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XMR (Monero) as the leading CryptoNote Coin.
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It may well be possible that XBT gives and advantage over DRK or XMR in law enforcement determining the size of an illegal drug market. My point is that there are fairly straight forward ways to measure this. For example: A law enforcement agency knows how many drugs they intercept. All they need to know is the fraction of the drug shipments they are intercepting, and they can figure out the size of the market. How to measure the fraction? Simple place a sample number of undercover orders, determine the fraction of the undercover others that are intercepted, and bingo you know the size of the market.
The real market here is not illegal drug sales but rather the growing number of law abiding citizens that are getting sick and tired of being tracked left right and centre by large corporations intent of manipulating them for the purpose of generating sales. The XBT blockchain is potentially a massive marketing gold mine, and a coin like XMR solves this issue. A weaker solution such as DRK could be cracked by the marketers, since they can muster significant resources.
That does seem to be a pretty good definition of who's being marketed to here. I don't think that was included in the fundamental valuation of the currency that was mentioned a couple months ago. What types of costs are currently being expended on marketing to people based on metadata of previous purchases? I would imagine it's astronomical. Point is - these companies are already paying 'x' amount of money to get this information. If Monero were to potentially allow some of it to be choked off, while at the same provide the possibility to optionally offer the data to these same companies at a lesser cost because of less resources required to compile the information (while also optionally protecting identity) .. what value could that bring to the currency? Specifically, these companies pay millions/billions to collect and analyze this information already. Using blockchain technology, this information is inherently inside of the blockchain .. and I would argue it would be much easier (based on your previous response about XBT's blockchain being a goldmine) to compile than present methods they're using today. What would they pay for this type of information, provided I can continue to keep my identity away from them (again, optionally) and instead only offer them transaction details (provided it can be done - yet another job provided by crypto  )? I think the answer is simple: the same or less than what they're already paying. In this case, the demographic would cover not only people who are sick and tired of being tracked .. but also includes those who are sick and tired of being tracked and letting whatever companies that sell this information currently to capitalize on the information. You only get half of the story when you get sales information from the store, they don't know who bought what (unless they go and talk to the cc companies). I just wonder what kind of price tag they'd put on the other half? I'm not advocating this, just wondering if there's something there I guess. I consider private sector marketers and their thirst for data the single biggest threat to privacy in the 21st century, far worse than most government spy agencies. The latter depend to a large degree on private sector marketers, via programs such as PRISM, for their spying anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#mediaviewer/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg The fact that XMR can frustrate these marketers in their thirst for data alone makes the technology very worthwhile. There are of course many more important reasons for privacy in crypto-currency, with some examples in the following excellent post by gmaxwell https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=648656.msg7963150#msg7963150. |
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I agree that DRK, XMR, and BTC would have all likely provided the same situation, currently. What I was trying to point out was that .. well .. anyone can put up a website and sell drugs for money and schedule exchanges for cash/whatever. FBI may or may not go after them. In this case though, the situation was that exactly how much value exchanged hands was easily accessible and knowable. I wouldn't think FBI would be putting nearly as much resources into finding a small time exchange over a big time one (likely the reason this continued for so long? Or, perhaps there's an ulterior motive where they were collecting information .. or maybe just that it really was 'anonymous' enough and they had no idea what they were dealing with). Anyways, I'm saying that the possibility of finding out the exact amount of money flowing through the website allowed them to know exactly how much effort they should put into stopping it.
If SR was just a cash/drug drop system .. the first thing they would do is try to figure out how many people they should put on the case. If it's only a few thousand dollars, there would be much less people involved (if any at all), as compared to an exchange with millions of dollars involved. The ability to determine that so much money was accumulating in one place beforehand was just a bonus to them, because as you said above it was a needle that wasn't in a haystack. If, instead, the funds had all been going through an exchange or mixed transaction (be it cryptographically mixed, or tumbled through a mixer) .. well that would have likely hampered the investigation in that they would have had to place more initial resources into it from the start (where even then they might not yield good enough results). Maybe they'd take their time, searching out the service amongst whatever has hidden in it?
Maybe they'd locate the most common mixing services/exchanges and place them on a gag order for months .. slowly accumulating information the values of transactions and their sources and destinations by IP if possible (which would likely be supplied by the operator under order, and would circumvent the mixing service .. it would be hampered by TOR usage OFC). In this case though, that information was already accumulated and placed directly onto a blockchain as infallible proof that a transaction occurred and the details of exactly how much that transaction was worth (even if IP's weren't recorded and placed onto a database .. which many likely weren't because it used TOR) were easily tabulated. They didn't have to find sources, or rats, or even put someone under cover trying to infiltrate to find out how much volume they were dealing with. They didn't even have to put resources into funding TOR nodes and hoping that they were both exit and entry for enough people that they could paint their own picture. All they had to do on their end was confirm that the service was legitimate with a few purchases .. and then find location of the service.
