rpietila Altcoin Observer

[btc-mike]

...
2. Boolberry should not be in a position to overtake Monero based on it's minimal and questionable changes.
...

Odd phrasing. While both Boolberry and Monero are based on Bytecoin only one has "minimal and questionable changes."

[smooth]

Sybil attack on masternodes (even if unlikely?)

You don't need to resort to power law wealth for masternodes to be Sybil attacked. If they are an investment that is priced for a market return then someone who wants to also use them to spy has a competitive advantage. That being the case one should expect that every masternode in a competitive market is secretly spying. Similar to your argument about who is providing Tor bandwidth for free.

I doubt they would "destroy their investment" by spying, as with all intelligence sources the spying would be kept secret in order to protect its value.

[othe]

...
2. Boolberry should not be in a position to overtake Monero based on it's minimal and questionable changes.
...

Odd phrasing. While both Boolberry and Monero are based on Bytecoin only one has "minimal and questionable changes."

I guess you mean BBR, as Monero has a lot more code contributed to it and is far more diversed from the CN reference code.

[AnonyMint]

Sybil attack on masternodes (even if unlikely?)

You don't need to resort to power law wealth for masternodes to be Sybil attacked. If they are an investment that is priced for a market return then someone who wants to also use them to spy has a competitive advantage. That being the case one should expect that every masternode in a competitive market is secretly spying. Similar to your argument about who is providing Tor bandwidth for free.

I doubt they would "destroy their investment" by spying, as with all intelligence sources the spying would be kept secret in order to protect its value.

That is more lucid than my and your prior attempts to explain that upthread. I'm a bit cross-eyed at the moment. Did 21 hours straight on Saturday...

[othe]

Sybil attack on masternodes (even if unlikely?)

You don't need to resort to power law wealth for masternodes to be Sybil attacked. If they are an investment that is priced for a market return then someone who wants to also use them to spy has a competitive advantage. That being the case one should expect that every masternode in a competitive market is secretly spying. Similar to your argument about who is providing Tor bandwidth for free.

I doubt they would "destroy their investment" by spying, as with all intelligence sources the spying would be kept secret in order to protect its value.

That is more lucid than my and your prior attempts to explain that upthread. I'm a bit cross-eyed at the moment. Did 21 hours straight on Saturday...

But the thing is, look at the masternode distribution, you don't really need a sophisticated attack - a simple email to amazon, ovh and do from the FBI and they have access to 90% of them.

[illodin]

You don't need to resort to power law wealth for masternodes to be Sybil attacked. If they are an investment that is priced for a market return then someone who wants to also use them to spy has a competitive advantage. That being the case one should expect that every masternode in a competitive market is secretly spying. Similar to your argument about who is providing Tor bandwidth for free.

I doubt they would "destroy their investment" by spying, as with all intelligence sources the spying would be kept secret in order to protect its value.

Every masternode could be spying, but unless they are co-operating there's not much for them to gain. Competing investors co-operating in competitive market? Nahh...

But the thing is, look at the masternode distribution, you don't really need a sophisticated attack - a simple email to amazon, ovh and do from the FBI and they have access to 90% of them.

Distribution by operator is what it is mainly because the first guides written on how to set up a masternode used Amazon as an example, and people were already familiar with those big operators. So the people who wanted to have a node running asap with minimal effort started using those. We'll see if the distribution will change as time passes, probably at least some kind of education on the matter is needed.

[AnonyMint]

Nobody's gamed it yet

Proof? Evidence?

Anybody can blow any nonsense words out their arse. Cryptographers understand that until you do cryptanalysis, you don't fucking know.

Nobody's gamed it yet - while I agree it needs analysis, if you can, do it. It's easy to sit in your armchair and point out there's a possibility that there is a weakness, it's a whole different story to either look for one or get someone to. One is easy and worthless, the other is harder, yet constructive.

I am so tired of that genre of Dunning-Kruger illogic.

If you can't fucking get a clue, then please stop forcing me to come back and repeat the same damn cryptography education for you again.

You may never know that someone is getting a disproportionate amount of coins because they cracked the PoW and didn't tell you.

What 'caution' and what 'crap' again?

...

If I didn't have something much more potentially lucrative that is keeping me fully preoccupied, I would endeavor to go attempt to crack these PoW and keep it secret to make a lot of money mining. Maybe someone already has. And you don't know!

You want to criticize Zerocash for having unvetted crypto, but you won't accept the same criticism when you generate a new hash function and someone points out that the design deviates glaringly from accepted cryptography practices and you ignore it.

