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Hi Gnosis,
I have a quick question about the RSA UFOs that will be used in Zerocoin:
For the Anoncoin implementation, will you be using the originally generated RSA UFOs, or will you instead be using the UFOs after their small factors have been removed?
I understand why we are trying to remove small factors for the selection process (some UFOs might be inappropriate and only contain small factors...). However, it seems to me that if someone is going to try to crack Zerocoin, that we shouldn't make it easy for them: They should have to redo all the work that we are now doing.
On the other hand, by using a smaller UFO, it might be less computationally intensive for the zero-knowledge proofs and better for the network...
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It's true that we are a bit short-staffed (I and most of the other devs have full-time jobs). If anybody knows a developer who is interested in Zerocoin, forward him/her my way. It would be useful for the dev to know at least one of these (but the more the better): - C++ (especially bitcoin/litecoin/*coin clients)
- cryptography (especially public key)
- distributed computing
Just a status update: I am putting the finishing touches on the UFO server, which will talk to the UFO clients (source and instructions at https://github.com/Anoncoin/ufo_client ). I expect it to be ready by tomorrow at the latest. Once again, if you want to participate and have CPU cores to spare, message me with your nick and pubkey, as described in the above instructions. When this is up and running, I will return to working on libzerocoin improvements and integration with the Anoncoin wallet. As for those concerned about price drops when deadlines are missed: I for one am thinking about the long haul, and I do not care at all about short-term speculators. When a working Zerocoin is released, the price will increase dramatically, and stay consistently high. If I try to rush this to meet a deadline, the quality will be sub-optimal. That's just how it is. And pay no attention to those who say development has stopped on this. I have invested hundreds of hours of my time on this, and I am going to finish it even if it kills me.  Gnosis, that's great to hear that the UFO client will be up and running tomorrow. Would it be possible to give a conservative, realistic estimate for when the Zerocoin testnet will be up an running? I think that most of us realize that software projects take longer than anticipated, and some of the discontent in this thread is based on the fact that previous estimates were, in retrospect, overly optimistic. If you could make a conservative estimate, and then multiply the time by two, that will shut many people up for awhile... And thanks for devoting your time to this. If there is anyway we can help out, just let us know. I know that money is not always the solution, but if it is a limiting factor, I am sure that many people would be willing to donate. |
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"We're building a system that will not have a back door"... Well there's no way of knowing that the security parameters do not contain a back door, so we have to trust the people who generate them. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to generate them in a provably trustworthy fashion. I don't know if that's possible.
In fact, it is possible to generate the security parameters in a completely trustless manner for the original Zerocoin protocol of Miers et al. (Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin). All you need to do is generate a number that contains two large prime numbers, and whose factorization is unknown. Amazingly, you can generate such numbers using RSA UFOs, and this is the approach that Anoncoin has chosen for their implementation of Zerocoin. Unfortunately, you can not do the same thing with the newer Zerocash protocol of Ben-Sasson (Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin). |
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but which coin in your opinion would be the most attractive to somebody who is new to this?
The problem is that most people don't do the research: None of the altcoins you listed are truly anonymous (even anoncoin today is not anonymous). For the most part, they are at best just using fancy ways to mix transactions to make it harder, but not impossible, to figure out transaction linkages. The best solution doesn't always win on the open market, as the rise of DRK attests. Zerocoin and Zerocash are the only solutions that I am aware of that provide 100% provable anonymity, and Anoncoin will probably be the first to implement zerocoin. So, to answer your question: Anoncoin is the most attractive for not only provable anonymity, but because it's price is currently in the gutter... there are quite few coins claiming to implement zerocoin right now. anoncoin absolutely must do it first in order to somehow recover. if other project gets there first somehow then its pretty much over. is there any way to at least find out how much zerocoin feature been done so far or at least hints on its finalisation? Exactly. ANC is a hit or miss atm. Current estimation is about 4 weeks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=227287.msg7425706#msg7425706 - but we have no way to tell if that is going to happen or not, previous estimates of launch in late march/early april failed to emerge. (and this is only for the test net) what about other projects? they have estimates? There are only two options at this point: Anoncoin's implementation of the original Zerocoin protocol, or Zerocash, which is a modified version of Zerocoin. Other altcoins might fork these implementations later, but no other altcoin will beat these two to the finish line. Zerocash claims that they need between 2-5 months, but I think that they are being overly optimistic (just as was anoncoin....). |
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Why do people need decentralized storage? Just for Storj coins?
