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Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

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Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#81

Post by gota »

Yizahi wrote: post #35
jrm4 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It's always felt like there's a disproportionate amount of hate for crypto -- not that people should like it or love it, but that I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability. So it seems like they treat it as something to be killed (impossible) as opposed to something to buckle up and get ready to manage (more or less like they correctly do with AI.)

Inevitable for law avoidance? Sure. We know quite well that humans like very much systems which allow them to avoid laws of any kind, so of course such a system will survive for a long time. Inevitable for lawful daily usage? Nope. Fundamental problems and lack of benefits will prevent blockchain based ledgers to be deployed in any useful scalable way. Actually not "will" but rather "did". Token proposals had a decad…

Not to mention that in that same decade crypto coins have failed at everything but item 1 the instant payment systems solved the problem of digital money transfer beautifully (and legally)

Yours is a great way to explain it. I'd say - bitcoin and siblings are 'inevitable' like drug trafficking, not like breathing air

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#82

Post by peyton »

imtringued wrote: post #68
peyton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What progress do you want cryptocurrency to make? They’re bearer assets. You can go pay people with them today.

The most obvious first step is to stop all initial coin offerings against money. If the cryptocurrency is a security, then that is ok, but there are some regulations that need to be followed. In the EU there are plenty of companies willing to manage a security token offering for your company. A security token is basically a cryptocurrency that acts as an informal stock.

I don’t see what that has to do with cryptocurrency like Monero, the topic of this post.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#83

Post by lawn »

tikkun wrote: post #29

What's considered better these days: Monero or Zcash, and why?

Opt-in privacy is poor because most people don't bother, and this drastically reduces the privacy for those that do. Even if something has perfect privacy features, this alone is a deal-breaker.

With Zcash you get opt-in privacy, with Monero it's enforced with every transaction, for everyone.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#84

Post by forty »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #67
forty wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what are people purchasing with it?

The whole point of monero is that it's none of other people's business what I buy with my money.

Sorry maybe my question was not well asked. I don't want to know what you buy, but more generally what can be bought with it.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#85

Post by Taek »

Going to mention this as a top level comment because a lot of people here seem to believe that Monero is an anonymous cryptocurrency.

Unfortunately, techniques to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2018, and these techniques are effective at breaking essentially any partial-mixing based cryptocurrency. (Monero, Lelantus, CoinJoin, Wasabi, etc).

Initial attacks (famously The Flashlight Attack) were capable of breaking the anonymity of targeted individuals, but this attack was later generalized (by me) to break everyone.

These attacks never got a lot of coverage but they are highly effective. The only way to get strong on-chain privacy is to use a full-anonymity cryptocurrency like Zcash.

https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu...

https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/0dbd4906bfa50b7d8dba23f7...

The general idea behind each of these is that you can identify people by doing math that essentially asks "what is the likelihood that these N outputs are this close together in the transaction history graph" - and the answer ends up being "cryptographically unlikely" after just a handful of transactions from the same party. The privacy decays unexpectedly quickly. I never formalized the math but iirc you can get enough evidence to be convinced that two different transactions were by the same person after they spend something like 3 outputs total. The math is really nasty.

The only fix we know of is to switch to full anonymity systems. The privacy break is exponential in strength, and therefore even systems like Lelantus that use mixin sizes of >50,000 outputs fail to provide meaningful anonymity.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#86

Post by ajot »

forty wrote: post #45
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #19

Monero is perhaps the only cryptocurrency that both works as advertised, and has gathered a self-sustaining userbase. No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wan…

I'm curious, what are people purchasing with it?

I've donated to some projects I like (e.g. Radio Paradise)

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#87

Post by seligerasmus »

ur-whale wrote: post #47
forty wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, what are people purchasing with it?

[flagged]

>Why would it be any different for Monero This response does not make much sense: how do you pay for cars, groceries, condoms with Monero?

With fiat, you use some centralized banking instrument like cash, credit, debit, or whatever. Reconciling how that purchase experience is identical with Monero (but is somehow an anonymous, decentralized transaction) might require slightly more explanation to distinguish it from your garden variety anarchocapitalist crypto daydreaming.

Or, more likely, you mean that _in theory_ you could use it to buy anything, with the small hurdle of instantly overturning all of modern commerce infrastructure and the leviathan hard currency sovereigns that deliberately engineered traceable, centralized transactions as political and cultural contagion. Just gotta overcome that, teach grandma about cold wallets and the paramount value of anonymity, and we'll be off fiat.

Wake me up when Monero is broadly known for something other than the de facto payment vehicle for ransomware.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#88

Post by mrangle »

suslik wrote: post #26
psychoslave wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No hate, but no interest either. After all these years, all scam stories apart, what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources? Really I don’t know, and I admit I never wanted to dig the topic as there are many other topic I will never have the time to learn and yet doesn’t seem to have such an issue of what is at best a tremendous noise/signal ratio.

> what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources International money transfers, for instance. The traditional banking system was always slow and expensive, and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons. Many third-world countries have a decent crypto adoption, you can send someone money in a matter of minutes (I do).

That's a minuscule use case whose benefits are arguably exaggerated next to the UX inconvenience and other downside factors for the common abuela looking to receive grocery money.

Until crypto becomes at least as easy to get set up with and use as dealing with a bank, Western Union, or online banking, it'll remain niche.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#89

Post by mrangle »

suslik wrote: post #38
AlexandrB wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and, on top of that, countries cut each other out due to geopolitical reasons For a sovereign state this is a feature, not a bug. If you think that countries will take sending of funds to embargoed countries lying down you are sorely mistaken.

Sure, and that's exactly why sovereign states don't like monero and mixers - but that is their problem, not mine. Also, in many cases transferring crypto is not illegal - for instance, it is legal to transfer money to non-sanction banks in Russia, but in many countries, the banking system doesn't allow that. If you had a 90y.o. starving grandma there, you'd be grateful for the crypto.

Via sanctions, it is illegal for you to use specific mixers assuming you are a US citizen. Which does make it your problem.

And if you have a mixer or private coin that isn't under sanction, it is only a matter of time as determined by the US gov's assessment of the risk of it being widely adopted.

Re: Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

#90

Post by charlie0 »

kossTKR wrote: post #74
EscapeFromNY wrote: post #19

Monero is perhaps the only cryptocurrency that both works as advertised, and has gathered a self-sustaining userbase. No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wan…

[flagged]

Ah yes, let's starts banning books related to it as well. That's always a good idea.
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