Peter Todd calls dash snake oil.

[toknormal]

Dash is not in competition with Monero, which is not a cryptocurrency, was not designed as a cryptocurrency and is unlikely to ever perform a cryptocurrency role other than as a minority speculative asset (as it is does right now).

Monero (or the original design specification that characterises cryptonote's behaviour) is a cryptographic record keeping system designed to track money in a bank. What some fly developer decided to do (wittingly or unwittingly) is lift the template for the record keeping system, ditch the bank and try to get away with calling the residual cryptographic transport mechanism "money".

The Nature of Money is Not Obscurity
Contrary to what a lot of cryptographic programmers come-self-appointed-monetary-analysts assert, privacy (in the sense of hiding transactions) is not an integral part of any "money like good". It is the domain of record keeping for such.

Metals, Coal and even Paper cash do not have privacy "buit into them". They have fungibility which supports anonymity amongst its holders. The records that track the transactions for such "money like goods" are private and may (as in the case of bank accounts) in fact be referred to as 'money' but they are not the money, they are just the records.

Obscurity - A Bookkeeping Concept
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is no intermediate counterparty holding records on your behalf. (If there was, a system like cryptonote might still be of some use). Cryptocurrency therefore re-orders the priorities of monetary transparency and record keeping privacy such that latter becomes the domain of the holder and not the monetary media itself. This is what allows bitcoin to be defined as base money as opposed to a mere record keeping system.

Anonymity - A "Visible Cash" Concept
What IS important in cryptocurrency, however, is fungibility - as everyone keeps raging about. Improving fungibility enhances the performance of any money-like-good as a cash medium. Coal is pretty fungible. You could watch a shipment of coal arrive at the port without reasonably distinguishing it from any other shipment. But you wouldn't improve the fungibility by hiding the shipment altogether - you'd simply be sowing doubt about the its existence and destroying coal's suitability as a monetary medium.

Dash does not try to do this. It is possibly the only cryptocurrency project right now that has all the design priorities of blockchain-based money in the right balance.

Who Has the Right Design Goals ?
Dash hasn't thrown the baby out with the bathwater like sidechains does (by ruining bitcoin's fungibility and mobility - two fundamental properties of good money) or by reverting the blockchain back to a mere bookkeeping system as cryptonote does. Instead of such car crash, ill thought through sledghammer approaches, it adds a little bit of salt, in a minimally invasive way to the existing bitcoin architecture while extracting huge gains from the result. In other words, it doesn't hide the coal shipments, it just makes the piles of coal less 'lumpy' and perfectly fungible.

Peter Todd may have had a weak technical case if Dash and Monero had been trying to solve the same problem. They are not. Cryptonote is solving the wrong problem - one that's associated with its original role as a record keeping system. You can't just take a cryptographic banking system, throw away the bank and call it money. (You can fool some of the people...).

Dash, on the other hand, is addressing a genuine monetary property - i.e. solving the "right problem" without adversely impacting any other characteristic of bitcoin's almost-perfect design.

[smooth]

Dash is not in competition with Monero, which is not a cryptocurrency, was not designed as a cryptocurrency and is unlikely to ever perform a cryptocurrency role other than as a minority speculative asset (as it is does right now).

Monero (or the original design specification that characterises cryptonote's behaviour) is a cryptographic record keeping system designed to track money in a bank. What some fly developer decided to do (wittingly or unwittingly) is lift the template for the record keeping system, ditch the bank and try to get away with calling the residual cryptographic transport mechanism "money".

Toknormal you have not the slightest clue how the technology works. The NSA document you linked bears no resemblance at all to how cryptonote works.

In fact cryptonote works almost exactly the same way as Bitcoin or Dash, but with different formats for addresses and signatures, while the document you linked works nothing like Bitcoin and discusses almost exclusively Chaum's e-cash schemes that preceded Bitcoin both chronologically and as a matter of fundamental design iteration (specifically the major advance of Bitcoin, and retained in both Dash and cryptonote, was to remove the bank function that you are confused about).

You would do your cause good to actually learn something about the design of what it is you are flailing around trying to criticize and avoid citing documents that are not only off-base from a technical perspective, but bear exactly the same relationship to Dash as they do to Monero in terms of technical lineage.

Metals, Coal and even Paper cash do not have privacy "buit into them".

This is fundamentally wrong. Physical money is inherently private in that only the parties transacting have knowledge of the transaction (unless they choose to share that knowledge). Bitcoin removed this privacy by making all transactions public to every third party in the world. More private systems like Dash and Monero try to restore the original property of being private-by-default. Peter Todd has his opinion about which is more of a valid solution, as do both of us. Two of those opinions are well-informed.

