I will not be joining any coin that has a foundation, the exception being a foundation that has the very limited role of holding the domain names (and any other assets that can't be held anonymously) for compliance with law.

I observe throughout all examples in human history all collective trust is corruption directed. The best intentions of mice and men won't change this, e.g. I was banned at least once from their Cryptocrypt forum. They could have learned a lot of information from me a lot sooner, but their top-down perspective won (unwittingly a manifestation of gestapo).

PoW solved the bottom-up consensus without trust problem (although we discussed upthread that the trend towards centralization hasn't been solved yet and if I am correct BCX will need to find a new vocation and abandon his pools). Google Paul Brody at IBM to see how fundamental this paradigm shift is.

The most useful activity those with large capital can do is to angel invest in startups which proliferate the use of crypto-currencies to hopefully drive adoption as a unit-of-account. For as long as crypto-currencies are just a pass-through mechanism (e.g. Bitpay) then we've accomplished nothing against the coming global consolidation of fiat power.

Okay sorry.

Ideally he should promise to publish the exploit after a certain time, so there is more at stake on his reputation. The entire thing is bizarre. Has created a lot of confusion and doubt for investors. Maybe that is what he is trying to accomplish. Perhaps he wants investors to be more afraid of new altcoins. In that regard, he might up to ante on the layman education new coins need to do.

There are so many ways of looking at this. Well I need to go back to work. See ya.

Edit: I see BCX and I were composing posts at the same time, I basically read his mind.

Edit#2: he could also be trying to leave the altcoin space open for more competition by blowing some holes in the "arrogance" that some believe the Monero group exhibits. This may also be a way of spanking, "don't piss on the community".

Should he instead say nothing and then when the exploit is active (assuming he isn't bluffing), no one had a chance to get out. But not promising to publish the exploit after some time is very suspicious.

If you review the history, he received private messages urging him to look at "the shitcoin Monero" about 2 - 3 months ago. As he investigated he found some flaws and his initial enthusiasm in Monero changed to "I think the price will decline". He was then challenged to justify that and thus the OP of this thread.

If he is bluffing, my comment could feed the selloff. So I am torn what to post, but I do want logic to prevail here.

And thus the battles for public opinion. And even we developers aren't 100% sure which technological innovations are superior and must wait for the market and exploits to tell us.

Once the technological innovation settles down a bit, I and others can pursue education of laymen. I enjoy that actually. I used to tutor my engineering friends in college in physics, math, etc..

Right now we are so busy actually trying to innovate, do not have sufficient time to educate and we don't have sufficient unifying understanding to educate optimally. It is more a piecemeal process at this juncture.


Killing innovation too early though also has a cost. And it appears to me BCX is too busy and was asked by his confidents to make a decision on XMR (and CN) and took his investigation only as far as finding the answer he wanted.

And doesn't interest him (economically) to expend more effort on it. Of he could be bluffing for some reason such as deciding he wants to be in XMR and thus wants to buy it cheaper.

Or he had a hunch and wanted to entice someone to do his work for him.

You have articulated my belief that a coin which has its act together on making laymen knowledgeable (in a non-confrontational manner) will have an advantage.

I like you am too busy to pursue this. And if my hunch is correct, one needs significant hashing power to exploit it, which I don't have. Plus I don't want to create animosity with the developers, because I am hoping they will work with me in the future. I do appreciate your efforts and hope to be the beneficiary of your audit in the future.

Note he didn't confirm my hunch. There is also a possible antithetical meaning to the above post.


