$100,000 is chump change. I earned that in 2 months (inflation-adjusted) in 2001.

I believe these guys have a lot more money than that and they are dabbling with small amounts of their money in projects they think might have large potential.

They are trying to find the next home run, while holding a core, large position in BTC. Their Monero holdings are even smaller than their BTC holdings (or at least it was before Gavincoin was on the threat horizon).

I believe if they see superior technology and market momentum, they will quickly be joining that camp.

These guys are trying to figure out how to expand the pie beyond the limited scope of bitcointalk.org. They are experimenting and trying to find the killer combination.

I am also experimenting.

Personally I am not interested in attacking Dash. The masternode concept is fundamentally flawed because it is not autonomous. It violates the end-to-end principle. But if people want an inferior system for speculative frenzy reasons (or what ever reasons they have), then who I am to tell them what to do?

Smooth already created a thread which details the alleged instamine for Darkcoin. He provided a disclaimer there acknowledging his conflict-of-interest. I wasn't even aware of that until I read smooth's thread.

Again I would suggest to smooth to back off of attacking Dash. Nothing more will be gained from that and it is counter productive. The way you help is by educating n00bs in your own site and threads. And that doesn't need to be an attack on Dash. Simply explaining why autonomy is important and why CoinJoin (and other off chain anonymity such as CoinShuffle) is not autonomous and can never be.

To your credit, I ack that the vote here should indicate to smooth the counter vailing forces to excessive attacking. You don't go against a large community. That is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Also I hear you guys about being more about coding than talking. Hear here. I will definitely internalize that wisdom.



One of the reasons I liked Evan was he was (as far as I knew) a non-anonymous guy coding and creating his own coin while being very chatty with the forum. I figured he was sincere. I am surprised to read about the alleged instamine.

My white paper conspicuously cites Cryptonote

Apologies I did miss the entry at the end. They did put it in the References section.

Cryptonote ring sigs are not fully zero knowledge. The values of the transactions forces some correlations that wouldn't be there if the values were hidden. For one thing values requires smaller anonymity sets as for example noted in section 3.3.3 of the ShadowCash white paper (and similarly for Monero/Cryptonote):

http://shadow.cash/downloads/shadowcash-anon.pdf


Smooth and I recently discussed this issue when I pointed out that Blockstream's Confidential Transactions hide values (but they don't provide untraceability).

Additionally we can't predict the types of sophisticated combinatorial analysis research that could come out against the data provided by revealing the values. As I said to smooth in that recent discussion:


P.S. How does ShadowCash justify trying to obscure that it copied Cryptonote and doesn't even cite Cryptonote in its white paper? It looks to me they were trying to fool n00bs into thinking they had created something different or superior to the pre-existing Cryptonote?

I agree the website needs to be professional and most of all, it needs to actually teach n00bs. I love to teach people. I get great joy from making complex things easy for everyone to understand.

That is how you win.

Disagree. The website even doesn't function correctly in my Chromium browser on Linux.

All that circus stuff (dog & pony show, clowns jugging flaming objects, etc) is for n00bs who want to lose money.

Android with its cruder looks kicked ass on iPhone so resolutely that in a few years it went from 0% to 80% global market share.

What is actually most important is network effects. ShadowCash is following the Steve Jobs philosophy of a walled garden that is optimized. If they can do everything themselves they can make it more perfect, more complete, and better. Wrong! Network effects trumps all.

If you want to facilitate SilkRoad, then you need to fix I2P and/or Tor (or replace them with a fixed network)! Thus enabling 1000s of flowers (sites as hidden services) to bloom.

Building some proprietary market place on top of broken anonymity networks is masturbation.

Not my misunderstanding at all.

It would be better to say curve 25519 than Curve25519, because afaik the latter refers to a white paper for a ECC Diffie-Helman key exchange, which is a different purpose and more optimized than EdDSA which is for public/private key signing. Much more than a minor distinction (thanks to DJB for such premature optimization on the naming and confusion):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19147619/what-implementions-of-ed25519-exist

Also for other readers and the original point of discussion, here is more on the advantages of EdDSA vs. Bitcoin ECDSA:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/50878/ecdsa-vs-ecdh-vs-ed25519-vs-curve25519

Sorry I am not going to be able to teach you the exhaustive reasons in a forum thread. This issue will be explained more in depth in a future white paper.

I understand it is very difficult for n00bs to understand.

Well it is pointless (for Shadow and Monero) if it is based on I2P because I2P is no protection against the NSA. It has worse flaws than Tor. And when the NSA decides it is time to bust up I2P hidden services, they can easily do it.

There is a fundamental flaw in the way these anonymity networks publish the route to the hidden service. Await a future white paper for details and a proposed solution.

Edit: I just read at Shadow's Market place FAQ that it will reply on Tor or I2P. So the claim of it being anonymous (against the NSA) is bullshit.

