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

[Anon136]

Monero might turn out to be the equivalent of Bitcoin, but for those who want private transactions like private companies(dell etc), and ordinary people who want privacy.

Lets be honest here, its not going to scale well enough for that. Its going to be for people who want to buy drugs on the internet and people who want to hide from the irs

[smooth]

Monero might turn out to be the equivalent of Bitcoin, but for those who want private transactions like private companies(dell etc), and ordinary people who want privacy.

Lets be honest here, its not going to scale well enough for that. Its going to be for people who want to buy drugs on the internet and people who want to hide from the irs

In its present form it won't really scale much better or worse than bitcoin. The constant factor of increased size won't really matter.

That all blockchain based coins have scaling issues is a better argument.

[AnonyMint]

In its present form it won't really scale much better or worse than bitcoin. The constant factor of increased size won't really matter.

That all blockchain based coins have scaling issues is a better argument.

The scaling issue ties in holistically with mining centralization (wherein one or two pools now control > 50% of Bitcoin's hashrate), but avoiding a full client is not the only reason for the use of pools, it is also to deal with variance.

Agreed if you assume mostly only pools are running the full client, then the constant factor of bloat isn't really a difference from Bitcoin because large pools can handle the resource requirements.

However if ever pools were to be decentralized too such that we end up with many smaller pools each running from a users home computer over a fast DSL or cable connection, Monero's larger constant size factor could present an obstacle.

All Monero clients need enough transaction history in order to find transactions to mix with for each of the fractional amounts. So this might be more heavyweight than Bitcoin lite clients, but I haven't run the calculations to see if this is significant in any facet.

Lets be honest here, its not going to scale well enough for that. Its going to be for people who want to buy drugs on the internet and people who want to hide from the irs

The police state will be coming after both such uses.

Dude. what the fuck is your point? that this currency is not able to be untrackable by the fucking nsa? Da fuq - go copy it out and write your own coin mr. expert programmer. stop dumping on innovation you retard.

have a nice life, loser!  

Your bruised personal pump and dump aspirations aside, sober analysis is useful for those who are serious. Analysis is part of the process of innovation.

I may be biased so I am interested to read analytical rebuttals. Ad hominem rebuttals add nothing.

[aminorex]

It's rather silly to make claims about what Monero will be in the future.  It is what it is today.  Tomorrow, it will be what participants cause it to become in the intervening time. There are no insoluble problems of significance on the horizon.  There are numerous very soluble problems, which need work.

For example, naive timing analysis is a pretty easily solvable problem, technically.  Claiming that those solutions will not be applied in a suitable time-frame is just nattering negative nabobery.  It is quite suitable and appropriate to solve that problem after the mix-net is working. In our neighborhood of space-time, things happen in a well-defined partial order.  If you try to get ahead of that order, you might get a speeding ticket from God.

For every measure, there is a counter-measure.  When the cost of measure and counter-measure is consistently and overwhelmingly asymmetric, a nimble defender can hold much ground.  That's sort of fundamental to most crypto.  I see no reason to believe that Monero cannot be evolved into a state of sufficient privacy to make it infeasible for any real entity to defeat its functions at at level which makes it unusable for a substantial minority of actual candidate users.  Monero can take advantage of numerous force multipliers, and hold much ground, despite its present diminutive stature.  As its stature grows, it will be able to hold more yet.

Everything will always be vulnerable, because you can't even know the rules of the game.  The laws of physics are not at all certain or clear, except in statistical terms.  Thus every real system, implemented in physical reality, has some unknown, unknowable, potential to violate your assumptions.  Chasing after a perfect system is a complete and utter snark hunt.  It's good math, but bad engineering.  Systems are only ever either good enough or not good enough, for any well-defined purpose and criterion of evaluation.  Pretending that illusory criteria are normative is either Bad Faith or folly.

TL;DR:  Monero has deficiencies.  They are being addressed by development.  If you want it to go faster, try submitting a pull request.  The boogeyman is not likely to kill us any time soon.

