Pros and Cons to Anon coins, Including Darkcoin / Cloakcoin, lets discuss them.

[HinnomTX]

What happens if Alty wants to send Cloakcoin to Joe but Joe is offline?

Joe receives Altys CLOAK like any normal wallet.  Offline wallets have been tested to work. Since wallet build #19 of 27

The wallet can be offline and still respond to Alty's request for new _PoSA address? That's some pretty cool magic.  Can you explain how that works?

[voxelot]

What happens if Alty wants to send Cloakcoin to Joe but Joe is offline?

Joe receives Altys CLOAK like any normal wallet.  Offline wallets have been tested to work. Since wallet build #19 of 27

The wallet can be offline and still respond to Alty's request for new _PoSA address? That's some pretty cool magic.  Can you explain how that works?

Magic?

Joe does not do anything when _PoSA is generated.  Alty knows Joe's address and is initiating a transaction.  This prompts the PoSA nodes to generate the necessary addresses and the funds are shipped.  There are no actions required from Joe's wallet.

[HinnomTX]

What happens if Alty wants to send Cloakcoin to Joe but Joe is offline?

Joe receives Altys CLOAK like any normal wallet.  Offline wallets have been tested to work. Since wallet build #19 of 27

The wallet can be offline and still respond to Alty's request for new _PoSA address? That's some pretty cool magic.  Can you explain how that works?

Magic?

Joe does not do anything when _PoSA is generated.  Alty knows Joe's address and is initiating a transaction.  This prompts the PoSA nodes to generate the necessary addresses and the funds are shipped.  There are no actions required from Joe's wallet.

In the diagram, there's a box there on the upper right that reads: "Tells Joe to Create _PoSA Address and receive it from him".  Then there's another box that reads "Send _PoSA address to Anty from Joe". Looks pretty clear to me that Joe's client needs to be online to generate the _PoSA address. Is the diagram wrong?

[voxelot]

What happens if Alty wants to send Cloakcoin to Joe but Joe is offline?

Joe receives Altys CLOAK like any normal wallet.  Offline wallets have been tested to work. Since wallet build #19 of 27

The wallet can be offline and still respond to Alty's request for new _PoSA address? That's some pretty cool magic.  Can you explain how that works?

Magic?

Joe does not do anything when _PoSA is generated.  Alty knows Joe's address and is initiating a transaction.  This prompts the PoSA nodes to generate the necessary addresses and the funds are shipped.  There are no actions required from Joe's wallet.

In the diagram, there's a box there on the upper right that reads: "Tells Joe to Create _PoSA Address and receive it from him".  Then there's another box that reads "Send _PoSA address to Anty from Joe". Looks pretty clear to me that Joe's client needs to be online to generate the _PoSA address. Is the diagram wrong?

That flow chart is the worst thing ever and I agree is confusing.  Just because Joe can generate _Posa does not mean he has to.  There are even now options to decide how anon you want to be and how many times you want your transaction to be split. There will be a node to create _posa.  I have tested turning my wallet off and have received txs sent via posa.

[MasterMined710]

Just a heads up on MasterMind710. He's responsible for the Cloak FUD subreddits and most of the baseless comments in the sections of Cloak related articles and videos. The only thing backing up his claims is his investment in DRK masternodes..

No idea if this is true but MasterMind710 please let's try to keep at least this thread readable and more "technical".

it's not true. storyteller has been running around telling stories that i posted a bunch of reddit threads but i have repeatedly told him this is not true. i did post some questions on one youtube video and on the article cloak commissioned. i copy and pasted some good cloak questions i found on reddit but they were not mine and i never started any reddit threads. if i did i would say.

i'm not sure what it is that i said in this thread that you have a problem with but i stand behind everything i wrote.  send me a pm if you want to talk/explain.

[MasterMined710]

XC offers both completely anonymous transactions and instant p2p encrypted messaging.  In other words, XC offers a complete platform that protects one's rights to privacy.  Bye NSA.

working or vaporware? when is all this stuff supposed to happen, rev 3? release date?

