Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 174. (Read 387552 times)

Hmm, you are indeed right. Most of the masternodes are on Amazon servers, making them all easy to shut down by the government/NSA, or Amazon themselves.

There appear to be at least a few thousand (over 5000 in my peer list) though nodes come and go constantly so it is hard to ever get an exact count.

Mixing doesn't happen with every anonymous transaction in Darkcoin. And why the snarkiness?

This is not accurate for a successful platform that is used for a high volume of transactions in commerce. Since there will likely be substantial transaction fees in line with the processing cost of private transactions (higher than bitcoin's non-private transactions), such a Sybil attack would be prohibitively expensive.

It would not be enough to spend as much on transaction fees as everyone else combined, you would need to spend far, far more to dominate the output set on the network, because you need all of the mix outputs chosen for a transaction (other than the real one) to be yours.

If I use a mix factor of 3, then you need all 3 of the outputs I choose to mix to be yours. If you are 50% of the transactions on the network, your chance of success here is only 12.5%. To get even a 50% chance of success you need to be 80% of the transactions on the network (you are spending 4x the total everyone else is spending on transaction fees). To get to a 90% success rate, you need to control 96% of the outputs. At this point you are now spending 24 times as much as everyone else combined.

Since you can't control which outputs I pick, you need to do this constantly to maintain your share of the network outputs. You can't turn on and off the attack when needed.

This is already unlikely. However, it gets (much) worse for the attacker.

I've previously explained how extremely high mix factors for high risk transactions are readily achievable at modest cost using sequential transactions. For example, if I use a mix factor 3 five times sequentially (I need to be careful to avoid traffic analysis, but that is feasible), the ambiguity set is 1024 (with an increase in aggregate transactions size of only 20). Even a mix factor of 3 applied twice yields an ambiguity set of 16 with transaction size increase of only 8x.

To reach a 90% chance of success on your attack with an ambiguity set of 16 you need to control 99.3% of the outputs on the network (spending 141x as much as everyone else combined).

This is becoming implausible even for a state-level actor, and certainly for anyone else. Visa's revenues (almost entirely transaction fees) are about $10 billion. 141 times that is $1.41 trillion. (For comparison world GDP is something like $85 trillion.)

With an ambiguity set of 1024 (used for my hypothetical "high risk" transaction), you'd need 99.9897% of the network for 90% success, which means spending almost 10,000 times as much as everyone else. If you can't tolerate a 10% chance of failure for your attack, then your costs explode further. These numbers easily exceed world GDP.

The Sybil attack as described is not feasible.

You understand that if Darkcoin is mixing coins to any degree it will lead to blockchain bloat that meets or exceeds the levels of CryptoNote coins? Good, just wanted to make sure you were aware.

How many nodes there are now btw?

lol



LOL



False. If you'd DOS or take down every masternode in "Darksend+" (implementation should be ready in couple of weeks), that would NOT destroy DRK's anonymity, because all coins in peoples' wallets would already be anonymized. Only those coins (= inputs) that have not been anonymized, will go through masternode's anonymization process. And, for those clients, the network would just seem stalled. The anonymity would NOT be destroyed.

Good morning.

I have found this point impossible to ignore. You are misrepresenting the argument.

Sybil attacks can be used against IP anonymization layer such as I2P.

I assume you have made this mix-up, because these systems are called mix network. It sounds similar to the mixin parameter of Monero.

To compromise ring signatures with such an attack, an attacker needs to serve you a completely changed block chain that contains only their own signatures.

If an attacker can do this, you have lost and it does not matter what coin you are using.

Your math is wrong all servers located with Amazon can't be considered "masternodes" they are NSANodes where NSA does not even pay for upkeep. Anything centrally located nodes means no anonymity at all with zero cost for powerful attacker.

It matters competitively. A clone or direct competitor without the persistent stigma of the illegitimate launch will outcompete the original. This has been demonstrated before with LTC, now more recently with XMR, and probably in other cases.

The original fraud is a time bomb ticking away at the base of DRK that will never go away until the coin eventually fails.

Furthermore DDOSing a single node accomplishes nothing. It is a symmetric peer-to-peer network and therefore naturally resistant to DDOS and other risks. There is no small set of "special" nodes that become a natural target.

