Hello all,

Do you guys know anyway I can split my pre-fork XMC and XMO coins?

Splitting the XMR was easy since the current anti-ASIC Monero chain has a minimum ring size of 7, while the other two accept 5 and above.

But since both XMC and XMO accept the exact same ring sizes, I'm left with no easy way to split them.

Is there any trustworthy person (Bitmain?) selling post-fork coins?

If not, is there a way I can use coin control to craft a transaction that has a post-fork exclusive input in its ring?

Thanks

XMC == XMO, despite price sites displaying them as different currencies, they're the same. Just different development groups.

OP, I haven't read your academic paper, but I'm already interested by the summary you just made.

Could you tell me if your solution has anything to do with what is proposed by Maged in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57647.0;all ?

A block-tree could eventually render freezing attacks more difficult. Such advantage alone already makes it interesting. If as a plus it also improves performance significantly, then it's definitely something that should be studied more seriously.

And how would that be possible in a decentralized way?

The only setup I'm aware of that could do what you say is e-cash (blind signatures, part of Open Transactions). But this algorithm requires a server to perform the settlement. Perhaps the servers could evolve to multiple hidden servers where very few trust is needed. If you could easily move money from one e-cash server to another (can we?), and if you could be sure they can't steal from you (multi-signatures!), then we could practically have an e-cash decentralized network. Perhaps it's time to study Open Transactions...

A blacklist need to have a threshold, otherwise it's meaningless (you could distribute taint to people you don't like, if you happen to have tainted coins). If the percentage of taint is below a certain level, you can't really consider that input as linked to the originally tainted output.

And concerning the fact that most mixers would contain mostly tainted coins, even if that becomes the case, they would still be able to cover tracks.
Let's say a non-violent, honest individual does something perfectly ethical but which governments tend to punish, like, say, not paying taxes, selling cocaine or whatever. If governments manage to identify a particular address as participant in a particular "made-up crime", they'll taint it for that reason. If the said individual mixes his coins enough, even if in the end he gets lots of tainted coins still, the original reason his coins got tainted for is practically lost. Yes, there may still be lots of tainting in his coins, for many different reasons, what indicates with a decent probability that he did something the government does not approve. But you can't really know what. Legally, they can't hold anything on him, other than the fact that he probably tried to cover his money tracks. Yeah, perhaps they can criminalize that with some scary wording like "money laundering". But, well, if wallets do it automatically on the background once in a while, it would be hard to criminalize it.

Also, there would probably be multiple different blacklists. Victims of one particular blacklist have an interest in working together with victims of other blacklists in order to mix their coins. Assuming the place you want to spend your coins block coins from blacklist A but not blacklist B, exchanging your taint from A to B would make you clean.

Further on, from an tyrannical surveillance POV, blacklists don't easily allow a government to know everything you do with your money. Whitelists allow them to track each little spending of yours. When they control your money, they control you.

Anyways, I'm not trying to say that blacklists offer no danger and that people should not try to fight them, quite on the contrary. I'm just trying to point the fact that it's easier to work around them, when compared to whitelists. Mandatory whitelists could render the Bitcoin payment network almost as awful as credit cards. We'd still have an inflation-proof currency, what's great, but the payment network value would considerably decrease.

With all due respect, but I feel that's analogous to a Jew in the early 30s trying to reach Nazi leaders in order to convince them of how wrong they were.

You're just putting your ass on the line. These people are working with regulators.

Oh but they're not quite the same. Blacklists are easier to work-around. Mix your coins enough and there will be no meaningful taint anymore.

Whitelists, OTOH, are an entirely different matter. Authoritarian governments may force every business in their jurisdiction to only accept money from the whitelist. Everything not whitelisted should be taxed or even seized. That's the real danger.

Since I'm replying to the bright mind behind Zerocoin, I'll use the opportunity to ask: does it make sense to talk about whitelisting Zerocoin transactions/addresses? I confess I tried to understand how your system works, but I'm just too dumb to actually get it.


Whitelists do not need to be public.

You're assuming the white-list will be public. It needn't be.


How would you know in advance which business are helping the thugs create their whitelist and which are not? It's not like they need to publicly advertise it.

Definitely. I read somewhere that the estimations on how much tax money this will bring back makes it just not worthy, if that was the only motivation.

It already works as capital controls, actually. And it's also a surveillance tool.

Okay, I get it, you mean a black market will keep existing. That's correct. But there will be much more monitoring, and that makes it much more difficult. For example, suppose your salary is payed in BTC. They know exactly how much you have, because your salary is whitelisted. Now you want to buy something they don't approve or donate money to wikileaks, whatever. You know you can't use your whitelisted addresses because they can link them to you. You'd need to exchange your coins against "free coins". But that would leave a trace... you see the problem? By controlling your money, they control you.

I agree and support everything you said here, Gregory, but I'm afraid that might not be enough.

Working around balcklists is feasible, through the means you cite. But the threat here are not blacklists, the threat are mandatory whitelists.

You may coinjoin your coins as much as you want. If you want to use them in "the land of the free" you'll have to give away your freedom and privacy by declaring them to Big Brother. Otherwise your output might just be frozen by the "law abiding merchant" that receives it.
Mixers are not enough to fight back. But I fail to see alternatives.

