CryptoNote technical discussion and Chess Challenge

[letsplayagame]

I just noticed this:

"edit 11/27/2015: demo version of RingCT using the MLSAG's is coded - next up is implementing 1. Diffie helman passing of masks and 2. implement a short representation of amounts"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3pw30d/ringct_for_monero_updated_versions/

Progress seems to be happening pretty quickly! After the next implementation step it sounds like the proof of concept should be pretty well established.  It seems to be that RingCT is a matter of WHEN instead of IF.

Yes this is very exciting; however it will require extensive peer review and testing before implementation.

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

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[Rias]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

[boolberry]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

Your post history suggests you have a great interest in CryptoNote so that comment is hard to understand coming from you.  You know demand for privacy is far more than a small niche. Why else would you spend so much time involving yourself with privacy related coins?

[boolberry]

I like Rc7. Lets try to open some files before offering a draw. We need to be careful to prevent white from making progress on the queenside. As languagehasmeaning explained if we are not careful team Monero may be able to make a passed pawn. Rc7 seems like a good move for both aggression and defense. Next we can swing a rook over to the kingside and open some files there.

Ke7+ draw offer: tifozi
Rc7: languagehasmeaning, galdur, newb4now

If I can change the vote Rc7 draw offer is good.

Edit; scratch the draw. Just Rc7.

Ke7+ draw offer: tifozi (1 vote)
Rc7: languagehasmeaning, galdur, newb4now, boolberry (4 votes)

[smooth]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

[boolberry]

Current position
Based on the votes in this thread Team Boolberry has chosen to play Rc7. Now it is time for Team Monero to respond. I will plan to count votes again tomorrow at approximately 0:00 UTC.

Team Monero (white pieces) vs. Team Boolberry (black pieces)
white to move


Game PGN:

Code:

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Qxd4 a6 5.c4 Nc6 6.Qe3 g6 7.Nc3 Bg7 8.Be2 Nf6 9.O-O O-O 10.h3 Nd7 11.b3 Nc5 12.Bb2 f5 13.exf5 Bxf5 14.Rad1 Qa5 15.Rd2 Rf6 16.Nd5 Re6 17.Qf4 Ne4 18.Bxg7 Kxg7 19.Rb2 Nc3 20.Nd4 Re5 21.Bf3 Nxd5 22.Bxd5 Qc3 23.Nxf5+ Rxf5 24.Qd2 Qxd2 25.Rxd2 Rb8 26.a3 e5 27.Be6 Rf6 28.Bd5 Nd4 29.b4 b6 30.Rb2 g5 31.a4 Rff8 32.Rfb1 Rfc8 33.f3 Kf6 34.g3 Rc7

[TPTB_need_war]

The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

Ring Confidential Transactions built on top of Blockstream's Confidential Transactions (or my roughly equivalent but apparently more efficient Zero Knowledge Transactions built on top of Denis' Compact Confidential Transactions) does not absolutely prevent undetectable abuse of the money supply.

The relevant (to your stated concern) distinction from Zerocash (and a friendly reminder to not conflate Zerocoin with Zerocash because the former requires equal revealed values and doesn't integrate with hiding values) is that there isn't a global trusted master key (generated once at setup of the sytem) to be potentially abused (if the trusted setup was gamed some how). Yet in both systems, if you can muster enough computing resources even just once (and/or break/weaken the number-theoretic cryptographic assumptions security), you can create unlimited money out-of-thin-air and this can't be detected (unless detection means everyone has the same level of breakage capability and all values can be globally unmasked rendering value hiding useless).

Homomorphic values and ring signatures come with potentially huge anti-DDoS costs as I have been explaining in a thread I started in the Bitcoin Discussion forum. In that thread, I have alluded to we might be better off to just eliminate homomorphic (hiding) values and also eliminate Cryptonote's one-time ring signatures and move to something like CoinShuffle, because we are going to need to do a CoinShuffle any way. The details on this tradeoff need to be further mulled over and elucidated.