IMO, centralized storage is enough for me.
So you trust Dropbox/Condoleezza-Rice to back up your altcoin wallets? |
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but which coin in your opinion would be the most attractive to somebody who is new to this?
The problem is that most people don't do the research: None of the altcoins you listed are truly anonymous (even anoncoin today is not anonymous). For the most part, they are at best just using fancy ways to mix transactions to make it harder, but not impossible, to figure out transaction linkages. The best solution doesn't always win on the open market, as the rise of DRK attests. Zerocoin and Zerocash are the only solutions that I am aware of that provide 100% provable anonymity, and Anoncoin will probably be the first to implement zerocoin. So, to answer your question: Anoncoin is the most attractive for not only provable anonymity, but because it's price is currently in the gutter... |
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Here is some news from Gnosis, taken from the IRC channel. The good news is that it appears that testing of the RSA UFOs, which are a crucial element of Zerocoin, will begin in the next day or two <Gnosis@I2P>: Gnosis@I2P is still alive  M10: Gnosis: great to hear! do you have an ETA for the test UFO client? <Gnosis@I2P> M10, if all goes well, 3 days from now Next, here are a few details he gave us on the purpose of the UFO factorization tests lunokhod: Gnosis, I'm curious what exactly your UFO factorization tests are supposed to do. Are you going to try to factorize increasingly larger numbers, and then extrapolate how much time it would take to factorize employed valued used in Anoncoin? Or are you going to test the probability that there are in fact two large primes in a given RSA UFO (as a function of size)? Or something else?
<Gnosis@I2P>: What we ultimately need for Zerocoin is a set of RSA UFOs such that the probability of all of them being factorizable is less than 1 in a billion. To achieve this, we pick ~13 3840-bit numbers pseudo-randomly and try to find increasingly larger factors. If any of these candidates are reduced to less than 90% of their bit length, we pick a new candidate in its place. If we expend enough effort into attempting to factor these, the probability can be ~0.80 that each one cannot be factored. |
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Here is another interesting article describing how to deanonymize bitcoin by linking transactions to IP addresses: http://www.coindesk.com/eavesdropping-attack-can-unmask-60-bitcoin-clients/It is my understanding that Anoncoin is immune to this type of attack if you route your client through i2p. However, it is less clear to me if the same type of attack would work with darkcoin darksend transactions and cryptonote transactions. Does anyone have any insight on this? |
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What exactly is the problem you are hinting? I don't see it. The article discusses how to deanonymize bitcoin transactions that make use of CoinJoin (which is a simple way of mixing a small number of transactions together in a block). DarkCoin's "darksend" is based on coinjoin, so I presume that it is equally unsafe (but perhaps there are some extra subtleties). The point is: If anoncoin gets zerocoin working, it will be the only truly anonymous coin out there... I quote from the article: Bitcoin users in need of serious transaction privacy should avoid popular services like Blockchain’s SharedCoin and other CoinJoin implementations, according to a well-known security expert.
Consultant Kristov Atlas, author of the book Anonymous Bitcoin, published a security advisory today saying weaknesses in SharedCoin offered privacy only from “unskilled examiners of the bitcoin blockchain” – and even then, only until more sophisticated analysis tools were made user-friendly enough for the average user to deploy.
