Topic: Shadowcash vs. Monero, an unbiased debate. (Read 7796 times)

Yes.

Is SDC anon feature decentralized?

Well... been a while... just bumpin' this thread to see if there's anything else to say here?  LOL

Seems like ALL of my (few) "alts" not doin' too well lately but still gonna hodl 'em just as hedge against any bitcoin catastrophe or whatever "natural evolution" may happen here in crypto-world.  

Fun times  



P.S. {Edit} Sig tag says, "formerly AnonyMint, UnunoctiumTesticles, iamback, contagion, TheFascistMind, etc…" and FWIW and IMHO your best coolest screen name by far has always been "AnonyMint" but really, why change accounts so much?  WTF, dude?  LOL

Okay I won't go off on that tangent here.

Thats for damn sure. Shadow is tackling the crypto end game while most people are just dicking around digging for shit to fling.

Also I do not think instant transactions are feasible. How would you divy out blockchain authority and ensure that a one to one transaction is secure without a vote (can't rely on closest/quickest response time)? But that is a whole nother topic and this thread should stick to the main theme of POS vs. POW and the perceived benefits/flaws of SDT.

Without spam resistance, an adversary can flood a channel and lower the anonymity set. Adversary could also drive users away from using the chat due to the spam overhead, thus further reducing the anonymity set.

Appears to me ShadowCash are trying to do too much at one time thus preoccupied away from being thorough in their white papers. See upthread for supporting facts.

Disagree. I think instant transactions and scaling to microtransaction volume (million transactions per second) will unseat Bitcoin.

Anonymity will become more important, but most people in the world don't care about anonymity. They care about social media and stuff like that. Monetizing that with microtransactions is the huge market.

Anonymity could end up being very important as the bankrupt States of the world start to tax everything that moves. Chicago is going to tax video streaming on the internet.

But these anonymity markets may be much slower to develop than microtransaction markets. I'd pursue both if I did a coin.


I would suggest making it super easy for people to mix BTC. Then try to hook them into using XMR from there.

I would suggest creating new uses for anonymous coins and especially combined with microtransactions.

Block chain scaling is a problem even for Bitcoin with no private transactions.

All cryptocoins have scalability problems.

I intend to attempt to solve this.

Public and private coin spaces are a problem, because they can weaken the anonymity for the private coin space. Think about it. If you allow people to spend off to non-anonymous space, then spend back into the anonymous space then anonymity sets break down.

The CN viewkey is superior in that you can give to a trusted party without giving it to the public. Public coin spaces of SDC give the anonymity breakage to everyone.

Logic on this stuff isn't always as obvious as n00bs think it is.

I would caution I make mistakes sometimes. I do try to correct and admit when I find an error in my work.

I read the summary. Will probably read the white paper in detail in the future.

They claim to prove sufficient security for some cases where the entropy of PoS has been attacked, but afaics they haven't proved every genre of attack, because afaics the entropy of PoS can't be characterized so we can't know what all the attacks might be. For example, let's say we took entropy for the modifier from a hash of the transactions for each block. But this hash can be gamed by the participants in the mining.

Their points against PoW I think can be eliminated, but again I will have to say await a white paper.

The basic problem with PoW now is we burden it with too much responsibility. Satoshi forgot to follow the Principle of Least Power and separation-of-concerns. I believe it possible to unburden PoW so that it is not longer an expensive appendage, but rather just a voting mechanism as it was originally intended to be, essentially one vote one computer because PoW won't have the power that it does not. Specifically I think it is possible to entirely filter the 51% attack. But I need to work through all the details formally before I can be sure of this.

I would take TPTB_need_war/Anonymint words over the ones of the most people on this thread, he posted clues about who he is in other threads, Monero Research Labs delivered several worthy academic papers but he is an independent expert.

No there are distinct advantages for PoW:

• You can prove PoW's security. We know the failure points are 51% attack, 25 - 33% for selfish mining attack. Each PoS is adhoc, and can't prove generally/reliably the security nor characterize the entropy of the system. With PoS, generally you have no idea if you are secure or not. which is the antithesis of security.
• PoW can distribute coins, even widely to home users if you realize they will not count the cost of their electricity, but PoS can not distribute.

Whether someone can prove security math for a specific flavor of PoS, is something I am unaware of. Has anyone done it?

How does a declining block reward to some trickle constitute protection against a 51% attack?


Mining centralization is also due to the rising transaction rate per second (see the current GavinCoin chaos for Bitcoin now) causing the increasing block size to not propagate without some centralization amongst a fewer number of high bandwidth nodes. Solutions such as IBLT are really just obfuscation of mining centralization.

This is a complex discussion from another thread that I am not going to repeat here.

Also afaik, ASICs haven't yet been designed for CryptoNite hash so I don't think you can reliably make that claim.

Both are good. Each has it's strenghs and weaknesses. It is more a religious question in my opinion, which of both is better.

There is one thing that PoW can do which PoS can't. Distribute coins to new users who own no coins. PoW fails at this in practice because Bitcoin is dominated by ASICs. I think I may have an economic solution that destroys ASICs.


I think I may have a solution to this and solved the 51% attack also. Await white paper.

...

Thanks, I'll be taking a look at all of this when I can. Gives me some direction for my personal research

It is not scholarly to not discuss prior art and explain the differences. Which is typical of altcoins isn't it.

Also note I edited my post, to point out no discussions of spam resistance and scaling.

Curious that the white paper makes no mention of how their system is similar to and/or different from bitmessage.

But then, they did include bitmesssage in the list of references.

I started discussing I2P on page 21 and the discussion continued until at least page 24 of the thread:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11842826

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Also I don't know where to find a technical description of ShadowCash's private messaging anonymity algorithm?? You can see my analysis of similar attempts on the prior linked and following linked post, and I very much doubt that ShadowCash is doing it correctly:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11844778

I am nearly certain that ShadowCash will have a flaw in it and that is probably why they are not detailing it in a white paper. They are hiding details.

Edit: Okay I found the ShadowChat white paper. I didn't know what to google for until just recently.

http://www.shadow.cash/downloads/shadowcoin-p2p-em.pdf

Section 3.3 Message Propagation makes it clear that is a Bitmessage-like clone. They are sending every encrypted message to every peer on the network, except grouped by 1 hour channels. So that means they send out a list of all messages to all peers, then peers only request an hourly channel which contains a message intended for them.

That is indeed Information Theoretic Security anonymity.

So thus I will give ShadowChat a thumbs up. This is the first proposal I've seen which is a potential alternative to Bitmessage.

From that description it may be feature incomplete from my perspective of what is really needed out by the market. And I will not detail now the other features I would like to see. They probably have many plans for the ShadowChat which I am not aware of.

However, I don't know if it can scale. That is one of the problems with Bitmessage. Imagine you have 1 million peers and you have to send a message digest to all of them. You can of course shrink the anonymity sets to the desired sizes by decreasing the channel width in time, but the digests still need to be sent to every peer. There are alternative ways to design the channels so digests are not sent to all peers. Appears they haven't done that yet.

Also there is no discussion of the spam resistance.

Again I am giving ShadowMarket a thumbs down.