So in summary, it is possible that Monero and Cryptonote (including Confident Transactions and the attempts to combine them with one-time rings) is one grand waste of time and effort, but that determination is not yet entirely clear to me. I need to spend some time writing down all the details so I can convince myself what are key determinants on this issue. It is possible that the conclusion may be a multifurcation.

Anonymity is very difficult to accomplish holistically especially at-scale (Monero is no where near accomplishing that at-scale) and it doesn't come for free.

[TPTB_need_war]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

Making anonymity that is immune to the global police state is an immense challenge especially for businesses, because they can't just go hop on another anonymous WiFi connection every time they want to interact with the block chain (and that won't even help you individually with a low scale coin like Monero, because you are the only person hopping on anonymous WiFi in your geographical area so your transactions can still be correlated!). Making an IP address mixnet that is immune to a party which can see all traffic over the internet is an extremely challenging if not implausible statistically. I have been thinking deeply for a long time about the sort of attacks that are possible on mixnets and nothing (that I've analyzed) seems to entirely immune.

A generative essence realization is there is no possible way to obfuscate your IP address with an autonomous cryptographic protocol (such as RIngCT or Cryptonote). The only way to obfuscate IP addresses is with an interactive mixnet, which then either incurs a simultaneity requirement or the mixnet must generalize to many forms of internet traffic so a sufficient mix set always available. But especially generalized mixnets suffer from Sybil attacks because of the cost of scaling relaying nodes scales with traffic and DDoS. As smooth knows from our past private discussions (afair last year), my only idea on how to attack the Sybil problem of Tor and I2P is to pay the nodes you are want to relay through for an onion routing. But this comes with another set of holistic issues. So far, I haven't been able to design the system that is immune to the NSA. I am still working on this problem, but have deprioritized it, because to my consternation it is such an intractable quagmire (a.k.a. clusterfuck).

So let's say we only want privacy against other smaller corporations that don't have special access to NSA analysis. Yet now we must assume the NSA can't be hacked or individual employees bribed. And the NSA is not the only national security agency doing this. We have at least the 5 Eyes nations plus Russia and China with sophisticated, well funded national security agencies.

Can you know understand better why Martin Armstrong (and I reguritated) that a Dark Age is possible?

The world is in a pickle. I am doing my best to try to find a way out. I am now thinking perhaps anonymity is not the ticket (yet continuing to develop and consider it, as an option) and instead massive volume of micro-transactions might be more liberating. In short, to pursue my Knowledge Age theory of breaking the Theory of the Firm down to individualized production. In short, death the corporation as being too slow to even effectively use the data it is accumulating. If you read my 2010 thesis linked from the OP of the Economic Devastation thread (in the Economics forum), you can gain insight into what I am referring to where I explained that top-down access to information is not knowledge creation. Knowledge creation is accretive, spontaneous, and highly individualized.

Paradigm shift. I am apparently good at creating those, not so much at the intricate patterns of chess (too many intricacies are burdensome to the degrees-of-freedom to see over the forest). In short, I prefer deforestation paradigms.

[smooth]

If peer review supports the soundness of RingCT cryptography interest could expand exponentially. There are more potential uses than I can count and this is the most promising privacy technology I have seen so far. The inability to verify the number of coins in circulation with ZeroCoin scares me.  At least if something goes wrong with the money supply system with RingCT we would be able to tell.

I am quite confident that blockchain privacy is not a huge topic anymore. Of course RingCT may draw some extra attention to Monero. However, in my opinion that still would not be relevant.

The fintech is finally converging on the markets and real business issues. However, real business that has money doesn't care about privacy, it's simply of out scope. There is no huge ass real world problem in it that could be backed by corporate money that will stimulate adoption and attention.

This still maybe a great update and it serves privacy goals well. However, privacy protection issue is still a small niche, not a mass phenomenon.

