Topic: Monero exchance centralization... a danger? - page 3. (Read 6478 times)

Both are not in contradiction, that's what I'm telling you.  When you go to an exchange, then you are giving out your ID, which is normal.  You have a trading interaction, your trading partner knows in most cases who you are.  You also know that you were trading with an exchange, do you ?  So you know about them, and they know about you, and both of you know that you and them were trading coins for fiat.   What has this voluntary act of giving away ID information to do with the fact that the MONETARY ASSET is not going to propagate your information ?



That's a perfectly good illustration.  Go to Poloniex and buy monero and withdraw them.  Next, do a few transactions to yourself with different addresses on the monero chain.  (this is because monero is still leaking SOME information, it isn't perfect like zero knowledge proofs can be).  Now, wait for a year or so.

Then, use those monero to go over to Alphabay to buy crack and guns.  The link with your ID on poloniex is totally lost.  Of course, one can try to trace you using opsec failures, IP addresses and so on *when you were buying on alphabay*, but whereever these coins came from (via poloniex) has become essentially untraceable through the monero chain, and that's all monero is concerned with: not propagating earlier transaction information.

Now, do the same exercise with bitcoin.  See the difference ?

Why did I say that you had to wait for a year and that you had to transact a few times yourself ?  This is because the monero anonymity mechanism isn't total.  Poloniex knows what transaction it used to send you the monero you withdrew.  If immediately afterwards, you do a next transaction to alphabay, then this transaction will only be mixed with a few other potential transactions, and if this transaction is found out because the FBI got into alphabay's computers and found all their transactions, they know this transaction too, so the "number of potential guilty persons" is limited (the anonymity set is restricted).  However, the longer you wait, the more your Poloniex transaction is going to mix up with other transactions you have nothing to do with.  If you have done a few intermediate transactions, you raise the anonymity set size essentially to the power of the number of intermediate transactions.  After a year or so, this web of potential people is so large that this information is essentially useless for law enforcement.

However, what remains of course is all contact you take with alphabay, the delivery of the goods and so on.  All this has nothing to do with the monetary asset used to pay for the stuff.  It is not because you use a monetary asset that doesn't propagate your ID, that you don't leak your ID in another way.  If you put your postal address to Alpha bay so that they send you the package to your home, of course that has nothing to do with monero.  You'll get caught just as well.  It is very difficult to do anonymous business.  That's not the point.  The point is that the payment system doesn't propagate information.  Monero, in the example you asked for, doesn't do so. Bitcoin does.  Unless you use bitcoin tumblers (you trust), and you do a lot of bitcoin transactions in between.

But if you do the same thing with bitcoin, that is, you buy bitcoin on coinbase, you do 3 transactions to yourself, you wait for a year, and then you buy a gun on Alphabay, and alphabay gets compromised by the FBI, then the link between your coinbase ID and the transaction is in fact very obvious.  Bitcoin propagates it like a bush fire.

Dino "The Contrarian" please do read the topic title then look at the picture i posted then the part cirlced in red.

Good day sir  

---

EDIT:

Oh and when you have completed that task i have for you..
Please feel free to head on over to Poloniex and hand them your Picture ID
..then over to AlphaBay to buy crack & guns.

To add to this:

a monetary asset is always supposed to be exchanged against something else during the execution of an agreement.  In most cases, making an agreement implies somehow that the two parties agreeing, know something about one another.  If you want to buy milk with dollars, it is somehow unavoidable that the one selling milk has an identifiable place where you can get to the milk.  Also, most of the time, you don't mind the milk seller to know something about you.
If you want to buy coins with fiat, it is unavoidable that the entity that accepts your fiat and sells you some coins, knows something about you (in order to get your fiat for instance).

So the very fact that a TRADE cannot be entirely anonymous in most cases, and that identity information is given out to the trading partner, is entirely normal.  As a monetary asset is made to do trades against other stuff, it is entirely normal that the identity of ownership of that monetary asset is given out to the trading partner.