It is priced in, but I suspect many drk bagholders wouldnt of bought if it wasnt for the initial hype/pump. 50% instamine on any other coin that wasnt offering masternode mixing/coinjoin "anonymity" would of destroyed it entirely.

My math was wrong((I forget one bitcoin is around $600 instead of $500 and I accidentally put 500k), 1 Masternode costs 6.2k to buy, which is 10 bitcoin. There are around 500 masternodes.

500 times 6,200=3,100,000.

That means it would cost $3,100,000 for a person/company to buy up All of Darkcoins masternodes and be able to see every transaction for themselves, destroying darkcoin's "anonymity".

Also, one can simply hack/DDOS the masternodes instead of buying them up, which would destroy darkcoin's "anonymity" as well

No such thing like that^^^, can happen to Cryptonote coins. If one were to DDOS a node(they cant buy it), it would only be temporary as you cant DDOS forever, Plus it will not affect Cryptonote coins anonymity in any way.

Comparison:

If someone were to DDOS all the nodes for a Cryptonote coin, it would simply stall the network temporarily and it will have No affect on the Cryptonote coin's anonymity

If someone were to buy up(centralize), DDOS, hack, or take offline(Amazon servers) All the nodes for Darkcoin, the network will stall and it's "anonymity" would be destroyed.

Ok so based on what you said, 2 is Darkcoin's value if it is "good enough to evade everyone except the NSA". That statement is wrong however, since there are many people that could stop/evade Darkcoin's anonymity besdies the NSA. Darkcoin's "anonymity" relies on Masternodes, and if those Masternodes were to get DDOSed, taken offline, or centralized, Darkcoin's "anonymity" would be destroyed.

Truthfully, I would give Darkcoin a rating of a 1.5, and give Cryptonote's a rating of a 3.5, since there is nothing anyone can do to take down Cryptonote coin's anonymity, but any millionaire can take down Darkcoin's "anonymity" at any point in time.

With I2P added, Cryptonote's anonymity would be a 4.5, if Darkcoin added I2P, it's rating would be a 2.5 because of the reasons above..

In either way, Darkcoin's "anonymity" relies on Masternodes, and those nodes can always be compromised, especially since there's a list of all the Darkcoin nodes that are offline and online and their Ip addresses. lol.

Before you say, "you can take down nodes for cryptonote coins etc", You can do that for Bitcoin as well. Even if you were to take down some nodes, the network will still run, just not as efficient...and the Cryptonote anonymity will never be compromised like Darkcoin's if one were to take down some nodes.

It is very unfortunate the launch happened as it happened. I was pissed off at the start too. The market has probably priced it in by now however.

I think, I am not alone in curiousness about your trading results, since you are ignoring advice from far more experienced traders so easily.

The conception of many important things/companies/groups can be argued to have been "illegitimate", yet they continue to shape our world. Your personal feelings are quite irrelevant when it comes to investing. The market cares for results, not whether someone thinks it's fair.

The conception of DRK was illegitimate, I will not buy it for this reason alone.

I wouldn't use word "only" when something is twice as big while having 1/100th of transactions. Even if you reduce it by 50-70% it will not scale for mainstream. Bitcoin based coins won't either in their current state, but there is a known solution for Bitcoin based coins - mini-blockchain.


Again, your math (amongst other things) is off.



You have said multiple times that I am a liar. I asked you to show me where exactly I have lied. No response. If you claim someone is a liar (multiple times) then you should back it up.

Let's assume that both DRK and CN coins have enough anonymity to evade everyone except government entities. I know you think Darkcoin anonymity is trivial, but the reality is that neither you  (nor anyone else from competitor coins) can trace a transaction.

To simplify things a bit, let's assign a numerical value to anonymity. Let's say Darkcoin has a value of 2, CN has a value of 2.5 and you need 5 to achieve "true" anonymity.  Let's say that our arbitrary value of 2 is good enough to evade everyone except the NSA. A rating of 2.5 does you no additional good, because it's still less than the 5 you need. So although you can say it's technically more anonymous, that "extra" anonymity does you no practical good, while the platform that provides it actually has negatives. Can you see what I'm saying? Why would anyone looking for privacy/anonymity go with CN, if it provides no additional benefit, while introducing new problems into the equation?

edit: I know you'll try to bring nodes into this, so once again, I'll remind you that CN nodes can also be attacked. And don't say you'll have more, the bloat will diminish the number of nodes you would have otherwise had.