Topic: Official Anoncoin Information, FAQ & Description thread. I2P/Tor explained [Mod] - page 9. (Read 44443 times)

1. You didn't fixed coind dll issue: libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll is missing (no mingw/gcc installed, Win).
2. You didn't fixed /? output. Default port in help are litecoin port.

I think you have overseen one of my post, so I quoted myself

Coin control is possible also with Bitcoin, even if not with the standard client, for the time being.

What about implementing natively something like zerocoin?

As a reminder to those who haven't updated yet.

Anoncoin New mandatory client release. Be sure to upgrade your client as soon as possible. The Old version will be incompatible from block 87.777!

This update will fork to improve the difficulty adjustment. We can not allow the hit 'n run mining to continue as it makes coin transfers slow, and the mining unfair to regular miners.

We have implemented several improvements based on user feedback, and the dev teams own experiences.

Changes to block target and difficulty:
The Kimoto's Gravity well will improve upon the rapid difficulty adjustment, providing smoother transactions, improving security by rejecting blocks that are a direct result of "hit 'n run" mining by large coin jumping pools.
The target time has been changed to 3 minutes. This means there will be ~480 blocks per 24 hours instad of the previous ~420.
Overall this improvement will be noticed by most users by the faster, more stable transaction times.

Please visit our website to obtain the latest version today; https://anoncoin.net

Yes because we implement more than just I2P support. Our main focus is anonymity. For example the last build have Coin control implemented that let you choose which coins to send instead of your client choosing it randomly.

Would Anoncoin be still useful if Bitcoin would gain native I2P support?

Why?

Because first of all, we don't like the Central banks, and would love to see they lose their monopoly. If you haven't noticed, they aren't so happy about Bitcoin, Litecoin and all other coins out there. And they will try to stop them.

AnonCoin goal is to be used on both darknets like I2P, TOR and others, and internet/clearnet. At current moment it works with SOCKS over I2P/TOR. Native support to I2P should be in place soon. It's a scrypt based coin, forked from Litecoin but still got some nice features from other coins too. Not at least it's own twist of them.

Note, paypal etc isn't allowed anymore to do transactions which can be related to bitcoin trading. Not at least, it isn't the first time Central banks have stopped other currencies that have become large enough to threat their monopoly.

Related links:
http://rt.com/op-edge/bitcoin-threat-bank-lost-433/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/07/bitcoin-scares-banks-governments
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-06-03/will-bitcoin-go-same-way-liberty-reserve
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/05/liberty-reserve-and-government-control-of-money/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-21/us-begins-regulating-bitcoin-will-consider-virtual-transactions-money-laundering






Thanks to:

A list of people to thanks for this:
The Bitcoin developers.
The Litecoin developers.
The Primecoin developer.
The Megacoin developer.
Giv for the original I2P patch to the Bitcoin source code.
cozz for the original Coin control patch to the Bitcoin source code.
People from the community! You know who you are

I Probably forgot a few too! Sorry!

History

Anoncoin started somewhat bad. It was a hard period where 50 new coins where made per day almost. We didn't have a testnet and mined some blocks before the release and was blaimed for premining. Please see the history thread for more info. All the premined coins has gone to the facuet, and donations and tips from the users. This is also in the history thread.

History thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/official-anoncoin-chat-thread-including-history-227287

Anoncoin started out with a somewhat special specs. This was corrected and a calculation mistake was made so the coin was highly instamined in the start. The first protocol switch was at block 15420. It then swiched again at block 77777 after abuse of the blockchain/diff. Now, multipools or solo miners have found a way to do that again. Therefore it will be a switch now at 87777 wthich will introduce Kimoto’s Gravity well.

What/Howto Tor

1. Install Tor https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en

2. Put this in your config file (anoncoin.conf):
onlynet=tor
tor=127.0.0.1:9050
addnode=m6xwmit3jovw34r2.onion
addnode=aqmdzilaqayzjb6o.onion
addnode=sf2px26xdsqphkef.onion
addnode=wwniwxrykmk2wtcw.onion

On windows, simply type "%appdata%" in Run, then navigate into Anoncoin folder and create the file if it does not exist.
MARK: create it with notepad and select all files (in save dialog), and make sure it don't add a trailing .txt so the file will be named anoncoin.conf.txt

On linux (Terminal):
cd .anoncoin
touch anoncoin.conf
open anoncoin.conf

Your client should over time intregrate with more Tor clients as well as clearnet since Tor is a "proxy" to the internet. (So yes, your connections will go via Tor if you use the setup above)

How to run Anoncoin as a Tor hidden service?

