Dash has cheaper transaction fees right now so if you just wanna pay someone who accepts dash and you dont care about privacy than perhaps there are some situations where dash would be superior. However if privacy is your concern than yes it isn't even a comparison.

Dash just has a coin join style mixing. It has been shown to be broken. I cant seem to find that research paper right now can someone in this thread help me out? Additionally "privacy" is optional on dash meaning if you use it it looks suspicious making the currency not necissarily fungible in all cases. Oh also its a premine scam. It was released as X-Coin. At its inception the devs of X-Coin said they wouldnt start mining till the next day but actually started in secret before everyone else and additionally it mined some huge percentage of the currency supply in that first night. It then re-branded to DarkCoin a couple of days later to try to escape this debacle. And re-branded AGAIN to dash to presumably further distance its self. I don't remember all the specific figures but that's enough info to go on if you want to research it.

ZCash requires a trusted set up. Meaning if everyone involved in the innitial setup was reliable and trustworthy than it is safe (*edit* it uses really cutting edge modern not very well tested cryptography so maybe not even then). But if one of them was a bad actor than all supposedly "private" transactions can be discovered by him or who ever he gave the private information to. Additionally producing a private transaction is EXTREMELY computationally intensive. As I understand it it takes some peoples computer up to an hour to crunch all the numbers. Also the transactions are huge and so clog up the blockchain and are expensive to get included. This means the feature is rarely used and so again like I said with dash, has negative implications for fungibility.

So now for monero. Being as unbiased as possible I will try to critique it as well. Monero was pretty fairly distributed but there was a time in the early days when a guy had personally developed mining software that was more optimized than what anyone else had. It wasn't like with dash where he mined a third of the damned currency supply in a day. I think he had like 50% efficiency advantage over everyone else for like a month. Someone correct me with the specifics if you remember. It was nothing catastrophic but hes probably pretty rich now. Also we are currently facing the first real threat to our privacy right now in the form of an issue with ring signature input reuse on an up coming fork chain called MoneroV. If someone wanted to criticize us for having an issue there they wouldn't be wrong. Another criticism is that our transactions are rather large. I think around 13kb instead of like 250 bytes for a bitcoin transaction. This is actively being addressed though with a proposal called bullet proofs which will have probably about an 85% space savings. Maybe a great deal more more if implemented with batched transactions and people widely adopt and use batched transactions. Other than those issues monero has very strong privacy through the combination of several core features.

1) All transactions are forced to be private. This has an externalizing effect of improving everyone's privacy. Imagine it this way, if you have very well mixed coins, no one can trace them back to you, but then you send them to a known address that is a huge information leak on your end. It undermines a lot of the privacy that you gained by your therough mixing. On the extreme end, someone can go to the guy you sent to and use the 5 dollar wrench technique to find out who you are.

2) All amounts that are sent are unknown. Look at this random transaction from the block explorer https://moneroexplorer.com/tx/ec14e0f6c91966a5b899c49297a23f8e21e02716b517938c69740892d46e1990 Look at anywhere that it says ammount. It's just a "?".

3) All monero addresses are untraceable. That is to say there is no way to know who is receiving a given transaction.

4) All monero sending addresses are unlinkable. Ring signatures are used for this. A transaction is signed by several separate inputs. It is possible to know that one of those inputs is the true signatory and is valid but it is not possible to know WHICH of the inputs is the true signatory.

That was a lot of work so I hope you really care and weren't just exploiting some signature campaign. Or if you are than hopefully SOMEONE gets some value from it.

What if a few trusted members of the community went fishing? We could all put small amounts of monero on the web wallet and see if we could get anyone reliable to confirm the thefts. Any other legendaries who are long time veterans of this thread interested?

I did a transaction last night and it was about 85 cents. That isn't THAT bad and bullet proofs are being worked on right now that will reduce fees by 80% or more.

When you make a transaction do it like this:
It will then tell you how many blocks you can expect until your transaction is included. For me it's always 1. But make sure that what ever it tell you is acceptable for you.

The dev team has hired security researchers to and are also themselves looking into the claims about mymonero.com. It could just be fud but they received enough complaints to look into it more deeply. For now though I would just avoid it to be safe. The hardware wallet will be here soon and it is supposed to only be $30 dollars. Using that and connecting to a remote node will be the way to go in the near future if you do not wish to run a full node.


If it is really happening, smart people are looking into it but they havn't found any vulnerabilities yet.


Unless MoneroV implements this suggestion by one of our devs
Than they will have to be considered either attackers or grossly incompetent. Also their roadmap paper is riddled with inaccuracies and faulty logic. And considering that they are minting themselves 10% of the currency supply in this fork as some sort of purported "solution" to some sort of "problem" in monero, I think it's not very hard to guess at their true motivations. Whatever the case I wouldn't bother with them myself.

Like the kind with a qr code on her bum?

No. Because your transaction of "B -> exchange" will use several ring signature partners and your transaction "B -> C" will use several ring signature partners and both of those transactions will have one ring signature partner in common, and that one partner in common will be you.

The only way to do it safely is to have all of the ring signature partners the be the same for both transactions and there does not currently exist any function inside of monero to choose specific ring signature partners.

Here you go. https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7x297t/careful_with_monero_forks_with_airdrops/du537ij/ It's a pretty simple to understand issue.

