By design, no. Otherwise someone could just access your funds as long as they had your keys file.

The wallet program doesn't have any memory of what it created and when; it just looks for .keys files in the same directory depending on your call argument. Delete your wallet-related files and start over (there's a .bin, a .bin.keys, and a text file with the address).

Call it from terminal for the first time with:

./simplewallet --generate-new-wallet wallet.bin

And every subsequent time with:

./simplewallet --wallet wallet.bin

simplewallet needs to be called with the argument "--wallet wallet.bin", if wallet.bin is what you named it.

The altcoin space is mostly people who watch coinmarketcap for movement and buy during pumps initiated by 'whales'. Why would the anonymity coin subspace be different? Actual properties of coins are manifested in a long-term drift in price, not daily movements. This 'flatlining' you refer to is, what, the last 2 days? Many of us sat on Darkcoin for 3-4 months before it went anywhere.

Few exchanges have adopted it because it takes work, unlike for Bitcoin-based coins where they already have everything set up. More will follow in the next few months.

I find it funny that "BCN" is used, even though that's a name bitcointalk came up with 2 months ago for this 2 year old currency. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

You shouldn't be worried about them shutting down. You should be worried about them logging data without telling you and providing it to governments, which tech companies are known to do (see PRISM for example). The approach is neither decentralized nor trustless.

smooth, good point about recipients.

Can you (or someone else) explain what Boolberry did to allow pruning and why it works? The solution I knew of was to make old outputs unspendable. This quote from crypto_zoidberg:

For this reason in Boolberry we changed tx identification from whole blob hash to tx_prefix hash, and when blockchain entry will be covered by checkpoint the ring signatures could be cutoff.

These are all correct points. Tacotime wanted the thread name and OP to use the word privacy instead of anonymity, but I made the change for marketing reasons. Other coins do use the word anonymous improperly, so we too have to play the marketing game. Most users will not bother looking at details to see which actually has more privacy; they'll assume anonymity > privacy. In a world with finite population, there's no such thing as anonymity. You're always "1 of N" possible participants.

Zero knowledge gives N -> everyone using the currency, ring signatures give N -> your choice, and CoinJoin gives N -> people who happen to be spending around the same amount of money as you at around the same time. This is actually the critical weakness of CoinJoin: the anonymity set is small and it's fairly susceptible to blockchain analysis. Its main advantage is that you can stick to Bitcoin without hard forking.

Another calculated marketing decision: I made most of the OP about ring signatures. In reality, stealth addressing (i.e. one-time public keys) already provides you with 90% of the privacy you need. Ring signatures are more of a trump card that cannot be broken. But Bitcoin already has manual stealth addressing so the distinguishing technological factor in CryptoNote is the use of ring signatures.

This is why I think having a coin based on CoinJoin is silly: Bitcoin already has some privacy if you care enough. A separate currency needs to go way beyond mediocre privacy improvements and provide true indistinguishably. This is true thanks to ring signatures: you can never break the 1/N probability of guessing correctly. There's no additional circumstantial evidence like with CoinJoin (save for IP addresses, but that's a problem independent of cryptocurrencies).

I recommend to DRK holders that they partially diversify to put an end to this obvious insecurity. Diversification is smart financially, too.

He bases this on 2 things:

1. He wants built-in IP obfuscation. You could also argue that it's an independent function that's already available with other software. In any case, I think CN-based coins will eventually have I2P once a dev gets around to it. It makes sense to make it easier (for the less technically-capable user), but this is not a systemic limitation and it doesn't have anything to do with CN v. Zero v. CoinJoin.

He also wants something better than Tor or I2P. I asked him what, and he said what he envisioned doesn't exist yet. AnonyMint is an idealist who will find fault in everything (not that there's anything wrong with that). You should maybe see his other post where he compared the practical aspects of the various anonymity systems and said CN probably has the best trade-off choices. gmaxwell said the same. I'm paraphrasing - neither of them are necessarily pro-CN.

2. He misunderstood the implementation of ring signatures. Outputs are broken down so matching pairs can always be found and rendered indistinguishable. He initially thought that they weren't, which would require exact matching of totals. Hence the comment that the opportunity to use ring signatures is rare. You can actually always use them with the way BCN implemented it. (It's actually CoinJoin that has this very problem, because it requires concurrent participants.)

My knowledge isn't deep, I just read up on things said by people who do have deep knowledge.

