Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1324. (Read 4670643 times)

About that cryptsy law suit that someone posted earlier, it seems utter bullshit 

http://altcoinpress.com/2014/10/california-man-has-computer-hacked-then-blames-crypto-exchange/

who admin moneropool.com ? i see this pool handle more than 51% hashrate   of monero

Monero : Most speculative investment for me so far.
No user friendly wallet for mac yet. reddit readers 731, fb likes 226, no real homepage.. i suspect there are not many devs building on Monero as there are no services yet, no adoption, really nada, except highly speculative hope. Also the community is still very small as we speak, but that doesn't surprise me cause not enough work has been done yet to attract users (can't really use it yet, seems like in alfa phase).

So why did i invest? Mostly because of specualtion, the brand name Monero (might have a nice ring to it in SA and the hispanic world), anonymity, and a few loud voices.

Having lived and worked in SA, mainly Brazil, i know how many people have problems with paying txs (trying to avoid them), sending cash, inflation.. and cash in SA is still king for the majority. Monero could be very useful in SA indeed.

Why don't ypu all quit bitchin about sidechains and worry 'bout dat price?

Because smooth has better things to worry about. Thus,

development is just that. That which hath no meaning, is destined to fail.

Monero exists to buck the trend. A bucking bull is hard to ride, but every man who dare try it, is more of a man than not.

That works with a blacklist but it doesn't work with a scoring system that looks at how recently the coin has been involved with "evil" stuff or others sorts of sophisticated blockchain analysis. Resisting blockchain analysis is why Monero (Cryptonote) was created; tacking it on to Bitcoin is neither easy nor necessarily feasible at all.

I'm not really singling out Coinbase here, I just happen to be aware of what they have been doing. I doubt that other major Bitcoin companies are much different (perhaps using the same third party services, but again I'm just speculating on that). This will all probably get worse with BitLicense, etc.

taint all the coins

They specifically try to avoid that, at least in the federated model. They are trying to make side chain transactions look like ordinary multisigs to avoid censoring or blacklisting transactions to "evil" sidechains.

There is always some plausible deniability in Bitcoin really, since every time the coins move to a new address it can't really be proven that they didn't change owner (at least not from blockchain analysis). But tracing to you can still be an issue, and tracing on the chain at large can be a bigger issue, by identifying clusters of activity associated with various "evil" things. That could cause problems even if it couldn't be used to convict you. For example, Coinbase has been banning people whose Bitcoins seem to seem to transit "evil" parts of the blockchain. I don't know for sure, but I suspect they are using either a third party scoring system for this or they built their own.

There is no answer for "how they work" since they don't exist apart from some secret experiments apparently done by the sidechain developers using the trusted (federated) model.

There is nothing in the sidechain paper about mixing or other measures to inhibit tracing of coins to or from a sidechain. They do offer a method of avoiding address reuse making it harder to identify as an observer which transactions involve a side chain (what we call avoiding linking i.e. stealth). Linking alone isn't enough for real anonymity though. If you send coins to a sidechain and then those coins move, you know someone pulled coins off the sidechain and got your (former) coins. If you do that a lot, you could see a lot of these. Likewise when you pull coins off the sidechain, you will get coins somone sent there, which are also traceable.

You could personally mix your coins before sending to a sidechain, or ask that your coins from a sidechain be sent to a mixer address. But then it becomes questionable why you don't just use the mixer in the first place.

I think side chains will likely become a useful tool for building various things but I caution against making the leap from that to everything all of the sudden becomes a sidechain. I think even the developers overreach a bit in their paper, and people who haven't really looked carefully a the paper and are just responding to the buzz are overreaching even more.

What type of systems can be devised, possibly similar to coin mixing, that will prevent the accumulation of a measurable history of a particular bitcoins life if it were to be used in an alt-chain? Is that how they work?

Specifically I'm referring to keeping a recorded history on the usage of a certain amount of bitcoins, that possibly are 'tough' to be tied to any particular person, in an anonymous side chain that incorporates ring signatures? Would it be possible to recognize if someone had tried to pay someone (with resources available to them) with bitcoins received, even unknowingly, from such a chain after a certain date?

Yes. If your goal is to move into monero then back to BTC a side chain may make more sense since 1 BTC would always equal 1 SideChainRingSignatureCoin and you can move back and forth whenever you want.

A side chain could certainly be created whether it succeeds is not really any more clear than any other coin. In fact I don't think anonymity is really the best use case for side chains at all and other features are probably a better fit.

For example, if you can use a side chain for ultrafast possibly 0-conf transactions like XCN to safely pay for coffee, that could work quite well as long as you and the coffee seller have wallets supporting the side chain.

