I can't follow where the coins came from without cryptography.  Everything is hidden.  The ledger does not exist, only a chain of cryptography.  As Toknormal always says, it's throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Now I feel like we're just repeating ourselves.  This means you are not really reading what I wrote, and that means this is futile.

In cryptonote, I still can't verify it with logic, therefore I will not trust it.

Please show me you can do the same on your blockchain, which I can't see how to do, and then I'll be satisfied that monero is trustless.  Otherwise, I'll never be a fan

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1126927.msg11919237#msg11919237

As for what Tok is trying to say here (I believe, I could be getting him wrong, hate to put words in people's mouths) is that cryptonote was designed initially to be used with a central authority that holds the "keys".  Throwing those keys away only makes it impossible for anyone, not even a central authority to verify what happened, inside or outside of the blockchain.  The cryptography must be trusted, which kills the whole concept of trustless.  Thus his constant harping on illegitimatizing the blockchain.

Dash is not in competition with Monero, which is not a cryptocurrency, was not designed as a cryptocurrency and is unlikely to ever perform a cryptocurrency role other than as a minority speculative asset (as it is does right now).

Monero (or the original design specification that characterises cryptonote's behaviour) is a cryptographic record keeping system designed to track money in a bank. What some fly developer decided to do (wittingly or unwittingly) is lift the template for the record keeping system, ditch the bank and try to get away with calling the residual cryptographic transport mechanism "money".

The Nature of Money is Not Obscurity
Contrary to what a lot of cryptographic programmers come-self-appointed-monetary-analysts assert, privacy (in the sense of hiding transactions) is not an integral part of any "money like good". It is the domain of record keeping for such.

Metals, Coal and even Paper cash do not have privacy "buit into them". They have fungibility which supports anonymity amongst its holders. The records that track the transactions for such "money like goods" are private and may (as in the case of bank accounts) in fact be referred to as 'money' but they are not the money, they are just the records.

Obscurity - A Bookkeeping Concept
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is no intermediate counterparty holding records on your behalf. (If there was, a system like cryptonote might still be of some use). Cryptocurrency therefore re-orders the priorities of monetary transparency and record keeping privacy such that latter becomes the domain of the holder and not the monetary media itself. This is what allows bitcoin to be defined as base money as opposed to a mere record keeping system.

Anonymity - A "Visible Cash" Concept
What IS important in cryptocurrency, however, is fungibility - as everyone keeps raging about. Improving fungibility enhances the performance of any money-like-good as a cash medium. Coal is pretty fungible. You could watch a shipment of coal arrive at the port without reasonably distinguishing it from any other shipment. But you wouldn't improve the fungibility by hiding the shipment altogether - you'd simply be sowing doubt about the its existence and destroying coal's suitability as a monetary medium.

Dash does not try to do this. It is possibly the only cryptocurrency project right now that has all the design priorities of blockchain-based money in the right balance.

Who Has the Right Design Goals ?
Dash hasn't thrown the baby out with the bathwater like sidechains does (by ruining bitcoin's fungibility and mobility - two fundamental properties of good money) or by reverting the blockchain back to a mere bookkeeping system as cryptonote does. Instead of such car crash, ill thought through sledghammer approaches, it adds a little bit of salt, in a minimally invasive way to the existing bitcoin architecture while extracting huge gains from the result. In other words, it doesn't hide the coal shipments, it just makes the piles of coal less 'lumpy' and perfectly fungible.

Peter Todd may have had a weak technical case if Dash and Monero had been trying to solve the same problem. They are not. Cryptonote is solving the wrong problem - one that's associated with its original role as a record keeping system. You can't just take a cryptographic banking system, throw away the bank and call it money. (You can fool some of the people...).

Dash, on the other hand, is addressing a genuine monetary property - i.e. solving the "right problem" without adversely impacting any other characteristic of bitcoin's almost-perfect design.

Dash is not in competition with Monero, which is not a cryptocurrency, was not designed as a cryptocurrency and is unlikely to ever perform a cryptocurrency role other than as a minority speculative asset (as it is does right now).

Monero (or the original design specification that characterises cryptonote's behaviour) is a cryptographic record keeping system designed to track money in a bank.

What some fly developer decided to do (wittingly or unwittingly) is lift the template for the record keeping system, ditch the bank and try to get away with calling the residual cryptographic transport mechanism "money".

No offense, but you should not abuse your Anoncoin Twitter Account for advertising Monero Coin.

A lot of work seems exaggerated. I could probably do this in 15-30 minutes if I were a bit more familiar with the proxy tools.

The C++ i2p looked to be coming along but not stable enough to integrate, if I recall correctly what fluffypony said the last time he looked at it. That was a while ago though, so perhaps it is closer now. No specific target has been set for it though, I think the main push now is to get the database release tagged.

lololololol and you sound like a honeypot

most private coin (XMR) on the most KYC-nuts exchange (polo), most private exchange[1] without the most private coin

[1] still not sure about your i2p exchange, ip protection is the most weak-ass of them all, I could just go to a cybercafe or use a random open wifi and make my XMR transaction that cannot be tracked or linked, or use an exchange on i2p network that btw is not perfect nor much better than TOR (just less used) to trade Bitcoin-clones.

it's a weird world.

Have you tried Whonix?

A lot of work seems exaggerated. I could probably do this in 15-30 minutes if I were a bit more familiar with the proxy tools.

The C++ i2p looked to be coming along but not stable enough to integrate, if I recall correctly what fluffypony said the last time he looked at it. That was a while ago though, so perhaps it is closer now. No specific target has been set for it though, I think the main push now is to get the database release tagged.

