Other than the prior post, the Zerocash forum has begun removing and censoring my posts. So yet another attempt to pull the wool over speculator eyes and not open source on factual discussion.

So many deluded folks in crypto who get offended when they realize they aren't even close to understanding all the issues I understand about crypto currency, and the ramnifications that their projects are ill-focused and not ready for prime time.

A DAG has multiple chains (branches) of partial orders. This is not a global or total ordering such that we know which transactions occurred in which order relative to each other, when those transactions are on separate branches of the DAG (i.e. separate Partitions).

To simulate a total ordering, Iota uses a math model that it expects all participants to adhere to. Problem is afaics this model can't be enforced, the game theories are unbounded in terms of which model of the total ordering is dominant (in terms of defining double spends), this I conjecture (expect) chaos and divergence of Consistency (i.e. inconsistency a.k.a. lack of global agreement about double-spends and thus which downstream branches of transactions are valid).

A more formal mathematical elucidation would be more unassailable than my English language explanations. Yet I am confident (conjecture) that those who are expert enough can judge my statements to be correct or at least a strong concern.

---

I think we may not see the true risks in the early stage of Iota's launch, because my understanding is they are using some centralized servers in the ramp up phase. So perhaps the payers delegate their math model to these servers. I haven't studied their code to know.

Wait I will try to locate CfB's first reply to my line of argument on this point and come back here and post a link. Hopefully also my posts today have added further weight and/or clarification of my conceptualization.

Here is a link to CfB's post to start reading from (not sure if it is the only or best one):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13536310#msg13536310

Try reading forward in chronological thread order from that post until at least the following:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1319681.msg13542612#msg13542612

I have made the following post to create the thread entitled "Fundamental Challenges?" at the Zerocash forum which is currently hidden there awaiting approval from the forum moderator:

One more point I considered in my holistic analysis is that for most transactions we can't be anonymous. Thus anonymity is more suited to those who want to receive some payment anonymously and hide the funds there and extract them only to public funds in small morsels or to spend in other rare anonymous transactions (e.g. buying some gold bars from someone you trust won't reveal your identity).

In that case one might think you can just use Stealth Addresses (unlinkability) and run a full node to confirm receipt of funds anonymously. No need for Cryptonote, RingCT, nor ZeroCash. But the problem is the payer can be identified and be pressured to reveal your identity.

So this is why we need Zerocash to make the untraceability impervious to meta-data correlation.

But the problem with my proposal for ephemeral Zerocash mixers is that when we take the coins out of the mixer they can now be correlated to our meta-data (e.g. IP address, etc). So thus it seems to hide large funds and only take out small portions publicly as needed, will incur risk of losing those coins in my proposal, but at least they will be provably anonymous.

Anonymity is a clusterfuck. If we can't make trusted hardware, then anonymity is unprovable. Period.

So just give up on anonymity, or get busy trying to make hardware we can trust?

(or if Zerocash has developed a provably secure way to generate a master public key, which I doubt)

I proposed ephemeral mixers based on Zerocash technology. They will be ferreted out if they are doing this, because it will be known that the key was compromised when the mixer expires and everyone has to cash out of the mixer back into the public coin. The bastards can't keep doing it over and over again. The participants will get wise as to the methods the attackers are using.

I am not absolutist. Rather I think correctly and realistically when I weigh marketing, tradeoffs, and delusion as follows:


Marketing and design are holistically joined at the hip. Those fools who said the marketing can come later are clueless.

The hardware has to be audited. But we also have to audit our hardware that we use to run Cryptonote. If Intel is planting spies in the hardware, then we are screwed.

100% trust is impossible. And this is another reason I deprioritized anonymity. It is a clusterfuck.

Also I think perhaps Zerocash was working on a way to generate the public key decentralized, but I haven't kept up with progress on that.

Indeed Zerocash could end up being a Trojan Horse (a way to get fiat in the back door) and that is why I made my proposal to use them only as ephemeral mixes that die periodically, so then we will know if the key was compromised or not.

The result of my proposal is:

• Stolen coins isn't systemic to the overall coin (same as losing some coins to Mt. Gox and Cryptsy isn't), and at least participants get ongoing ceremonies to get better and better at auditing the hardware.
• No anonymity is ever lost.
• No NET coin supply is ever created out-of-thin-air (instead some people lose coins if they chose an insecure mixer that had a compromised key), which is also the case for both Zerocash and RIngCT where coin supply could be created out of thin air and we would never know it due to a bug in cryptography.

