Why should I have an opinion about it either way ?

It's a decentralised community and Dash's technical objective is to maximise fungibility without recourse to loss of transparency. People are therefore free to trawl the blockchain if they so wish and the staffers have a professionally duty to support initiatives wishing to provide services to 3rd party adopters, whatever market sector they may be in.

We will now see how noble and valuable that objective is - to support the confidence that transparency brings without loss of anonymity for users and to avoid this sort of thing where scams, heists and rumourmills are allowed to grow in a pit of blockchain obscurity and everything happening inside a back hole  

(Overheard recently...)

A fud-posting frenzy from the Monero people in the Dash thread ?

Are we to understand that panic is now setting in that you're about to lose your Mcap place back to Dash when the next 4-hour chart correction ensues ? LoLz

This is a very unqualified and ambiguous statement.

It's true that it is a type of "puzzle" in terms of patterns. But think for a moment what you are implying with the phrase "reasonable accuracy". The "solution domain" you allude to, lies OUTWITH the blockchain itself - i.e. off chain, in the real world. You are using a data file which contains nothing but digits - totally anonymous, with no identity information in it whatsoever to try to discover information about a vastly more complex, more rapidly changing and completely open system that lies outwith it. You can solve the blockchain "puzzle" all you like and still know very little about the ultimate solution domain.

One thing that the obscurity bandwagon likes to push on people is the idea that a blockchain "addresses" are synonymous with an individual - i.e. if you can know something about that address you can know something about that individual. In extreme cases the analogy even drifts into use of personal pronouns for blockchain addresses and attempts to allude to the idea that linking one address to the next is the same as "de-anonymising" an individual.

It's a kind of Emperor's clothes like effort to push a technology that was never conceived of to engender monetary value but rather to "protect and hide" a record keeping system for non-anynymous, bank-backed money. The truth is that a single transfer from one address to another is all thats needed to "reset" the puzzle as far as the real world is concerned. You can know everything you like about one address and absolutely nothing about the next one that gets transferred to - not with the most advanced blockchain crawlers imaginable.

Blockchain crawlers will mitigate the fungibility of transparent blockchains - thats true, and there are equally rapidly emerging solutions to this that don't involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But what they will not do is "de-anonymise" everybody overnight with "reasonable accuracy" because the "puzzle pieces" you cite are not on-chain.

rofwl !

Even Paycoin didn't look so perfectly sculpted.

Was somebody requiring a quick exit before October's zerocoin/zerocash arrival ?

Pity there were no parachutes for the poor noobs that jumped with them.

Blockchains no more broadcast the "identity" of a keyholder than gold does.

I know it's an obsessive propaganda point for worshippers of obscured blockchains to convince people that they do, but they don't.

No identity information whatsoever is to be found on chain. It has to be gleaned off-chain and even then the relationship between "owner" and "holder" is ambiguous. Granted, one can use patterns in the blockchain to augment off-chain information I have. For example, if I know you paid me from a certain address I can detect various addresses connected to that one. But that is as it should be and it doesn't mean you have to bury the entire blockchain because of some de-anonymisation paranoia since I still have no idea what the nature of those connections is. I have to glean everything I know from off-chain information.

Then, if I only make one transaction to another address, I've completely de-linked those funds as far that off-chain domain goes (which is where all the identity information is).

The folly of this design (as far as unbacked money goes) is to map the priorities of a banking model based on credit directly onto a blockchain, since in the credit model all the identity information IS stored "on chain". You then have to ditch a whole load of very valuable monetary properties just to support that one when in fact there are plenty of other approaches to mitigating even the address linkeage patterns on the blockchain itself.

As evidence of this look at bitcoin. It is 7 years old. That is a long time. It doesn't have any augmented fungibility features whatsoever and yet it remains largely anonymous. Block analysis techniques are improving sure, but they still only rely on OFF CHAIN information which gets more ambiguous every time any transaction is made. It isn't difficult therefore to conclude that a much more optimal approach to maintaining value and confidence is to keep the blockchain transparent AND anonymous at the same time using augmented fungibility techniques.