[Anon136]

Monero might turn out to be the equivalent of Bitcoin, but for those who want private transactions like private companies(dell etc), and ordinary people who want privacy.

Lets be honest here, its not going to scale well enough for that. Its going to be for people who want to buy drugs on the internet and people who want to hide from the irs

In its present form it won't really scale much better or worse than bitcoin. The constant factor of increased size won't really matter.

That all blockchain based coins have scaling issues is a better argument.

Well yes the argument has a wider context. I dont think there is anything wrong with using it in a narrow context simply because it has a larger context though . AnonyMint says he can solve the scalability problem with block-chains though, so yea, problem solved .

[jwinterm]

It's rather silly to make claims about what Monero will be in the future.  It is what it is today.  Tomorrow, it will be what participants cause it to become in the intervening time. There are no insoluble problems of significance on the horizon.  There are numerous very soluble problems, which need work.

For example, naive timing analysis is a pretty easily solvable problem, technically.  Claiming that those solutions will not be applied in a suitable time-frame is just nattering negative nabobery.  It is quite suitable and appropriate to solve that problem after the mix-net is working. In our neighborhood of space-time, things happen in a well-defined partial order.  If you try to get ahead of that order, you might get a speeding ticket from God.

For every measure, there is a counter-measure.  When the cost of measure and counter-measure is consistently and overwhelmingly asymmetric, a nimble defender can hold much ground.  That's sort of fundamental to most crypto.  I see no reason to believe that Monero cannot be evolved into a state of sufficient privacy to make it infeasible for any real entity to defeat its functions at at level which makes it unusable for a substantial minority of actual candidate users.  Monero can take advantage of numerous force multipliers, and hold much ground, despite its present diminutive stature.  As its stature grows, it will be able to hold more yet.

Everything will always be vulnerable, because you can't even know the rules of the game.  The laws of physics are not at all certain or clear, except in statistical terms.  Thus every real system, implemented in physical reality, has some unknown, unknowable, potential to violate your assumptions.  Chasing after a perfect system is a complete and utter snark hunt.  It's good math, but bad engineering.  Systems are only ever either good enough or not good enough, for any well-defined purpose and criterion of evaluation.  Pretending that illusory criteria are normative is either Bad Faith or folly.

[Anon136]

The boogeyman is not likely to kill us any time soon.

Maybe sooner than you think. We would do well to act quickly. I may disagree with anonymint on some points, but i think we would agree on this one.

[Finger]

The boogeyman is not likely to kill us any time soon.

Maybe sooner than you think. We would do well to act quickly. I may disagree with anonymint on some points, but i think we would agree on this one.

"In our neighborhood of space-time, things happen in a well-defined partial order." - aminorex

* Finger learning space-time

[AnonyMint]

bitcoin is not anonymous, it is as ''anonymous'' as the link you can make from the person to the address, with Monero there is no such weakness.

Wrong! Both the I2P and Tor websites state they are not anonymous against a global adversary, e.g. the national security agencies. This is the 3rd time I have written this today. It is getting annoying that you don't read.

It's rather silly to make claims about what Monero will be in the future.  It is what it is today.  Tomorrow, it will be what participants cause it to become in the intervening time. There are no insoluble problems of significance on the horizon.  There are numerous very soluble problems, which need work.

Bitcoin is proof that design has inertia, and somethings can never be changed later because they conflict, e.g. I pointed out that the bloat of ring signatures may rule out decentralized mining, which could mean the government will control the coin as they probably will Bitcoin (by controlling the few well known pools with national security gag orders).

Engineers plan ahead. Agreed design is incremental, but ignoring what we know now is not engineering. Bridges are designed to last for 25+ years, and crypto-currency must be designed with a view of the future as well.

For example, naive timing analysis is a pretty easily solvable problem, technically.  Claiming that those solutions will not be applied in a suitable time-frame is just nattering negative nabobery.

Sybil attacks on the Tor or I2P server nodes is not solvable.