It behoves you to go review the Round 1 candidates for SHA-3 and see that many were broken and they were designed by cryptographers who did some analysis on their designs. Perhaps they were not broken in a way that would impact use in PoW, but these were (later broken) designs attempted to be reasonably correct by cryptographer designers, so one wouldn't expect major snafus.

Whereas, the egregious mistakes (radical experiments) made on these two PoW hashes by non-cryptographers are quite glaring. I don't know for sure they lead to significant breakage.

And you don't know either. So STFU. Mofo.  

P.S. what I did from my armchair was give up extremely valuable time that I should be applying to other work, to be kind of enough to explain the potential vulnerabilities I see. As a starting point, for someone who has time to dig and study further. Also as warning and clue to novices who have no idea otherwise.

Edit: take it from the words of your own paid cryptographer review:

http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

It's absolutely unconscionable to to come up with a new "Proof of Work Al-
gorithm" and then refrain from including any sort of pseudocode to describe that
algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh.

He fails to mention "refrain from including any sort of cryptanalysis to back up that algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh.".

Edit#2: also it has been alleged that the Cryptonote PoW was likely a trojan planted to mine most of the coins for the developers of Bytecoin. So it was perhaps never designed to be secure, but rather designed to maximize obfuscation of the alleged Bytecoin scam.

[fluffypony]

He fails to mention "refrain from including any sort of cryptanalysis to back up that algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh.".

Just to clarify (again) - there are only 7 members of the core team, as listed earlier. We do not make any such claims.

[AnonyMint]

He fails to mention "refrain from including any sort of cryptanalysis to back up that algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh.".

Just to clarify (again) - there are only 7 members of the core team, as listed earlier. We do not make any such claims.

Please clarify your statement? Do you mean you disclaim the need for cryptanalysis of a new hash function used in PoW or do you disclaim something Wolf0 wrote?

Wolf0 I apologize to lose my temper, but I don't like the deal where you require me to do all work for your group, else I can't speak to common methodology in cryptography to offer some insights.

Everyone knows that cryptography breaks when your input entropy is broken. Duh!

That is why it is so important to insure your random generator isn't subject to a birthday attack. The same applies to the random oracles you use when doing lookups in a scratchpad.

[dga]

2. Next Monero seems to have more articulate and reasoned devs who are around to address technical points astutely, e.g. smooth and fluffypony (is drawingthesun a Monero dev?). If dga is a dev, you need to reign him in— his demeanor reflects badly on Monero.

Core team is listed on the official Monero thread: tacotime, eizh, smooth, fluffypony, othe, davidlatapie, NoodleDoodle

It does not include drawingthesun or dga although dga has contributed code (PoW) and DTS may have contributed as well (I don't know there are a lot of contributors now).

Correct.  I have contributed to both the XMR and BBR code.  I do not develop for any coins, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the cryptonotes because they're the most technically interesting coins I've seen arise.

(For those watching from home confused about why I'm replying to a reply, I have AnonyMint on ignore;  as you can probably tell from the tone of the comments, we seem to get along like baking soda and vinegar, and life is too short to let people waste your time.)

[crypto_zoidberg]

.........

4. My cursory impression is it appears that Boolberry is not garnishing the same level of professionalism in the community and focus. My cursory impression is Zoidberg needs to be able to convince someone of smooth's caliber to lead the public side of Boolberry's face and also organize about adding developers, e.g. cryptanalysis of the PoW, etc..

My interpretations and gut instinct could be wrong, and I am open to be pointed to a link to that changes my mind.

Note the bitmonero launch was horrible. So they've come a long way in a short time. Boolberry could too if Zoidberg is serious about delegation.

...........

If your technical capabilities are superior, it will be self-evident in your well organized PR materials, e.g. whitepaper, devs in your public threads, etc..

You are lashing out at Monero's success in community organization, because you focused on coding. Realize there is another stage after coding where you release and need community.

I agree with you here.

 
And this is the main reason why we are looking for partnership/investment now. We have technical ideas and ability to improve project(colored coins, multisig transactions etc), and we are looking for a credible person with marketing/PR experience.

[crypto_zoidberg]

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Is your target market only programmers? 99% of the people in the world don't know what 'bool' means. You flunk Marketing 101.

99.999% also have no idea what is monero, since it is only about 2000 people know esperanto .

[AnonyMint]

........
Is your target market only programmers? 99% of the people in the world don't know what 'bool' means. You flunk Marketing 101.

99.999% also have no idea what is monero, since it is only about 2000 people know esperanto .

+1 for deescalation by chuckle. 

