rpietila Altcoin Observer

[binaryFate]

I do not want to join bagholders war but you guys are aware that enough anonymity is quite a funny idea - something is anonymous or it is not. the rest is easily achievable with bitcoin.

So is Monero NSA-proof / absolutely and fully 100% anonymous?

The cryptography is recognized as unbreakable (nowadays and for some time) by academic scholars. The cryptonote whitepaper itself is currently under academic review.
Of course you cannot be 100% sure, it's like asking if Bitcoin is NSA-proof, if SHA256 and ECDSA are absolutely and fully secure or not.

IMHO people tend to overestimate the power of the NSA in that field. I believe they are limited by mankind current maths knowledge, as any other human being. That is why they try to introduce "weak" curve for ECDSA, or decrease the entropy of PRNGs: the maths concepts behind are not practically breakable themselves, at least nowadays.

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[AlexGR]

I do not want to join bagholders war but you guys are aware that enough anonymity is quite a funny idea - something is anonymous or it is not. the rest is easily achievable with bitcoin.

So is Monero NSA-proof / absolutely and fully 100% anonymous?

The cryptography is recognized as unbreakable (nowadays and for some time) by academic scholars.

The cryptography is one thing. Using it in a coin, over a network environment where network broadcasts can be "heard", and where there is no reliable way of 100% IP obfuscation, is another thing.

[statdude]

Loving the major FUD against XMR right now. It could even succeed in pushing the price down futher.

Just the PERFECT springboard. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Getting my BTC ready.

[dawie]

Loving the major FUD against XMR right now. It could even succeed in pushing the price down futher.

Just the PERFECT springboard. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Getting my BTC ready.

As a silent observer of this thread thus far I must concur.  I have sold every single DRK and jumped into XMR for the fundamentals as explained in great objective ways in this thread.
Thank you all for the great debates.  My bets are placed.

[Brilliantrocket]

Do you guys even read these coins' respective threads? It's blatantly obvious from the Monero thread that there remains a mountain of work to be done, just to achieve reasonable usability. It's comparable to Bitcoin in early 2010. Just be aware of that. For the sake of your money, please read the thread and see the volume of bugs, defecits and other issues with the code. Of course I don't expect most of you to take this advice. You'll call me a troll and continue existing in your blissful delusion, where Monero is perfect.

Monero will take up to 2 years to achieve real world usability, and even then, the bloat will be crippling.

[darkota]

Do you guys even read these coins' respective threads? It's blatantly obvious from the Monero thread that there remains a mountain of work to be done, just to achieve reasonable usability. It's comparable to Bitcoin in early 2010. Just be aware of that. For the sake of your money, please read the thread and see the volume of bugs, defecits and other issues with the code. Of course I don't expect most of you to take this advice. You'll call me a troll and continue existing in your blissful delusion, where Monero is perfect.

This is all that Monero/Cryptonote coins need(read quote below). Other than that, they're leagues ahead of any other "anon" coin out there. Right after The cryptonotes, is probably Vertcoin, at least Vertcoin uses Stealth Addresses that don't rely on a centralized trivial, mixer, that can always be DDOSed, like Darkcoin does. It's funny that you complain/lie over non existent issues in other coins, yet you fail to realize the crippling failures of the own coin you support, Darkcoin, with it's trivial coinjoin based "anonymity", it's horrid 50% instamine by it's own dev team, and it's name(darkcoin) that will Always be affiliated with drug/illegal activity + the other 101 problems it has. You try too hard rocket, making up lies won't help darkcoin...
[/b]

Are you being disingenuous or do you just suck at math? If you have twice the blockchain growth with just a tiny fraction of the transactions, what do you think will happen if you were at real volumes?

Transaction identification by prefix: this feature will let us to cut off ring signatures from blockchain that under checkpoint - save space by 30-70%(depends of mixin usage) -Crypto_Zoidberg, Boolberry

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.0

Whoa, I wonder what that is, I wonder if you seperate the daemon and wallet, that you can create light clients so you dont have to download the full blockchain, just like with Bitcoin!

It's funny to see that you completely ignore the other points, when you've been outed as a Liar. Lmfao.

[cAPSLOCK]

Would be great to see a similar comparison for Monero vs Boolberry if someone is up for it.

I have a dream: BBR and XMR devs become one team

bonero

Moonberry?

[bitcoinbear]

Would be great to see a similar comparison for Monero vs Boolberry if someone is up for it.

I have a dream: BBR and XMR devs become one team

bonero

Moonberry?

Marsberry?

