delete

[TheFascistMind]

Why is the focus on the anonymity in Monero? Shouldn't the focus be on other things BCX alluded to earlier.

I agree if you could eliminate any chance for time warp attack then any risk from cracked private keys that have already been spent, is thus mitigated.

The anonymity is still important because even if BCX would no longer have the economic motivation to attack if such a TW attack was nullified, the NSA might still want to destroy the anonymity using Sybil amplification. And note they could do so entirely silently.

And if we mitigate the anonymity attack, we also mitigate the alleged ability to crack private keys.

Note afaics the alleged attack can only crack private keys that have been spent. And that is why the Time Warp attack is needed to rewind the block chain to re-spend those to the attacker. Again we have not confirmed nor disproved that already spent private keys can or can not be cracked. I hear some mathematicians are skeptical and they have good reason to be skeptical.

[TheFascistMind]

As the saying goes: Do not feed the trolls.

Agreed. Was just trying to give investors a calm mind.

[ceti]

Investment from this coin pulled for preservation of funds. Will be recommending the same to the wolf pack.

Will focus on other options.

Has been fun, but seriously, get out now.

Nuf said.

[TheFascistMind]

Here is my take:

BCX and TFM are playing good cop/bad cop.

No unknown exploit exists.

It is all theater.

This is what I also believe, I also read TFM's posts and concluded more than a week ago that it's not AM, just somebody that purposely tries to write like him, guess this was the end game.

Rpietila will be able to verify it is me, when I say, "remember the 10oz machined bars from Academy". No one else can possibly know that episode.

At one time I owned 18,000oz of silver and still I have never touched one of those machined bars. How sad. This is the cost of living in the Philippines.

[Chris001]

Investment from this coin pulled for preservation of funds. Will be recommending the same to the wolf pack.

Will focus on other options.

Has been fun, but seriously, get out now.

Nuf said.

If you weren't smart and had too much on one coin (a mistake I make sometimes too) then yes you may want to fix that. However, most likely, I don't see Monero actually being killed off, so at one point, there is going to be a great time to ENTER the market.

I own zero, but watching this closely, as it may be  great coin to add soon.

[TheFascistMind]

Investment from this coin pulled for preservation of funds. Will be recommending the same to the wolf pack.

Will focus on other options.

Has been fun, but seriously, get out now.

Nuf said.

If you weren't smart and had too much on one coin (a mistake I make sometimes too) then yes you may want to fix that. However, most likely, I don't see Monero actually being killed off, so at one point, there is going to be a great time to ENTER the market.

I own zero, but watching this closely, as it may be  great coin to add soon.

And since I will probably be one of the first to realize a fix is coming, who do you think will be buying the dip

[mmitech]

Watching many of the familiar hero members behind this that were involved in so many alts before, makes XMR seems as a pump and dump ALT after all..... I am amazed on they are jumping on every new shitcoin... I guess this tells allot about their intentions and about the whole XMR scene.

I knew since the beginning that this coin is nothing special after taking a look at what it offers but when I saw Risto and many hero involved with it I knew that this was a big pump and dump attempt a huge ponzi....this is why Bitcoin and most alts wont succeed...because of crack heads and scumbags like these... making a ponzi schemes looks legit, but hey, don't think you are too safe because most of you will pay hard for scamming people into ponzi investments like this guy

[TheFascistMind]

Here is my take:

BCX and TFM are playing good cop/bad cop.

No unknown exploit exists.

It is all theater.

This is what I also believe, I also read TFM's posts and concluded more than a week ago that it's not AM, just somebody that purposely tries to write like him, guess this was the end game.

Rpietila will be able to verify it is me, when I say, "remember the 10oz machined bars from Academy". No one else can possibly know that episode.

At one time I owned 18,000oz of silver and still I have never touched one of those machined bars. How sad. This is the cost of living in the Philippines.

TheUniporn posted the following link then deleted his post before I could quote it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=222998.msg3596721#msg3596721

In that post I mentioned all the details above except for the detail that Rpietila and I were doing a trade on 10oz bars from Academy. Apparently he realized this and deleted his post. Any way, your Google fu is admirable.