One should understand his own investments and the competition before investing, no? This seems to escape most people, who prefer to latch on to a few words that they think they understand (and then go on a trolling spree).

I'm afraid with that, you show you have no clue what ring signatures even are. This is actually where CryptoNote outperforms DRK by a massive margin that cannot be closed. DRK, like just about all altcoins, has a microscopic volume in the bigger financial picture - only BTC (and maybe LTC) has the consistent volume to pull off half-usable CoinJoin since it requires other participants. Ring signatures do perfect mixing with arbitrary amounts and arbitrarily low volume. And I do mean perfect (bounded by the anonymity set). They are the theoretical limit that CoinJoin can't approach. ZKP is also perfect, but with a larger anonymity set that comes with other costs.

You also don't seem to understand 'bloating'. Because that's actually not even it - the issue is pruning. All cryptographically strong anonymity solutions cannot perform pruning because they, by nature, need outputs from far in the past. Why? Because that's precisely how you get a large anonymity set! The very reason Bitcoin and Bitcoin-clones like DRK can perform pruning is because their anonymity is of low quality and fundamentally limited to that low quality. Saying a system has '99.99% anonymity' when you don't seem to understand the concept of an anonymity set is kind of silly, no?

There actually are (inconvenient) ways to prune ring signature or zero knowledge currencies. But here we are in 2014 with a large Bitcoin blockchain and we're doing fine. Hardware and network improvements have outpaced the blockchain growth. If sync time is your argument against actual anonymity rather than pretend anonymity, that's rather unconvincing.

Too obvious.

By the way, as pointed out by gmaxwell, CoinJoin is already available in Bitcoin. The only difference is that this CoinJoin is run by Amazon instead of blockchain.info.

Last I checked, discrete GPUs are an expensive technology largely confined to rich white Western males. Let's not pretend it's 'fair'. Just like everyone else, they're an interest group trying to serve themselves. It's actually a rather tiny community in the grand scheme (the world is pretty big), but they have a disproportionate presence on this forum.

I think there probably will be one and it probably will be faster one-on-one compared to a CPU. Whether it will be faster for the same cost (fixed and/or electricity) remains to be seen. This is *much* more memory bound than scrypt, so the GPU/CPU performance ratio should be worse.

Seeing as you capitalize Ring Signatures (tm?), I'm guessing you have no idea it's a cryptographic primitive rather than some proprietary lines of code. O(n) scaling is a property of this group, as a basic Google scholar search will tell you.

I'm really not sure why you feel qualified to comment on what's 'stoneage'. 'Sheer specs' aren't very helpful when you don't understand what you're actually reading.

Technical illiteracy is fine, but contradiction a few words down the sentence? It's 2014. Even trolling requires minimum standards.

I wonder if concern trolls feel cognitive dissonance when declaring ring signatures 'unscalable' and then turning right around and talking about their currency adopting ring signatures in 'V2' to stay even. Fascinating.

If this were true, it would also crash all other anonymous coins. Anyway, as I pointed out in my previous post, it's easy to abstract away and imagine something 'better' coming along but taking a hard look at known cryptography, we have it pretty good as it is. I'm pretty comfortable with my risk level.

You're confusing CryptoNote and Bytecoin. BCN just happens to be an implementation where the devs had contact with CN before CN went public. Most of BCN's code even says "// Copyright (c) 2012-2013 The Cryptonote developers" right at the top so they might even have just gotten freebies from CN. CryptoNote devs are the real geniuses behind all this and they're NOT secretive profit-seekers like BCN devs. They even have a website and a forum where they actively respond to questions.

If anyone radically improves CN, it will likely be CN devs themselves, which means it will be available for all CN forks to implement. They don't release their own cryptocurrencies, but merely monitor their proliferation and provide assistance.

You need to look at the anonymity technology itself instead of abstracting away. Ring signature size scales linearly with the anonymity set. Zero-knowledge proofs are constant size (anonymity set is the entire network), but there are other well-known shortcomings. What's an improvement over these two? Constant small size with an unlimited anonymity set but without ZKP weaknesses - i.e. no trusted entity initiation or total blinding of the economy. The ability to prune so that a verifier doesn't require a large storage space would also be nice.

Let me know when you come with cryptography that can pull that off. All of academia doesn't seem to know right now. Even ZKPs are at the edge of modern research, so I'll worry about BCN 2.0 in 2024 rather than now.