Shadowcash vs. Monero, an unbiased debate.

[ffmad]

Is it possible to break this down and try to simplify the differences?  I am just trying to make a simplified summary here.

Monero is POW
Shadowcash is POS

Monero is building new protocol
Shadowcash is building on top of bitcoin protocol

Monero uses viewkeys to make wanted tx public
Shadowcash uses public and private tx

Am I missing anything?

Monero is built on top of cryptonote, they are not building something from scratch.

Monero and Shadow have private transactions, you can use a view key to show the transactions only to the persons you want (it's not the same name for shadow, but works the same)
Shadow also has public transactions.

This leads to the question asked by litebit

Debatable topic: Monero's single token (100% private) system to Shadow's dual token (public & 100% private) system.
- Which is better and do you really need 2 coins to do what 1 can do flawlessly?

This is a serious advantage for Shadow.

Why having two types of tx instead of one ?
Look at monero blockchain size. The private tx are way bigger than the public one

By keeping the two types of tx, you can avoid to surcharge the blockchain with private ones when they are not needed.
You can also imagine a lot of applications using that possibility of having both private and public tx.

Monero blockchain size might become a huge problem if it become really successful

[1714031554]

1714031554

[smooth]

Why having two types of tx instead of one ?
Look at monero blockchain size. The private tx are way bigger than the public one

By keeping the two types of tx, you can avoid to surcharge the blockchain with private ones when they are not needed.
You can also imagine a lot of applications using that possibility of having both private and public tx.

Monero blockchain size might become a huge problem if it become really successful

I'm not sure about this. The cryptonote protocol allows both mixed and unmixed transactions, and unmixed transactions are smaller than Bitcoin-style transactions. That is by design and is discussed in section 2.5 of the cryptonote white paper.

Furthermore, many, perhaps most, of the transactions on the Monero blockchain are unmixed (though we do expect this to change in the future).

I think the reason the Monero blockchain is larger is just more usage (from being a higher profile coin that has been traded more actively on exchanges for a longer period of time).

Take a look for yourself. You can scroll pages and pages at http://explorer.shadow.cash and see hardly any non-empty blocks. Looking at http://chainradar.com/xmr/blocks, there are only about 30% empty blocks on Monero. Both coins have the same one-minute block time so this is a valid comparison.

Another contributing factor to the Monero chain size was a temporary bug in the pool implementation (which at the time was brand new -- we sponsored its development) that created a lot of extra transactions on the Monero chain for the first few months. It is annoying that made the chain bigger, but it isn't ongoing growth, so it doesn't present a concern for the future.

Chain size is a concern for every coin. Just look at the current debate over raising Bitcoin's block size. Allowing the chain to grow too much is a huge issue.

[newrad]

Shadowcash is a scam.

[erok]

Shadowcash is a scam.

Saying it doesn't make it true. Shit isn't like Beetlejuice.

[Diplo]

Shadowcash is a scam.

Saying it doesn't make it true. Shit isn't like Beetlejuice.

I think the beggar came here for a handout, has a donation address in his sig -- suck lack of self respect. lol

[KeyJockey]

I am just trying to make a simplified summary here.

Monero is POW
Shadowcash is POS

Monero is building new protocol
Shadowcash is building on top of bitcoin protocol

Monero uses viewkeys to make wanted tx public
Shadowcash uses public and private tx

Am I missing anything?

As more or less an outsider to all this stuff, I'd say seems like a pretty good TL;DR you've put there, LOL.

For ME personally I've put a little money into both Monero AND Shadowcash just on theory that the only possible alt-coin that MIGHT be able to approach BTC is simply gonna HAVE TO be one of the ANON coins.  

Nothing else besides anonymity is ever gonna be enough to ever match (or unseat) bitcoin.

For ME, Monero seems like it has better technology but (so far) lousy marketing.
(Sorry to say it, Fluffy etc, but just callin' it as I sees it...)