The black budget of those who are in control is in excess of $3 trillion, as announced by Donald Rumsfeld on national TV the day before 9/11. How convenient that the records were all destroyed at the Pentagon the next day.

It is quite suitable and appropriate to solve that problem after the mix-net is working.

Mix-nets have no good solution against Sybil attacks from an adversary with nearly unlimited funds.

Also the transactions could be Sybil attacked too, so the ring signatures are mixing with mostly NSA created faux transactions. So then they can isolate who actually sent the transaction.

In our neighborhood of space-time, things happen in a well-defined partial order.  If you try to get ahead of that order, you might get a speeding ticket from God.

True I discussed the math as to why there can't exist omniscience, but in this context that is mostly irrelevant. If I know certain outcomes to be very likely based on good data and analysis, then it falls within my partial-order (i.e. perspective).

For every measure, there is a counter-measure.  When the cost of measure and counter-measure is consistently and overwhelmingly asymmetric, a nimble defender can hold much ground.  That's sort of fundamental to most crypto.

Inertia of installed mass is also fundamental to crypto. Thus your opportunity to get it correct is only early before the coin is adopted.

I see no reason to believe that Monero cannot be evolved into a state of sufficient privacy to make it infeasible for any real entity to defeat its functions at at level which makes it unusable for a substantial minority of actual candidate users.

The past several posts we've been discussing the market need Monero could fulfill.

Who needs anonymity if you can't hide from the government with it?

Mainstream sheepeople will just use Bitcoin.

TL;DR:  Monero has deficiencies.  They are being addressed by development.  If you want it to go faster, try submitting a pull request.  The boogeyman is not likely to kill us any time soon.

I am not analyzing to push Monero faster in any direction (the devs I'm assume studied their viable options already). I analyzing the future of the fundamentals of Monero that are taking form now.

[Anon136]

words n stuff

Dude. If you have a solution to blockchain scalability what on earth are you doing here arguing with us. Please go code out your solution. Please stop wasting your time on us. We aren’t worth it.

[dewdeded]

AnonyMint: Just give some clear suggestions for improvements for Monero. So the devs and community can discuss.
 
We all read your vague, repeating, standard NSA & Co remarks already 2 till >5 times in this and other threads.

[adhitthana]

Bitcoin is proof that design has inertia, and somethings can never be changed later because they conflict, e.g. I pointed out that the bloat of ring signatures may rule out decentralized mining, which could mean the government will control the coin as they probably will Bitcoin (by controlling the few well known pools with national security gag orders).

There is no the government  though. Yes the US is trying to make itself so, but the tide is firmly against it globally now.
The world is moving away from being unipolar, and a fair degree of this is in reaction to the over reach of the USA on the internet. It's not clear where this will take us in the next few years, but I don't think we can be justified in talking about "the government" taking the kind of control you talk about for certain.

[AnonyMint]

AnonyMint: Just give some clear suggestions for improvements for Monero. So the devs and community can discuss.

The mini-blockchain design was done bitfreak! and aaaxn. I already linked to it.

To combine it with an anonymous coin design requires more innovation. Afaics, Monero can't do it because Mini-blockchain is fundamentally incompatible with the ring signatures. But anoncoin had already the I2P, so someone could perhaps fork that and implement the mini-blockchain design, if you want the I2P with decentralization. Or fork Cryptonite (not Cryptonote) to add I2P. I heard that anoncoin is implementing Zerocoin (not Zerocash).

There are many people working on different things. One thing I can do is point to directions they should not go.

As for an anonymity solution that will blind the NSA entirely, you have to dump (or supplement) mix-nets (Tor and I2P) and look for something else from the cryptography research.

There is no the government  though. Yes the US is trying to make itself so, but the tide is firmly against it globally now.
The world is moving away from being unipolar, and a fair degree of this is in reaction to the over reach of the USA on the internet. It's not clear where this will take us in the next few years, but I don't think we can be justified in talking about "the government" taking the kind of control you talk about for certain.

