Tante, maybe this will cheer you up.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. - Gandhi
The good news is we are no longer getting ignored. One step closer.
I have pretty much given up on using Bitcoin. It takes 10 minutes - 5hrs+ for a transaction to confirm depending if you spend 20 cents or 1 cent. I store my crypto in Dash and just use shapeshift.io to instantly convert and pay with Bitcoin when needed. My Bitcoin mining payouts convert to DASH through shapeshift.io too so I no longer even touch my Bitcoin wallet. I don't have to store a 40GB Bitcoin blockchain that takes an hour to update if I don't load it every day. It will keep getting more and more attractive to move to Dash.
Oh, no worries, today I had a lovely person, luigi1111, help teach me about cryptonote. If you want to take a look at what I came up with, here it is:
http://steemjammer.com/share/Cryptonote.pdf1. luigi1111 is indeed a great guy, very patient, knowledgable, and not any kind of shill or troll. You did well to work with luigi on this.
2.
Finally, you may ask yourself, can’t you just see if a key was spent, to tell which TXID was the real TXID? I believe the answer is no because of possibly two things.
The answer is no because what is on the list of spent keys are
key images, which are deterministic hashes of the actual keys. That is a one-way function. So you can check to see if a key image is on there, but you can't go backwards to identify the actual key (or the transaction with which it is associated).
3.
When thinking on this, I also have to question whether or not cryptonote actually does indeed obscure transactions better than DS. The reason I say that is because every transaction has a 1:3 chance of knowing which is the correct owner of the transaction. DS, on the other hand, can be told to mix many times so that the chances of following a transaction are almost nill. Of course both systems could have bad actirs, especially early on.
The answer is that 1:3 is arbitrary. You can use whatever mix factor you want (could be 100, though the transaction will be large), or you can send the transaction through mixes multiple times (more or less analogous to multiple rounds of darksend)
4.
Because there are no blockchain explorers that give out all the information for a cryptonote coin that I could find, and because I'm not a programmer who can make my own blockchain analyzer, I am very curious to know if one could determain, from the actual output (the payee) and the change address, which combination of TXIDs were used to create the outputs
Indeed this is just a limitation of the current block explorers. It is possible to write code to identify the
candidate transactions that were spent, just as you suspected. The print_tx commend of the node sort of does this, but not exactly (it gives output indexes not txid's but that is relatively straightforward to translate to a txid).
(Not sure why this is relevant to the Dash thread?)