By definition, I would say. If people expect it, then the market has already corrected for it, and moon is here already so you can't get there any more.

Of course.  You are the juice of crypto.  People like you are needed, so that others can make benefits.  It is, after all, a zero sum game.  Without losers there wouldn't be winners.  Losers are very important in this business, they make it live.

I think you hit the nail on its head.

As far as I understand, that's not true.  Some banks are using a *private version* of ethereum.  They are not using the public ethereum chain, but they are investigating a private clone of it.  In other words, they are looking at the open source code base of ethereum to build their own chains with it.

I'm only going to comment on the technological side.  The speculation side is maybe totally different.  After all, for the speculation side, there doesn't even need to be a block chain or any code running: exchange IOU are sufficient, if hyped enough.  So the market cap, speculation, "making profit" side of crypto, which is ridiculous to me, is not my piece of cake.  Speculation has nothing to do with the technology of the coin apart from a sterile "hyping" feature.

I'm interested in crypto for "crypto anarchist" reasons, which I think are the only valid reasons to prefer crypto over fiat.  There's strictly no reason to go through the hassle of crypto of one wants to "go to the masses" and "comply to the law".  Fiat does that better, cheaper and more reliably than any crypto ever will.

As such, when comparing bitcoin, DASH, ZCASH and monero, my preference goes out to monero, but not because I'm a monero shill, but because the three others have significant no-gos.   Bitcoin is great, but not fungible, leaking incredible amounts of privacy information (way, way, way more than fiat does).  Bitcoin used to be grass roots, but has become a chinese consortium, and the only thing it has running for it is the fact that it was the first, and hence no suspicion on any premine scam can rest upon it.

DASH was a serious improvement over bitcoin on the privacy side, but essentially lacked the right technology.  Bitcoin technology is traceble, and the only thing that DASH did, although very important, was to automate the mixer process.  However, DASH had a scammy start.  The other problem with DASH is that in order to do privacy "automatically" with technology that is not adapted, it needs a whole messy structure of masternodes, and this invites the other problem of illegal security stuff.

Monero was the clean follow-up on the scammy, but brilliant bytecoin.  The new technology proposed by bytecoin, namely ring signatures, solved a fundamental problem of privacy in bitcoin like chains.  However, bytecoin started out with such a terrible scam, that a new coin was due, to rescue the technology.  However, monero's technology isn't perfect, it still leaks some entropy about privacy, and it is still missing scriptability.   That said, to me, it solves an essential shortcoming of transparent block chains, and monero is inherently fungible, and quite privacy oriented.  Moreover, it is also pretty grass roots.

ZCASH is a big disappointment.  It includes the best privacy technology as of today, better in principle than the ring signature scheme of monero, because NO entropy is leaked with zero knowledge proofs.  But it has been set up in a way that is both scammy (the dev tax) and a no-go: optional anonymity.  Moreover, it has had a very questionable to be trusted setup.   In other words, ZCASH has brilliant technology, but fucked up in its setup.

This is why, as of today, I only see Monero as a serious private coin in the list of the OP.  It is really a pity that zcash fucked up so hard.  It has potentially better technology.    bitcoin and DASH are "old generation" technology to me, with too many problems

If I may tune in.  There is in fact no such thing as a scam in a crypto currency.  Every form of coin creation comes with seigniorage.  Only perfect proof of work destroys that seigniorage, and even that is not true, because seigniorage comes in two parts:
1) coin creation
2) value increase of created coins

because in both cases, the holder of the coin is entitled to more market value than the value he brought to the market.   Of course, from a certain point of maturity onward, the value increase of the coin is not "seigniorage" any more, but "speculation".   One can define that this point is reached when about all coins have transited a few hands (real hands, not sybils).  Someone buying a coin at a certain point, to speculate on a higher price at a later point (because of demand for usage, or because of greater fool expectation) is not profiting from seigniorage but is just speculating, if the coin's existence is sufficiently well known that it doesn't concern a small, but increasing club.  Speculation is considered "fair" because you take risk, and you can win or you can lose.  Seigniorage is considered unfair, because your gains are quite certain.  But in both cases, someone is attributing himself higher market value than he brought to the market ; the speculator did bring some "information" to the market through his act of speculation ; the "counterfeiter" (the person obtaining seigniorage) didn't.

