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

[GreekBitcoin]

$290 million to build and $200 million to launch a satellite. I'll put up a bounty of 10xmr for a dish to relay XMR transactions. It all depends on how far they want to take this.
 Might need a couple for global coverage  

I was always thinking about it for the far future of crypto Its even cheaper than that and prices are falling by the year...But thats a bit far for now

BTW: http://www.coindesk.com/jeff-garzik-announces-partnership-launch-bitcoin-satellites-space/

[Jshank]

Would look good under XMR features "We got a fucking Satellite".

-rpietila, wouldn't look for change in US without a nudge from the rest of the world. Most are to preoccupied to care...at all. I'm finding many people under 30 are identifying and acknowledging the problem. Next 20 years will probably be the most defining in the history of the US.

[generalizethis]

"I heard even Obama saying that NSA must be put under scrutiny and things exposed!   So if he supports Snowden, how about arranging a (Congressional) Medal of Honor, since this guy has really done more to liberty than any one of those who fought in the bankster wars?"

Obama politically distancing himself from the NSA is not Obama supporting Snowden. Snowden is lucky if he'll get a pardon in the next couple election cycles; even  Feinstein (D,Cali) was calling Snowden's acts treasonous. If a ranking liberal in one of the more liberal states who wields a huge amount of political power isn't ready to come off the "He's a traitor!" soapbox, then it's unlikely he'll get any favors unless there's a huge shift in public opinion by either Democrats or Republicans (probably both would be needed now), one of the parties is overhauled (Libertarians become the Conservative base/Anarchists the Liberal base--maybe, someday), or moderate voters see his leaks in a different light. It would take a huge bombshell to shake the "Not sure how I feel about that guy," apathy that surrounds moderate voter's opinions about Snowden.  Doesn't matter what you know or feel; politics is about the perception of a reality and who can sell that reality best--this is why so many politicians are lawyers.

[ArticMine]

You seem to assume that people will forever regard NSA as legit? Once they lose that in the eyes of enough of people, it does not matter even if we move back to eternally-logged Bitcoin, they cannot do anything.

Using sufficiently-hard to decipher communications may be a way to force them to use such draconian methods in their action that no one wants to work for them anymore, and the critical mass of people will wake up.

But also if they realize they have pushed you over the edge already, you are already a lost case, and often such people are left alone because any repression towards them will just ignite them to self-preservation mode which is contagious in the era of social media. For these people it might even be an asset to leak their stuff over to NSA so that they can readily observe that the person is interested in his financial privacy and better world, and is not fomenting an armed rebellion.

This assumes that the NSA is the biggest threat arising, out of the United States, to personal freedom and liberty and that includes financial freedom. The evidence points otherwise as private sector organizations such as the NFL (National Football League), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) etc., post a much greater threat. A good list is those organizations and corporations that supported SOPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_official_stances_on_the_SOPA_and_PIPA. One must also watch those organizations that withdrew their support under pressure such as Apple. The fundamental problem here is that the only effective way to protect "intellectual property rights" is to centralize control over computers and devices such as cell phones and tablets away from their owners and into the hands large corporations such as Apple and Microsoft. This is typically done by using a combination of propriety software at the operating system level, DRM and the fact that the majority of the population are not "nerds" and thereby less aware of the threat and less likely to fight back. Centralized control of networks in the hands of big telecom also another way, so battles over net neutrality can actually become battles over personal freedom and civil liberties with big telecom on the side of tyranny and oppression.

There are crucial lesson here in the Snowden leaks. Most of the NSA spying depended on the data collection habits of large corporations as best demonstrated in the PRISM program. A list of the the corporate enablers can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#mediaviewer/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg. One of the simplest routes to privacy and individual personal and financial freedom is to withhold personal information from the corporate enablers.

Some of us that "have been pushed over the edge" use GNU/Linux as their primary desktop OS (less than 2% of the population) root their Android phones in order to lock out the manufacturer and telecom provider, consider Apple's IOS only suitable for the telescreen in George Orwell's 1984, avoid social media such as Facebook etc. Crypto currency such XBT and XMR becomes part of a portfolio of tools and not the only tool used to enhance personal freedom and privacy.

[generalizethis]

You seem to assume that people will forever regard NSA as legit? Once they lose that in the eyes of enough of people, it does not matter even if we move back to eternally-logged Bitcoin, they cannot do anything.

Using sufficiently-hard to decipher communications may be a way to force them to use such draconian methods in their action that no one wants to work for them anymore, and the critical mass of people will wake up.

But also if they realize they have pushed you over the edge already, you are already a lost case, and often such people are left alone because any repression towards them will just ignite them to self-preservation mode which is contagious in the era of social media. For these people it might even be an asset to leak their stuff over to NSA so that they can readily observe that the person is interested in his financial privacy and better world, and is not fomenting an armed rebellion.