[generalizethis]

Dash is not in competition with Monero, which is not a cryptocurrency, was not designed as a cryptocurrency and is unlikely to ever perform a cryptocurrency role other than as a minority speculative asset (as it is does right now).

Monero (or the original design specification that characterises cryptonote's behaviour) is a cryptographic record keeping system designed to track money in a bank. What some fly developer decided to do (wittingly or unwittingly) is lift the template for the record keeping system, ditch the bank and try to get away with calling the residual cryptographic transport mechanism "money".

Toknormal you have not the slightest clue how the technology works. The NSA document you linked bears no resemblance at all to how cryptonote works.

You would do your cause good to actually learn something about the actual design of what it is you are flailing around trying to criticize.

He doesn't understand how cash works either. He wants us all to live our digital lives without the wallet blindness afforded us by a leather wallet. He thinks all account balances should be public and on display for governments, mobsters, hackers, business competitors and our wives--Tok doesn't even get why people wouldn't want this public knowledge--he's a fucking moron or so deluded with his fantasy of dash becoming THE global currency that he misses the whole point of an anon coin--hiding shit when you want, showing shit when you want.

[toknormal]

Toknormal you have not the slightest clue how the technology works

Nothing would please me (or my wallet) more than for you to convince me of your case, since I could pick up nearly 5 times the amount of Monero for a given holding of Dash.

Somehow though...  

Maybe I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm just "ignorant" as smooth  alludes to or a "moron" as Generlize says, and will have to consign myself to eternal poverty from now on  

(P.S. It's the public who ultimately decides what is money and what isn't. If you're trying to define and pass of mere 'balances' as money then a public blockchain is a public blockchain. "Obscure" it at your peril).

[generalizethis]

Toknormal you have not the slightest clue how the technology works

Nothing would please me (or my wallet) more than for you to convince me of your case, since I could pick up nearly 5 times the amount of Monero for a given holding of Dash.

Somehow though...  

Maybe I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm just "ignorant" as smooth  alludes to or a "moron" as Generlize says, and will have to consign myself to eternal poverty from now on  

(P.S. It's the public who ultimately decides what is money and what isn't. If you're trying to define and pass of mere 'balances' as money then a public blockchain is a public blockchain. "Obscure" it at your peril).

I wrote moron or deluded by greed (cognitive dissonance).

We obscure cash every day in our wallets. People decided that, they actually created a thing to hide their money in because they either liked the privacy or thought they needed it--in your backwards dashworld, people are wearing their cash around their necks.

[toknormal]

We obscure cash every day in our wallets

Never mind.

I'm sure the discerning public will understand your logic, even if I don't 

[PenguinsDancing]

I'm interested in the discussion about what makes money money. Two questions:

Obscurity - A Bookkeeping Concept
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is no intermediate counterparty holding records on your behalf. (If there was, a system like cryptonote might still be of some use). Cryptocurrency therefore re-orders the priorities of monetary transparency and record keeping privacy such that latter becomes the domain of the holder and not the monetary media itself. This is what allows bitcoin to be defined as base money as opposed to a mere record keeping system.

I'm not sure I understood the point here and I think that is making it more difficult to get the rest of your discussion. Can you elaborate a bit?

You can't just take a cryptographic banking system, throw away the bank and call it money. (You can fool some of the people...).

What specific problems result from obscuring the blockchain? Why does hiding transactions make something less like money? (and for the Monero people here, is this actually what Monero does? If not, please explain why so that someone with limited familiarity with Monero or cryptography could understand.)

[smooth]

You can't just take a cryptographic banking system, throw away the bank and call it money. (You can fool some of the people...).

What specific problems result from obscuring the blockchain? Why does hiding transactions make something less like money? (and for the Monero people here, is this actually what Monero does? If not, please explain why so that someone with limited familiarity with Monero or cryptography could understand.)

I don't know what toknormal is talking about with the 'bank' business, and I doubt he does either.

Monero does two relevant things differently from Bitcoin:

1. It automatically creates a new address for each payment using stealth addresses. This would be the same as Bitcoin if people didn't reuse addresses (or use one one of the wallets for Bitcoin that support stealth addresses). This prevents linking multiple payments to the same recipient (since each uses a different address).

2. It signs transactions (spending an output) using ring signatures rather than regular signatures. Ring signatures cryptographically guarantee that one of the private key holders signed it, but don't reveal which it was. This prevents tracing of payments since there are multiple candidate sources for each payment.