I think you must have mist interpreted whatever post that was.

Gold coins are not obscured in any way and if they are, the "obscurity" is extrinsic, not intrinsic. i.e. it's in a safe, under the floorboards, in a vault, whatever. They are therefore a perfect example of what I've been arguing for since the start of this thread - that the priorities of anonymity and transparency should be decoupled in order to optimise the value of cryptocurrency.

If you have 2 gold coins which are indistinguishable, then they are perfectly fungible without recourse to obscurity.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

(The chocolate teapot version of that is the "people don't need to see the money" argument   )

In theory, thats correct. Because everything else stems from the validity of the transaction.

In reality, you're not interacting with theory. You're interacting with some random technology that was built by humans with a claim to implement it. You therefore need a large number of reference metrics from all over the place to support public confidence that a particular technology "works".

People make up their own minds what's important to them in that respect. If they want to control-total the outputs for a particular blockchain address and that has meaningful significance in the context of their audit then censor that information at your peril if you want your unbacked blockchain to be worth anything.

All this is well known in every walk of industry. I don't need to defend it. Pilots stick their finger in the wing tanks to measure how many hours endurance they've got, even though the fuel pump told them already and the guage told them already.

You are trying to argue that a blockchain has some kind of 'perfection' at it's heart that's a hotlne to god. It isn't. It's no different from an aircraft refuelling pump, a fuel gauge or a mechanical cash register. All you have is a file on your local hard disk that you have no clue about and a .exe application that claims to parse it that you have even less clue about.

A crypto currency economy is made up of a myriad of failure intolerant technologies that are no more reliable than the weakest link in their chain and, contrary to what you're attempting to convince everyone of here, people who use blockchains do spend a hell of a lot of time inspecting balances - regardless of whether they hold a private key to the address concerned or not. A valid check on the total amount I've sent is the total number of valid transactions I've made. An equally valid cross check on that is the movement in a control balance that includes transactions that I HAVEN'T made and that is generated by an alternative reporting resource in that blockchain's ecosystem.

The cat's out of the bag. If you think that 7 years down the line, people will accept a blockchain that censors their ability to audit any and every address without recourse to a private key then you should think about a line in chocolate teapots as well - it might be even more successful  

No. Thats not what "I'm wanting to check" but I think you already know it  

P.S. I don't know if you realise you've spent this entire thread trying to convince me of how useless the ability to perform control balances is when a system is transaction based and yet this coin's entire value proposition is based on the exclusive right to do just that.

Funny that  

I don't know how many decades you've been designing and developing transactional systems that allows you to come out with (excuse me) "drivel" such as...


...and...


All transactional system's states are derived from the "list of transactions" and All transactional systems support enough transparency to generate a variety of consolidations, control totals and 'state variables' with which to verify agreement between various input and output sources.

If I have access to a wallet application that reports to me I have a "valid transaction" and simultaneously have access to, say, a block explorer somewhere in random cloudland that is tallying all the outputs for a given address they may agree or disagree. In other words my wallet may report that I have a valid transaction and the balance may or may not have moved. Assuming the blockchain is working as advertised, that tells me that either I've got a dodgy wallet or a dodgy block explorer.

Simply saying to users "ok, you've got a valid transaction, now f*ck off" is not enough. A system with such limited audibility is unlikely to engender the public consensus and resistance to huge confidence knocks thats required to get through what bitcoin had to go through in its first decade because it doesn't only have to support it's own integrity but also that of a host of client technology of a vast range of quality and origin.

If I build a brick wall and and counted the number of levels as I went along, I should also be able to measure the wall height and divide by the brick thickness as an alternative to check on my previous result. The number of levels remains the same in both cases, it's just my measure of it I'm checking. People find lots of ways to analyse and audit things - the blockchain needs to support as many as possible and make these transparent.

Another thing. The very fact that we are presenting such consistently opposed points of view tells you something.

Ok, I accept that whether one or the other view is "correct" doesn't necessarily matter. There are users of blockchains who simply put "privacy" as a priority above all else and identify strongly with the concept. Equally there are those who hold "transparency" as a high priority.