Shadow OTOH has more impressive graphics, website, video, etc.  Slick marketing IOW.  
(But, yeah, from some comments by people way smarter than ME, seems like maybe not the best tech underlying its crypto and etc.  Sorry to say it, shadow-folks: but "just callin' it" again...)

$64,000 question: IS the underlying tech more important that snazzy marketing and image?  

In a perfect world it ought to be, of course, but we know that's not always enough.  Sometimes the lesser tech DOES still win larger market share (i.e. see Windows vs Mac).  Sad but still true.

So...? What to do??

Personally, I'm just gonna HODL a little of BOTH on the off chance that a hedge on BITCOIN may be needed someday.  

And may the best man win

[XMRpromotions]

I am just trying to make a simplified summary here.

Monero is POW
Shadowcash is POS

Monero is building new protocol
Shadowcash is building on top of bitcoin protocol

Monero uses viewkeys to make wanted tx public
Shadowcash uses public and private tx

Am I missing anything?

As more or less an outsider to all this stuff, I'd say seems like a pretty good TL;DR you've put there, LOL.

For ME personally I've put a little money into both Monero AND Shadowcash just on theory that the only possible alt-coin that MIGHT be able to approach BTC is simply gonna HAVE TO be one of the ANON coins.  

Nothing else besides anonymity is ever gonna be enough to ever match (or unseat) bitcoin.

For ME, Monero seems like it has better technology but (so far) lousy marketing.
(Sorry to say it, Fluffy etc, but just callin' it as I sees it...)

Shadow OTOH has more impressive graphics, website, video, etc.  Slick marketing IOW.  
(But, yeah, from some comments by people way smarter than ME, seems like maybe not the best tech underlying its crypto and etc.  Sorry to say it, shadow-folks: but "just callin' it" again...)

$64,000 question: IS the underlying tech more important that snazzy marketing and image?  

In a perfect world it ought to be, of course, but we know that's not always enough.  Sometimes the lesser tech DOES still win larger market share (i.e. see Windows vs Mac).  Sad but still true.

So...? What to do??

Personally, I'm just gonna HODL a little of BOTH on the off chance that a hedge on BITCOIN may be needed someday.  

And may the best man win

What marketing plans do you suggest for Monero? I also believe that Monero has the best tech but could benefit from more effective promotion

[illodin]

What marketing plans do you suggest for Monero? I also believe that Monero has the best tech but could benefit from more effective promotion

I think posting a lot in competitors' threads in the forums could be a worthy marketing plan. And create a lot of new threads as well. Not sure how effective though, but would get people to talk about Monero at least. You could nominate Icebreaker as your Chief Marketing Officer. Just an idea.

[TPTB_need_war]

Monero is going in the other direction pushing all transactions into the anonymity set, although that isn't implemented yet

So Monero is going with that knapsack stuff with mixing block wise?

[TPTB_need_war]

3. Bitcoin's use of secp256k1 is...ok, but given that SafeCurves (Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange) view secp256k1 as unsafe, the use of the same curve is a little bit of a risk (Monero uses Curve25519).

You don't know your own code, lol. Cyptonote uses Ed25519 for EdDSA, not Curve25519. It is an understandable mistake because Ed25519 is very similar and related to Curve25519. But that you don't know the difference, shows you are not the low-level cryptographer for Monero. And we all knew that any way. You are the server and networking guy correct? So no offense intended.  

Afaik, the main improvement that Bernstein achieved was to eliminate side channel timing attacks because his formulation of ECC is constant time (if implemented correctly). But some have argued that attribute isn't necessary in Bitcoin's application of ECC (ECDSA).

[TPTB_need_war]

Does Monero intend to develop an i2p market as well? I'm not familiar with the plans. If it intends to solely cater to the TOR-based DNMs, well, ok... TOR is not what it used to be thanks to the NSA, and centralized markets are going to be a dying breed, thanks to exit scams, and the NSA.

Having a fully integrated system is one of the major reasons the shadow project could be so revolutionary, not just in the crypto space. Convenience carries a major value and decreases the barriers to entry=mass market adoption.  

