[XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency

[dEBRUYNE]

Little DB update I saw on reddit

It's worked on Windows since quite near the beginning. What you probably read is that we were making a platform agnostic blockchain import format, which we've also subsequently completed. There are performance issues we're dealing with at the moment, and we have to get those 100% right, else we could end up with a network fork (half of the network on the database version and half on the in-RAM version).

[1714504054]

1714504054

[1714504054]

1714504054

[1714504054]

1714504054

[1714504054]

1714504054

[Johnny Mnemonic]

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/386vh0/borromean_ring_signatures_new_research_by_greg/

A constructive post by YOU?

Maybe our love for Monero is finally defrosting his heart...

"You're a mean one Mr. Grinch Primer...."

It seems we're warming up to him and not the other way around.

Deep down we all love primer- and his harsh, unforgiving exterior... whether we choose to admit it or not.

[hodlmybtc]

Maybe he bought in again?

[5w00p]

Maybe he bought in again?

He bragged that he mined 31 blocks the other day, so we knows he loves Monero.

[hodlmybtc]

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1077994.0

Some here may be interested in a new cryptosystem I've been working on which efficiently and privately proves the knowledge of secrets according to an policy defined by an AND/OR network:

https://github.com/Blockstream/borromean_paper/raw/master/borromean_draft_0.01_34241bb.pdf

This new ring-signature is asymptotically 2x more efficient than the one used in Monero/Bytecoin: It needs n_pubkeys+1 field elements in the signature instead of 2 * n_pubkeys. In particular, it retains this 2x efficiency gain when doing an AND of many smaller rings, because the +1 term is amortized across all of them.

The paper also describes a new way to think about ring signatures; which might be helpful to anyone who has looked at them before and found them confusing. (If we were successful, you'll think the new construction was so simple that it was completely obvious; I can assure you it was not... fortunately Andrew Poelstra came up with an especially good way to explain it.)

While the connection to Bitcoin may not be immediately obvious, I've used this as a building block in a much larger and more applicable cryptosystem which I'll be publishing, complete with implementation, shortly  (I'm trying to not flood people with too many new ideas built on new ideas all at once, and I'm still working on the description of the other constructions). I think this construction is interesting in its own right, and I'd be happy to learn if someone knows of this being previously published (though I was unable to find anything prior).

[generalizethis]

Good question: "If the NSA compromises monero users' wallets, gives Poloniex the order for the coins in their possession, and steals and buys more monero coins, the more transactions they can trace. And nobody would know the percentage of the outputs the NSA would own."

Is this response correct or am i missing where the cryptography hits the road? 

I believe they would have had to have done that from day one (like bytecoin's 82% premine) and to have kept doing it to amass enough current transaction data to break monero's untracability due to the outputs not being time deterministic. I believe it is like a theoretical time machine in this respect where you can travel back in time, but only as far as when the machine was built. So my understanding is that you would only have access to the transactions you made, but not to information before the wallet existed, so when your funds are mixed with old inputs and outputs, you'd have no idea whether the data is old or new unless you created it. 

[MoneroMooo]

Good question: "If the NSA compromises monero users' wallets, gives Poloniex the order for the coins in their possession, and steals and buys more monero coins, the more transactions they can trace. And nobody would know the percentage of the outputs the NSA would own."

Is this response correct or am i missing where the cryptography hits the road? 

See MRL4. It looks at how minimal mixin values affects the likelihood of an adversary with some percentage of outputs available to mix to see through to get the spent inputs in a ring signature. Turns out a rather low minimum mixin is enough to quickly drown a static (who doesn't generate more new known outputs) adversary.

For the active adversary above (I magically become the owner of loads of coins and inputs) then sure, if the NSA finds an exploit that lets them steal pretty much all the coins in existence, you're a bit screwed. Even if they didn't even bother to try to deanonymize.

[mrkavasaki]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

[binaryFate]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

What if Ridicule could kill?
Than I think you will be very dead

[generalizethis]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

What if Ridicule could kill?
Than I think you will be very dead

mrkavaski, I just reported you to yourself--did you get the message?

[mrkavasaki]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

What if Ridicule could kill?
Than I think you will be very dead

Than i think also the monero Community will be very dead
At least i am not talking Shit like  "monero will overtake bitcoin in 2016" 

[luigi1111]

Yeah, i've heard this argument before and I think a solution is to make another wallet available. Noob wallet. Designed for bitcoiners coming to Monero.

Again, I don't see why that's necessary. All wallets should be "noob wallets" because payment ID should not be the concern of the sender. Give me an address to send coins to. That's it. Any additional step is unnecessary.

right, i get it, and it seems we are definitely moving towards that in some fashion (serialized addresses / payment IDs), if we're on the same page.

in the meantime, though, i would argue that a stop gap solution is warranted. I don't know if you're lurking on IRC, but almost all of the folks that drop in (i.e., are there for one purpose and then leave) ask about the payment ID. i mean, i'm generalizing, but its a lot.

I proposed (and luigi1111 designed) a stop-gap solution that I believe would work great, and should be fairly simple to implement. It's just a matter of somebody doing it (luigi said he might).