[fluffypony]

Please clarify your statement? Do you mean you disclaim the need for cryptanalysis of a new hash function used in PoW or do you disclaim something Wolf0 wrote?

Wolf0 I apologize to lose my temper, but I don't like the deal where you require me to do all work for your group, else I can't speak to common methodology in cryptography to offer some insights.

Everyone knows that cryptography breaks when your input entropy is broken. Duh!

That is why it is so important to insure your random generator isn't subject to a birthday attack. The same applies to the random oracles you use when doing lookups in a scratchpad.

I mean we don't make any claims of it never having been broken or being perfectly secure. I'm not sure if you follow the Monero Missives at all, but when we released the whitepaper review we said the following:

The initial work has been completed on analysing the CryptoNote whitepaper, and the review that has come out of it is now available to all. This is an academic approach to analysing it, and is the first step in figuring out whether the principles it espouses are reflected in the Monero code, and (further to that) how we can improve on its deficiencies. You can grab the whitepaper review here: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

We also expanded on that explanation in the following Monero Missive:

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.

[crypto_zoidberg]

...
2. Boolberry should not be in a position to overtake Monero based on it's minimal and questionable changes.
...

Odd phrasing. While both Boolberry and Monero are based on Bytecoin only one has "minimal and questionable changes."

I guess you mean BBR, as Monero has a lot more code contributed to it and is far more diversed from the CN reference code.

Othe, according to things that smooth said about problems with nodes bandwidth overhead, this i2p implementation looks really strange, since it definitely make this also slower.

I have no doubts that you informed about all issues and would be happy to see a result when you finish that.

[AnonyMint]

I mean we don't make any claims of it never having been broken or being perfectly secure.

Good. You've got a $6 million marketcap, surely you can rub a few nickels together to hire some cryptanalysis. You all said you inherited a crud PoW implementation, so it behoves you to not play el cheapo on such a fundamental aspect of a crypto-coin.

Heck I haven't been paid a penny, and the PoW I did has extensive cryptanalysis. You better be ready!

Correct.  I have contributed to both the XMR and BBR code.

And you are respected for that.

(For those watching from home confused about why I'm replying to a reply, I have AnonyMint on ignore;  as you can probably tell from the tone of the comments, we seem to get along like baking soda and vinegar, and life is too short to let people waste your time.)

But this childish melodrama is pathetic. And reflects badly on the coin you say you are trying to help.

I was never attacking the valuable work you did on cleaning up the crud in the implementation of the PoW. I merely pointed out that a non-uniform and or non-random distribution on the lookups in the scratchpad can enable reduction of scratchpad. Since the default Crytonote PoW algorithm is supposedly random memory latency bound, then smaller memory footprint might mean moving into L2 cache which has significantly lower (faster) latency.

[illodin]

Simply from marketing and brandability point of view (it's a vanilla scrypt clone), what do you think about iCoin? Mainstream potential?

I'm bummed its dev quit and took off months ago, so the coin is pretty much dead now. The remaining marketing and web design guys quit also soon after. They said they made sure they wouldn't get into trouble using the name iCoin, in case someone thinks Apple has trademarked i*.

The website seems to be down, but I found this short video displaying the logo design: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygdXrS4XoWQ

Wouldn't mind if someone happened to design a perfect crypto coin and taking over iCoin brand and giving the current iCoin holders a few new coins in return.

[cAPSLOCK]

........
Is your target market only programmers? 99% of the people in the world don't know what 'bool' means. You flunk Marketing 101.

99.999% also have no idea what is monero, since it is only about 2000 people know esperanto .

With all due respect (and I have a few bbr in my pocket), this may be the biggest "glass house" statement I have ever read.

Monero is widely regarded a terrific name for a cryptocurrency.  Smells like money in many languages.  What does boolberry smell like?

[tacotime]

Othe, according to things that smooth said about problems with nodes bandwidth overhead, this i2p implementation looks really strange, since it definitely make this also slower.

I have no doubts that you informed about all issues and would be happy to see a result when you finish that.

The I2P network is designed for interaction of persons making transactions with main nodes without revealing your IP. It's not intended for general use (we will continue to use the normal P2P code for that).

[AnonyMint]

Othe, according to things that smooth said about problems with nodes bandwidth overhead, this i2p implementation looks really strange, since it definitely make this also slower.

I have no doubts that you informed about all issues and would be happy to see a result when you finish that.

The I2P network is designed for interaction of persons making transactions with main nodes without revealing your IP. It's not intended for general use (we will continue to use the normal P2P code for that).

So mining isn't anonymous?