Cryptonote: More Bitcoin Than Bitcoin

[smooth]

Crypto note seems really promising, I'm gonna keep an eye on it for a while, mabey it will create a good coin one day.

I've been following this project since the begining when the Bytecoin vs Monero controversy started. For now its clear Monero is the leading cryptonote coin. As far as I know a solid gui hasn't been released yet. Anyone knows when it will be done??

OT. Let's keep this about cryptonote as a protocol and technology and not about Monero please.

[1714972210]

1714972210

[1714972210]

1714972210

[1714972210]

1714972210

[smooth]

One day, bitcoin will probably attempt to incorporate cryptonote features into it. But it will be politically difficult.

That will not happen.  Those who wish to have anonymous transactions can use coinjoin (which is being developed into a number of wallets).   Anonymous transactions can be built on top of public transactions.   The consensus model of any crypto currency means that the scope of the changes will always be small.

It is in interesting question because often the argument for why altcoins have no merit and will fail is that bitcoin will incorporate any of their features. In fact that argument was made on this very thread. But as you point out there are serious problems with that line of reasoning in practice.

[funkenstein]

Basically some guys got together and decided that bitcoin addresses are way too easy to remember and type, and bitcoin is just way too light on resources like memory, CPU, bandwidth and hard drive.  Also it just didn't seem sketchy enough in it's history, and the infrastrucure seemed too developed and easy to use.   So they got together and made cryptonote for us.  As a fan of cryptographic diversity I must give mad props to Nicolas van Saberhagen.  If fiat is the galactic empire and Satoshi is Seldon, cryptonote is second foundation.   

[smooth]

Basically some guys got together and decided that bitcoin addresses are way too easy to remember and type, and bitcoin is just way too light on resources like memory, CPU, bandwidth and hard drive.  Also it just didn't seem sketchy enough in it's history, and the infrastrucure seemed too developed and easy to use.   So they got together and made cryptonote for us.  As a fan of cryptographic diversity I must give mad props to Nicolas van Saberhagen.  If fiat is the galactic empire and Satoshi is Seldon, cryptonote is second foundation.   

Yes that's exactly what happened. Traceability, linkability, blockchain analysis, mining concentration, a fixed blocksize limit, etc. had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It is in interesting question because often the argument for why altcoins have no merit and will fail is that bitcoin will incorporate any of their features. In fact that argument was made on this very thread. But in fact as you point out there are serious problems with that line of reasoning.

One can think of Bitcoin as a low level protocol like TCP. Services can be built on top of it.  HTTP isn't a part of TCP/IP but HTTP didn't require a new low level transmission protocol or a new low level addressing protocol.  It expanded the capabilities of TCP & IP but it didn't replace TCP/IP.  Now everything can't be implemented this way but a lot can.   Anonymous transactions are one example.  The barrier to making breaking changes to the core protocol is high so someone saying that anything can be incorporated into the core protocol is at best misleading.   A user of a web browser today doesn't really care that TLS, DNS, HTTP, TCP, IP are all discrete protocols layered upon each other working together.  It just works.   The altcoin line of thinking would be to replace all that with one super protocol called WEB but that hasn't happened.  The layered approach worked just fine.

[A.F.K]

What about this thread? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0

And what about the NSA speculations behind Cryptonote? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote#NSA_involvement

These are usually never founded.

[funkenstein]

Basically some guys got together and decided that bitcoin addresses are way too easy to remember and type, and bitcoin is just way too light on resources like memory, CPU, bandwidth and hard drive.  Also it just didn't seem sketchy enough in it's history, and the infrastrucure seemed too developed and easy to use.   So they got together and made cryptonote for us.  As a fan of cryptographic diversity I must give mad props to Nicolas van Saberhagen.  If fiat is the galactic empire and Satoshi is Seldon, cryptonote is second foundation.   