However, it is a property, or not, of the monetary asset to propagate that knowledge BEYOND what the trading partner can know.  With fiat, that knowledge can be propagated only when law enforcement, tax collectors and/or your financial institutions desire to propagate it: its propagation depends on their desire to do so or not.  But most of the time, they do not propagate that knowledge, and that is part of their service.  With transparent ledgers, that knowledge is propagated publicly.  With monero, that knowledge is almost NOT propagated and there isn't even a centralized authority that can do so.    The only one who can, is yourself, with your view key, if you decide so. 

But that has nothing to do with ALL OTHER identity information that is given out.  What monero does, is simply not CONTRIBUTE to that propagation of knowledge (or almost not) with its block chain.  But that your trading partners know who you are, because you told them, has nothing to do with it.  At least, the block chain of monero is not a propagator of that knowledge.

In other words, a "monetary asset" that is *never associated with any giving out of identity information* is an oxymoron, because you couldn't even do any trade with it where you have to identify with your partner.  And hence accusing a monetary asset of not being like that is a straw man.  This is like complaining about a messenger system that someone can read what you are sending.  Of course, if you are sending a message, the idea is that someone will read it.  A messenger system where a message is never read is an oxymoron, and accusing a messenger system that messages can be read is a straw man.

Again, what some may *claim* falsely or correctly about a technology has no influence on the actual properties of that technology, no more than what people may claim falsely or correctly about the number Pi would change its digits, right ?

I quoted the essence in red.  *that*'s the monero part.  The fact that you talk to centralized entities and give out your information has nothing to do with monero.  What has to do with monero is that that information is not (much) propagated with its block chain, contrary to bitcoin for instance.   If you have the most secure safe in the world, but you go and give the codes of that safe to your local vendor, then OF COURSE that guy, and potentially everyone he talks to, can get into your safe.  But that doesn't say anything about the safety of the technology.   It is not because the vendor's friend is a burglar that came into your house and got (of course) into the safe, that there's something wrong with the safe.  It is the fact that you gave your codes to the vendor that was the culprit.  That's monero, when you give out your information to an exchange.
However, if your safe is constructed in such a way that whatever you put inside and take out again, now has the information of how to open your safe, then *that* concerns the (bad safety) technology.  Imagine for instance that the safe is based upon nano particles: you have a spray of specific nano particles that the safe can detect and open when present.  However, it is unavoidable that these particles get onto the stuff you put inside.  That means that whatever you put inside, and take out again, and give to someone, has traces of your safe, and has the stuff needed to open it.  That's bitcoin.  It propagates your information.

Well, OF COURSE that information you provide to an exchange is potentially given to authorities, to agencies, and to lucrative business, what did you expect ?  What does this have to do with monero per se ?  At least, monero doesn't *propagate* that information on its chain.

I'm not a monero shill, but at the moment, I like monero because it has quite successfully tackled a fundamental problem with bitcoin and several like coins: the privacy/anonymity nightmare of transparent block chains.  On top of that, monero has a few other nice properties, but it also lacks an important aspect: scriptability and (hence) multisig stuff.
Dash (formerly darkcoin) has the historical honour of being the first coin trying to do something about this privacy horror, but lacked the technology to do so.  Bytecoin was invented with brilliant tech, but was such a terrible scam, that it failed, and monero came in its place.  Zcash has fundamental problems, even though potentially the technology is better.  So indeed, I like monero, because by far most other coins are privacy nightmares.

@Dino
Point being was you are a supporter who in my view is reaching hard to try and discount "the danger"

Re: Monero exchange centralization... a danger?
Yes or no guys. LOL

I'd say yes but what concerns me even more is when you COMBINE that with the Exchange collecting the Identification of it's users together with the potential of handing that and your trade history etc off to various govt agencies etc.

And they CAN and they DO !

Cryptsy said they did that and Coinbase did too.
Any of these guys that ask for your info would comply with a USA govt related "request"

Danger ? Uhh yeah.. duh  

Do i expect a Monero shill to admit it ? Of course not.
The motif of Monero has been deny deny deny here for years.