It isn't on our project agenda, but you should keep in mind that the nature of Monero is that a lot of projects get done by third parties (this is not just a bold theory but is already reality with projects like xmr.to, moneroaddress.com, monerowallet.com, etc.), so someone else may well do one.

Well it is pointless (for Shadow and Monero) if it is based on I2P because I2P is no protection against the NSA. It has worse flaws than Tor. And when the NSA decides it is time to bust up I2P hidden services, they can easily do it.

There is a fundamental flaw in the way these anonymity networks publish the route to the hidden service. Await a future white paper for details and a proposed solution.

Edit: I just read at Shadow's Market place FAQ that it will reply on Tor or I2P. So the claim of it being anonymous (against the NSA) is bullshit.

Edit#2: putting one marketplace on an entire coin is really STOOPID. You are killing network effects by taking away what you should allow lots of others to innovate on. For example, one set of rules on how decentralized voting can make sure that a "car" isn't in the "clothes" category.

When we get to the point where users are more important than investors, then the market will naturally chose a winner as it did for MSDOS, Windoze, and lately Android.

In all those cases, network effects is what beat the competition (and Steve Jobs twice made that mistake of a walled garden ecosystem first for the MacOS and repeated for iOS).

My point is there are bigger fish to fry than infighting amongst ourselves. Let's go increase the size of the pie instead.

http://aboutshadow.com/index.php/shadowmarket/q-a

What happens if someone advertise say a “Car” in the “Clothes” category?
ShadowMarket will have a weighted voting system, allowing the category users to decide if a particular item is relevant for that section.

P.S. I knew when I saw all the fancy flash graphics at the Shadow site last year, that it would end up be another loser. That is how I can always distinguish the losers from the winners. Google won with its text interface. Monero is winning with formerly a very simple website. I am not invested in either of these coins. I am invested in my own anonymous coin effort which is vaporware at the moment. I am just noting that correlation seems to always be true. Fluff instead of stuff. The n00bs always fall for the fluff, bells, and whistles and other circus paraphernalia.

[Wheatclove]

Does Monero intend to develop an i2p market as well? I'm not familiar with the plans. If it intends to solely cater to the TOR-based DNMs, well, ok... TOR is not what it used to be thanks to the NSA, and centralized markets are going to be a dying breed, thanks to exit scams, and the NSA.

Having a fully integrated system is one of the major reasons the shadow project could be so revolutionary, not just in the crypto space. Convenience carries a major value and decreases the barriers to entry=mass market adoption.  

It isn't on our project agenda, but you should keep in mind that the nature of Monero is that a lot of projects get done by third parties (this is not just a bold theory but is already reality with projects like xmr.to, moneroaddress.com, monerowallet.com, etc.), so someone else may well do one.

Well it is pointless (for Shadow and Monero) if it is based on I2P because I2P is no protection against the NSA. It has worse flaws than Tor. And when the NSA decides it is time to bust up I2P hidden services, they can easily do it.

There is a fundamental flaw in the way these anonymity networks publish the route to the hidden service. Await a future white paper for details and a proposed solution.

Edit: I just read at Shadow's Market place FAQ that it will reply on Tor or I2P. So the claim of it being anonymous (against the NSA) is bullshit.

Edit#2: putting one marketplace on an entire coin is really STOOPID. You are killing network effects by taking away what you should allow lots of others to innovate on. For example, one set of rules on how decentralized voting can make sure that a "car" isn't in the "clothes" category.

When we get to the point where users are more important than investors, then the market will naturally chose a winner as it did for MSDOS, Windoze, and lately Android.

In all those cases, network effects is what beat the competition (and Steve Jobs twice made that mistake of a walled garden ecosystem first for the MacOS and repeated for iOS).

My point is there are bigger fish to fry than infighting amongst ourselves. Let's go increase the size of the pie instead.

http://aboutshadow.com/index.php/shadowmarket/q-a

What happens if someone advertise say a “Car” in the “Clothes” category?
ShadowMarket will have a weighted voting system, allowing the category users to decide if a particular item is relevant for that section.