That will kick ass on Monero, because if I pass through the mixer, I know my anonymity is provable and I know I didn't lose my coins. It is only people who still sitting inside the mixer who risk losing coins. Everything has a risk. I would much rather the microscopic risk of a compromised key (causing me to lose some coins) to the sure risk of meta-data correlation in Monero which can send me to jail! Surely I would be judicious about not mixing all my coins at the same time and not all in the same mixer.

The masterkey is generated once and only the public key is retained. As long as no one saw nor can recover the private key before it was discarded, then there is nothing proprietary remaining in the use of the Zerocash open source. The Zerocash open source code requires a public key to be pasted in. It is the public (ceremony) generation of that key, which determines whether anyone had access to the private key when the public key was created.

DRM has nothing to do with it all. Thus I assume you don't understand the issue.

The only issue is whether the public key can be computed at a public ceremony and the private key was securely discarded. So for example, they could use any computer, encase it in lead before running the computation, and no external connection to the computer other than the screen which reads out the public key.

Then slide the computer into a barrel of acid so that it is permanently destroyed. All done at a public ceremony so there can be no cheating.

Of course one could envision elaborate/exotic means of cheating, such as using radio waves to communicate the private key out to external actor, but again that is why I wrote encase it in lead. There is the issue of how to destroy it while not momentarily removing it from its communication barrier. But I am confident these physics issues can be worked out to a sufficient level of trust.

As for trust, not even the Elliptic Curve Cryptography and other math we use for crypto can be 100% trusted. So if you start arguing silly about 100% trust, then it is safe to ignore as loony.

That is either a lie or a serious delusion.

This is precisely what I mean by a circle jerk that does not value the expertise and effort we need to win. In other words, not a meritocracy.

Okay I will leave the thread.


I didn't introduce the Zerocash discussion. Apparently some in your community think it is relevant to this thread. You blame me for everything because you just want a circle jerk here because you are mining each other. Who knows you are probably behind some scheme to take money from other investors here. There is always a reason that people act irrationally towards truth.

So much for your idealistic delusions about open source and doing it as a community for the common good. That is all bullshit.

Devs who want to change the world and make a lot of money should wake up and join with a better leadership.

Yeah I believe in open source, but it applies in refinement scenarios. Not in design scenarios. Groups are filled with game theory. Design requires focused intent and focused profit.


The game theory politics of pulling the wool over the eyes and mining each other is palatable.

You confuse a desire for capitalism and meritocracy with your scam here. So then you try to frame my pleas for meritocracy as me being in love with myself. Of fuck, just go on masturbating here.

ArticMine I moved the technical discussion to other Monero thread. I am leaving this thread, as requested by at least two here.

No closed source. The key would be produced publicly at a ceremony.

---

The meta-data (e.g. IP address, browser cookie, timing analysis and location of connection, what you said in facebook or on the phone, etc) correlation problem isn't likely impacted no matter how many times or inputs you ring mix. It is very difficult for mere mortals to cover their tracks on all the possible meta-data correlations. It is unfathomably difficult. Don't fool yourself into thinking it isn't.

The combinatorial analysis flaw (which I introduced to smooth during the BCX incident and hence followed up in debate with Shen-noether) is very theoretical and may or may not be plausible. In my thinking, it comes more into play if combined with meta-data breakdown of the anonymity systemically. Mixing more may help somewhat, but it can also make it worse because it is the excessive overlapping in mixes that causes the combinatorial unmasking.

In short, it is a clusterfuck (not a clean, clear, provable solution) and that is why I abandoned it.

---

My interpretation of FinCEN guidance is miners would have to register as MSBs if they are forced to transfer some of the coinbase to some other party. Just because it is enforced by the protocol, doesn't absolve the miner from (the legal culpability of) creating the block which created new supply and transferred it to a third party.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

---

I hate when n00bs make me repeat the same shit over and over and over again. Do you think my time is free?


I already proposed a solution in my prior reply to you that is using their technology in ephemeral mixers, which thus avoids systemic risk and reveals which mixers are compromised (which is likely to be quite rare because participants will learn to judge which masterkeys were generated correctly at ceremony).

Free markets always work best as long as systemic risk is avoided.


Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Exemplifies that you are a n00b who should STFU.

