You still don't say why you're in crypto.  Crypto is not legal tender, hence illegal tender (that's more or less your reasoning).  So why are you in "illegal tender", and then cry out that monero is illegal (bitcoin is then just as illegal) ?
Why don't you stay with fiat, nobody's going to come and handcuff you because you are using your bank account, aren't you ?  You started this thread with someone getting handcuffed because he used bitcoin.  Now, bitcoin is everything but an anon coin: you scream out to the world what you do with your illegal tender.  And clearly, people got into trouble because of that.  so why are you into crypto ?

Why ?  What goal is one trying to accomplish ?
Why would one use crypto and not the existing fiat system if the goal is to be totally privacy-less and transparent ?
I can understand all arguments about legality, the fact that people want to stay away from anything that could attract them the anger of the state and so on. 

But crypto is going through a lot of hassle and difficulties to AVOID central authority.  If you start from the premise that you want to accept a central authority, what is the basis to go through all that hassle in the first place ?  Why not USE the fact that you accept an authority (the state) to make everything MUCH MUCH easier and do away with distributed trustless systems, which have no place where there is a central, accepted authority ?

This is like going through the hassle of making an airplane, but wanting to stay on the ground.  Why not continue with cars then ?

Ok, you're telling us why you are NOT here.  But why are you here ?  What is your drive to be interested in crypto ?

No, seriously, why are you interested in crypto ?  Or do you want to warn people NOT to use crypto because it's against the law ?

I know why I'm interested in crypto: because I think law and state are evil, and that one has the civil duty to oppose oppression and the crushing of fundamental rights, and I see in crypto a tool to help in that fight.  Crypto can be to the oppressed economic rights, what the internet has been to the lack of freedom of public expression.  But clearly that's not your PoV.  So what brings you here ?

Bitcoin is then illegal too.  What are you doing in crypto ?

And why are the directors of most exchanges not arrested on the spot, as they are dealing in illegal activities ?
You mean that Polo, Bittrex, Kraken ... are dark markets that are out and open in the blue and nobody is bothering them ?

Oh, I see: they are the FBI running them to capture all the crooks daring to have a monero wallet or a bitcoin wallet ?

BTW, as long as crypto is not illegal (in the sense that the very fact of having something to do with crypto will land you in jail), there will be legally allowed economic acts, and (unfortunately) a lot of illegal economic acts.  Even better, there are a lot of economically legal acts which remain legal as long as you declare them.
Now, you can do all that with an anon coin such as monero.  You can do your honest tax declaration, including your crypto business.  You can pay taxes as it is due on all your earnings in crypto.  As long as you don't buy stuff that is illegal, and you don't get into commercial activities you are not allowed to do so (as I said, this is unfortunate, because it is a fundamental liberty that is taken away, but you can accept that and live by it), there's nothing wrong with using anon crypto.

If ever you are interrogated concerning your declarations, you can, with your view key, PROVE what you did.  You can show law enforcement, or tax collectors, if they ask you, what you did.  Like you can explain using a bank account.  But at least, anon coins have the advantage that, apart from law enforcement or tax collectors, nobody else can put their nose into your business if you don't show them.

The fact of engaging into acts that are illegal or not, has nothing to do with the fact that you have total control over the privacy of certain acts, privacy you can lift if you desire to do so, to prove the legality of your activity.

Indeed.  My question too.  How can that guy be interested in crypto, if the only thing he considers allowed is "legal tender" ?  What is he doing here then ?

Why are you a crypto supporter ?
I already asked, didn't get an answer.  What is your drive to be a crypto supporter (apart from greed and the hope to rip off someone else) ?  No crypto is "legal" in the way you mean it.  So why do you support it, if you think that doing things that are not legal are "problematic" ?

That was indeed my point. Spoetnik claimed that the very act of possessing anon coins, or probably, even running a node or writing code for it, is illegal.  If ever that becomes true, then we live in a kind of North Korea.  I do not exclude this, but we're not there yet.

That in order to deal legally with buying anon coins, exchanges require ID, is nothing special.  That doesn't render the possession and transmission of said coins illegal.

And in fact, from the strictly law enforcement and taxation viewpoint, that's in fact good enough, as long as no closed economy is formed with crypto.  The hard part is in fact not, as Spoetnik thinks, on the buyer side.  The hard part is the cashing out on the seller side.

