Once again, look carefully at the quote you copied from above:


I was not the one that compared Shadow with cryptonote, Longenecker was. I responded to the innaccuracy in his post, just as I've responded to the many inaccuracies in yours.

I'm not familar with this technovert. What else has he accomplished?

Assuming your developer is not a cryptographer and employed the assistance of one, that speaks well of him. There are certainly aspects of shadowsenc that are different from cryptonote (such as the way it integrates with the non-anonymous SDC), and any changes or differences in context should be reviewed by a cryptographer, yes.

What case?

I was quoted, and then someone claimed that "cryptonote simply obfuscates the outputs, whereas Shadow destroys them" which is complete and utter nonsense. The subsequent discussion explained how minting and redeeming has nothing to do with anonymity and in fact could impair it under some conditions.

Everyone reading it except you seemed to get the point. Open your mind a bit, some good info might find its way in there.

Because I was discussing some technical issues about SDC and shadowsend before you starting talking about some other coins.

I was also invited to have this conversation by other members of the SDC community who don't share your ugly and combative approach.

Thank you ArticMine and dnaleor for the generous and highly appreciated donations.

I'm looking forward to the parties.

Fair enough, but I keep telling you there is no "CRYPTONOTE VS SHADOWSEND" except that one particular person seems to want to make it into that.

Let's see, they first applied the ring signature technique combined with stealth addresses to distributed cryptocurrencies, which is the exact same combination of techniques that SDC has now adopted as its core feature.

It should pretty damn obvious that something implemented 9 months later in the same market -- that the developers damn well knew about -- is clearly a derivative.

Your comment is about as absurd as asking what Satoshi did for us.

How about you stop posting that lie? Especially since your own devs included the cryptonote white paper as a reference in their white paper. It was somewhat questionable that they never explained how that reference relates to the rest of the paper (hint: extensively) but perhaps that was an honest oversight.

But since I've explained this to you several times already, and cited specific technical details to back it up, I can only conclude that you are being deliberately dishonest. Let's hope you are the only one. Individual trolls on bitcointalk are no big deal. The rest of the SDC community seems pretty cool about the whole thing.

What perplexes me is why people are bending over backward to claim that shadowsend doesn't use (something very close to the) the cryptonote design for anonymous coins. It's a great system, the best one around. Your project and developers should be congratulated for choosing it and apparently implementing it effectively.

Instead this turns into a food fight over claims of "No, it's completely new!" (which as someone else pointed out is rather silly even if it weren't incorrect with respect to cryptonote, since every single coin is copied from bitcoin) and who is supposedly advertising in your thread. Silly.

Just give cryptonote their due credit for their part of all this (which is sort of done in the white paper since they are listed as a reference) and get back to the business of building and promoting the coin.

Reasonable explanation especially since Abe, who is conspicuously pro nuclear reopening, won a decisive election victory a few weeks ago. While only one (or possibly zero, I'm not sure) Japanese nuclear plant has literally reopened so far, the market may be responding to expectations they will reopen.

There was a large run up in oil prices from about 80 USD to 120 USD in 2011 after Fukushima.

There is no advertisement, I'm just having a semi-technical discussion, and people seem to frequently ask about SDC compared to other coins, so those other coins come up. DRK has come up as well, and I'm certainly not advertising for that.

I mention it only in response to others who do so, particularly when the statements are incorrect. Example:



Now you are doing it. Why?

We don't know exactly what is possible in the far future. It is not possible in either Monero or shadow to tell which addresses own which coins using the obvious direct inspection the way you can with a bitcoin-style coin. I assume by your comment about Monero you are referring to MRL-0001 which talks about some failures that can occur (allowing blockchain analysis to extract some information) if too-small ring sizes are used (and the same applies to shadow). The possibility of routine and frequent transfers between shadow and SDC provide another potential avenue of attack. Those are not the only potential weaknesses.

The current anonymity techniques we have now are steps in the right direction. No one has fully "solved" this yet.

Sorry, but you are incorrect. It is using the exact same techniques of one time ring signatures (intractability) and stealth addresses (unlinkability). The code may be brand new but the cryptography techniques and math behind the one time ring signatures are the same (which include the zero knowledge proof) and were invented by cryptonote.

I could go and rewrite the code to do this stuff yet again (in fact I have done so for my own experimental purposes) but I wouldn't claim it to be anything other than a reimplementation of cryptonote. Someone else on the Monero project did it in python, and called it mininero.

