Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 103. (Read 387551 times)

Exactly. The car dealer is engaging in a traceable transaction. He got your ID and can identify you to the authorities. It doesn't matter what you use to pay. Cash, gold, bitcoins, Moneros or "fully anonymous" pixie dust crypto coins, its all the same at that point.

But once they get to you with a well implemented ring signature-based coin, the trail ends. There is no way for you deanonymize people who sent you coins. At best, they get some list of candidate outputs and can try to trace them back to some individual, but this too is likely to work far less well than it does for Bitcoin, perhaps even provably so (though we aren't quite there yet).

Unless you collected the sender's ID as the car dealer did with you. If we all turn into car dealers recording IDs for everyone we deal with (and presumably reporting that information or at least having a recordkeeping requirement for it), then no coin technology is going to help you.

Cripes man. From the beginning I have stipulated that my statement applies when there is a traceable asset traded, e.g. house, car, fiat. I wrote that cash is going away, and all fiat will be traceable (electronic). That means who paid me is knowable.

If you possess a car that you didn't possess before, the authorities can demand that you show how you paid for the car and whom you bought it from. In fact, they are already doing this in Europe, where it has become increasingly difficult in some European jurisdictions (at least I have reports from Sweden and Switzerland) to move any significant amount of money without having to give proof to the bank of what the funds are being used for.

From the beginning I stipulated that my statement did not apply when an anonymous untraceable asset is traded, e.g. a virtual good or service or perhaps even gold can be traded anonymous with meet ups wearing a mask. But the authorities can make that illegal.

They can't demand what you don't know, and in general you don't know or have any way to know who paid you, either physical identity or coin source. If everyone is going around recording the physical identities of everyone they transact with, then sure the authorities can go around person to person and collect that chain of IDs. This is out of scope for the coin (any coin) itself however. At the very least it puts a high burden of cost on such investigations (as opposed to downloading transaction data from Visa or Bitcoin and running big data algorithms on everyone in the world).

Furthermore, you can just delete your keys once you are done with them. They are of no real value to you once the recipient has acknowledged receipt.

EDIT: I also don't think ZeroCash allows this form of tracing even if your keys are revealed. If the authorities force you to reveal your keys, all they get to do is see how much you have and spend it. So if that is your goal here there is already a solution (largely vaporware for now though).

As usual, you are incorrect.

You trade some coins for an asset which reveals your  identity. The tax authorities want to trace back where you initially obtained the coins (for capital gains cost basis proof also to track whom you obtained them from), thus they demand you provide both your input and output across any CoinJoin mixes (both the inputs and outputs are on the block chain) or they demand you provide the identity of who paid you in a Cryptonote ring signature. Given that a traceable asset was exchanged, they can trace to the Cryptonote sender and force he/she to give up the private key for the ring signature. The Global Police State (cooperation of the G20 with the NSA was already announced for tracking down tax evasion) is making this a reality soon.

What I am saying is that a really anonymous coin wouldn't make it possible to reveal the trail back to where you originally sourced your coins, even when you are forced to reveal everything the authorities know that you know.

This is a mind twister. Consider it a puzzle for those of you with very high IQ.


And you will kick yourself later when the solution is revealed.  

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On the issue of a programmable block chain, I think what I wrote 14 years ago still applies.

I am not convinced this provides in reality any extra protraction to the merchant. In fact it can make things worse. What is to stop the double spender from generating a flood of transactions, using say a script, in excess of the total balance in total, with each transaction just under the withdrawal limit just before the target spend? The merchant would not be aware of this, checks the balance is well over the withdrawal limit, and approves the transaction. Then the merchant waits for N blocks as all the bogus transactions go by one by one (one per block) and the balance dwindles to zero before the merchant gets paid. It is actually worse than BTC or XMR since the merchant does not find out about the double spend until N blocks later, giving the fraudster plenty of time to escape the law.

Sorry I didn't mean you wrote an obituary, just referring to those who have.

A "high profile catastrophic block chain corruption" would be great fun.  XCN needs the (social) media publicity!   

And the experience/expertise gained from the fiasco would be invaluable.  Nothing like a good chain forking to bring the community together and upgrade its antifragility!     No test net can emulate such real world ecology.

We probably are in a blow-off top, but I will continue to be greedy while others are fearful.   

Reliably accepting payments with zero confirmations is an exclusive feature of XCN, and due to its innovative use of withdrawal limits on an account tree:

I think it is attractive at 1000-1500. That puts the eventual constant price market cap at about $10 million, or alternately in the millions over the next few years. That leaves room for upside as the gains awareness, recognition, and maturity. That is assuming everything goes right. I also think the coin is a good candidate for the first high profile catastrophic block chain corruption where nobody knows who owns what. That plus the risk it just goes nowhere means you want to see a lot of upside to invest.

I don't even think the price right now is terrible, just not attractive. I think it goes down more as miners continue to dump.

If I may ask, what do you see as a optimal buy-zone for XCN?

Please explain more how this works. How can zero confirmations be possible?

I never wrote an obituary, I said I would consider buying it! But only after the price goes down. Since I first said this, the price has gone down. A lot. It has more to go.