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

No, privacy from every idiot who wants to front-run you, or play amateur detective and figure out a lot of private things about your business or personal affairs and publish them. I've seen both happen on this forum. Liquid isn't guarding inter-exchange flows from the NSA, it is hiding them from whale clubs.

Most businesses and people are just too obscure and unimportant to warrant much interest from the NSA or from the largest globalist corporations. But they all have nosy neighbors, with varying degrees of sophistication.

Though if the global police state does evolve to the point where everyone is a person-of-interest, then indeed it will be a dark age, and it isn't clear whether cryptography and cryptocurrencies can help with that at all. Maybe.

[TPTB_need_war]

Privacy from the NSA, when the NSA means the largest globalist corporations (politically connected with the global police state) have asymmetric access to secrets?

No, privacy from every idiot who wants to front-run you, or play amateur detective and figure out a lot of private things about your business or personal affairs and publish them. I've seen both happen on this forum.

Most businesses and people are just too obscure and unimportant to warrant much interest from the NSA or from the largest globalist corporations. But they all have nosy neighbors, with varying degrees of sophistication.

Though if the global police state does evolve to the point where everyone is a person-of-interest, then indeed it will be a dark age, and it isn't clear whether cryptography and cryptocurrencies can help with that at all. Maybe.

Don't know if you read the edit I did on my prior post.

Problem is that if anyone is collecting that data (even if the NSA has no desire to analyze it or retain it forever), they can be potentially hacked or individual employees bribed. The prize is so valuable, it nearly insures another Edward Snowden will surface yet with a profit motive to exploit that dataset. The problem is that even to collect that data means they have peeping routers all over the major backbones and these are thus vulnerable to hacking and bribes, etc..

When we live in a world where it is possible to collect all data, then the defense against bad outcomes with your data (and the greater threat than the NSA w.r.t. to data aggregation may be Google, Ad Sense, and Facebook Likes) is perhaps not to depend on the implausibility of statistical correlation (which may not be so implausible as the naive assumption, e.g. per my examples above and in the general paradigmatic category), rather perhaps to depend on keeping your assets stored in micro-granular Knowledge Creation paradigms instead of stored monetary calls on labor (which I claim is a dying paradigm). The data aggregator can't do anything with aggregated data against a micro-granular asset with attributes perhaps orthogonal to the flows of popularity. I mean everyone can see which ventures are popular and trending by numerous means such as Google metrics. Transparency aids competition which accelerates knowledge creation. The government can't tax to death a populous activity without declaring a global Dark Age (which has never occurred, i.e. even during the Dark Age in Western Europe the prosperity trended up else where).

As for being vulnerable to haters, I am surely vulnerable by posting on this forum and not being anonymous. This seems to go along with any action on the internet. I read where some teenager in the Philippines shot another teenager because of some insulting remark about a girl friend on Facebook. I am not so sure that anonymity can be holistically ubiquitous to protect me from all the potential ways the internet spreads the opportunities to be hated and not anonymous. It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth). Other than the risk of large wealth (and the obvious issues that raises) and being outspoken on the internet (and the conflicts that raises), my personal life story is a prime example of how risk to life and limb comes from chaotic, unexpected directions, so I don't know if focused on the very difficult issue of anonymous money transfer stands out as the greatest risk in most people's lives.

Any way I am not sure. So as I wrote, I am hedging my bets by still pursuing anonymity, but I have deprioritized it somewhat (not entirely) to focus more on micro-transactions.

Edit: I am contemplating whether it is possible that fungibility could be orthogonal to anonymity. Fungibility could first be defined as the ability to get your transactions into the majority consensus of the block chain, instead of a stricter definition that would require that anyone who accepts such a transaction can't be coerced nor hassled by the government nor whom ever. As long as you can get your transactions on the block chain, then if you spend them to parties that careless about coercion (e.g. in small morsels in social interactions where the government can't possibly go after every person who received a microtransaction). So instead of just anonymity designs, I have also been thinking a lot about how to insure block chain inclusion remains permissionless.

