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We need a review of this technology. Something brilliant and clever like this should not be ignored. Even satoshi made some comments on the essence of Cryptonote. Maybe he contributed in some way or another towards its development

Apparently it was in development since a few years and was intended to be a step ahead in the right direction, that is transaction privacy. Cryptonote is the tech which should have been bitcoin in the first place.

Care to share a little about what it is? Am I right guessing it's a coin with anonymous send features like DRK and a few others?

Its not a coin, its a protocol

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

I don't know enough about it to be able to meaningfully contribute to the discussion, but there is quite a bit of discussion about it in the Alt Coin Discussion forum, especially in some of the Monero threads.

Ok, that's interesting. I don't know how I feel about it as part of what I like about Bitcoin is the transparency of the blockchain. If it was somehow an option that could be turned on and off...

The first cryptonote coin was announced in 2014, but if Satoshi actually discussed it then that would lend it a lot of credibility.  Of course, he didn't.

But Monero already has a strong case for being the #2 most important coin after Bitcoin, since Cryptonote coins are the only ones that aren't based on Bitcoin.  I also like Dashcoin, because you can get a million of them for about 50 cents.

I think anyone running "dark markets" is mentally insane by not accepting Monero as teh official coin. Even Andreas himself said in his latest speech in MIT (you can search the video in youtube) that Bitcoin is impossible to be effectively anonymous and you are better off using other coins (basically Monero)

I wouldnt be so sure if I were you. Because in the following post, Satoshi describes the essence of cryptonote :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770.msg9074#msg9074

Um. What do you want to know? I'll talk about Monero since that's the CN chain I've worked on the most.

(1) It uses a different elliptic curve than Bitcoin for signing (EdDSA, which uses Schnorr signatures on a Twisted Edwards curve).
(2) It uses a different hashing algorithm than Bitcoin for PoW, which is AES heavy and currently performs similarly on GPUs and CPUs. One of the main downsides to this is that sidechains are currently impossible (validation takes too long), however as sidechains don't actually exist right now we've been ignoring this. If we want to add sidechain support in the future, the hashing algorithm can be change to something simple. In the meantime, the algorithm is relatively "egalitarian" in that no specialized hardware is required.
(3) One time use addresses ("stealth addressing") is mandatory for all transactions. This makes light clients very difficult to secure or create in general, but it dramatically enhances privacy because it's impossible to ever reuse an address.
(4) All transactions are denominated in base 10, and fractionated by mantissa.
(5) Ring signatures obfuscate spending of outputs by allowing you to do a 1-of-N input for a transaction where you spend funds from Bob OR Alice OR Michael OR Claire OR et cetera. Like one time use addresses, this is a passive privacy technology that doesn't require any active participation of anyone in the network (unlike DarkCoin, CoinJoin, and so on).
(6) A single pair of private keys is used for the recovery of all outputs owned by a wallet, but with a different type of data structure than BIP32 has (viewkey/secretkey).
(7) An implicit, silent multisig implementation centered around Schnorr signatures is being researched and developed (thanks andytoshi/gmaxwell).
(8) Research is ongoing into ways to break our privacy technology and improve it. See: https://lab.monero.cc/
(9) Monero is readily auditable from a regulatory perspective (you can easily prove your ownership of funds if you need to, for example to tax agencies).
(10) It has a much faster emissions (subsidy/reward) curve than Bitcoin. 80% is mined within 4 years. The emissions curve is also much smoother than for Bitcoin, with reward decreasing every block.
(11) Unlike Bitcoin, Monero will have long term perpetual inflation. Subsidy will become fixed in about 10 years time at a flat rate of less than 1%, to keep the chain from becoming fully deflationary and to better incentivize miners. This makes it more likely to be useful as a currency than Bitcoin, in my opinion.

It's a protocol that uses ring signatures to provide anonymity. There are many different Cryptonote coins including Bytecoin (BCN) and Monero (XMR) which are the two major ones, as well as Quazarcoin, Boolberry, Fantomcoin, Darknote, Monetaverde, Dashcoin, Aeoncoin, Infinium-8, and more. In practice, it's similar to Darkcoin which I'm sure you're familiar with but the anonymity provided is stronger. Unlike Darkcoin, these coins share no code with Bitcoin as the Cryptonote protocol was written from the ground up. The use of ring signatures has a few downsides though, such as blockchain bloating. For example, Monero's blockchain grew by 1 GB barely a month after it was launched.

Cryptonote allows you to be completely anonymous or public by giving out your view key IIRC

Thanks for the detailed reply tacotime. Apparently Monero seems to be the best implementation of this technology at the time

And now he works with DarkNote (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=788916.0) as it's the most advanced CryptoNote inspired project  8)

That can't be true, when him and his wife were round for supper on Tuesday night he didn't mention that at all.

IS IT TRUE

What about this thread? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0

And what about the NSA speculations behind Cryptonote? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote#NSA_involvement

is it going to the moon? should I buy It?  ???

Your satoshi is fake, guys! He said he is not married.

Sorry, but only comments about the 'protocol' have been invited. So please stop shilling activities here. I hope you understand. Thanks

If I want to buy some dodgy stuff from some dodgy market no way I would use Bitcoin. Monero seems indeed the ideal solution there. I don't trust the DRK system when the nodes can be subjected to attack.

