Off-topic but related, any way to block/disable their stupid auto-play videos?
I use uMatrix and uBlock Origin and didn't get auto-play...
The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
21–30 of 120 posts
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#22How long was the criminal underworld using bitcoin before they learnt it was a public ledger.
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I didn't downvote you. Your comment provides little new information and looks like bullshit. Lots of people are predicting bitcoin's fall. For lots of reasons. People can rarely time the markets, I'd expect strong evidence otherwise. Do you track all your predictions?
/speculation: If Bitcoin doesn't implement the lightning network or something else withing 3 months, they will die, eventually.
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#24monero 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…
I'm confident that we won't need something like MobileCoin, which is based on secure hardware which you have to trust. I'm pretty sure someone will come up with some kind of combination of RaiBlocks and Monero, for example. Also, SpectreCoin might be onto something if they are able to implement stealth staking.
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#25How long was the criminal underworld using bitcoin before they learnt it was a public ledger.
Anyone who can read the white paper could figure that out
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#26> 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?
In other fields, fuzzing data while still maintaining accuracy is a well-established practice.
A simple example that fits closely to debits/credits is the "vote fuzzer" on reddit. This was important back when reddit allowed you to easily access not just the point score of a post but also the count of up and down votes. The points are calculated as (upvotes - downvotes), but spambots could take advantage of that to figure out if their votes were really being counted, or being thrown away by the spam detection systems.
So suppose the score on a post is currently 20 points with 30 up, 10 down votes. Reload, and you might see 32/12. Or 37/17. The fuzzer would give back fictional always-increasing counts of up/down votes which happened to add up to the correct score. It would also add phantom votes to offset spambots it had detected, so a spambot might see 32/12, issue an upvote, and then see 33/13, where the 13th downvote was a complete fiction invented by the fuzzer, to cover up for throwing away the bot's upvote.
Apple's differential-privacy implementation in iOS does something similar; it boils down the metrics it will submit into a fixed-size data structure, then randomly flips some bits before submitting. But the weighting and occurrence of the bit flips is set up so that on average for every time, say, the third bit of a given submission flips from 1 to 0, there will be another submission that flipped its third bit from 0 to 1. This preserves the overall statistics while making it impossible to know which bits of any submission were "real" versus which were flipped by the fuzzer.
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#27Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I didn't downvote you. Your comment provides little new information and looks like bullshit. Lots of people are predicting bitcoin's fall. For lots of reasons. People can rarely time the markets, I'd expect strong evidence otherwise. Do you track all your predictions?
I wasn't making a prediction. I was thinking out loud, in retrospect of the gains and then falls, about what might have caused it. The only reason I said "called it" was because the Bloomberg article is making a similar point. In any case, I take your point and accept why people are downvoting.
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#29monero 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…
DAG based coins don't have a blockchain to download. Byteball offers Blackbytes for privacy right now over Tor
http://freebe.byte-ball.com/
Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 tr…
> traders mostly don't need to be anonymous. Not sure I follow -- you suggest exchanges should send out who placed an order in the book, in addition to the price, amount, order type, etc.? Wouldn't that be a massive breach of privacy? Or are you not talking about exchanges?
I think GP is saying that many/most people just trade Monero/Zcash for profit, they don't actually care about concealing their own transactions.