A bit desperate this one is it not ?

Blockchain daemons can be run by anyone, anywhere, anytime. For that matter, half of them can be run in the foyer at Langley HQ for all the difference it makes to the network's behavioural logic. Thats the whole point of a decentralised network.

Don't worry, if TPTB truly feel the need to de-anonymise one of your addresses, they'll have easier ways of doing it than waiting for one of your transactions to be handled by some random masternode, attempting to find out where in the world it and its participating partners for that transaction are, commandeering those virtual servers only to discover that they can't detect your transaction originating address anyway. They'll probably just knock on your door instead.

(On the other hand, since they "own" cryptonote tech and all known jiggery pokery, scam logic, corrupt transactional behaviour and heists are totally hidden from public view and therefore void of public accountability, I'm sure they won’t mistake which one has the “low hanging fruit”).

P.S. Masternodes are secured by a collateral populated coin address, not hosted servers.

P.P.S. Mind your definitions.  

Centralised:


Decentralised:

Maybe our love for Monero is finally defrosting his heart...

(1) As long as people host their masternodes properlywith encrypted wallets with backups, I can't see anything that could cause any issues. (2) If a hosting company were to refuse hosting masternodes for whatever magical reason, nobody would lose anything and there are plenty of them around so I wouldn't call it centralized. I mean there are much fewer pools than masternode hosting services so for the time being I think we're fine.

For most coins, nodes being hosted on a corporate server isn't a big deal, but when their advertised anonymity depends on those nodes, it's a massive security breach waiting to happen.

(Facts and figures)

--Over 95% of the masternodes are on servers owned by companies located in 5 countries. If this coin ever reached the market cap levels of Bitcoin or threatened global monetary supply, it would certainly gain the inquisitiveness of LEA worldwide who would likely share data in order to prosecute criminals or those that threatened their monopoly of wealth. This shouldn't be made this easy. This is further proof that cryptosystems that rely on users to follow best practices are relying on failure.

What a nice research!

And now, please, you can talk about this:

Attacking The Consensus System via Sybil attack
https://www.dashpay.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/InstantTX.pdf


And this:


thank you,

Yet, the DRK I drksent to someone else is still forever recorded in my wallet with that person's public address. Even after importing it on a different computer. Imagine if they got my wallet dump?

Regardless of the inbetween, the end points are what we're talking about here. But that's okay anyways:

If my private key was capable of being compromised by TLA's, here's the transaction they would select, simply for no other reason other than that it  'looks' like a darksend transation, because it's creating darksend denominations: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?4fbe96210f828f5fbfd1c4859217d8fd76b2d3344325ec0ceae3d0cf1efd5ffd.htm

Then, when parsing the blockchain for those output addresses, they'd deftly reveal the private key to reveal if they've been spent, or just look for it on the blockchain. Because they're a TLA, they're interested in larger amounts first. Let's pick one of the 10 drk denominations:

Here's the first denomination of 10 that's gonna be my 10 drk to drksent. I know it's mine because it's an address that was in the last transaction:

https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?7c7cde0076f0169f42b7a6ee863d4a24929d33c4558e5123a8a9cd415cc8d607.htm
    6   4fbe96210f828f5f...:26   XfeJKzKEJUtVDYvuv7vF9jJKkF3Dx23ft6   10.0001 DASH

Anyways, let's say that out of those 9, XcRHvNsezZzKB6U7sejx2EPUKjkFkrSEm3 is the address that correlates to me. It goes to this tx: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?1655733.htm

Because we're dealing with a situation where rsa/ecc are compromisable in the first place, I'd simply just go ahead and plug into all of the masternodes because encryption is bunk. Seeing as how their IP's are easily discoverable and public knowledge, I'd simply go ahead and sign into it as a remote user, because again cryptography/encryption just doesn't hold up anymore and then I'd go ahead and reveal all of their private keys to myself.

Next, I'd take the second transaction above, that was sent to a masternode and dump the private keys for all of those transactions (for luls). We have 9 transactions, being sent off on some time interval to some other masternode

So, when I'd like to discover when a masternode has sent someone some return DRK, I can just say "OH well I received this guy's 10 DRK, then sent it off to the next node". So I'd go ahead and see where that 10 DRK got sent to, because, you know, more cryptography. Basically I'd set up a table of masternode keys and just simply walk myself through the transactions one by one, until ... it leaves the masternode addresses (it would be insanely profitable, so how could I not?).