The thread is more so focused around the earliest implementation of Cryptonote, that is Bytecoin(BCN). Which has been investigated hard enough to be confidently called a scam job at best. It was in a manner shown that Bytecoin has been existing for a few years and a major portion of the currency has already been mined. A forum user strangely discovered it one day browsing an onion link. Investigation revealed possible faking of dates. You can read more about it on that particular thread.

The possibility of a big scam going on was the reason a different, completely fair chain called Monero was started. It is the second implementation of Cryptonote and holds the largest vote share of miners.


I am afraid i am not qualified enough to offer any meaningful insights

Unfortunately, like any technology, the ultimate test will come when it really counts. Hopefully for cryptonote it will be something more vanilla than the trial by fire bitcoin experienced.

(really just replying to watch the thread - I hope I added something to the conversation)

The article it links to is on a domain that has expired, unfortunately, but the article is still on archive.org (here (https://web.archive.org/web/20141026085004/http://www.cryptobang.com/2014/10/05/what-nsa-created-cryptonote-for/)). The article is completely bizarre, and written by "Barnie" in that October 26 grab, and then suddenly by "Project CIA" in the November 6 grab (https://web.archive.org/web/20141026085004/http://www.cryptobang.com/2014/10/05/what-nsa-created-cryptonote-for/).

This is from the same people that slammed Namecoin as a useless clone (https://web.archive.org/web/20141014020505/http://www.cryptobang.com/2014/09/05/namecoin-useless-bitcoin-clone/), so take it with a pinch of salt.

How about changing the thread title to: 1) be a bit less of an advertisement, and 2) indicate some relevance to Bitcoin since you are posting in the Bitcoin area.

"Cryptonote: More Bitcoin Than Bitcoin"

It's true.

One out of two is not bad.

No, I remember DRK uses coinjoin tech. Monero and bytecoin uses Cryptonote Technology. It's different anon technology from coinjoin.

Look at XMR(monero) it's going up crazy nowadays. ;D

Title updated

It's actually a Blade Runner reference. "More Human Than Human" is the Tyrell Corporation motto.

If you look at Satoshi's original client, you can see that it creates lots of fresh addresses for transactions. This is already a half-step towards mandatory stealth addressing.  Satoshi also talked about a "1 CPU 1 Vote" system which Cryptonote accomplishes with its mining algorithm. Block-by-block reward adjustment does what bitcoin does with its halvings, only better. Block sizes are also automatically recalculated after every block.

One day, bitcoin will probably attempt to incorporate cryptonote features into it. But it will be politically difficult. Look how hard it is just to increase the bitcoin block size. Gavin has to write essays and debate people. Bitcoin's mining will one day become dangerously centralized. AMD and NVIDIA will produce 99% of ASICs in a handful of countries in 5 years from now if bitcoin continues growing.

If it's this difficult to change the block size, imagine how difficult it will be to change the bitcoin mining algorithm.

Satoshi got as close to his vision as he practically could as a 1 man coding machine, and it's revolutionary. But cryptonote is in fact much closer to his vision than what he created. More private. More decentralized. More secure. Untraceable. Unlinkable. Better at being bitcoin than bitcoin.

Interesting read - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241.0

(disclaimer - hopefully the below will not be read as "oh this ginger guy is hardcore monero, so he's just pumping blah blah blah. I'm not hardcore monero - I'm hardcore decentralized value exchange, and currently, in my opinion, I think monero foots the bill. Indeed, I am still critical of monero - the use of pools, for instance, pushes the scales towards centralization. Now, back to the topic)


Yah, I wish I could see an honest discussion or at least some input from the hardcore bitcoin diehards. (no offense, I'm seeing a lot of usual suspects in here). And if I've missed the discussion because I'm late in the game, I'll totally mod my post if someone gives me a good non-trolled discussion about the topic.

In my opinion, bitcoin is here to stay, but its slowly moving towards the equivalent of a centralized financial technology that also functions as currency. I.e., you could purchase your own bitcoins for your economic activity, but the merchant and the merchants bank and your personal bank are already doing all of their communication / remittances / etc on the bitcoin blockchain, so why bother? We've already seen that the regular financial user really wants convenience as opposed to security and/or pseudonymity - whats the proportion of accounts that are originated / hosted / whatever on third party sites? (coinbase, circle, blockchain.info, etc)

Of course, the "currency vs. fintech backbone" could be applied to any cryptocurrency, and its something that only time will tell.

Hrm, actually, I'm scanning over satoshi's whitepaper. It's quite interesting, privacy is not mentioned in the conclusion.


Indeed, privacy is only mentioned as point #10, which is sandwiched by point 9 "Combining and splitting value" and point 11 "calculations". At this point I can only infer things because I missed the original discussions, but "privacy" seems an afterthought or an emergent property, not necessarily a designed property.

So based on the whitepaper, bitcoin technically does what it set out to do as a technology. It is "a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust". Indeed, the concept of decentralization is not explicit in the whitepaper. In fact, the only two instances of the root "central" are:



I think the phrase "cryptonote: more bitcoin than bitcoin" refers to the bitcoin ethos - that is, decentralization of a fundamental component of contemporary civilization: the ability to transfer and store value. In my opinion, privacy is required for a fully functioning value transfer system that properly represents the value that a civilization has for stuff (material goods, thoughts, actions, service, etc).