Edit#2: putting one marketplace on an entire coin is really STOOPID. You are killing network effects by taking away what you should allow lots of others to innovate on. For example, one set of rules on how decentralized voting can make sure that a "car" isn't in the "clothes" category.


http://aboutshadow.com/index.php/shadowmarket/q-a



P.S. I knew when I saw all the fancy flash graphics at the Shadow site last year, that it would end up be another loser. That is how I can always distinguish the losers from the winners. Google won with its text interface. Monero is winning with formerly a very simple website. I am not invested in either of these coins. I am invested in my own anonymous coin effort which is vaporware at the moment. I am just noting that correlation seems to always be true. Fluff instead of stuff. The n00bs always fall for the fluff, bells, and whistles and other circus paraphernalia.

You don't know your own code, lol. Cyptonote uses Ed25519 for EdDSA, not Curve25519. It is an understandable mistake because Ed25519 is very similar and related to Curve25519. But that you don't know the difference, shows you are not the low-level cryptographer for Monero. And we all knew that any way. You are the server and networking guy correct? So no offense intended.  

Afaik, the main improvement that Bernstein achieved was to eliminate side channel timing attacks because his formulation of ECC is constant time (if implemented correctly). But some have argued that attribute isn't necessary in Bitcoin's application of ECC (ECDSA).

So Monero is going with that knapsack stuff with mixing block wise?

Another problem right now is that most of the users of cryptocurrency are the speculators. Thus decisions about which coins to invest in tends to be driven by n00bs speculators, instead of by actual use.

When we get to the point where users are more important than investors, then the market will naturally chose a winner as it did for MSDOS, Windoze, and lately Android.

In all those cases, network effects is what beat the competition (and Steve Jobs twice made that mistake of a walled garden ecosystem first for the MacOS and repeated for iOS).

My point is there are bigger fish to fry than infighting amongst ourselves. Let's go increase the size of the pie instead.

Hahaha. Well I admit I allowed myself to get sucked into something.  

I was thinking about that the other day and it is embarrassing.

The anonymity tech is difficult to explain so that distinctions can be understood by laymen.

That I as an experienced software dev (but not yet experience cryptographer) could get sucked into some misunderstandings should serve as evidence of how people such as john-conner can think they are on to something big but be entirely off.

There needs to be much better articulation all around. White papers, websites for coins, etc..

Let's see if we can raise up a bar that all coins have to rise to if they want to compete. I am not talking about fancy presentations with meaningless buzzwords (zero knowledge anonymity, zerotime, zero censorship, etc..) and insufficient detailed explanation yet that still somehow make n00bs wet their pants ('dey loves 'dem buzzwords ya know).

Let's attack through competition, not in threads. That is my call to action now.

Edit: everyone wants to think they discovered a gem. Even we devs too. The proof in the pudding is writing down proofs in a white paper. And then peer review of those. Implementation is a matter of encoding what is in the white paper. But in Bitcoin's case, much of what is encoded isn't even in any white paper. For example, Maxwell recently explained about the heuristics he uses to control Sybil attacks on P2P network interconnections. Didn't seem very sound to me. There are more Swiss cheese holes likely lurking out there in cryptoland. We need to check our pompousness at the door (meaning myself too). This stuff is difficult to fully specify formally. It is a huge effort. Should we get busy?

No I am not against you on this issue smooth. Please reread my post.

I am saying that your trying to do the ethical action of weeding out the scams and shit coins.

I am also saying that when we do that, we tend to get carried away (because we become so tenacious when researching and compiling the issues). For example, I was a bit upset that after reading VanillaCon's white paper that I had wasted that time on something which doesn't even have a specification. How gullible can investors be to invest in something that has no specification  

In Dash's case, hey yeah there are more holes than Swiss cheese, but they have some right to claim they are trying to do their best. They can't help it that they are just are not smart enough to do cutting edge math and other research required for something like Blockstream's Confidental Transactions or Cyptonote.

Let them have their Swiss cheese. I have not been following the premine issue at all. I don't care. It is already done. The community has too much inertia already. You have to just let it play itself out.

On AEON, I don't care what you do there. I would understand trying to get something rolling where you could make more experiments faster. I don't know how your XMR brethren feel about it. Any way, it is not my concern. Why should you not be able to compete and innovate  

I think the golden rule here is Matthew 7. Attack and you will be attacked. So you need to decide if it is really worth it? You already have the thread about the alleged premine. As for the Swiss holes in the anonymity, I think Monero could be more concise on its website as to the distinction. Communicate more clearly on the Monero website. There is far too much noise on that website IMO (as an experienced web marketer).

Absolutely not! Censorship doesn't help.

Let us discuss.

Other than the OP's point about smooth potentially using his reputation from Monero to get a faster ROI in AEON (which the poll on this thread is not about), and also smooth's tendency to get carried away with attacking scams (this is very big issue for him), I don't see any legitimate complaint.


