Topic: Shadowcash vs. Monero, an unbiased debate. - page 2. (Read 7796 times)

Yeah, not asking you to pull out all the stops in regards to supporting your arguments, but directing curious minds to the proper resources to do their own research is helpful.

Thanks

Fair enough, noted for next time.

It is not a simple argument to support. I have already supported in a document I have not yet published. I am not ready to publish it yet. But if you go to I2P's website, they readily admit what I've stated.

I2P was not designed to be robust against three letter agencies. It was designed to provide some privacy against normal adversaries.

I explained this is more detail in the "Economic Totalitarianism" thread. I'll try to dig up a link for you...wait...

If you can't back up an argument with evidence, don't make it?

My white paper conspicuously cites Cryptonote

Apologies I did miss the entry at the end. They did put it in the References section.

There seems to be a lot of that going around.

They did include Cryptonote in their list of references BTW, but they never mentioned it anywhere in the paper.

Cryptonote ring sigs are not fully zero knowledge. The values of the transactions forces some correlations that wouldn't be there if the values were hidden. For one thing values requires smaller anonymity sets as for example noted in section 3.3.3 of the ShadowCash white paper (and similarly for Monero/Cryptonote):

http://shadow.cash/downloads/shadowcash-anon.pdf


P.S. How does ShadowCash justify trying to obscure that it copied Cryptonote and doesn't even cite Cryptonote in its white paper? It looks to me they were trying to fool n00bs into thinking they had created something different or superior to the pre-existing Cryptonote?

It's the same branding trap that Darkcoin fell into. Label it a suitably dark/scary/shadowy name that will no doubt get the hormones rushing of any teenage misunderstood pot-advocating cinema shooter... and all of his pocket money. It might sound nice as you jerk off, but no-one with any serious money is going to want to touch it.

One of the reasons I got into Monero was because of the somewhat ludicrously ingenious stealthy name. Broke from the yadayada-coin syntax while providing minimal "crap" that could otherwise potentially link it to the evils of the darkweb.

Sooner or later the anonymous sector will be attacked by Sean Hannity and his friends. Why do their job for them?

As someone who's only requirement is to throw large amounts of money across the globe anonymously, it's a mess I would want no part in.

I agree the website needs to be professional and most of all, it needs to actually teach n00bs. I love to teach people. I get great joy from making complex things easy for everyone to understand.

That is how you win.

Actually I do agree with you: see what I said above re: fixing image vs. fixing flawed tech later on.

BUT you have to admit that sooner or later (probably later) this "fluff" or "image" stuff eventually DOES matter.

None of these coins (even bitcoin) is really ever gonna go mainstream without a good IMAGE behind 'em.  

It may be a sad fact or "unfortunate truth" that we don't LIKE, but "image" does still matter and it does contribute a lot to eventual success, that is IF we want any of these coins to ever be anything more than just a fun niche for nerds to play with...

Disagree. The website even doesn't function correctly in my Chromium browser on Linux.

All that circus stuff (dog & pony show, clowns jugging flaming objects, etc) is for n00bs who want to lose money.

Android with its cruder looks kicked ass on iPhone so resolutely that in a few years it went from 0% to 80% global market share.

What is actually most important is network effects. ShadowCash is following the Steve Jobs philosophy of a walled garden that is optimized. If they can do everything themselves they can make it more perfect, more complete, and better. Wrong! Network effects trumps all.

If you want to facilitate SilkRoad, then you need to fix I2P and/or Tor (or replace them with a fixed network)! Thus enabling 1000s of flowers (sites as hidden services) to bloom.

Building some proprietary market place on top of broken anonymity networks is masturbation.

Well, I suppose for starters maybe the Monero team could recruit or steal away whoever did Shadow's website and graphic design co-ordination.  

Shadow's videos and images, logo, graphics, color scheme etc all totally kicks ass, very slick, very professional and clearly had a lot of thought and effort put into it.  All other anon coins...? Not so much.

Honestly, I bought the little bit of ShadowCoin that I own on Polo pretty much on a whim, totally based only on how polished their website and videos are, even before I bothered to look into who actually has the best crypto and etc.  I think it was the promo link they ran on preev for a while that caught my eye at first.

OTOH, in Monero's defense it's still true that IF you're gonna short change one side or the other at first, i.e. either the technology or the marketing, it's probably better to cut corners on the marketing at first because if your tech is solid but your image sucks, you can always fix the image stuff later... but if your tech foundation is weak and image/marketing strong, eventually (probably) the "lipstick on a pig" reality will come back and bite you on the ass.

