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

[Drhiggins]

Long time since I've posted here.  Have been busy running my mining rigs and other crypto projects.  Can someone give me a State of the Union run down on Monero and what has been going on and what is coming up for the year?

Links or replies will work for me.  Hope everyone is well here.  This has always been my go to place for Monero news and problem solving. 

[Anon136]

This thread is insanely long. Is monero superior compared to dash and zcash?

Dash has cheaper transaction fees right now so if you just wanna pay someone who accepts dash and you dont care about privacy than perhaps there are some situations where dash would be superior. However if privacy is your concern than yes it isn't even a comparison.

Dash just has a coin join style mixing. It has been shown to be broken. I cant seem to find that research paper right now can someone in this thread help me out? Additionally "privacy" is optional on dash meaning if you use it it looks suspicious making the currency not necissarily fungible in all cases. Oh also its a premine scam. It was released as X-Coin. At its inception the devs of X-Coin said they wouldnt start mining till the next day but actually started in secret before everyone else and additionally it mined some huge percentage of the currency supply in that first night. It then re-branded to DarkCoin a couple of days later to try to escape this debacle. And re-branded AGAIN to dash to presumably further distance its self. I don't remember all the specific figures but that's enough info to go on if you want to research it.

ZCash requires a trusted set up. Meaning if everyone involved in the innitial setup was reliable and trustworthy than it is safe (*edit* it uses really cutting edge modern not very well tested cryptography so maybe not even then). But if one of them was a bad actor than all supposedly "private" transactions can be discovered by him or who ever he gave the private information to. Additionally producing a private transaction is EXTREMELY computationally intensive. As I understand it it takes some peoples computer up to an hour to crunch all the numbers. Also the transactions are huge and so clog up the blockchain and are expensive to get included. This means the feature is rarely used and so again like I said with dash, has negative implications for fungibility.

So now for monero. Being as unbiased as possible I will try to critique it as well. Monero was pretty fairly distributed but there was a time in the early days when a guy had personally developed mining software that was more optimized than what anyone else had. It wasn't like with dash where he mined a third of the damned currency supply in a day. I think he had like 50% efficiency advantage over everyone else for like a month. Someone correct me with the specifics if you remember. It was nothing catastrophic but hes probably pretty rich now. Also we are currently facing the first real threat to our privacy right now in the form of an issue with ring signature input reuse on an up coming fork chain called MoneroV. If someone wanted to criticize us for having an issue there they wouldn't be wrong. Another criticism is that our transactions are rather large. I think around 13kb instead of like 250 bytes for a bitcoin transaction. This is actively being addressed though with a proposal called bullet proofs which will have probably about an 85% space savings. Maybe a great deal more more if implemented with batched transactions and people widely adopt and use batched transactions. Other than those issues monero has very strong privacy through the combination of several core features.

1) All transactions are forced to be private. This has an externalizing effect of improving everyone's privacy. Imagine it this way, if you have very well mixed coins, no one can trace them back to you, but then you send them to a known address that is a huge information leak on your end. It undermines a lot of the privacy that you gained by your therough mixing. On the extreme end, someone can go to the guy you sent to and use the 5 dollar wrench technique to find out who you are.

2) All amounts that are sent are unknown. Look at this random transaction from the block explorer https://moneroexplorer.com/tx/ec14e0f6c91966a5b899c49297a23f8e21e02716b517938c69740892d46e1990 Look at anywhere that it says ammount. It's just a "?".

3) All monero addresses are untraceable. That is to say there is no way to know who is receiving a given transaction.

4) All monero sending addresses are unlinkable. Ring signatures are used for this. A transaction is signed by several separate inputs. It is possible to know that one of those inputs is the true signatory and is valid but it is not possible to know WHICH of the inputs is the true signatory.

That was a lot of work so I hope you really care and weren't just exploiting some signature campaign. Or if you are than hopefully SOMEONE gets some value from it.

[Nathan047]

This thread is insanely long. Is monero superior compared to dash and zcash?

If you're looking for anonymity, then yes,
Edit: Read the post above mine

[explorer]

Long time since I've posted here.  Have been busy running my mining rigs and other crypto projects.  Can someone give me a State of the Union run down on Monero and what has been going on and what is coming up for the year?