They didn't have to ask the questions of: Well I see this website has a lot of traffic, and a lot of orders are placed .. but are they all legitimate? Could this site be making fake orders to create a 'haystack' so that the users of the site had some sort of plausible deniability? Or, in the very least, how can I be sure that this wont be a waste of my time and taxpayer dollars (however little that means to them) .. IE: is this an actual threat? Or my current favorite .. How much money do people spend on drugs, using magic internet money in 2014?
They didn't have to ask these questions because the entire business ledger was available for download in its complete form in under a day. This includes both the ledger they'd normally show in court, and the one that stays encrypted on your secretary's computer (or deep down under all the folders in their desk). The decision was effortless, because the exact magnitude of the offense was known beforehand.
And then there's the question of how did they find the service (though this isn't really the point I'm trying to make)? Wasn't the service using TOR? Did they catch their IP by serving up enough nodes, and then cross reference that with known wallet deposit addresses (or links to such addresses) to track them down? Or did they just find someone and 'ask' where it was based? This part isn't really relevant to my point .. which is that knowing the actual magnitude of the transactions was what would have signaled them to be investigated in the first place. That magnitude was revealed by the medium of exchange that was used. You would have a very tough time putting together an accurate picture with cryptographically-mixed values. You'd have a tough time putting together an accurate picture with non-cryptographically mixed transactions as well, but people are still going to ask (who have never met you, or even likely have ever heard of you): 'Where did this person get all this money from, and who is this person?' unless they go through a lot more work to keep the value hidden and not accumulated (something people tend to do naturally with money -- so it's kind of counter-intuitive).
It may well be possible that XBT gives and advantage over DRK or XMR in law enforcement determining the size of an illegal drug market. My point is that there are fairly straight forward ways to measure this. For example: A law enforcement agency knows how many drugs they intercept. All they need to know is the fraction of the drug shipments they are intercepting, and they can figure out the size of the market. How to measure the fraction? Simple place a sample number of undercover orders, determine the fraction of the undercover others that are intercepted, and bingo you know the size of the market. The real market here is not illegal drug sales but rather the growing number of law abiding citizens that are getting sick and tired of being tracked left right and centre by large corporations intent of manipulating them for the purpose of generating sales. The XBT blockchain is potentially a massive marketing gold mine, and a coin like XMR solves this issue. A weaker solution such as DRK could be cracked by the marketers, since they can muster significant resources. |
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Gavin is very much on the right track here. I find it really interesting that he carefully laying the ground work in order to address the real issue that Bitcoin faces namely the 1 MB blocksize limit. |
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... Yeah, it's a weird statement. How did the FBI determine that SR was even worth raiding if BTC was so anonymous? I'm sure they didn't go after them thinking they were only playing around with a few thousand dollars .. so I wonder what tipped them off that there were millions of dollars flowing through SR, and it was a worthwhile target to make some auction money  ? I serious doubt the anonymity or lack thereof of BTC had much to do with the SR bust. Furthermore I suspect it would have happened just the same with DRK or XMR as the currency. We must keep in mind that cash based drug dealers are busted all the time, so in reality this is not that different. There are all sorts of techniques law enforcement can use that are not dependent upon the anonymity of money. The other issue is that all privacy crypto-currency solutions are ultimately based on the concept of a small needle in a large haystack. When one talks about terrorist organizations or large drug cartels this fails because in these cases we have a large knitting needle in a comparably small haystack. There is a reason why Mexican drug cartels had to use HSBC to launder their money. They needed a large haystack in order to try to hide their knitting needle. |
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Maybe I am missing something but my understanding is that DRK was launched this year, so how can anyone be using it for a year on SR when SR was closed in the fall of 2013? Now I have heard allegations of a pre-mine. So it is possible that the pre-mine coins were used in SR, and consequently were seized by the US Government. I await for the auction of these pre-mine coins by the US Government, until then there are so many inconsistencies in the story here that only prudent course of action is to stay well away.
I think rikkejohn was talking about using BTC on SR, not DRK? Yes that is true. He was referring to BTC, which is why I deleted my post. Still how is BTC anonymity is good enough for SR an argument for DRK over XMR? This is beyond me. I assumed incorrectly rikkejohn was trying to make some sense here. |
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In my books, at this point in the development of Monero the trend in market capitalization, is way more significant than the trend in price, as an indicator of the growth and acceptance of the currency. We could see price move sideways or even slightly downward while there is very significant growth simply because of the emission rate.