P.S. I knew when I saw all the fancy flash graphics at the Shadow site last year, that it would end up be another loser. That is how I can always distinguish the losers from the winners. Google won with its text interface. Monero is winning with formerly a very simple website. I am not invested in either of these coins. I am invested in my own anonymous coin effort which is vaporware at the moment. I am just noting that correlation seems to always be true. Fluff instead of stuff. The n00bs always fall for the fluff, bells, and whistles and other circus paraphernalia.

I2P traffic and IP addresses are encrypted 4? times. How exactly is it unsecure?

[fluffypony]

3. Bitcoin's use of secp256k1 is...ok, but given that SafeCurves (Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange) view secp256k1 as unsafe, the use of the same curve is a little bit of a risk (Monero uses Curve25519).

You don't know your own code, lol. Cyptonote uses Ed25519 for EdDSA, not Curve25519. It is an understandable mistake because Ed25519 is very similar and related to Curve25519. But that you don't know the difference, shows you are not the low-level cryptographer for Monero. And we all knew that any way. You are the server and networking guy correct? So no offense intended.  

Afaik, the main improvement that Bernstein achieved was to eliminate side channel timing attacks because his formulation of ECC is constant time (if implemented correctly). But some have argued that attribute isn't necessary in Bitcoin's application of ECC (ECDSA).

You're completely misunderstanding. I'm ONLY talking about the curve, and Ed25519 uses the same underlying curve as Curve25519, albeit with different representations. That is why SafeCurves doesn't need a separate Ed25519 section, as Curve25519 covers it. That also explains why you can trivially convert Ed25519 public keys to Curve25519.

In fact, the IETF Ed25519 draft qualifies this by saying "For Ed25519, the curve used is equivalent to Curve25519 [CURVE25519], under a change of coordinates, which means that the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem is the same as for Curve25519."

It would be difficult for me to reference SafeCurves, but then talk about Ed25519, without going into great detail explaining this relationship. As the relationship is obvious to anyone (such as yourself) it is sufficient for me to merely state that I'm talking about the curve.

I'm not the "server and networking guy" - Monero is an open source project with a great many contributors. You can learn more here: https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/people

[TPTB_need_war]

I2P traffic and IP addresses are encrypted 4? times. How exactly is it unsecure?

Sorry I am not going to be able to teach you the exhaustive reasons in a forum thread. This issue will be explained more in depth in a future white paper.

I understand it is very difficult for n00bs to understand.

[TPTB_need_war]

You're completely misunderstanding. I'm ONLY talking about the curve, and Ed25519 uses the same underlying curve as Curve25519, albeit with different representations.

Not my misunderstanding at all.

It would be better to say curve 25519 than Curve25519, because afaik the latter refers to a white paper for a ECC Diffie-Helman key exchange, which is a different purpose and more optimized than EdDSA which is for public/private key signing. Much more than a minor distinction (thanks to DJB for such premature optimization on the naming and confusion):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19147619/what-implementions-of-ed25519-exist

Also for other readers and the original point of discussion, here is more on the advantages of EdDSA vs. Bitcoin ECDSA:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/50878/ecdsa-vs-ecdh-vs-ed25519-vs-curve25519

[KeyJockey]

What marketing plans do you suggest for Monero? I also believe that Monero has the best tech but could benefit from more effective promotion

Well, I suppose for starters maybe the Monero team could recruit or steal away whoever did Shadow's website and graphic design co-ordination.  

Shadow's videos and images, logo, graphics, color scheme etc all totally kicks ass, very slick, very professional and clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into it.  All other anon coins...? Not so much.

Honestly, I bought the little bit of ShadowCoin that I own on Polo pretty much on a whim, totally based only on how polished their website and videos are, even before I bothered to look into who actually has the best crypto and etc.  I think it was the promo link they ran on preev for a while that caught my eye at first.