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Hello Everyone. Anyone interested to see Top 50 Rich addresses in Anoncoins?? Please vote , and places your guesses. What do you think is the balance of the richest address? What percentage does the top 10 or 50 addresses hold??? Reply and share your guesses.. I will release the list on ancblockchain.com very soon.. K1773R (AK1773RTmRKtvbKBCrUu95UQg5iegrqyeA) = 6004.2 ANC Meeh (AMeehr1AtpyMaZKVLv4Tb1wdRtVfx3wDj3) = 6580.86402573 ANC Neither is in the top 20, but it is good to know that they have a modest stake in anoncoin. |
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Anoncoin value is falling off the cliff in exchanges. It now costs less than 1 mBTC. And you might be worried about it. You can help Anoncoin community by doing following things. 1. Participate actively in the forum and on IRC chat. Write articles about anoncoin on blogs and forums. At least one new article in the forum or blogs in every 12 hours. 2. Create supernodes of Anoncoins to strengthen the Anoncoin Network. 3. If you are developer , there are many possibilities on what you can do by creating applications and tools. 4. Tweet about Anoncoin and its features. Discuss about the difference with Darkcoin and how its better. Finally, You can also donate few ANCs to my address, so that i can build more applications and services. http://ancblockchain.com/address/ASAdJpndrVcuMzfA52XBGzQMhFRQfdCh7k . Could you tell me what a supernode is, and how you can set this up? |
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are you actually going to come threw on zerocoin? many have said they will and just scam grabbing some up for the low  Thanks, hope we can finish it soon. Could you give us an rough estimate for when you will implement zerocoin? As you are aware, Anoncoin is claiming that they will have this done in about 1 more month. Zerocash (which is somewhat similar) is claiming to come out in 3-6 months. Do you plan on beating Anoncoin? |
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If you only use I2P for ANC, why dont you just use ANC in clearnet as privacy is none of ur concerns.
Good point! Some things I demand privacy for, and others not. Other times I use TOR. In any case, I should have said that I use "-onlynet=i2p" Regardless, it's great to hear that there will be a choice to use the built in version. I think that most of us here don't mind installing i2p at the command line, but if Anoncoin becomes widely adopted, the majority of users will do whatever is the easiest, which at this point is clearnet. I would therefore make i2p to be the default option. It would probably be a good idea to require that the user encrypts their wallet as well. |
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@ Skaia - Wouldn't mind seeing ANC on a less laggy exchange. I don't hate cryptsy, it just is slow and clunky to navigate!!!
Not sure why they are taking so long with their wallet. It is kinda annoying to update tho, have to start I2P network, wait 5 mins, start anoncoin wallet, close anoncoin wallet, then open anoncoin wallet again.
What a rigmarole for I2P. Maybe I should try the other networks see if they are easier?
Yeah, I kind of agree here. I only use i2p for the anoncoin client too, and it is a bit annoying. If the developers added an i2p router to anoncoin, along with zerocoin, it would be a killer app. |
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I have some ideas about how to integrate (parts of) the Zerocash system http://zerocash-project.org/paper into Anoncoin. If the ANC devs are interested in experimenting with a few things on testnet please let me know. Unfortunately for ANC if substantial progress is not made soon I am afraid DRK (or potentially a few others) will win the battle for anonymous coin supremacy (by winning the adoption race) even if its technology is not necessarily the best. I don't think that the competition is Dark Coin: they will slowly go away as better solutions are offered. Nevertheless, if Matthew Green and his team releases Zerocash before Anoncoin releases their version of Zerocoin, Anoncoin will be dead with no hope of resurrection, EVER. Matthew Green brings "respectability" to the table (at least to some, I could care less) as an academic crytptographer, and they are certain to find a setup of their initial parameters that will likely be "acceptable", even if it is not trustless. It is true that you can not monitor the total money supply of Zerocash, and that trust is an important issue, but if people trust Darkcoin and CryptoNote, they will certainly trust Zerocash. Furthermore, as a coin coming from academia, I am certain that Zerocash will be introduced in a fair manner (unlike DRK), and will come with ample documentation. According to Ian