Topic: Peter Todd calls dash snake oil. - page 10. (Read 12021 times)

No, not really.  I can follow the coins all the way back to when they were created.  I can do that with my own eyes, following the account numbers.  Nothing is obscured, even when mixing the coins, breaking them up into exact denominations, etc...  This is how Bitcoin works, this is how DASH works.

Actually, there is no way that you could call DASH snake oil, that is ridiculous.  It is simple, it does what it says it will do, it doesn't take anything other than simple math to understand the odds of guessing the owner of the coins.  Simple to understand, simple to implement (with a double network) simple to protect from attack.  I can understand it fully, deeply.  I can not glean all the information from cryptonote to see with my own eyes that all is true and correct.  Therefore I refuse to trust it, simply because I have to trust it.

Okay well that's totally wrong.


This totally misunderstands the concept of a blockchain. To verify a blockchain (even Bitcoin) requires cryptography. Unless you rely on cryptography, you could easily be given some fake bunch of data that looks like a blockchain but is actually nonsense.

As for what Tok is trying to say here (I believe, I could be getting him wrong, hate to put words in people's mouths) is that cryptonote was designed initially to be used with a central authority that holds the "keys".  Throwing those keys away only makes it impossible for anyone, not even a central authority to verify what happened, inside or outside of the blockchain.  The cryptography must be trusted, which kills the whole concept of trustless.  Thus his constant harping on illegitimatizing the blockchain.

in the end, you have to fully trust that the cryptography is protecting the blockchain, as there is no outside way to verify that after the fact.  That is the main issue Tok is talking about.  And although we think today that the cryptography is impossible to break, well, remember Bill Gates purportedly said 640KB of memory "ought to be enough for anybody."?  Every computer on anyone's desktop and every smart phone out there is a super computer, almost a quantum computer to one from those days.  What makes you think the cryptography wont be broken once quantum computers start to really take off?

Finally, when studying this site: https://cryptonote.org/inside, and I admit, I may not be seeing this correctly, but it seems to me that the elaborate ring signatures system only introduces as much doubt as to who the transaction belongs to as DarkSend does.  I can see that you can use as many people as you like to insert doubt (the example uses 3, which is the default number used by DS) and you could use 10, 20, 50 ring signature participant, as you could with mixing.  I don't see an advantage.  Each ring signature comes at a cost, as each one must be stored.

Yet DS's results insert just as much doubt about who spent the funds, without fancy cryptography that could be broken at some point in the future, and keeps the blockchain easily verifiable to anyone at any time.  It is completely future proof.  As Albert Einstein said, as simple as possible but no simpler.

I can digest it, but it sits in my head the same way Thetans do when Tom Cruise waxes idiotic.

One of the hallmarks of eloquence is condensing large ideas into the smallest format available. This is what makes poetry so powerful and good speeches so short. When Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." He was saying wit with both its humorous and intellectual properties intact--adding example to meaning--Tok is about as eloquent as he is witty.

Please explain.


No, I think he is saying that they are required specifically when "money" is backed by debt. If money = gold (and only gold), then no central bankers are needed.

This article helped me understand how that works.


However, that raises a few other question for me. Monero (or other related coins) is not based on debt; it has a blockchain. Why does making transactions invisible lead to a lack of confidence that it is actually "money" based on something rather than just a ledger?

Here is an abridged version of toknormal's answer to this question from the thread he linked earlier:



Firstly, if people are using Monero, or something similar, to buy things in the real world, doesn't that make it visible in the sense of the picture above? The important thing for people to know is that it can and is being used by people in the real world to purchase things. (Or are you saying that we will never get to that point? If so, why?)  The only part missing is the claim that value is maximized when "money" is fully auditable, but why is that a requirement?

Secondly, it's not clear to me how scams, heists and deceptions suddenly arise out of hiding which addresses are responsible for transactions.

I don't think any of you are able to digest and understand what Toknormal is saying. You are ideologically blind.  I do hope that lightbulb moment will come to you some day.  In the mean time, Toknormal, you are the most eloquent at explaining this, and thus, you must continue to try, because this is of foundational importance. 

