Can anyone comment on the privacy solution offered by BTCD? They have termed it Teleport and Telepathy.
Teleport seems to have components of XMR's solution to privacy:
"In a mantissa attack you are identified because of the exact size of your transaction.
That makes your transaction distinctive among others and it is easy to spot you on the blockchain.
To remove this threat the telepods use standard denominations, i.e.100, 50,10, 5,1 and so on."
I've seen comparisons of XMR with other anon-centric coins but not with BTCD.
Unless it has been reworked from the dark paper last year, it is worthless and doesn't solve any of the problems that blockchains exist to solve.
You send your telepod to the recipient. The recipient can either submit it on the blockchain, it which case it ends up looking exactly the same as if you spent it yourself. Or they can pass the telepod on to another recipient, which in theory delinks you from the first recipient (though you are now linked with the second, which for all you know might even be worse, and vice versa). What is to keep first recipient from passing the output on to two parties (effectively a double spend) or to keep you from double spending the output while it is being passed around? Nothing.
So:
1. Ignores the need for double spend protection
2. Transactions are still strongly linked to some actual recipient on the blockchain (even more so than coinjoin), by at best a small number of hops, maybe none.
Other stuff in BTCD like the asset exchange might be worth something -- I haven't evaluated it -- but the privacy stuff is just nonsense.
If there is something new going on, I'd need to see a new paper, though frankly I'm not sure I would put in the effort to read it. Getting through the dark paper was excruciating.
I did some digging to try and find out specifics about BTCD's anonymity features and this was all I could find (mostly from the supernet/nxt report).
Quoting the parts that I think are relevant:
"Unlike all other anonymity coins, BitcoinDark does not use mixing or ring signatures to achieve anonymity."
"Teleport allows you to send money in a way that makesit very hard to track your IP address. It is done through a trustless and decentralized off-blockchain exchange mechanism.
Telepathy on the other hand will allow users to send data without the need to know each other's IP addresses... transactions are end-to end encrypted and not linked to each other.
There is no exact time when a transaction happens and the transactions will use standard denominations."
"This is avoided in teleport by using one-time addresses called telepods. Each address is used only once,so its impossible to link it to any other part of
the network. This approach was recommended by Satoshi, but very few bitcoin users seem to follow that advice in practice."
"Instead of submitting a transaction directly to the network, the privacy-server encrypts it multiple times and passes it through several other nodes first"
"telepathy... allows nodes in the network to communicate without knowing the IP address of the recipient. Transactions are sent to a 'dead-drop' address
which is seen by multiple parties. No one knows who exactly is the recipient, other than the recipient himself. This is because the transaction is encrypted and only the
recipient can decode it."
I tried looking for the actual whitepaper but was unable to find it so I'm working with what I can find.
The BTCD is supposed to be releasing a much more efficient version of the Bitcoin wallet (Iguana) which has 'anon' features using BTCD tech.
If Bitcoin users use the iguana wallet as their main BTC wallet (due to efficiency) it is important that the anonymity feature that is most accessible to them is actually functional.
From what you said, the anon features do not seem thoroughly tested and possibly even not that anonymous.
If this is true, this is going to be a big problem, especially for users that want to make use of anonymity.