If there is a flaw in the cryptography for proving the homomorphic sums (and that is new cryptography), then indeed the attacker can create new value out-of-thin-air and not be detected. I am not going to explain the examples and math again. I already did in the past. Go ask Shen-noether.

You should have paid attention the last time I explained this! You always want to use me but then you don't respect me enough to reward me[1] and then you expect me to correct for your inability to study and remember my posts carefully.


Again my point is that you could have the safest snot in the world, but if people can't use snot for anything, then they are going to put their energies into perfecting and peer reviewing what they need.

Seems you all often miss the points entirely. They fly right over your heads.

I do agree that the new cryptography for Zerocash and zk-snarks is more complex than the new cryptography for homomorphic proof-of-sums for RingCT (or my ZKT), but I don't think that helps given the meta-data problem for RingCT/ZKT/Cryptonote (and every anonymity technology other than Zerocash). What is the point of pursuing a direction which is known to be unreliable and fundamentally flawed (in a way that can never be fixed), when we can pursue a direction that fixes the meta-data problem and is a matter of convincing whether the technology is sound with much peer review. Certainly the peer review can be done over time, and probably incentivized if the technology has a popular application.


Please don't tell me I will have to waste more of my time defending an obvious point (for anyone who has the slightest technological understanding).

I am frustrated how much fucking time we waste. You all have been convincing yourselves in your little delusions for years of what ever circle jerk bubbles you prefer to be in (which often include ridiculing/dismissing me).

Edit: correction:

[1] I was rewarded by smooth, jl777, and rpietila. Big thanks to them. Very much so. I am just frustrated because I need a viable financial direction and we need to work smart and find a way that we can make these matters work in our favor. And I am trying to find people who value me and find a way to get it done.

---

If you apply that line of thinking, then every anonymity is insecure because operating systems and computers are never 100% secure.

I already proposed how to spread the risk out and make it non-systemic.

Note that Monero (Cryptonote one-time rings and every other kind of anonymity technology) also has systemic risk due to combinatorial analysis cascade as more and more users are unmasked with meta-data and overlapping mixes.

---

The masterkey is generated once and only the public key is retained. As long as no one saw nor can recover the private key before it was discarded, then there is nothing proprietary remaining in the use of the Zerocash open source. The Zerocash open source code requires a public key to be pasted in. It is the public (ceremony) generation of that key, which determines whether anyone had access to the private key when the public key was created.

DRM has nothing to do with it all. Thus I assume you don't understand the issue.

The only issue is whether the public key can be computed at a public ceremony and the private key was securely discarded. So for example, they could use any computer, encase it in lead before running the computation, and no external connection to the computer other than the screen which reads out the public key.

Then slide the computer into a barrel of acid so that it is permanently destroyed. All done at a public ceremony so there can be no cheating.

Of course one could envision elaborate/exotic means of cheating, such as using radio waves to communicate the private key out to external actor, but again that is why I wrote encase it in lead. There is the issue of how to destroy it while not momentarily removing it from its communication barrier. But I am confident these physics issues can be worked out to a sufficient level of trust.

As for trust, not even the Elliptic Curve Cryptography and other math we use for crypto can be 100% trusted. So if you start arguing silly about 100% trust, then it is safe to ignore as loony.


FUD. The ceremony is only to computer a public key, nothing else. No other software has to be audited. Only need to confirm that the private key was not communicated from the computer to any one. Period.

---

---

If can't trust the math, throw Monero in the garbage can too.

My point is that nothing is 100%. We have to weigh the reasonable risks and benefits.

---

I proposed ephemeral mixers based on Zerocash technology. They will be ferreted out if they are doing this, because it will be known that the key was compromised when the mixer expires and everyone has to cash out of the mixer back into the public coin. The bastards can't keep doing it over and over again. The participants will get wise as to the methods the attackers are using.

I am not absolutist. Rather I think correctly and realistically when I weigh marketing, tradeoffs, and delusion as follows:


Marketing and design are holistically joined at the hip. Those fools who said the marketing can come later are clueless.

---

I think I did correct my myopia in the subsequent reply to him. And I think the points reached sort of a stalemate. I don't dismiss his point, but if that white paper above is our concern, then none of the software we use is trustworthy. Okay I understand the point that doing something once and we all have to rely on that, is different than we all each download our software and run diverse hardware. But is it? Seems we all are running the hardware made by Intel and all the download links run through routers controlled by TPTB.