I had a look at CN coins I could find, checking their address "network" bytes. Here's what I found:

XMR: 0x12
BCN: 0x06
XDN: 0xdb01
MCN: 0xab34
BBR: 0x01 (presumptuous?)
DSH: 0x48
FCN: 0x22
QCN: 0x02
AEON: 0xb201

I'm curious (but didn't go hunting for the info) if the coins that have two network bytes aren't from that "coin mill".

Anyway, I digress. I believe a new address scheme should be accompanied by an incremented network byte after thinking about it some more. This should create an environment for less unexpected behavior from non-compliant clients, etc. It also provides potential support for an "integrated truncated address". We have 15 straight increments available before we run into FCN (not that that poses a real issue IMO).

Keep in mind network bytes don't work the same way in Cryptonote compared to Bitcoin, since CN pays to pubkeys directly instead of hashes.

Edit: based on that, the proposal looks like (random address + payment ID):

Code:

Once again order is: network byte, pubspendkey, pubviewkey, paymentID, checksum
0x13 7849297236cd7c0d6c69a3c8c179c038d3c1c434735741bb3c8995c3c9d6f2ac bdc158199c8933353627d54edb4bbae547dbbde3130860d7940313210edca0a6 \n
3aae9f047faa4a8f70efc79c435e5adc13c89e344c9abd894d9e705f5e39da78 db935d83

cnBase58: 4FtAMs2HTeb3FE2gcT3LJjAWJ6fGWq8t8YKRqwwit8vmVtomVZYg34v9uDgXFtuPeqfMJyjJBgVW7d4NweAkfCMDUode8wYTV6yQzZRDJY22RFdp2U6SFDnwEPy1koguM2JVEdrKPkE (always 139 characters)

[medusa13]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

he is right, its dangerous.
i know he is a troll and i know he writes stuff like that every day.

still this particular thing is a risk. i personally think monero would survive an event like this. but there would be a lot of pain, no question

[shitaifan2013]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

he is right, its dangerous.
i know he is a troll and i know he writes stuff like that every day.

still this particular thing is a risk. i personally think monero would survive an event like this. but there would be a lot of pain, no question

not sure if someone would actually win that much from hacking poloniex. right now it's the only place where a hacker could dump large amounts of stolen xmr.

the case of hack I have in mind would mean a hacker got control over the exchange and at least their hot wallets.

[exciter0]

What if Polo get hacked soon?
Than I think monero will be very dead

he is right, its dangerous.
i know he is a troll and i know he writes stuff like that every day.

still this particular thing is a risk. i personally think monero would survive an event like this. but there would be a lot of pain, no question

He is not right, he's an idiot.
If Polo gets hacked then hacker will be rich. We'll all resort to using the OTC thread and OTC IRC channel
But really, who cares if they get hacked or not...I have my XMR in my own wallet.
If you're loaning out your XMR for shorts then, well, you deserve it.
What if a bank gets robbed, would the whole economy go down too?

[medusa13]

the stolen funds are not the problem. the problem would be the main liquidity place gone(assuming polo goes completely down) and the short to mid term chaos (otc/new exchange etc). but as allready said, i guess community could handle it. still, this is not the time to lay back. we have to try to spread the volume better!

[kazuki49]

the stolen funds are not the problem. the problem would be the main liquidity place gone(assuming polo goes completely down) and the short to mid term chaos (otc/new exchange etc). but as allready said, i guess community could handle it. still, this is not the time to lay back. we have to try to spread the volume better!

After Polo forceful identification program went live you can be sure only a small fraction of the XMR supply is actually sitting there.

[smooth]

the stolen funds are not the problem. the problem would be the main liquidity place gone(assuming polo goes completely down) and the short to mid term chaos (otc/new exchange etc). but as allready said, i guess community could handle it. still, this is not the time to lay back. we have to try to spread the volume better!

Bittrex is not an unreasonable exchange as far as I can tell, so in the event of a Polo disappearance I suspect most of the volume would just immediately move there.

It is somewhat inevitable that the volume will be concentrated in one place at one time because people want to trade where the most volume is. Polo got that by being first and not screwing up.

[GingerAle]

the stolen funds are not the problem. the problem would be the main liquidity place gone(assuming polo goes completely down) and the short to mid term chaos (otc/new exchange etc). but as allready said, i guess community could handle it. still, this is not the time to lay back. we have to try to spread the volume better!

After Polo forceful identification program went live you can be sure only a small fraction of the XMR supply is actually sitting there.

i'm sure someone with enough time on their hands could get a rough estimate of how much monero actually left poloniex leading up to their "live" date by looking at the blockchain.

[kazuki49]

the stolen funds are not the problem. the problem would be the main liquidity place gone(assuming polo goes completely down) and the short to mid term chaos (otc/new exchange etc). but as allready said, i guess community could handle it. still, this is not the time to lay back. we have to try to spread the volume better!

After Polo forceful identification program went live you can be sure only a small fraction of the XMR supply is actually sitting there.

i'm sure someone with enough time on their hands could get a rough estimate of how much monero actually left poloniex leading up to their "live" date by looking at the blockchain.

tipped 1 XMR for the jocose insidious truth

edit: new pool: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1078009.60