Now, all crypto currencies suffer from serious seigniorage: that's what stimulates their creation in many cases.  Most crypto currencies are invented with the purpose of "becoming rich" without having to produce value to the market, but just because "being amongst the first few knowing about it".  Extreme cases are like those with bytecoin or dash, where the devs have been inventing stories to gather a lot of coins for themselves before the actual market players could start taking place.  But when we look at ZCASH, they attribute themselves a serious (post) premine, and most ICO do exactly the same: the ICO is nothing else but selling premined coins.  ALL these schemes, which "optimize" the seigniorage for a limited clique, can be called unfair (a "scam" if you want to).   But, apart from a coin starting out at very small value, and being mined by many people in a grassroots movement, where the "seigniorage" aspect is minimal, and the "speculation" aspect is large, so that the original clique has almost no coins from their initial mining and they all changed hands several times, ALL coins suffer from the unfairness of seigniorage ; some much more than others.

However, this doesn't seem to bother people much.  Indeed, one way of gaining market cap is by convincing sufficient people to "join the scam early" and to rip off the latecomers.   As such, there's not much difference between seigniorage unfairness, and "greater fool theory", which is the basis of most of crypto's market cap in any case.

So, a "scammy premined coin" can have a lot of success in the crypto market.   Greater fool theory is very powerful.  And it doesn't even mean that it has to crash, if the "greater fool" incentive stops early enough, to start to be used for real.  I'm still very doubtful about that, for all crypto.  Real usage seems not to take off.   Market cap is still mostly sustained by greater fool expectations.  For the moment this is not a problem: the world is still full of greater fools.

I thought that too: free money (free as in freedom, of course not as in beer).  However, the very big hurdle is the following one: fiat money is not free because the powers that be want it that way.  Free money only seems to catch on in as much as it "complies".  But then free money loses its edge over fiat.  Complying with the powers that be is much, much easier with fiat than with free money.

I only saw one real use case: being able to gain economic freedom.  But that is not compatible with compliance.  And visibly, most people want compliance, and don't care about their economic freedom.  The hassle and risk related to offending the powers that be by taking up one's own economic freedom aren't worth it, when one can join them, comply and play according to their rules, exploiting others.   So the use case isn't that obviously scaling.


The physical limits on communication are so many orders of magnitude away from our current technological limits, that they don't matter in this discussion.  We're not talking about scaling up 20 orders of magnitude or so.  We only need 3 or 4 orders of magnitude to have the technical ability to overtake the world economy (the *technical* ability, but the economic need will not be there).
We won't be hurting any Planck constant or light speed limit.  When you look at the network capacities in the 90-ies and right now, then you find those 3 or 4 orders of magnitude without the slightest problem.  That's only 20 years ago.  Like Moore predicts.


The hypothesis is of course that all these small offsets are to be neglected as compared to the bulk of course.  You should have looked at my orders of magnitude.   I'm in high speed data acquisition as a professional, so I do know a lot about these issues.  If you want to send blocks of a few hundreds of bytes, you run into these problems.   If you send blocks of 1 GB or you send them in chunks of 10 MB (which you do IN ANY CASE, no nutcase sends a single 1 GB block with the risk of loosing it all if one bit is flipped over) the network protocol overload is nothing as compared to the bulk load.   The chunking up in smaller packets because of lower-level network protocols is done in any case.  When the smallest blocks we're talking about are still a few orders of magnitude larger than the chunks used by networks, by storage units, and by cashing devices, then there's no overhead.



