rpietila Altcoin Observer

[ArticMine]

https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

Thoughts?

Gavin is very much on the right track here. I find it really interesting that he carefully laying the ground work in order to address the real issue that Bitcoin faces namely the 1 MB blocksize limit.

[1715517280]

1715517280

[1715517280]

1715517280

[1715517280]

1715517280

[celestio]

It is altcoin.

Hehe now I know you are probably immersed in coding, because you dropped the 'an' as I often drop words that I read in my head by forget to type, because I am distracted.

BTCD is Bitcoin Dark. I suspect (it, hehe) is CoinJoin. Haven't bothered to look closely.

Not coinjoin: https://www.mirrorcreator.com/files/0G9JRRFF/jl777-Teleport-DarkPaper.doc_links

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.0

and

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.740

That coin Bitcoindark, doesn't have any privacy features, they plan to copy off of Cryptonote(doubt they will even do that, everything theyve said has just been hot air) , the following is a quite from one of the dev team members for Bitcoindark from the second link

"I am part of BTCD community now and I happen to be developing a cryptonote fork to add anon features to NXT. It turns out that my methods should apply to BTCD also. I will be working on integrating cryptonote tech into BTCD, but it is more than "just" cryptonote anon tech as I am also making my solution include a near realtime exchange (InstantDEX) so people can directly trade just by running the coin."

[cAPSLOCK]

I am part of BTCD community now and I happen to be developing a cryptonote fork to add anon features to NXT. It turns out that my methods should apply to BTCD also.

This two sentences seems fairly full of impossible.

[Conurtrol]

It is altcoin.

Hehe now I know you are probably immersed in coding, because you dropped the 'an' as I often drop words that I read in my head by forget to type, because I am distracted.

BTCD is Bitcoin Dark. I suspect (it, hehe) is CoinJoin. Haven't bothered to look closely.

Not coinjoin: https://www.mirrorcreator.com/files/0G9JRRFF/jl777-Teleport-DarkPaper.doc_links

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.0

and

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.740

That coin Bitcoindark, doesn't have any privacy features, they plan to copy off of Cryptonote(doubt they will even do that, everything theyve said has just been hot air) , the following is a quite from one of the dev team members for Bitcoindark from the second link

"I am part of BTCD community now and I happen to be developing a cryptonote fork to add anon features to NXT. It turns out that my methods should apply to BTCD also. I will be working on integrating cryptonote tech into BTCD, but it is more than "just" cryptonote anon tech as I am also making my solution include a near realtime exchange (InstantDEX) so people can directly trade just by running the coin."

Not using cryptonote and not hot air. Read the paper before commenting please.

[othe]

It is altcoin.

Hehe now I know you are probably immersed in coding, because you dropped the 'an' as I often drop words that I read in my head by forget to type, because I am distracted.

BTCD is Bitcoin Dark. I suspect (it, hehe) is CoinJoin. Haven't bothered to look closely.

Not coinjoin: https://www.mirrorcreator.com/files/0G9JRRFF/jl777-Teleport-DarkPaper.doc_links

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.0

and

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.740

That coin Bitcoindark, doesn't have any privacy features, they plan to copy off of Cryptonote(doubt they will even do that, everything theyve said has just been hot air) , the following is a quite from one of the dev team members for Bitcoindark from the second link

"I am part of BTCD community now and I happen to be developing a cryptonote fork to add anon features to NXT. It turns out that my methods should apply to BTCD also. I will be working on integrating cryptonote tech into BTCD, but it is more than "just" cryptonote anon tech as I am also making my solution include a near realtime exchange (InstantDEX) so people can directly trade just by running the coin."

Not using cryptonote and not hot air. Read the paper before commenting please.

Theres no Whitepaper, a Whitepaper would have references but the footnotes aren´t even linked to the text above them...
So far it has nothing, i personally can´t understand how you can advertise with something that doesn´t even exist and people pump their money in, but each on their own.

[Este Nuno]

It is altcoin.

Hehe now I know you are probably immersed in coding, because you dropped the 'an' as I often drop words that I read in my head by forget to type, because I am distracted.

BTCD is Bitcoin Dark. I suspect (it, hehe) is CoinJoin. Haven't bothered to look closely.

Not coinjoin: https://www.mirrorcreator.com/files/0G9JRRFF/jl777-Teleport-DarkPaper.doc_links

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.0

and

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.740

That coin Bitcoindark, doesn't have any privacy features, they plan to copy off of Cryptonote(doubt they will even do that, everything theyve said has just been hot air) , the following is a quite from one of the dev team members for Bitcoindark from the second link

"I am part of BTCD community now and I happen to be developing a cryptonote fork to add anon features to NXT. It turns out that my methods should apply to BTCD also. I will be working on integrating cryptonote tech into BTCD, but it is more than "just" cryptonote anon tech as I am also making my solution include a near realtime exchange (InstantDEX) so people can directly trade just by running the coin."