So I've been thinking about this MoneroV fork problem. I saw the suggestion in a reddit thread about a tool that would allow monero users to specify ring signature inputs thus allowing us to sign with the same ring signature inputs that we used on the MoneroV blockchain.

I was wondering if anyone has given thought to a two pronged approach? We could additionally utilize a blacklist of ring sig inputs used on the forked chain. Some trusted team member could produce and update this blacklist. It could be a basic text file that we drag and drop into our monero directory. I know it would harm privacy to shrink the pool of available ring sig participants but we would only be blacklisting the ones used to produce the initial transaction on the MoneroV chain. So it would be a tiny tiny fraction of the ring signatures out there. Additionally new ring signature candidates are being produced constantly every 2 minutes every day.

It's a partial solution and an imperfect solution to a difficult problem but maybe worth considering.

So suppose few people dump it. This boosts the price up and makes these clowns look serious. Great.

Cultist? I don't even own any bitcoin right now.


Expensive yes. Unsustainable maybe. But it certainly isn't clear that it is unsustainable. Perhaps it can continue to be sustained. It is definitely possible.


No... It's redistributing capital from HODLers. HODLers who have voluntarily opted into this system. Again you really don't seem to understand how bitcoin works or maybe just basic economics.


It isn't free right now...


You sound poor to me. You seem to think 10,000 dollars is a lot of money or something .


Again. Economicses r haurd. It's not cheaper to have savers pay instead of spenders. It's just a different group of people that is paying. And you have to think, hopefully scaling technologies will allow that 10,000 cost to be divided among many more people than it would currently be divided among with 1mb blocks and 250 byte transactions.


Except that this transition from HODLers paying to spenders paying incentivizes people to just HODL more and harder than they are already doing right now.


Yea I actually think there is a pretty good chance that your conclusions are correct. It's just your argument's that are bad. Bitcoin will probably be replaced by better cheaper technology in the future that processes transactions cheaper and more efficiently. I mostly agree with your general point. Just not your claim that bitcoin is a ponzi. That is a stupid claim. Satoshi implemented the best solutions to decentralized digital currency that were known and available at the time. It is very unlikely that satoshi schemed to lure everyone into an open system that would later become restrictive.

Ah ok. Lame. There probably wont be pressure until transaction fees get too high again. But I expect there should and will be a great deal of pressure once that happens.


Thanks for the clarification.

Understand what it is and how it works (in theory). I'm wondering how do I physically utilize those nodes in that picture to my advantage right now?

Is this real? How do I use it? Or what is a good resource to explain how to use it?


OMG I love it!

Sooo I heard the lightning network is finally a real thing. Any plans to integrate wallet.trezor.io with the lightning network in some way?

Oh yea I completely agree with being concerned about this. I was talking about a different kind of concern. A different concern vector if you will.

Subsidizing miners with block rewards only makes it more difficult to perform a doublespend or a denial of service attack by producing empty blocks. It doesn't really motivate people to use the chain. Normal users are ignorant of how bitcoin works under the hood. They don't care about this stuff. They would only care if someone did successfully doublespend or DOS the block chain. So as long as transaction fees are sufficient to incentivize miners to collectively produce enough hashing power to prevent this than there is no reason to expect the drop off in block rewards to negatively effect bitcoin in any way.

I think it is you who does not understand how bitcoin works.

Well will you look at who it is boys! Troll indicator flashing red!

I guess what I mean to say is, what it really truly comes down to, is whether or not real talent is leaving to go with another fork. If its just outsider idiot opportunists who aren't even part of the existing dev team at all, like in the case of MoneroV, that fork is as much of a threat to us as Verge or DeepOnion. Really you can lump it into that category and just think of it as another one of those and the fact that it happens to be a fork of monero isn't really relevant. Then there is the kind of fork where moneromoo and fluffypony find themselves at an impasse, start butting heads and one of them forks the repository and they both proclaim that their fork is the real monero.

You cant homogenize forks. The first kind is no threat to us at all and as a matter of policy should be totally ignored, the second is a huge threat and everything in our power should be done to avoid it (short of one thing that I will argue against in the next paragraph). So if the first kind of fork, the MoneroV style fork, is resulting over and over again from bi-annual scheduled forks than I don't think that is much of a reason at all to cancel that policy. Should we try to stop competitors from developing crapcoins like DeepOnion while we are at it?

As far as the second kind of fork is concerned, all scheduled forks could really do, at worst, is expose an existing rift inside of our community and bring it to a head. They aren't going to create a rift. But honestly is willfully stagnating because there is a fracture in the values inside of our community the ideal response? It kind of just damns both sides of the argument instead of hopefully only the "wrong" side. Isn't is more healthy to just let that second kind of fork happen if it's going to happen but continue to push development forward on both forks rather than everyone just sitting around with their thumbs up their butts not improving the network because trying to do so "might cause a fork"?

If bi-annual hard forks are a known part of the social contract I don't see them ever becoming risky. Unless there is a fracture in the values, direction and vision of the core dev team, in which case it could make hard forks difficult even when Monero was still relatively small. Especially non risky if all they were doing with the fork was slight bi-annual changes to the POW algo. I mean imagine if some ne'er-do-wells rose up in response to a slight change in the POW algo and said "we are the proletariat and we are not going to take this any more, we are sticking with the old POW algo" they wouldn't be a threat, they would be laughed out of the room.

I don't think you could ever describe what I was doing before as "fighting" but yes you are correct, I got mine back.