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

[smooth]

from the op

This feature makes a timing analysis of the blockchain useless.

But what if they were running nodes all over the planet and storing and time stamping all of the network traffic they received, could they then use timing analyses on this time stamped record of all network traffic?

If you are monitoring a large portion of the Internet then yes you can identify where transactions originate. That doesn't necessarily tie the transaction to an individual (nor to other transactions on the block chain), though in some cases it might.

Note that the OP refers to timing analysis of the blockchain meaning that by analyzing the blockchain (at any time in the future) one can infer that all partners in a coinjoin transaction must have taken place at approximately the same time, which vastly narrows the list of candidate transactions. This is not true for outputs mixed using ring signatures. This is a distinct vulnerability from (and one accessible to many more adversaries than) real time monitoring of the Internet.

[monero]

Monero Missives

July 20th, 2014

Hello, and welcome to our seventh Monero Missive!

Major Updates

1. We've had an incredibly positive response to our ongoing need for donations, and we'd like to thank everyone that has donated and continues to donate. Several pools have stepped up to donate some of their fees to us - CryptonotepoolUK, for instance, has a 1% fee, but the entirety of the fee is donated. Risto Pietila has also kindly setup a donation "Hall of Fame", which has been taken over by cAPSLOCK, and can be found here. This, and all the ongoing donations, are critical to our ability to spend even more time and energy on Monero, and are greatly appreciated.

2. Now that the CryptoNote whitepaper has been peer reviewed by our mathematicians and cryptographers, they have begun initial work reviewing the implementation thereof. This is most especially important, as Monero has inherited quite a bit from the CryptoNote reference code. The initial focus is on the cryptographic primitives and higher-level cryptographic functions, which will be evaluated by code analysis as well as by running test vectors (that are different from those in the Monero test suite) against those functions. The methodologies and results will, of course, be published in due time.

3. A number of important and critical dev efforts are under way, most notably the embedded database work (to cut down on the RAM requirement), the daemonising work (to allow for a much more stable environment for exchanges, pools, merchants, and other automated systems), and the QoS work (to reduce and limit the bandwidth requirements). Technical updates on these are in the dev diary below.

4. We'd like to officially welcome Pavel Kravchenko as a key technical contributor to Monero. With a PhD in Information Security, specialising in public key infrastructures, he will be devoting some time to tackling the larger issues that Monero faces in its drive to become a truly private, untraceable cryptocurrency.

5. Further to the last missive, the German word list has been completed, and work has begun on the Portuguese version. This is very early work, and is very important to our ensuring that it fits well with our current mnemonic system.

Dev Diary

Blockchain: abstraction of the blockchain storage functions is basically complete, and the next step will be to start integrating LevelDB so that we have a baseline for our performance testing. A number of the key-value stores / embedded databases that we will be evaluating are forked from LevelDB, so it makes sense to start with that. This is moving out of "core" and into "blockchain" for categorisation going forward. The ongoing progress on this can be followed here: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/blockchain

Core / Wallet: much of the work on daemonising Monero has been complete. On Unix-like systems (Linux, OS X) the daemon backgrounds correctly, and commands can be run against the daemon (through command line arguments or RPC calls). On Windows the daemon can install itself as a Windows service, and can subsequently be managed through the standard Windows service system. The Windows service can also be removed by the daemon. Similarly, rpcwallet has inherited this functionality, with the difference that rpcwallet can run in multiple instances (whereas the daemon only allows a single instance). This covers edge cases where a single machine needs to have multiple wallets accessible via multiple rpcwallet instances.

RPC: a new get_connections RPC call has been added to the daemon and merged into master. This is needed by the DNS seed control software, which is at a very early stage. Once complete the hardcoded seed nodes will be removed in lieu of DNS seeds. At a later stage when the DNS seed control software is feature complete, there will be a call for 4 or 5 people who are happy to run DNS seeds on an extremely long-term basis.

RPC: due to some exchanges finding it difficult to poll get_payments, an urgent change has been made to allow for get_payments to take multiple payment IDs are input, as well as a block height to scan from (excluding older transactions). This will break compatibility with the classic get_payments, and will thus be moved to a call of its own. The initial commit can be found here, and tested if you are feeling particularly brave: https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/commit/65c6b193e406fe23944c63eb0a6b69165ef5666b

Core: initial work has been completed on the QoS bandwidth control. If you'd like to take a look at the commits to have an extra set of eyes on it, it can be found here: https://github.com/rfree2monero/bitmonero/tree/dev-rfree

Until next week!