My suggestion is to find a fixed set of stable nodes. (The seed nodes run by the project are okay but if you don't want to be tied to just those nodes you can find your own list.) Then set up local proxies to those node addresses and set up the monero node to connect to your local proxies using --add-exclusive-node and --hide-my-port

You will have to periodically review your list of nodes and if they become unstable replace them.

What is stopping you?

1. ANC was the first to integrate I2P with a SAM bridge
2. I am not aware of other coins with native I2P integration yet
3. Any coin can be configured to use I2P or TOR manually

ANC development has been extremely slow and the original developers have left.

I now believe that Monero is the best privacy option in crypto that exists today.

Peter Todd, Greg Maxwell and other bitcoin core devs seem to be of the same opinion
https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/622022840330682368

Electromagnetic shielding around your computer can defeat this.

If the NSA has determined your location, you are already probably toast.

They key about IP obfuscation anonymity mixing is the NSA not knowing who is doing what.

I plan to be retired by the time the NSA starts trailing me. My essential work will be done over the next several months, then turned over to other devs to carry on. I need to make sure ALL of those other devs can not be identified.

As for future-proofing, then wider keys such as 512-bit ECC and super singular isogenies against quantum computing can be considered.

No we don't have to give up. There won't be any place on earth to emmigrate to. This totalitarianism is global this time. You have 3 axis powers pretending to be antagonists who are really working together to enslave the people, and between them their militaries can reach any corner of the globe. China has a huge standing army to deploy to South America, Africa, etc.. They will hunt you down.

Someone please post a link to this post over in the Monero thread so they can come over here to address it. I don't want to shit on their thread. I am not criticizing Monero per se. I am technically criticizing I2P when deployed against a high-powered adversary such as the NSA. I am disappointed in whom ever made this decision for marketing reasons (apparently) without sufficient engineering investigation.

I2P (which is relied on by Monero to insure your anonymity) has updated their detailed summary of potential attacks. That looks really bad (as I had expected). I wouldn't trust for that for obfuscating who sent a message to whom in the face of a powerful adversary and neither do they:

https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/other-networks


What they are really saying at the above quote is that the underlying I2P network is low-latency hogwash that can't protect against a high-latency adversary and that if someone builds a high-latency system (whether they run it on I2P or not is irrelevant), then you may be protected. Well duh! I2P isn't high-latency mixing and doesn't protect you. I doubt I2PBote does either. I am studying I2PBote and once again the design is not fully documented. I2PBote appears to store messages in a DHT and uses optionally high-latency relaying to provide the anonymity, but absolutely no details are given and the relaying may not even be sufficiently implemented or utilized (too small of mix set) to be of any use.

I2P was designed by the folks who did P2P file sharing apps. They did not design I2P to be anonymous to powerful adversaries, rather they designed it to be a performant, low-level network layer for basic privacy.

Stay away! Don't trust I2P for that threat model!

Thus Monero is not yet anonymous against a high-powered adversary (such as the NSA) unless you use a connection to the internet that can not be correlated to you nor to any activity you do from that connection (e.g. Google's cookie in your browser, logging into any website, etc). This is because if an identity is attached to a sent transaction (via the lack of IP address obfuscation), then it is known that identity is associated with the sender of that transaction, regardless of the ring signature mixing on chain.

Most users have no clue what they are doing and will not likely be anonymous against a high-powered adversary in Monero even if they think they are using an unregistered connection to the internet. And if widely the case, then this can cascade into reduced anonymity sets for everyone thus even destroying the anonymity for those who were careful enough.

You see this shit is very complex and it can't be done with such nonchalant attitude. It requires serious technical documentation and analysis.

I am not angry at any one per se; we are running out time and we should be working together to solve the problem instead of playing marketing battles here. We need to stop attacking each other. I am not attacking Monero. I am just stating technical facts.

You know they added I2P because I mentioned last year in a forum there where smooth et al were present or lurking that IP address wasn't obfuscated. I think fluffypony picked up on my criticism and pushed for adding it, but I am not really sure who did. Ever since then, I've been telling smooth that I2P is not sufficient against a high-powered adversary. It is one year hence and we still haven't solved the problem.

As AnonyMint I was the guy in the Anoncoin thread in 2013 (as kLee can attest) making the point their I2P integration lacked high-latency protection against timing attacks. Now 2 years later we are still in the same predicament.

Look I am just one guy. You can't expect me to do the work that requires dozens and dozens of highly skilled programmers working for years. I can only do so much. I am working 100+ hours a week and doing my best. I will try to fix all this shit but I won't be able to do it alone.

P.S. what got me off on this tangent was searching for a better alternative to Bitmessage, but unfortunately I think maybe there is none when obfuscating the link between sender and recipient. In terms of encrypting messages so only sender and recipient can read (and not concerned about linking the identities of sender and recipient), then I2PBote looks better than Bitmessage because it has a 512-bit ECC encryption option (thus maybe providing a few more years of historical protection, perhaps even against early, less powerful quantum computers that may come) and better usability features.

To demonstrate how naive users are, I had asked a programmer for his Bitmessage address and he told me bitmsg.me! Cross that guy off the list for potential employment. He doesn't even understand how using a website would eliminate the entire point of using Bitmessage in the first place (unless of course that website is using client-side Javascript encryption and receiving all network messages from the server and attempting to decrypt them client-side and not relying on the server hosting bitmsg.me to do that instead, which may be the case but I doubt it).

---

Edit: I am reading I2P's technical documentation. They are talking about maybe implementing some high-latency delays for version 3.0 (they aren't even at version 1 yet since starting in 2003), and worse is they plan to let the sender set the delays at each hop of the garlic layer! I guess they don't realize that this will allow a high-powered, omniscient attacker to flood inbound tunnels with specifically timed delays so they can unmask the tunnel! These I2P devs should not be trusted about anonymity.