This assumes that the NSA is the biggest threat arising, out of the United States, to personal freedom and liberty and that includes financial freedom. The evidence points otherwise as private sector organizations such as the NFL (National Football League), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) etc., post a much greater threat. A good list is those organizations and corporations that supported SOPA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_with_official_stances_on_the_SOPA_and_PIPA. One must also watch those organizations that withdrew their support under pressure such as Apple. The fundamental problem here is that the only effective way to protect "intellectual property rights" is to centralize control over computers and devices such as cell phones and tablets away from their owners and into the hands large corporations such as Apple and Microsoft. This is typically done by using a combination of propriety software at the operating system level, DRM and the fact that the majority of the population are not "nerds" and thereby less aware of the threat and less likely to fight back. Centralized control of networks in the hands of big telecom also another way, so battles over net neutrality can actually become battles over personal freedom and civil liberties with big telecom on the side of tyranny and oppression.

There are crucial lesson here in the Snowden leaks. Most of the NSA spying depended on the data collection habits of large corporations as best demonstrated in the PRISM program. A list of the the corporate enablers can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#mediaviewer/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg. One of the simplest routes to privacy and individual personal and financial freedom is to withhold personal information from the corporate enablers.

Some of us that "have been pushed over the edge" use GNU/Linux as their primary desktop OS (less than 2% of the population) root their Android phones in order to lock out the manufacturer and telecom provider, consider Apple's IOS only suitable for the telescreen in George Orwell's 1984, avoid social media such as Facebook etc. Crypto currency such XBT and XMR becomes part of a portfolio of tools and not the only tool used to enhance personal freedom and privacy.

This is beautiful. Is there a way to create one touch anonymity solutions for less tech savvy consumers who don't want Big Brother watching them?

[ArticMine]

...

This is beautiful. Is there a way to create one touch anonymity solutions for less tech savvy consumers who don't want Big Brother watching them?

In many cases it is not the suitability of the tools but rather the awareness and availability of the tools. For example a properly set up GNU/Linux laptop is way easier for many less tech savvy users to use and maintain than the typical Windows laptop sold at retail. Most consumer computers are actually thrown out in well under two years due to software problems for this reason.

The average lifespan of computers in developed countries has dropped from six years in 1997 to just two years in 2005.

www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/the-e-waste-problem/.
I have run usability tests with non tech savvy seniors using LibreOffice on Ubuntu and Office 2007 on Windows XP. The seniors figured out in no time how to print a document on the GNU/Linux box but got nowhere in attempting to do the same task on the Windows box. The best part is that the seniors had used Windows before but had not used GNU/Linux at all. It has got worse. Try placing a not very tech savvy person in front a Windows 8 desktop and watch what happens.

To build a robust anonymity solution one has to start with a solid foundation. It is way easier to use some malware on Windows to get the private XMR key of your target than throw massive computing resources in an attempt to unravel ring signatures in XMR or to try to legislate XMR out of existence.

Sometimes a very simple analogy gets the message across to a non tech person. Microsoft is to Monsanto as GNU/Linux is to organic seeds.


Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4boTbv9_nU. "Failing" eyesight due to "age" is not the problem here.

[owlcatz]

Quote
more young Americans support Snowden but for older Americans it is the opposite.

thanks.. but can you define "Older americans" please & thank you.

[ArticMine]

Quote
more young Americans support Snowden but for older Americans it is the opposite.

thanks.. but can you define "Older americans" please & thank you.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/22/most-young-americans-say-snowden-has-served-the-public-interest/

[smooth]

Quote
more young Americans support Snowden but for older Americans it is the opposite.

thanks.. but can you define "Older americans" please & thank you.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/22/most-young-americans-say-snowden-has-served-the-public-interest/

Correlated in the obvious way with age group:

[Hotmetal]

Still, there's no way anons can prevail over the government agencies such as NSA. It is so clear I don't get how people fail to see it.

I fail to see it. Perhaps you can make the case for me.

*edit* also notice that there are several different questions here that are sometimes treated as one.

1) can one create a crypto where if the nsa spends 10 million dollars trying to figure out the transaction history of 1 single person they still will not be able to uncover that information.

2) can one create a crypto where it is prohibitively expensive for the nsa to uncover the transaction history of large groups of people.

3) every point on the sliding scale between these two extremes

When you send XMR from your wallet to someone, is that transaction sent in plain text?
When you connect to a mining pool, or even solo mining, is that communication ALL encrypted?

*sniff sniff*

Essentially the entire function of Monero is a cryptosystem that hides (i.e. encrypts) useful information about transactions such as who they are from, who they are to, their amounts, and their linkages with other tranactions.