- updated by fluffypony

[GreekBitcoin]

Good news guys   I will soon donate some more and i also i may can help with the DNS seeds.

P.S. I want that damn db

[Brilliantrocket]

I remember looking at a graph that showed the blockchain size vs time. Can anyone tell me where to find it?

[Anon136]

from the op

This feature makes a timing analysis of the blockchain useless.

But what if they were running nodes all over the planet and storing and time stamping all of the network traffic they received, could they then use timing analyses on this time stamped record of all network traffic?

If you are monitoring a large portion of the Internet then yes you can identify where transactions originate. That doesn't necessarily tie the transaction to an individual (nor to other transactions on the block chain), though in some cases it might.

Note that the OP refers to timing analysis of the blockchain meaning that by analyzing the blockchain (at any time in the future) one can infer that all partners in a coinjoin transaction must have taken place at approximately the same time, which vastly narrows the list of candidate transactions. This is not true for outputs mixed using ring signatures. This is a distinct vulnerability from (and one accessible to many more adversaries than) real time monitoring of the Internet.

Yea I get it. This is a vulnerability that i hope will be looked into at some point since there are groups of people out there recording all internet traffic in giant data centres. Probably could be solved by staggering the outputs of a transaction with random time intervals between using a random number generator.

[GreekBitcoin]

I remember looking at a graph that showed the blockchain size vs time. Can anyone tell me where to find it?

http://monerochain.info/charts/bcsize

[Brilliantrocket]

I remember looking at a graph that showed the blockchain size vs time. Can anyone tell me where to find it?

http://monerochain.info/charts/bcsize

Thanks

[PeaMine]

Thanks for the news!

[AnonyMint]

Btw, there is no way to prevent ASICs. But the problem with ASICs is not their existence, but rather that they are not readily available on time to everyone in the same efficiencies. So if you want to defeat this problem, you've got to think about it a totally different way.

You think I haven't been working eh.

Hint: does every user in the world need the most power efficient implementation of SHA-2 such that Intel would make it happen in every PC? No. This is why there is an ASICs problem for Bitcoin, wherein there isn't anymore equal access to efficiencies in mining.

Funny you'd say that, because the answer is:  Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_SHA_extensions

They'll probably be available some time in 2015.



But if I were to make a *completely* wild guess based upon the relative speed of AES, it won't bring CPUs into anything near parity with ASICs -- but it might just narrow the gap with GPUs to a factor of two.

Actually I vaguely remembered that when I wrote the above, but I didn't have time to go recollect and also my point was about the first 5 years of Bitcoin's adoption where it really mattered. Even if those are released in 2015, they won't be in most users' computer for another few years as it takes a while to retire old computers.

Now we have $17 ASICS, but much better they will there by default in every computer.

And yes AES-NI is already widely deployed.

My understanding is Intel has been on 22nm while ASICs have been 28 or 40nm (?), so Intel has inherent advantage if they decide to make a ubiquitously used instruction more efficient. As encryption becomes more used on everyone's computer, Intel is going to have an economic incentive to make AES-NI (and perhaps SHA-2?) more efficient.

[aminorex]

Probably could be solved by staggering the outputs of a transaction with random time intervals between using a random number generator.

what you really want is indistinguishable dummy transactions or running on a global clock heartbeat.  All blocks full every block.

[Anon136]

Probably could be solved by staggering the outputs of a transaction with random time intervals between using a random number generator.

running on a global clock heartbeat

That's smart.

[kulin3422]

Monero Missives

July 20th, 2014

Hello, and welcome to our seventh Monero Missive!

Major Updates

1. We've had an incredibly positive response to our ongoing need for donations, and we'd like to thank everyone that has donated and continues to donate. Several pools have stepped up to donate some of their fees to us - CryptonotepoolUK, for instance, has a 1% fee, but the entirety of the fee is donated. Risto Pietila has also kindly setup a donation "Hall of Fame", which has been taken over by cAPSLOCK, and can be found here. This, and all the ongoing donations, are critical to our ability to spend even more time and energy on Monero, and are greatly appreciated.

2. Now that the CryptoNote whitepaper has been peer reviewed by our mathematicians and cryptographers, they have begun initial work reviewing the implementation thereof. This is most especially important, as Monero has inherited quite a bit from the CryptoNote reference code. The initial focus is on the cryptographic primitives and higher-level cryptographic functions, which will be evaluated by code analysis as well as by running test vectors (that are different from those in the Monero test suite) against those functions. The methodologies and results will, of course, be published in due time.

