Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 879. (Read 4671920 times)

because im involved in the missives, I guess I can speak up. We record them. I edit them. People transcribe them. And then they sit in a magical digital incubator until the moon turns the proper shade of purple and enough animal un-sacrifices are made (thats when you set up animals to breed. The Monero gods are pro-life. So go find some turtles and put on some Barry White)

re: database testing. The latest bug that my daemon keeps hitting is some threading issue. Anybody have any experience debugging threading problems?

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/issues/328

I've gotten #2 before but never yet #1. Did you have allies or did you manage that solo?

dnaleor played some agar.io again today

Will there be another Monero Missive released soon?

Any updates on database testing?

By repeating false enough times, it surely becomes true, no? 

Since you are repeating this nonsense, you obviously missed the correct answer I already gave earlier.


Furthermore I'd add that it won't work, because given such a premine and intelligent users (or wallet developers) they will simply avoid mixing with the premine outputs. This in turn makes the task of an attacker easier, because now that attacker need only control a large portion of the remaining outputs, a far smaller number.

So you can choose your poison. Either certain traceability by the original fraudulent developers, or easier traceability by a subsequent attacker.

Or you can just leave the scammers to the dustbin of history and use a true open source coin with a open, community-driven development process and a fair ongoing distribution process that makes it extraordinarily unlikely for anyone to control anywhere near 80%, particularly if the coin actually sees widespread use.

Isn't life a bit too short to be wasting your mental effort trying to come up with increasingly contrived excuses for Bytecoin's fraud and greed?

preposterous as it sounds the statement it seems to me is true. bytecoin scam or no bytecoin scam. as I say Ill now look to see the last 12 months+ trading history to see if it has already been disproved by large% sales.

why stop giving me the benefit of the doubt after my most curious insight thus far that arguably a CN coin's anon cannot be safeguarded unless a large % is never sold on exchanges or mined by bad actors or both, and (very tentatively, perhaps regrettably) provides BCN with a justification for a premine.

understand this is purely a thought-experment. i am not vouching for anything here.

That is a central bank.


FWIW I have been giving you the benefit of the doubt as we get to know you.

You just added enough to the "doubt" pile that I am second guessing that benefit.

understood.

and (sorry to repeat) do you agree with the following statement?:

The only way to prevent gov(s)/attacker(s)/whoever(s) buying-in and/or mining in order to de-anon the CN system would be to premine a huge amount and vow to not sell it.

(LOL. I know that sounds like trolling but the logic is sound, yes? In this scenario the creators, aware of the fatal flaw, take the only measure possible to securie its anonymity forever*, assuming they keep their vow to never sell)

thanks
*shouldnt use that word. sorry.

(will look/see how much has been sold in last 12 months)

There is no specific set amount, but 80% is very high. It is a question of probabilities. Someone who controls e.g. 80% has a high probability to control all of the mixins of any new transaction and therefore know which is the real one (since it is the only one that isn't theirs). With a mix of 5+1 that 80% owner will be able to trace about 33% of new transactions. In that same situation someone who owns 20% (still a lot in any remotely reasonably distributed coin) would only be able to trace 0.032% of new transactions, so obviously that is a huge difference.


No, because such a vow could never be verified or enforced, and furthermore you don't need to sell it, just share information about it. There is certainly no possibility of confidence as long as someone is in a position to do that in an invisible and undetectable manner.

The only protection against this vulnerability is for the coin to be launched, traded, and mined, in a public process where market dynamics and transparency give anyone observing the process reasonable confidence that such disproprtionate control is unlikely or impossible. The best way for major stakeholders to do that is to just hold a significant portion themselves, which is far easier to do when distribution is fair and gradual.

As long as there is a significant number of people doing this (as there is in any well-launched, and well-distributed coin such as Bitcoin or Monero), there is an exceedingly small likelihood of anyone controlling an unacceptably large portion (for example, as above, 80% vs. 20% or less).