So all-in-all, I accepted his point. I think anonymity is a clusterfuck. Given the way Zerocash's forum treated me (they removed all my posts after they realized I was explaining serious flaws and challenges), I don't expect any success from them either.

I'd like to move on away from anonymity. Maybe one day in the future we could make some mixers based on Zerocash (long after their effort has faded into the dust) and maybe use it for some few esoteric uses for anonymity. But reliable anonymity on a widescale is unfortunately a delusion that even I had to finally come to grips with. Sad to say.

As for unreliable anonymity, I can do that now with Bitcoin. I just go use an unregistered wireless network connection. Eventually that will be impossible, but for now it is available in some jurisdictions.

If someone could identify a use for ring mixing that applied to businesses who don't mind if the NSA is tracking their privacy, then perhaps I could be convinced there is a market. But as I wrote before, the NSA has employees and those employees can't be trusted to not sell your privacy to your competitors. Corruption is the rule, not the exception. A mouse will always eat the cheese.

I start to comprehend now how it might be true when Martin Armstrong says we might descend into a Dark Age.

The only way I can think to fight back now is go for popularity and control in the hands of the people. Win the political war.

---

There is nothing available for reliable anonymous transactions. For unreliable anonymity, I might as well just use Bitcoin and jump over to my local McDonalds on the unregistered WiFi connection. So yes there is a better alternative, Bitcoin. And it is more widely accepted.

I would not entrust not receiving jail time on the assumption my meta-data can't be correlated, neither with Monero nor Bitcoin. The only anonymous things I would do would be legal things I want to hide from for example the public, but not from the NSA (and the employees of the NSA). In that case, I can do this reasonably well using Bitcoin.

I can't make the sources of my transaction untraceable with Bitcoin (unless I use some unreliable mixer, CoinJoin, or CoinShuffle), i.e. if someone wanted to premine and then make it impossible to connect them to the premined coins. So maybe we can argue that Cryptonote/Monero would help people who want to create scams. But decentralized exchanges might accomplish the same (not sure about that yet, still analyzing them).

In short, I just can't see what is the large market for this unreliable anonymity in Cryptonote as compared to the unreliable anonymity in Bitcoin?

Hey I am not happy it worked out that way. As much as I don't like the boastfulness of some Monero's community (not all the devs), I still would prefer if anonymity was realistic. I am saddened. And especially pissed off to have expended so much effort on anonymity and not have realized sooner.

Actually the market for Monero might be criminals. They may have the incentive to study how to guard their meta-data and willing to take the risk on the combinatorial unmasking (since a criminal mind seems to ignore the prospect of jail time). But they need to be mixed with regular users, otherwise their anonymity sets may not be large enough. I don't want to be in a project who sole main use case is criminals.


Hitler claiming to support Libertarian principles (e.g. anonymity). 

Have you ever heard of the concept of respecting the freedom of others. I am flabberghast that you think you can tell me what I can write about. Do I tell you what you can write about.

No closed source. The key would be produced publicly at a ceremony.

---

The meta-data (e.g. IP address, browser cookie, timing analysis and location of connection, what you said in facebook or on the phone, etc) correlation problem isn't likely impacted no matter how many times or inputs you ring mix. It is very difficult for mere mortals to cover their tracks on all the possible meta-data correlations. It is unfathomably difficult. Don't fool yourself into thinking it isn't.

The combinatorial analysis flaw (which I introduced to smooth during the BCX incident and hence followed up in debate with Shen-noether) is very theoretical and may or may not be plausible. In my thinking, it comes more into play if combined with meta-data breakdown of the anonymity systemically. Mixing more may help somewhat, but it can also make it worse because it is the excessive overlapping in mixes that causes the combinatorial unmasking.

In short, it is a clusterfuck (not a clean, clear, provable solution) and that is why I abandoned it.

---

My interpretation of FinCEN guidance is miners would have to register as MSBs if they are forced to transfer some of the coinbase to some other party. Just because it is enforced by the protocol, doesn't absolve the miner from (the legal culpability of) creating the block which created new supply and transferred it to a third party.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

---

I hate when n00bs make me repeat the same shit over and over and over again. Do you think my time is free?


I already proposed a solution in my prior reply to you that is using their technology in ephemeral mixers, which thus avoids systemic risk and reveals which mixers are compromised (which is likely to be quite rare because participants will learn to judge which masterkeys were generated correctly at ceremony).

Free markets always work best as long as systemic risk is avoided.


Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Exemplifies that you are a n00b who should STFU.

