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Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 879. (Read 4670673 times)

legendary
Activity: 1470
Merit: 1000
Want privacy? Use Monero!
dnaleor played some agar.io again today Tongue
hero member
Activity: 686
Merit: 500
Will there be another Monero Missive released soon?

Any updates on database testing?

legendary
Activity: 1154
Merit: 1001
By repeating false enough times, it surely becomes true, no?  Grin
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198


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.


That is a central bank.



(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)


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.


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.

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

Quote from: smooth
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.

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?

full member
Activity: 225
Merit: 100


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.


That is a central bank.



(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)


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.


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.
legendary
Activity: 3766
Merit: 5146
Whimsical Pants


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.


That is a central bank.



(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)


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.
sr. member
Activity: 350
Merit: 250
full member
Activity: 225
Merit: 100
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.

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 mixin 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.



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)
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
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.

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.

Quote
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?

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.
full member
Activity: 225
Merit: 100
@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?
legendary
Activity: 3766
Merit: 5146
Whimsical Pants
Woah! Monero is getting popular indeed https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/329

Neato.  I wonder what his intentions/interest are?
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
Im not sure how u can claim it was a scam from "start to finish".

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.

Quote

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

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.

Quote
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%?

See MRL-0001 at lab.getmonero.org

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

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.
full member
Activity: 225
Merit: 100

 it seems just as likely that the coin was mined in closed private circles for several months as it does the chain was entirely faked.


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.

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.

Quote from: Wanderlust
There are no facts at hand (except whitepaper forensics) and a lot of educated guesswork

(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.




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.



I repeat: It seems just as likely that the coin was mined in closed private circles as it does the blockchain was entirely faked. There is no way of knowing if the entire BCN Team or just a part of it is responsible for this mystery. also despite the "fake dates" on the paper it seems very likely that CN was being developed in 2012.


I'm not stranger to this conclusion, there is definitely fake dates in the whitepaper, as it has been proved, but it does not discard the technology that has been "saved" through Monero, moreover it continues being developed this means another clean fork could take place in the future, I think the problem with this history is how deeply ignored it is outside Bytecoin/Cryptonote/Monero circles, like you said, you don't see a single interview with the "Bytecoin team" where the guy asks what the fucking is wrong with the timestamps and why there is not proof that it has been mined since 2012, one of the few mainstream publications that tried to explain with a honest approach all these issue was Lets Talk Bitcoin back September, 2014: http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mind-to-matter/lets-talk-bitcoin/e/lets-talk-bitcoin-144-news-talk-35387986 I continue to observe Bytecoin and I have to confess the level of activity around this coin is surprisingly large which makes me wonder if they are planning something in the future, but so far the only move that could save it from eternal scrutiny would be a reset of the blockchain or a at least of all that mined before it was made public (March 2014 I think) even making it permanently inflationary would not excuses the massive amount mined in secret, if this was a darknet coin so why did it was made public after 80%+ mined? Why not let it being a "darknet coin" and launch clean ones with verifiable honest launch on the clearnet... oh wait that was already been done: Monero and others.

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.
sr. member
Activity: 350
Merit: 250
Woah! Monero is getting popular indeed https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/329

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.


Lol, you mean it wasn't enough to ninjamine 80%+ they deliberately launched the coin with a cripple miner for us peasants?
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198

 it seems just as likely that the coin was mined in closed private circles for several months as it does the chain was entirely faked.


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.

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.

Quote from: Wanderlust
There are no facts at hand (except whitepaper forensics) and a lot of educated guesswork

(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.
hero member
Activity: 649
Merit: 500

 it seems just as likely that the coin was mined in closed private circles for several months as it does the chain was entirely faked.


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
Quote
Followed a day later by raising that to a 5x speedup, and then an 8x speedup, and within a week, an 11x speedup.  That was pretty remarkable, given that a developer had already started trickling optimizations into the codebase.