But, look... let's be honest here, really.  
Biggest problem in ALL cryptocurrency is that the NAMES of all of 'em totally SUCK.  

"ShadowCash" sucks.  Kinda cool maybe for some people but "shadow" still too illegal for most.
"Monero" sucks.  Nobody cares about esperanto.  Too phony-baloney pseudo intellectual.
"MaidSafe".  Srsly?  Great project, great idea, great tech honestly but... really? Maid?

All names for all these coins suck.  The entire field is still just too nerdy and zero design-sense.

The ONLY NAME that doesn't suck, actually, is "BITCOIN".  

It's perfect: even better than BitGold would've been. Among SO many other things... Satoshi NAMED bitcoin absolutely perfectly.

Any other project with any hope to become even a small fraction of what bitcoin is, really needs to pay attention to this... but it's really hard to change your name later on down the line.  Gotta choose it well at the beginning and IMHO none of 'em have really done that right...

Not my misunderstanding at all.

It would be better to say curve 25519 than Curve25519, because afaik the latter refers to a white paper for a ECC Diffie-Helman key exchange, which is a different purpose and more optimized than EdDSA which is for public/private key signing. Much more than a minor distinction (thanks to DJB for such premature optimization on the naming and confusion):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19147619/what-implementions-of-ed25519-exist

Also for other readers and the original point of discussion, here is more on the advantages of EdDSA vs. Bitcoin ECDSA:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/50878/ecdsa-vs-ecdh-vs-ed25519-vs-curve25519

Sorry I am not going to be able to teach you the exhaustive reasons in a forum thread. This issue will be explained more in depth in a future white paper.

I understand it is very difficult for n00bs to understand.

You're completely misunderstanding. I'm ONLY talking about the curve, and Ed25519 uses the same underlying curve as Curve25519, albeit with different representations. That is why SafeCurves doesn't need a separate Ed25519 section, as Curve25519 covers it. That also explains why you can trivially convert Ed25519 public keys to Curve25519.

In fact, the IETF Ed25519 draft qualifies this by saying "For Ed25519, the curve used is equivalent to Curve25519 [CURVE25519], under a change of coordinates, which means that the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem is the same as for Curve25519."

It would be difficult for me to reference SafeCurves, but then talk about Ed25519, without going into great detail explaining this relationship. As the relationship is obvious to anyone (such as yourself) it is sufficient for me to merely state that I'm talking about the curve.

I'm not the "server and networking guy" - Monero is an open source project with a great many contributors. You can learn more here: https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/people

I2P traffic and IP addresses are encrypted 4? times. How exactly is it unsecure?

Well it is pointless (for Shadow and Monero) if it is based on I2P because I2P is no protection against the NSA. It has worse flaws than Tor. And when the NSA decides it is time to bust up I2P hidden services, they can easily do it.

There is a fundamental flaw in the way these anonymity networks publish the route to the hidden service. Await a future white paper for details and a proposed solution.

Edit: I just read at Shadow's Market place FAQ that it will reply on Tor or I2P. So the claim of it being anonymous (against the NSA) is bullshit.

Edit#2: putting one marketplace on an entire coin is really STOOPID. You are killing network effects by taking away what you should allow lots of others to innovate on. For example, one set of rules on how decentralized voting can make sure that a "car" isn't in the "clothes" category.


http://aboutshadow.com/index.php/shadowmarket/q-a



P.S. I knew when I saw all the fancy flash graphics at the Shadow site last year, that it would end up be another loser. That is how I can always distinguish the losers from the winners. Google won with its text interface. Monero is winning with formerly a very simple website. I am not invested in either of these coins. I am invested in my own anonymous coin effort which is vaporware at the moment. I am just noting that correlation seems to always be true. Fluff instead of stuff. The n00bs always fall for the fluff, bells, and whistles and other circus paraphernalia.

You don't know your own code, lol. Cyptonote uses Ed25519 for EdDSA, not Curve25519. It is an understandable mistake because Ed25519 is very similar and related to Curve25519. But that you don't know the difference, shows you are not the low-level cryptographer for Monero. And we all knew that any way. You are the server and networking guy correct? So no offense intended.  

Afaik, the main improvement that Bernstein achieved was to eliminate side channel timing attacks because his formulation of ECC is constant time (if implemented correctly). But some have argued that attribute isn't necessary in Bitcoin's application of ECC (ECDSA).

So Monero is going with that knapsack stuff with mixing block wise?

I think posting a lot in competitors' threads in the forums could be a worthy marketing plan. And create a lot of new threads as well. Not sure how effective though, but would get people to talk about Monero at least. You could nominate Icebreaker as your Chief Marketing Officer. Just an idea.