I think between 5 and 6 coins or so.  I run a miner on my laptop when it is idle, and I think I must have accumulated between 5 and 6 coins but that's quite a while that I didn't check.  I run a full monero node for fun, but that node doesn't have the wallet that corresponds to it.   A very long time ago, I also mined some, I think even 10 or so, but I think I've lost the wallet that corresponds to it ; although I'm pretty sure it must be on one of my old backups.  But I didn't look. Why do you ask ?

@Dino
How many Monero coins do you own ?

Yes, so what ?  You are saying that the FED will always produce enough FED-dollars out of thin air to sustain the parity with bank-dollars.  Sure, very well probable.  But that doesn't change the fact that bank dollars are NOT FED dollars.  They are different entities.  Bank dollars are bank IOU, between you and the bank.  FED dollars are FED IOU between the FED and a bank, OR they are dollar bills if you keep them physically in your hands (and these dollar bills are the only FED dollars YOU will ever see if you are not a commercial bank).  A bank can invent as much bank dollars as she wants.  When you take a loan, she invents new bank IOU which she calls dollars, and which she puts on an account for you, against your promise.  No FED dollar sees the light when a bank gives out a loan.  I'm not criticising this, I'm just explaining to you that bank dollars are NOT FED dollars, except when you withdraw them at an ATM, but that we consider them *equivalent* because they are on 1-1 parity as long as we can withdraw them.   
Why can the FED do this now, and why couldn't she do that when the dollar was standing for an amount of gold ?  Because in as much as the FED can invent new dollars, she cannot invent gold.  For about 60 years (from 1914 to 1972) the FED has been lying, because it was claimed that a dollar was standing for gold, (I think it was 38 grams) but as you couldn't withdraw that gold, that parity didn't hold.  There was a TRUE DIFFERENCE between actual physical gold, and the dollar which was to be "equivalent", but wasn't because you couldn't redeem the equivalence.

With crypto and exchanges, you are in exactly the same situation: one cannot "print" crypto at will (that was the whole idea), but exchange IOU are like bank money.  As long as you can withdraw true crypto from an exchange, it is like you can redeem physical gold from the FED, or like you can withdraw dollar bills at an ATM from your bank account.  But exchange IOU are NOT crypto, not more than bank dollars are FED dollars.  There is an act of withdrawal that keeps the parity to 1-1 *as long as it works*.  However, like the FED couldn't "bail out" with gold as she can't print extra gold and one had to declare the official end of the parity in 1972 (which was already factual when you couldn't redeem your actual gold for decades at that moment), an exchange cannot be "bailed out" with crypto, as one cannot invent extra crypto.

So no, of course the FED will never bail out an exchange: nobody can.  Because you cannot "print extra crypto" to do so.


The fact that the *economy* collapsed shouldn't have had any effect on the CLAIMED PARITY of ECB euro's and Greek bank Euros.  What happened in fact is that the ECB, contrary to the FED, refused to bail out *totally* the Greek banks.  In other words, the claimed parity of Greek bank Euros and ECB Euros was a bit like the FED gold and dollar bills before 1972: one claimed that they were equivalent, but the withdrawal was not made possible freely.


That's the problem when you are part of the privileged which can enjoy the seigniorage of arbitrarily freshly printed money.  And it is exactly one of the problems bitcoin wanted to tackle.  And what we observe now, is that people are building EXACTLY THE SAME KIND OF BULLSHIT on top of bitcoin and other crypto, namely "IOU tokens" as what was done with gold dollars, in order to be able to "trade quickly" and not be annoyed with the limits of crypto, like block chains, settling times, and block periods.
 
This is why I'm pretty sad when I look at the state of crypto.  It is denying the very reasons why it was made, when most of the volume and hence most of the support of the market cap comes from trading, not crypto, but their "exchange IOU".  And when "an exchange gets hacked" the only thing that you get at that point is that the parity between those exchange IOU and the actual crypto tokens gets broken.