Links or replies will work for me.  Hope everyone is well here.  This has always been my go to place for Monero news and problem solving. 

Multisig, sub-addresses, default fee reduction (what else?) in next month's fork.  Bulletproofs next fork after (massive reduction in tx size and fees)

monero hardware wallet soon, ledger nano s soon.

Our very own premine scam fork, moneroV soon.

network hash rate + GH/s

tons of media on web browser miners and 'crypto jacking' bot nets

That's a quick rundown off the top of my head.

[Drhiggins]

Long time since I've posted here.  Have been busy running my mining rigs and other crypto projects.  Can someone give me a State of the Union run down on Monero and what has been going on and what is coming up for the year?

Links or replies will work for me.  Hope everyone is well here.  This has always been my go to place for Monero news and problem solving. 

Multisig, sub-addresses, default fee reduction (what else?) in next month's fork.  Bulletproofs next fork after (massive reduction in tx size and fees)

monero hardware wallet soon, ledger nano s soon.

Our very own premine scam fork, moneroV soon.

network hash rate + GH/s

tons of media on web browser miners and 'crypto jacking' bot nets

That's a quick rundown off the top of my head.

Thank you. 

[ozkraut]

Long time since I've posted here.  Have been busy running my mining rigs and other crypto projects.  Can someone give me a State of the Union run down on Monero and what has been going on and what is coming up for the year?

Links or replies will work for me.  Hope everyone is well here.  This has always been my go to place for Monero news and problem solving.  

Multisig, sub-addresses, default fee reduction (what else?) in next month's fork.  Bulletproofs next fork after (massive reduction in tx size and fees)

monero hardware wallet soon, ledger nano s soon.

Our very own premine scam fork, moneroV soon.

network hash rate + GH/s

tons of media on web browser miners and 'crypto jacking' bot nets

That's a quick rundown off the top of my head.

Thank you.  

globee payment processor / merchands some time ago
xmr.to
android wallet

probably more

ah yeah: FluffyGate ....

[explorer]

Long time since I've posted here.  Have been busy running my mining rigs and other crypto projects.  Can someone give me a State of the Union run down on Monero and what has been going on and what is coming up for the year?

Links or replies will work for me.  Hope everyone is well here.  This has always been my go to place for Monero news and problem solving.  

Multisig, sub-addresses, default fee reduction (what else?) in next month's fork.  Bulletproofs next fork after (massive reduction in tx size and fees)

monero hardware wallet soon, ledger nano s soon.

Our very own premine scam fork, moneroV soon.

network hash rate + GH/s

tons of media on web browser miners and 'crypto jacking' bot nets

That's a quick rundown off the top of my head.

Thank you.  

globee payment processor / merchands some time ago
xmr.to
android wallet

probably more

ah yeah: FluffyGate ....

Of course! The integration of XMR.to into the Monerujo Android wallet was epic!  Monero usability grows and grows!

[haster100]

I have been a monero holder for a while, and it seems really undervalued. Anyone having privacy concerns should find interest in it.

[Millionero]

FluffyGate ....

Which one?   

[sunnydmd]

everything gold :')))
that's been a while since last time I notice XMR, price rise so quickly.
remember that time, when I chose XDN over XMR. and time pass out, XND still rise, but nowhere near XMR. . . make me fell sad so much
but now, ONION rise as very potential anonymous coin. . .
a little bit pointless comment but...any one see through ONION? please tell me your opinion.

EVERYONE can see through ONION.  It's blockchain is transparent.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg28075509#msg28075509

sorry that's my bad English
I mean if anyone take a look at ONION

by the way. if it's blockchain is transparent so why they call it anonymity.
and thanks for information ^^

[dzkrb1966]

Today I saw forecasts and Monero enters the 8 most promising coins for 2018. This is associated with the anonymity of transactions.

[iCEBREAKER]

Hey Crypto People,

I've seen discussion about how using a unique ringsize (EG 41) is a problem for privacy.

Would it be possible to use CT/Pederson commits/range proof magical crypto stuff to hide the ringsize from everyone that doesn't need to know it?

I'm sure Confidential Ringsize is a silly idea, but would like to know exactly why.

[Anon136]

by the way. if it's blockchain is transparent so why they call it anonymity.