Imagine you run a dark market, and you earn a lot of monero.  Now, one day you decide you have made enough, say, 500 000 XMR, you quit, and you stop your dark market thing.  As long as LE didn't catch your dark market when doing your thing, you're pretty OK.  3 years later, you decide that you want to live off your earnings from your dark market days.   If the world is still mainly running on fiat, and chances are that it will be in 3 years from now, how are you going to buy a Porsche with your monero (assuming similar market price as today) ?  You can go to your car dealer, and ask him if he accepts monero.  If he does, great.  But if he doesn't ?  You need to get fiat.
And that's where it hurts.  Of course, the day that you are going to exchange 10 000 XMR to get enough $$ for your Porsche, this is in the clear, because on an exchange, and from your exchange to your bank account.

However, this may change if the crypto economy gets more closed.  But there are not much signs of it right now.

It is correct that if you have more than 51% of hash power at your disposal, you can, entirely while playing according to the original rules, "rewrite" part of the already included blocks in a chain.  So you are right there, that one can do a 51% attack while remaining within the original rules, but just orphaning a series of recent blocks, and do them over with more hashing power, so that this new chain becomes the dominant one, still according to the rules.

So my argument wasn't proving the error in your reasoning (which is still there).  Sorry about that. 

My simple argument is that the mining nodes (sooner or later you will have to admit that there are such things, because they are the essence of mining strategy) are the ones that make the rules, and that the non-mining nodes have nothing to say about it.

*in practice* it is not a good idea for a mining consortium to go against the rules of the non-mining nodes, but that has nothing to do with their "safeguarding the block chain rules".  This is rather because most non-mining nodes are also user nodes.   The miners depend on the user's approval in order for them to maintain the market cap.  Miners wouldn't like to chase away users, because then the market cap plummets, and hence their source of profit dries up.  So miners are not going to change the rules against the wishes of the users, but only for reasons of market cap.

However, if the miner nodes decide to change the rules, that is, change the way they are going to build the block chain, then there's nothing that non-mining nodes can do about it, apart from noticing, and not updating.  Non-mining nodes are not being the "guards" of what so ever, apart from informing their owner that visibly, the miners decided to change the rules.

You should really understand that, before thinking about the dynamics of consensus.  Non-mining nodes have strictly no power, apart from the power to inform that its rules are not respected, something nobody cares about.

I already replied to that.  I can't do that because the miners do not agree.  They will not build upon my block, and hence it will get orphaned, simply because they don't consider the chain with that block valid.   Your "requested proof" is a counter factual straw man.

You really are claiming that a 51% attack is not possible even if 80% of all miners and hash rate agree upon the attack.
And you are claiming that, on the other hand, a 51% attack is easily done by a sybil attack of non-mining full nodes.  It is sufficient to start up a large quantity of non-mining nodes implementing the new rules, and they take over the network.

As such, you are essentially denying the whole security of any PoW crypto, including bitcoin.  You have in other words, a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the consensus mechanism in PoW.

This is not the case yet.  But there will be a world-wide fight by the state-maffias to try to keep their citizens as their slaves, and they start to see the eminent danger that cryptography in general presents for their power.  Cryptography is an ultimate freedom tool, and states don't like freedom (states being based upon slavery).  We'll see how this turns out.  Freedom won the first crypto war, but the second one will be harder, with much more stupid people than 30 years ago.

Why are you interested in crypto, Spoetnik ?  What drives your interest ?  (apart from greed, perhaps...)

So you mean a 51% Sybil attack of the number of full nodes is enough to succeed, and all that "hash rate security" stuff is just made up ?
There are about 6000 full nodes in the bitcoin network.  If tomorrow, I install 15000 nodes with my modified rules, I take over the bitcoin network, because I now dictate the consensus, because my new rules are on a large majority of Full Nodes ?  On the other hand, you think that if 90% of hash rate switches to a new protocol that is not supported by 5500 of the 6000 nodes, they cannot do a 51% attack ?
It seems to me that you've totally misunderstood the importance of the relationship between mining and consensus.  

It seems that you have a confusion between "owners of ASICS" and "miners".  Miners are those who *decide what block chain they accept to add their block to, and what block content, according to what rules, they construct*.