I know you and many other bitcoin developers have brilliant minds... I hope you manage to come up with a solution.

You really believe that? You really believe the idea is for it to remain truly voluntary?

Why would any business even bother requesting only white-listed addresses, if it wasn't due to coercive regulations?


Yes. It seems you still trust governments.

Man, I'm not inventing anything, just read about the subject, and you'll see it yourself. Since when does the USG care about the concept of jurisdiction BTW?


More? Okay, let's try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act
https://www.internationalman.com/78-global-perspectives/1009-fatca-a-tool-of-the-electronic-surveillance-state
http://www.repealfatca.com/
https://www.internationalman.com/78-global-perspectives/995-the-worst-law-most-americans-have-never-heard-of
http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Corporations/Foreign-Account-Tax-Compliance-Act-%28FATCA%29

Unfortunately you're wrong. Please inform yourself about FATCA. This is capital controls done in a way never seen before.


I believe you don't even need to do business in the US directly. AFAIK FATCA is "recursive". To be compliant, you must ensure every institution you do business with is also compliant.


No, in practice they don't really have a choice. The only choice is not to do business with any other financial institution in the current financial world, to create a "parallel financial world" that has no connections with the one which accesses the US market. Due to the weight of the US economy, that's just not a viable option.

You don't believe businessmen would just refuse money like that, do you? If they're doing so, there must be a strong reason.


Now you know, it's named FATCA.


I hope, for your own good, that you don't truly believe this bullshit you wrote.

The reason why multiple financial institutions outside the US are rejecting US citizens is called FATCA - Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

FATCA forces "Foreign Financial Institutions" to provide burdensome reports on every "US person" (US citizen/resident or green card holder) they happen to have an account with. If they don't do so, they suffer a 30% tax (or something close to it) on any financial instrument they might hold in the US. And I think it has some sort of recursive function too: to be compliant, you must ensure that every financial institution you work with is also compliant, or you risk having your financial instruments in the US heavily taxed just because you accept to do business with someone who did not respect FATCA. I don't know for sure what "do business" mean though. What I know is that due to US's weight in the financial world, the US government is able to impose an international law.

The easiest path for such FFIs is to simply deny doing business with "US persons". This way they're compliant.

This is the most outrageous form of capital controls ever enacted. It isn't an explicit capital control, but in practice that's what it is, since from now on US persons will have great difficulty to send money abroad. And it's outrageous because it's one government forcing financial institutions of the whole world to behave as they want. In many countries, for FFIs to comply with FATCA, they'd need to violate local laws.

FATCA is already responsible for a raise in the number of US citizens dropping their US citizenship. I think many more will do so in the next couple years.

Medieval Iceland and Ireland didn't have an actual government, law was decentralized. I wouldn't call any medieval society "sophisticated and peaceful", but they compared well to other European places of the time.
There's also lex mercatoria which was a set of voluntary merchant laws that transcended states of the time.

There have been practical examples of decentralization of mostly everything a state monopolizes today, if not all.


Empiricism may be used to demonstrate to skeptics an already proven praxeological theory, but it's not through empiricism that economic science should be done. The deflationary spiral theory is supported by empiricist economists, by the way - no wonder is so wrong. For empiricist scientific methods to work, you must be able to isolate all variables and reproduce experiments at will. That's obviously impossible when studying the human action. You can't even enumerate all possible variables, let alone isolate them. Economics can only be developed through the "apriori" method, the same method of mathematics: you start with basic axioms, and then you deduct logical conclusions.

Ludwig von Mises wrote a lot on the importance of the praxeological method to the economic science. Perhaps you should search his texts.

And by the way, libertarianism isn't only economics. Actually, I'd say it's more an "ethical philosophy" than anything.

Of course it's an insult. I actually said "authoritarian asshole" IIRC. So, yeah, I wanted to insult you, after you broadly compared ancaps like me with potential murderers. I believed I've manage to control my temper better than you did, though.

EDIT: Once more justusrainver put it better than me, so I'll just quote him:

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Sigh... I won't derail this rapidly growing topic. But you're just ignorant and should read a bit more on ethics and economics.

I thought that too. The problem with that reasoning is that he'd be trusting the blackmailer not to attempt to blackmail him again in the future.

There's also the possibility of this whole hired murder thing being fake. The US gov is definitely not a trustworthy entity. Maybe they preferred to create this story so that DPR's image is severely tainted, and he cannot present himself in courts as a "peaceful individual" who was "removing violence from drug trade".

All this is just speculation, though.

Logic != faith.
One concludes blackmailing is not an aggression after following a long series of logical deductions - that will not be found entirely on the link I posted, it's much longer than only that - not by blindly trusting the tales of ancient book that supposedly contains the words of a super-powerful divinity.

You've manage to write it better than me what I wanted to say. Thanks.

That was not exactly what you said. Let's recapitulate it, shall we?


You simply concluded that somebody with "extreme anarcho-capitalists tendencies" (what's "extreme ancap" by the way? You're either ancap or you're not, it's pretty binary, no "intensity levels" are possible) is automatically not a "swell guy"... in the particular case, a potential murderer.

Well, I am an anarcho-capistalist myself, as many people around here. You just compared us with a potential murderer. Calling you an "authoritarian asshole" was quite polite on my part, if you want to know.