What/Howto I2P

Here are some parameters:

Your client will act as a gateway between I2P and clearnet if you don't add -onlynet=i2p

If you have used your Anoncoin client on clearnet before, you might need to delete peers.dat if you don't get any connections.

To use the wallet on I2P do the following:

1. Download and install I2P ( www.geti2p.net ), then start it. (It will run as a daemon, so don't expect any window)
2. Wait a minute or two, then navigate to http://127.0.0.1:7657/configclients
3. Make sure to start the "SAM application bridge" (Tip: After starting it, check it for autostart and save configuration)
4. In run (enter the start menu and type run on windows Vista/7) type %appdata%
5. Open or create the Anoncoin folder
6. Create/edit the anoncoin.conf file
7. make sure to set the following options: rpcuser, rpcpassword and onlynet=i2p
8. (Optional) you can set i2p=1 instead of onlynet=i2p

Example:
rpcuser=someone
rpcpassword=super_secret_password
onlynet=i2p


Note: The I2P router uses a little time to integrate into the I2P network, so you might not get a connection before I2P have runned for about 5-10minutes.

How can it help you now and in the future to be Anonymous?

First of all, Anoncoin is like other coins, it has a blockchain and transactions can be traced there as well as in all other coins.

As said, this coin focus on your Anonymity, and now the last version got Coin control, which helps a bit, but not much.

A good question was asked, and I decided to add it here to make people reading this post less confused.


Yes of course you can see transactions. What this coin is aiming for is to be used on darknets, which make it difficult to track regarding IPs etc. Also I2P/Tor provides a great encryption layer, but yes, it does not help the transactions. The transactions can never be anonymous in the way you describe it.

Anonymity is not a boolean, you have to know how to be it.. You can't just download a software and expect to be guaranteed 100% anonymous.

Also, the name isn't just because of the upcomming features. It's also a "activist" coin agains the Central bank monopoly which try to stop bitcoin and all other coins if you haven't noticed. Believing the Central banks won't try to stop coins, is naive..


What will it bring in the future?

We're looking and testing out both Coinjoin as a internal wallet function, and of course Zerocoin. And a chaos idea by Meeh which will be described more in detail at a later time. When those will be intregrated is still hard to say since it's a lot of work, and every core developers have dayjobs as well of working on the coin.

Services

Webpage:
http://anoncoin.net
http://anoncoin.i2p (I2P link)
http://futz4b7tmqzoxnc6.onion (TOR link)

Block Explorer:
http://explorer.anoncoin.net
http://darkgamex.ch:2751/chain/Anoncoin

Forum:
http://forum.anoncoin.net

Exchanges:
https://www.cryptsy.com/markets/view/66
https://coinex.pw/trade/anc_btc

Lottery:
http://lotto.anoncoin.net

Mining pools:
https://github.com/Anoncoin/anoncoin/wiki/Comparison-of-mining-pools

Payment methods:
https://www.coinpayments.net

What is Anoncoin?

Anoncoin is a coin with active development support which focus on Anonymity. It was forked out of Litecoin, but have since catched up with the Bitcoin 0.8.5.3 source, and taken it's own way.

Features (Some will not take effect before protocol switch #3):
- 3 minute block targets
- 5 coins, then subsidy halves in 306600 blocks (~2 years)
- A limit on 4,2 Million coins
- Native I2P support (Anonymous darknet)


The I2P Network?
I2P is a scalable, self organizing, resilient packet switched anonymous network layer, upon which any number of different anonymity or security conscious applications can operate.

I2P is an open source project developed in early 2003 by a group of full time developers with a group of part time contributors from all over the world.

It is fundamental to understand that inside an I2P network the "hidden" component is represented by an application in execution on the node doing, and of course the path followed by the information to reach the destination. Another important concept for I2P is the "tunnel", a directed path which extends through an explicitly selected list of routers. The first router that belongs to a tunnel is named "gateway".