OTOH, in Monero's defense it's still true that IF you're gonna short change one side or the other at first, i.e. either the technology or the marketing, it's probably better to cut corners on the marketing at first because if your tech is solid but your image sucks, you can always fix the image stuff later... but if your tech foundation is weak and image/marketing strong, eventually (probably) the "lipstick on a pig" reality will come back and bite you on the ass.

But, look... let's be honest here, really.  
Biggest problem in ALL cryptocurrency is that the NAMES of all of 'em totally SUCK.  

"ShadowCash" sucks.  Kinda cool maybe for some people but "shadow" still too illegal for most.
"Monero" sucks.  Nobody cares about esperanto.  Too phony-baloney pseudo intellectual.
"MaidSafe".  Srsly?  Great project, great idea, great tech honestly but... really? Maid?

All names for all these coins suck.  The entire field is still just too nerdy and zero design-sense.

The ONLY NAME that doesn't suck, actually, is "BITCOIN".  

It's perfect: even better than BitGold would've been. Among SO many other things... Satoshi NAMED bitcoin absolutely perfectly.

Any other project with any hope to become even a small fraction of what bitcoin is, really needs to pay attention to this... but it's really hard to change your name later on down the line.  Gotta choose it well at the beginning and IMHO none of 'em have really done that right...

[TPTB_need_war]

Shadow's videos and images, logo, graphics, color scheme etc all totally kicks ass, very slick, very professional and clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into it.  All other anon coins...? Not so much.

Disagree. The website even doesn't function correctly in my Chromium browser on Linux.

All that circus stuff (dog & pony show, clowns jugging flaming objects, etc) is for n00bs who want to lose money.

Android with its cruder looks kicked ass on iPhone so resolutely that in a few years it went from 0% to 80% global market share.

What is actually most important is network effects. ShadowCash is following the Steve Jobs philosophy of a walled garden that is optimized. If they can do everything themselves they can make it more perfect, more complete, and better. Wrong! Network effects trumps all.

If you want to facilitate SilkRoad, then you need to fix I2P and/or Tor (or replace them with a fixed network)! Thus enabling 1000s of flowers (sites as hidden services) to bloom.

Building some proprietary market place on top of broken anonymity networks is masturbation.

[KeyJockey]

Disagree. The website even doesn't function correctly in my Chromium browser on Linux.
All that circus stuff is for n00bs who want to lose money.

Actually I do agree with you: see what I said above re: fixing image vs. fixing flawed tech later on.

BUT you have to admit that sooner or later (probably later) this "fluff" or "image" stuff eventually DOES matter.

None of these coins (even bitcoin) is really ever gonna go mainstream without a good IMAGE behind 'em.  

It may be a sad fact or "unfortunate truth" that we don't LIKE, but "image" does still matter and it does contribute a lot to eventual success, that is IF we want any of these coins to ever be anything more than just a fun niche for nerds to play with...

[TPTB_need_war]

I agree the website needs to be professional and most of all, it needs to actually teach n00bs. I love to teach people. I get great joy from making complex things easy for everyone to understand.

That is how you win.

[rangedriver]

Shadow's videos and images, logo, graphics, color scheme etc all totally kicks ass, very slick, very professional and clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into it.

It's the same branding trap that Darkcoin fell into. Label it a suitably dark/scary/shadowy name that will no doubt get the hormones rushing of any teenage misunderstood pot-advocating cinema shooter... and all of his pocket money. It might sound nice as you jerk off, but no-one with any serious money is going to want to touch it.

One of the reasons I got into Monero was because of the somewhat ludicrously ingenious stealthy name. Broke from the yadayada-coin syntax while providing minimal "crap" that could otherwise potentially link it to the evils of the darkweb.

Sooner or later the anonymous sector will be attacked by Sean Hannity and his friends. Why do their job for them?

As someone who's only requirement is to throw large amounts of money across the globe anonymously, it's a mess I would want no part in.