Firstly thanks for the reply.
Pleasure:)
1) Highlighted RED: I take umbrage with: really quite good (only quite?)
Yes. It is not remarkable or groundbreaking in the way that Satoshi's whitepaper was, elegantly tying together concepts in a way that had previously never been thought of. The paper introduces some novel ideas, but things like ring signatures had
already been mentioned by Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2010. It is also quite flawed in that it sketches the idea of an "egalitarian PoW algorithm" without detailing how it would work, which is rather useless and much like me showing you pictures of the cake you're trying to bake but not giving you the recipe.
Finally, it is not conceptually free from defect (not that the Bitcoin paper was, but it was certainly quite close and addressed many of the game theoretic problems that would only become apparent years later), as discussed in
MRL-0001 and
MRL-0004.
many years (3)
Is 3 not many? Let us not waste too much time on the semantics of a word choice that is largely irrelevant to the discussion.
demonstrably untrue (Im not convinced).
The only reason we know that Bitcoin started when it did is because it was on a very public mailing list that is archived in multiple places, and that many people (including myself) were subscribed to at the time. If CryptoNote was a profoundly innovative cryptographic miracle you'd expect that they would want to let their peers know. Academics are not only proud of their accomplishments, but they make their research extremely public as soon as possible, to avoid
multiple discovery.
- you state the CryptoNote Team is "in on the scam". Noted, no pun intended (again unconvinced).
That their discovery was not made public for several years is absolutely stupefying. Either Saberhagen / the CryptoNote researchers are the humblest academics ever known to grace the face of the planet, or they purposely withheld their research from the public for years, or they only actually completed it more recently and have backdated it to match up with the Bytecoin premine scam.
The first option is implausible, given that they have, more recently, tried to speak at p2pfisy (via
a Skype call that nobody could understand, apparently). They want their discovery to be known, so the idea that they were floundering in the darkness by chance is incomprehensibly illogical. It doesn't fit with the facts.
The second option is unconscionable, and if true it means that they purposely kept the implementation and network absolutely secret in order to amass a large quantity of Bytecoin (and thus they were "in on the scam", so to speak). I find this to be at least somewhat implausible, as their claim is that it was on the "dark web", and they point to some "unicorn library" that used to exist on Tor as evidence of a service that accepted Bytecoin. The only problem with this is that academics who would use this service would definitely discuss the cryptocurrency publicly, and yet we see no evidence of that.
The last option is the only one that makes absolute sense, especially given their reaction to being caught out on faking the dates on their whitepaper. Why not just back off, admit to having misstepped and made a bad decision, and then moving on?
2) Highlighted BLUE: (I also take umbrage with) You place the BCN guys in a bind, a Catch 22. Those who wish to remain anonymous will hardly reveal their identities and anybody who comes along with a pseudonym saying they were there in 2012/13 will certainly be dismissed out-of-hand. archive.org cant help given the origins. I am struggling to imagine what might convince you BCN was started in 2012 but am finding it hard to think of what.
You misunderstand - why would they be dismissed out-of-hand if they're known entities? Was the famous mathematician
Nicolas Bourbaki dismissed before it came to light that it was a group of mathematicians? What about
Blanches Descartes or
Auguste Antoine Le Blanc? For that matter, it has been suggested that Nick Szabo is a pseudonym. Another example is
Why the Lucky Stiff (aka _why), a famous Ruby developer who remained pseudonymous and eventually disappeared (although eventually being outed by an anonymous blog post later on).
People are "known", not because they've spoken at a conference or because we've seen their passport, but because they've been around and public for many years, using the same pseudonym, and have been consistent. They usually excel in a particular area, and choose to publish work pseudonymously for their own personal reasons, but their existence is known and they are often considered domain experts or are at least very knowledgeable. Hackers are another example of people who remain pseudonymous, but are absolutely well known. Same goes for many of the contributors to Monero and Bitcoin.
Now that we have that out the way, let's address the other part of your statement. These "known entities" can't be self-referential. In other words, we can't take their word on it, we need people from outside the circle that were around when Bytecoin launched. Not "mining team" garbage on their blog, not obvious sock puppets on Bitcointalk, but people are are publicly known (by their pseudonym or real name) who can vouch for Bytecoin's launch date, and also presumably provide a copy of the code from before the March 2014 commit. If a sufficient amount of evidence piles up (as would naturally have occurred) then this would be a non-issue.
3) Highlighted GREEN: the answer. cheers. so SURAE NOETHER is indeed an anonymous entity with credentials (we are lead to believe) who works for Monero Research Labs. OK. Whilst his paper is probably sound since he is a pseudonym it is necessary for a known entity to (at some point) validate the paper, no? One of the points of the Zeuner Review (SDC) is that Zeuner IS a known entity and respected etc etc Getting one anon guy to review another is pretty meta. Point taken about reputations - this helps to a degree altho Surae has no rep like Satoshi and if Satoshi re-appeared magically he'd also be dismissed as prob being a phoney.
Surae and Surang wrote the review collectively, as at that stage Surang had no pseudonym of his own. Both of them are known to me, and their proviso for working on Monero was that they use a pseudonym. The circle that have met them in real life consists of the other current MRL members, as well as Monero contributor tewinget, which is still a closed circle. Thus the reason for "trusting" their review is three-fold: (i) the review comments stand on their own merit, despite being written when our understanding of the work CryptoNote had done was still in its early days; (ii) other known entities that have read it have added comments, none of which have slammed the review as being incorrect; (iii) the subsequent body of work put out by the Monero Research Lab further cements their position as domain experts.
You are correct in that Zeuner is a known entity. He has
a LinkedIn profile and everything. But he is not known or respected in the fields required to review SDC's whitepaper or code. He has no papers published on arXiv (in contrast to the MRL academia, a statement you will have to take at face value I'm afraid). His LinkedIn profile lists him as being proficient in the fields of: domain names, e-mail marketing, tourism, business intelligence, market research, telecommunications, search engines, financial. None of those are particularly relevant. Cryptographers, even those with only a modicum of skill, actively participate in cryptography discussions, but I see no evidence of him on any of the cryptography mailing lists / forums / subreddits / crypto.stackexchange answers. We can also get a monkey to rubber-stamp Monero, but that's not particularly advantageous to anyone, except as a marketing gimmick, don't you think?
It is all very well for anon geniuses to come along and write papers so long as known entities validate the work. Without wishing to cast aspersions on Surae has this happened? thanks
See above. The validity of the work remains unchallenged, and stands based on its own merit and on the subsequent MRL research bulletins published by the same authors.