[Cablez]

Would be great to see a similar comparison for Monero vs Boolberry if someone is up for it.

I have a dream: BBR and XMR devs become one team

bonero

Moonberry?

Marsberry?

Or just boner.  hehe

[superresistant]

Would be great to see a similar comparison for Monero vs Boolberry if someone is up for it.

I have a dream: BBR and XMR devs become one team

bonero

Moonberry?

Marsberry?

Or just boner.  hehe

BigBonerX

[ShameOnYou]

Loving the major FUD against XMR right now. It could even succeed in pushing the price down futher.

Just the PERFECT springboard. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Getting my BTC ready.

Indeed, I've got lots of staggered bids in, and we're getting close. I don't mind bagholding for a little while. This coin is going places. Should see some very nice bounce.

[JorgeStolfi]

The cryptography is recognized as unbreakable (nowadays and for some time) by academic scholars.

Just to pick a nit, the cryptography has not been proved unbreakable.  The only "proof" that it is safe is that many people have tried to break it, over a decade or more, and no one has found and published a significant weakness.

Scholars generally assume that the cryptographic methods used in the bitcoin protocol are unbreakable when they develop other things on top of them.  Strictly speaking, those methods could be broken tonight, or they may have been broken years ago without the fact having been made public.  However, in either case the world would face a much bigger disaster than the collapse of bitcoin.

[smooth]

AlexGR, what are you talking about? Monero is currently 2:1 size wise, growing less than twice the rate of Bitcoin.

You're trying too hard here, your bias is obvious.

Don't you understand that growing 2:1 with virtually no tx's compared to BTC (100-1000tx per block) is a problem?

Most of the current growth is due to empty one-minute blocks, which is not inherent in the design at all, and can (and probably should) be changed to a slower block target. For example, as I write this 5 out of the previous 6 blocks are all empty:

123047   2 minutes ago   468   1   4521dc5d9db1c40882b8274efa7f9454e0c16c6def50559c72e26b57e5ef1374
123046   3 minutes ago   332   1   2a759d05a824a4c728aa26e65bc7cb9eaa5280925e1943dbb6512987c3cfc34e
123045   3 minutes ago   332   1   089680af1f6eaa1b1f92e9bbefb8a7e954101f2fec80cd62928c0c83301ea20c
123044   3 minutes ago   332   1   9904d04d7932622881de262fa2e54f3792b9a108333a9e0359418f4928071991
123043   3 minutes ago   332   1   b19f5d4c871ab16e5fbd98ad59ddffdedb43ee3ee3b365179bbbdef5e9901da2
123042   4 minutes ago   332   1   72de4622a8d5ee808069de7a82c0791a919ae7e495eda6a0508b2954caf20251

Very little of the actual current growth is due to the size of ring signatures. Increased usage will cause sub-linear incremental growth because the first thing that will happen is that empty blocks will have transactions added to them (reducing chain overhead from 100% to <100%) and the next thing that will happen is that block headers will be amortized over a larger number of transactions.

In some hypothetical future if XMR has transaction volume that is comparable to BTC, its block chain will be several times larger since its transactions are larger. If that happens, the market will have accepted that a constant factor (very likely <10x) of increased chain size is an acceptable trade off for increased privacy of transactions on the chain. I see no way to objectively predict whether that will happen.

[smooth]

no immediate urgency to deploy a database

Most computers cannot use XMR without a database, because the chain doesn't fit in memory.  I'd consider that urgent.  Not urgent enough to do it wrong, however.

Perhaps you have more precise information than I do. When I google "64-bit market share" I get hits claiming that nearly 50% of computers were running a 64 bit OS in 2010. I would assume that this fraction has increased significantly over the past four years (for example other hits suggest than nearly all Windows 8/8.1 computers are 64-bit)

Even 32 bit computers can work with 3 GB setting (though that is non-standard)

[tacotime]

Most of the current growth is due to empty one-minute blocks, which is not inherent in the design at all, and can (and probably should) be changed to a slower block target. For example, as I write this 5 out of the previous 6 blocks are all empty:

If all blocks were empty and the average block size was 350 bytes, that amounts to just 500 kb a day from blocks. If it were 2 min block time, that's 250 kb. That's not a big difference, and I don't think much to worry about.

Very little of the actual current growth is due to the size of ring signatures. Increased usage will cause sub-linear incremental growth because the first thing that will happen is that empty blocks will have transactions added to them (reducing chain overhead from 100% to <100%) and the next thing that will happen is that block headers will be amortized over a larger number of transactions.