Once again, this stuff has happened already.


To sum it all up:

Rev 2.45 (private payments).

XChat RC 6 (true P2P instant messaging with end-to-end encryption)

XC TOR Stick (releasing on Thursday; doesn't use TOR exit nodes so packet sniffers can't find you)

ok thank you, great info. i'll have to check it all out. i believe i saw there was a bounty for cracking xc anon feature. can you post that link please. looks like i need to give xc a second look, thanks.

[MasterMined710]

How on earth was XC "decloaked" ? It has nothing to do with cloakcoin or its tech. There will be no problem with bloating blockchain, and the reason the anon rev is stalled for gui is because the encrypted messaging was being worked. There have been many releases since "a few weeks ago". Don't take my words for it, if you consider yourself an intelligent individual just go search the topic and official XC forums for yourself, but don't just throw FUD around like that.

xc anon was cracked by chaeplin but they are redoing it now. i don't have time to keep up with xc anymore and have moved on, sorry. it's too hard to tell what they have working and what is just more vapor. they talk like everything is working but all i see is vapor. please educate me to what is working now and what is just planned for release (rev 3) and when. good to see they have some bounties unlike cloak.

Ah, that opinion. It's old FUD. Chaeplin didn't understand what was being tested.

Here's why.

pretty sure he did understand but there is a language barrier. xc did change what they were doing after that test though.

[MasterMined710]

what about the scalability problem from bloating and the mass adoption issue of non provable transactions. seems like those issues would prevent mass adoption.

Ooooh, this is my area of knowledge:)

Firstly, any mixing technology will also have bloat - you understand that, right? If it goes through 8 hops that's 8 entries in the blockchain. The ONLY advantage that a cryptocurrency using mixing has is that they *can* prune the blockchain (not that they have or even necessarily know how). There is no evidence to suggest that Monero can't prune its blockchain - it absolutely can. The only thing that is currently viewed as hard-to-do-maybe-to-the-point-of-being-impossible is pruning of the key image set and the utxoset, but the blockchain itself can be pruned right up to the highest block.

I also have never heard of Monero transactions being "non-provable". If that were the case your wallet wouldn't know that a particular transaction is meant for you. It does so by "proving" it is. Baked right into the protocol is a "view key" that can be used to expose multiple transactions, and each transaction has a one-time key that can be exposed to show the details of a transaction and confirm it is yours. Monero is, thus, cryptographically anonymous and unlinkable, and optionally transparent on a per-transaction basis. NB: The tooling to both reveal this and inspect it is still being written, but every transaction from the genesis block on has been functionally anonymous and has this optional transparency baked in.

How do other coins handle this? I mean, how do you reveal a transaction in Darkcoin/XC/Cloakcoin and prove it came from you?

thanks. after reading anonymints back and forth with you guys i was under the impression that pruning the bc was questionable and he seems to think it can't be done. it way over my head but he does seem to know his stuff. to clarify he did say it's not possible right? i saw the bbr guy pruned or is pruning some stuff but anonymint claims it's not near enough, correct?

i've seen people talk about the transaction provability part several times but forget the specific phrase they used. i'll check into it and get back to you.

so if i send you some xmr for something and you say you did not get it is there a transaction hash on the bc i can point to and prove it?

thanks for your time.

[some138]

Just a heads up on MasterMind710. He's responsible for the Cloak FUD subreddits and most of the baseless comments in the sections of Cloak related articles and videos. The only thing backing up his claims is his investment in DRK masternodes..

Moving forward.

1)
Since when is the right to privacy of developers a CON? Cloak developers have done more in the last month than most other coins have done in the last nine. Please explain to me how advocates of anon technology also advocate that developers reveal themselves in order for their work to be taking seriously. If you believe anon to be a negative factor in development, then the same argument will be made later down the road for merchants using anonymous currencies. Remember Satoshi was a fellow anon. Just because a new altcoin popped up with developers willing to expose themselves doesn't mean it is a recipe for success; Morever, this should not validate their work or their abilities.