If there is a flaw in the cryptography for proving the homomorphic sums (and that is new cryptography), then indeed the attacker can create new value out-of-thin-air and not be detected. I am not going to explain the examples and math again. I already did in the past. Go ask Shen-noether.

You should have paid attention the last time I explained this! You always want to use me but then you don't respect me enough to reward me[1] and then you expect me to correct for your inability to study and remember my posts carefully.


Again my point is that you could have the safest snot in the world, but if people can't use snot for anything, then they are going to put their energies into perfecting and peer reviewing what they need.

Seems you all often miss the points entirely. They fly right over your heads.

I do agree that the new cryptography for Zerocash and zk-snarks is more complex than the new cryptography for homomorphic proof-of-sums for RingCT (or my ZKT), but I don't think that helps given the meta-data problem for RingCT/ZKT/Cryptonote (and every anonymity technology other than Zerocash). What is the point of pursuing a direction which is known to be unreliable and fundamentally flawed (in a way that can never be fixed), when we can pursue a direction that fixes the meta-data problem and is a matter of convincing whether the technology is sound with much peer review. Certainly the peer review can be done over time, and probably incentivized if the technology has a popular application.


Please don't tell me I will have to waste more of my time defending an obvious point (for anyone who has the slightest technological understanding).

I am frustrated how much fucking time we waste. You all have been convincing yourselves in your little delusions for years of what ever circle jerk bubbles you prefer to be in (which often include ridiculing/dismissing me).

Edit: correction:

[1] I was rewarded by smooth, jl777, and rpietila. Big thanks to them. Very much so. I am just frustrated because I need a viable financial direction and we need to work smart and find a way that we can make these matters work in our favor. And I am trying to find people who value me and find a way to get it done.

---

If you apply that line of thinking, then every anonymity is insecure because operating systems and computers are never 100% secure.

I already proposed how to spread the risk out and make it non-systemic.

Note that Monero (Cryptonote one-time rings and every other kind of anonymity technology) also has systemic risk due to combinatorial analysis cascade as more and more users are unmasked with meta-data and overlapping mixes.

---

The masterkey is generated once and only the public key is retained. As long as no one saw nor can recover the private key before it was discarded, then there is nothing proprietary remaining in the use of the Zerocash open source. The Zerocash open source code requires a public key to be pasted in. It is the public (ceremony) generation of that key, which determines whether anyone had access to the private key when the public key was created.

DRM has nothing to do with it all. Thus I assume you don't understand the issue.

The only issue is whether the public key can be computed at a public ceremony and the private key was securely discarded. So for example, they could use any computer, encase it in lead before running the computation, and no external connection to the computer other than the screen which reads out the public key.

Then slide the computer into a barrel of acid so that it is permanently destroyed. All done at a public ceremony so there can be no cheating.

Of course one could envision elaborate/exotic means of cheating, such as using radio waves to communicate the private key out to external actor, but again that is why I wrote encase it in lead. There is the issue of how to destroy it while not momentarily removing it from its communication barrier. But I am confident these physics issues can be worked out to a sufficient level of trust.

As for trust, not even the Elliptic Curve Cryptography and other math we use for crypto can be 100% trusted. So if you start arguing silly about 100% trust, then it is safe to ignore as loony.


FUD. The ceremony is only to computer a public key, nothing else. No other software has to be audited. Only need to confirm that the private key was not communicated from the computer to any one. Period.

---

---

If can't trust the math, throw Monero in the garbage can too.

My point is that nothing is 100%. We have to weigh the reasonable risks and benefits.

---

I proposed ephemeral mixers based on Zerocash technology. They will be ferreted out if they are doing this, because it will be known that the key was compromised when the mixer expires and everyone has to cash out of the mixer back into the public coin. The bastards can't keep doing it over and over again. The participants will get wise as to the methods the attackers are using.

I am not absolutist. Rather I think correctly and realistically when I weigh marketing, tradeoffs, and delusion as follows:


Marketing and design are holistically joined at the hip. Those fools who said the marketing can come later are clueless.

---

---

I think I did correct my myopia in the subsequent reply to him. And I think the points reached sort of a stalemate. I don't dismiss his point, but if that white paper above is our concern, then none of the software we use is trustworthy. Okay I understand the point that doing something once and we all have to rely on that, is different than we all each download our software and run diverse hardware. But is it? Seems we all are running the hardware made by Intel and all the download links run through routers controlled by TPTB.