But what is the appropriate response to such conflicting design priorities ? To decouple them. Thats what you do in any such situation so that one can be addressed independently of the other. This goes back to the point that I argued at the very start of this discussion - that there are plenty of ways to address fungibility without doing so at the expense of blockchain transparency and that that is the optimal approach since money can't sustain value without confidence but it can sustain it without obscurity.

(P.S. Gold does not have privacy or obscurity "built in". Any privacy that gold holders enjoy is extrinsic not intrinsic and the fact that a vault "hides" the gold does not make the vault any more valuable   )

LoL. Remember you said that the next time you check your wallet balance  


It matters because (in an unbacked monetary system) there needs to be consensus between the participating parties that  the blockchain state was altered and the nature of that alteration. For there to be consensus, that state change needs to be reported consistently to all concerned. Doesn't matter if it's "balances" or transaction ID's or what. We all need to be looking at exactly the same information and have access to the same data, even though altering it may be a privileged action.

The idea that such a trivially simple but commonly performed act of summing all the transaction outputs for a given random address should be limited to only 1 individual in the entire world who happens to have a private key to that address is ludicrous. It's a perfectly legitimate control test amongst hundreds that may be applied in order to construct aggregated state variables with which to observe changes (such as balances). Not only that, the amount of work and programming involved in actually hiding this information is phenomenal because you're basically having to UNDO (conceptually at least) all the work that has already been done by the public-private key encryption that makes "the wonder" of a transparent blockchain possible in the first place. Look at what Cryptonote projects are doing. While everyone else is getting on with tooling up commercial interfaces, Android wallets, iPhone wallets, API's commercial gateways and diverse gateways, Cryptonote has it all to do on the blockchain protocol. And for what ? To make a blockchain thats less transparent, less auditable, more open to confidence scams and far higher maintenance than bitcoin ?

I know why it has that priority - as I've said previously it has to maintain allegiance to its banking system archetype. But it's the wrong archetype for an unbacked monetary system that relies on public consensus for very existence.

If I send 50 transactions to an address I should be able to sum the outputs to that address to obtain a control total from the blockchain that matches what I thought I sent, regardless of whether I posses a private key to it. Not because thats a measure of "transaction veracity" but because thats what everybody else will be doing.

Yes - I realise the balance is nothing but a dynamically generated "report" of all the unspent outputs (or valid transactions) for that address. But thats what makes it a good control.

Although it's not a test of the veracity of any given transaction, it's one measure of blockchain "state", being an aggregation of multiple substates. A valid transaction should therefore result in a movement in that "state variable" corresponding to the size of the transfer. The maintaining of and auditing of such values is just standard practice for all transaction oriented systems and something is just second nature to anyone with a background in them.

Think of it this way. You have a locker in a train station and an errand boy who collects donuts from people and puts them in the locker. We define some kind of failsafe "receipt" that the errand boy returns to you when your donut is deposited so you know your delivery definitely arrived.

The total number of donuts in the locker is a "state variable" of the system that can be calculated from the total number of valid transaction receipts held amongst all the disparate senders. That "state variable" is meaningful and adds to the perceived integrity of the system. In some ways it's like a digest hash that gets used to test if a document has changed since it was created. It also serves as a human-readable "control" on individual transactions because you can detect both blockchain errors and reporting errors by checking that the aggregate and granular interpretations agree.

The difference between Bitcoin and obscured blockchains is that bitcoin makes these blockchain aggregations auditable by all - not on condition of whether you happen to have a private key to a particular address. That gives it lots of advantages in terms of confidence, robustness, usability and perceived integrity because granular actions (individual transfers) can be controlled by aggregate observations in a way that they cannot be on an obscured chain.

Save it   I think I might just understand controls in financial systems better than you do and you've written a small novel's worth of posts by now, all of them attempting to justify why they're not needed.

Pour yourself a beer instead.

No. You do not know.

Please read the section in this page called "Proving to a Third Party You Paid Someone".