Good point. I've tried to make a metric that combines the price (aka final market cap) and current market cap metrics into one. Something like: the cap of all the coins that have been mined + all future coins discounted to the present using a X% APR discount rate If parameter X is reasonable, this should theoretically be the best metric, as both the current number of coins and the eventual number (probably infinite) have their biases. Yes this would work well. X is a parameter that is market driven and will change as the coin evolves. To keep it simple I am going to consider POW coins with a fair release (no premine / instamine / ninjamine) and with a fixed overall supply. I am also assuming the coin is not the dominant form of money in the market place. XBT and XMR are good examples in very different stages of evolution. There are three types of players here: Long term players / investors, short term investors / speculators, and users. Users are not interested in the long term future of the coin. They see the coins primarily as an attractive way to either receive payment for goods or services or pay for goods or services. One should point out that two other important players: Those who are interested in the coin for altruistic / social / "make the world a better place" reasons, and miners. The first are essentially very long term players. For this reason I include them under long term players / investors. They may leave; however if they see another coin that is better suited to meet their altruistic / social / "make the world a better place" goals. Miners on the other hand can fall into any category depending on their motivations. Satoshi mining XBT in 2009 is a long term player / investor while at the other extreme there are many miners who will mine a coin and promptly sell it. They are in reality users who provide a service to the network, get paid for it and move on. X is perceived very differently by each category of market player. For users X is essentially infinite since they are not concerned with the future value at all, on the other hand for the long term players / investors X approaches zero as their primary concern is the long term viability of the coin. The short term investors / speculators will fall somewhat in between. The relative impact of each type of player in the market at a given point in time should then determine an estimate of X. Of course the importance of X diminishes as the inflation rate of the coin decreases. For XBT, at the present time, one can make a "price only" analysis as an approximation by neglecting the inflation rate during the term of the analysis and normalizing the eventual number of coins to the current number of coins; however for XMR such an analysis would ignore the impact of the users and short term investors / speculators and would likely lead to erroneous conclusions. It is also very important when comparing for example XMR with LTC, NMC or even PPC in order to predict for example how XMR would perform during a sharp rise in the BTC/USD rate, based upon the performance of LTC, NMC and PPC during previous sharp rises in the BTC/USD rate. One needs to estimate X for each coin during each of the previous sharp rises in the BTC/USD rate. |
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In my books, at this point in the development of Monero the trend in market capitalization, is way more significant than the trend in price, as an indicator of the growth and acceptance of the currency. We could see price move sideways or even slightly downward while there is very significant growth simply because of the emission rate.
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Here is some in depth proof that your donations are going to people who are striving to make a great cryptocurrency platform. The video highlights the new GUI in progress as well as ports, and the database work being don among other things. Well worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlTDS3iCqRYThank you. This is well worth watching. One aspect of this presentation that really pleased me is the emphasis on building a strong base at a fundamental level. The database work, in particular separating the storage and logic functions of the blockchain, and designing it to be agnostic to existing FLOSS and propriety database solutions, is the kind of approach that will produce very good returns over the long term and is critically important even though it is not glamorous in the short term. It does provide me with additional confidence that the development team is very much on the right track here. |
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Ebola is spread only through the exchange of bodily fluids. Therefore it doesn't spread as easily as the flu which you can catch through airborne water droplets when somebody coughs. Getting rid of paper currency doesn't do anything. Remember not to touch your eyes as this is the only part of your body that exposes the inside of your body and therefore is the primary gateway for all types of nasties.
But sweaty hands do touch coins and paper notes - even if that sweat is imperceptible. Also people sneeze or exhale small droplets with their exhalation, so things tend to get airborne*. There are two assumptions right now: 1. It is not airborne 2. It is not transmitted in the incubation period ...neither assumption is very strong. * It could also be made airborne intentionally: http://rt.com/news/178992-ebola-biological-weapon-terroristsThe original author was talking 30-60% population reduction, which I can't see happening without subsequent mass fear, hiding, suspicion, riots, revolts, pillaging and the like.