Other than that it works the same as Bitcoin in terms of how it handles transactions (there are other differences such as different PoW, not having a fixed block size limit, etc. but those aren't relevant here). There is no bank, no bookkeeping, and none of the other nonsense toknormal was rambling about.

[toknormal]

Obscurity - A Bookkeeping Concept
In the case of cryptocurrency, there is no intermediate counterparty holding records on your behalf. (If there was, a system like cryptonote might still be of some use). Cryptocurrency therefore re-orders the priorities of monetary transparency and record keeping privacy such that latter becomes the domain of the holder and not the monetary media itself. This is what allows bitcoin to be defined as base money as opposed to a mere record keeping system.

I'm not sure I understood the point here and I think that is making it more difficult to get the rest of your discussion. Can you elaborate a bit?

It's to do with how you define "base money" as opposed to derivatives of base money. If you are a plumber and offer to do work for me in exchange for my bike, the "bike" forms the base money for the transaction. If then later I give you an IOU for the bike because you wanted to collect it later, the IOU becomes the money instead, but it is not the "base money" - the bike is. It lies at the end of a chain of trust which now comprises paper IOU as well as the bike.

We consider a fiat bank account to be "money" since it can be exchanged for goods. But it is actually just a number in an account which is backed by base money - (ultimately 'debt' which in turn represents some other person's future contribution to the economy). Gold shares that are traded on the stock exchange are not "base money", they are secondary derivatives (like the IOU). The gold is sitting in the vault and doesn't physically change hands but represents the "base money" for the transaction.

When is comes to "privacy" in the traditional world it is a distinct concept from "fungibility". Privacy manifests itself in the accounting for base money (in this respect, I equate a fiat bank account to a bookeeping function which tracks it's holders call on a common pool of debt - the debt which acts as the 'base money' for the economy).

Cryptocurrency portends to re-invent the concept of 'base money'. It is a base monetary medium that is not backed by anything. It is anonymous (because unlike a fiat bank account, it is not directly associated with an individual / legal entity). The way the Satoshi model is designed uses a type of public / private key approach to allow individuals to hold and transfer cryptocurrency without loss of anonymity and - more importantly as far as the 'integrity of base money' argument goes - without impacting on its transparency.

If you're going to design a new form of base money, you would do well to start with the properties of money and implement these as faithfully as possible. There is a broad level of agreement on what they are:

http://contrarianinvestorsjournal.com/?p=391#
http://www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/awb_nav.pl?s=wpd&c=dsp&k=money+characteristics
http://blog.milesfranklin.com/the-seven-characteristics-of-money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money

Note that "privacy" (as in "obscurity") features nowhere amongst them. Even the word privacy barely appears. If you're designing new money therefore, you need to decide if you're building the wallet or the contents. Cruptonote has done the former at the expense of the latter and that's why Dash isn't pursuing this route. Instead it has faithfully supported the public blockchain while at the same time addressing fungibility improvements directly.

Contrary to what Monero proponents like to promote, bitcoin IS a fully anonymous currency. Any information about who happened to be on the other end of a transaction has to be gleaned from OUTSIDE the blockchain. In this sense, it's exactly the same as paper cash - if you hand me a 100 dollar note, I can clearly associate that 100 dollar note with you. The amount of information you can glean about the people controlling the movements is mitigated by maximising the fungibility of the base-monetary media (which, as I've explained, is exactly what Dash is doing).

On the other hand, obfuscation of the blockchain is attaching a priority to the base monetary media that does not belong there - and particularly not in a new digital medium that portends to function as base money.

That type of obfuscation alludes to two incorrect appraisals of what cryptocurrency is:

[1] - a form of money where an address corresponds to a person as a bank account does (it doesn't any more than a lump of gold does)

[2] - a record keeping system backed by some other 'base money'

The 'public blockchain' is therefore an essential element of anthing that portends to act as 'base money' as opposed to a record keeping system which is backed by such.

I described this more fully in this post from earlier this year.

[From Above]

Who the fack is Peter Tudd?
So what crypto coin is not snake oil?
lmao
so boring

~CfA~

[g4q34g4qg47ww]

If you're going to design a new form of base money, you would do well to start with the properties of money and implement these as faithfully as possible. There is a broad level of agreement on what they are:

http://contrarianinvestorsjournal.com/?p=391#
http://www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/awb_nav.pl?s=wpd&c=dsp&k=money+characteristics
http://blog.milesfranklin.com/the-seven-characteristics-of-money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money

Note that "privacy" (as in "obscurity") features nowhere amongst them. Even the word privacy barely appears. If you're designing new money therefore, you need to decide if you're building the wallet or the contents. Cruptonote has done the former at the expense of the latter and that's why Dash isn't pursuing this route. Instead it has faithfully supported the public blockchain while at the same time addressing fungibility improvements directly.