(I apologize if I missed something in the whitepaper or in my general exposure to the field. This is a hobby after all, and I must make breakfast for my family)

Garbage.  That's the whole strength of Bitcoin, is it's transparent, trustful, trace any transaction to the Genesis Block Blockchain Ledger.

Having an anonymous blockchain seems shady, seedy, and made for illicit activity.

Thank God this thing is pretty much dead on arrival anyway.  Soon to be forgotten in the annals of Crypto history.

RIP Cryptonote.

One nice thing about cryptonote as opposed to some of the other anonymity schemes is that there is a degree of traceability. It is ambiguous whether a coin comes from A, B, or C, but it must come from one and only one of them. So you do have a verifiability that the integrity of the money supply hasn't been violated. That's one of the big issues with zerocash and the "trusted setup".

Crypto note seems really promising, I'm gonna keep an eye on it for a while, mabey it will create a good coin one day.

Cryptonote does allow you the option of "turning transparency on and off".  Through the use of "payment IDs" and "view keys" you can give others access to information.  I believe the view key functionality is not entirely implemented in Monero (the coin I am interested in), but all the mechanics for this are there.

Crtyptonote coins give you the choice of privacy or transparancy.

Interesting read-2  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=978447.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=978447.0)

Anything truly important/revolutionary that Cryptonote does, can be rolled into Bitcoin in the future if necessary.
It won't be copy & paste protocol, but can be implemented.

Satoshi created the Bitcoin Whitepaper.
If CryptoNote is more toward what Satoshi intended as a coin, then Satoshi would have outlined/designed that, instead.
There is nothing in CryptoNote that Satoshi could not have envisioned and implemented at the time.

Excuse my ignorance, but why is this thread not in the Altcoin section?

Satoshi's initial creation of Bitcoin was very buggy. Gavin actually cleaned up/improved most of the Bitcoin code. For example, when Bitcoin first came out, there was a bug that allowed for unlimited creations of Bitcoins..

So, Satoshi is/was not perfect.

Besides, getting back on topic. I *like* Bitcoin's transparent blockchain for it's ability to trace transactions. If it had anonymity from the start it'd be a different story(I'd like that too), but anything other than transparent now and it'd seem dubious. While at that, I also *like* cryptonote for it's *dual functions* at anonymity/transparency, I'm new at it but Monero seems like the leader currency there.

As I understand it, the discussion is intended to be about crytponote protocol, not specifically an altcoin.

I find it funny how lately a lot of anti-bitcoin threads emerge from stuff from years ago..
If there was any interest in developing and persuing any other bitcoin alike we wouldnt be here where we are, the market showed its interest, and it decided for bitcoin.
Having an annonymous blockchain is not something desirable if you want to bring virtual curency worldwide, it belongs in shady area of deep web, not on the front pages.

cheers

Ok, Post Count 4 Sockpuppet who likes/uses Monero. Thanks for your chime in over here at Bitcoin Discussion.

But CryptoNote is not Bitcoin. It shouldn't be in the Bitcoin Discussion section.

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's due to this:


I agree this thread would probably feel quite at home in the altcoin section too. Perhaps even more so than here. But I can also understand why it's here.


I'm not too sure about this. Satoshi was a genius, and he probably had the skills to implement something similar to CryptoNote, but he was only really active from 2009 to mid-2010. He was busy with Bitcoin at the time, and only began branching off into Namecoin just before he left. The cryptographic principles behind the CryptoNote protocol are very complex (http://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf) and not really something that anyone can just whip up in an afternoon.

If you look at the above satoshi quotes its quite clear that is not true. He knew about ring signatures and he even thought they were a good fit for a cryptocurrency, but he didn't know how to make them usable for a coin (i.e. prevent double spending). It was the application of partial linkability that was the real breakthrough in cryptonote.

As far as what section this should be in, I think its possible to have a discussion that belongs in one or the other, though they are different. If it is all about non-Bitcoin coins that use cryptonote then that belongs over there, but if it is about how the cryptonote concepts cold or should be applied to Bitcoin or are better or worse than Bitcoin then it is fine here, just like any other discussion of proposed improvements/changes to Bitcoin would be here.

I said I liked cryptonote even though I just got introduced to it. Doesn't make me a sockpuppet, Lol? You obviously are new to the cryptoscene, come back when you actually know what Satoshi's original code for Bitcoin looked like. Hint: It was messy. I have no problem saying that Satoshi may have been the greatest mind(s) of the 20th/21st century, but he/they is/are human, not gods, and you can't expect Satoshi to be perfect(Which he was not).

I just love when people babble about things they're clueless on...

Getting ring signatures in would be a soft fork, and very difficult in the current political climate of Bitcoin. Andytoshi and gmaxwell are proposing it as a sidechain, because almost certainly it would be extremely difficult to do on the main chain. There are many other differences too, e.g. the signature algorithm and inflation which would never be accepted into Bitcoin main chain.

Of course, sidechains themselves are considered highly experimental and I'm a little dubious of them being able to work (but I guess we will see). There's also nothing to stop bilateral two way pegs, that is, transfer of XMR to the Bitcoin blockchain as a tokenized coloured coin and the transfer of Bitcoin to the XMR blockchain as a tokenized coloured coin when sidechains come out. Then blockchains simply become decentralized trading apparatuses with different inherent features.

Interesting you know so much about it. Why don't you tell me with your non-sockpuppet account?