I would hope the OP would reconsider his criteria for PRO/CON in relation to personal privacy.

2)
Please show me at least one alt-coin that has invested money into a high-level independent audit - closed or open. I'm not talking about Kristov Atlas, I'm saying a real authoritative audit from a place like www.opencryptoaudit.org. These places are backed up 3-5 months in advance and the costs are upwards of $50k+. It's comes out to around $5,000+ a week per auditor. It's one thing to sit in this forum and play armchair auditor it's another thing to do it for a living. I'm an investor for Cloak and I'm willing to fund 100% of the independent audit for PoSA. I doubt anyone here is willing to do the same for their investment. I'm already speaking with various candidates and their results will eventually be made public when finished. Dagger, the project lead for Cloak clocks in 20+hour days as do the others on the team. This type of commitment is all I need to validate my investment in a professional audit. The crypto space is one of the most vile and disgusting communities on the internet. Shameless promotions and baseless accusations are all the norm here. Innovation is ripped from another coin and re-branded almost the same day the source is published. It's not a surprise that developers who innovate are moving to more of a closed source development cycle to protect their investors.

Pony up and do the same for your coin because once these results come in your internal reviews won't hold a candle to Cloaks.

3)
A detailed diagram has been released that outlines the inner workings of the Proof-Of-Stake Anon (PoSA) protocol. There is a public beta available for Cloak's PoSA. Feel free to join the IRC #CloakCoin. There are 7 core developers working on Cloak in addition to 5 other developers working on supporting projects. Anyone of them is available to answer questions. There is a diagram on the way that will be easier to read for those who have trouble understanding this one.

Update:

There's been quite a lot of pressure for us to release in greater details, information about our finished anon product.

The whitepaper was deliberately made sparse to avoid attempts at copying from an early stage.

Cloak PoSA is well advanced now so we can now reveal a more indepth paper that shows how our finished Proof of Stake Anonymity system works.

PoSA is entirely trustless and solves the Byzantine Generals problem.





A first look at CloakPal coming tomorrow.

This is not a trustless system, it can be easily cheated. see the discussions in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=713836.0

[btcsup]

Why Supercoin  SuperSend is not in this list? The fastest and most advanced anonymous technology used in the all altcoins. They were working on trustless system as well. (Not hype one like cloakd XC or dark) In matter of weeks they are starting tests.

[fluffypony]

thanks. after reading anonymints back and forth with you guys i was under the impression that pruning the bc was questionable and he seems to think it can't be done. it way over my head but he does seem to know his stuff. to clarify he did say it's not possible right? i saw the bbr guy pruned or is pruning some stuff but anonymint claims it's not near enough, correct?

i've seen people talk about the transaction provability part several times but forget the specific phrase they used. i'll check into it and get back to you.

so if i send you some xmr for something and you say you did not get it is there a transaction hash on the bc i can point to and prove it?

thanks for your time.

Both AnonyMint and I agree that pruning, in the Bitcoin sense of the term, is not possible with any of the CryptoNote currencies. That does not mean that other reductions in storage aren't possible, but there will always be a need to keep more data than with Bitcoin and its clones. Specifically, the utxoset *and* the key image set is required, and the key image set is unpruneable. The pruning that BBR does is to remove ring signature proofs, a purely linear pruning and one that I am hesitant about from a cryptographic soundness perspective.

You get a transaction ID for your transaction, most definitely. Here's a transaction of 335 XMR sent to my Monero address (49VNLa9K5ecJo13bwKYt5HCmA8GkgLwpyFjgGKG6qmp8dqoXww8TKPU2PJaLfAAtoZGgtHfJ1nYY8G2 YaewycB4f72yFT6u) on all 3 block explorers:

http://monerochain.info/tx/047c2c11632120f7cd1565c312f94f76135a45f0b2194bbe958826280878fc3d
http://chainradar.com/xmr/transaction/047c2c11632120f7cd1565c312f94f76135a45f0b2194bbe958826280878fc3d
https://minergate.com/blockchain/mro/transaction/047c2c11632120f7cd1565c312f94f76135a45f0b2194bbe958826280878fc3d

As you can see, there's no way to track where it came from, where it went to, or even ascertain the correct amount. However, the very act of being able to provide the transaction ID to me (coupled with me receiving it) is normally sufficient to prove a transaction, since only the sender and recipient will know the transaction ID and the amount.