[xtent]

Need to reply, so I remember to check back on this thread.

[RAJSALLIN]

Following with interest

[fluffypony]

you are the only one I know that is able to deal with both the cryptomath and totally open to any type of attack being possible.

One with an open mind can see what others assume cant be there

James

James, with all due respect what you've just said is baseless and untrue.

We're completely open to any type of attack being possible, and I can assure you that we are cryptographically competent. To that end, we have and will continue to push out research like the Monero Research Lab bulletins that cover theoretical attacks and corner cases that may be impossible to practically pull off. We are not naïve enough to believe the CN reference code we inherited lacks flaws, nor are we stupid enough to believe in our infallibility. The code does have bugs, and may contain as-yet unknown issues, but we are quite confident in the maths and cryptography (as are gmaxwell et. al.), and have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

Thus far we have seen AnonyMint / TheFascistMind merely redo our MRL-0001 research. We are waiting to see if he can add an additional amplification to it or not. Even so, it is unlikely that the MRL-0001 chain reaction has anything to do with this, as a "time warp" attack doesn't relate to it.

And, too, thus far we have seen no evidence that BCX actually has an exploit. All we have are disjointed breadcrumbs that don't fit an overall picture of how the proposed attack would play out. Given the lack of evidence we are certainly not discounting the remote possibility that there actually is an exploit, but just as with each of Bitcoin's 26 very serious exploits we will analyse an attack if there is one, patch it, and move on.

Between now and 60 hours time we are not going to "rapidly evolve" just because BCX claims he has an exploit but won't give us the technical details. We are, instead, going to continue our work on incrementally documenting and refactoring the codebase, as well as our independent research into edge-case cryptographic weaknesses, and deal with an attack if there is one.

[doch]

As the saying goes: Do not feed the trolls.

Agreed. Was just trying to give investors a calm mind.

That's nice and all but I'm pretty sure most investors would rather you spend your time productively than reply to retards on bitcointalk. Don't expend the time or effort to comment here unless it's something important.

[drawingthesun]

Watching many of the familiar hero members behind this that were involved in so many alts before, makes XMR seems as a pump and dump ALT after all..... I am amazed on they are jumping on every new shitcoin... I guess this tells allot about their intentions and about the whole XMR scene.

I knew since the beginning that this coin is nothing special after taking a look at what it offers but when I saw Risto and many hero involved with it I knew that this was a big pump and dump attempt a huge ponzi....this is why Bitcoin and most alts wont succeed...because of crack heads and scumbags like these... making a ponzi schemes looks legit, but hey, don't think you are too safe because most of you will pay hard for scamming people into ponzi investments like this guy

Funny how Monero has attracted so much love and hate from many reputable figures in the CryptoCoin space. I feel that many people, such as yourself, are feeling threatened by a heavy weight coin emerging from the alt coin section.

I've never seen a community this divided, I feel this actually gives Monero more legitimacy as all eyes now focus on it.

[jl777]

you are the only one I know that is able to deal with both the cryptomath and totally open to any type of attack being possible.

One with an open mind can see what others assume cant be there

James

James, with all due respect what you've just said is baseless and untrue.

We're completely open to any type of attack being possible, and I can assure you that we are cryptographically competent. To that end, we have and will continue to push out research like the Monero Research Lab bulletins that cover theoretical attacks and corner cases that may be impossible to practically pull off. We are not naïve enough to believe the CN reference code we inherited lacks flaws, nor are we stupid enough to believe in our infallibility. The code does have bugs, and may contain as-yet unknown issues, but we are quite confident in the maths and cryptography (as are gmaxwell et. al.), and have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

Thus far we have seen AnonyMint / TheFascistMind merely redo our MRL-0001 research. We are waiting to see if he can add an additional amplification to it or not. Even so, it is unlikely that the MRL-0001 chain reaction has anything to do with this, as a "time warp" attack doesn't relate to it.

And, too, thus far we have seen no evidence that BCX actually has an exploit. All we have are disjointed breadcrumbs that don't fit an overall picture of how the proposed attack would play out. Given the lack of evidence we are certainly not discounting the remote possibility that there actually is an exploit, but just as with each of Bitcoin's 26 very serious exploits we will analyse an attack if there is one, patch it, and move on.