You are looking at this at too low a level. There is no reason to encrypt node-to-node traffic because the assumption is that anyone can run a node (or see the same data on a block explorer, which is really a web view of a node).

The traffic is useless, however, in that it does not allow extracting useful financial information. It would be pretty dumb to create a privacy-enhanced coin where anyone can run a node and node traffic allows compromising your privacy.

i2p will be used to hide the fact that you are running a monero node at all, to provide a different sort of privacy. Really, though you could probably run in tails and hide that now (I haven't tried it).

Personally, I think *not* encrypting client-node / node-to-node traffic is a mistake. Huge efforts are made to provide anonymity and the last mile is in plain text, and without compression?
There are HUGE locations dedicated to sniffing end-user traffic (take the UK for example) where if Bitcoin/Monero/(insert favourite coin here) where to be outlawed, taxed etc, in its current state it would be *extremely* easy to know who is sending and receiving BTC/XMR/etc..

Really, really silly. Watch, when it does happen everyone will be running around with their tails between their legs because no one had the foresight to see it happening.

[NewLiberty]

in the u.s. your rights of privacy and anonymity are constituionally guaranteed.  it is likely that totalitarian regimes will outlaw anonymizing technologies, albeit with very limited success.  the likelihood of criminalization of anonymizing tech in western liberal democracies generally is zero.

By Law you must provide Identification any time it is demanded by authorities whether they are in the right to ask for it or not.

This is not accurate.  There are specific circumstances where ID must be provided or it entitles them to take some specific actions.
Authorities are always entitled to ask, but then so are you.

[user2]

...
Personally, I think *not* encrypting client-node / node-to-node traffic is a mistake.

Can you explain please what data specifically should be protected? Do you understand that your transaction will be stored in the blockchain?

[Anon136]

When ever i see comments like this funny picture of solders with mickey mouse ears on their helmets pops up in my head. Anyway the point is that this mpaa is no threat to your liberty what so ever. They dont have a police force. They dont have a military. They dont have apache helicopters or nuclear submarines. What on earth are they going to do to force their preferences on you? oh wait thats right they are going to go to the government, who does have those things. So tell me who is the real threat here these guys



or these guys.



Without those guys pictured above, the mpaa or who ever you want to point at would have no capacity to do any of those things because consumers would simply switch to a network service provider who didnt do those things. only by holding competition out of the market can they get away with the terrible things you are talking about. and only by way of the jackboots pictured above can they do that.

[macsga]

Somehow this thread transformed into a political debate. Not anyone cares about the USD/XMR rate anymore?  

[ArticMine]

...
 these guys

Why? Because the pen is mightier than the sword. These guys seek to control the pen.

Edit: The "evil" state is well aware of the power of the pen also. http://www.pcworld.com/article/185604/article.html Apple DRM can be much more effective than tanks in Tiananmen Square to meet the censorship wants of the Government of China for example.

[smooth]

i2p will be used to hide the fact that you are running a monero node at all, to provide a different sort of privacy. Really, though you could probably run in tails and hide that now (I haven't tried it).

Personally, I think *not* encrypting client-node / node-to-node traffic is a mistake.

1. Client-node traffic is entirely local to your own computer. There are no thin clients or other methods where it would make sense to access a foreign node directly from a client.

2. If you think your node-to-node traffic needs to be hidden and you aren't doing it, you have no one to blame (see above)

3. Lack of direct I2p integration is not a "mistake," it is a work in progress.

[24Kilo]

The XMR wallet at BITrex is disabled... there is nothing in their 'News' about Monero or the reason for the wallet status... can anyone clarify?

Thanks!

[smooth]

The XMR wallet at BITrex is disabled... there is nothing in their 'News' about Monero or the reason for the wallet status... can anyone clarify?

Thanks!

First item here: https://bittrex.com/news

Azure maintenance in progress, wallets will peroidically become unavailabe.
As previously announced, we are in an Azure maintenance window. Wallets will go offline for short periods (30-45min).

No issues with Monero itself.

[ArticMine]

The XMR wallet at BITrex is disabled... there is nothing in their 'News' about Monero or the reason for the wallet status... can anyone clarify?

Thanks!

First item here: https://bittrex.com/news

Azure maintenance in progress, wallets will peroidically become unavailabe.
As previously announced, we are in an Azure maintenance window. Wallets will go offline for short periods (30-45min).

No issues with Monero itself.

The issue is actually with Microsoft.

[24Kilo]

First item here: https://bittrex.com/news

Azure maintenance in progress, wallets will peroidically become unavailabe.
As previously announced, we are in an Azure maintenance window. Wallets will go offline for short periods (30-45min).

No issues with Monero itself.

Apologies... I assumed that Azure was a 'coin', not part of the trading platform... my bad.. thanks!