Of course, this isn't the robust or cryptographically sound way of doing it, which is why we're adding tooling to allow someone to reveal the one-time key (which is different to the transaction ID) for their transaction, and the person (or persons) they send that key to can see the exactly details of their transaction on a blockchain explorer or similar. In other words, this functionality is inherent in the protocol and in each transaction, but we just have to give people the ability to both retrieve this information and for someone else to verify it.

[synechist]

XC offers both completely anonymous transactions and instant p2p encrypted messaging.  In other words, XC offers a complete platform that protects one's rights to privacy.  Bye NSA.

working or vaporware? when is all this stuff supposed to happen, rev 3? release date?

Once again, this stuff has happened already.


To sum it all up:

Rev 2.45 (private payments).

XChat RC 6 (true P2P instant messaging with end-to-end encryption)

XC TOR Stick (releasing on Thursday; doesn't use TOR exit nodes so packet sniffers can't find you)

ok thank you, great info. i'll have to check it all out. i believe i saw there was a bounty for cracking xc anon feature. can you post that link please. looks like i need to give xc a second look, thanks.

Sure, no problem.

XChat and private payments are now merged into a single app!

Try it out. Feel free to message me on the XChat address and pubkey in my signature.

[MasterMined710]

thanks. after reading anonymints back and forth with you guys i was under the impression that pruning the bc was questionable and he seems to think it can't be done. it way over my head but he does seem to know his stuff. to clarify he did say it's not possible right? i saw the bbr guy pruned or is pruning some stuff but anonymint claims it's not near enough, correct?

i've seen people talk about the transaction provability part several times but forget the specific phrase they used. i'll check into it and get back to you.

so if i send you some xmr for something and you say you did not get it is there a transaction hash on the bc i can point to and prove it?

thanks for your time.

Both AnonyMint and I agree that pruning, in the Bitcoin sense of the term, is not possible with any of the CryptoNote currencies. That does not mean that other reductions in storage aren't possible, but there will always be a need to keep more data than with Bitcoin and its clones. Specifically, the utxoset *and* the key image set is required, and the key image set is unpruneable. The pruning that BBR does is to remove ring signature proofs, a purely linear pruning and one that I am hesitant about from a cryptographic soundness perspective.

You get a transaction ID for your transaction, most definitely. Here's a transaction of 335 XMR sent to my Monero address (49VNLa9K5ecJo13bwKYt5HCmA8GkgLwpyFjgGKG6qmp8dqoXww8TKPU2PJaLfAAtoZGgtHfJ1nYY8G2 YaewycB4f72yFT6u) on all 3 block explorers:

http://monerochain.info/tx/047c2c11632120f7cd1565c312f94f76135a45f0b2194bbe958826280878fc3d
http://chainradar.com/xmr/transaction/047c2c11632120f7cd1565c312f94f76135a45f0b2194bbe958826280878fc3d
https://minergate.com/blockchain/mro/transaction/047c2c11632120f7cd1565c312f94f76135a45f0b2194bbe958826280878fc3d

As you can see, there's no way to track where it came from, where it went to, or even ascertain the correct amount. However, the very act of being able to provide the transaction ID to me (coupled with me receiving it) is normally sufficient to prove a transaction, since only the sender and recipient will know the transaction ID and the amount.