So what is the "exchange danger" ?  Well, as I said, as long as an exchange is just an entry point to crypto to buy crypto with fiat, and eventually to get fiat for crypto when you need to get out, there's no more "danger" to an exchange than there is danger to milk because you have to buy it at the supermarket.  The day the supermarket closes, someone else will probably open a store where you can buy milk.  That is, when you buy milk to DRINK IT. 
However, when most of the milky business consists in "taking options" on bottles that are supposed to be stored in the supermarket, to trade those options, then yes, having all those bottles stored in one supermarket is of course very dangerous for *those holding a lot of those options*.  If the essence of the milk business is about holding options on bottles in a supermarket, and is not about drinking milk, well, my point is then that it doesn't matter that this is "dangerous".   There's nothing worth of my attention in people holding options on milk bottles, if the idea was to bring milk to the people for them to drink it but they don't.

@Dino
You are ALWAYS reaching here acting like a contrarian.. i have dealt with you a million times before and nothing changes.

Honesty bud, i don't think you won anything over on me here.
Most importantly all the others here can be the judge.

Not sure what the fuck you are trying to say when you keep reaching all over the place.
Re-Read the topic title.

Danger ?

Well want to tell stories ?
Here is one for you.. and if you don't believe me i have the guy on video right now.

A stock market trader was on CNN talking about the bail-out's (from years ago)
He said over night he made something like 1.6 BILLION dollars in profit.
He said it was stupid easy and laughed his ass off loudly and obnoxiously on TV.
And he went on to say he wasn't the only one either.
He said lots of other trading groups etc did the same exact thing.

What did he do you might wonder ?

Fuck all really.. it was deadly simple.
He knew the Fed's would back the banks and by association the whole entire economy.
INCLUDING EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR IN EVERY BANK *IOU* <-- what you said earlier
So..
He crashed the markets.. in unison with all the other greedy dipshits.

Greenspan created the problem and Bernanke was more than happy to provide Bush them Bail-Out's
His little band-aid that magically fixed the worlds financial problems forever.. albeit with massive inflation they all admitted. (look around inflation did happen)

They all crashed the markets Greenspan swore up & down the traders would not let collapse.
So they could collect the bail-out money.

Want to talk about Greek's ?
The economy in Greece collapse during the recession because of housing derivative bundles.
Sort of like a worthless ICO coin "Exchanges IOU" me thinks ROFL  

Sucks for you idiots there is no bail-outs coming and Mark & Paul are enjoying your money RIGHT NOW.
Laughing like the guy on CNN. (and Alex Green from Mintpal or RealSolid from McxNOW or others)

Exchange Danger ?
Jeezuz where do i start ?

You guys than "think" what ever you want.. reality is a bit different than crypto-philosophies and idealistic rabble.

Don't forget i am the mother fucker who warned you all of regulations coming
while you all 99.99% mouthed me off and laughed and said we don't need ties to FIAT
and that they CAN NOT regulate us etc.

Then.. uhh lippy dipshits look around idiots i was 100% right and when too !

My track record and perception on all this is on the record and proven 100% accurate on the money.. endlessly.

I have proven a Million lippy idiots wrong in crypto a million times over again on a million different topics.
I AM in fact always right.
Verbal gymnastics won't save you guys LOL

I stuck around to make sure i tell you idiots I TOLD YOU SO as you get arrested and hand over your PICTURE IDENTIFICATION to Exchanges.. while you all still chant Free Market Greed is good NO LAWS Decentralization etc.
Cryptsy class-action lawsuit anyone ? hahahhaha
Amusing i was mouthed off saying above on the Cryptsy-Troll box.. and now ?
They are chanting CALL THE COPS LIEK OMGBBQ!!!1111
..same dipshits who cried free market.. they can't regulate us and we don't need them.
NOW in line with a Cryptsy class action lawsuit ROFL

Bitcointalk = bullshit spinners for profit.