Probably because they hold a lot of it and they think that if people think it is private it will be worth more.

[birr]

everything gold :')))
that's been a while since last time I notice XMR, price rise so quickly.
remember that time, when I chose XDN over XMR. and time pass out, XND still rise, but nowhere near XMR. . . make me fell sad so much
but now, ONION rise as very potential anonymous coin. . .
a little bit pointless comment but...any one see through ONION? please tell me your opinion.

EVERYONE can see through ONION.  It's blockchain is transparent.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg28075509#msg28075509

sorry that's my bad English
I mean if anyone take a look at ONION

by the way. if it's blockchain is transparent so why they call it anonymity.
and thanks for information ^^

Fixing a hole in the ocean
Trying to make a dove-tail joint, yeah
Looking through a glass onion.

[birr]

So I've been thinking about this MoneroV fork problem. I saw the suggestion in a reddit thread about a tool that would allow monero users to specify ring signature inputs thus allowing us to sign with the same ring signature inputs that we used on the MoneroV blockchain.

I was wondering if anyone has given thought to a two pronged approach? We could additionally utilize a blacklist of ring sig inputs used on the forked chain. Some trusted team member could produce and update this blacklist. It could be a basic text file that we drag and drop into our monero directory. I know it would harm privacy to shrink the pool of available ring sig participants but we would only be blacklisting the ones used to produce the initial transaction on the MoneroV chain. So it would be a tiny tiny fraction of the ring signatures out there. Additionally new ring signature candidates are being produced constantly every 2 minutes every day.

It's a partial solution and an imperfect solution to a difficult problem but maybe worth considering.

Do you have a link to that thread? I don't know enough about this to have an opinion.

Here you go. https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7x297t/careful_with_monero_forks_with_airdrops/du537ij/ It's a pretty simple to understand issue.

I'm trying to parse the seriousness of this... attack, for lack of a better word.
If revealing the real input was the only problem, it wouldn't bother me so much, because it's only one transaction.  Monero would live on without permanent ill effects.
But some of the reddit comments give the impression that there are knock-on effects that compromise other transactions.
My main concern is how it will affect the pool of decoy inputs.  Does the fact each transaction that's executed on both chains reveals four decoys mean that those decoys are rendered useless thereafter?  Or can the same decoys be used in future transactions safely?

[Anon136]

Does the fact each transaction that's executed on both chains reveals four decoys mean that those decoys are rendered useless thereafter?  Or can the same decoys be used in future transactions safely?

No you are misunderstanding. Each decoy input is SOMEONES real input. So it would only reveal that the other inputs were decoys for you not necessarily decoys for anyone else who uses them. It would reveal your real input and your decoys. So then if someone else used your real input as a decoy in the future they would have their mixin set reduced by one. So if they did a mixin 6 and it selected one of the 6 as your real input that was revealed by you spending on both chains, they would get the effect of having used mixin 5 instead.

I hope that makes sense.

As for the seriousness. It is serious. Serious in the sense that something will have to be done about it. But not serious in the sense that nothing can be done about it.

[explorer]

everything gold :')))
that's been a while since last time I notice XMR, price rise so quickly.
remember that time, when I chose XDN over XMR. and time pass out, XND still rise, but nowhere near XMR. . . make me fell sad so much
but now, ONION rise as very potential anonymous coin. . .
a little bit pointless comment but...any one see through ONION? please tell me your opinion.

EVERYONE can see through ONION.  It's blockchain is transparent.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg28075509#msg28075509

sorry that's my bad English
I mean if anyone take a look at ONION

by the way. if it's blockchain is transparent so why they call it anonymity.
and thanks for information ^^

Because they are unconscionable liars.  Scammers, if you will.

[explorer]

Some interesting discussion on the fork attack:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7xz0mz/monero_deanonymization_or_how_i_learned_to_stop/

[ozkraut]

Ah somebody throw me some merits pls? Ive been inches away from hero when the 'merit system' came in and now like fkn miles away. lol Not that it really matters but it does

cheers

[Anon136]

Ah somebody throw me some merits pls? Ive been inches away from hero when the 'merit system' came in and now like fkn miles away. lol Not that it really matters but it does

cheers

Say something meritorious.