I take your point about emission dominating demand in determination of market cap.  But I am betting on the fact that awareness/volume/hype/maturity/etc. can only go up due to exponential network effects (and at even faster rates than linear emission dilutes those effects on price). 

XCN is barely a week old, let's give it a couple of months before writing an obituary.     The high and long emission rate is there in part to prevent or at least regulate harmful bubbles; that's a feature, not a bug!   

Part of me is curious how much it costs for a botnet or EC2 running Wolf's latest to mine a block, but another part of me doesn't care and only looks at the bid/ask price spread.

You're missing the point. The price doesn't need to go up AT ALL for the market cap to reach into the millions and easily break the top 100, and even (in a few years at least) the top 10. The new coins will increase the market cap automatically.

The coin a week or so old. In 10 weeks it will have 10x the market cap with no change in the price at all. In two years it will have 100x the market cap, again with no change in price.

I'm not suggesting by the way the the price can't go up. I agree with you that there is potential for increased awareness, hype, maturity, etc. But it is very hard for a large bubble to develop from current prices given the high rate of new coins that needs to find a home every single minute.

I have said that when the price drops to what I consider to be a sustainable price given the constant emission, I will consider buying it, for largely the same reasons you state. It is actually fairly close now, certainly much closer than it was at 5k-10k satoshis when I first started saying this.

I don't think the current price is sustainable, because it's too low.   

Current low prices are the result of minimal public awareness, vanishingly small volume, high initial block rewards, low initial difficulty, and unequal distribution of mining resources (AWS/botnets/private miners/lack of pools). 

In a few months there will be more/better open-source miners/pools, higher difficulty/volume/awareness, and lower block rewards.  Not to mention an actual economy of goods/services!

Given how much the market loves HypeCloneScamCoins like CLOAK, expecting a valuation in the "many millions" for a truly disruptive project like XCN is fairly reasonable.  At the very least, it should be in the Top 100!

This is false. Yes, you are personally identified once you buy the land, car, etc. This would be true even if you paid with magical pixie dust coins that are fully anonymous in every sense of the word. This identifies where the seller got the coins from.

However even if you are forced to reveal your private keys, this doesn't unmask where you got the coins from, at least not in the cryptonote design with ring signatures.

Current market cap is irrelevant given the emission that won't significantly decrease for several years. If you think the current price (or even worse the price a few days ago) is sustainable then you are betting on a market cap in the relatively near term of many millions of dollars.

No I wasn't assuming that, I was merely stating that I don't see huge (and certainly not super-linear) improvements beyond what is readily implementable in Bitcoin as the need to scale presses. As with SPV clients, for example. A few years ago they didn't exist, now they are common. Pruning will likely follow a similar trajectory if needed, though may not actually be needed due to other obstacles both technical and to economic scaling.


Because there is already an installed base of maybe a million or so users, an increasing number of merchants accepting it, reasonably high quality hardware and software wallets, and countless other reasons that a strong network effect not only already favors Bitcoin itself, but also favors approaches that break the fewest parts of that machine. A new technology with small advantages won't overcome that either within Bitcoin as a reimplementation or as a competitor replacing it. It will take very large advantages for that to happen.

The bigger issues I see with Bitcoin have nothing to do with scaling of storage and everything to do with centralization. Mini-blockchain itself does not solve that, although I woudln't rule out that it could possibly enable some complementary approach that might. Cryptonite certainly doesn't though, at this point.

I will not "admit that the hype and the amount of money poured in thus far has been astronomical."  Your statement applies to Bitcoin, not XCN.  Mom and Grandma ask about Bitcoin these days, but their heads still might explode if anyone tried to tell them about Cryptonite!   

Nobody outside of our little uber-power-geek bubble has heard of XCN, and even many inside the bubble missed the launch because alt-world is such a noisy place.  So the hype has been minimal, and Official Marketing Efforts have not even started.

As for money, XCN's market cap is extremely tiny in proportion to the amount of innovation and blue-sky potential it bears.  XCN isn't even on any major non-Chinese exchanges yet.  Compared to other less-exotic coins' massive hype/market caps, obscure young XCN is nothing and I will accumulate as many as possible while the market cap is less than $100k.  A $65,000 market cap for XCN is a joke; nom nom nom cheap coins!!! 

I have been distracted by the tech-wow factor of mini-blockchains, but the real impact for retail users is XCN enabling zero-confirmation transactions via withdrawal limits.  That is just fucking huge (another Holy Grail) and a totally unreported story previous to BitFreak's recent interview.

And yes, I do plan to hlod XCN long-term.  When it gets to $1/XCN I can retire!   

You are right, it probably isn't fair, but it is my opinion. Conversely you could say that it isn't fair to compare an unused coin with one that already has a lot of adoption.


That requires that the indeed effective address different parts of the economic pie, and that each do so in a sufficiently better way a to overcome the natural network effect advantages of one coin instead of two.


That would be all well and good if I believed that Bitcoin wasn't as scalable as XCN, but I don't.

I do agree that other features of XCN may be more valuable, but their value at this point is quite speculative.

I still consider it overvalued, but getting closer to speculatively attractive.

What happened to the island?  Did the seas rise?