Even if you remember to switch on "set store-tx-keys" and even if you go through the convoluted process of capturing the TX-ID and sending it to the receiving party, they can still claim whatever they like because you're using different tests to measure the success of the same transaction. In fact their test is the "control" on yours so it carries even more authority but you don't have access to it. I realise that should never happen, but thats the whole point of controls in systems engineering, finance or science - to change the "should" to "does".

Bitcoin and other transparent blockchains do not have this problem because they allow both parties access to the control.

Also, you do tend to make a great deal of assumptions in your reasoning if I may say so   Anyone (of the millions of potential users of blockchains) could download a hacked wallet that gives them all the right smoke signals that their "transaction is accepted on the block chain" and yet still send the coins to the hackers address instead of the one they typed in, not send them at all or do any number of blockchain gymnastics that were not the ones commanded. It's true that even with weak, asymmetric transaction audits such as the ones supported by Monero this would eventually come up. But open blockchains ASSUME this is the case the whole time and give the party who is invoking the transaction access to a control balance to allow them to fully verify the action immediately.

The type of asymmetric verification used in obscured blockchains simply opens them up to a host of significant attack vectors and confidence-cratering scenarios, not least in the social engineering category even without having to resort to malfunctions, hacked wallets and programming.

I am implying that two parties should be able to use the same criteria to test the presence or absence of a balance at a given address, regardless of whether they hold a private key to that address or not.

That is a fundamental control which Bitcoin supports and is what supports a growth in shared consensus of the blockchain state.

It's not enough to have a ticket to say "your money arrived ok", since that is an uncontrolled test and isn't the one that the other party will be using. That asymmetry is the flaw in audibility.

Thanks, I understand that very well  

That is exactly why symmetrical audits are required on a transaction - any transaction, be it an accounting package, a blockchain or a chemical plant mass balance because that tells you whether the problem lies in the IOU or in the blockchain. The thing about controlled actions is that the control needs to be identified/measured using the same criteria as the original intent. Thats the problem with this design.

So if I use a blockchain address to command my wallet to execute a transaction, I also need to use that address to test the result. With obscured blockchains, this is not possible (because they were originally conceived of to transport fiat with a trusted party in the loop, not unbacked crypto). Thats why this is an obsolete archetype.

Bitcoin and all modern transparent blockchains however, do support properly controlled actions on the blockchain through a symmetric transaction audit. If I send a bitcoin balance to Poloniex therefore, I’ll be using exactly the same criteria to test the result as they are (...and use as the basis for their "IOU"). This is possible of course due to the magic of public-private key cryptography which effectively allows for 2 blockchains - a private one and a public one. I can command the action using the “private” address domain and BOTH sender and receiver can test the result using the same public address without revealing any private key.

When asymmetric transaction audits are enforced on users on the other hand, you don’t have this option. The control is gone. You will be using one set of criteria to measure the success (“Transaction was successful message from wallet + transaction ID) and they will be using another (visually inspecting that the address is populated). By definition the action is therefore uncontrolled.

The fact that these may be the same tests “under the hood” is irrelevant because a control needs to be explicit, not implicit. (Poloniex at least, will only endorse the ‘explicit’ result anyway).

The flaw in this (encrypted blockchain) design isn’t in the technology which I accept works fine, it’s in the original design archetype. It is made to work like a bank account from the account holder’s perspective where you can only see” your stuff” and nobody else’s. But even that system has controls because there is a brokering party that DOES have access to a symmetric transaction audit and the account holder has recourse to that trusted party.

You seem to be digging yourself a great big hole here. Please read this line back.

Even anecdotally it's dismissible.

 - You send a transaction to Poloniex using a blockchain address they supply
 - your local simplewallet app reports your balance reduced by the transaction amount
 - But the balance on your exchange account doesn't move for a whole day

That is only 1 tiny scenario of thousands that occur day in day out in every cryptocurrency where the actual blockchain itself (as opposed to exchange trading) is in heavy use.

