Topic: Peter Todd calls dash snake oil. - page 6. (Read 12021 times)

You're wasting your time. Let's recall toknormal is the guy that said "Cryptography has never been a significant part of cryptocurrency - even though it may share the first few letters." -- nicely cached by Google for everyone to see.

Zero technical knowledge. He's simply stringing words together that he doesn't understand in an attempt to sound smart. You would have a deeper conversation with a chatbot.

What are you talking about--I can let people view my transactions with a viewkey, so the tax man is satisfied which all the transparency I need. Never mind that Smooth just corrected all your misconceptions. But keep on harping about it while you shilling your snake oil. I've got the money I want.


I think cheap coins and the darkmarket will help distribute monero--though how long coins stay under dollar and how big the darkmarket gets is anyone's guess. The official GUI will have smart (background) mining and that should help distribution and network strength. Most people won't get much, but it will be like free change depending on your energy costs.

A viewkey is not remotely a substitute for transparency. In fact it's an example of exactly the design cludge I'm talking about since it's a compromise between transparency and privacy - without enhancing either.

Bitcoin, Monero, and Darkcoin all have the same large problem.  The ASIC came too soon for Bitcoin, so a wide distribution, which is required for currency, is a fraction of what it would have been if off the shelf hardware could have been used for even a couple more years.  Even Satoshi has quotes talking about a "gentlemen's agreement" to not use GPU miners, heh.  Whether the Bitcoin distribution is good enough for it to succeed in the long run is unknown.

For Darkcoin, having block rewards set to 10x what they're supposed to be the first day or two, then reducing coin supply afterwards from 80 mil to 20 mil is a show stopper.  Does anyone really think Bitcoin would be as big as it is now if Satoshi pulled off that blunder?  The answer is an obvious no.  People would refer to Bitcoin as "Scamcoin" if  Satoshi had done that, and the market cap never would have broke a dollar.  Every other coin that's had a blunder that huge on launch, such as "GPUcoin", was relaunched.  The fact that Darkcoin was not relaunched after a mistake that huge is nuts.

Then for Monero, just like all CPU mined coins, trying to mine any with the botnets on it is almost impossible.  I tried mining Monero the third day it was released with two Haswells and got zero.  I don't think it even had botnets on it then.  Ironically, Dogecoin probably has a better distribution than everything else in the top 10.

The addresses are "obscured" in exactly the same way as they are when you use Dash and Bitcoin and follow the recommended best practice of not reusing addresses. If I'm not mistaken, Darksend does this automatically as well.

The balances are obscured in that you can't tell which outputs belong together, and you can't tell which are spent. Again, this is the same as with Dash or Bitcoin. You can't tell the balance in my Bitcoin wallet, because my Bitcoin wallet has many receiving addresses, and you don't know which those are.

This was always the intent of Bitcoin and this is how it works today. The difference is that Cryptonote (and Dash for that matter, if we put aside the third party trust required of masternodes, and the fact that the entire system is ad-hoc defined with no formal specification and no possibility of mathematically-proven soundness) leaks less unintended information in the form of identifiable links between transactions and addresses than Bitcoin does, leaks which allow people to perform third party analysis and piece together more information (for example which addresses and/or "coins" have been used for various "bad" things, which other addresses might  be owned by he same person who just sent me some money, etc.).

It has nothing to do with "good money" or "audits."

I'm sorry tok, you are just horribly confused and (likely willfully) ignorant.

Again viewkeys, TOk, you keep repeating this tripe and you know, at least you should, that it is complete BS. A viewkey acts as receipt with all the information that an accountant would need. Smooth's point is that the blockchain is reviewable without giving up private information. This is no different than how cash works. So is cash not money?

Using quotations around "bitcoin developer" to describe an actual Bitcoin Developer is childish and inaccurate. And calling Icebreaker an idiot was mean spirited. This is the internet, you have as many words as any of us, so playing victim comes off as a last ditch ploy.

This is just technological B.S. that nobody monetary user is interested in or needs to know. It is not a financial audit.

I already described what an "audit is" and it is not something that cryptonote supports because the relevant information is obscured. The originating address is obscured, the destination addresses are obscured, even the balance itself is obscured - that is the whole *point* of the cryptonote technology which is why I say it's relevant for bookkeeping or record keeping of a trusted party-backed currency but not for defining a new form of base money.

It might have been offhand, and it might have been mean spirited. Neither of those is necessarily admirable. However, there is nothing to suggest it is inaccurate, and you are certainly in no position to put your level of expertise and credentials up against Peter Todd's in making that determination.