Meirs's twitter feed, they are planning a Zerocash release in 3-6 months time ( https://twitter.com/secparam/status/468784402558771200). The Anoncoin devs are way behind schedule, have not set up the testnet, and are not responding at all to help that is being offered from the community. I have tried to contact them via this forum, reddit, and the irc channel, offering 20 cores for the entire month of June for their brute force attacks on RSA UFOs, and have received no response. A previous poster offered 5000 USD in matching funds for Gnosis if he finished Zerocoin by June 1, and he wasn't even interested (10k in ANC would certainly become 1 million a month later, if successful....). Though Meeh stated in March that Gnosis received financial backing to implement Zerocoin, Meeh's last post states that Gnosis is busy with his other full time job and can not commit ample time to Zerocoin. Meeh's idea of "I'll get back with more Anoncoin updates soon!" is 3 months time. In three more months, zerocash could already be here. So, my prognosis is the following: If the developers have nothing to show us by July 1, this coin will die. I assumed a testnet was already set up.... I dont want to blame the developers (it appears their time may be limited because of other obligations) but they should accept offers to help when available. Lets set up a bounty pool with rewards for hitting certain benchmarks. I am sure many ANC holders would be happy to contribute. Why not hire outside coders if the current devs are too busy and/or cannot give us frequent updates? I already suggested setting up a donation address for bounties about a month or two ago, and the devs never responded. |
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I have some ideas about how to integrate (parts of) the Zerocash system http://zerocash-project.org/paper into Anoncoin. If the ANC devs are interested in experimenting with a few things on testnet please let me know. Unfortunately for ANC if substantial progress is not made soon I am afraid DRK (or potentially a few others) will win the battle for anonymous coin supremacy (by winning the adoption race) even if its technology is not necessarily the best. I don't think that the competition is Dark Coin: they will slowly go away as better solutions are offered. Nevertheless, if Matthew Green and his team releases Zerocash before Anoncoin releases their version of Zerocoin, Anoncoin will be dead with no hope of resurrection, EVER. Matthew Green brings "respectability" to the table (at least to some, I could care less) as an academic crytptographer, and they are certain to find a setup of their initial parameters that will likely be "acceptable", even if it is not trustless. It is true that you can not monitor the total money supply of Zerocash, and that trust is an important issue, but if people trust Darkcoin and CryptoNote, they will certainly trust Zerocash. Furthermore, as a coin coming from academia, I am certain that Zerocash will be introduced in a fair manner (unlike DRK), and will come with ample documentation. According to Ian Meirs's twitter feed, they are planning a Zerocash release in 3-6 months time ( https://twitter.com/secparam/status/468784402558771200). The Anoncoin devs are way behind schedule, have not set up the testnet, and are not responding at all to help that is being offered from the community. I have tried to contact them via this forum, reddit, and the irc channel, offering 20 cores for the entire month of June for their brute force attacks on RSA UFOs, and have received no response. A previous poster offered 5000 USD in matching funds for Gnosis if he finished Zerocoin by June 1, and he wasn't even interested (10k in ANC would certainly become 1 million a month later, if successful....). Though Meeh stated in March that Gnosis received financial backing to implement Zerocoin, Meeh's last post states that Gnosis is busy with his other full time job and can not commit ample time to Zerocoin. Meeh's idea of "I'll get back with more Anoncoin updates soon!" is 3 months time. In three more months, zerocash could already be here. So, my prognosis is the following: If the developers have nothing to show us by July 1, this coin will die. |
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We have our own forum now at http://storjtalk.org. We will be giving out 1 SJ0 per post when we do our crowdsale soon. I just tried to create an account there on the forum, but I keep getting "The following errors were detected in your registration. Please correct them to continue: You did not answer the verification questions correctly." I tried several times with different captchas... |
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I think the XLB will come true with anonymous technology. Because of IE.
