so much for taking the time to dig in and work through the process. Really cool of you to put in the effort and time on something that helps a project you aren't on board with. I understand that one can't prove a negative and there may still be some issues, but the fact that you had an interpretation of the discussion and followed it through is very Cryptos community-minded of you.

Same goes to jl7777 for offering the bounty. Very cool.