Anyways, from there it's pretty safe to say that the output address would be the same user as the three addresses above.

Finally here, I sent 29.0 of the mixed darksend: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?8ce9862e053bce9272f023a4c2654a30edaf6118dd430b6391e611e26ceb84b9.htm

For which, we will pick both of the 10 drk denominations which are from this transaction (also, this absolutely confirms that these inputs are from one person, which means 20 of the transactions in this are the same person): https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?8ce9862e053bce9272f023a4c2654a30edaf6118dd430b6391e611e26ceb84b9.htm

So going to the input side of that tx, just look for the only other tx that's capable of having >20 inputs, which is this transaction: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?1655916.htm, (c7a33d66547c65fa39b9a10511c5827c0353f6507c107118adae5bbc0d65da98)

EDIT: Wow, copying and pasting is balls, sorry for what I'm sure is the flame trail after this post that I didnt even read up to yet):
  (Follow those 20 inputs to the next tx - https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?1655874.htm
  ( Then once more - https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?1655733.htm)
  (and bam link

Stealth addressing - you'd have an absolutely miserable time doing what I just did if you used stealth addresses as well. Then they'd really need to get those private keys to make the work much less harder.

Of course, this is mostly useless. Likely compromised keys would be used to just spend unspent output, and steal. Because crypto's not going anywhere fast. Nobody cares much about the private financial history of something like a DRK or and XMR user. I'm really just compromising private keys for luls, because the lack of stealth addressing and knowing that change goes to the miners makes identification of the actual money trivial to identify.

Now that I've spent this godawful amount of time doing this, can someone please return the favor and walk me through the same thing for XMR? Preferrably someone that favors DRK, yet is curious about XMR. If not that's fine.

Also, Because it took me much less time to actually trace my tx, than it actually took to complete the tx (I spent a lot of time waiting), this means real-time monitoring is a possibility, therefore not fungible if private keys are compromisable.

Oh, god, 60 replies since I started writing this. I haven't read any of them since I quoted illodin

Currently people run their masternodes on Amazon et al. because it's just so easy and cheap to do so as the reward of running one ($40/month or so) isn't big enough to put in more effort.

But let's analyze the scenario you described where LEA's might start getting interested, and consider how the numbers might change.

Let's assume using round numbers DASH has market cap of current Bitcoin $3,000,000,000, has 6,000,000 coins, and that there are 3000 masternodes, and that the block reward is 5 DASH of which 45% goes the masternodes. One masternode would then collect 13 DASH / month on average, which would equal to $6,500 earned each month. Now we are starting to talk about the kind of money which would allow people to purchase DDOS protection and private dedicated servers, and hiring professionals to secure them. And someone running 10+ nodes could easily set up their own datacenter and retire.

Also, who's to say DASH mixing stays exactly the same as it is now, it's been improved during the last year and I don't see why it would stop being improved. An example of an improvement would be that masternodes couldn't see which inputs and ouputs belong to the same user, so even if you owned 100% of the nodes that wouldn't help you to find out whose coins went where in any of the mixing rounds.

[1] "There are other methods of attacks, so addressing one attack does not address them all" is like saying nothing.

Please be specific, then maybe I can help you or guide you  to someone who can help (or maybe you are adressing a new vector attack that we need to cover, that would be very welcomed!)

[2] Masternodes are public (for now), you are welcome!

ok, I really enjoyed our conversation. If you want to spread FUD (without understanding the basics of the masternode system and assuming some paranoic statements without any proof)  i'm out.

btw. I still waiting a comment about this:

Attacking The Consensus System via Sybil attack
https://www.dashpay.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/InstantTX.pdf

(citation needed)

This is not, again, about "believing something", this is a fact:

http://www.dashnodes.com/index/masternodes/?sorts%5Bisp%5D=1&perPage=100

Use your fingers and count. I did.  

