I literally answered your question earlier:

This has been discussed at length, it's to ensure that (generally speaking) an attacker can't determine if you are using Monero or not.

FoxyProxy is centralised using their servers, it's not a decentralised solution to masking traffic.

Except that with Bitcoin you can trust a mined transaction after a few confirmations, despite not trusting anyone on the network. Bitcoin solved the BGP (Byzantine General's Problem) using the blockchain. Doing it anonymously requires ingenuity and extreme cleverness in the fields of software development, mathematics, and cryptography.

This has been discussed at length, it's to ensure that (generally speaking) an attacker can't determine if you are using Monero or not.

We're not beholden to what the CryptoNote academics believe, so whilst any input they have to offer is always appreciated, we've already diverged far from their reference code, and will continue to do so as we fix deficiencies in their protocol (some of which were highlighted in the Monero whitepaper review).

There are two "simple gui" wallets, but bear in mind that Monero is not "like all these other coins"

From the OP:

GUI
All current GUIs are in beta, but they should be fairly safe to use because they work through bitmonerod and simplewallet from the main code.

• Qt GUI (Cross-platform) by Neozaru
• Windows GUI by Jojatekok

I actually don't disagree with you on some of the points you raised. But there are some bizarre things you've claimed.


The network is random in what sense? There are no delays, it's a low-latency network. Transactions broadcast from my laptop in South Africa show up within fractions of a second on one of my server's in the US (easily confirmed with print_tx <transaction ID> on any node).


I have yet to find a single instance where someone lost a single coin. There have been instances where people have used old clients with the incorrect fee, their transaction is thus not mined, and falls out the mempool within 24 hours. Since they're using an old client they won't be aware of this unless they delete their mempool and wallet cache and sync up again. Yet the coins are clearly not "lost".


You absolutely can, it's inherently baked into the protocol. There is no tooling for this yet, as could be expected from a cryptocurrency that is a few months old and doesn't have the pleasure of inheriting 5.5 years worth of work on Bitcoin's code and then just being able to add small features to it.

It's basically impossible to "lose" funds. The worst that can happen is that you've done something completely bizarre, and the transaction falls out of the mempool after 24 hours.

We've seized power over the whole of gitHub?

*flexes muscles*

Fear me, puny humans! We have seized power over the whole of gitHub! We now control all of the open-source projects in the known universe! You cannot fork them to BitBucket or a Gitlab instance!

We are the masters...of...gitHub!

Agreed - in my opinion it's the most elegant solution, as it prevents miner collusion and selfish miners artificially forcing a fee increase by rejecting / slowing down min-fee transactions. Fees may still serve a dual purpose, though - both as a way of preventing spam, and as a way of indicating transaction priority.

Just discussions on IRC in #monero-dev (we will move to a more archivable format soon) - once something is ready to be formalised it will be proposed and put up for commentary.

That image is a follow-on to the CryptoNote whitepaper, so it uses the same parlance. This is not "mixing" in the Bitcoin or CoinJoin sense - everyone is well aware that any approach that has the term "mixing", "nodes", or "CoinJoin" is fundamentally broken.

The bottom line is that knowing that there was 1 of 5 people involved in a transaction still won't help the FBI figure out who those 5 people were (even assuming they have locked up your drug dealer and have access to his wallet).

Yeah, I was just being snarky:-P


I don't think pruning is possible, at least not in the way you could with Bitcoin. There are other things we're looking at, but in my opinion pruning is a non-starter for solving this.

Not really, you still have to trust someone to build that hardware.

There's a running joke when discussing "secure" systems, that if you want it to be "truly" secure you have to design and build the hardware yourself, and then write the OS yourself. And it has to have no exploitable bugs. In other words, good luck with that;)

When you take usability into account (presumably you don't want to jump through tons of hoops for every message you send and every penny you spend), the best you can do is exercise a moderate amount of caution, and use older, known cryptography on older, known hardware.

There is no indication that I2P offers "illusory" protection. There are theoretical attacks that remain to be proven, and there are demonstrable attacks that are quickly patched. It is not perfect, but again, it is an added layer of obfuscation that will make it exceedingly hard for an advanced and resourceful attacker to even determine whether you are running Monero or not.

I also never said bloat was a non-issue, but that we were aware of it and we were not concerned with solving it right now, most certainly not in some half-baked way that has potentially far-reaching and devastating consequences. We aren't diverting attention from it, we are solving things around it whilst we consider existing solutions and invent brand new ones.

If it will make you feel like you won some sort of non-existent argument, you are welcome post once a day on the Monero topic and say "just a reminder that the Monero blockchain is going to be linearly larger than Bitcoin's when it reaches the same amount of use!"

Confirmed:)

Thank you all!

That's not how ring signatures work.

In order for the FBI to come talk to the other parties in the ring group, they would need to completely compromise all parties. This is, of course, unlikely to the point of being impossible.

An analogy is like you being at a coffee shop using the wifi, along with a bunch of other people. Someone in the group does something illegal, and the FBI find out about it. They know there was a group of people, and that it was one of the group, and that's it. They have no video camera footage they can use to identify the participants, just the knowledge of the number of participants.

You're conflating - the conversation you were involved in was about the "best" anonymous coin, not the most usable or the most feature-complete. The person referred to ZeroCoin, so clearly they're talking about the "best" with regards to the degree of anonymity provided.

Bloat is something we know about, but not something we're concerned with solving right now, so stop bringing it up. Rehashing it is a strawman argument.

A minute, maybe 2. Variance on 60 second blocks isn't terrible, so I haven't seen a notably high block time yet.

First thing to check would be monerochain.info to see if it's been mined, just search for the transaction ID. If it is, then make sure you "refresh" the other wallet, and make sure you're caught up and in-sync with the network.

mixin = the level of ambiguity you want to add to the transfer (ie. the number of signatures you want to mix with)

payment ID = an optional field, exchanges and merchants may give you a 64 character string to put in here

The fee is currently 0.005 XMR per transaction. This will change in future.

As a South African I'm in the ideal place to test Monero under rubbish Internet infrastructure:) A lightweight wallet would be great here, but it'll still be too heavy for mobile phones, for instance.

I think that off-chain services are better suited to certain parts of the globe, with a small number of full nodes running in that country. At the same time, solutions to this differ from environment to environment, and will reveal themselves over time as people in that country who know the lay of the land decide to drive it.

Unfortunately it's not possible to completely disable the ability to prove a transaction is yours. After all, your "balance" (for want of a better term) is really just the sum of all your unspent inputs, determined by stepping through the blockchain with your private key and determining, for each transaction, if it contains an output or input related to you. Thus, at its worst, a user could move funds to a new wallet and reveal their private key for the old in order to expose transactions. We have to accept this as a given.

Thus, we may as well provide the functionality in a way that doesn't compromise users on either side of the transaction. BUT - you are right, it is not a major focus right now. There are stacks of other things that have to be done before we get to this tooling, but it is on the radar.

Changes to increase resistance to attacks that attempt to reduce the anonymity set are under discussion (as evidenced here, but on IRC more), so we definitely aren't letting things stay as-is:)


Monero is at least 12 months away from anything close to this, and it's hard to determine when it is "safe enough" for this. My comment was just to point out that to the casual observers, very technical people, and even reasonably sophisticated attackers Monero is already "safe enough". To a more sophisticated attacker, especially the aforementioned 3LAs, there are so many edge cases we need to deal with that it will take time. But in its current form, it already blows CoinJoin out the water.