He's trying to rationalize dash is better than bitcoin and monero at the things bitcoin and monero are best at. Bitcoin is the world's largest most secure decentralized clear blockchain. Monero is the world's largest and most secure decentralized opaque blockchain. He thinks (or wants us to believe)that masternodes are the preferred bridge between these two networks, but refuses to see (or admit) masternodes for what they really are: middlemen who can be bought and have control over the network they are supposed to decentralize and secure--so yeah, he is actually replacing bankers with masternodes and saying it is a good thing. Good for him and the other dash bagholders, bad for anyone who wants decentralization and/or privacy.

Toknormal's description of how Cryptonote works or what is required for money to work was not legitimate.  With his pictures, he seemed to even imply that central bankers are needed for money to function at all.  Is this guy shilling?

E-Peen Battle

What is being stated about DASH is that its methods of "addressing fungibility improvements directly" are unsound. So unsound in fact as to deserve the term "snake oil."

Nowhere in your links for the definition of money is it stated that a requirement for being considered base money is that it have a public accounting system. Gold does not have a universal directory of past transactions. Nor does cash. You have not explained why it is essential or even preferential for a currency to have this property, and none of your links claim it to be necessary in their definitions.


What if I mail it?

This thread is about dash, but since you mention monero, there is a function called 'viewkey' which performs the exact function you claim it is not capable of.



Dash's methods of "maximising the fungibility of the base-monetary media" is what is being claimed to be unsound.



By your own definitions, obfuscation of the blockchain actually IS a requirement to be considered money. Fungibility (aka consistency) happens to be a requirement. Dash's unsound attempts to be fungible happen on a volountary basis. Unmixed coins used to buy CP are not the same as coins that have been mixed. By their taint they carry properties the mixed coins do not. The same goes for unmixed coins used for non-nefarious purposes. The point is that they are not consistent.



This is what you have not explained....

Who the fack is Peter Tudd?
So what crypto coin is not snake oil?
lmao
so boring

~CfA~

It's to do with how you define "base money" as opposed to derivatives of base money. If you are a plumber and offer to do work for me in exchange for my bike, the "bike" forms the base money for the transaction. If then later I give you an IOU for the bike because you wanted to collect it later, the IOU becomes the money instead, but it is not the "base money" - the bike is. It lies at the end of a chain of trust which now comprises paper IOU as well as the bike.

We consider a fiat bank account to be "money" since it can be exchanged for goods. But it is actually just a number in an account which is backed by base money - (ultimately 'debt' which in turn represents some other person's future contribution to the economy). Gold shares that are traded on the stock exchange are not "base money", they are secondary derivatives (like the IOU). The gold is sitting in the vault and doesn't physically change hands but represents the "base money" for the transaction.

When is comes to "privacy" in the traditional world it is a distinct concept from "fungibility". Privacy manifests itself in the accounting for base money (in this respect, I equate a fiat bank account to a bookeeping function which tracks it's holders call on a common pool of debt - the debt which acts as the 'base money' for the economy).

Cryptocurrency portends to re-invent the concept of 'base money'. It is a base monetary medium that is not backed by anything. It is anonymous (because unlike a fiat bank account, it is not directly associated with an individual / legal entity). The way the Satoshi model is designed uses a type of public / private key approach to allow individuals to hold and transfer cryptocurrency without loss of anonymity and - more importantly as far as the 'integrity of base money' argument goes - without impacting on its transparency.

If you're going to design a new form of base money, you would do well to start with the properties of money and implement these as faithfully as possible. There is a broad level of agreement on what they are:

http://contrarianinvestorsjournal.com/?p=391#
http://www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/awb_nav.pl?s=wpd&c=dsp&k=money+characteristics
http://blog.milesfranklin.com/the-seven-characteristics-of-money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money

Note that "privacy" (as in "obscurity") features nowhere amongst them. Even the word privacy barely appears. If you're designing new money therefore, you need to decide if you're building the wallet or the contents. Cruptonote has done the former at the expense of the latter and that's why Dash isn't pursuing this route. Instead it has faithfully supported the public blockchain while at the same time addressing fungibility improvements directly.

Contrary to what Monero proponents like to promote, bitcoin IS a fully anonymous currency. Any information about who happened to be on the other end of a transaction has to be gleaned from OUTSIDE the blockchain. In this sense, it's exactly the same as paper cash - if you hand me a 100 dollar note, I can clearly associate that 100 dollar note with you. The amount of information you can glean about the people controlling the movements is mitigated by maximising the fungibility of the base-monetary media (which, as I've explained, is exactly what Dash is doing).