Who said I have a *non-sockpuppet* account? Could it not be that I simply dislike using forums for communication and much prefer IRC if to communicate at all? Well it is latter. I don't frequently come on the forums, and just came back into the *cryptoscene*.

I'm not sure you can do ring sigs with a soft fork. A Bitcoin input refers to a source output uniquely. The corresponding output and input scripts are combined and then executed. Upon success the original output is marked as spent. I don't see how you can express a single spend of (one from an ambiguous set of) multiple outputs in Bitcoin without structural changes.

You'd have to add a new OP_CODE for input verification and separate database bucket for outputs which can be spent as part of a ring signature. In that database outputs would never be considered provable spent. The soft fork rule would be to use the new input OP_CODE to verify a spend from any number of transaction outputs from a list of previous outpoints with ring signature verification.

So... pretty much impossible to get into Bitcoin now I would guess.

Okay I guess that could work. You would have to specify some output that existing clients would then consider spent, and never reuse it, but it could be arbitrary, like you just choose one in the order it originally appeared, with no real relevance to what is actually being spent.


In practice, sure, that's true.

Its not about altcoins, more about the protocol it uses , i believe there was similar discussion regarding CIYAM's automated transaction (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=963031.0)
Since Crypto note obviously doesnt even have enough interest of the public, we should just let it die out, and leave this thread in the past, its a bogus one anyways.

cheers

Thanks for adding value to the thread, you dont seem legendary enough to me


You can refrain from posting if you find this thread of that nature. Thanks

That will not happen.  Those who wish to have anonymous transactions can use coinjoin (which is being developed into a number of wallets).   Anonymous transactions can be built on top of public transactions.   The consensus model of any crypto currency means that the scope of the changes will always be small.  Maybe a new opcode, maybe improved immutability, scalability enhancements, bug fixes, etc.   Ring signatures for transactions is an interest concept (the rest of cryptonote changes aren't very interesting) but Bitcoin would require such extensive changes that while it is technically possible it is not realistic.   

Compared to coinjoin, ring signatures have a number of advantages but they have one major drawback and that is size.  To provide a high level of anonymity requires multiple public keys and that bloats transaction sizes.  It remains to be seen how well Bitcoin with much lighter transactions can scale.  Additional size makes the problem even more difficult.

 

What you say in the first part is technically true I suppose, but would require a fundamental change at a level of the protocol and the blockchain which is unrealistic to implement without destroying bitcoin and the faith in it.

What you say in the second part is pure foolishness IMHO.  I think the premise made by others that this is what satoshi intended in the first place is hyperbolic as well as your assertion that he would have thought of and rejected methods for a privacy centric blockchain.

FWIW I believe it is inevitable for a blockchain to emerge that offers the security of privacy and anonyminty while Bitcoin (with it's gigantic network effect) continues to lead the transparent blockchain.

Surely you find our temperamental and sometimes impossible C code interesting. :)

Cryptonote is actually one of the most interesting implementations along with Digital/Turing Complete contracts in my view. I picture Cryptonote as more "currencylike" and Turing Complete as more "application" like if that makes sense.

I've been following this project since the begining when the Bytecoin vs Monero controversy started. For now its clear Monero is the leading cryptonote coin. As far as I know a solid gui hasn't been released yet. Anyone knows when it will be done??

I learned of btc in Feb. 2013 as a US online poker player.  Withdrawing funds was difficult and Seals With Clubs, an online btc poker site, promised ease of transactions.  This was true.  After buying my first btc and learning more about it I bought many more than I need to play and all purchases except my first one was through Coinbase which I then transferred to Seals.  I was learning about btc and being unsure of wallets used Seals as my wallet in the beginning.  This was before the first "bubble" of 2013.  If I did that now I would be banned from Coinbase.  At first I sent my winnings to coinbase to cashout.  If coinbase wanted to be very strict they could analyse the blockchain and know exactly what I was doing.

What I first learned was that btc was anonymous.  This turned out not to be true.  As far as using coinjoin, there are weaknesses to it.  Improvements have been made and I expect more will be done but the analysis of the blockchain also is getting better.  A point that I don't think people appreciate is that as the analysis improves, what you thought was sufficient will no longer be so and those tools can be used retoactively :o  This means coinjoin and other ways of providing privacy have to be resistant to all future analysis tools for it to work as intended.

The real issue is privacy.  With a transparent blockchain and advanced analysis your financial history is an open book.  For anybody who thinks that financial privacy is not important, may I suggest you post your bank account statements and/or your credit card statements for all to see.

Again, with cryptonote you chose which transactions are pivate and which are public.

OT. Let's keep this about cryptonote as a protocol and technology and not about Monero please.

It is in interesting question because often the argument for why altcoins have no merit and will fail is that bitcoin will incorporate any of their features. In fact that argument was made on this very thread. But as you point out there are serious problems with that line of reasoning in practice.

Basically some guys got together and decided that bitcoin addresses are way too easy to remember and type, and bitcoin is just way too light on resources like memory, CPU, bandwidth and hard drive.  Also it just didn't seem sketchy enough in it's history, and the infrastrucure seemed too developed and easy to use.   So they got together and made cryptonote for us.  As a fan of cryptographic diversity I must give mad props to Nicolas van Saberhagen.  If fiat is the galactic empire and Satoshi is Seldon, cryptonote is second foundation.   