Quoted message trimmed for brevity and relevance.

@smooth. re the above. thanks

the BTC q was asked to see if there were any parallels. not out of disrespect . without BTC none of us would be here.

I would say there is an understandable obsession with fair distro. sadly IMO fair distro simply does not exist in crypto, mostly to do with mining farms, pnd groups, BTC whales messing with altcoins etc etc

The BCN story is undeniably dodgy.Does it make a diff if BCN was privately mined rather than its blockchain being faked? to me it does, if only slightly

regarding my Q about minimum CN coin supply required for de-anon - i asked that to establish if the amount allegedly pre-mined was exactly equal to the amount required to de-anon the tech.

moving forward it is only fair to assume some 3-letter agencies are accumulating these types of currencies, if only as a precaution. Ill read the MRL doc u linked in the hope that the answer to what the min % of CN supply is required for a de-anon is plain to see. needless to say the notion a fascist gov would only need to "buy de-anonymisation" by gradually accumulating a certain % of coin is fing disturbing, as much or more than the BCN origin story. Yes it might take time, yes it might spike the price and yes they could do it. ironically the only way to prevent a gov buying-in/mining in order to de-anon the system would be to premine a huge amount and vow to not sell it. LOL. I know that sounds like trolling but the logic is sound, yes?

Neato.  I wonder what his intentions/interest are?

By "start" I mean the public launch/reveal/"discovery". Before that I don't know what happened, nor do I particularly care, since the subsequent fraud made the whole thing uninteresting to me, except as a project ripe to be forked away from developers who had destroyed any possibility of community trust or respect.


None, and I answered this question comprehensively on the "Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam" thread. I don't really know that it is on topic there, but it is certainly off topic here. Please be respectful of forum rules and etiquette about thread topics and head elsewhere unless this has some relevance to Monero.


See MRL-0001 at lab.getmonero.org


Some forum guy who has been around for a while and wrote mostly about various altcoin, etc. scams. He was looking into the Bytecoin scam before that post though, I remember him writing about it on the coinmarketcap thread a few months earlier, possibly elsewhere as well (Bytecoin thread?). Apparently he was/is a student at Princeton, I don't remember seeing him identify himself other than that.

Quoted message trimmed for brevity and relevance.

1. There a few "facts at hand". I should have said few.
2. Im not sure how u can claim it was a scam from "start to finish". GingerAle's remembered theory of a rift in the original team seems plausible
3. am i being "obstinately contrary"? quite possibly, but im learning a lot. thanks

4. Q How much Bitcoin was mined in "private circles" before the launch of bitcointalk and/or a wider mining community

5. smooth, u know ur stuff - kudos.
Q. clearly owning 80% of a CN coin allows de-anon (is this proven byw?). my final question is, in ur opinion what is the minimum amount required to achieve a 50% chance de-anon'ing tx's. could one "crash the plane" with 50%?

6. who is rethink-your-strategy? when i google "bytecoin scam" it all points to his original post.

many many thanks for ur inputs


@kazuki - thanks for this post… interesting. the part emboldened is why i began looking into this. as i said before i assumed BCN was dead.



No intention here to shill BCN. Just replying. thanks. Luckily the "opening lid" thread has sparked up and we can move things over there. Pls quote this post over there if u wish. cheers.

Woah! Monero is getting popular indeed https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/329


Lol, you mean it wasn't enough to ninjamine 80%+ they deliberately launched the coin with a cripple miner for us peasants?

Agree, but mining it 'in closed private circles for several months' is faking it considering that it claimed to be two years old, and 'closed private circles' for whatever period of time constitutes a premine by definition (mined before public release).

Furthermore, the premise that the cryptographic and programming experts who developed the original technology couldn't do even the most basic of optimizations (or more likely de-unoptimizations) on the mining code they invented over several months (much less two years) is completely implausible. It is likewise implausible even that independent 'mining teams' not directly associated with the original inventors wouldn't have optimized it at least to some degree, leading to a much higher hash rate, which is not seen on the (faked) blockchain.