The factors you mention are "extra". Mortality rate through the virus alone is 60%. We'll see how this story develops and whether it affects cash being banned at some stage during the next months / years. If this happens, it also has the potential to create a massive boom in the anon-currencies, as they are better equipped to replace cash than Bitcoin due to their privacy. Banning cash has been the goal of those trying to control the population for well over two decades. The trouble is that the poor refuse to play along simply because account based payment methods (banking, debit cards etc.) make no economic sense at all, for them or their service providers. Furthermore AML/KNC and anti money laundering laws have made providing banking services to the poor even less cost effective. We must keep in mind that it costs roughly the same for a financial institution to do AML/KNC on someone who has has a net worth of 10,000,000 USD or 1 USD. The profit for the financial institution is greater in the first case by a factor of 7 orders of magnitude or more. The economic reality is that banning cash requires eliminating poverty. When it comes to privacy or transactions involving poor people, for in person transactions, it is very hard to beat low tech solutions such as cash and a hoodie. It is online and at a distance where crypto-currencies such as BTC and XMR can shine providing both privacy and a cost effective method for the poor to send and receive money. By the way the opportunity for the wealthy in BTC or XMR is as an investment and / or a store of value. For the poor it is as a way to send and receive money in a cost effective manner. This creates a rather unusual synergy between those at the top and those at the bottom of the financial pyramid. Ironically those in the middle say a wage earning consumer that does not do international transactions may end up benefiting the least. |
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note that ring signatures are not essential to crypto-currency.
Of course not. Computers are essential though, and most of them are being turned into glorified iPhones. The rest are contraband. Game over. Which is why running a FLOSS OS such as GNU/Linux is critical in order to preserve freedom, privacy, democracy, human rights, civil liberties etc. |
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Let me get this. Apple stopped its DRM based attack on Bitcoin when the BTC/USD rate was around 600. This allows us GNU/Linux and Android/Linux users who have being buying BTC all along at say well under 10 USD per BTC to sell to IOS users at say at 10000% profit or more. Edit: So the new top 1% wealthy are those who choose FLOSS based operating systems, such as GNU/Linux, while the other 99% are those who choose propriety operating systems such as those sold by Microsoft and Apple. |
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Reliably accepting payments with zero confirmations is an exclusive feature of XCN, and due to its innovative use of withdrawal limits on an account tree:
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I am not convinced this provides in reality any extra protraction to the merchant. In fact it can make things worse. What is to stop the double spender from generating a flood of transactions, using say a script, in excess of the total balance in total, with each transaction just under the withdrawal limit just before the target spend? The merchant would not be aware of this, checks the balance is well over the withdrawal limit, and approves the transaction. Then the merchant waits for N blocks as all the bogus transactions go by one by one (one per block) and the balance dwindles to zero before the merchant gets paid. It is actually worse than BTC or XMR since the merchant does not find out about the double spend until N blocks later, giving the fraudster plenty of time to escape the law. |
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Has anybody tested the new android app?
Yes I have tested Cryptonote Bitcoin. One suggestion is to allow the saving of the default coin and exchange. I use it for XMR on Poloniex rather than BCN on Hitbtc. Otherwise it is quite useful. |
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Voted yes because if Satoshi is human (not an agency, corporation, organization etc.) there is a strong possibility that if he or she does not spend his or her bitcoin his or her estate will. This issue here is depending on the jurisdiction is capital gains taxes triggered on death (deemed disposition upon death), estate taxes or both.
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Proof of reputation can be very easily manipulated because it is very easy to create a fake reputation with advertising and marketing.
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Here is a possible scenario: A Sybil https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses attack by an OS vendor that controls 91.68% of the desktop OS market. http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8&qpcustomd=0. The operating system vendor uses the DRM built into the OS to patch the Bitcoin clients and turn them into malicious clients controlled by it. If the ratio of Bitcoin nodes running on the attacker's OS to the total number of Bitcoin nodes corresponds to the attacker's OS market share, that attacker would control 91.68% of the nodes. Edit: A variant of this attack is where the attacker manages to create malware that infects the above mentioned OS. If the infraction rate is high enough it could approach the OS market share. If the DRM in the OS is used to spread the malware the attacker could use anti-circumvention laws as a deterrent against anti-malware software. |
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Who is proposing to leave the transaction cap alone (retain blocksize limit in 1MB), and why? (Where is the battle line?  ) A good starting point to research this is https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=709970.0 and the links in the OP's post. There was a fair amount of discussion on this in early 2013; however the discussion goes all the way to 2010. A forum search for yields 3 pages of results. Other variants of the above search will lead more results. There is actually quite a fair amount on material on this. A poll conducted in 2013 on this subject is quite revealing and shows the split in the community. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145636.0As an aside I came across rpietila Altcoin Observer https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.0 while researching this topic myself in early July and as a result got involved with XMR. |
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