The communication within a tunnel in unidirectional, this means that it is impossible to send back data without using another separated tunnel.

Also for I2P a layered encryption model is implemented, known as "garlic routing" and "garlic encryption", the information transits on network routers that are able to decrypt only the respective layer.

I2P Routing?
When Alice wants to send a message to Bob, she does a lookup in the netDb to find Bob's leaseSet, giving her his current inbound tunnel gateways.

Alice's router aggregates multiple messages into a single "garlic message", encrypting it using a particular public key, in this way only the public key owner can open the message.

For typical end to end communication between Alice and Bob, the garlic will be encrypted using the public key published in Bob's leaseSet, allowing the message to be encrypted without giving out the public key to Bob's router.

She selects one of her outbound tunnels and sends the data include of necessary instructions message and with instructions for the outbound tunnel's endpoint to forward the message on to one of Bob's inbound tunnel gateways. When the outbound tunnel endpoint receives those instructions, it forwards the message according the instructions provided, and when Bob's inbound tunnel gateway receives it, it is forwarded down the tunnel to Bob's router.

Be aware, we have said that transmission is unidirectional, this means that if Alice wants Bob to be able to reply to the message, she needs to transmit her own destination explicitly as part of the message itself.

I2P is end-to-end encryption. No information is sent in clear or decrypted during its path including the sender and recipient. To each node is assigned an internal network address different from the network IP address that isn't used.



Layered Encryption
The term layered encryption refers to the encryption process used during the transfer from a source to the destination through a series of peers that composes the tunnel.

Both Tor and I2P use layered cryptography. Intermediate entities have only to know how to forward the connection on to the next hop in the chain but cannot decipher the contents of the connections.

I2P is end to end encryption. No information is sent in clear or decrypted along its path, including the sender and recipient. To each node is assigned an internal network address different from the network IP address that isn't used.

I2P uses cryptographic ID to identify both routers and end point services, for naming identifiers is used the "Base 32 Names" techniques that attributes a SHA256 digest to the  base64 representation of the destination. The hash is base 32 encoded and ".b32.i2p" is concatenated onto the end of the hash.



Garlic Routing
Garlic Routing is very similar to onion routing with several differences. Let's consider first of all that in garlic routing, it is possible to aggregate multiple messages. Another difference from Tor is that the tunnels are unidirectional.

Garlic routing in I2P is adopted mainly in three distinguished phases:

 1. For building and routing through tunnels (layered encryption). In I2P communication tunnels are unidirectional; this means that each interlocutor has to create a couple of tunnels, one for outbound and one for inbound traffic. There is also the possibility of a reply from the recipient, therefore another couple of tunnels must be created for a total of four tunnels.
 2. For bundling, determining the success or failure of end to end message delivery.
 3. For publishing some network database entries.



The Tor network?

The Deep Web is the set of information resources on the World Wide Web, not reported by normal search engines. It is a network of interconnected systems not indexed having a size hundreds of times higher than the current visible web.

A parallel web that has a much wider number of information represents an invaluable resource for private companies, governments, and especially cybercrime. In the imagination of many persons, the Deep Web term is associated with the concept of anonymity that goes with criminal intents that cannot be pursued because they are submerged in an inaccessible world. It’s fundamental to remark that this interpretation of the Deep Web is deeply wrong.

Tor is the acronym of “The Onion Router”, a system implemented to enable online anonymity thanks to the routing of Internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers hiding user’s information.

As usually happens, the project was born in the military sector, sponsored the US Naval Research Laboratory, and from 2004 to 2005 it was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Access to the network is possible using a Tor client, a software that allows user to reach network resources otherwise inaccessible. Today the software is under development and maintenance of Tor Project.  Using a Tor Network a user could avoid his tracing, his privacy is guaranteed by the unpredictable route of the information inside the net and due to the large adoption of encrypting mechanisms.

Connecting to the Tor network
Imagine a typical scenario where Alice desire to be connected with Bob using the Tor network. Let’s see step by step how it is possible.

She makes an unencrypted connection to a centralized directory server containing the addresses of the Tor nodes. After receiving the address list from the directory server the Tor client software will connect to a random node (the entry node) through an encrypted connection. The entry node would make an encrypted connection to a random second node which would in turn do the same to connect to a random third Tor node. The process goes on until it involves a node (exit node) connected to the destination.