With anonymity things are a bit more complex, as you need a high level of usage (to create and replenish a large anonymity set) and you also need to not impair your anonymity at the entry/exit chokepoints, which is kind of hard to do as long as the (transparent) Bitcoin main chain remains dominant. Here are some of my earlier comments. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9298204

Also, eliminating exchange risk vs. Bitcoin is probably useless in the bigger picture unless Bitcoin becomes much bigger in the world at large. Exchange risk vs. fiat is what matters and Bitcoin certainly has that still.

Could a sidechain that uses ring signatures be created eliminating need for monero as there would be no exchange risk and the bitcoins are made anonymous with the sidechain?

Even if you get the same coins back you still added a bunch of plausible deniability as the coins would have been "marked" as going into the side chain and impossible to tell if you are the same person or not taking them out even if you get the same coins back. 

That's your response to the substance of my message?


It is possible this could happen! I suspect we would at least do it very slightly differently that addresses some of the issues I mentioned at negligible cost though.


What!? I'm certainly not wrong about #1 at the very least. You can't download the entire chain from the p2p and you must rely on a web site. Do you disagree? And #3 was actually supporting Boolberry's approach! Did you even read my message?

You have very tricky language smooth.
Even when you'll decide to do the same with ring sigs, you'll find the nice way to explain this

And once again - you wrong about 1, 2, 3. Blockchain is a confirmation of transaction history, and in BBR you can't change transaction history like i any other currency. Ring signatures has no sense after hundreds of confirmations, esspecially under checkpoins.


Zoidberg

In ~99.8% of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies you can verify the entire chain by: 1. Retrieving the entire chain from the p2p network, ensuring that you have the correct chain with the assumption that you are able to connect to at least one honest peer, 2. Verifying that no blocks have ever been changed by checking block and tx hashes, and 3. Verifying that chain of transactions from the genesis block is valid (with checkpoints disabled).

Boolberry:

1. Can't do #1 because the chain doesn't exist on the p2p. You would have to use (i.e trust) a web site.

2. Can't do #2 because the tx hashes don't include signatures.

3. Can do #3 predicated on the assumption that nothing has gone wrong with #1 and #2

Certainly you can see a degree of trust has been added here (#1) and the chain of steps that is normally used for trustless verification is broken in at least two places (#1 and #2).

As I have said before, I don't know that this is necessarily a bad trade off, but it is a different trade off. What is frustrating about it is not that Boolberry has decided to do something differently (experimentation and diversity and choices in the marketplace are great). It is that Boolberry aggressively portrays its changes unambiguously as "improvements" or "fixes" when they are actually trade-offs. This confuses people and causes them to then ask us why we are relying on an "unimproved" solution when in fact we have simply made different tradeoffs.

A very similar argument could be made about XCN, except that XCN is much more explicit that it is making a trade-off in order to achieve certain goals, and doesn't run around saying "XCN fixes Bitcoin flaws."

I remember a day back in October 2011 I read almost the same discussion on a Bitcoin forum. Bitcoin was going from 5 USD to almost 2 USD in a few days and I got quite a stack of BTC in my wallet.
I decided to do my usual day-to-day work and do not care so much. A youtube video I was watching on my phone while waiting for the breakdown service to get to my car reminded me that I got a bitcoin wallet on one of my old usb sticks sitting in a jar on a windowsill collecting dust. It was a few days before Christmas 2013. I sold them all, got a nice replacement for my old VW Golf 3 and some nice things for my kids&wife.

Moral of the story: Do not call a coin dead _before_ it is dead. Just keep what you got and come back later if you are unsure, or get all you can afford and wait for your happy moment.

Thats exactly what happening.  People have been pulling money out of alts into bitcoin for months.  Now they are moving out of bitcoin into fiat.  Many people have made significant profits.  You can't spend altcoins so you need to turn it into fiat via bitcoin to buy that single malt scotch, new car, kitchen remodel, etc...  Some people have made tremendous amounts of money.  They want to enjoy it not watch it shrivel away.

Well, it'd definitely be better for them in the longterm.

I'm saying that Alts can still be tied to BTC partially(during uptrends), since they are all cryptocurrencies, but they need to start cutting themselves off from Bitcoin(having their own payment processors, their own exchanges, and etc) in some ways so if bitcoin is in a bearish state, it wont affect the alts that much.

If that happen will be bad for alts at least on short term.
I am sure there are many investors, that invest in alts so much since they believe that if bitcoin will raise x10 in USD price all alts will also. If there would not be this believing, many would pull out part of majority of  their investments.