Monero Tard's are no exception.

I heard xrm trusted setup compromised.

Is this true?

No they aren't.  About 4% of dollars are FED dollars.  All the rest are bank IOU.   But we call bank IOU (bank accounts) also "dollars" because those few times that we want to "withdraw" actual dollars (say, at an ATM) it works out.  So for the very small amount of withdrawals, the 4% backing is sufficient to keep parity.

However, ask the Greeks what they thought of the very very limited backing that the European Central Bank wanted to give to their banking system when their politicians didn't agree to the dictate of Europe.  Their withdrawals were limited to 60 Euros per person per day.  They could play with bank IOU Euros as much as they wanted.  But not with ECB Euros, which were in short supply.


Because FED dollars are in unlimited supplies.


You fundamentally can't, not any more than that they could invent gold.  Crypto is in limited supply, so you cannot "bail out" exchanges.  They could, if ever they wanted to, bail them out in fiat as much as they wanted to.  But they cannot bail them out in bitcoin of course.

The bailing out of banks is a ticking time bomb that is placed under the seat of the fiat financial system, though.  The whole idea of crypto is that such a thing is not possible.  Read the coinbase message of the very first block of bitcoin if you want a reminder.


Yeah.  Sure.  You will find your chinese miner selling you BTC on the corner of the street.


For exactly the same reasons you would want to buy bitcoins: to use them.  There is no difference between an altcoin and bitcoin, except that bitcoin was the first altcoin.


Well, that would surely be easier with monero than with bitcoin, wouldn't it.  But alphabay is also a centralised system.  I would simply prefer that they add monero to openbazaar.

You are reaching again.. to make comparisons.

FED dollars at the bank are essentially backed.
Why did the US gov and the FED reserve hand out bail out's to banks ?
And when will they do that for Crypto exchanges ?
Before or after they add stock market style financial regulations to crypto ?

And you said this.. "exchanges are a necessary evil to "link" to fiat."
nope.
I can go buy BTC at LocalBitcoins.
Altcoins ? who cares.. why would i want to buy them ?
LocalBitcoins could add LTC or XMR.
There is lots of options.. ever heard of snapcard ?

I will admit we ARE linked to FIAT especially when buying ETH ICO "Fuel Tokens" so it can "replace" Bitcoin.

Exchanges = greedy ROI systems.. lawless penny-stocks trading platforms.
They are no "Bank"

Anyway.. "Danger" ?

Well, go hand over your picture ID to Poloniex..
Then setup your own version of Alpha Bay and lets see how long you go before you are arrested.

@Febo
mmmm hhhhmmmm the whale manipulators seen this complaint / topic and are making plans ROFL
They should have done that 2 years ago..
Oh and by the way, do other exchanges collect your ID and / or hand over your data to US govt requests ?
Spreading out the traffic does not solve problems.. it diversifies them  

It seems things will solve by itself. No need to worry to much. I am 99% sure there will not be in 2018 any exchange having more then 40% Monero volume.

Picture = 1,000 words.

This is one of the reasons I have been backing Gulden since 2014. They going for usage and not begging to get onto the largest volume exchanges to increase trading value. It turns out they have a shit hot development team but this only became evident 2nd half of last year.

I agree with you: exchanges as they are now, actually "nullify" crypto's reason of existence.   You don't own crypto tokens on an exchange, you own exchange IOU, in the same way that you don't own FED dollars when you have a bank account, but you own bank IOU.  That is, your entitlement to the "promised backing" is just as good as the honesty and the solidity of the entity that made you believe so (the exchange, or the bank).  If you own bitcoin IOU on an exchange, the only thing you own is a promise, you don't own bitcoin.

Now, a priori, exchanges are a necessary evil to "link" to fiat.  But the idea was that you only went to an exchange *temporarily* to buy some coin IOU, and withdraw them immediately to use them on the block chain for goods and services.  At some points, it might have been necessary to do the inverse, and sell bitcoins on an exchange to get, and withdraw immediately, some fiat, because the economy in crypto isn't closed.