So all-in-all, I accepted his point. I think anonymity is a clusterfuck. Given the way Zerocash's forum treated me (they removed all my posts after they realized I was explaining serious flaws and challenges), I don't expect any success from them either.

I'd like to move on away from anonymity. Maybe one day in the future we could make some mixers based on Zerocash (long after their effort has faded into the dust) and maybe use it for some few esoteric uses for anonymity. But reliable anonymity on a widescale is unfortunately a delusion that even I had to finally come to grips with. Sad to say.

As for unreliable anonymity, I can do that now with Bitcoin. I just go use an unregistered wireless network connection. Eventually that will be impossible, but for now it is available in some jurisdictions.

If someone could identify a use for ring mixing that applied to businesses who don't mind if the NSA is tracking their privacy, then perhaps I could be convinced there is a market. But as I wrote before, the NSA has employees and those employees can't be trusted to not sell your privacy to your competitors. Corruption is the rule, not the exception. A mouse will always eat the cheese.

I start to comprehend now how it might be true when Martin Armstrong says we might descend into a Dark Age.

The only way I can think to fight back now is go for popularity and control in the hands of the people. Win the political war.

---

There is nothing available for reliable anonymous transactions. For unreliable anonymity, I might as well just use Bitcoin and jump over to my local McDonalds on the unregistered WiFi connection. So yes there is a better alternative, Bitcoin. And it is more widely accepted.

I would not entrust not receiving jail time on the assumption my meta-data can't be correlated, neither with Monero nor Bitcoin. The only anonymous things I would do would be legal things I want to hide from for example the public, but not from the NSA (and the employees of the NSA). In that case, I can do this reasonably well using Bitcoin.

I can't make the sources of my transaction untraceable with Bitcoin (unless I use some unreliable mixer, CoinJoin, or CoinShuffle), i.e. if someone wanted to premine and then make it impossible to connect them to the premined coins. So maybe we can argue that Cryptonote/Monero would help people who want to create scams. But decentralized exchanges might accomplish the same (not sure about that yet, still analyzing them).

In short, I just can't see what is the large market for this unreliable anonymity in Cryptonote as compared to the unreliable anonymity in Bitcoin?

Hey I am not happy it worked out that way. As much as I don't like the boastfulness of some Monero's community (not all the devs), I still would prefer if anonymity was realistic. I am saddened. And especially pissed off to have expended so much effort on anonymity and not have realized sooner.

Actually the market for Monero might be criminals. They may have the incentive to study how to guard their meta-data and willing to take the risk on the combinatorial unmasking (since a criminal mind seems to ignore the prospect of jail time). But they need to be mixed with regular users, otherwise their anonymity sets may not be large enough. I don't want to be in a project who sole main use case is criminals.


Hitler claiming to support Libertarian principles (e.g. anonymity). 

Have you ever heard of the concept of respecting the freedom of others. I am flabberghast that you think you can tell me what I can write about. Do I tell you what you can write about.

No closed source. The key would be produced publicly at a ceremony.

---

The meta-data (e.g. IP address, browser cookie, timing analysis and location of connection, what you said in facebook or on the phone, etc) correlation problem isn't likely impacted no matter how many times or inputs you ring mix. It is very difficult for mere mortals to cover their tracks on all the possible meta-data correlations. It is unfathomably difficult. Don't fool yourself into thinking it isn't.

The combinatorial analysis flaw (which I introduced to smooth during the BCX incident and hence followed up in debate with Shen-noether) is very theoretical and may or may not be plausible. In my thinking, it comes more into play if combined with meta-data breakdown of the anonymity systemically. Mixing more may help somewhat, but it can also make it worse because it is the excessive overlapping in mixes that causes the combinatorial unmasking.

In short, it is a clusterfuck (not a clean, clear, provable solution) and that is why I abandoned it.

---

My interpretation of FinCEN guidance is miners would have to register as MSBs if they are forced to transfer some of the coinbase to some other party. Just because it is enforced by the protocol, doesn't absolve the miner from (the legal culpability of) creating the block which created new supply and transferred it to a third party.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

---

I hate when n00bs make me repeat the same shit over and over and over again. Do you think my time is free?


I already proposed a solution in my prior reply to you that is using their technology in ephemeral mixers, which thus avoids systemic risk and reveals which mixers are compromised (which is likely to be quite rare because participants will learn to judge which masterkeys were generated correctly at ceremony).