3. A number of important and critical dev efforts are under way, most notably the embedded database work (to cut down on the RAM requirement), the daemonising work (to allow for a much more stable environment for exchanges, pools, merchants, and other automated systems), and the QoS work (to reduce and limit the bandwidth requirements). Technical updates on these are in the dev diary below.

4. We'd like to officially welcome Pavel Kravchenko as a key technical contributor to Monero. With a PhD in Information Security, specialising in public key infrastructures, he will be devoting some time to tackling the larger issues that Monero faces in its drive to become a truly private, untraceable cryptocurrency.

5. Further to the last missive, the German word list has been completed, and work has begun on the Portuguese version. This is very early work, and is very important to our ensuring that it fits well with our current mnemonic system.

Dev Diary

Blockchain: abstraction of the blockchain storage functions is basically complete, and the next step will be to start integrating LevelDB so that we have a baseline for our performance testing. A number of the key-value stores / embedded databases that we will be evaluating are forked from LevelDB, so it makes sense to start with that. This is moving out of "core" and into "blockchain" for categorisation going forward. The ongoing progress on this can be followed here: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/blockchain

Core / Wallet: much of the work on daemonising Monero has been complete. On Unix-like systems (Linux, OS X) the daemon backgrounds correctly, and commands can be run against the daemon (through command line arguments or RPC calls). On Windows the daemon can install itself as a Windows service, and can subsequently be managed through the standard Windows service system. The Windows service can also be removed by the daemon. Similarly, rpcwallet has inherited this functionality, with the difference that rpcwallet can run in multiple instances (whereas the daemon only allows a single instance). This covers edge cases where a single machine needs to have multiple wallets accessible via multiple rpcwallet instances.

RPC: a new get_connections RPC call has been added to the daemon and merged into master. This is needed by the DNS seed control software, which is at a very early stage. Once complete the hardcoded seed nodes will be removed in lieu of DNS seeds. At a later stage when the DNS seed control software is feature complete, there will be a call for 4 or 5 people who are happy to run DNS seeds on an extremely long-term basis.

RPC: due to some exchanges finding it difficult to poll get_payments, an urgent change has been made to allow for get_payments to take multiple payment IDs are input, as well as a block height to scan from (excluding older transactions). This will break compatibility with the classic get_payments, and will thus be moved to a call of its own. The initial commit can be found here, and tested if you are feeling particularly brave: https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/commit/65c6b193e406fe23944c63eb0a6b69165ef5666b

Core: initial work has been completed on the QoS bandwidth control. If you'd like to take a look at the commits to have an extra set of eyes on it, it can be found here: https://github.com/rfree2monero/bitmonero/tree/dev-rfree

Until next week!

- updated by fluffypony

Thank you for update!

[tempusr]

How long do monero confirm a transaction transaction, i have transfer some coins to a excahge plartform for 10 hours,but the excahnge palrtform still not receive my coins?anyone know what happen?thanks !

Busoni has said about 30 minutes for poloniex. One hour is the absolute most I'd wait. I don't know what exchange you're on, but it's definitely time to open a ticket.

Did you use a payment id?

i always use bter plartform payment id  8a171c7529caa03d935059b3b200e9e2d0e47112b56a75f64e9b76c10892d3f7
I used the following command
transfer 0 47CunEQ4v8FPVNnw9mDgNZeaiSo6SVDydB3AZM341ZtdYpBYNmYeqhh4mpU1X6RSmgBTfC8xqaAtUGC 2DArotyaKSz1LJyj 13.6 mo

This appears to be your transaction, so it looks like it was indeed confirmed into the block chain. That being the case, the next step would be to contact BTER support.

http://monerochain.info/tx/096a7b3c1b8c49d6f309df8cb437b9454ac5910903a04e0d66be21e8ada5237e

hi,smooth.I have contact Bter,He said that blockchain have not record and let e contact monero,What should I do next,appreciate youe help!

[HardwarePal]

How long do monero confirm a transaction transaction, i have transfer some coins to a excahge plartform for 10 hours,but the excahnge palrtform still not receive my coins?anyone know what happen?thanks !

Busoni has said about 30 minutes for poloniex. One hour is the absolute most I'd wait. I don't know what exchange you're on, but it's definitely time to open a ticket.