Not using cryptonote and not hot air. Read the paper before commenting please.

https://github.com/jl777/pNXT

I assume when he says "cryptonote tech" he means ring signatures. But he also says that he's developing a "cryptonote fork" that will add anon features to NXT??? I'm not an expert but isn't that like saying I'm developing a XCN fork that will add a mini-blockchain to Bitcoin? It just doesn't work like that, right? I'm confused.

[fluffypony]

Not using cryptonote and not hot air. Read the paper before commenting please.

I read the whitepaper, although I struggled to get through the ridiculous analogies that seem shoe-horned to fit with the "pirate" metaphor instead of being suited to task. Oh, and the lack of references by footnote is extremely frustrating (an appendix of reading material is not a footnote).

He acknowledges that the ring signature implementation in Monero "'is absolutely spectacular’ and the advances it offers groundbreaking". I do think he misses the point when he claims that "weak correlations are still possible", as ring signatures in Monero are combined with always-on stealth addresses. Thus, practically speaking, his example of 1.23 RingCoins if sent with a mixin of 15 would not actually just have 15 ring signatures. It would be 15 for each output, thus a total group for that transaction of 45 signatures, and unless you can crack the stealth addresses (ie. brute-force a 256-bit hash, which would take more energy than exists in the universe to crack just 1) for at least 42 of the signatures you simply have no way of knowing which of those signatures is real and which are fake. Even if you did know which was real by some miracle, you still only have the stealthed destination and not the actual address. Those outputs will be used in future both in ring signatures and in an actual transaction, but since there is no way of knowing if an output is real or not it will forever be considered unspent (spends at mixin=0 notwithstanding). Therefore, even weak correlations are not possible due to the combination of stealth addresses and ring signatures.

His main criticism of CryptoNote is that the blockchain bloat causes the Monero blockchain to be "an order of magnitude" larger than Bitcoin's. The first problem with the criticism is that it he uses completely incorrect numbers. He uses the actual Bitcoin blockchain data, but then for Monero he uses it's current on-disk size. Currently, the Monero blockchain is stored in an inefficient, duplicated, flat format. It is vaguely analogous to storing your holiday snaps in BMP instead of high quality JPG - the BMPs will take up a significantly larger amount of storage space for no appreciable advantage. We are moving Monero's blockchain to an embedded database precisely to solve this. If you use the actual blockchain data then you will find that, on average, excluding the dust transactions that came from pools earlier in Monero's history, the blockchain is 5.5x linearly larger than Bitcoin's (10x larger, or a single order of magnitude, only occurs if you include the early dust transactions). That means that in 3-5 years, ostensibly, if Monero has the same reach as Bitcoin and has achieved the same level of traction we should see the blockchain at around 110gb, hardly a figure to write home about when you consider that the majority of users will use web wallets and thin clients, and those that choose to run full nodes will most assuredly have 110gb of free space.

Beyond that, the lack of commonly accepted cryptographic terms makes it exceedingly difficult to understand what he's trying to achieve. There is no problem with making a term up, as long as it is thoroughly explained before use in the rest of the paper, but using the term "hyperspace" in a technical paper that has nothing to do with space travel just makes it illegible. Finally, anything that relies on "privacy servers" operated by amateurs volunteers will end up relying on a ridiculously small group of servers to not be compromised. That these servers are meant to be run by "anyone" on a VPS shows a distinct lack of understanding of the threat model. If Tor's exit nodes can be similarly attacked to find the location of SR's server (which they did, and then they compelled data centres in Latvia, Sweden, and Romania to hand over a copy of the data on the server - and since they had physical access to the server on-disk encryption would be irrelevant since they can just access data that is unencrypted in-memory) then you can bet that anything reliant on a group of servers for privacy is doomed to failure. Relying on a group of servers for convenience (eg. Electrum) is a vastly different exercise, this should never be relied upon for privacy.

[AnonyMint]

https://github.com/jl777/pNXT

I assume when he says "cryptonote tech" he means ring signatures. But he also says that he's developing a "cryptonote fork" that will add anon features to NXT??? I'm not an expert but isn't that like saying I'm developing a XCN fork that will add a mini-blockchain to Bitcoin? It just doesn't work like that, right? I'm confused.

I haven't looked at that in detail for what he is proposing specifically for NXT (not since he was promising to implement Zerocoin on NXT several months ago), but I think the following will shed some light on anything James writes.

He appears to be a prolific coder, so I am not insinuating that he can't help. However, I read (most of) his long, rambling whitepaper on his proposed convoluted and bizarre (and unpublished?) Telepods and Hyperspace for anonymity (the naming is adolescent), and he hasn't even dealt with fundamental issues such as denial-of-service and scaling. It appears he is trying to create a high-latency Chaum mix-net (but apparently doesn't even know that), so refer to our upthread discussion of the issues with low-latency Chaum mix-nets such as Tor and I2P.

It will take him many months to find all the holes and go back to the design drawing board to deal with them. In the end, let's see what kind of spaghetti he ends up with given he didn't have a holistic understanding from the beginning of his design.

