rpietila Altcoin Observer

[smooth]

Edit: Got to love all the intrigue and drama surrounding Cryptonote coins, e.g. Moanero and Foolberry. (feel free to return a political stab, I am just pointing out my opinion that what doesn't start well, usually doesn't end well, better to start with a clean slate and something differentiated)

Unlike the others, Monero is a completely clean slate and has no relationship whatsoever with the bytecoin/cryptonote scammers, despite their apparent effort to saturate the market with their own pump-and-dump clones.

I will say that given the degree of fraud and deceit uncovered, it is reasonable to be cautious about the possibilities of back doors in the code. We have reviewed a lot and continuing to review everything very, very carefully. Nevertheless it is somewhat new code from a source that is not only untrusted but now reasonably distrusted. Caution is advised.

[othe]

hey hey hey ! "Observers"

looks who's back to laugh at you ?

: D

remember this blog post :

http://kolinevans.wordpress.com/2014/07/04/why-has-litecoin-decoupled-from-bitcoin-and-is-on-a-price-decline-and-why-is-this-important-for-quark-and-other-free-market-crypto-currencies/

Where is said Quark would be a great crypto "reserve" to store "capital" in because it is driven by the free market...

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/views/filter-non-mineable-and-premined/

monopoly land doesn't looks so healthy- who's capital is going to come in now and give all these LTC ASICS a free lunch?

what about all the new BTC ASICS farms - we need someone to buy ?

oh the Dark monopoly collapsed ( but that was pretty obvious) (wasn't it)

caching the page now -

: D

You can´t store wealth in a currency which has 7k USD tradevolume (liquidity...) the last 24 hours and still lost 5% of its value.

But i agree about LTC and co.

[simplecrypto]

Edit: Got to love all the intrigue and drama surrounding Cryptonote coins, e.g. Moanero.

hmmm reading now -

Yea me too. Could everyone else who's reading post here as well. Or if you're not reading you can post that. As long as you post something.

I read it. Princeton needs to rethink their strategy of admitting students of the OP's caliber. Nothing earth shattering was discovered in that post at all. Just an excuse to strong arm people and it didn't work short term for some reason.  

[fluffypony]

I read it. Princeton needs to rethink their strategy of admitting students of the OP's caliber. Nothing earth shattering was discovered in that post at all. Just an excuse to strong arm people and it didn't work short term for some reason.  

Nothing earth shattering? How is purposeful deception not earth shattering? Based on the information provided we now know not to trust a group of cryptocurrencies that are most likely churned out by the same coin mill. I think that's pretty earth shattering.

[smooth]

I read it. Princeton needs to rethink their strategy of admitting students of the OP's caliber. Nothing earth shattering was discovered in that post at all. Just an excuse to strong arm people and it didn't work short term for some reason.  

Nothing earth shattering? How is purposeful deception not earth shattering? Based on the information provided we now know not to trust a group of cryptocurrencies that are most likely churned out by the same coin mill. I think that's pretty earth shattering.

It wouldn't be earthshattering that altcoin scams exist in general. This one is a little different because the technology appears to represent a significant advance, which is why it has gotten far more attention from many bitcoin developers and users. Also for that reason, many were reluctant to see the red flags, including when I pointed them out months ago on the Bytecoin thread. Now we know.





 

[digitalindustry]

Edit: Got to love all the intrigue and drama surrounding Cryptonote coins, e.g. Moanero.

hmmm reading now -

Yea me too. Could everyone else who's reading post here as well. Or if you're not reading you can post that. As long as you post something.

TL;DR for people:


-  Some dudes thought  "features" where what made Crypto popular so faked a bunch of white-papers to make them look older than they were - then shilled thier Crypto (can't blame the guys)

- missing the point that people probably don't give a fuck about "Anon" anyhow, and will just use mixers in the future...

- Then Monero came out and they are playing the same "We invested, now it your turn to invest guyz" , "trust us its good!" , "Anonymity!"

- meanwhile people out in fiat land have no idea what a "blockchain" is...



***- Most interesting part of the whole story is the screen dump of the fake "anarchist" trying pathetically to support "micro transactions" lol  (to hurt the BTC core code lol)

[simplecrypto]

I read it. Princeton needs to rethink their strategy of admitting students of the OP's caliber. Nothing earth shattering was discovered in that post at all. Just an excuse to strong arm people and it didn't work short term for some reason.  

Nothing earth shattering? How is purposeful deception not earth shattering? Based on the information provided we now know not to trust a group of cryptocurrencies that are most likely churned out by the same coin mill. I think that's pretty earth shattering.

The purposeful (or otherwise) deception was well known. Those who are into Monero already knew about the Bytecoin scam, others were not taken seriously anyway. Some of the posts thanking the OP were fluffy in nature, meaning they already are in the Monero ecosystem and didn't care about the coin mill CN coins.

[drawingthesun]

Edit: Got to love all the intrigue and drama surrounding Cryptonote coins, e.g. Moanero.

hmmm reading now -

Yea me too. Could everyone else who's reading post here as well. Or if you're not reading you can post that. As long as you post something.

