The first problem with obscure blockchains is to do with engendering confidence and integrity of the entire monetary ecosystem. Crypto's are attempting to be 'unbacked money'. That's a tall order. So if there's no worldwide, transparent, societally endorsed consensus over blockchain movements then you have a recipe for disaster - a confidence bomb just waiting to implode. All it takes is one dodgy wallet and a lot of rumour, then nobody knows what the f*ck's going on on that blockchain and everybody dumps "just in case".
How do you think bitcoin survived all its various hammerings and media shitstorms over the Mt Gox debacle, the malleability scaremongering, and the rest ? Because throughought everything there were 10's of thousands of people every day scrutinising
this type of publicly endorsed information, verifying their wallet balances from two or three sources, checking the progress of confirmations, squaring off balances between addresses and so on.
Say what you like about privacy, but if you don't have at least that level of verifiable transparency in an unbacked monetary system, you don't have squat.
The second problem with so called 'obscured blockchains' is that they conflict with traditional age-old distinction between cash and credit. These are two well understood, forms of exchange who's priorities and properties are almost mutually exlusive.
Cash is fungible, anonymous and public (i.e. it's out in the open' not managed behind closed doors by a trusted third party)
Credit is not fungible , not anonymous and therefore needs to be kept private (managed behind closed doors by a trusted third party)
Crypto is a peer-to-peer monetary medium. It therefore needs to adopt the cash model, not the credit one and so the anonymous, publicy accountable blockchain applies. In that context, confidence and value are maximised by supporting the levels of transparency that bitcoin has, and transaction privacy derives from the inability of observers to make much of a distinction between the coins at one address and those at another.
See
here for more info. (And
here).
The problem with DashHoles isn't that they know so little, but rather they know so much that just isn't true.
Please seek education on the basics of ring signatures and homomorphic functions before further embarrassing yourself.
Here, I'll help.
bitcoins with homomorphic value (validatable but encrypted)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoins-with-homomorphic-value-validatable-but-encrypted-305791The starting point is it is known in the literature that you can do additively homomorphic encryption, and there are also zero-knowldge proofs of less than. (Proving E(a)+E(b)=E(a+b) is not enough you also have to prove that the attacker did not add n to his balance during the process as the addition is modulo n, the order of the group, not normal arithmetic.) Its more efficient to do less than a power of 2, but arbitrary values are possible by composition (all values are buildable from power of 2 ranges after all).
https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txtThe basic tool that CT is based on is a Pedersen commitment.
A commitment scheme lets you keep a piece of data secret but commit to
it so that you cannot change it later. A simple commitment scheme can
be constructed using a cryptographic hash:
commitment = SHA256( blinding_factor || data )
If you tell someone only the commitment then they cannot determine
what data you are committing to (given certain assumptions about the
properties of the hash), but you can later reveal both the data and the
blinding factor and they can run the hash and verify that the data you
committed to matches. The blinding factor is present because without one,
someone could try guessing at the data; if your data is small and simple,
it might be easy to just guess it and compare the guess to the commitment.
A Pedersen commitment works like the above but with an additional
property: commitments can be added, and the sum of a set of commitments
is the same as a commitment to the sum of the data (with a blinding key
set as the sum of the blinding keys):
C(BF1, data1) + C(BF2, data2) == C(BF1 + BF2, data1 + data2)
C(BF1, data1) - C(BF1, data1) == 0
In other words, the commitment preserves addition and the commutative
property applies.
If data_n = {1,1,2} and BF_n = {5,10,15} then:
C(BF1, data1) + C(BF2, data2) - C(BF3, data3) == 0
and so on.