In some hypothetical future if XMR has transaction volume that is comparable to BTC, its block chain will be several times larger since its transactions are larger. If that happens, the market will have accepted that a constant factor (very likely <10x) of increased chain size is an acceptable trade off for increased privacy of transactions on the chain. I see no way to objectively predict whether that will happen.

The current daemon softfork limits the blocksize to ~192 KB to avoid propagation issues, which may be exacerbated when we move from in-memory DB to an actual database. Of course, miners may make larger blocks if the median allows for it, but it's very likely they'll be orphaned.

This gives us about 2x the theoretical bandwidth of Bitcoin. End of the day, I think what will happen is that fees will begin to dictate tx inclusion, and that tx via Monero will probably be more expensive than for Bitcoin (given unlikely equal adoption).

Softfork to mandatory minimum mixin of 3 will bloat the chain about 3-fold further, but as it currently stands this is not a huge issue.

Most computers cannot use XMR without a database, because the chain doesn't fit in memory.  I'd consider that urgent.  Not urgent enough to do it wrong, however.

I'm working with tewinget right now on the database, so it won't be that far off in the future.

[binaryFate]

The cryptography is recognized as unbreakable (nowadays and for some time) by academic scholars.

Just to pick a nit, the cryptography has not been proved unbreakable.  The only "proof" that it is safe is that many people have tried to break it, over a decade or more, and no one has found and published a significant weakness.

Scholars generally assume that the cryptographic methods used in the bitcoin protocol are unbreakable when they develop other things on top of them.  Strictly speaking, those methods could be broken tonight, or they may have been broken years ago without the fact having been made public.  However, in either case the world would face a much bigger disaster than the collapse of bitcoin.

Sure. A large part (maths & algorithms in particular) of our modern world is build over things for which we have no proof of existence/inexistence. You can boils down pretty much everything in that fields to whether P = NP or not, for instance. For "huge" things like this, if nobody published anything you can reasonably assume nobody knows anything. It is just an assumption but we have no other way to go.

Let's rephrase it non-ambiguously: Monero is based on state-of-the-art cryptography.

Btw, nice to see you are following Monero

[smooth]

If all blocks were empty and the average block size was 350 bytes, that amounts to just 500 kb a day from blocks. If it were 2 min block time, that's 250 kb. That's not a big difference, and I don't think much to worry about.

I stand corrected. Many blocks are empty but they are small so they don't add too much to blockchain size growth. Though they do add to sync time, and processing latency (both being amortized over a tiny average number of transactions per block).

Nevertheless the block time should be increased significantly, probably not even to 2 but to something like 4 or 5. That is the only way to avoid an unacceptable orphan rate for a decentralized network, or the alternative (close to what we have now) of extreme centralization as everyone moves to the largest pools.

Bitcoin already has problems with centralization. By design (although in fact the block time was not really a design choice in the usual sense of the word, it was just one of the cut-and-paste tweaks that TFT did when he cloned BCN) XMR is far worse than bitcoin.

Also 2x the bitcoin bandwidth will not work. If transactions are roughly 10x as large (ring sigs plus breaking up by amount), that gives 1/5 the transaction rate. And bitcoin still needs to scale a lot to get a large scale use. This page envisions block sizes of half a gigabyte or more: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

[Quanttek]

(snip)
 ...the bloat will be crippling.

No, as already stated enough, diskspace will never be a problem for neither Bitcoin nor Monero. 20GB at BTC are nothing, that's less than one $1 in diskspaceYes Monero#s blockchain bloat is worse than bitcoins and at a similiar usage it will be around >10 times, but it will still be slower that Moore's law. And the bloat in CoinJoin-esque "anonymity" solutions like DRK is much worse, because a tx gets divided in hundreds of sub-tx. Stop ignoring this fact

[illodin]

And the bloat in CoinJoin-esque "anonymity" solutions like DRK is much worse, because a tx gets divided in hundreds of sub-tx. Stop ignoring this fact

Actually the recent drk developments have drastically reduced the bloat - there is no need to divide every tx.

Darkcoin is constantly evolving and improving.

[Quanttek]

And the bloat in CoinJoin-esque "anonymity" solutions like DRK is much worse, because a tx gets divided in hundreds of sub-tx. Stop ignoring this fact

Actually the recent drk developments have drastically reduced the bloat - there is no need to divide every tx.

Darkcoin is constantly evolving and improving.

On the average a drk send tx gets divided mroe than 3 times, which is worse than mixin 3, the most used mixin, which offers clearly a higher anonymity than drk