Yes that's exactly what happened. Traceability, linkability, blockchain analysis, mining concentration, a fixed blocksize limit, etc. had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

There's a lot to cover isn't there.  I'd also like to see discussion of the choice of DSA.  Is cryptonote necessarily not limited in blocksize?  I thought pooled mining was basically the same?  Colored coins aren't going to work are they.  

[smooth]

It is in interesting question because often the argument for why altcoins have no merit and will fail is that bitcoin will incorporate any of their features. In fact that argument was made on this very thread. But in fact as you point out there are serious problems with that line of reasoning.

I am not saying altcoins have no merit or that they have merit.   One can think of Bitcoin as a low level protocol like TCP. Services can be built on top of it.  HTTP isn't a part of TCP/IP but HTTP didn't require a new low level transmission protocol or a new low level addressing protocol.  It expanded the capabilities of TCP & IP but it didn't replace TCP/IP.  Now everything can't be implemented this way but a lot can.   Anonymous transactions are one example.

Anonymous transactions can't be implemented very effectively on Bitcoin, there are always major impairments in terms of blockchain analysis (esp. if only a minority of users are using it). The inventor of coinjoin has described cryptonote as being "much better" in terms of anonymity than conjoin. (Maybe someone has the exact quote/source; I don't.) If you go the route of off-chain mixers that can completely break taint then you have couterparty risk. In both cases you have risks associated with surveillance by or of the broker.

BTW, ipv4 is being slowly and painfully replaced with ipv6, and some applications work quite poorly on top of TCP (esp those requiring reliability and but not ordering, or value timeliness over reliability) so people do build custom protocols, both on top of IP and even lower stack levels). If Bitcoin is like TCP/IP then it is more vulnerable than often assumed from that analogy.

[smooth]

Basically some guys got together and decided that bitcoin addresses are way too easy to remember and type, and bitcoin is just way too light on resources like memory, CPU, bandwidth and hard drive.  Also it just didn't seem sketchy enough in it's history, and the infrastrucure seemed too developed and easy to use.   So they got together and made cryptonote for us.  As a fan of cryptographic diversity I must give mad props to Nicolas van Saberhagen.  If fiat is the galactic empire and Satoshi is Seldon, cryptonote is second foundation.    

Yes that's exactly what happened. Traceability, linkability, blockchain analysis, mining concentration, a fixed blocksize limit, etc. had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

There's a lot to cover isn't there.  I'd also like to see discussion of the choice of DSA.  Is cryptonote necessarily not limited in blocksize?  I thought pooled mining was basically the same?  Colored coins aren't going to work are they.  

1. DSA is out of my area of expertise so I'll let others such as tacotime address it.

2. There is no fixed limit on blocksize in cryptonote, it is a dynamic equilibrium between transaction demand, mining rewards, and penalities imposed on miners for too-large blocks. There has certainly been some criticism of that, and it may or may not work out well in practice (we'll see I guess assuming any cryptonote coins actually get enough usage). They did at least attempt a solution.

3. Pooled mining is much the same but the PoW is designed to be "egalitarian" and support mining on regular computers, with little gain from specialized hardware. It is so far the most successful attempt at this, by a fairly decent margin, with very limited payoff from GPU mining even. Of course there may eventually be ASICs, etc. but it seems there are credible opinions (for example from dga) that it will be modest and have limited payoff (much less than SHA or scrypt), further delaying its arrival and reducing its effect.

4. Colored coins won't work as-is but could be made to work with the relatively simple modification of adding a color tag (so only coins of the same color could be mixed). This is in effect by design to inhibit blockchain analysis, since that's exactly what colored coins are.

[Eastfist]

LOL. People love putting words into Satoshi's mouth. If only he could strike them down with lightning. SMDH.

[smooth]

LOL. People love putting words into Satoshi's mouth. If only he could strike them down with lightning. SMDH.

Quoting his posts is not putting words in his mouth.

Crypto may offer a way to do "key blinding".  I did some research and it was obscure, but there may be something there.  "group signatures" may be related.