It's resolved by a symmetric audit of the transaction (described earlier) which is supported by transparent blockchains such as bitcoin and serviced via a number of public block explorers.

You go to great lengths to justify hiding the output of a user's own transaction from them.

Yet, the bitcoin network is 7 years old, fully transparent and benefits hugely from that transparency.

Maybe you need to rethink why.

Here's a clue: (And here's another one)

Have you ever heard of scientific controls ?



In this case, the independent variable is the balance in the destination address and the dependent variables are just about every aspect of the blockchain mechanics that you cite in last previous post.

Controls are everywhere. If you go to the dentist, you don’t need a degree in dentistry to know if you have toothache afterwards or not. The toothache is the “control” that allows you to test the integrity of the treatment without spending 4 years at dentist school. In bookkeeping, a trial balance acts as an aggregate “control” on the recording of individual transactions.

You say that the blockchain’s too complicated for ordinary users to understand and but that the technology is based on sound theory, programming and should therefore be trusted. This is unacceptable and would be unacceptable in any other field of industrial or administrative activity because though people may be too unskilled to understand the mechanics of the system, they are not too unskilled to understand a control.

Cryptonote and similar technologies impose an asymmetric audit on end users as its means of supporting "fungibility". This deprives them of just such a control since 2 addresses are required, not 1.

The problem with asymmetric audits is that they are cancerous to the integrity of any system - doesn’t matter if it’s financial, mechanical or chemical. They are therefore never used because they lack any kind of control that rings the alarm bell on some detailed aspect of the system which failed.



Bitcoin supports a symmetric audit at the granular (transaction) level. That’s to say, the balance movement in the sending AND destination addresses act as controls for the user on the blockchain mechanics which facilitate it. Although it’s at granular level, the aggregate effect of millions of blockchain users carrying out controlled actions on the blockchain in this way gives it immense resistance to confidence challenges. This is the MINIMUM level of transparency needed in an unbacked monetary system. As an encrypted bookkeeping technology, cryptonote is quite nice. But as a universal unbacked electronic asset, it's holed below the waterline due to this fundamental weakness - the asymmetric control for end users.

There's an interesting interview with the Monero rep(s) on Lets Talk Bitcoin from last year where halfway through they are asked the elephant in the room question as to "if it's so great, why didn't Satoshi use the Cryptonote approach". They responded that they didn't know the answer which, when you think about it is a bit alarming. If I were embarking on a challenging technology that ditched fundamental properties of the market leader such as transparency, I'd want to do a bit of due diligence and find out.

In fact the answer is staring us in the face every day we use bitcoin and every time we get back from the dentist and don't hit the roof at the first cup of coffee...  

Trusting in theory is not the same thing as trusting in practice.

About the most flakey link in the whole chain of crypto are wallets - everybody knows that. The chance of your wallet showing you the right balance at any given moment is about as good as the chance of me scoring 100 out of 100 basketball set shots with one hand tied behind my back. (That isn't very high b.t.w.    ). Wallets stick, may be unsync'd, have backloged transactions - you name it. And thats just the un-hacked ones. None of this has anything to do with "trust in cryptography" or the number of PHD's you happen to have on your dev team.

Contrary to what a lot of posters in here would like people to believe, the biggest challenge for crypto isn't privacy, it's confidence.

In that regard, this is a very strong model:



...and this is a very weak one:



It isn't just weak with regard to confidence, it also drives a truck through blockchain usability & maintenance because the entire technology stack has to be over engineered to support something that is not a priority for unbacked, anonymous media at the expense of something that is. The end user therefore has to satisfy themselves with only an implicit level of auditability rather than the explicit one they get with transparent blockchains. In the long run, thats just going to lead to a growing number of confidence scams, hacks and rackets that has the potential to fatally corrode monetary integrity in the eyes of its users.

As I said earlier, it doesn't mean that fungibility can't and shouldn't be improved in blockchains. But do it the proper way - by creating blockchains that natively mitigate the distinction between one address and another. Not by burying it under a thick layer of cryptographic syrup and torpedoing the very properties that give it value in the first place.