I intended to leave the forum for a while to get some work done, so the AnonyMint account was closed and I am happy for that. Because talk is cheap. And the silly arguing we were doing wasn't productive or had reached diminishing returns, especially compared to possible value I could create by coding and not talking. Or at least I wanted to not throw my reputation around because I am in support of the notion that the best code should win, not the best control over public opinion (yeah I wee bit annoyed that Monero tries to win with control over public opinion rather than not bashing the other CN coins and simply out innovating them and let their code speak for itself. And also a little bit annoyed that animorex and rpietila annoint the winner of altcoin innovation without seeing all the innovation and also with their limited understanding of the detailed issues involved. I am also guilty somewhat which is another reason to terminate AnonyMint. At the end of the day, we all need any innovations any one can do, and simply buying or earning bounties on that coin which is the most innovative will make us all rich so we don't need to get too overly aggressive on the public opinion battles.). I am in full support of any innovation that any altcoins can accomplish because I believe there are ominous threats to our human freedom on the near-term horizon which outweigh any of my personal desires for gain. For example, I am very interested in any exploit against one-time ring signatures, since I contemplated using them in an anonymity toolset. Notwithstanding though I would also like to make some money in this space and I trust myself to bring about the necessary innovations more than I trust any other developer or group of developers that I am aware of in this space. But if another development group leaps forward and proves me wrong, I might just have to join them. However, honestly I don't know too well TacoTime's (at al) capabilities or what they have in mind for the near-term future.  I am enticed back to this thread because some people who I think would be my angel investors (even if they don't know it) are also investors in XMR and BBR, thus I don't want them to lose the money that I am hoping they will invest on my efforts if ever I get there. Thus I want to try to ascertain whether there is any risk here on BCX's allegation. In short, if something is really important for the future of altcoins, I am drawn back to post.

Note I continue to get further evidence that jl777 doesn't have a deep grasp of the technology. Or at least some areas are not within his realm of expertise. I haven't looked at his code, and prolific coders can be extremely helpful if you keep them away from core things they don't understand well. Note I don't claim to be omniscient or to not make mistakes. And I don't claim to be better at cryptography than gmaxell and other core Bitcoin developers. I am a recent autodidact on cryptography and I am a generalist. So I have some distinct disadvantages, but I also have some creative freedom they may not have.

I learned in this thread that gmaxell (and Adam Beck?) semi-regularly communicate with the Monero developers. Well he thinks I am an idiot, so you have a strong ally I would probably never attain. Closing AnonyMint and stop fighting with the smart developers is a wise step on my part.

If he is not bluffing, my hunch is probably correct. CN was never analyzed from the standpoint of the mathematical correlation of multiple intersecting rings. Rather the proof of security was for one ring in isolation.

I bet you will quickly find his exploit if you pursue my hunch.

I am too sleepy to work through the math of my intuitive hunch. But looking again at the NIZKP in the CN whitepaper, I am suspecting that when the same rings are used by all or some of the members in the ring, then maybe 'x' the private key can be determined from a system of equations.  Then if one had sufficient hashrate to fork (rewind) the blockchain, they could double-spend these wallets to other destination addresses.

Perhaps have your cryptanalysis guy look at this, if I don't get a change to come back to it.

Maybe you are correct and you should buy these dips. Or just maybe BCX loves to play on overconfidence and figures those who should be harmed most will be. I dunno. This is bizarre.

Bool is short for Boolean. It is a programming and logic term.

Other brainstorming ideas.

Boolt or Bolt (security and anonymity, also like lightning bolts or Usain Bolt)

Boollion (computer bullion)

Boolring

Boolseye

Booloid

Rubools or Robools

Boogle

Yaboo

7008

Boolberry stands out. Rune is open the dictionary and point at a word and get another name for 1 in 1000 altcoin.

If you are going to change the name, it needs to standout more than Rune.

Why not Bools? Keep continuity and shorten the name and discard the silly berries.

Or Boollars or BBollars.

If BCX does have the "coin-killer" exploit he claims, and assuming his goal is to protect the users (the point of the clean out the shitcoins thread he is involved with), then he would not reveal this to the developers because they would then have an advantage over the users of Monero (and other CN coins such as BBR) in dumping the coin first. Thus I believe he has decided the fairest option at his disposal is to warn everyone of what will eventually come (someone will find and exploit it because of the anger that feels Monero hijacked the intent of Cryptonote to be a standard amongst many competing coins{*}) and let the users make their own decisions.

The clearest indication or hint of BCX's intent is in the following quote:


Clearly BCX is seeing an unfortunate confluence that has trapped many innocent parties. And he is trying to be as fair as he can in terms of how this will all unwind.

I am trying to figure out the exploit, if I can quickly. I don't have much time to devote to this, so I may have to abandon my attempt.

I don't want to cause a stampede run on the price of CN coins. I don't have any knowledge that the exploit exists, other than BCX's allegation. I know what I would do if I owned any CN coins at this time, which would be to make sure my exposed risk was a small % of my net worth at least until more clarity is obtained. BCX has a strong reputation and seems to have upstanding motives. He wants to see real innovation in crypto-currency. He has no strong aversion against CN, but apparently thinks it is sufficiently flawed thus isn't investing.