Of course, this isn't the robust or cryptographically sound way of doing it, which is why we're adding tooling to allow someone to reveal the one-time key (which is different to the transaction ID) for their transaction, and the person (or persons) they send that key to can see the exactly details of their transaction on a blockchain explorer or similar. In other words, this functionality is inherent in the protocol and in each transaction, but we just have to give people the ability to both retrieve this information and for someone else to verify it.

great info man, thanks. the one-time key feature will solve the provability problem i've seen brought up but i still can't think of the damn technical name they were using
sounds like what bitshares x is doing with a secret key to prove transaction to a third party type escrow. the whole anon scene is very exciting!

only other real issues is the bloating and (visa level) scalability that anonymint always talks about. what are y'alls plans to fix that?
the crippled hash things is fixed (right?) and doesn't concern me as it only affected like 2% from what i saw which is super fair in the cryptocoin world.
the only other thing i can think of now is the issue of inflation,  4 years pow if i'm not mistaken?
 some have also questioned the pow algo cryptonite because i guess it's new and cryptographically unproven but getting professionally audited at some point?
seems like y'all have a great team working on things and i'll definitely consider putting some btc into your project.


what's your thoughts on bitshares x anon feature titan?

http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/TITAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDvXZMQNnhE

Delegated Proof of Stake - Let's Talk Bitcoin Episode 129
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdBpoRLmrbA&list=WL#t=726

[MasterMined710]

XC offers both completely anonymous transactions and instant p2p encrypted messaging.  In other words, XC offers a complete platform that protects one's rights to privacy.  Bye NSA.

working or vaporware? when is all this stuff supposed to happen, rev 3? release date?

Once again, this stuff has happened already.


To sum it all up:

Rev 2.45 (private payments).

XChat RC 6 (true P2P instant messaging with end-to-end encryption)

XC TOR Stick (releasing on Thursday; doesn't use TOR exit nodes so packet sniffers can't find you)

ok thank you, great info. i'll have to check it all out. i believe i saw there was a bounty for cracking xc anon feature. can you post that link please. looks like i need to give xc a second look, thanks.

Sure, no problem.

XChat and private payments are now merged into a single app!

Try it out. Feel free to message me on the XChat address and pubkey in my signature.

lol, yeah that was my next question. smart move.  i saw bitshares x was doing that too. i'll try both in the next few days or so. everything anon is moving so fast, love it!

[G-Bert]

So... Have any other Coins other than XC got Anonymous transactions and encrypted chat working currently?

Surprised by the low price still on XC, anyone have any ideas why?

[MasterMined710]

So... Have any other Coins other than XC got Anonymous transactions and encrypted chat working currently?

Surprised by the low price still on XC, anyone have any ideas why?

bitshares x does. they are currently the number 2 anon coin by market cap after darkcoin. their dpos is better than the old pos that many coins use. dpos helps prevent rollbacks and other pos attack vectors.

also, just saw a darkcoin member has created a encrypted chat program that uses the masternode protocol. he is also working on a ebay level scalable dark market using the masternodes. darkcoin will also be implementing their own super fast i2p network using masternodes. the future uses for masternodes are endless.

[fluffypony]

great info man, thanks. the one-time key feature will solve the provability problem i've seen brought up but i still can't think of the damn technical name they were using
sounds like what bitshares x is doing with a secret key to prove transaction to a third party type escrow. the whole anon scene is very exciting!

only other real issues is the bloating and (visa level) scalability that anonymint always talks about. what are y'alls plans to fix that?
the crippled hash things is fixed (right?) and doesn't concern me as it only affected like 2% from what i saw which is super fair in the cryptocoin world.
the only other thing i can think of now is the issue of inflation,  4 years pow if i'm not mistaken?
 some have also questioned the pow algo cryptonite because i guess it's new and cryptographically unproven but getting professionally audited at some point?
seems like y'all have a great team working on things and i'll definitely consider putting some btc into your project.


what's your thoughts on bitshares x anon feature titan?

http://wiki.bitshares.org/index.php/TITAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDvXZMQNnhE

Delegated Proof of Stake - Let's Talk Bitcoin Episode 129
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdBpoRLmrbA&list=WL#t=726

I haven't had much time to look into what Bitshares is doing, I tend to focus solely on improving the already working privacy in Monero instead of constantly looking over the fence into everyone else's yard;)

No cryptocurrency has Visa-level scalability right now. Bitcoin *can* be pruned, but it hasn't been pruned yet. I honestly think that Visa-level scalability will come from off-chain transactions - so someone like Visa or PayPal or whoever will provide a way to use the current infrastructure for extremely rapid transacting, and then all accounts will have on-chain settlement every day or week or whatever.