You're talking about today's technology.  I'm talking about when networks will be able to blitter 1 GB in 1 second on average around the world.  20 years from now or so.  When that technology arrives, and it will, then block chains are not going to be a hassle for scaling.  And honestly, the technology will be here before the economics is here.  20 years from now, still 99.9% of economy will still be done in fiat (I don't know the number of 9 I have to put after the comma).

There is nothing monetary failing about fungible money (meaning: not knowing where it comes from, only knowing that the total amount is conserved in transactions).   We've gone through that discussion already.  The traceability of transactions is not what is essential ; the scarcity is.  When the scarcity is provable, when the conservation of amount of monetary unit in a transaction is provable, then those entities are collectible assets, which is all that is needed.

You may think that monetary units need other properties, like non-fungibility, full traceability and so on, but you are simply factually proven wrong, with traditional monetary systems, and with cryptocurrencies.  Gold itself is perfectly fungible and its transactions are not traceable, nevertheless, nobody has any doubt about its value.  Cash money has the same properties.  On fiat coins, there's not written who had them before.  With crypto currencies, the same.  There ARE fungible, private cryptocurrencies (like monero) that ARE traded against value.  That's proof enough that your theory is false: it is contradicted by observation.

I think you all got that idea about "anonymity" backwards.  "anonymous" crypto is not about secret agents, terrorists and shady markets (although they do appreciate it of course).  People don't seem to realise how much LOSS of privacy open block chains imply, as compared to more traditional ways of doing things.  I illustrated this in several posts elsewhere, but bitcoin-like block chains *propagate* too much partial information.  I gave the example of me, the plumber, repairing the toilets at Joe's bar, getting paid in bitcoin, and then offering those coins to Mary, my friend, who then gets a coffee with it at Joe's bar.  Joe (and several of his customers) can now easily find out that Mary is my friend and that she got the coins from me.  In NO OTHER PAYMENT SYSTEM such a lack of privacy is present.  If you had paid me with fiat (whether cash or a wire transfer), he wouldn't be able to find out that I gave exactly his money to Mary.

What "anonymous" crypto does, is putting back some privacy into the block chain.  People have been attacking coins like monero because of their inability to be totally untraceable when the NSA is after you.  But that's not the point.   The point is that the so-called pseudonymity of bitcoin fails when one can link all transactions, combinations of change addresses and new payments in one big, cluttered network that propagates all partial knowledge about individual transactions.   Anonymous coins are not about being able to pay evil deeds without being annoyed.  They are just about not being a tool that leaks partial transaction information all over the place.


I think that the big market is finding a use case.   Clearly, apart from betting and speculating, crypto doesn't go anywhere.  The hypothetical case of me, the plumber, being paid in bitcoin for repairing toilets in a bar is, at this moment, still a fairy tale.  That's also why it SEEMS that anonymity is not a market.  Nobody cares, because bitcoin is, at this point, like most crypto, just a kind of backing of exchange IOU.


This is only correct if the increase in block size goes faster than the increase in network bandwidth.  If block size doesn't increase faster than Moore's law, there's no problem, and if the protocol is scalable (doesn't contain hard constants), then the time taken to transfer them remains constant and small compared to the time spend on PoW.  Also, if blocks get larger, the corresponding transaction fees get larger too.  So minting a large block with a longer time can be just as lucrative as minting a small block.

In fact, the amount by which you chop up the chain in blocks doesn't matter.  Whether you process 100 blocks of 10 MB in 10 minutes, or you process 1 block of 1 GB in 10 minutes, has about the same network load, the same ratio of network time over PoW time.  The only difference is that with 100 blocks in 10 minutes, you get much faster a confirmation of your transaction.  Note that the PoW that "safeguards" your transaction is also independent on the block size/time ; only the total amount of PoW spent after your transaction secures your transaction, whether that's chopped up in 100 small efforts, or one big one, is indifferent.  Of course, 1 GB of transactions in 10 minutes is only, as you rightly point out, reasonable if we can blitter 1 GB to China, to Brazil, and back in, say, less than a minute.  Which will happen, according to Moore's law, at a certain point in the near future.