There's something here in the general area:
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hopwood/crypto/rh/

What we need is a way to generate additional blinded variations of a public key.  The blinded variations would have the same properties as the root public key, such that the private key could generate a signature for any one of them.  Others could not tell if a blinded key is related to the root key, or other blinded keys from the same root key.  These are the properties of blinding.  Blinding, in a nutshell, is x = (x * large_random_int) mod m.

When paying to a bitcoin address, you would generate a new blinded key for each use.

Then you need to be able to sign a signature such that you can't tell that two signatures came from the same private key.  I'm not sure if always signing a different blinded public key would already give you this property.  If not, I think that's where group signatures comes in.  With group signatures, it is possible for something to be signed but not know who signed it.

As an example, say some unpopular military attack has to be ordered, but nobody wants to go down in history as the one who ordered it.  If 10 leaders have private keys, one of them could sign the order and you wouldn't know who did it.

[iCEBREAKER]

We need a review of this technology. Something brilliant and clever like this should not be ignored. Even satoshi made some comments on the essence of Cryptonote. Maybe he contributed in some way or another towards its development

Apparently it was in development since a few years and was intended to be a step ahead in the right direction, that is transaction privacy. Cryptonote is the tech which should have been bitcoin in the first place. If it had surfaced a year later after bitcoin, things could have been different

This is a very interesting topic.  If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.

Nick Szabo gave us the roadmap back in the mid 90s.

First Bitcoin (implement blockchain).

Next Monero (implement Cryptonote).

And finally Ethereum (implement smart contracts).

Then we use these tools to free ourselves of the statist JBT parasites who have for too long held back humanity's destiny among the stars.

[Lorenzo]

It is in interesting question because often the argument for why altcoins have no merit and will fail is that bitcoin will incorporate any of their features. In fact that argument was made on this very thread. But in fact as you point out there are serious problems with that line of reasoning.

I am not saying altcoins have no merit or that they have merit.   One can think of Bitcoin as a low level protocol like TCP. Services can be built on top of it.  HTTP isn't a part of TCP/IP but HTTP didn't require a new low level transmission protocol or a new low level addressing protocol.  It expanded the capabilities of TCP & IP but it didn't replace TCP/IP.  Now everything can't be implemented this way but a lot can.   Anonymous transactions are one example.

Anonymous transactions can't be implemented very effectively on Bitcoin, there are always major impairments in terms of blockchain analysis (esp. if only a minority of users are using it). The inventor of coinjoin has described cryptonote as being "much better" in terms of anonymity than conjoin. (Maybe someone has the exact quote/source; I don't.) If you go the route of off-chain mixers that can completely break taint then you have couterparty risk. In both cases you have risks associated with surveillance by or of the broker.

Here's the quote you were looking for:

extremely interesting thread...what struck my eye was the slow validations which can cause a major clog with transactions when Dark Coin (based off of CoinJoin) gets bigger, right? The more coins transacted the slower the confirmations am I right in saying that?

No, not in a meaningful sense. Validation is very cheap. You do run into block size limits if you're trying to transact too much at once, but any privacy system is limited in its privacy by transaction volume.

"Dark Coin" really strikes me as pointless. The whole idea in coinjoin is that coinjoin is already part of the design of Bitcoin. There is no advantage in having a new and different system. If you're going to do something incompatible, losing Bitcoin's network effect in the process, then you can do something much stronger.

It also depresses me somewhat to see people talking about darkcoin (or even zerocoin/zerocash) when bytecoin has a privacy system with much better properties than CoinJoin (it's similar to CJ except you safely join with offline coin holders, and all users are participants), something made possible by the fact that it doesn't have to fit within the existing Bitcoin network, and it's completely practical, reasonably performant and deployed for some time now. But strangely, it's virtually unheard of...  Bytecoin's privacy properties are in some sense weaker than zerocoin's— since its like a supercharged coinjoin— but the cryptography is much stronger and much more efficient, so in practice I'd expect it to have better anonymity just due to it being much more practical (also as evidence to it existing as a deployed system).  ... so yea, if you actually are interested in privacy technology in a non-bitcoin system, Bytecoin seems to have pretty much nailed it.