Yes. You should really learn how these systems actually work.


Okay then. Not "money" according to your (and likely only your) definition. That includes Dash.

LoL. Really ?

Then you don't have money I'm afraid.

You guys started this thread to slap DASH in the face with an off handed, inaccurate and mean spirited comment by a so called "bitcoin developer" who is acting childish and insecure.  And you continue to act childish and insecure.  We just want to make sure that anyone opening this thread gets the other point of view as well. 

As I explained to you earlier, you can do exactly the same type of audit. Every single transaction except coinbases have inputs exactly equal to outputs (if fees are included in outputs), and that is entirely visible. Coinbases can be verified to match the published reward schedule in every instance starting from block 0 all he way to block infinity (unlike Dash, BTW), again all visible. Thus you can be assured that coins are not and never have been created out of thin air.

You further need to verify that transactions have valid signatures (for which all the necessary inputs are, again, visible), which is finally exactly the same thing you need to do (but with slightly different mathematical equations) with every other cryptocurrency.

Tok, no one cares (except dashers) about your weird theory of money that happens to mangle dash into your prescribed fit. If it were a good theory, you would be able to explain in a clear and concise manner, not like someone who got a hold of really good ganja and watched a documentary about money once.

The money I want is simple: about everyone takes it, it's fungible, and it won't be traced back to me--like a coin, which is even better than cash. Monero fits this definition and i don't need graphics or links or convoluted sentences to explain why it works for me.

I don't know why your bitching that a cryptographer is giving technical analysis--that's what he's an expert in, so trying to shift his criticism away from what he's an expert in misses why his critique matters so much and why you can't just dismiss it with, "But I think money...." Either meet his criticism head-on or find yourself being ridiculed for not adding to the conversation or what this thread is addressing.

You seem to be happy enough to have joined the club 

I don't think you're following.  Sure, the transactions are valid in that they have ownership verified and approval from the miners to spend, but every coin has a pedigree you can research, and you can verify every transaction in a bitcoin like blockchain.  In the case of DASH, it looks exactly the same, only because DarkSend coins were broken down to look exactly alike (with same amounts) then mixed, you can't tell which coins came from where, but they have a corresponding input, preserving privacy and fungibility.  I can't audit a cryptonote blockchain.  At least not the way I can figure.  This is what I need to learn if it's possible.  And it must be audited without cryptography.  Because cryptography only validates ownership, not pedigree.  Or at least as far as I can understand at this moment.

It must be a very interesting life to spend every single one of one's limited lifetimes' days on an internet forum discussing, caring so hard and fighting about something(altcoins) that the world's population will never care about, will never use, and is entirely obsolete.  Talking about waste...

May these peoples' little egos fuss and fight here, it's better than making a fuss on the real streets, eh?
bb!=)

Peter Todd is an expert in crypto and computer science.  You only attacked his credentials *AFTER* he dared to criticized a coin you are holding bags of.

If he said, 'Yes I love Dash, and Monero is rubbish' you would obviously be singing his praises.  That's called hypocrisy...

Breaking gmax's CoinJoin and renaming it "DarkSend" isn't thinking "outside of the box."

Breaking green addresses and renaming them "InstantX" isn't thinking "outside of the box."

Ignoring Bitcoin's raison d'etre, which is trustlessness, by involving trusted third parties in the form of Masternodes isn't thinking "outside of the box."

None of that is any more "genius" than a cargo cult priest's "outside of the box" idea to build bamboo runways.   

In that case every single cryptocurrency fails your standard because it is impossible to verify the balance of an address without using actual cryptography to validate tranasctions. Yes you can add or subtract tx amounts, but you may be adding and subtracting invalid transactions, making the resulting total incorrect, invalid, and meaningless.

There is no escaping cryptography to audit any blockchain. Period.

There's no technology in existence that you can't cherry pick aspects of and make such idle remarks.

What is lazy and disingenuous about Peter Todd's comments is that they don't address any of the real priorities identified by the various competing projects in the cryptocurrency space. Rather they are the remarks of an overgrown schoolboy trainspotting programmer who could care less about what he's implementing and everything about the tools he uses to implement it.

I'm not saying that's necessarily what he is, but I am saying that that is what such remarks characterize.

I have tried to address those things in this thread - ie present some level of business (or monetary) process analysis that is abscent from all the technological mud slinging. I've supported my arguments with a whole lot more background than Peter Todd did so I don't feel the need to defend petty point scoring factoids about perceived weaknesses in network security.

This debate is about something much more fundamental.