Yes that's exactly what happened. Traceability, linkability, blockchain analysis, mining concentration, a fixed blocksize limit, etc. had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

One can think of Bitcoin as a low level protocol like TCP. Services can be built on top of it.  HTTP isn't a part of TCP/IP but HTTP didn't require a new low level transmission protocol or a new low level addressing protocol.  It expanded the capabilities of TCP & IP but it didn't replace TCP/IP.  Now everything can't be implemented this way but a lot can.   Anonymous transactions are one example.  The barrier to making breaking changes to the core protocol is high so someone saying that anything can be incorporated into the core protocol is at best misleading.   A user of a web browser today doesn't really care that TLS, DNS, HTTP, TCP, IP are all discrete protocols layered upon each other working together.  It just works.   The altcoin line of thinking would be to replace all that with one super protocol called WEB but that hasn't happened.  The layered approach worked just fine.

These are usually never founded.

There's a lot to cover isn't there.  I'd also like to see discussion of the choice of DSA.  Is cryptonote necessarily not limited in blocksize?  I thought pooled mining was basically the same?  Colored coins aren't going to work are they.  

Anonymous transactions can't be implemented very effectively on Bitcoin, there are always major impairments in terms of blockchain analysis (esp. if only a minority of users are using it). The inventor of coinjoin has described cryptonote as being "much better" in terms of anonymity than conjoin. (Maybe someone has the exact quote/source; I don't.) If you go the route of off-chain mixers that can completely break taint then you have couterparty risk. In both cases you have risks associated with surveillance by or of the broker.

BTW, ipv4 is being slowly and painfully replaced with ipv6, and some applications work quite poorly on top of TCP (esp those requiring reliability and but not ordering, or value timeliness over reliability) so people do build custom protocols, both on top of IP and even lower stack levels). If Bitcoin is like TCP/IP then it is more vulnerable than often assumed from that analogy.

1. DSA is out of my area of expertise so I'll let others such as tacotime address it.

2. There is no fixed limit on blocksize in cryptonote, it is a dynamic equilibrium between transaction demand, mining rewards, and penalities imposed on miners for too-large blocks. There has certainly been some criticism of that, and it may or may not work out well in practice (we'll see I guess assuming any cryptonote coins actually get enough usage). They did at least attempt a solution.

3. Pooled mining is much the same but the PoW is designed to be "egalitarian" and support mining on regular computers, with little gain from specialized hardware. It is so far the most successful attempt at this, by a fairly decent margin, with very limited payoff from GPU mining even. Of course there may eventually be ASICs, etc. but it seems there are credible opinions (for example from dga) that it will be modest and have limited payoff (much less than SHA or scrypt), further delaying its arrival and reducing its effect.

4. Colored coins won't work as-is but could be made to work with the relatively simple modification of adding a color tag (so only coins of the same color could be mixed). This is in effect by design to inhibit blockchain analysis, since that's exactly what colored coins are.

LOL. People love putting words into Satoshi's mouth. If only he could strike them down with lightning. SMDH.

Quoting his posts is not putting words in his mouth.

Nick Szabo gave us the roadmap back in the mid 90s.

First Bitcoin (implement blockchain).

Next Monero (implement Cryptonote).

And finally Ethereum (implement smart contracts).

Then we use these tools to free ourselves of the statist JBT parasites who have for too long held back humanity's destiny among the stars.

Here's the quote you were looking for:



I believe there is a bounty for an open source GUI wallet for Bytecoin and Monero. There are other, less popular CryptoNote coins that already have GUI wallets so I'm not sure what the reason is for them to not have one yet.

Monero has GUI wallets. Though none are endorsed by the core team(There official GUI is still in the making).

https://getmonero.org/getting-started/choose

*applause*
Ad Astra!

Saying something like this is a direct insult to hero's like Edward Snowden who put their life on stake for protecting privacy of others

Privacy matters. I dont want everyone to know how much money i have, how and where i spend it. Imagine asking your boss for a raise and him advising you to stop losing money on playing poker first. Imagine you becoming a laughing stock when your friends find out about the mysterious cult you donated to.

An anonymous blockchain for me is of much more value than a transparent one.

Cryptonote provides its users the choice between private and public transactions.  It's like PGP for internet money!

Bitcoin does not support private transactions 'out of the box.'  It only sends internet money in plaintext, unless you trust third party anonymization services.

Why are you against giving people the option?  Do you want to force everyone to eschew privacy? 

Are you scared of encryption in general, or just anon blockchains?

You know this forum is a spin-off of the cypherpunk list, right?  If you don't like crypto, you'll hate it around here! 

I hope you enjoy my new sig, because your post inspired me to create it.   :)

Well, that's the beauty of cryptonote. It can provide both relative transparency and secure anonymity. It's not one thing, it's both.

EdDSA is a 64-bit architecture optimized Schnorr signature over a birationally equivalent curve of Curve25519. It was designed by renown cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein. Curve25519 has been widely used as of recently in cryptography software (http://ianix.com/pub/ed25519-deployment.html).

DJB wrote about the design of the curve and EdDSA here: http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140323-ecdsa.html
He also made a large comparison table of features here: http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/

It's a sensitive investment to own a decent stack of XMR. I bought during the last bubble and even if im on a loss I know long term I did the right thing and will get my investment back + returns.