[smooth]

It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth).

No, because these ventures will have large flows of money. Even if you are correct and storing monetary wealth is becoming irrelevant, moving it privately will still be desired.

Even things as mundane as Facebook likes can have proprietary knowledge behind them. Everyone can see when someone or something is getting a lot of Facebook likes, but not everyone can see how that popularity is being monetized, and the latter is what is really valuable.

[LucyLovesCrypto]

35. Kf2

[XMRpromotions]

35.Rf1 (planning f4)

If we play a5, black can respond with b5. If we ever play b5 black can respond with a5. Rf1 seems well timed with the black king on f6.

35.Kf2 (LucyLovesCrypto)
35.Rf1 (XMRpromotions)

Another important chess tournament starts today:
http://www.londonchessclassic.com/gct/gct_schedule.htm

[ArticMine]

35. Rf1

[TPTB_need_war]

It seems anonymity for money is mostly focused on the concept of obscuring large monetary wealth, but I am arguing that perhaps that paradigm is dying and instead store wealth in knowledge creation ventures (ongoing and active wealth).

No, because these ventures will have large flows of money. Even if you are correct and storing monetary wealth is becoming irrelevant, moving it privately will still be desired.

Even things as mundane as Facebook likes can have proprietary knowledge behind them. Everyone can see when someone or something is getting a lot of Facebook likes, but not everyone can see how that popularity is being monetized, and the latter is what is really valuable.

Well that is the sort of statistical pattern that I think it implausible to hide if the person who needs to know thus can afford the resources to know.

I don't think in this Technocracy age of Big Data, one can't hope to obscure patterns on large data sets. The generative essence of the implausibility is that the statistical patterns hidden at one layer, leak into the next layer, so it becomes a requirement for a globally leak-proof synergy of activity in cyberspace. It seems futile from that high-level perspective. And I stubbornly didn't want to accept that, but having really looked deeply at the technical issues, I now lean to that being the hard reality.

That is why I posit that the paradigm of wealth stored in forms that others can easily emulate, tax, and expropriate is dying.

Rather as I suggest, if you have your wealth stored in forms that others can re-use but not entirely emulate/replace, then your "wealth" can't be siphoned away with any means of introspection. For example, see the modules I am adding to my Github account. Sure someone could copy those some where and basically run away with my effort to-date. But they'd be silly to do that, because they'd lose my ongoing knowledge to maintain and improve those modules. They'd be much better rewarded by contributing and re-using them with attribution. And from there, my wealth grows in units of active and ongoing knowledge creation. The monetization will come and I will be able to eat. The big story isn't whether I can buy a Maserati but whether I can impact the world in my small way.

Also I admit there will perhaps be a transitional phase from the economy we have to the Knowledge Age (and perhaps a totalitarian interlude, but isn't that my point about what is dying), so I have not yet tossed aside anonymity entirely. But I am increasingly seeing it as an albatross around my neck as it seems to mess up everything with scalability and still not give the assurances I wanted when I was originally so concerned about needing anonymity. i am still working through the details of it all, so let's see where I end up with my conclusions. If there is useful anonymity that integrates holistically with scaling, then I will be more positive about adding it so people who feel they need it can. But I also worry that they are creating for themselves a false sense of anonymity (and may be later shocked that their actions were not anonymous).

[Rias]

Your post history suggests you have a great interest in CryptoNote so that comment is hard to understand coming from you.  You know demand for privacy is far more than a small niche. Why else would you spend so much time involving yourself with privacy related coins?

I was really into privacy back then. CryptoNote was a radically fresh approach a couple of years ago when I saw it. I was growing more interested in crypto scene, but I seemed to be overlooking the way the technology is adopted and what drives large corporations. I reconsidered a lot of things since then.

Yet, I like CN as a technology, and I did get quite knowledgeable in it during the last years.