You did not read the post I linked to. In that post, I quoted the links to the evidence that the G20 is cooperating and preparing to act in unison in hunting down all wealth as the western socialism collapses into bankruptcy.

Don't believe the propaganda put out by the-powers-that-be in their controlled mass media that make you believe that the people are rising up. Cyprus, Greece, Ukraine, Syria, etc are evidence that Russia, Europe, and the USA are fully cooperating to destroy people who wish to be sovereign, self-reliant, and free. Don't believe the media circus put out there to make you think Putin and Obama are adversaries. These oligarchy are working together. The majority are already dependent on the government and will (unknowingly) support the oligarchy. As the economies turn down hard in 2016 (much worse than in 2008), the Fed will not do QE again and more people will become dependent on the government for their survival. The government will come after all the wealth.

You will be begging for hyperinflation when you experience what government always does throughout history during large scale sovereign defaults.

[aminorex]

The boogeyman is not likely to kill us any time soon.

Maybe sooner than you think. We would do well to act quickly. I may disagree with anonymint on some points, but i think we would agree on this one.

Boogeyman A (imaginary) and Boogeyman B (real).  There is no omniscient omnipotent adversary.  We're safe from the omniscient omnipotent adversary.  There is a multi-headed, clever, highly-resourced enemy of the very human freedom and dignity which Monero offers to strengthen.  The degree of Monero's success will largely determine the degree to which it is attacked; however, increasing success will also increase the resources which can be employed in defense.  Monero has the initiative, and can choose the battlefield.  Absent suicidal decisions, it will be one advantageous to Monero.  But I do not think the outcome of such a contest is in any sense pre-determined.  Good execution will probably win the day, for one side or the other.  For the time being, Monero is probably far below the radar of threat assessment.  

It is certainly possible to use even bitcoin in an effectively anonymized fashion.  It is not easy enough to allow most potential victims of attacks which depend on privacy defects to use it in that way.  Monero is able to become several orders easier to use in an effectively anonymized fashion than bitcoin is ever likely to be.  The more progress that can be made, the better and more fit Monero will become to occupy that crucial dark liquidity niche.  Again, it just takes time, money, and hard work.

Even a fundamentally superior cryptographic protocol would require long implementation time, political and social project engineering, favorable project economics, network building, &c.  Monero is a long way down that road already. So far, in fact, that I am skeptical that any fundamentally superior competitor can displace it.  Theory means little without practical implementation.  Most of the attack surface of a system is in the details of its implementation, not the fundaments of its theory of operation, simply because the implementation is substantially more complex than the theory.

I'm much more concerned about the coherent vision of the developers than I am about the underlying protocol, the progress of the implementation, the growth of the economy, or even the integrity of the network:  Unless it is politically and socially possible to maintain important and well-defined goals for the system, there is little hope that the implementation will achieve those goals.  In my opinion it is centrally important that a defining dialog be on-going, in order to keep this loosely bound raft of driftwood headed in one direction.  The most vulnerable attack surface of all is the (even more complex) human mind.

[adhitthana]

You did not read the post I linked to. In that post, I quoted the links to the evidence that the G20 is cooperating and preparing to act in unison in hunting down all wealth as the western socialism collapses into bankruptcy.
Don't believe the propaganda put out by the-powers-that-be in their controlled mass media that make you believe that the people are rising up. Cyprus, Greece, Ukraine, Syria, etc are evidence that Russia, Europe, and the USA are fully cooperating to destroy people who wish to be sovereign, self-reliant, and free. Don't believe the media circus put out there to make you think Putin and Obama are adversaries. These oligarchy are working together. The majority are already dependent on the government and will (unknowingly) support the oligarchy. As the economies turn down hard in 2016 (much worse than in 2008), the Fed will not do QE again and more people will become dependent on the government for their survival. The government will come after all the wealth.
You will be begging for hyperinflation when you experience what government always does throughout history during large scale sovereign defaults.