For its commendable speaking of truths, I have quoted your post.   8)

Hmm that reminds me of another coin, I just can't remember the name.  

Edit:  I remembered!  It is "bitcoin". 

Not sure if it's already been mentioned in this thread, but there is actually a coin called ShadowCash (SDC) that uses cryptonote tech as a layer on top of Bitcoin codebase. Best of both worlds.... perhaps.

...but its pos
...so absolutely uninteresting

Best of both worlds or worst of both worlds, or some of each. Hard to say.

Also as later poster added, PoS comes from neither Bitcoin nor cyptonote tech, so the above isn't even true. It is more like cryptonote tech on top of a Blackcoin code base or something. Less compelling when described that way IMO.

Besides PoS, it uses the bitcoin codebase. I'm sure it's common knowledge(or ough to be), that altcoins using the bitcoin codebase aren't going anywhere.

*cough* bitcoin clone *cough*
*cough* bitcoin can add on their features instantly if it's actually worthwhile*cough*

Yes, we all know that codebases which are more buggy and less well tested are generally more likely to "go somewhere". 

Actually much more likely to go somewhere. Clones of Bitcoin/Altcoins that use Bitcoin's codebase tend not to be worthwhile, for obvious reasons.

OK I'll bite.  Please enlighten us as to what the obvious reasons are that software projects or communication protocols which build on bitcoin tend towards the not worthwhile. 

They are Bitcoin clones essentially. If they ever made a feature worthwhile(most haven't but you never know), Bitcoin would be able to incorporate it with relatively no problems. Think of it like a treebranch, and Bitcoin is the entire tree, and the altcoins based off Bitcoin are the branches and leaves. Why would anyone take the leaves when they have the whole tree? Those altcoins who use Bitcoin's codebase are basically trying to compete with Bitcoin while being an initial clone of Bitcoin.

Those that don't use Bitcoin's codebase are new territory. If someone/company finds the coin interesting, they can create new services based around it, and be the first in the field to do so(Which is more profitable since there is likely to be less competition at the beginning with new codebases, unlike bitcoin based coins). Those coins are entire trees themselves, not "leaves" on the tree like bitcoin based coins are.

In theory, bitcoin could incorporate any feature from any codebase.  It could move to cryptonote even, if a consensus majority agreed.  Which they never would, for obvious reasons ;) 

Your arguments suggest that coins are always in direct competition with one another, which is not necessarily the case.  You also suggest that building services for little-used coins is more profitable than building services which have a large number of existing potential customers.  The only reason this would be the case is if you plan to design services of such low quality that they can't compete. 

   

"You also suggest that building services for little-used coins is more profitable than building services which have a large number of existing potential customers.  The only reason this would be the case is if you plan to design services of such low quality that they can't compete. ", that's not what I said. I said the competition will be less, since you'd be required to design your services based around a new codebase(That isn't bitcoin based, and that requires skill and time to make), which means the profit might be higher for those services if the coin surges in popularity, potentially higher than that of a bitcoin-based coin.

The main argument comes down to this: Would the public use a coin that's basically bitcoin+other features? Or a coin that's entirely different from bitcoin down to the protocol level+other features? The latter.

Your most important two words are "in theory".

Bitcoin could possibly survive adding features from branches of it's own codebase, but even if a coin added ring signatures etc to the bitcoin codebase inheriting changes this fundamental and large would arguably destroy the trust in the protocol.

It's obvious you don't think cryptonotes features are worth having in crypto-finance, but there are many many of us who believe they are not only worthwhile, but essential.  It may not be Monero, or cryptonote, but some blockchain that offers solid simple fundamental privacy HAS to exist.

It will never be Bitcoin.

This. It has been said before, Blockchain cant adopt ring signature technology, it would need a major rewritting of the code, fork.. tons of stuff that are not good for the stability of the network.

Bitcoin doesn't need to be what it isn't, that's why both Bitcoin and Monero have legitimate value.

This is also a very important point.  It is arguably better for each blockchain for them both to exist.

Andreas Antonopolous himself has been saying repeatedly that Bitcoin cannot guarantee total anonimity and that other altcoins should be used if one was concerned about remaining 100% anonymous, so he does not see a problem with it.

If we didn't think cryptonote's features had some value, we wouldn't be here.  It is worth pointing out that simple fundamental privacy is not something to be offered but something to be claimed.  Lets look at privacy with a specific example to make things more clear.  Using tor, I send some litecoin to a throwaway poloniex account and convert it to bitcoin and send it via coinjoin to a stealth darknet market address so I can buy antibiotics.  How is my privacy? 

Good enough for a hundred quid worth of antibiotics I'd wager. 

On the other end, the dealer redeems with the stealth address and uses tor to move the coin, moving to another alt and through a dice game before cashing out using an e-coin card. 

It is possible to have pretty good privacy with bitcoin.  It just isn't default out of the box behavior.  Could we do better with ring signatures and cryptonote avoiding all the counterparty risk in my example?  Maybe we could.  However we aren't there yet.  First you guys will have to build a working full node wallet that can run with 512M ram, and a javascript library or equivalent for easy paper wallet creation.  That's to enter the race mind you, not to win it.         




     

At a similar level of knowledge but I'll keep a watch on it myself looking at how much discussion it has generated
It sounds interesting in concept though reading the wiki article on it
Some contorversies on that page but it's new relatively so I'm sure the dust will settle if the crytography is what is promised.

