The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

monero has become popular in this space, but the average (illicit) user is still probably making operational mistakes while buying, using, and selling it. in the case of monero a lot of people like to skip the step where they download a 30GB+ blockchain over tor, and I can't blame them. when the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies are effortlessly private, that's when they will have arrived so to speak. I'm fairly optimistic about moxie & co's recently-announced mobilecoin (https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf) for that reason -- if it's going to get adopted by whatsapp, the user experience will necessarily be pretty darned simple.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#5

Post by elmar » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 6:31 AM UTC

tribby wrote: post #4

monero has become popular in this space, but the average (illicit) user is still probably making operational mistakes while buying, using, and selling it. in the case of monero a lot of people like to skip the step where they download a 30GB+ blockchain over tor, and I can't blame them. when the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies are effortlessly private, that's when they will have arrived so to speak. I'm fairly opti…

only way to acquire 100% private crypto is to mine it yourself and then always use a full node for transactions.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#6

Post by phs318u » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 6:36 AM UTC

Called it (in a rather verbose comment 11 days ago).

TLDR: BTC - the mob came, the mob went - XMR

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993110

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#7

Post by thisisit » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 6:43 AM UTC

justboxing wrote: post #2

> Some coins post fake blockchain entries to hamper surveillance I don't get this. How do you post fake entries? Wouldn't the ledger be out of balance, or unbalanced or whatever the correct term for that is? And how are fake transactions identified by the faker?

I guess the writer got an ELIF and hence the whole thing was simplified a lot.

Here's my understanding of Monero - It has the concept of ring signatures. I guess this is what the author is referring to. When a transaction is posted to blockchain it is assigns coins to a public key (generally known as the address). Now what Monero does is that it obscures the end address and hides who the transaction went to.

That said, blockchain doesn't exactly use the concept of double boook keeping. So, you don't really have things going to out of balance. I am writing an article on how cryptocurrency transactions work. It it still WIP.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#8

Post by phs318u » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 6:51 AM UTC

phs318u wrote: post #6

Called it (in a rather verbose comment 11 days ago). TLDR: BTC - the mob came, the mob went - XMR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15993110

Interesting... two downvotes, no comments. I'd love to know why. Did I come across as snarky? If so, didn't mean to. It's just the timing of this article is so close to my prior speculation on this that I thought it warranted a mention.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#9

Post by thisisit » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

> Its main competitor, Zcash -- which isn’t known to have a significant criminal following -- can offer even better privacy protection.

On zcash, there was this discussion:

http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactio...

which suggested that nearly 31.5% of the hidden transactions in Zcash has some transparent parts to it.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#10

Post by paulmd » Wed, Jan 03, 2018, 6:59 AM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #9

> Its main competitor, Zcash -- which isn’t known to have a significant criminal following -- can offer even better privacy protection . On zcash, there was this discussion: http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactio... which suggested that nearly 31.5% of the hidden transactions in Zcash has some transparent parts to it.

re: only 3.5% of traffic using z-addrs:

The dirty secret of crypto is that there is almost no economy that exists for any of the altcoins, and relatively little even for Bitcoin (which functions as the reserve currency due to its lions' share of the economy).

Effectively, by volume most altcoins are held by either miners (who sell immediately), or daytraders who will pump and dump. A very small fraction is held by true believers (who will HODL under all circumstances), but they don't contribute to the economy either.

Such people don't care about anonymity, they're not actually using the currency, they're just traders, and traders mostly don't need to be anonymous.