Whilst the scenario you favour is one possible scenario, it's not the only possibility, and I don't tend think it's the most likely one (although parts of it are in all likelihood  unavoidable) . But as I don't now the future I may be wrong.
I don't tend to think the powers that be are omniscient or omnipotent. I think the world is rudderless rather than being under the control of a criminal elite.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgSbaKpCjq4

I had a quick look at the video you appear to be relying on to say "the Fed will not do QE again", but it's 41 minutes long so I'm not sure if I'll watch it. Can you summarise the argument for me and if it sounds interesting I will watch it. Thanks

[smooth]

You're right that XMR has Bitcoin beat with private and untraceable transactions (if the bugs are fixed), but Bitcoin is, in fact, anonymous, because

"Anonymous" is pretty much a vacuous concept here. It gets thrown around a lot with respect to crypto coins, but the dictionary definition is just "not associated with a name" and that does indeed apply to bitcoin and not only every other coin but most pieces of software and systems on the internet in general.

That is one reason it is better to speak in more precise terms such as unlinkability and blockchain analysis resistance. I'm highly critical of much of what they do and how they do it but in this respect I give high praise to the people behind cryptonote. They recognize that to solve real problems you must first clearly define those problems.

[adhitthana]

but Bitcoin is, in fact, anonymous, because there is no identifying information associated with it.

But if you pay me , then I know your address (or one of them), so doesn't that mean you are not anonymous to me?
And can't I then see a lot more about your finances than  potentially if you used some other types of coins?

[Anon136]

but Bitcoin is, in fact, anonymous, because there is no identifying information associated with it.

But if you pay me , then I know your address (or one of them), so doesn't that mean you are not anonymous to me?

and if that information gets leaked, from one single person you interact with, than all of your transaction history becomes discoverable. sure there is always an element of plausible deniablity, but tyrants dont give a crap about plausible deniability.

[RentaMouse]

Those posts earlier. I have heard the argument that a sufficiently empowered entity could inject sufficient txes into the system to greatly reduce the anonymity effect of ring signatures (if I am in fact Alice, Bob and Carol, then David isnt as anonymous as he thought he was). In fact the XMR community was doing quite a good job of this by itself by telling each other to use mixin value of zero for txes, so one of the future dev plans is to hard code a minimum  mixin into the client.

Ok, that still wouldnt stop the entity with sufficient resources from trying, but if all "legitimate" txes are already using a mixin count of 5+ then the number fake txes they have to be injecting must be exponentially higher to be effective. Not saying it wouldnt work in theory, but in practice the network would either grind to a halt or people would notice that something peculiar was happening and take action to circumvent or avoid it (pools sending themselves high mixin dust txes in order to generate additional fees from the tx injection?)

[AnonyMint]

The socialism doesn't need to be omniscient. Fact is we can study history and see what happens every time. The masses ride the socialism all the way down until it comes after them too. Then war and chaos. Then reset.

Implementation is critical (damn don't I know that!), for without it then all the theory and talk is useless. And it is true that the coin with the best implementation will be able to cherry pick the best features from other coins, but only if some aspect of its inertia prevents it. I think without a holistic design early on, there is a risk for Monero either to fall into the inertia trap that Bitcoin fell into, or not reach critical mass. I will not try to quantify that risk, as I don't want to take a political position. I shared some technical analysis. I do desire the NSA-blinded coin (don't you?).

Design parameters can be important if they impact exponential differences in adoption rate, as that impacts the prior paragraph.

Integrating I2P or Tor with a coin isn't a bad thing, it can supplement any other anonymity added.

Good luck. We all are going to need it. The multi-headed monster called socialism is headed towards a 309 year confluence event. These are usually quite turbulent and bloody. Also we are shifting into a 309 year public wave cycle (alternates between public and private every 309 years), so the 15th century and the Hundred Years War, the 9th Century, the 3rd Century, or the widespread war leading into the formation of the Athenian Empire would be a better reference point.

Btw, just saw this Original NSA Whistle Blower: Goal is 'Total Population Control'.

wolf0, mixers are honeypots.