What is being stated about DASH is that its methods of "addressing fungibility improvements directly" are unsound. So unsound in fact as to deserve the term "snake oil."

Nowhere in your links for the definition of money is it stated that a requirement for being considered base money is that it have a public accounting system. Gold does not have a universal directory of past transactions. Nor does cash. You have not explained why it is essential or even preferential for a currency to have this property, and none of your links claim it to be necessary in their definitions.

Contrary to what Monero proponents like to promote, bitcoin IS a fully anonymous currency. Any information about who happened to be on the other end of a transaction has to be gleaned from OUTSIDE the blockchain. In this sense, it's exactly the same as paper cash - if you hand me a 100 dollar note, I can clearly associate that 100 dollar note with you.

What if I mail it?

This thread is about dash, but since you mention monero, there is a function called 'viewkey' which performs the exact function you claim it is not capable of.

The amount of information you can glean about the people controlling the movements is mitigated by maximising the fungibility of the base-monetary media (which, as I've explained, is exactly what Dash is doing).

Dash's methods of "maximising the fungibility of the base-monetary media" is what is being claimed to be unsound.

On the other hand, obfuscation of the blockchain is attaching a priority to the base monetary media that does not belong there - and particularly not in a new digital medium that portends to function as base money.

By your own definitions, obfuscation of the blockchain actually IS a requirement to be considered money. Fungibility (aka consistency) happens to be a requirement. Dash's unsound attempts to be fungible happen on a volountary basis. Unmixed coins used to buy CP are not the same as coins that have been mixed. By their taint they carry properties the mixed coins do not. The same goes for unmixed coins used for non-nefarious purposes. The point is that they are not consistent.

The 'public blockchain' is therefore an essential element of anything that portends to act as 'base money' as opposed to a record keeping system which is backed by such.

This is what you have not explained....

[muddafudda]

E-Peen Battle

[r0ach]

Toknormal's description of how Cryptonote works or what is required for money to work was not legitimate.  With his pictures, he seemed to even imply that central bankers are needed for money to function at all.  Is this guy shilling?

[generalizethis]

Toknormal's description of how Cryptonote works or what is required for money to work was not legitimate.  With his pictures, he seemed to even imply that central bankers are needed for money to function at all.  Is this guy shilling?

He's trying to rationalize dash is better than bitcoin and monero at the things bitcoin and monero are best at. Bitcoin is the world's largest most secure decentralized clear blockchain. Monero is the world's largest and most secure decentralized opaque blockchain. He thinks (or wants us to believe)that masternodes are the preferred bridge between these two networks, but refuses to see (or admit) masternodes for what they really are: middlemen who can be bought and have control over the network they are supposed to decentralize and secure--so yeah, he is actually replacing bankers with masternodes and saying it is a good thing. Good for him and the other dash bagholders, bad for anyone who wants decentralization and/or privacy.

[TanteStefana2]

I don't think any of you are able to digest and understand what Toknormal is saying. You are ideologically blind.  I do hope that lightbulb moment will come to you some day.  In the mean time, Toknormal, you are the most eloquent at explaining this, and thus, you must continue to try, because this is of foundational importance. 

[PenguinsDancing]

Toknormal's description of how Cryptonote works or what is required for money to work was not legitimate.

Please explain.

With his pictures, he seemed to even imply that central bankers are needed for money to function at all.

No, I think he is saying that they are required specifically when "money" is backed by debt. If money = gold (and only gold), then no central bankers are needed.

This article helped me understand how that works.


However, that raises a few other question for me. Monero (or other related coins) is not based on debt; it has a blockchain. Why does making transactions invisible lead to a lack of confidence that it is actually "money" based on something rather than just a ledger?

Here is an abridged version of toknormal's answer to this question from the thread he linked earlier:

https://i.imgur.com/tZBa6qi.png

You just can’t go from a fully uncensored blockchain to a censored one and make it look the least bit attractive because the alternative is the electronic equivalent of a swiss bank account for rich people except without the "trusted third party auditor” (which in bitcoin is the eyes of the world - not an algo) and therefore a breeding ground for scams, heists, deceptions. . .