Consider that during Tor routing, in each connection, the Tor nodes are randomly chosen and the same node cannot be used twice in the same path.

To ensure anonymity the connections have a fixed duration. Every ten minutes, to avoid statistical analysis that could compromise the user’s privacy, the client software changes the entry node.

Up to now we have considered an ideal situation in which a user accesses the network only to connect to another. To further complicate the discussion, in a real scenario, the node Alice used could in turn be used as a node for routing purposes with other established connections between other users.

A malevolent third party would not be able to know which connection is initiated as a user and which as a node, making the monitoring of the communications impossible.



The Tor client distributed from the official web site of the project could be executed on all the existing platforms and many add-ons are freely available that allow the integration of navigation software in existing web browsers. Despite that the network has been projected to protect user's privacy, to be really anonymous it's suggested to go though a VPN.

A better mode to navigate inside the Deep Web is to use the Tails OS distribution which is bootable from any machine without leaving a trace on the host. Once the Tor Bundle is installed, it comes with its own portable Firefox version, ideal for anonymous navigation due to an appropriate control of installed plugins.

The user must be aware of the presence of many plugins in his browsers that expose his privacy to serious risks. Many of these plugins could be used to reveal a user's information during the navigation.

As said, the resources inside the Tor network are not indexed and is very hard to find them if we are accustomed to classic search engines. The way to search the information is profoundly different due to the absence of indexing of the content. A practical suggestion to new users is to refer to Wikis and BBS-like sites that aggregate links, categorizing them in more suitable groups of consulting. Another difference that the user has to take in mind is that instead of classic extensions (e.g. .com, .gov), the domains in the Deep Web generally end with the .onion suffix.

Be careful, some contents are labeled with commonly used tags such as CP= child porn. PD is pedophile, stay far from them.

The Deep Web is considered the place where everything is possible, you can find every kind of material and services for sale, most of them illegal. The hidden web offers to cybercrime great business opportunity, hacking services, malware, stolen credit cards, and weapons.

We all know the potentiality of the e-commerce in the ordinary web and its impressive growth in last couple of years, well now imagine the Deep Web market that is more than 500 times bigger and where there is no legal limits on the goods to sell. We are faced with amazing businesses controlled by cyber criminal organizations.

Conclusion from the first ref.
The article has the main purpose to introduce basics of the two most diffused softwares to anonymize a user's experiences on the web, Tor and I2P. Their importance is very high; thanks to these networks it is possible to avoid censorship and monitoring. At the moment I have a meaningful experience with Tor networks, its community as said provides a great support for those users that desire or need to be anonymous on Internet.

I believe that despite the fact that I2P has existed about a decade, it is very under-utilized, the presence of a limited community represents in my opinion a brake on its growth.

I have used both and I found both efficiency effective. I tried also to sniff a package using specific software with the intent to disclose navigation data or any reference to the user's identity, of course without success.

The success of anonymizing a network is related to their diffusion, and without doubt Tor is a step forward, and the more users have access to sharing resources, the faster will be the navigation.

Refs.
http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/anonymizing-networks-tor-vs-i2p/ - Thansk for this descriptions!
http://www.i2p2.de/index.html
https://www.torproject.org/
http://www.i2p2.de/_static/pdf/i2p_philosophy.pdf
http://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/tor-anonymity-how-it-works-and-how-to-use-it/
http://www.i2p2.de/how_intro

Welcome to the Official Anoncoin Information, FAQ, & Description thread

This thread is moderated, and is open for discussions.
Off-topic & trolling thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/official-anoncoin-chat-thread-including-history-227287

Anoncoin 0.8.5.6 is released!

Windows and OSX binaries are released here:
https://anoncoin.net/downloads/0.8.5.6/

Changelog:
https://anoncoin.net/blog/?p=45



You can also style your client with CSS. Put a CSS file inside your anoncoin config dir, like default.css, and then add style=default.css to load the stylesheet! Link to CSS reference is here: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/stylesheet.html

Index
1. What is Anoncoin? - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324932
2. Services. - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324933
3. How can it help you now and in the future to be Anonymous? - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324935
4. Howto I2P - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324938
5. Howto Tor - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324942
6. History - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324945
7. Why & Thanks to - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3324948