Thus I wasn't surprised when I was searching for information on James' "decentralized" exchange (which I concurred upthread is not decentralized) and I stumbled onto this post...

At least he knows he doesn't know and that he must stumble into the rabbit hole and then dig himself out when he realizes there are so many holes in what he is implementing now...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=684090.msg7882465#msg7882465

I am not smart enough to see the final solution, until I get past the last difficult patch.
I use an iterative development approach. Basically, I solve what I can and that simplifies the remaining problem.
Repeat and eventually I see the final solution.

So, a white paper is going to be wrong as soon as it is written.

The goals I have are of course, anon (but I call it privacy), but also a lot more. I also take an open-tent inclusive approach and like to use the best tech that is available, wherever it might come from. I tend to drive anybody that is super-organized and methodical pretty crazy, but this is the only way I know to do the stuff that hasnt been done before...

[Este Nuno]

https://github.com/jl777/privateNXT

So is this just a vanilla CryptoNote fork? What does it have to do with NXT? How is this implementing ring signatures in to NXT?

Or is it just the same type of thing that's happening with "BitcoinDark"? Name the product after something established to imply association?

[AnonyMint]

https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

Thoughts?

Concur this must be done. But it is not sufficient by itself to solve all the issues it targets.

[Vanderi]

https://github.com/jl777/privateNXT

So is this just a vanilla CryptoNote fork? What does it have to do with NXT? How is this implementing ring signatures in to NXT?

Or is it just the same type of thing that's happening with "BitcoinDark"? Name the product after something established to imply association?

Who cares, nxt was a premined pos scam.

[AnonyMint]

AnonyMint, can you please comment on Open Transactions (OT)

How can I evaluate it efficiently when they don't provide a whitepaper nor technical summary any where that I can find so far.

[fluffypony]

https://github.com/jl777/privateNXT

So is this just a vanilla CryptoNote fork? What does it have to do with NXT? How is this implementing ring signatures in to NXT?

Or is it just the same type of thing that's happening with "BitcoinDark"? Name the product after something established to imply association?

It's a stock CN fork. If you look his commits: https://github.com/jl777/privateNXT/commits/master he's created the genesis block hash on July 3 and nothing else. It's completely stock, unchanged from the CryptoNote "starter kit".

[Majormax]

Has anyone looked at Supercoin's claim to a unique Trustless Anonymous send ?  The presentation is a bit rocky, but I don't know if there is any substance there. Is it feasable as an idea ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=618552.msg8272890#msg8272890

[AnonyMint]

Towards a 12 second block period, and other derivative improvements...

https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2

Thoughts?

Concur this must be done. But it is not sufficient by itself to solve all the issues it targets.

Note the MBC (mini-blockchain) has a "canonical ordering of transactions in blocks", because the Account Tree must be updated with a canonical ordering so that every full node has the same copy, so that the entire Account Tree doesn't have to be sent with each block solution.

It got really quiet in this thread. Did I say something sufficiently offensive, shocking, or motivational?  

[2dogs]

This is a mind twister. Consider it a puzzle for those of you with very high IQ.

And you will kick yourself later when the solution is revealed.  

The thread is quiet because we are waiting for the answer.

[iCEBREAKER]

It got really quiet in this thread. Did I say something sufficiently offensive, shocking, or motivational?  

Here's a genuine Altcon Observation to discuss:

XCN successfully moved to pruned mode, and its price spiked up ~27% from the deep support at 0.00001375.

XCN cracks two hard nuts at once.  Mini-blockchain is ultimate prunability (so a full node may run on your phone).  And withdrawal limits on the account tree enable non-malleable zero-confirmation transactions.

Like E=MC^2, scarcely two dozen people in the world grasp the magnitude of this technology's implications.   

[smooth]

It got really quiet in this thread. Did I say something sufficiently offensive, shocking, or motivational?  

Here's a genuine Altcon Observation to discuss:

XCN successfully moved to pruned mode, and its price spiked up ~27% from the deep support at 0.00001375.

XCN cracks two hard nuts at once.  Mini-blockchain is ultimate prunability (so a full node may run on your phone).  And withdrawal limits on the account tree enable non-malleable zero-confirmation transactions.

Like E=MC^2, scarcely two dozen people in the world grasp the magnitude of this technology's implications.  

I'm not fully sold on the claimed advantages for reasons explained earlier nevertheless I find the current valuation attractive, at least short to medium term. There is enough potential to support the current price (something I most certainly did not believe at 10k sat or even 5k sat).

[rpietila]

It got really quiet in this thread. Did I say something sufficiently offensive, shocking, or motivational?  

Haven't you heard that the Malla Summer Retreat is ongoing? 

[Este Nuno]

It got really quiet in this thread. Did I say something sufficiently offensive, shocking, or motivational? 

Haven't you heard that the Malla Summer Retreat is ongoing? 

The real question is why isn't he there. You could get him drunk and he might divulge all his secret crypto plans that he's alluded to.

September perhaps?