In fact, I think that continuous forking of important coins into several competitive ones can also solve the scaling issue.  Look at ETH.  Not that they have a scaling issue at the moment, but the ETH network just doubled when it split into ETH and ETC.   If such kind of forking would happen continuously (say, on average once a year), we would get many competitive coins with similar user basis, and be able to distribute the load over several independent networks.   Exchange points (preferentially decentralized but even if they are centralized that's not a problem) would get us from one chain to another ; like we now have different fiat currencies.  Market forces would put prices on the different networks.  Note that for "hodlers" that would be a night mare, but for use as a currency, that's no problem.  It would also create enough inflationary pressure to keep the price of coins down, and stop the silly speculation. 

That's indeed the main problem, as well for bitcoin as for monero.  These things are almost not used.  We're indeed talking totally hypothetical, because nor bitcoin, nor monero are much used as a currency, and anonymity only matters in that respect. 

It seems that these coins are mainly used as a kind of backing for speculative IOU on exchanges.  As I said already many times, you don't need anonymity for that ; hell you don't even need a block chain for that.  IOU on a web site can be done without block chain, code or whatever.

Nevertheless, the few places where crypto IS used as a currency, are especially dark markets, where LACK OF anonymity like in bitcoin can be problematic.  It seems that crypto cannot compete with fiat in all other areas, especially because fiat is much more private and anonymous than open chain crypto in that respect.  Without a court order, nobody can find out what happens with my bank account.  On the bitcoin block chain, most people can find that out.  Fiat is much more private at this point than bitcoin.

That's scary.

The whole point is that bitcoin's block chain propagates this kind of partial information, while anonymous chains don't (or do it in a much more limited way).  In other words, you are of course right that no crypto currency protocol can protect you from directly gaining information about a transaction (at the end points, by failing OPSEC, by IP tracing ...) ; but a public block chain like bitcoin PROPAGATES this information from transaction to transaction, while an anonymous chain doesn't.

That's like saying that cash transactions don't help against being filmed by a surveillance camera showing you giving the cash to someone else.  However, that information is not propagated to the next transaction of that cash.  With an anonymous chain, that's similar.  However, with bitcoin's chain, this information, gained at some point, is PROPAGATED to the next transaction.

If Jack is filmed paying Joe, Jack and Joe are identified for that transaction.  However, the next transaction with those funds don't associate it to this transaction on an anonymous block chain, and do so on a public chain.  This has nothing to do with the fact of whether the transaction between Jack and Joe was "legal" or not.   It has to do with the fact that whatever Joe is doing with his money, shouldn't be traceable to the fact that he got it from Jack.  First of all, because that's a matter of privacy.  Second, because if we want all monetary units to be equivalent, this is a necessary property.  And third, because what is considered "illegal" shouldn't always be considered illegal.  Certain acts can be illegal but not criminal (that is to say, there are no victims).   Selling drugs should be legal, but isn't.

You seem to fail to understand the notion of anonymity of a crypto currency.  It is not about "giving you the opportunity to be anonymous".  You are right that this is almost impossible to achieve perfectly.  It is about not making the situation WORSE.  A block chain that propagates information about identity makes privacy essentially inexistant, and makes the quest for partial anonymity worse.  A block chain that doesn't propagate that information at least doesn't bring more harm to your privacy and anonymity than what you had before.

It is not a matter of "improving your anonymity/privacy", it is a matter of not screwing it up still more than it is today.

I thought that the OP was asking about a "zero cost" thing.  Of course you can use *an existing* block chain to write about anything on it.  But in order for that chain to live, it has to have valuable tokens on it (otherwise, nobody's going to mine it, nothing at stake).  The thing is that for the application at hand, the OP doesn't *need* a block chain, as there's nothing to be transferred: there are just promises to be issued by whoever wants to issue promises ; and promises to be redeemed.  Without any transaction, the heavy, full block chain mechanism is simply not *necessary*.  Verifiable signatures are sufficient.

