This is already debunked. The address cited here is a corporate registration service (apparently running out of the same building as a law office -- see picture below) located in what appears to be a commercial neighborhood. That has nothing to do with where the exchange is operating.

https://www.49dollarmontanaregisteredagent.com

That's interesting since is charged to the borrower in real time. Poloniex just holds on to it I guess.

What I've noticed when lending is that you will often get many small loans instead of one big one and some of them get paid off frequently so you end up with coins released to your borrowing account. It wasn't clear to me that was all from repayments and not interest, but in hindsight that makes more sense. Thank you for the clarification.

Yes that is correct (except that the interest is paid calculated along the way, once every few minutes, not at the end). You could possibly reinvest your earnings in which case the compounded return could be higher, if the loan is repaid early and you reinvest the total, but no guarantee you would be able to reinvest at the same or higher rate.

EDIT: While the interest/fees are calculated and credited frequently (minutes) they are paid when the loan is repaid. Thanks to TrueCryptonaire for the correction.

To go long people would borrow Bitcoins and then use them to buy XMR (or whatever other coin).

 
Yes if you lend out Bitcoin and people use it to buy a coin that collapses too quickly you can lose principal.

None of these losses have happened so far on Poloniex afaik, but I understand there have been margin losses on some of the leveraged Bitcoin exchanges.


There is never a good time to get Goxed.

Yes that is very true.

The risk is that in an explosive price increase short sellers make take so much of a loss that they can't pay back the loan despite margin requirements and forced liquidation, and you will lose principal. That and (compared to keeping coins in your own wallet) the risk getting Goxed. I'll let you decide for yourself whether or when that is a good deal.

As far as the mechanics of how the loans work medusa13 had it right. You set the rate (daily) and the maximum term (2-60 days). If someone borrows from you they can pay back early. Otherwise you continue to get the agreed rate of interest credited to your account quite often (every minute or few minutes).

No one can tell you what rate to set, since it depends entirely on market conditions. Sometimes even 0.0002% may not ever get taken by a borrower. Other times it can be 1% or higher.

No stealths got 'unstealthed'. All rings got 'unringed'. That makes the chain fully traceable but multiple payments to the same address are still not linkable, unless they are spent together, which is common. So this is quite fragile on its own as a privacy method, arguably useless.

Stealth addresses are 100% equivalent to not reusing Bitcoin addresses.

Unless you think it is possible to provide real privacy on Bitcoin without adding any form of mixing (rings, coinjoin, whatever) just by not reusing addresses, then killing rings makes it a full deanon.

Do you have evidence for this because I haven't seen it. I'm not denying it, just asking if you have evidence or are making it up. I have no idea how much he spent.


He has made donations to various aspects of funding along with many other community members.

Putting the blockchain on smartphones will not be required certainly but it isn't something entirely avoid either. As computing is moving more and more to mobile platforms, if you don't have mobile nodes you won't have many nodes at all. And furthermore if you want the highest degree of privacy and security you have to run your own node.

It is already quite feasible to run a node on a smartphone as demonstrated by people running them on RPis which are significantly less powerful than current smartphone models. Also, the database and bandwidth are being optimized which will further reduce the footprint (along with the possibility of DB pruning features). The 2 minute block time change will reduce the overhead a bit too.

It hasn't been implemented in any chain whatsoever.

That is purely R&D work on cryptography. Maybe that's how he came across the math issue, I don't know the details.

@erok There is no such bug in Monero itself. It uses the proper method for key images, not the incorrect one.

Nothing like that has been announced. It won't be launched for several months. After that I would guess it will trade on some exchange(s).

Sounds strange to me, but fluffypony would know better. He might be asleep right now so check back later.

Good post LiteBit, but I'll take issue on one point:


Agree that stealth addresses are not broken. Disagree that ring signatures protect only the sender's identity. They also serve (together with stealth) to resist blockchain analysis, so breaking them makes the overall chain easier to analyze and potentially hurts everyone's privacy.

But as you say the bug can be fixed and the feature hasn't been used that much in the past anyway.

Are you entering the command all on one line with no extra spaces in between. If you have a line break after AbtF5Ps as shown above or any extra spaces it would not work

So like this:

It wasn't entirely based on a quote, but also on some discussions I've had with people who understand the cryptography better than I do. I read the section of the paper coins101 posted and the modification to provide privacy against unbounded opponents seems to require a private (and guaranteed secure) side channel. I'm not sure how that is going to work in practice; it seems like a significant deviation from how cryptocurrencies normally operate. I'm not saying it couldn't be worthwhile, but many details would need to be worked out.


I can confirm they have stated this is various (public) discussions with me over the past couple of years. Of course having a goal and actually implementing it are two different things, but I wish them the best with it. I expect there will be quite a few people working on different Zerocash implementations, not just the Zcash one that seems to be getting a bit of hype now.

There is a community project to create a fork of Open Bazaar supporting Monero natively. So far the project hasn't gone very well, but some of that may be related to delays in the underlying Open Bazaar development. That's probably off topic here though. You know where to find us if you want to discuss more.

I wasn't familiar with what they said about the proposed modification so I can't comment on it further. Sounds interesting.

Zerocash is not quantum safe by any means. If that is your concern, do not go there.

(Nor are any of these other coins, so please don't take this as FUD or pumping of anything.)

Quantum-safe cryptographic methods are a current area of research. Zerocash may or may not be desirable for other reasons. Quantum computers are not one of them.

So, you don't, at present, have any cryptographer at all? Does this seem like it might be a problem?