Yeah, IE is a scammer. Also a coin does not need to be anonymous. Anonymous services can be used external to the coin for anonymity. DarkCoin's anonymity comes at a VERY high price, 10% of every block in fact. Darkcoin is not anonymous either. It only mixes your transaction with a few others. It offers better privacy than other coins, but that is about it. Do you not know how darkcoin works? It's anonymity equals that of Bytecoin's and those Bytecoin clones(Monero, Quazarcoin, HoneyPenny, and FantomCoin) Plus, while it's masternodes serve a function to provide anonymous transactions, they also serve as an huge incentive to uphold the network. With bitcoin, if you run a node to help the network, you dont get paid, with Darkcoin you do... Not to mention, Darkcoin will be having I2P AND Ring Signatures. It's practically the perfect anonymous coin, and it isn't a clone, like Monero, Quazarcoin, HoneyPenny, and Fantomcoin, are of Bytecoin. You do not seem to understand the difference between anonymity and privacy. In Darkcoin, it is hard to figure out the transaction linkages because of coinjoin/darksend, but not impossible. Even the developer acknowledges that. Btyecoin is similar: The fewer the number of participants in the ring signature, the easier it is to figure out the sender. The developers acknowledge that. It is no secret. I2P only hides your IP number. This is useful, but is unrelated to blockchain analysis. Darkcoin will not implement ring signatures according to the developers. Do your homework, and stop wasting people's time. |
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I don;t know what is going on with this project, are the devs still working on it? do they still plan on implementing zerocoin? any time frames?
Yes Yes I cant give you an ETA, ask Gnosis. Also this would only be a rough guestimate. I asked Gnosis about the time frame - no reply I also asked Meeh - no reply As you are an anoncoin developer, do you have contact with Gnosis and Meeh? They told us that the test net would go live about two months ago, but since then, there has been complete radio silence. In Meeh's March blog entry, a lot was promised, but nothing has yet materialized. We all understand that these things usually take longer than planned, and we would of course like them to get things right, but a simple update from time to time doesn't seem like too much to ask for. I am not asking them to pump this coin with propaganda in any way like darkcoin, but their disregard for the Anoncoin "community" (if you can call it that, you just need to read this thread and count the number of people who have become disillusioned) shows a complete lack of professionalism. Sure, perhaps this is just a small side project for them, but if that were the case, Meeh should not say on the official Anoncoin website that this is his full time job. If Zerocoin is implemented, that would be great for Anoncoin in the short term. Nevertheless, other copycats will certainly follow. Ultimately, I will chose to use that coin which has the best community, and which has the best development team that is committed to implementing new features. I really doubt that the real winner in the end will be Anoncoin. I hope to be proven wrong, because I am truly impressed with how knowledgable the developers are. You see, I offered these guys a fiat donation for implementing ZC and they called it just a stack of bills... totally nuts. Brotroxer is little awkwardly expressed at the end of the response, and didn't contacted the major developers. After that Gnos1s accept your offer. Actually I was clear in the sense that I'd match donations from the community up to $5,000... so I expected to see some action from them in this regard, but they didn't move a finger AFAIK. I understand Gnosis is a busy person (though I disagree with his absolute lack of communication), but he could have delegated the task of managing donations to someone such as... Brotroxer? What again does that guy do? Also I don't think ZC will be ready by June 1st, there's just no time left, and even if they managed to do it somehow, there'd be no donations for matching. I don't get it either. 10,000 USD will likely become 1 million USD at the peak of the post zerocoin bubble. Either the devs are already wealthy, extremely idealistic, extremely naive, or just screwed up. I have brought up "delegation" before, and they don't seem to get it: If you look at the website, you will notice that they recently added "We are in need of a person (or team) to perform PR, and community support. You can donate your time, or get paid for your work on a regular basis." This is exactly what I suggested should be done about a month ago in this thread (i.e., a team of about three people). They even copy-pasted my coinwiki article on Anoncoin (in an extremely awkward way) into their site (no tips, THANKS ALOT!). I already offered to help, for free: no reply. At this point, I just don't care anymore. If the devs pull this off, I will cash out at the first opportunistic moment, and support the first zerocoin clone that comes along. If the devs think that I am in this just for a quick investment, they can go fuck themselves. |
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