Between now and 60 hours time we are not going to "rapidly evolve" just because BCX claims he has an exploit but won't give us the technical details. We are, instead, going to continue our work on incrementally documenting and refactoring the codebase, as well as our independent research into edge-case cryptographic weaknesses, and deal with an attack if there is one.

no offense to you, but I qualified it with someone that I know and I am not knowing of you yet. Also your response indicates to me that you are content to wait and see what happens and thus are not open to a clear and present danger that could be mitigated.

so regardless of your crypto skills if you are convinced BCX has no attack, then you wont find any because you know there cant be.

I am not saying that there is or isnt an attack possible. All I am saying is that I dont know and that it is possible for there to be one and so anonymint is our best chance to find and mitigate the attack as he apparently redid your MRL-001 research in a day, so maybe another two days and he will do the MRL-002 and MRL-003.

All I know is that anonymint is smarter than me and he says there is a possibility and without a mathematical proof that proves there is no possibility, I would be foolish to ignore the possibility

James

P.S. Have you thought of the possibility that BCX does not know the precise technical details due to the complexity of the CN codebase, but can still create a successful attack? It could be an empirically found exploit and not theoretically based. The fact that BCX said it depended on "implementation" is some clue about this.

[TheFascistMind]

Even so, it is unlikely that the MRL-0001 chain reaction has anything to do with this, as a "time warp" attack doesn't relate to it.

The two are related by the fact that the alleged ability to crack sent private keys isn't enabled until the anonymity of the ring signatures is broken by the correlation of the sender. And TW is needed to rewind the blockchain to re-spend those cracked. Again I reiterate and concur that we don't know if private keys can be cracked and have good reason to be very skeptical. Normally it is implausible to factor P=xG mod l where P is the public key and x is the private key. If it were, all popular public key crypto would be at risk. However the difference in this case is that the CN ring signatures create another equation, I=xH(P) mod l. Normally that equation can't be correlated to P=xG because we don't know which P from the ring inputs is the Pi where i == s. But when we break the anonymity with the amplification, then we can correlate those two equations. Now I don't know if there is any trick to combine the factoring of those two equations such that it becomes plausible. The second equation adds information, so my math intuition tells me there is a risk.

Gmaxell hasn't posted. Have you all heard from him on this?

And, too, thus far we have seen no evidence that BCX actually has an exploit. All we have are disjointed breadcrumbs that don't fit an overall picture of how the proposed attack would play out.

He has stated he has a GPU farm ready and only needs < 20% of the hashrate to accomplish an attack. He is only one of two guys (the other being ArtFortz who apparently taught him how to TW attack) that ever successfully performed a TW attack on any coin in the past.

Given the lack of evidence we are certainly not discounting the remote possibility that there actually is an exploit, but just as with each of Bitcoin's 26 very serious exploits we will analyse an attack if there is one, patch it, and move on.

The TW attack issue can probably be fixed in any case. But there is a possibility that the anonymity issue can't be fixed. This is what BCX said in the prior closed thread and I am seeing some possibility he might be correct. I need to spend some time trying to characterize the amplification.

Between now and 60 hours time we are not going to "rapidly evolve" just because BCX claims he has an exploit but won't give us the technical details. We are, instead, going to continue our work on incrementally documenting and refactoring the codebase, as well as our independent research into edge-case cryptographic weaknesses, and deal with an attack if there is one.

Are you telling XMR investors you don't care if BCX steals their money and you will just fix it after the fact?

Sorry I know BCX hasn't given us any proof so normally we should ignore him, but this is BCX a guy who has done it before.

[fluffypony]

P.S. Have you thought of the possibility that BCX does not know the precise technical details due to the complexity of the CN codebase, but can still create a successful attack? It could be an empirically found exploit and not theoretically based. The fact that BCX said it depended on "implementation" is some clue about this.

Absolutely - we are very open to the possibility of an attack, and we are not discounting his claims. It's not that we don't believe him or we think he's dishonest, we just haven't seen any evidence or enough specifics to pin it down.