In many, many years time when there is an extremely low-latency (nanosecond-scale) global network on ipv6 and disk space is faster+cheaper+more abundant and cryptography has advanced many fold it is entirely possible that an ancestor of today's cryptocurrencies will provide this level of transacting on-chain. The basic nature of "the size of a transaction" won't change much, so that level of scale is around 100 billion transactions per year (MasterCard: 34 billion in 2013, Visa: 58.5 billion in 2013) which averages out to around 200 000 transactions a minute. A Bitcoin-style pseudonymous network with no mixing (let's not forget that any mixing adds multiple transactions, ie. bloat) will run up about 1.32gb per 10-minute block. A Monero-style network (as it currently stands) will run up about 680mb per 1-minute block, about 6.8gb every 10 minutes. That's a yearly hit of 70tb (Bitcoin with no mixing) and 360tb (Monero). Both of these are unsustainable with our current technology, not only with regards to disk space but also with regards to the low-latency global network required to broadcast blocks and transactions.

The reality is that by the time this becomes possible from a network perspective in many, many years, I can guarantee that both 70tb and 360tb will be irrelevant figures. I already have a 1tb USB flash drive (Kingston HyperX Predator, released beginning of 2013), and WD released their 6th WD Red NAS drives the other day, so storage space is increasing rapidly. In fact, where Moore's law aims to pinpoint processor growth, Kryder's law shows a much sharper curve for storage space growth. His model says that a 14th drive will be available by 2020 and will cost $40, and you can extrapolate from there. By the time the current Internet reaches a point where ipv6 is commonplace and network speed and latency is such that moving even 1.32gb around in 10 minutes is a complete non-issue even in rural Africa, Kingston will have released its Wireless USB 7.0 compatible 2pb HyperZZZ SoaringEagle flash drive, and all this "blockchain bloat" stuff will be a non-issue.

[FreedomCoin]

Scalability is on everyone's mind regarding all coins, but we cannot just hope that Moore's law solves that problem for us.

BTW added Supercoin to Post #1

[kyma]

So... Have any other Coins other than XC got Anonymous transactions and encrypted chat working currently?

Surprised by the low price still on XC, anyone have any ideas why?

I think its worth mentioning ShadowCoin [SDC] as they seem to be on the playing-field with XCurrency (mobile apps and whatnot)... not to mention they've been hiding under he woodwork until this week

Everyone in the XC forum has been asking themselves that all week. Seems like a healthy market right now with little to no large whale manipulation. This I'm ok with as I'm not a big day trader.   

[vertoe]

Dark Coin:
Cons:

Uses a CoinJoin clone for anon trading of coins. Which has been shown to have flaws, see “CoinJoinSudoku”. http://www.coinjoinsudoku.com/advisory/
Was instamined over 2 million DRK on launch, due to only a few having access to the windows mining client and not publicly released for some time. And due to problems with the difficulty readjustment. http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Was_Darkcoin_Instamined.3F

Just an update, Darksend, initially released with Darkcoin was indeed a poor implementation of coinjoin and vulnarable to sudoku/timing attacks. With the recent release of RC4, Darksend was removed from the clients and replaced by Darksend+ which is not mixing the coins during the send but in a complete separate denomination phase which fixes this issue usually seen with all other coinjoin implementations. It's worth to look into that.

Kristov Atlas who found the Coinjoin Sudoku vulnarability is currently reviewing the code of Darksend+ and will publish a paper soon with the results
http://blog.anonymousbitcoinbook.com/2014/08/visualizing-one-round-of-darkcoins-darksend/
https://twitter.com/anonymouscoin/status/508541929890787328