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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)

#161

Post by phyro »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #160
ur-whale wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is eye opening to realize there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No. Well, this is what the promise of Bitcoin was, but the lack of anonymity in BTC missed the mark by a few inches. Monero (and it's competitors: ZCash, Grin, Beam, MWC, ...), which IIRC uses the Mimblewimble [1] principle to preserve anonymity)…

I personally Love Mimblewimble. I'm a Monero user mostly, but I love Grin. John Tromp has a proposal for an interactive coin shuffling protocol for Grin [0] that would negate a lot of the privacy concerns, I personally haven't fully tried to understand it and it seems pretty cumbersome to me compared to Monero. I hope to see it in action so I can get an idea of how it compares. [0] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimbl…

The protocol you linked is noninteractive. The user simply creates an onion-based transaction and sends it to the service. The service collects these and creates a single joint transaction which includes your output.

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

#162

Post by phyro »

lawn wrote: post #138
tromp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero just makes different trade-offs than Bitcoin [1]... [1] https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html It's missing several of Bitcoin's features, such as an identifiable UTXO set, relative time locks, a fully auditable supply, instantly verifiable PoW...

> a fully auditable supply You can audit Monero's supply as well. The only difference with Bitcoin is that it uses more advanced math, making it much harder for regular Joe. Best take criticism from a self-proclaimed Monero competitor with some skepticism. You're right though that technically Monero doesn't do everything that Bitcoin does.

That's not the only difference. As tromp said, if someone figured out the discrete log of H, they could inflate Monero and nobody would be able to tell. If someone inflated Bitcoin, everyone would notice immediately.

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

#163

Post by fastball »

kossTKR wrote: post #110
fastball wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the lie?

Monero is not private. I remember reading about this in 2018. Extremely dishonest to ignore this. There's even comments here spelling it out. Besides that it's marketingspeak through and through in that post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36084467

Everyone is ignoring it because it's not true. That user has no PoC and no formalized math. Just "trust me the anonymity isn't that good".

I think this[1] is another good rebuttal to that claim.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36085114

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

#164

Post by iJohnDoe »

beachwood23 wrote: post #59
Taek wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to burst the bubble but strategies to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2019. It turns out that the general strategy of mixing a subset of outputs together is insufficient to provide robust privacy, even if the mix set is large (like in Lelantus). The only strategies that can provide strong anonymity for on-chain crypto are full anonymity set currencies like Zcash.

ZCash is insecure by default. It is a honeypot for people who wish to use the default privacy settings of Monero. > On June 8, 2020, Chainalysis added support for Zcash to their Chainalysis Reactor and "Know Your Transaction" (KYT) technologies.[22] This permits Chainalysis to trace and provide transaction values and at least the sender or receiver address for over 99% of Zcash activity.[22] Chainalysis explains that…

There have been some claims that Chainalysis has been able to make progress in de-anonymizing Monero. It’s hard to know what’s true. We’ve certainly seen where false information is used to steer people in certain directions. E.g. “Monero isn’t anonymous, so don’t use it.” When it reality it is anonymous, which is the real reason they don’t want you to use it.

Bitcoin was never anonymous. It just took an incredible amount of effort to follow the transactions, along with subpoenas to exchanges, that even the shady exchanges gave into. Chainalysis are credited with bringing down the biggest criminals that tried to hide behind Bitcoin. Who knows if they have also cracked Monero, because there was a short while where people thought Bitcoin was safe before it was known that Chainalysis was already at their door.

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

#165

Post by roenxi »

dmbche wrote: post #119
roenxi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look for purchasable things there isn't much. But the current US president is effectively identifying some of his political opponents as traitors [0]. it isn't that clear which exact opponents he is referring to (does it include Trump, who was a slim margin from being the US president?). We've seen bank account freezes deployed against that truck protest in Canada too and it isn't obvious why any of us have a…

Separately from the rest of your comment, I think you should look into how crypto was used in the trucker situation - it did not work at all, iirc a lot of money just vanished

I'm certainly interested, but a source would be helpful. If they're using an anonymous crypto I'd expect all the money to vanish.

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

#167

Post by Yizahi »

jahr wrote: post #135
Yizahi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are several thing you have missed 1) International transfers: crypto is the best here. No stupid regulations, fast and cheap unlike SWIFT or something like it. I've used to work as international freelance programmer since 2003 or about and payments were the pain all time before 2015 or about when I have moved to crypto. Lost transfers, compliance investigations without any real reason with blocking funds for ma…

1) You didn't read my comment carefully. I did say that crypto is great for law avoidance. So yes, international money transfers avoiding any taxes, fees and regulation is indeed better with crypto. The thing is, I'm not an oligarch plundering my country and funneling stolen money to offshores and UAE. I do value AML laws and all the "stupid" regulations which come with it. Even if I'm personally affected by them and have to procure papers for money origin, is limited by in amounts and time to transfer - it is better that a so called "free market" a wild west libertarian dystopia.

2) I have heard about IPFS and other file storage projects like Filecoin or Siacoin. All of them are noncompetitive with any centralized service. And as for illegal filesharing - sure, it may be useful, bittorents are better though and have no shitty monetization attached to them.

3) Yes, I have heard about flashloans, a lot. It's an amazing source of lulz and comedy godl, finding out how another bridge had been abused, often by the flash loan. It's a completely bullshit and useless idea for a normal human, unless you are a technically inclined hacker, who looks for vulnerabilities in the shitty code running on a virtual machine actively discouraging writing longer code with test coverage and better programming practices, because the longer the code the pricier it is to run. To such hackers flash loans are invaluable to properly abuse broken contracts.

4) NFT doesn't guarantee ownership of nothing but the token itself (and token is useless, because of the tech limitations). Tickets have no benefits on the blockchain because they are always issued by the centralized source. Any property you wish can and MUST be set by that same centralized corporation. NFTs add zero, nothing to it. Same with license keys, again issued by a central authority. NFTs is a cargo cult by tokenbros who don't know how business works.

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

#168

Post by vitehozonage »

Taek wrote: post #85

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…

I solved the P versus NP problem too but I didn't bother to formalise the math. Do you believe me? That's what you sound like.

If what you write is true then please write the paper; it would be tremendously important. Until then it's impossible to take you seriously.

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

#169

Post by vitehozonage »

tikkun wrote: post #29

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

Zcash has directly admitted that it already had a catastrophic inflation bug [1]. Nobody can prove if it has been hyperinflated by an attacker. Developers linked to DARPA and the Israeli government had the knowledge, capability and opportunity to do so - do you trust them?

https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcash-counterfeiting-vuln...

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

#170

Post by dmbche »

roenxi wrote: post #165
dmbche wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separately from the rest of your comment, I think you should look into how crypto was used in the trucker situation - it did not work at all, iirc a lot of money just vanished

I'm certainly interested, but a source would be helpful. If they're using an anonymous crypto I'd expect all the money to vanish.

https://coingeek.com/why-bitcoin-cannot-help-canadian-trucke...

This is on how their use if Bitcoin didn't help, and here is one on where the money went

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/freedom-convoy-donatio...

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