TL;DR for people:


-  Some dudes thought  "features" where what made Crypto popular so faked a bunch of white-papers to make them look older than they were - then shilled thier Crypto (can't blame the guys)

- missing the point that people probably don't give a fuck about "Anon" anyhow, and will just use mixers in the future...

- Then Monero came out and they are playing the same "We invested, now it your turn to invest guyz" , "trust us its good!" , "Anonymity!"

- meanwhile people out in fiat land have no idea what a "blockchain" is...



***- Most interesting part of the whole story is the screen dump of the fake "anarchist" trying pathetically to support "micro transactions" lol  (to hurt the BTC core code lol)

You're a right odd ball!

Someone came up with some of the best tech in CryptoCoins since Satoshi created bitcoin, but instead of releasing it in a fair and open way they tried to over profit and control it.

Monero took that awesome tech and made it fair to the world.

Almost everyone cares about anonymity, Bitcoin is a dataminers wet dream, if Bitcoin takes off you have no idea how abused it's going to get.

And mixers? Are you serious? What are you, 12?

Why use a mixer where you trust that someone isn't keeping tabs when you can use actual anonymity tech like Monero? What planet are you living on? Oh right, the one where you care so much about your own profit that you'd rather the world use shitcoin tech.

Dude, you are selfish and wrong.

[smooth]

I don't have time to read this thread, so I don't know if this has been pointed out already. In our upthread discussion about Cryptonite and the MBC (mini blockchain), I failed to point out that the unscalable (without centralized mining) Bitcoin blockchain (and worse for Monero) can never be pruned because it relies on GUIDs to prevent double-spend replay transactions (or am I unaware that Bitcoin's tx GUID somehow incorporates the block hash?). If anyone is aware of a solution for that please let me know. Because I think it is major vulnerability of the MBC. Has Cryptonite addressed it in some way?

Their white paper says this:

In order to make sure the same signed transaction isn't processed by the network more than once, the block header must also contain a “lockheight” field. The transaction becomes invalid once the lockheight is outside the range of blocks which nodes are required to keep (lets call this the blocks “in view”), and same txid cannot be included twice in any of the blocks which are in view. This makes it impossible to use the same txid twice. However this solution requires that the txid is not malleable.

I think block header there is a typo...should that be transaction header?

[AnonyMint]

I feel I need to defend that thread that takes the time to explain some of the drama that went on with Cryptonote. Or at least offer the potential for another perspective.

You've got to ask yourself why would a group that was sitting on a revolutionary breakthrough in crypto-currency shoot themselves in the foot with a scam.

One possible explanation is there was infighting.

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end. But I am not sure.

I'm not surprised how many people have rationalized away this fact for Monero. Investment pumps just need cheerleading. Again I am not sure, because I don't know any secrets Monero might have up its sleeve.

Edit: One implicit argument that has been made for Monero is that centralized mining doesn't matter, since the anonymity of one-time ring signatures is decentralized.

Edit#2: But I pointed out that if you don't obfuscated the IP address, then the ring sigs don't insure your anonymity. And the pool controls the receipt of your tx over Tor/I2P so if centralized it can coordinate with the timing attack on your upstream router or ISP. Seems to me that centralized mining defeats anonymity. And the centralized pools will be required to defeat the anonymity by government regulation. So the entire thing seems to me to be mostly a waste of time and effort.

[Brilliantrocket]

Anonymint, whenever the issue of bloat is brought up, it seems that the standard response is that the average user will not be running a full node, thus it does not matter. Assuming that most people are running light wallets, and nodes are being run on dedicated servers, how does bloat ensure that a currency goes nowhere?

[devphp]

You've got to ask yourself why would a group that was sitting on a revolutionary breakthrough in crypto-currency shoot themselves in the foot with a scam.

One possible explanation is there was infighting.

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end.

I'm not surprised how many people have rationalized away this fact for Monero. Investment pumps just need cheerleading.

So what is the scam about? Does the code not work in all CN coins? Does the code not do what it's supposed to do? Creating a few coins can actually be a good idea, because yes, CN doesn't scale, so people will choose the CN flavor to their liking, which will keep each individual blockchain smaller. Win-win for all. All CN coins are about the same, except for inflationary rate and some have merge mining capabilities. Apart from those, what's the difference between them?

[digitalindustry]

You're a right odd ball!

Someone came up with some of the best tech in CryptoCoins since Satoshi created bitcoin, but instead of releasing it in a fair and open way they tried to over profit and control it.

Monero took that awesome tech and made it fair to the world.

Almost everyone cares about anonymity, Bitcoin is a dataminers wet dream, if Bitcoin takes off you have no idea how abused it's going to get.

And mixers? Are you serious? What are you, 12?

Why use a mixer where you trust that someone isn't keeping tabs when you can use actual anonymity tech like Monero? What planet are you living on? Oh right, the one where you care so much about your own profit that you'd rather the world use shitcoin tech.

