Topic: delete - page 48. (Read 165559 times)

Jimbob...you read our Monero Research Lab's very first publication, right? You know the one where we spoke about a cascading privacy failure if an attacker owned sufficient outputs? Here's a link for you to save yourself. At any rate, this could occur in a CryptoNote coin where persons unknown to everyone else controlled, to thumb suck an example, 82% of all the outputs. That would be an exceedingly unsafe CryptoNote coin to use, as those person(s) could easily reveal the actual signature of just about any transaction, thus negating any benefit of ring signatures.

When choose a currency to shill for, you really should choose one that doesn't have that flaw.

Because you say so. Sure.

There is no such campaign. Readers can decide who to believe. I suggest they look closely at your long history of posting in support of BCN, the 82% fraudulent premine coin, with obvious use of sock puppets (likely shills) that have been specifically identified and outed. LOL. Nice one.

Smooth, you are in the shit. I suggest you stop digging. You have totally and absolutely lost the argument regarding the concerted, orchestrated and most (by a million miles) annoying campaign by fudsters, shills and trolls that this forum has ever seen. After all that it doesn't really matter if your coin (I can't bring myself to mention the insipid name) has any technical merit. I have yet to see hard proof that it has brought anything of value to the CN table independently. Oh - apart from a pool - but then that is not really part of the coin is it.

I am not BM.

I can only ever speak to my own knowledge.

Thanks for the clarification that your prior statement was essentially "to the best of your knowledge of what your core XMR peers do".

"Accomplice" implies active participation or working in concert. There no one actively participating in the project or working with us, or contributing who pretends not to be. Everyone affiliated with the project is open about it. Anyone else is not affiliated.

Here is a definition that is clearer, from wikipedia:

"A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps a person or organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with the person or organization"

No one has a close relationship with the project who has not disclosed it (and most certainly no one has actively hid it).

Here is a specific example of someone you have cited who does not have a close relationship with the project: Nekomata. Nothing against him, he seems to be a sincere and consistent supporter, which we appreciate and recognize, but there is no close relationship and affiliation, any more than there is with you.

Here is my guess...

He already told the devs with a public post that too fast of difficulty adjustment and throwing away 20% of the timestamps are weaknesses. The devs were given approximately 25 days to rectify those flaws, and thus far afaik have not done so. Perhaps the devs didn't see any flaws in those design decisions. I thus expended some effort to broad-stroke outline some ideas of potential attacks that require one of those weaknesses.

I understand you want BCX to walk them through an attack with more details, but you know even most very smart Bitcoin devs didn't think selfish mining was real after the white paper was published until they went and built simulations to disprove it and ended up proving it.

Denial and confirmation bias makes climbing the nice wall inefficient. The most efficient is action and demonstration.

I have experienced many times in my life the "not invented here" syndrome and it is very inefficient to fight hierarchies and vested interests to get something done. Much easier is to do what one can do without being dependent on some slow moving molasses.

The other possibility is that he wants to maximization the amplification of his reputation, since it was slandered here. Also I can't rule out the possibility that he has some level of distaste for the hierarchy of XMR and its public face (although that might just be me projecting my distaste for centralized paradigms), but for political reasons I doubt he would want to let that be known.

Hopefully he will answer you too.

P.S. BCX also indicated another of the weaknesses is a coin killer (something about anonymity and wallets), meaning it can't be fixed. So helping the devs in that case wouldn't be evolution, it would be delaying killing what can't live. I am not sure if he meant he would be attacking that weakness though. Maybe not. Maybe he is only trying to wake up the community. And maybe that "coin killer" weakness is only theoretical and hadn't been fully developed into a deployable attack. I lean to this interpretation because BCX has only mentioned TW like aspects in the past days and he confirmed a "decline in price" differentiated that from the other choice of "price to 0".

Edit: in most cases I agree with filing a bug report with the developers. But in the case that forced evolution is timely and a bug report would have to be prioritized, I might choose the former too. But I've never played the role BCX does. I would instead spend my time creating a coin without the weakness I found. If I was a developer for XMR, I would be attempting to change the design, but I would probably be met with some resistance since no attack has been demonstrated yet. Refer to the upthread exchange with fluffypony wherein he stated that until an attack was demonstrated, they could assume they could unwind any damage from a future attack, and that he had time to go think at the beach with his wife (the implication was that I was too stressful and paranoid).

There is nothing that teaches better than the shock of having one's confirmation bias shattered rather than giving one a long period of time to think they discovered and rectified their bias on their on volition.

The claim of shills is essentially a claim of centralization, so I agree.

Independent agents who support (oppose) a project and are vocal in their support (opposition) are not shills.

Furthermore we never claimed the project is decentralized. In fact we have said that some degree of centralization is necessary at this early stage, with a goal to become more decentralized over time.

Nevertheless, centralized or otherwise, we have never employed shills.

Too bad you now have zero credibility.

Sorry to be argumentative. It is impossible to be both decentralized and make a statement that requires centralized authority.

What's next?

A direct question that has no hope of being answered directly.

Why are you attacking Monero?


Bonus question.

Why are you not following your own advice recently quoted ITT which is to contact the devs when a bug is found?

I was always on the side of facts, truth, investigating and innovating technology.

Would you want to buy or destroy such a coin?


Hard forks are politically very difficult. It can't evolve or at least not at a rapid enough pace to defeat an upstart with sufficient brain power.

Afaics thus far such an upstart has not presented itself publicly.


Forced evolution could also potentially clear the way for suitable technologies and/or it can reveal which organization is able to adapt to its environment.

For example, yesterday I wrote down a mathematical proof for an innovation that yields a higher than 25% threshold for selfish mining, regardless of the attacker's network advantage. And it doesn't require unforgeable timestamps.


Please note your confirmation bias. There are numerous possible motivations.

Oh God, making me go the "post the definition from the dictionary" route are you? OK, lets do it:

shill
SHil/
North American informal
noun
noun: shill; plural noun: shills

    1.
    an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others.
        a person who pretends to give an impartial endorsement of something in which they themselves have an interest.

So where is the word "employ" or any synonym used here?

And you know it wasn't you (nor ourself nor Schrödinger's cat) I was referring to.

Actually we do, if you know what the word means. Shills are people who act without disclosing their affiliation. If they had some affiliation, they would be shills, but they don't so they are not. They are just supporters (with whom you can certainly disagree) or possibly shills for someone else doing a reverse psychology attack. (Third possibility being detractors who are not shills doing a reverse psychology attack.)

You don't have to employ shills to have shills, and I don't have to take your word that you don't employ shills. Out of respect for my own well being I choose not to.

Then it is based on a false premise, since we have never employed any shills.

Given the foundation of your position being false, you might want to reconsider it, at least if you are going to be honest and logically consistent about it at all. Obviously you are not forced to.

shit got weird