This is a very sound analysis. 

Of course, that's not difficult to do.  Only, like "private block chains", there's not much "block chain" about that, because the two things that set a block chain apart from other public, shared files are that on a block chain, there's an incentive for people to want to ERASE data, and there's a needed ORDER IN TIME.  Fixing the order in time, and making things indelible are the two aspects of a block chain that were innovating, and that need "difficulty" (so that it becomes infeasible to "redo" the chain).  This was needed for a crypto currency, where one needs to prove two things:
- valid creation of coins (scarce coins)
- valid transactions of coins with no double spending (only the FIRST transaction in time counts).

But with random promises, there's no such thing.  There is no order in time.  The promise is there, or not.  A promise is not transferable.  It is only redeemable. 

What you need here, are just signatures and torrent or something that can share files.  People need to have their secret key, and their public key, like with GPG.  When you promise something to someone, you write this up in a text, with date, description of what you promise, and to whom (with his public key identifier), and you SIGN it with your secret key.
That file is now public (on a bittorrent server if you want).  Every body can:
- see exactly what you promised
- see that you promised it
- see when you promised it.
- see to whom you made that promise.

Nobody can fake a promise in your name, because they cannot sign it.

The person to whom you promise something can make a copy of that file (if you didn't send it directly already).  So even if YOU want to delete that file, that person can still put that file up again on a server.  You cannot deny any more that you made that promise, because everyone can put that file out.  There's no needed "order in time" of the file, because the date is written in the text and signed.

When the person wants to redeem your promise, you make him write a file where he/she writes that your promise has been redeemed, and signs it with his/her private key that corresponds to the public key in your message indicating him/her.  If YOU have that file now, you can put it on a server, and show to the world that said promise was redeemed.

Example:

"Today, 20. Dec 2016, I (dinofelis) promise to Joe (< public key of Joe here >) that I owe him a meal at KFC".
(signed with my private key).

This file is put on a server and sent to Joe. 

Everybody sees my promise.  The day I want to erase it, Joe has a copy (just as well as about any body else) and can put it back.

When finally, Joe redeems his meal, I make him write a message:

< my former message, including signature >
"I, Joe, declare that today, 25. Dec 2016, redeemed my meal from dinofelis"
( signed with Joe's private key ).

and put that on a server.

Everybody sees now that Joe redeemed his meal.  If ever Joe wants to claim again that I owe him a meal, I can show this message.  If Joe wants to delete it from a server, I can put it back.

There are already fungible coins on the market, which are much more fungible than zcash.  In fact, zcash is one of the least fungible coins around, because of this option to "go anonymous" OR NOT.   As such, there are 2 kinds of zcash: those that are "pure" and never got dirty on "getting anonymous" (mined in the clear, and bitcoin-style traceable).  These have the same fungibility aspects as bitcoin (that is, they can be colored).
And then there are the anonymous notes of zcash, which are AUTOMATICALLY stamped "anonymous" and maybe "suspicious", but which, amongst themselves, are perfectly fungible.

Now, THAT's a mess.  More than 90% of zcash is "bitcoin style" just as colorable, and 10% is "anonymous" fungible.

If you compare that to something like monero, or shadowcash or the like, the coins are much, much more fungible, because much much more alike, and essentially impossible to colour without ending up colouring the whole chain.

Making anonymity an option is the biggest blunder zcash ever made.  It is a no-go.

You're pedalling around the point that what SOME PEOPLE erroneously claim about a technology doesn't influence what a technology can actually provide.  It is not because someone writes on his T-shirt that safety belts will in all cases avoid you from getting hurt in a car accident, that safety belts don't increase safety.  

Hell, many people have claimed false things about bitcoin too.