Now, in order even to think to do so, they have to set up a full node, that picks of course the block chain to their likings (according to their rules, on which they decide to build), and that will, OF COURSE, accept a block as they make it (they will construct of course a block that is in agreement with their own rules).  They also need a full node to maintain a list of waiting transactions they will include into their blocks they are going to build.  These transactions have to agree to THEIR RULES.
In other words, everything that a miner has to do, corresponds to the function of a full node in which he programmed the rules HE wants concerning the block chain he's accepting, the transactions he's accepting, and the block structure he's accepting.  Without such a full node, the miner cannot even decide on what block chain to build, how to make his block and what transactions to put inside.  In other words, the full node of the miner is the essence of his mining strategy.

The miner (the miner node owner) also needs to perform a lot of hashes to find a block *according to his own rules*.  Now, he can possess that hashing hardware himself, or he can BUY HASHING POWER from people owning "Mining rigs" and pay them with coins. These people owning mining rigs can of course refuse to sell him their hashing power, because they will most probably be paid in exactly that coin they're mining (although that is by no means necessary: someone selling hash power for ETH could just as well be paid in bitcoin for his submitted hash power, but that contains a lot of exchange risk).

In as much as a miner node buys hashing power from several rig owners, that's called a mining pool.

And now the point is: in as much as a large majority of mining pools (miner node owners) have agreed on a certain set of rules, and their miner rig partners agree with that and sell them their hashing power *that's all that is having influence on the consensus*.  If these people agree amongst themselves to modify the rules programmed in the full nodes they use as their mining strategy, then, whether 1 million other, non-mining nodes exist and agree or don't agree, doesn't matter.  These other, non-mining, full nodes will simply see that the block chain that is being build, isn't valid to their rules, and stop downloading blocks.  And that's it.  Users that want to see their transactions, should send them directly to the mining nodes, and should find the block chain on that full node, which will run according to the consensus protocol between the miner nodes.  

The *only* thing that maintains consensus on the rules is the miner strategy (build into the full nodes that determine this mining strategy) that can apply more than 51% of the hash rate.
If 51% of the hash rate can be applied to a miner strategy built into a different full node, then that is now the new set of rules ; whether all other nodes agree or not.  If they don't, they simply come to a grinding halt.

The possession of gold and silver and cash must then also violate those laws.  Hell, the possession of a good idea must be illegal in that country !  After all, that good idea is worth a lot of money, and it doesn't tell where it comes from !  If everything that is worth something, and is not intrinsically traceable to where it came from, is illegal in that country, then that's quite a non-free country, isn't it !
About time to take up your civil responsibilities, and fight such oppressive regime, no ?

On the other hand, if you want to be a 100% fully law abiding citizen, that tries to please the state and the law, stay out of crypto, and use their fiat.  Crypto has nothing to offer to you.  You even see that a totally non-anon and fully transparant coin like bitcoin has led people into trouble.  So you should change your phrase: "it is simple, crypto violates the anti-money laundering laws".  It is BTW exactly to fight those laws that crypto was invented.  Because those laws take away a fundamental freedom: the freedom to trade.

I don't see how, if transactions are free (don't cost anything to the one giving the transaction order), you can avoid to get billions of transactions broadcast, "just for the fun of it" or for other reasons.  Also, if I were a miner/minter, it would in any case be more profitable for me to fill blocks with *my own transactions* than with other people's transactions (because I generate them myself and there's no network delay and so on).

I don't see how these problems can be solved without:
1) a cost if you want to transact
2) a gain if you include a genuine transaction for the miner in some way.

One should always avoid "hard numbers" such as block length, number of transactions, amount of transactions etc... because then your solution cannot scale (unless you fiddle manually with the parameters, which is similar to "manual price setting", instead of a market discovering the price).


That would kill the "currency" aspect of the crypto.  A currency must be able to be transmitted immediately.  You're then turning the crypto into a hoarding stuff.


I think that this is correct when the rules are graved in stone.  When the rules can change (regular hard forks for instance) then the time needed for the divergent drives to do their evil deed may be too long and can be killed by a change.


[/quote]

I'm also interested in finding out what's wrong with transaction fees (apart the obvious divergence they cause with PoS).