What does cryptonote do? Can someone give a beginners explanation pls.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

Look for "What is CryptoNote?" in the first post. This is a pretty good overview of what it is and what it does.

There is a decent high level intro on the web site. Extreme high level into is an anonymous (untraceable and unlinkable) blockchain plus some other tweaks to Bitcoin (no fixed block size, etc.)

https://cryptonote.org/inside/

It all seems great, but for some reason they are struggling to come up with a functional gui. AFAIK Monero still didn't got the gui going right?

The original code came from anonymous untrusted sources on the Internet, and was clearly unfinished at that. Unfinished meaning, among other things, not having a GUI.

Monero has (at least) five GUIs, some were supported by core developers but the work done by independent developers, some are purely third party (see link below). The core project itself has been focusing on fundamentals (see above "unfinished") first, including security audits, bug fixes, and restructuring some of the code for overall maintainability, but will ultimately have a bundled "core" GUI as well.

This is somewhat off topic though, as other cryptonote coins do have a variety GUIs from their core developers (more hastily put together than Monero's approach, but is neither inherently good nor bad, just a different set of priorities). Not all of them are open source though; the Monero project itself is 100% open source.

https://moneroeconomy.com/news/choose-your-wallet

We never messed around too much with a core GUI because there's so much as to do with the core code and core GUIs tend to become quickly antiquated (just look at Bitcoin-QT, which virtually no one uses anymore).

I get the part about using one time addresses for transactions, so thats stealth addresses right. What about this (Double- spending Proof)? The blockchain anaylsis resistance also blows over me lol.

The issue with ring signatures is that you can't tell which input was spent, so you need a way to make sure that no one is double spending their input. Take for example outputs A,B,C, and ring signature R that spends from A OR B OR C. How can we make sure that the owner of A doesn't also get to spend B and C? The answer is by using a niZKP that demonstrates knowledge of the private key and gives a unique identifier per private key. This is called the key image.

So when A spends her funds, she produces both her signature saying it's A OR B OR C, and her unique key image. The owners of B and C then also have unique key images that allow them to spend their funds without identifying who they are to the network.

So cryptonote protects against the Finney attack? I googled it here: Another attack the trader or merchant is exposed to when accepting payment on 0/unconfirmed. The Finney attack is a fraudulent double-spend that requires the participation of a miner once a block has been mined[2]. The risk of a Finney attack cannot be eliminated regardless of the precautions taken by the merchant, but the participation of a miner is required and a specific sequence of events must occur.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Double-spending

No, that's a separate, unrelated attack that still exists. Doublespend proof is referring to the niZKP component of the ring signatures.

See here:
https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0003.pdf

There's been a lot of fair amount of confusion since cryptonote uses that term, but in the cryptonote sense it applies only to the signatures, and even then only brings them back to the same degree of double-spending protection you get with regular (non-ring) signatures, such as Bitcoin.

In essentially every respect when it comes to double spending vulnerabilities, the protocol is exactly the same as Bitcoin.

I read about Adaptive Parameters, is that better than Hard (Defined) Paramteres?

One of the arguments in favour of Cryptonote over Bitcoin is of course incidents such as the following:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/2653 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/2653) A law enforcement raid over a relayed Bitcoin transaction
http://www.coindesk.com/chainalysis-ceo-denies-launching-sybil-attack-on-bitcoin-network/ (http://www.coindesk.com/chainalysis-ceo-denies-launching-sybil-attack-on-bitcoin-network/) The chainanalysis 'Sybil Attack' on the Bitcoin network.

As for adaptive parameters this is a feature of Cryptonote based coins that is not commonly discussed but is very important. The most visible advantage is that Cryptonote based coins do not have the 1MB maximum blocksize issue since the network adapts to the actual demand. I must say that it is this issue that led me to find out about and invest in Monero in the first place.

Cryptonote blocks are also relayed by nodes with IP addresses, and block explorers could report them if they like.  No difference here. 


Nothing stops me from doing the same thing to cryptonote networks. 


How is that important?  Do you see cryptonote chains as being good places to store large amounts of data?  Or built for microtransactions?  How many TX can fit in a 1MB cryptonote block? 

Perhaps eventually, yes. But that's all dependent on the hash function / network hashrate. I.e., i don't think we'll see electronics manufacturers rushing to incorporate cryptonite asics with 2 mb caches anytime soon. Meanwhile, a 10 watt bitcoin asic chip probably costs 10 cents

Monero will be huge no doubt, the thing is they are taking too long to come up with a functioning GUI and also what will happen with the blockchain bloat that I kept reading about back in the day?

There is a difference. You can report IP addresses but those IP addresses are much harder to link to anything useful on the blockchain. You can't for example find transactions that paid to or from a known address and then look for the IPs associated with those transactions. You likewise can't trace the flow of funds to earlier or later transactions and look for IP addresses associated with those. Nor can you go in the other direction and take a known IP and associate addresses to it (even if imperfectly).

The only useful things you can do with these p2p spying techniques is find an IP associated with a particular tranasction if you already know the transaction you are looking for, or find transactions associated with an IP, but in the latter case those transactions are largely opaque (can't be traced or tied to an address, and the amount is only visible with ambiguity). That is a window of vulnerability but a much narrower one than typically exists for Bitcoin.

Boolberry has a functioning GUI.