The post from smooth seems to summarize well:


Smooth has been trying to follow the various frauds alleged and so went over to the thread (perhaps out of boredom?) to follow up on the following. And during that time, he let himself get carried away with retorting what he believes to be a scam that is giving the entire altcoin community a bad reputation. He obviously feels as do I, that investors will shy away from all altcoin if so many scams continue to proliferate. That is why I gave my frank assessment of VanillaCon this week. I have not attacked DarkCoin and I will not attack Dash. My reasons are stated below.


Smooth would be wise to stop commenting on Dash.

I (as AnonyMint) stopped last year on DarkCoin after helping Evan a bit in public posts (no back dealings, I earned nothing from that) while also pointing out the flaws of CoinJoin (which I was the first to point out in Gmaxwell's thread on CoinJoin way before DarkCoin was ever conceived).

Dash has just enough substance that it is very difficult to successfully enlighten the foolsn00bs. Let them be foolsn00bs.

Any way we soon we can move the entire anonymity space head & shoulders away from that noise and it will be done. There won't be any need to attack Dash on a daily basis any more to protect foolsn00bs from a marginal anonymity coin that is alleged to be a scam. Trust me.

Any evidence?

Looks like a P2P software developer and not someone incredibly smart.

His argument with gmaxwell showed that he was only capable of looking at the issue from one stubborn perspective and thus not able to hold all possibilities in his mind at the same time pertaining to that complex issue.

He may have extensive knowledge in some areas of software development. I distinguish that implementation knowledge from "super smart". To invent totally new paradigms such as proof-of-work (or something like a zerotime that is actually proven in a white paper), you need to be seriously smart.

He may be seriously smart, but he needs to demonstrate it before I would claim that. For example, Daniel J. Bernstein is seriously smart. Vitalik Buterin is seriously smart. In both cases, that doesn't mean they are qualified to create a successful altcoin. Berstein probably lacks relevant domain experience in economics. Buterin appears to lack experience and decision making/prioritization/realism skills. My guess is fluffypony is probably not as mathematically endowed as those 2 guys, but already proven he is seriously capable of helping launch a fork for a successful altcoin. So my point is I am not even sure "seriously smart" is entirely informational in the context you are trying to employ it.

I believe I know a defense. Await a white paper.

jl777 is still very active coding. I have not been able to remain fully informed about what he is accomplishing in detail. Thus I can't offer any opinion at this time.

I will tell you that in private discussions with him, he readily grasps insights in terms of designs. And he doesn't waste time posting in forums like I do. The difficulty I have in interfacing with him is I find it very difficult to comprehend his descriptions of his algorithms. He appears to be a talented person who is handicapped in terms of writing technical documentation, which he readily admits and others have noticed too. One thing is he is admirably old school and believes in "shut up and code".

john-conner makes a sockpuppet.

We are not hating. Learn how to write a white paper properly so you don't waste our time. We will support that which is proven and fully described.

Gmaxwell reported these issues back in January apparently:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=920344.0


We should not have to reverse engineer code to check whether a design has merit. The white paper should contain sufficiently detailed descriptions and math to convince the technical readers. His white papers don't[1].

[1]	https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1149219.msg12111463#msg12111463 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1148745.msg12111401#msg12111401 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1149219.msg12111694#msg12111694

I can't yet determine whether john-conner is an intentional scammer or just a person who believes his capabilities are greater than they really are:


But it doesn't matter. Bottom line is stay away unless you enjoy losing your money.

He clearly has some technical knowledge.

If I remember correctly the person who did that work (whom I remember well since he and I got in a heated argument about some technicalities because I at the time was working on a similar sort of hash before I developed the latter one based on a NIST candidate) was generally praised and appreciated by the community for fixing a problem that had the potential to cause much more harm. So I concur with your clarification. I suppose his profit was viewed as fair by the community.

I would prefer to avoid the potential problem entirely by not putting so much pressure at the launch on needing the hash to be perfectly and fairly optimized at launch. And especially with entirely new hash again (well based on a NIST candidate, yet never widely deployed afaik). Fully optimizing the assembly language of the hash is another burden that would slow me down towards launch. I did write down the assembly code for Intel and AMD 64-bit, but there are so many hardware variants, GPUs, etc..

Also I think it is helpful (and in defense of Monero) to point out the conditions under which Monero was formed. It was basically an adhoc rescue of a great technology which was being destroyed by those who created it. The community reacted in a necessary haste to try to wrestle the technology away to save it. So there wasn't the opportunity for planning it out in some other way. Doing a fair distribution via mining was the probably the only possible fair reaction that was workable in that situation, especially given there was no opportunity for exclusivity for any period of time (as numerous clones had already popped up).

Edit: link to thread about Cryptonote's storied history:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1136638.msg11986713#msg11986713

And another concise summary:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1148913.msg12103449#msg12103449