But more to the point, I don't see what's wrong with "making the consensus diverge".  In fact, my idea is that a constantly hardforking, and splitting currency is a quite good crypto: it causes inflation, it kills "graving rules in stone", it avoids people thinking that the coin will go to the moon (so they don't hoard it), and it should add fluidity and flexibility.
There is no danger of "centralisation" because of the continuous splitting of the currency, that's simply not worth it.

We would then really have a currency, and not some "digital gold".

Actually, there are two different points. 

1) Why should one AVOID giving one's identity to Polo when buying monero ?  This question only makes sense if you think somehow that the simple fact of buying monero makes you a suspect.  If that is the case, then your liberties are in an extremely bad shape.  If the very fact of using a crypto currency makes you a suspect criminal, then the only thing you can hope for, is that half the world uses that crypto, so that half of the world becomes a suspect.  This is a matter of civil responsibility, to use all things that may "make them think you might be a criminal".  Set up a tor relay, use monero, use GPG, .... to fight for your freedom.

2) With monero (contrary to bitcoin) there is no reason to hide your identity when buying it, if you don't want people to link this act of buying monero with whatever you're going to do with it afterwards.  That's exactly what the crypto of monero is made for !

Of course the crypto can fail, like the crypto of bitcoin can fail.  Dark market activities are of course always a risky affair, and the biggest risk will not come from using monero, but from actually "getting into contact" and "obtaining stuff" there.  The whole idea of monero is not so much to stimulate dark markets, but to allow people to get their monetary privacy back which they lost partially with banks, and totally with bitcoin.   That privacy doesn't need to be used for illegal stuff.  You can just as well appreciate the privacy when doing things that are allowed by the laws that states have decided to impose upon to you.  But it is true that dark markets are a particularly well suited test bed for the solidity of the privacy.  So there's a symbiosis between all privacy-enabling technologies on one hand, and dark markets on the other.  The privacy-enabling technologies find in dark markets a great test bed, and dark markets can appreciate the privacy technology to allow them to escape the prying eyes of law enforcement.  It is a win-win situation.

You are upping your thing because you see that you're getting nowhere, don't you.  Now we already have a "terrorist".  First, it was a guy buying crack on Alphabay.  You're upping the amounts too, to get attention.  

I'm back to my guy buying 100 XMR on Polo.  I guess you can have your crack for some $1000,- right ?

Ok, so you think that all monero buyers on Polo are now under investigation.  That's good enough.  They have a lot of work then, at the FBI.


Up to now, that's not difficult.  That's the information you gave out to Polo.


So essentially, you're telling me that the guy would in any case be given out by someone, whether he was using monero or not.  So the fact of buying monero on Polo or not doesn't change a shit, does it ?


Of course, but that has nothing to do with monero, or with the "danger" of buying monero on Polo.  He would have been given out in any case.  So this doesn't prove your point about the danger of using monero when it is taken from a single exchange.


So every single person who ever withdrew some coins from Polo is now under profound investigation.   As such, whether or not you use those coins or not has nothing to do with the danger you spell out.  Monero is not the culprit is it ?  The guy is already under investigation.


Well, if it is proven that it was monero's block chain that gave him away, then that would be entirely normal because that is monero's value proposition.  If monero gets deanonymized, then of course it is worthless.  In the same way that if you can crack bitcoin addresses and do transactions in their name, bitcoin will be worthless.   If the cryptographic protocol of a crypto fails, then of course it is worthless.


if that happens through the deanonymisation of the monero block chain, I agree with you.   Like even if one person succeeds in finding the private keys of Satoshi from his (public) addresses, that's good enough to stop with bitcoin and put it in the dust bin.  Sure.

One single bitcoin key found from the block chain, and that's indeed good enough to consider it a total failure.  One deanonymisation of the monero block chain, and that's good enough to consider it a failure.


Consider now this.  Your guy buys 100 XMR of on Polo.
Now he loses his wallet.  His monero are gone.

A year later, he buys crack at a local dealer using amazon gift cards.  He is totally out of crypto.  In your story, he's JUST AS EXPOSED, because it was his buying coins one day on Polo, which got nowhere.  The very fact of buying monero on Polo put him under scrutiny, and whatever he did later which was against the law, got him caught, even if it didn't have anything to do with crypto.