The reason no such evidence of these optimizations/un-deoptimizations exists is most plausibly that they were actually running un-deoptimzied code on a very small number of computers over a small period of time to fake the whole thing.


(Putting aside for the moment that your statement reads as "there are no facts at hand except [the facts at hand]"...)

There are many facts at hand, including the first hand reports from many of us who were around at the time and saw the whole clumsily but obviously orchestrated "discovery" of BCN on a dead coin thread, the entire charade of a "message" from Cicada 3301 (100% fake), and all the rest of an obvious altcoin premine scam from the era that was the peak of the altcoin premine scams. The whole thing was a fraud from start to finish, and there are countless first hand reports of it. Moreover there is a lot of "facts at hand" in the rethink-your-strategy post (and various replies on that thread, including attempts to "refute" it from outed sock-puppet and purchased accounts) besides just the whitepaper forensics, all of which point to fraud and scamming. If you don't see it, you are being willfully blind or obstinately contrary.

IMO, the fact that the miner released with BCN was deliberately crippled to be orders of magnitude less efficient than it should be its determinant in turning the scales in favor of the blockchain being faked.

Minting Money with Monero ... and CPU vector intrinsics

That is the point that was made above, if you needed another confirmation.

It's as if you have a large plane taking off. Can it stay up ? It's got multiple engines, and is designed to be resistant to the loss of one or two engines and still be able to land. But a malicious mechanic might be able to sabotage more than or two. Three ? All four ?

Any such four engine plane is vulnerable to three of its engines being sabotaged, yes. And it may not be obvious until too late. In the case of Bytecoin, there is ample circumstancial evidence that three of the engines have been sabotaged. The fourth ? Maybe.

Could the Monero plane be sabotaged this way too ? Theoretically, yes. But this is all about conditional probabilities. What is the probability that Bytecoin has 80% of its outputs in a small set of hands, given the various things we've seen ? It is higher, all other things being equal, that the probability of another cryptonote having 80% of its outputs in a small set of hands. Sure, it could still be the case, like the next four engine plane you see migh have three of its engines sabotaged despite nothing weird having been detected about it.

Nothing's ever certain, even though the language of everyday life often couches things in assertions. Typically, people will say something like "Mike is at work", although the more correct thing to say might be "I saw Mike walk out the door as he usually does every morning to go to what he says is work, and enough time has elapsed that he had time to reach the workplace, assuming normal traffic conditions and no accident, etc, etc".

If you're actually interested in this, you may enjoy reading MRL-0004.pdf from the Monero labs people.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but hopefully someone else reading the original willful confusion may find this helpful.

Yes it would be the same. The difference it is that is extremely difficult and expensive to buy 80% of something that is out in public and viewed by a large number of people as having significant current or potential value, which has been the case for Monero almost since its very inception (certainly by the time 10% of it was mined). To do that you would need to bid the price up tremendously.

Furthermore, mining continues (<50% of Monero is even mined at all so far, so it would literally be impossible to buy 80% of the total supply right now) at a significant rate. Therefore, to maintain this sort of large share and not have it diluted away, you would also need to have a dominant share of mining, in this case competing with other people who want to mine it, an another expensive proposition. Or alternately buy a large share of the mined coins, again competing with anyone else who wants to buy it, or miners who want to hold it  (and yet again an expensive proposition). This of course is not the case for BCN, which is almost fully mined by now, and indeed was 82% mined by the time there is any verifiable evidence of anyone outside of its inner circle being aware of its existence.

By contrast if it is known or controlled only by a small group or single actor, you can ninja/premine as much as you want -- 82% for example -- without needing to bid/compete at all, so your cost can be virtually zero. and you can keep that 82% share forever at no further cost without needing to mine or buy at all.