Darknote a functioning GUI.

Monero has like 5 functioning GUIs, just not an Official one:

https://i.imgur.com/mmTnMxP.png (https://moneroeconomy.com/news/choose-your-wallet)

As for bloat, the MRL is working on a solution:

Dashcoin has a good wallet GUI.  It's set up differently from a typical crypto wallet, and it's not as flashy, but it has some advantages.  When you open the client, it syncs with the network before it opens your wallet.  Then you can create multiple wallets within the interface, and it requires a password for each wallet you create. 

Too bad Dashcoin was sold to Dark.  Taking a coin with proven Cryptonote privacy and ruining it with trusted masternode obfuscation BS is so wrong.

They should have just sold all their shitty Darkcoins and bought real Dashcoins instead.  But some people worry more about branding than technology.   ::)

@OP

Nope.

Try again

Any constructive reply? or just plain shilling

lol, not really.  Dark is changing its name to Dash, and they paid the Dashcoin dev to close the github, but Dashcoin is still going.  Dashcoin is still being traded on Poloniex, people are still mining, my wallet still syncs and my coins still spend.

I do use Bitcoin-qt :p I have become so used to it, and im paranoid to use any other wallet, at least for my "main stack" of BTC so to speak. I like to have the wallet.dat file of the original client in several backups.

Huh, interesting. This was not made clear to me I totally thought it was being taken over by the Darkcoin devs.

dashcoin is supposed to be the "digital cash" look at it's mascot, a paper cash...darkcoin devs are really dark on this  ;D

You know that you can export wallet.dat as this file is compatible with most of the other wallets. You can even export it on blockchain.info if you have to.
But you may want to have local 'lightweight' wallet like Multibit or Electrum for fast transactions. As for the Cryptonote technology well... bitcoin is fine without it and there is no sense in crying over it now. Just wait for the bitcoin 2.0

It seems that you believe that bitcoin was designed in a flawed manner. When I say flawed, I mean that you think it doesn't have enough anonymity for its purpose and function.

I, personally believe that bitcoin was designed in the correct manner for its purpose. It was never about 100% anonymity, and anybody that thinks such a thing would be highly delusional .

That's not to say that bitcoin will not be improved upon, as it is the basic application layer to a global system which is being developed ground up, using bitcoin as the foundation.

Is changing the hashing algorithm something that would realistically be considered?

hey i tried to mine these type of coins before and my thoughts are there are not much of different than bitcoin

I agree
Many different coins, ideas exist already, this Cryptonote seems like Monero to me.
In Maze Runner movie, one boy said: "Everything you can think of to escape the maze we already tried it and didn't worked". From now on, Any Alternate Cryptocurrency ideas seems to be like that Maze Runner movie line...

I see a few things here -  first of all bitcoiners are saying that if Cryptonote were important, it would have been incorporated into bitcoin already...  Well, no.  It didn't exist before 2012 -  2014.   
 
Then there are others who say that if it is important, it can be incorporated into a future version of bitcoin: no it can't.  The changes are too fundamental for that. 
 
And then there are those who say they don't want to see this - well sure, I can imagine it stinks being advised of a massive flaw in the bitcoin protocol (as amazing as it has been) that only a new technology can fix. 

I don't trust the wikipedia page to be accurate, what exactly is cryptonote?

Good decision, it is very manipulated.

Cryptonote is an alternate protocol and implementation for a proof of work cryptocurrency that implements untraceability and unlinkability using ring signatures (which satoshi called group signatures) and stealth addresses to provide resistance to blockchain analysis (which in turn helps with privacy and fungibility), along with some other improvements such a variable block size, no halving (subsidy drops a little each block), etc. The leading cryptonote coin is Monero but there are some other ones such as Boolberry (small, with some advanced featured), AEON (small, with some advanced features), Bytecoin (80% ninja premined), etc.

So that's why everyone keeps spamming Monero. It sounds pretty cool but I'm not quite sure I would want to drop bitcoin when bitcoin is so much more developed service wise. I hope we can get some of those features over to bitcoin soon.

Yes and no. Some people are indeed very enthusiastic about it because as you said, it sounds pretty cool. Others spam about it to discredit it in a sort of reverse trolling way. The coin market is a very messy competitive business with all manner of attacks flying in every direction (think "food fight").


I agree with you 100%


Unlikely in practice. Cryptonote/Monero has  been around for about 18 months and none of the features have been implemented in Bitcoin, nor will be any time soon. There is vague discussion about a flexible block size but that isn't happening any time soon either, assuming it happens at all.

Bitcoin bureaucracy seems to move pretty slowly. I don't think I'll be around by the time anything about that happens.

Yes and I think it will only get harder/slower as time goes on.

Bitcoin is great but it obviously has its scaling challenges in terms of "consensus" among the bitcoin space players.

When you say "small" do you just mean that the overall market for that coin is small, or the block size is small, etc? But I have been really impressed with monero's structure and community, I have been researching a little on it and so far so good on my end.  I'd just have to see it get closer to $1 for me to start wanting to invest in it.

To my knowledge boolberry solved the blockchain bloat issue.

yes that's what I heard too

I meant that in terms of market size, community size, and project size (the latter referring to number of developers and others working on it).

The blocksize in all of them is dynamic  (grows as needed, shrinks when not needed). Boolberry and AEON both have some pruning features (sightly different from each other).