Did you use a payment id?

i always use bter plartform payment id  8a171c7529caa03d935059b3b200e9e2d0e47112b56a75f64e9b76c10892d3f7
I used the following command
transfer 0 47CunEQ4v8FPVNnw9mDgNZeaiSo6SVDydB3AZM341ZtdYpBYNmYeqhh4mpU1X6RSmgBTfC8xqaAtUGC 2DArotyaKSz1LJyj 13.6 mo

This appears to be your transaction, so it looks like it was indeed confirmed into the block chain. That being the case, the next step would be to contact BTER support.

http://monerochain.info/tx/096a7b3c1b8c49d6f309df8cb437b9454ac5910903a04e0d66be21e8ada5237e

hi,smooth.I have contact Bter,He said that blockchain have not record and let e contact monero,What should I do next,appreciate youe help!

Have you tried to refresh your balance?
It might not have gone through and came back to your wallet

[dnaleor]

Monero Status Android Widget

A friend of mine made an android widget and app.

Updates
•Added fullscreen mode
•Added hitbtc.com
•Persistent user values in calculator (hashrate, coins)
•Bug fixes (coinmarketcap.com data being stuck is now fixed)



Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tr.monerostatus


If anyone feels like donating: 47g3CVqBdmPZgPEA8m2hjT4aosiNhmELD3jdQVbtbooVGuCjHfY7aBUQo5p2Qirk7629LiFZWH7ZWMZ nSAZ5n7paP7ePThK
Many thanks to the three donators!

P.S. Ask about more features and report about bugs!

it's a very good app, I use it daily
(and I'm one of the donators)

I don't know if it's possible, but maybe a volume weighted average exchange rate?

[equipoise]

How long do monero confirm a transaction transaction, i have transfer some coins to a excahge plartform for 10 hours,but the excahnge palrtform still not receive my coins?anyone know what happen?thanks !

Busoni has said about 30 minutes for poloniex. One hour is the absolute most I'd wait. I don't know what exchange you're on, but it's definitely time to open a ticket.

Did you use a payment id?

i always use bter plartform payment id  8a171c7529caa03d935059b3b200e9e2d0e47112b56a75f64e9b76c10892d3f7
I used the following command
transfer 0 47CunEQ4v8FPVNnw9mDgNZeaiSo6SVDydB3AZM341ZtdYpBYNmYeqhh4mpU1X6RSmgBTfC8xqaAtUGC 2DArotyaKSz1LJyj 13.6 mo

This appears to be your transaction, so it looks like it was indeed confirmed into the block chain. That being the case, the next step would be to contact BTER support.

http://monerochain.info/tx/096a7b3c1b8c49d6f309df8cb437b9454ac5910903a04e0d66be21e8ada5237e

hi,smooth.I have contact Bter,He said that blockchain have not record and let e contact monero,What should I do next,appreciate youe help!

Have you tried to refresh your balance?
It might not have gone through and came back to your wallet

Download the final version from the OP. Backup the .keys file. Delete the .bin file (not the .keys). Open the wallet as usual - a new .bin file will be created based on the .keys. After sync it should be fine.

[Brad_BCK]

Hehe. Started mining on Friday. Finished today in the morning (CET). Nothing.
My Lenovo notebook is too weak. But it was like a joke with a small hope to mine something.

So: is there are any information on which hardware it is better to mine XMR? I have some AMD videocards 77xx, 79xx or CPU mining is preferred here?

[shfc]

nice work

[Brad_BCK]

nice work

Ye. 
I do not want to mine much, but I want to try to do it a bit. So I'm interested: what hardware I must use to do it?
Any comparison table, review?

[papa_lazzarou]

I read your brief of your history in Crypto just now on polo trollbox. 6 months, huh?

You all in monero now or keep some change to trade?

Just trying to learn from experience... 

Yes, I arrived in January 2014, after I finished writing my master's thesis. The worst thing is I wanted to join for one year...

I am not all in Monero, I have other altcoins. But my next fiat is planned to be mostly Monero. If you plan to trade, have some BTC left for dumps. Or else short. But I am terrible at both. I'd say 60% of my money is on monero (depend on valuation) and the rest in other alts, all PoS save for some Zetacoin - NOBL, MINT, HBN, CAP, PHS, TEK, GRW, HYP.

I don't think this will help you in anyway, but hey, here it is

Sure it does. It's 6 months experience for free Thanks.

Also, how can I help getting monero on track? I'm planning on donating to the dev team when I get some spare money, and the Portuguese mnemonic word list is already under way so I don't know what else I can do...