If anyone is claiming otherwise they are either confused or trying to scam you (I don't suggest the latter necessarily, just pointing out the possibilities).

Everything on his entire system, including the daemon but also OS processes and whatever else, was using only 700 MB.

They are not linkable and spending isn't provable, so there is generally no way to create a meaningful richest.

The concept of an address "balance" isn't meaningful the way it is with a bitcoin-style coin.

Given that shadow uses the well-regarded cryptonote techniques and SDC uses bitcoin-style coins which are well known to be vulnerable to a lot of analysis/tracing, it is pretty obvious that more you use the former and the less you use the latter, the more actual anonymity will be achieved.

You can't stake shadow though. I'm not sure if that's something that matters a lot to folks here. The Louisd’or project has recently developed a PoS method that works with cryptonote and could probably be adapted here, so longer term that might be possible.

BCX didn't show up with his threats until late September. There was the first malleable block (212612) attack that happened in early September (and directly after that attack and recovery the price trend was positive).

I found the price action in the wake of BCX's deadline coming and going with no attack (revealing him to be a trolling windbag) to be perplexing. The price continued down, which suggested to me other factors at work -- in particular the exhaustion of buying demand.

"Competely anonymous" is not really a well defined term, especially when considering indirect inferences from timing factors and such.

Clearly the more you (and everyone else) use shadow (and using higher mix factors when you do) the less information you are leaking to potential blockchain analysis.

The scenario you describe is clearly better than frequent conversions back and forth, but not as good as everything being done with shadow exclusively. In order for that to happen every merchant, exchange, etc. needs to support it directly, and you also need to be willing to except the higher inherent costs of transactions.

If you have both lower highs and higher lows, then there is really no trend at all (except toward reduced volatility).

It was only since August that highs and lows both began to trend lower, and the downtrend became very clear and well developed.

I don't know the reason for this. My theory has been that by August we ran out of new investors, and original group of investors had accumulated as much as they wanted. The price needed to go lower to motivate some averaging down, and more recently bring in some new buyers who find the lower prices more attractive and less risky.

I don't have very high confidence that my theory is correct. There may be other explanations for it.

As far as I can tell that is true. The SDC implementation was apparently built from scratch (I haven't personally reviewed it) and from the whitepaper is effectively cryptonote with some relatively minor tweaks.

The XMR cryptonote implementation was apparently built (presumably also from scratch) by cryptonote itself, a shadowy (no pun intended) group that has no direct participation in the cryptocurrency community as far as anyone knows. They also created something called cryptonotecoin, but only as a proof-of-concept that is designed to have no value (the blockchain resets itself after a month or something).


Essentially the same, if widely used, but see below. The reduced number of denominations provides a small improvement in anonymity, but also an increase in transaction size, so it isn't really clear this ends up being a net gain in anonymity (compared to say an increase in mix factor with comparable increase in size).


I haven't seen the SDC wallet but from the screen shots in the OP it certainly looks nice. I'd give it high marks based on that alone.


At that point you are effectively using a traceable coin with a short trip through an untraceable coin, which makes the untraceable coin something of mixer, and that in turn only helps if there is a high level of activity, but still reduces anonymity given time-based attacks.

Consider that you take 53,17 SDC, convert it to shadow, send it to someone (for example to pay for a private purchase), and soon thereafter he converts it back to 53.17 SDC. During which time there hasn't been a whole lot of activity (certainly no other transactions in that same amount or close to it). Is this really fooling anyone?

(I have pointed out similar issues with the suggestion that Bitcoin add anonymity using a cryptonote-based sidechain.)


The advantages would be easier integration with services (exchanges, etc.) that expect everything to operate just like a Bitcoin clone, not and deal with stealth addresses, mix factors, etc.

Also lower cost for the non-anon transactions, since they are smaller and less resource intensive, but the trade off is moving activity to the (lower cost) non-anonymous coin reduces activity in the anonymous coin, which in turn reduces effective anonymity.


XMR stores the bloockchain in memory, which means you currently need at least 4 GB to run a node with reasonable performance, and this is growing, albeit slowly. DB development is progressing, also slowly. By contrast, SDC I understand uses the Bitcoin DB code so probably leveldb for storage? That isn't blazingly fast, but generally fast enough (especially for a coin with much less activity than BTC), and eliminates the issue of high memory requirement.


That is a tradeoff you will have to make. See above.

Hope this helps.