The more I looked at it, the more clear it became:  The original developers deliberately crippled the miner.  It wasn't just slow, and it wasn't just naive;  it was deliberately obfuscated and made slow by the use of completely superfluous copies, function calls, use of 8 bit pointer types, and accompanied by the most ridiculously slow implementation of the AES encryption algorithm one could imagine.[

(snip)

By May 16th, I'd squeezed about 90% of the optimizations out of it, and we were running 100x faster than the coin was at its initial release.  That didn't stop me from obsessing about speed tweaks for the next week or so, but it gave me a little breathing room to start thinking about the next step.
/quote]

See also how the Monero devs patched the glitch pretty fast:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11153715
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11153859
legendary
Activity: 1276
Merit: 1001
FINALLY. I am concerned about this 80% de-anon prob which could theoretically affect any CN currency. I asked before but would like a more conclusive response (if poss) as to whether one could buy 80% of a CN coin's supply to de-anon all tx's?

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.

legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
FINALLY. I am concerned about this 80% de-anon prob which could theoretically affect any CN currency. I asked before but would like a more conclusive response (if poss) as to whether one could buy 80% of a CN coin's supply to de-anon all tx's?

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.

legendary
Activity: 2268
Merit: 1141
Can someone share with me the volume of transactions from Monero Club so far?

I am also interested in the number of registered users by region

This data may give us some clues about where interest is higher and where more marketing activities should be directed.

Shoot Atrides a PM, he is the owner of MoneroClub -> https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/atrides-185001

full member
Activity: 225
Merit: 100
... For arguments sake if the motive was "3) To prevent a de-anon" then i'd feel our anonymity was in safe hands ...

This is of such absurd logic that it really get's comical. So you would feel safe to entrust your anonymity and investment privacy, over to an individual or group that holds the absolute power of turning your anonymity to shreds on a whim. A group that (going by your suggestion) favored deception over truth, privileged knowledge over fair and open/public access. Sweet.

Oh, crap, I got caught in a TrollTrap(TM) again...

There's a never ending supply of motivated bad actors providing BCN with life support.
Adding another one to my ignore list...  Roll Eyes


I agree it a spurious theory but the only one i could come up with which gives BCN the benefit of the doubt. I hold only 1BTC worth of BCN and am hardly a motivated actor. I have no attachment to the coins I hold and will readily dump them when I see fit. Adding me to your ignore list is uncalled for since I am not a troll.


I also think you're a troll because you're posting all this here (XMR thread). BCN is off topic, so please be respectful take your "inquisitions" to a BCN-specific thread.

To show I'm not a troll and simply being duly diligent I will copy this post (and yours) to the BCN thread.

[Hi, I'm back for more BCN related discussion]

Welcome back to the XMR thread, where your BCN blather remains off-topic. Please be respectful and take your troll posts back to the BCN thread where they belong.

Umm...OK? As you know I posted a link to the BCN thread where you replied to me (thanks). Some of your community replied in this thread and I replied them back. Not really my bad.



My favorite theory, which I've picked up from someone (i forget who), was basically that the crypto side and the scam side were 2 separate entities. I.e., the ones who developed the cryptography / core for BCN were not involved with the scam. The theory goes that most cryptographers / true crypto enthusiasts could care less about profiteering, so the crypto side just bailed when the scam side took over.




Interesting angle which could help resolve my issue with motive. Thanks.




+1

Could we please keep the debate on whether Bytecoin was a ninjamine or a premine in the following thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/blowing-the-lid-off-the-cryptonotebytecoin-scam-with-the-exception-of-monero-740112

I already posted there several days ago, no replies. BCN wont discuss this in their thread (LOL),  so I came to the XMR thread and am now being called a troll. It's a bloody raw deal if u ask me. I really dont see the problem if a CN history n00b (like myself) revisits the BCN/Monero origin story. One cannot discuss the history of Monero without telling the BCN origin story. There are no facts at hand (except whitepaper forensics) and a lot of educated guesswork. Thanks you all for opening the lid with me once more. Im sure that for you it seems tedious but this story will be told for a long time to come yet. Be prepared.


FINALLY. I am concerned about this 80% de-anon prob which could theoretically affect any CN currency. I asked before but would like a more conclusive response (if poss) as to whether one could buy 80% of a CN coin's supply to de-anon all tx's?

Thank you all once more for your invaluable time.


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