Thus without the technical details we cannot verify his claims. We also cannot scramble to look through the codebase any more than we have been doing, it is a relatively large codebase and working through it has taken time and will continue to take time.

If he wanted to ethically and responsibly disclose this he could privately send us the details and give us 72 hours to fix it.

[Hunyadi]

Anyone going to buy shorts for rpietila because of this? If you believe in BCX, you will profit enourmously.

Anyways...

[smoothie]

you are the only one I know that is able to deal with both the cryptomath and totally open to any type of attack being possible.

One with an open mind can see what others assume cant be there

James

James, with all due respect what you've just said is baseless and untrue.

We're completely open to any type of attack being possible, and I can assure you that we are cryptographically competent. To that end, we have and will continue to push out research like the Monero Research Lab bulletins that cover theoretical attacks and corner cases that may be impossible to practically pull off. We are not naïve enough to believe the CN reference code we inherited lacks flaws, nor are we stupid enough to believe in our infallibility. The code does have bugs, and may contain as-yet unknown issues, but we are quite confident in the maths and cryptography (as are gmaxwell et. al.), and have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

Thus far we have seen AnonyMint / TheFascistMind merely redo our MRL-0001 research. We are waiting to see if he can add an additional amplification to it or not. Even so, it is unlikely that the MRL-0001 chain reaction has anything to do with this, as a "time warp" attack doesn't relate to it.

And, too, thus far we have seen no evidence that BCX actually has an exploit. All we have are disjointed breadcrumbs that don't fit an overall picture of how the proposed attack would play out. Given the lack of evidence we are certainly not discounting the remote possibility that there actually is an exploit, but just as with each of Bitcoin's 26 very serious exploits we will analyse an attack if there is one, patch it, and move on.

Between now and 60 hours time we are not going to "rapidly evolve" just because BCX claims he has an exploit but won't give us the technical details. We are, instead, going to continue our work on incrementally documenting and refactoring the codebase, as well as our independent research into edge-case cryptographic weaknesses, and deal with an attack if there is one.

Good man and awesome response.

Keep your head down and working and dont give the giant distractions waving their hands in the air the time of day to get your attention. 

[cryptos]

This is one of the most fascinating threads in a long time and pleasure to read.

Can't wait to see outcome.

[Moneroman88]

you are the only one I know that is able to deal with both the cryptomath and totally open to any type of attack being possible.

One with an open mind can see what others assume cant be there

James

James, with all due respect what you've just said is baseless and untrue.

We're completely open to any type of attack being possible, and I can assure you that we are cryptographically competent. To that end, we have and will continue to push out research like the Monero Research Lab bulletins that cover theoretical attacks and corner cases that may be impossible to practically pull off. We are not naïve enough to believe the CN reference code we inherited lacks flaws, nor are we stupid enough to believe in our infallibility. The code does have bugs, and may contain as-yet unknown issues, but we are quite confident in the maths and cryptography (as are gmaxwell et. al.), and have yet to see any evidence to the contrary.

Thus far we have seen AnonyMint / TheFascistMind merely redo our MRL-0001 research. We are waiting to see if he can add an additional amplification to it or not. Even so, it is unlikely that the MRL-0001 chain reaction has anything to do with this, as a "time warp" attack doesn't relate to it.

And, too, thus far we have seen no evidence that BCX actually has an exploit. All we have are disjointed breadcrumbs that don't fit an overall picture of how the proposed attack would play out. Given the lack of evidence we are certainly not discounting the remote possibility that there actually is an exploit, but just as with each of Bitcoin's 26 very serious exploits we will analyse an attack if there is one, patch it, and move on.

Between now and 60 hours time we are not going to "rapidly evolve" just because BCX claims he has an exploit but won't give us the technical details. We are, instead, going to continue our work on incrementally documenting and refactoring the codebase, as well as our independent research into edge-case cryptographic weaknesses, and deal with an attack if there is one.

Good man and awesome response.

Keep your head down and working and dont give the giant distractions waving their hands in the air the time of day to get your attention. 

Word. No evidence, just words from Mr. Fat Mouth aka BCX.