Given the scams alleged against the original Bytecoin developers, perhaps they were aware of the exploit all along and was planted as a Trojan horse. Of course that is wild speculation on the order of tooth fairies except we have BCX's reputation at stake on this allegation.


{*}

That is a very astute point. The value of a coin other than as an investor pump has been the value of a currency, which is related to the number of goods and services it can be spent on and moreover the number of people who use it as their unit-of-account. Bitcoin has done only moderate inroads on the former and failed miserably on the latter (Peter Thiel's Bitpay actively works to not make it a unit-of-account).

The only prayer of attaining unit-of-account status is to put the coin in a 100 - 1000 million spenders' hands such that both the former and latter are synergistic. Apple Pay is going to lock up 200 million within a year or so. Time is running out, but there is still the developing world, yet I see Bangladesh has threatened to jail users of crypto-currency and Ecuador is also hostile.

I've had my mind on bigger issues than just anonymity. Anonymity is personally important to me, but not to vast majority of consumers. A coins design has to factor these realities in.

I had the idea since 2013. I had some posts in rpietila's earlier threads alluding to it. But I don't care who had the idea first. I care who is first to achieve it in a real coin. And put strong, scalable anonymity in it too.


Getting the PoW correct was an essential requirement, but not sufficient by itself to get everyone to mine.

P.S. I edited my prior posts in this thread.

Concur on both points. But there is a technological paradigm to always drive the price higher for PoW. The first to launch such is going to rock the world. Whale or no whale doesn't matter.

Okay thanks for confirming.

So ball in is BCX's court now. I will be ignoring this until then, because there is nothing that can be done (to prove or disprove the allegation) short of you guys hiring some cryptanalysis.

You are probably thinking of the Shamir transform which converts an interactive Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) into an non-interactive one (NIZKP) by employing a one-way cryptographic hash function. Or you are thinking of their separate invention of ring signatures.

That doesn't necessarily apply to CN's one-time ring signatures because these are a novel merging of NIZKP and ring-signatures to make them one-time use.

My wild guess without studying the math again in the CN whitepaper, is any exploit (if any) has something to do with finding collisions or preimages in the NIZKP that makes it possible to forge a one-time ring signature under certain conditions. I had intuitions to look at potential weaknesses such as this but didn't have time to pursue it. Afaik, CN's one-time ring signature invention was not vetted by significant cryptanalysis.

My question to smooth and other Monero developers is, "Has BCX revealed any exploit to any of you?", because the posts I've read from smooth seem to be wordsmithed in such a way as to avoid definitively answering that question.

P.S. I am AnonyMint.


Who is the person he has personal ties to?


True all the existing PoW coins suffer these. But it is possible to fix this. I will not tell you how though. Well actually I already told everyone but they can't wrap their mind around AnonyMint's posts, so nevermind.


Kudos to you sir.


One logistic was getting the PoW right. I first did a PoW in November 2013 which is essentially what CN ended up with independently, although mine was orders-of-magnitude faster by exploiting AVX2 which also provided botnet resistance. Then I realized fighting against ASICs was futile so I had to embrace them.


I am trying to not to post. But since I decided to correct that misunderstanding about Rivest and Shamir's relevance to CN's one-time ring signatures, I might as well reply to these comments.

Agreed the details of widespread mining are difficult to achieve.

Edit: I am not often reading the forum any more (no time for it). I just happened to read this thread because I was looking at a particular user's latest posts for an unrelated reason and they had posted in this thread.

Your nemesis AnonyMint wasn't around for 2 weeks.

If you actually READ (as in RTFM) the thread, such a grouping or streams solution is not simple as you might naively assume. And probably why it is not implemented.



Anyone who is actually a programmer knows the "devil is in the details". So these idiots who make proclamations based on some general rumor or conceptual idea, can't hold a candle to someone who is actually down in the trenches implementing this stuff and thus speaks from a deeper understanding of the issues involved.

For the meantime, Bitmessage is dead. And bringing it back to life isn't going to be trivial.

So who is trolling, as you always do.

Anyone still paying attention to this "Legendary" idiot deserves the misinformation he spews.

Bitmessage is dead.

Powers-that-be have defeated the only way to communicate anonymously.