I think, concerning anonymity, that far more people have been trapped by "lies" concerning the anonymity of bitcoin, than with monero, honestly.  Monero's anonymity technology does actually avoid the block chain to be a significant propagator of real world identity knowledge.  Bitcoin's "pseudonymity" does propagate very well real world knowledge.

Of course, the block chain technology itself is not responsible for the gaining of "endpoint real world knowledge" and for leaking transaction real world knowledge, both through inevitable use and also through OPSEC failure.   But the whole point is that that real world knowledge is propagated like fire on the bitcoin block chain, and is essentially stopped on the monero block chain.

You could compare it like this: the bitcoin block chain is made of wood, and the monero chain is made of stone.   These chains by themselves don't avoid fire to develop in its neighbourhood.  But if the chain is put on fire at a place (real world knowledge is discovered), then on the wooden chain, the fire propagates, and on the stone chain, it doesn't.  The privacy on both chains is burned where the fire got it, but on one chain, the fire propagates, on the other, it doesn't.

Of course, real world knowledge will always be won: simply by your counterparty when you transact (when you buy something, the guy you buy from will probably know something about you), so the "end points" know you.  Exchanges know you.  And yes, with OPSEC problems, when people look at your internet traffic, break into your computer, etc... they will gain real world knowledge.    No block chain will protect you from that.
The question simply is: does the block chain PROPAGATE that knowledge or not ?  Monero's protocol propagates it MUCH LESS than bitcoin's, who is essentially transparent.  Much more so than "pseudonymity" would suggest.

And this is where your and mine opposing claims come from.  You are considering that monero cannot protect you much better from "breaking anonymity" than bitcoin if your adversary is a powerful agency like the FBI or worse, the NSA.  That's most probably true.  As I said, it is not a good idea to pay some guys to shoot the POTUS with monero, nor with bitcoin, nor with gold: they'll get you.  Monero will not protect you.  Because they will gain DIRECT real world knowledge, independent of the block chain, through OPSEC and other investigative procedures (hitting a guy with a winch until he confesses can be part of it).

But on the other hand, my simple privacy, when "Joe, the bar keeper" is my adversary, is not even protected on the bitcoin block chain, while on the monero block chain, it is much better hidden.

So: is my privacy/anonymity protected ?

adversary: FBI/NSA :
gold (no), cash (no), bank account (no), monero (no), bitcoin (no)

adversary: Joe the bar keeper:
gold (yes), cash (yes), bank account (yes), monero (mostly yes), bitcoin (no)

The bitcoin failure in the second case comes from the transparency of the block chain, not from OPSEC failure.

Again, the exaggerated claims of some don't invalidate the fact that one thing has better protection than another.  Monero has much better privacy/fungibility/anonymity properties than bitcoin, which is badly lacking those features.  The pseudonymity thought of by Satoshi didn't work out as well as he thought it would, because of the easiness of chain analysis, which is exactly what techniques such as those used by monero seriously help obfuscating.


That's true, for sure there are ways to identify a monero user, for instance by hitting him with a winch until he confesses.   But the protocol makes cheap and obvious chain analysis, such as can be done on the bitcoin block chain, much harder and much less useful.   In the same way that using a long password, and two factor identification, makes your account much safer.  Which doesn't mean that it cannot be broken.  However, that is not an argument to say that, because some hackers can succeed in breaking even two-factor authentication, that one shouldn't have any accounts with a password, and that Joe and Jack can log into my email account or can log into my BCT account without any identification, because in any case, this is not 100% safe, and having a password would give a false sense of security of that account.

And it is not because some people make exaggerated claims about the safety of passwords, that they shouldn't be used at all.

It is not because the salesman of safety belts exaggerates the safety of his belts, that his belts shouldn't be worn.  To use your logic, people should drive cars without safety belts, and actually with air bags full of nails, so that they don't get any false sense of security: if ever they have an accident, they know at least that they will get blown to pieces before crashing through the wind shield.

To quote myself, here's a great illustration of that fact:

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/