But all this went to hell when people started trading, and when this trading became the essence of the crypto volume and market cap.  At that point, most "transactions" were trading transactions of *exchange IOU* and not of *crypto tokens*.  When that point is reached, we are actually having a new "banking system" we wanted to get rid off, but which are called "exchanges" and which are much less regulated, much more scammy, and just as prone to investigations and privacy breaks as the old banking system, except that you kill the original idea of crypto with it.

If there are only a few points where you can BUY a crypto to withdraw it and to USE it, that's not much of a problem.  And if this is a centralized TRADING point, then you're in any case out of the spirit of crypto.

*Starting* ? 

That can not be controlled now can it.. if users flock to 1 point then ?

And 2 wrongs don't make a right though even if BTC was like that.
Don't forget the price and rep tanked on BTC when GOX went down.

I see you making excuses trying to defend Monero.
It's not about Monero so much as it is about exchanges.

I don't like them and i never have and i made it no secret.. ask Cryptsy staff
I said what they did was useful and appreciated and i did not envy their jobs.
Running a crypto-busines with our Crypto philosophies would be hard.
And having to be the "Chooser" of what coins get added and what don't is not a position i envy.

But look at the topic title carefully.
Be honest.. a danger ?
Yes, i think that goes with out saying.

It's rarely mentioned that centralized exchanges were only suppose to be temporary.
So what did we do ? keep making more of them LOL
While chanting "Decentralization" ..then we get into putting 100's of centralized ICO's on them
..while chanting still LOL

I see a whole lot of hypocrisy.

Free Market & decentraliztion.. ANON etc yaddaa yaddaa ..but only when it pads my fucking wallet.  

If you all supported the ideals you parade around the reality of what goes on around here would be FAR different.
Your actions betray your words people.

Baggy Fear runs deep.. you will never see these bag holders admit negative points.
They are scared shitless it will devalue their coins they are clutching.
Sad really..
Admitting the problem and fixing it would actually be a constructive asset.
Embrace the FUD people it's there for a reason.
Denying a problem is different than saying hey yeah there is an issue so we need to work on it.

You all need to work on being more honest about all this.
After all it would benefit you and your bags.
We are being watched and stupid retorts don't sell coins.

I have several answers to this:

1) In 2013, 90% of bitcoin trading was done on MtGox.  That was 4 years after bitcoin came into existence.
Monero is 3 years in existence, and 1 year ago, it was still a minor crypto.

2) In any case, "trading" is a parasite onto crypto which doesn't even need a block chain.  You could have a "SWIFT-like" transmitter service between the few "big" exchanges in the world, and just have exchange IOU, allowing you to have your "wobblecoin" IOU tokens on exchange A to be transferred to wobblecoin IOU tokens on exchange B, trade like crazy with it, and never ever have a block chain or any code attached to "wobblecoin".  If block chains are simply transfer mechanisms between the few exchanges where you have accounts to trade, it is a ridiculous enterprise.  Unfortunately, 90% or more of crypto is now this ridiculous enterprise.  But that's not any judgement of the underlying crypto.

3) Monero is starting to be available on several exchanges.

4) the nice thing about an obfuscated block chain like monero is that the exchange information is not propagated on the block chain.  So in as  much as you want to USE monero (and not just "trade" monero IOU tokens on exchanges), you can easily buy monero on an exchange, transfer it once or twice to another account of your ownings, and whatever you are going to do now with that monero as a currency, whatever you are going to buy with it, is not "contaminated" with the information that was given out by buying it on an exchange.  That is a bit like buying petrol in a gas station, but not letting this information propagate to tell where you're driving. 
If you buy coins of a transparent ledger, like bitcoin, then the information that you got it from an exchange (where it is attached to your identity) is propagated to whatever you are going to do with those coins, and you need to do special things to get that information away (like using tumblers).  But again, if the only game is to trade with exchange IOU that have the same name as a crypto currency, all this doesn't matter of course.