The majority of the masternodes are not in amazon servers, and anyone can check it here:

It has to be noted that before MiG (which is in design still), there is not a single website that is coherently promoting Monero as an investment, a currency, a store of value, or anything that is material to its success marketcapwise.

Or please link if you know of one 

You did not.

You quoted me point for point and then promoted your usual random nonsense at each one about the strength of cryptography and the importance of privacy as if anyone's challenging it.

I'm sorry to tell you that what you're bagholding is a cryptographic bookkeeping system that isn't money, though it doesn't surprise me since you don't appear to have much appreciation as to the significant differences between fiat and crypto as far as privacy is concerned.

As far as your equally inaccurate statements about "centralisation" goes, be advised that any function that's redundantly reproducible cannot be described as 'centralised' despite the best efforts of a little band of jaundiced propagandists rattling around in their self indulgent threads.

If you really feel so comfortable in dismissing the challenges that Dash's approaches are addressing so successfully then maybe you should take a look at the latest litany of squabble threads in the Bitcoin Core vs Bitcoin XT saga and the spectacle of "celebrity devs" warring over the relative merits of a rock and a hard place.

Then again, that might distract you from your hobby of recycling stale agendas and have little relevance to endorsing your delusions about the relationship between "privacy" and "value" in crypto.

I am always a little terrified when I hear that in order to succeed, Monero needs also btc to be succeeded.
By investing into XMR the investor is taking a risk on both Monero's success and Bitcoin's success.

Is it really so that Monero cannot stand on her own feet and merit but need the bitcoin for its success?

Don't be sorry because that's a very different thing from defining what is and isn't "money" which - I reiterate - is a much more nebulous process in the absence of trusted counterparties and one that is ultimately arbitrated on by public consensus.

If you measure everything in terms of degree of cryptographic obfuscation of the public blockchain then all you'll get is the best "obfuscated blockchain". Good luck with that because monetary media derive both their consensual existence and value from a whole lot of properties, none of which is obscurity.

Fungibility is, however, an integral property of monetary media and you don't improve fungibility by implementing "strong cryptographic obfuscation" between one address and another on the blockchain. All you do is frustrate people who regard that as an essential element of public accountability, prepare the ground for scams and heists and generally kill confidence.

Dash has improved Bitcoin's fungibility in the most optimal way any approach could have while preserving transparency and confidence. It does it in exactly the way that traditional cash does.

Somebody earlier in this thread said they were surprised at how long Dash had lasted in the "top 10" and noted that despite their preference and the subject line of this thread, Dash was doing "insanely well".

In fact there was no need to be surprised - Dash is the only public blockchain which improves on Bitcoin's fungibility by orders of magnitude.

Privacy in crypto calls for different cryptographic priorities from what privacy in fiat does. Some things are necessarily more public, others are more private. Cryptonote simply sends up back to the dark ages with the old fiat model again which is why it's seen zero adoption and next to zero development in more than a year other than its bare existence.

Get real and stop harping on about garbage non-arguments that are well past their sell by date such as instamines, centralisation that isn't, amazon servers and the faux innovation that is invisible blockchains.
 

1.Because cryptographers don't define money. Users and markets do and the only reason they need to worry about privacy is because they have something of value. 2. If there's no value proposition in the first place then nobody gives a f* about privacy, no matter how much you scream about cryptographic proofs and mathematical certainty.

Contrary to what you allude to in your posts it doesn't work the other way around unfortunately.


3."clear blockchain" is money - and yes, they're going to need money to pay for those things. As far as their anonymity goes, they'll be slightly more worried about divulging a delivery address than an anonymous cryptocurrency address.


4. Well I don't have any problem agreeing on the first of those points. As far as people "not trusting math", we can probably even agree on that as well. Unless they see results that mean something to them * most people wouldn't trust math as far as they could "notionally" throw it  

5.* (In modern electronic 'money' with no trusted third party, that means "where did my money come from and where did it go")

In case you're referring to Operation Onymous, I thought it wasn't known how they found the hidden services' real IP's? I'm not following news regarding TOR very closely though so maybe they have disclosed their methods since.

Is there proof somewhere that they have been "buying TOR nodes" and how does that help to break its anonymity?