Dude, you are selfish and wrong.

nope - you are wrong.

people care about :

- Food
- Air
- Being alive
- Not living in a police sate.
- not having your time and energy stolen (being a slave)

take Debt money out of the equation and we pretty much fix that. ( don't even bother with the argument)

the biggest evolution in crypto has been :

(* after the NSA 1996 White paper) (and the Blockchain from the "Bitcoin" developers)

- The EQ reward
- cPoW - (multi algo complexity)
- BitFreak  Mini blockchain
-  the Myraid PoW  (likely)

* best to open another thread to continue the argument as i don't like to discuss things on a moderated thread.

[smooth]

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end.

I'll tell you a secret. I know how to make it scale to do what you want it to do. Whoever designed it is smarter than I am, so he/she/they probably knew as well.

I have several theories on why such a smart person has handled this so stupidly but the best is probably what was pointed out by someone else on that thread: being in the right place on the autistic spectrum means someone may be very smart about cryptography and exceedingly stupid to the point of functional blindness about social interactions.

Whether we go that route with Monero is an open question. Not everyone agrees with your view on what is scalable (personally I'm more in the Gavin Andresen camp that Moore's law has largely solved it and is in the process of further solving it) or what sort of scaling is best, or even that very fast scaling is important when the demand side appears to be so limited currently.

There may well be better solutions for how to do a coin, and Monero might fail for a variety of other reasons. "Can't scale" won't be what causes Monero to fail though.

[GreekBitcoin]

You've got to ask yourself why would a group that was sitting on a revolutionary breakthrough in crypto-currency shoot themselves in the foot with a scam.

One possible explanation is there was infighting.

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end.

I'm not surprised how many people have rationalized away this fact for Monero. Investment pumps just need cheerleading.

Bytecoin was a test coin and got out only to milk some BTC. It was doomed to fail with such premine but earned them a good pay.

Then they created bitmonero and with  on purpose slow miner so they can still have control over the currency. Only they didnt manage to control it because "open source" and because they seemed extremely retarded when it comes to their social skills. They may be good programmers or mathematicians but act like children when it comes to interacting to others.

Finally they dont seem to be that many as people might think. They tend not to have enough time to support their coins....


Thats what i believe.

[smooth]

Anonymint, whenever the issue of bloat is brought up, it seems that the standard response is that the average user will not be running a full node, thus it does not matter. Assuming that most people are running light wallets, and nodes are being run on dedicated servers, how does bloat ensure that a currency goes nowhere?

Light wallets do not require dedicated servers. Some models of light wallets do, but not all.

[drawingthesun]

nope - you are wrong.

people care about :

- Food
- Air
- Being alive
- Not living in a police sate.
- not having your time and energy stolen (being a slave)

Right, and once we get past these basic needs and wants, we move onto other things.

One of these other things is financial freedom, freedom requires a degree of privacy. (The freedom to be private)

the biggest evolution in crypto has been :

I said CryptoCoins, I was careful not to say Crypto in general.

* best to open another thread to continue the argument as i don't like to discuss things on a moderated thread.

Sure, go for it.

[AnonyMint]

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end.

I'll tell you a secret. I know how to make it scale to do what you want it to do. Whoever designed it is smarter than I am, so he/she/they probably knew as well.

I know how to make one-time ring signatures scale too. Simply limit the time window over which users can mix and force them to mix out of that window within a deadline. Anyone who doesn't, loses their balance. Then you can prune the window. But that puts an expiration date on balances, which will be a disaster. It also limits the anonymity set.

Do you know of another solution which doesn't have that drawback?

Also there are other problems with needing tx fees to limit Sybil attacks which impact the scaling.

[smooth]

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end.

I'll tell you a secret. I know how to make it scale to do what you want it to do. Whoever designed it is smarter than I am, so he/she/they probably knew as well.

I know how to make one-time ring signatures scale too. Simply limit the time window over which users can mix and force them to mix out of that window within a deadline. Anyone who doesn't, loses their balance. Then you can prune the window. But that puts an expiration date on balances, which will be a disaster.

Do you know of another solution which doesn't have that drawback?

At least two others.

[AnonyMint]

But I find the more plausible explanation to be they were smart enough to realize one-time ring signatures don't scale, and thus it was going no where in the end.

I'll tell you a secret. I know how to make it scale to do what you want it to do. Whoever designed it is smarter than I am, so he/she/they probably knew as well.

I know how to make one-time ring signatures scale too. Simply limit the time window over which users can mix and force them to mix out of that window within a deadline. Anyone who doesn't, loses their balance. Then you can prune the window. But that puts an expiration date on balances, which will be a disaster.

Do you know of another solution which doesn't have that drawback?

At least two others.

Do you know of any solution that doesn't require a deadline and where just one user can't jam the pruning? I don't expect you to reveal your secrets, I am just asking if you've solved it with no such drawback?

Because I can think of variants on my idea above, such as issuing one-time ids in lots, so that people can only mix within their lot id. But that has the same drawback.

I am thinking it is fundamentally impossible to prune without incurring that drawback in some form. Because if you find a way to identify which transactions in a mix have been spent, then at the minimum you reduce the anonymity set to the unspent and the spent even if you find some clever zero knowledge proof to accomplish it.