Crypto note seems really promising, I'm gonna keep an eye on it for a while, mabey it will create a good coin one day.

I've been following this project since the begining when the Bytecoin vs Monero controversy started. For now its clear Monero is the leading cryptonote coin. As far as I know a solid gui hasn't been released yet. Anyone knows when it will be done??

I believe there is a bounty for an open source GUI wallet for Bytecoin and Monero. There are other, less popular CryptoNote coins that already have GUI wallets so I'm not sure what the reason is for them to not have one yet.

[Joshuar]

It is in interesting question because often the argument for why altcoins have no merit and will fail is that bitcoin will incorporate any of their features. In fact that argument was made on this very thread. But in fact as you point out there are serious problems with that line of reasoning.

I am not saying altcoins have no merit or that they have merit.   One can think of Bitcoin as a low level protocol like TCP. Services can be built on top of it.  HTTP isn't a part of TCP/IP but HTTP didn't require a new low level transmission protocol or a new low level addressing protocol.  It expanded the capabilities of TCP & IP but it didn't replace TCP/IP.  Now everything can't be implemented this way but a lot can.   Anonymous transactions are one example.

Anonymous transactions can't be implemented very effectively on Bitcoin, there are always major impairments in terms of blockchain analysis (esp. if only a minority of users are using it). The inventor of coinjoin has described cryptonote as being "much better" in terms of anonymity than conjoin. (Maybe someone has the exact quote/source; I don't.) If you go the route of off-chain mixers that can completely break taint then you have couterparty risk. In both cases you have risks associated with surveillance by or of the broker.

Here's the quote you were looking for:

extremely interesting thread...what struck my eye was the slow validations which can cause a major clog with transactions when Dark Coin (based off of CoinJoin) gets bigger, right? The more coins transacted the slower the confirmations am I right in saying that?

No, not in a meaningful sense. Validation is very cheap. You do run into block size limits if you're trying to transact too much at once, but any privacy system is limited in its privacy by transaction volume.

"Dark Coin" really strikes me as pointless. The whole idea in coinjoin is that coinjoin is already part of the design of Bitcoin. There is no advantage in having a new and different system. If you're going to do something incompatible, losing Bitcoin's network effect in the process, then you can do something much stronger.

It also depresses me somewhat to see people talking about darkcoin (or even zerocoin/zerocash) when bytecoin has a privacy system with much better properties than CoinJoin (it's similar to CJ except you safely join with offline coin holders, and all users are participants), something made possible by the fact that it doesn't have to fit within the existing Bitcoin network, and it's completely practical, reasonably performant and deployed for some time now. But strangely, it's virtually unheard of...  Bytecoin's privacy properties are in some sense weaker than zerocoin's— since its like a supercharged coinjoin— but the cryptography is much stronger and much more efficient, so in practice I'd expect it to have better anonymity just due to it being much more practical (also as evidence to it existing as a deployed system).  ... so yea, if you actually are interested in privacy technology in a non-bitcoin system, Bytecoin seems to have pretty much nailed it.

Crypto note seems really promising, I'm gonna keep an eye on it for a while, mabey it will create a good coin one day.

I've been following this project since the begining when the Bytecoin vs Monero controversy started. For now its clear Monero is the leading cryptonote coin. As far as I know a solid gui hasn't been released yet. Anyone knows when it will be done??

I believe there is a bounty for an open source GUI wallet for Bytecoin and Monero. There are other, less popular CryptoNote coins that already have GUI wallets so I'm not sure what the reason is for them to not have one yet.