Firstly, if people are using Monero, or something similar, to buy things in the real world, doesn't that make it visible in the sense of the picture above? The important thing for people to know is that it can and is being used by people in the real world to purchase things. (Or are you saying that we will never get to that point? If so, why?)  The only part missing is the claim that value is maximized when "money" is fully auditable, but why is that a requirement?

Secondly, it's not clear to me how scams, heists and deceptions suddenly arise out of hiding which addresses are responsible for transactions.

[generalizethis]

I don't think any of you are able to digest and understand what Toknormal is saying. You are ideologically blind.  I do hope that lightbulb moment will come to you some day.  In the mean time, Toknormal, you are the most eloquent at explaining this, and thus, you must continue to try, because this is of foundational importance.  

I can digest it, but it sits in my head the same way Thetans do when Tom Cruise waxes idiotic.

One of the hallmarks of eloquence is condensing large ideas into the smallest format available. This is what makes poetry so powerful and good speeches so short. When Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." He was saying wit with both its humorous and intellectual properties intact--adding example to meaning--Tok is about as eloquent as he is witty.

[TanteStefana2]

Toknormal's description of how Cryptonote works or what is required for money to work was not legitimate.

Please explain.

With his pictures, he seemed to even imply that central bankers are needed for money to function at all.

No, I think he is saying that they are required specifically when "money" is backed by debt. If money = gold (and only gold), then no central bankers are needed.

This article helped me understand how that works.


However, that raises a few other question for me. Monero (or other related coins) is not based on debt; it has a blockchain. Why does making transactions invisible lead to a lack of confidence that it is actually "money" based on something rather than just a ledger?

Here is an abridged version of toknormal's answer to this question from the thread he linked earlier:

You just can’t go from a fully uncensored blockchain to a censored one and make it look the least bit attractive because the alternative is the electronic equivalent of a swiss bank account for rich people except without the "trusted third party auditor” (which in bitcoin is the eyes of the world - not an algo) and therefore a breeding ground for scams, heists, deceptions. . .

Firstly, if people are using Monero, or something similar, to buy things in the real world, doesn't that make it visible in the sense of the picture above? The important thing for people to know is that it can and is being used by people in the real world to purchase things. (Or are you saying that we will never get to that point? If so, why?)  The only part missing is the claim that value is maximized when "money" is fully auditable, but why is that a requirement?

Secondly, it's not clear to me how scams, heists and deceptions suddenly arise out of hiding which addresses are responsible for transactions.

in the end, you have to fully trust that the cryptography is protecting the blockchain, as there is no outside way to verify that after the fact.  That is the main issue Tok is talking about.  And although we think today that the cryptography is impossible to break, well, remember Bill Gates purportedly said 640KB of memory "ought to be enough for anybody."?  Every computer on anyone's desktop and every smart phone out there is a super computer, almost a quantum computer to one from those days.  What makes you think the cryptography wont be broken once quantum computers start to really take off?

Finally, when studying this site: https://cryptonote.org/inside, and I admit, I may not be seeing this correctly, but it seems to me that the elaborate ring signatures system only introduces as much doubt as to who the transaction belongs to as DarkSend does.  I can see that you can use as many people as you like to insert doubt (the example uses 3, which is the default number used by DS) and you could use 10, 20, 50 ring signature participant, as you could with mixing.  I don't see an advantage.  Each ring signature comes at a cost, as each one must be stored.

Yet DS's results insert just as much doubt about who spent the funds, without fancy cryptography that could be broken at some point in the future, and keeps the blockchain easily verifiable to anyone at any time.  It is completely future proof.  As Albert Einstein said, as simple as possible but no simpler.

[TanteStefana2]

As for what Tok is trying to say here (I believe, I could be getting him wrong, hate to put words in people's mouths) is that cryptonote was designed initially to be used with a central authority that holds the "keys".  Throwing those keys away only makes it impossible for anyone, not even a central authority to verify what happened, inside or outside of the blockchain.  The cryptography must be trusted, which kills the whole concept of trustless.  Thus his constant harping on illegitimatizing the blockchain.

[smooth]

As for what Tok is trying to say here (I believe, I could be getting him wrong, hate to put words in people's mouths) is that cryptonote was designed initially to be used with a central authority that holds the "keys".

Okay well that's totally wrong.

Throwing those keys away only makes it impossible for anyone, not even a central authority to verify what happened, inside or outside of the blockchain.  The cryptography must be trusted, which kills the whole concept of trustless.

This totally misunderstands the concept of a blockchain. To verify a blockchain (even Bitcoin) requires cryptography. Unless you rely on cryptography, you could easily be given some fake bunch of data that looks like a blockchain but is actually nonsense.