Free markets always work best as long as systemic risk is avoided.


Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Exemplifies that you are a n00b who should STFU.

If there is a flaw in the cryptography for proving the homomorphic sums (and that is new cryptography), then indeed the attacker can create new value out-of-thin-air and not be detected. I am not going to explain the examples and math again. I already did in the past. Go ask Shen-noether.

You should have paid attention the last time I explained this! You always want to use me but then you don't respect me enough to reward me[1] and then you expect me to correct for your inability to study and remember my posts carefully.


Again my point is that you could have the safest snot in the world, but if people can't use snot for anything, then they are going to put their energies into perfecting and peer reviewing what they need.

Seems you all often miss the points entirely. They fly right over your heads.

I do agree that the new cryptography for Zerocash and zk-snarks is more complex than the new cryptography for homomorphic proof-of-sums for RingCT (or my ZKT), but I don't think that helps given the meta-data problem for RingCT/ZKT/Cryptonote (and every anonymity technology other than Zerocash). What is the point of pursuing a direction which is known to be unreliable and fundamentally flawed (in a way that can never be fixed), when we can pursue a direction that fixes the meta-data problem and is a matter of convincing whether the technology is sound with much peer review. Certainly the peer review can be done over time, and probably incentivized if the technology has a popular application.


Please don't tell me I will have to waste more of my time defending an obvious point (for anyone who has the slightest technological understanding).

I am frustrated how much fucking time we waste. You all have been convincing yourselves in your little delusions for years of what ever circle jerk bubbles you prefer to be in (which often include ridiculing/dismissing me).

Edit: correction:

[1] I was rewarded by smooth, jl777, and rpietila. Big thanks to them. Very much so. I am just frustrated because I need a viable financial direction and we need to work smart and find a way that we can make these matters work in our favor. And I am trying to find people who value me and find a way to get it done.

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If you apply that line of thinking, then every anonymity is insecure because operating systems and computers are never 100% secure.

I already proposed how to spread the risk out and make it non-systemic.

Note that Monero (Cryptonote one-time rings and every other kind of anonymity technology) also has systemic risk due to combinatorial analysis cascade as more and more users are unmasked with meta-data and overlapping mixes.

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The masterkey is generated once and only the public key is retained. As long as no one saw nor can recover the private key before it was discarded, then there is nothing proprietary remaining in the use of the Zerocash open source. The Zerocash open source code requires a public key to be pasted in. It is the public (ceremony) generation of that key, which determines whether anyone had access to the private key when the public key was created.

DRM has nothing to do with it all. Thus I assume you don't understand the issue.

The only issue is whether the public key can be computed at a public ceremony and the private key was securely discarded. So for example, they could use any computer, encase it in lead before running the computation, and no external connection to the computer other than the screen which reads out the public key.

Then slide the computer into a barrel of acid so that it is permanently destroyed. All done at a public ceremony so there can be no cheating.

Of course one could envision elaborate/exotic means of cheating, such as using radio waves to communicate the private key out to external actor, but again that is why I wrote encase it in lead. There is the issue of how to destroy it while not momentarily removing it from its communication barrier. But I am confident these physics issues can be worked out to a sufficient level of trust.

As for trust, not even the Elliptic Curve Cryptography and other math we use for crypto can be 100% trusted. So if you start arguing silly about 100% trust, then it is safe to ignore as loony.


FUD. The ceremony is only to computer a public key, nothing else. No other software has to be audited. Only need to confirm that the private key was not communicated from the computer to any one. Period.

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If can't trust the math, throw Monero in the garbage can too.

My point is that nothing is 100%. We have to weigh the reasonable risks and benefits.

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I proposed ephemeral mixers based on Zerocash technology. They will be ferreted out if they are doing this, because it will be known that the key was compromised when the mixer expires and everyone has to cash out of the mixer back into the public coin. The bastards can't keep doing it over and over again. The participants will get wise as to the methods the attackers are using.

I am not absolutist. Rather I think correctly and realistically when I weigh marketing, tradeoffs, and delusion as follows:


Marketing and design are holistically joined at the hip. Those fools who said the marketing can come later are clueless.

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I think I did correct my myopia in the subsequent reply to him. And I think the points reached sort of a stalemate. I don't dismiss his point, but if that white paper above is our concern, then none of the software we use is trustworthy. Okay I understand the point that doing something once and we all have to rely on that, is different than we all each download our software and run diverse hardware. But is it? Seems we all are running the hardware made by Intel and all the download links run through routers controlled by TPTB.