No, that is not what I'm saying.  I'm saying that with monero's scheme, there is SOME ENTROPY leaking when two transactions happen quickly one after the other: the anonymity set is still small, in other words.  The number of potential "suspect transactions" is limited in that case.  If you put a few intermediate transactions, and you wait for a while, however, this "anonymity set" grows strongly, and in the end, it could be just any monero user.


That is true.  It is untraceable in the sense that EVEN two successive transactions are not traceable, in the sense that there is no way to PROVE that the second transaction was done by the receiver of the previous transaction, but there is some indication that it COULD be this receiver.  If you wait somewhat, and you do a few intermediate transactions, then this link is indeed becoming totally untraceable.


That was not your claim.  Of course, if the FBI gets into my computer, and sees directly my transaction to Alphabay, they know it was me.  Duh.  Your claim, however, was that having to buy monero on an exchange was the danger.   In other words, your claim is the fact that the MONERO PROTOCOL and block chain are going to rat me over ; that the fact that I bought monero on Polo was going to get linked to my buying stuff on alphabay with those same coins.  Well, I'm telling you that that is exactly what monero DOESN'T do (in opposition to bitcoin).

Of course, you are perfectly right that the very act of contacting Alphabay and having them send stuff to me is a risky act.  And that of course there's a serious risk that this very act, using computers and networks, is going to give me away.  But that has nothing to do with monero, and that is not your claim.  Your claim was that using monero on alphabay is going to be linked to my ID on Polo.  Well, I claim that that is not going to happen, exactly because of the way monero works.

That my very act of going to alphabay may give me away, is of course obvious.  But not through the use of monero.


Well, you need to find a deanonimisation bug in monero.  If you do so, I'm sure you can get rich with it.  Do you also consider that you can crack the bitcoin block chain, "because if it runs, it can be cracked", and that you can get at Satoshi's million coins or so ?  Or does your "if it runs it can be cracked" statement suddenly doesn't apply any more ?

If you consider that the cryptography can be cracked, then I wouldn't touch a bitcoin, honestly.  Before you know, people have cracked your address, and have discovered the secret key that goes with it.  Remember, if it runs, it can be cracked, and hence people know how to get the secret key of just any bitcoin address used on the chain.  Or are you suddenly much more confident ?


Sure.  So if you know someone's bitcoin address, you can crack the elliptic curve signature code, and find out his private key from it I guess ?  Who the hell would still be using bitcoin if it can be cracked ?


Of course, but if they do that to catch my buying on alphabay, they HAVE NOT USED MY POLO ID.  They just found me directly and saw me buying on alphabay directly, without the need of looking at monero.   And that was not your claim.  Your claim was that if I bought monero on Polo, and THEN bought something on alphabay, my Polo ID was going to give me away.

I'm telling you that in as much as it would be true that the monero block chain is giving me away because of that, that this is a cryptographic cracking that is of the same order as being able to find bitcoin private keys if one knows a bitcoin address.


Bitcoin is a traceable block chain.  If I do the same with bitcoin, I'm totally exposing myself.  That's exactly the difference between a transparant chain such as bitcoin, and an opaque chain such as monero.


To do a meager imitation of what happens automatically on the monero block chain, but with much, much more risk, and with the necessity to trust the mixer.  In other words, mixing can be even more dangerous.  Bitcoin is a privacy hell, everything can be followed.

Maybe you should understand how monero works before claiming things about it ?

Nothing was hacked.  Someone played smarter by the smart contract rules than the rest of the gullible and greedy participants, rules which were different than what the DAO creators claimed about the rules, but those that hadn't understood the rules that way, decided to deny this person his gains, and decided to turn back the clock so that his transactions were denied.  That was the end of the concept of smart contract: in the end, people vote over whether the contract should follow its rules, or whether you are denied your transactions when they don't like the outcome.

A small part of the chain continued to play by the rules (ETC), but most ETH users preferred visibly the "vote contract" over the "smart contract".  This put somewhat of a bummer on the ultimate Turing Complete Unstoppable Smart Contract platform, which Ethereum pretended, one day, to be, because it was shown that in the end, a few people vote over whether you can keep the outcome of a contract or not depending on whether they thought that it was "just" or not.  So in the end, this actually signed the end of the very concept of smart, unstoppable contract of which the first big application was simply stopped and turned out not to be smart.