Disagree. Real business and corporate money will struggle greatly with transparent blockchains. They don't have the same exact privacy goals as individuals and freedom advocates, but they have their own. In particular, not wanting to be spied on by competitors nor front run in markets. That's why, for example, CT is critically important even in Blockstream's closed blockchain Liquid.

I believe you're saying that under an assumption that corporations will adopt a form of blockchain that is already available on the market. I'm not so sure. Banks and certain IT companies do express their interest in blockchain, but judging from what I've heard them talk, it's more about permissioned blockchains.

It is a entirely different paradigm of privacy. You still have blockchain, which is easily auditable and verifiable for any party that might have such rights, but a competitor would not be able to even connect to the blockchain.

I assume this may prove to be more efficient for corporate goals than using permissionless anonymous blockchains, or even permissioned anonymous blockchains. I don't see big urge for the companies to be adopting open blockchains or particular cryptocurrencies, at least for now. There are of course certain cases when that can still be beneficial (e.g. on-chain bonds for smaller companies).

To say it in another way, the technology has converged on the market, but its tested application seems to be diverging from the original libertarian/anarchistic/openness ideas proposed by free-thinkers. Well, the time will say.

However, a real huge problem is parallel to what we might be discussing here. I bet nobody can point to a company or a particular painful use case that CryptoNote or Monero can be serving. The real market I mean, not our dreams of such. We've all been involved in creating a new better economy, while the course of history shows that we rather need the traditional economy upgraded instead.

I am not trying to say that privacy is an irrelevant issue. It surely is. I'd agree with TPTB_need_war. The big data and surveillance may actually drag us into techodark ages. However, I don't see how private cryptocurrencies can be incorporated into real markets. There's no decabillion market value here. And unfortunately, I would remain pessimistic on the perspectives: I doubt that there will ever be such a market.

[Quicken]

Your post history suggests you have a great interest in CryptoNote so that comment is hard to understand coming from you.  You know demand for privacy is far more than a small niche. Why else would you spend so much time involving yourself with privacy related coins?

I was really into privacy back then. CryptoNote was a radically fresh approach a couple of years ago when I saw it. I was growing more interested in crypto scene, but I seemed to be overlooking the way the technology is adopted and what drives large corporations. I reconsidered a lot of things since then.

Yet, I like CN as a technology, and I did get quite knowledgeable in it during the last years.

So, are you out of Bytecoin now (i.e. own none), Rias? Just curious.
Cheers, Q

[smooth]

I believe you're saying that under an assumption that corporations will adopt a form of blockchain that is already available on the market.

Not necessarily, no, but the technology will still be important.

[permissioned blockchains]

It is a entirely different paradigm of privacy. You still have blockchain, which is easily auditable and verifiable for any party that might have such rights, but a competitor would not be able to even connect to the blockchain.

The real world doesn't work that way. Business collaborate one day and compete the next (or even the very same day). Even when collaborating they don't want to share all information, and certainly not with every member of a group. To control access to information once access to the blockchain has been granted at all, privacy features are needed.

Permissioned blockchains will often need privacy, just as the current example (or maybe more near future, but I'm not sure of the deployment schedule) of the Liquid permissioned blockchain does. Depending on the nature of the use cases for the permissioned blockchains, there may be some exceptions (explicitly public records perhaps).

Furthermore, I'm not even sure there will be too many successful permissioned blockchains. In the past, there were many proprietary closed networks. A few still exist, but most communication now happens over the regular internet. Not even VPNs, but web services with access keys. The need for many interconnections may in time make these closed/semiclosed systems impractical and/or cost-ineffective even when the interaction takes the form of blockchains.

[damashup]

This game of chess finally got interesting!   

[galdur]

This game of chess finally got interesting!   

It seems very even. The bishop is maybe slightly better than the knight but I doubt that it´s meaningful. I´d say a draw is practically certain.