Monero has GUI wallets. Though none are endorsed by the core team(There official GUI is still in the making).

https://getmonero.org/getting-started/choose

[funkenstein]

We need a review of this technology. Something brilliant and clever like this should not be ignored. Even satoshi made some comments on the essence of Cryptonote. Maybe he contributed in some way or another towards its development

Apparently it was in development since a few years and was intended to be a step ahead in the right direction, that is transaction privacy. Cryptonote is the tech which should have been bitcoin in the first place. If it had surfaced a year later after bitcoin, things could have been different

This is a very interesting topic.  If a solution was found, a much better, easier, more convenient implementation of Bitcoin would be possible.

Nick Szabo gave us the roadmap back in the mid 90s.

First Bitcoin (implement blockchain).

Next Monero (implement Cryptonote).

And finally Ethereum (implement smart contracts).

Then we use these tools to free ourselves of the statist JBT parasites who have for too long held back humanity's destiny among the stars.

*applause*
Ad Astra!

[pandher]

Having an annonymous blockchain is not something desirable

Saying something like this is a direct insult to hero's like Edward Snowden who put their life on stake for protecting privacy of others

Privacy matters. I dont want everyone to know how much money i have, how and where i spend it. Imagine asking your boss for a raise and him advising you to stop losing money on playing poker first. Imagine you becoming a laughing stock when your friends find out about the mysterious cult you donated to.

An anonymous blockchain for me is of much more value than a transparent one.

[iCEBREAKER]

Garbage.  That's the whole strength of Bitcoin, is it's transparent, trustful, trace any transaction to the Genesis Block Blockchain Ledger.

Having an anonymous blockchain seems shady, seedy, and made for illicit activity.

Thank God this thing is pretty much dead on arrival anyway.  Soon to be forgotten in the annals of Crypto history.

RIP Cryptonote.

Cryptonote provides its users the choice between private and public transactions.  It's like PGP for internet money!

Bitcoin does not support private transactions 'out of the box.'  It only sends internet money in plaintext, unless you trust third party anonymization services.

Why are you against giving people the option?  Do you want to force everyone to eschew privacy? 

Are you scared of encryption in general, or just anon blockchains?

You know this forum is a spin-off of the cypherpunk list, right?  If you don't like crypto, you'll hate it around here! 

I hope you enjoy my new sig, because your post inspired me to create it.   

[Joshuar]

Garbage.  That's the whole strength of Bitcoin, is it's transparent, trustful, trace any transaction to the Genesis Block Blockchain Ledger.

Having an anonymous blockchain seems shady, seedy, and made for illicit activity.

Thank God this thing is pretty much dead on arrival anyway.  Soon to be forgotten in the annals of Crypto history.

RIP Cryptonote.

Cryptonote provides its users the choice between private and public transactions.  It's like PGP for internet money!

Bitcoin does not support private transactions 'out of the box.'  It only sends internet money in plaintext, unless you trust third party anonymization services.

Why are you against giving people the option?  Do you want to force everyone to eschew privacy? 

Are you scared of encryption in general, or just anon blockchains?

You know this forum is a spin-off of the cypherpunk list, right?  If you don't like crypto, you'll hate it around here! 

I hope you enjoy my new sig, because your post inspired me to create it.   

Well, that's the beauty of cryptonote. It can provide both relative transparency and secure anonymity. It's not one thing, it's both.

[tacotime]

1. DSA is out of my area of expertise so I'll let others such as tacotime address it.

EdDSA is a 64-bit architecture optimized Schnorr signature over a birationally equivalent curve of Curve25519. It was designed by renown cryptographer Daniel J. Bernstein. Curve25519 has been widely used as of recently in cryptography software.

DJB wrote about the design of the curve and EdDSA here: http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140323-ecdsa.html
He also made a large comparison table of features here: http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/

[manselr]

is it going to the moon? should I buy It? 

It's a sensitive investment to own a decent stack of XMR. I bought during the last bubble and even if im on a loss I know long term I did the right thing and will get my investment back + returns.