So all-in-all, I accepted his point. I think anonymity is a clusterfuck. Given the way Zerocash's forum treated me (they removed all my posts after they realized I was explaining serious flaws and challenges), I don't expect any success from them either.

I'd like to move on away from anonymity. Maybe one day in the future we could make some mixers based on Zerocash (long after their effort has faded into the dust) and maybe use it for some few esoteric uses for anonymity. But reliable anonymity on a widescale is unfortunately a delusion that even I had to finally come to grips with. Sad to say.

As for unreliable anonymity, I can do that now with Bitcoin. I just go use an unregistered wireless network connection. Eventually that will be impossible, but for now it is available in some jurisdictions.

If someone could identify a use for ring mixing that applied to businesses who don't mind if the NSA is tracking their privacy, then perhaps I could be convinced there is a market. But as I wrote before, the NSA has employees and those employees can't be trusted to not sell your privacy to your competitors. Corruption is the rule, not the exception. A mouse will always eat the cheese.

I start to comprehend now how it might be true when Martin Armstrong says we might descend into a Dark Age.

The only way I can think to fight back now is go for popularity and control in the hands of the people. Win the political war.

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There is nothing available for reliable anonymous transactions. For unreliable anonymity, I might as well just use Bitcoin and jump over to my local McDonalds on the unregistered WiFi connection. So yes there is a better alternative, Bitcoin. And it is more widely accepted.

I would not entrust not receiving jail time on the assumption my meta-data can't be correlated, neither with Monero nor Bitcoin. The only anonymous things I would do would be legal things I want to hide from for example the public, but not from the NSA (and the employees of the NSA). In that case, I can do this reasonably well using Bitcoin.

I can't make the sources of my transaction untraceable with Bitcoin (unless I use some unreliable mixer, CoinJoin, or CoinShuffle), i.e. if someone wanted to premine and then make it impossible to connect them to the premined coins. So maybe we can argue that Cryptonote/Monero would help people who want to create scams. But decentralized exchanges might accomplish the same (not sure about that yet, still analyzing them).

In short, I just can't see what is the large market for this unreliable anonymity in Cryptonote as compared to the unreliable anonymity in Bitcoin?

Hey I am not happy it worked out that way. As much as I don't like the boastfulness of some Monero's community (not all the devs), I still would prefer if anonymity was realistic. I am saddened. And especially pissed off to have expended so much effort on anonymity and not have realized sooner.

Actually the market for Monero might be criminals. They may have the incentive to study how to guard their meta-data and willing to take the risk on the combinatorial unmasking (since a criminal mind seems to ignore the prospect of jail time). But they need to be mixed with regular users, otherwise their anonymity sets may not be large enough. I don't want to be in a project who sole main use case is criminals.


Hitler claiming to support Libertarian principles (e.g. anonymity). 

Have you ever heard of the concept of respecting the freedom of others. I am flabberghast that you think you can tell me what I can write about. Do I tell you what you can write about.

If you apply that line of thinking, then every anonymity is insecure because operating systems and computers are never 100% secure.

I already proposed how to spread the risk out and make it non-systemic.

Note that Monero (Cryptonote one-time rings and every other kind of anonymity technology) also has systemic risk due to combinatorial analysis cascade as more and more users are unmasked with meta-data and overlapping mixes.

I have respect for some (former and active) Nxt devs (e.g. Come-from-Beyond and jl777), but I think they need to write better specifications. I have personally told this to jl777.

What you have above is very incomplete.

At this time, I am trying to figure out which group I should be working with.

That is either a lie or a serious delusion.

This is precisely what I mean by a circle jerk that does not value the expertise and effort we need to win. In other words, not a meritocracy.

Okay I will leave the thread.


I didn't introduce the Zerocash discussion. Apparently some in your community think it is relevant to this thread. You blame me for everything because you just want a circle jerk here because you are mining each other. Who knows you are probably behind some scheme to take money from other investors here. There is always a reason that people act irrationally towards truth.

So much for your idealistic delusions about open source and doing it as a community for the common good. That is all bullshit.

Devs who want to change the world and make a lot of money should wake up and join with a better leadership.

Yeah I believe in open source, but it applies in refinement scenarios. Not in design scenarios. Groups are filled with game theory. Design requires focused intent and focused profit.