On the other hand, obfuscation of the blockchain is attaching a priority to the base monetary media that does not belong there - and particularly not in a new digital medium that portends to function as base money.

That type of obfuscation alludes to two incorrect appraisals of what cryptocurrency is:

[1] - a form of money where an address corresponds to a person as a bank account does (it doesn't any more than a lump of gold does)

[2] - a record keeping system backed by some other 'base money'

The 'public blockchain' is therefore an essential element of anthing that portends to act as 'base money' as opposed to a record keeping system which is backed by such.

I described this more fully in this post from earlier this year.

I don't know what toknormal is talking about with the 'bank' business, and I doubt he does either.

Monero does two relevant things differently from Bitcoin:

1. It automatically creates a new address for each payment using stealth addresses. This would be the same as Bitcoin if people didn't reuse addresses (or use one one of the wallets for Bitcoin that support stealth addresses). This prevents linking multiple payments to the same recipient (since each uses a different address).

2. It signs transactions (spending an output) using ring signatures rather than regular signatures. Ring signatures cryptographically guarantee that one of the private key holders signed it, but don't reveal which it was. This prevents tracing of payments since there are multiple candidate sources for each payment.

Other than that it works the same as Bitcoin in terms of how it handles transactions (there are other differences such as different PoW, not having a fixed block size limit, etc. but those aren't relevant here). There is no bank, no bookkeeping, and none of the other nonsense toknormal was rambling about.

I'm interested in the discussion about what makes money money. Two questions:


I'm not sure I understood the point here and I think that is making it more difficult to get the rest of your discussion. Can you elaborate a bit?


What specific problems result from obscuring the blockchain? Why does hiding transactions make something less like money? (and for the Monero people here, is this actually what Monero does? If not, please explain why so that someone with limited familiarity with Monero or cryptography could understand.)

Never mind.

I'm sure the discerning public will understand your logic, even if I don't 

I wrote moron or deluded by greed (cognitive dissonance).

We obscure cash every day in our wallets. People decided that, they actually created a thing to hide their money in because they either liked the privacy or thought they needed it--in your backwards dashworld, people are wearing their cash around their necks.

Nothing would please me (or my wallet) more than for you to convince me of your case, since I could pick up nearly 5 times the amount of Monero for a given holding of Dash.

Somehow though...  

Maybe I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm just "ignorant" as smooth  alludes to or a "moron" as Generlize says, and will have to consign myself to eternal poverty from now on  

(P.S. It's the public who ultimately decides what is money and what isn't. If you're trying to define and pass of mere 'balances' as money then a public blockchain is a public blockchain. "Obscure" it at your peril).

He doesn't understand how cash works either. He wants us all to live our digital lives without the wallet blindness afforded us by a leather wallet. He thinks all account balances should be public and on display for governments, mobsters, hackers, business competitors and our wives--Tok doesn't even get why people wouldn't want this public knowledge--he's a fucking moron or so deluded with his fantasy of dash becoming THE global currency that he misses the whole point of an anon coin--hiding shit when you want, showing shit when you want.

Toknormal you have not the slightest clue how the technology works. The NSA document you linked bears no resemblance at all to how cryptonote works.

In fact cryptonote works almost exactly the same way as Bitcoin or Dash, but with different formats for addresses and signatures, while the document you linked works nothing like Bitcoin and discusses almost exclusively Chaum's e-cash schemes that preceded Bitcoin both chronologically and as a matter of fundamental design iteration (specifically the major advance of Bitcoin, and retained in both Dash and cryptonote, was to remove the bank function that you are confused about).

You would do your cause good to actually learn something about the design of what it is you are flailing around trying to criticize and avoid citing documents that are not only off-base from a technical perspective, but bear exactly the same relationship to Dash as they do to Monero in terms of technical lineage.


This is fundamentally wrong. Physical money is inherently private in that only the parties transacting have knowledge of the transaction (unless they choose to share that knowledge). Bitcoin removed this privacy by making all transactions public to every third party in the world. More private systems like Dash and Monero try to restore the original property of being private-by-default. Peter Todd has his opinion about which is more of a valid solution, as do both of us. Two of those opinions are well-informed.