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The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#101

Post by plasticmachine »

shrimpx wrote: post #30
anonytrary wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But they DO need privacy, they're more at risk of targeted theft than regular users. ZCash fails at this by making it impossibly hard for an exchange to allow z-address withdrawals, and impossibly hard for a mobile app / hardware wallet to support them, which means large holders withdrawing from an exchange are painting a target on their back.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#102

Post by zeroxfe »

apo wrote: post #78
vadimberman wrote: post #45

A question to the experts: why don't the criminals use smart contract platforms like Ethereum? My amateurish take is that, for instance, a smart contract could work as an untraceable distributed Silk Road with escrow and everything else. Because there is no one machine where everything runs, it's impossible to shut down the server; there is nothing that links these transactions together, except for the commonly used…

It's sad to see the "Bitcoin doesn't do smart contracts" line repeated so faithfully - even implicitly as in your question. It's rubbish. Bitcoin supports smart contracts, and has done so since launched in 2009. Even the simplest Alice-pays-Bob transaction is actually running a smart contract written in Script, a Forth-like language custom built for Bitcoin. Bitcoin also supports metacoin protocols that create tradea…

The difference is that Bitcoin supports a limited number of smart contract types (due to limitations in its scripting language.) To create new types, it requires changes to the Bitcoin scripting language, protocol, and runtime, followed by a coordinated soft fork. This is a pretty heavyweight process.

Ethereum is effectively a generalized distributed computer -- so new types of contracts can be written, tested, and iterated on readily, without requiring a change to Ethereum itself.

> Ethereum does, however, enjoy a massive marketing advantage.

I really don't think that's true. I'd wager that the majority of the public that is aware of Bitcoin has no idea what Ethereum is.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#103

Post by jatsign »

nerdponx wrote: post #97
jatsign wrote: post #56

Monero's big problem, right now, is that the fees are high - around $3. They're working on "Bulletproofs" that will reduce the size of transactions, and hopefully fees, by 80%. Zcash has more advanced crypto, but it takes nearly a minute to generate a private transaction on a normal computer. My favorite "privacy" coin is PIVX. It uses the zerocoin protocol and is fast with low fees. Die-hard privacy advocates don't…

Why PIVX instead of Zcoin itself?

I don't think it's for a rational reason tbh. Maybe I just like the stupid name. The two are very similar (with znodes now out for zcoin).

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#104

Post by harlanji »

jameskegel wrote: post #64
tobltobs wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and sell BTC for cash in real-life parking-lot transactions. Doesn't sound practicable.

This is all we had in the beginning; I did all my meets on a basketball court next to a police station because I was a teenager, and that’s where I would meet people from forums to sell my other stuff online like X-men cards and MTG cards.

Walmart/Target parking lot or Caribou Coffee here. Craigslist was (is) the best. People are still good, our "social" media just tells us otherwise. You have to be street smart to be able to do this stuff... if you go to meet afraid, a maybe-mugging is a sure-thing-mugging. Most people just wanna do business and be done, some of them may take an opportunity if it's there so don't give one beyond doing business. This is true in all of life, so meet in courts by the police stations "and stuff"... be smart. I've used CL as recently as last year in SF, and in 3+ cities over 10 years. No free lunch, if it looks too good to be true it probably is, don't take free candy from strangers, tell a friend where you're going, etc...

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#106

Post by sametmax »

corey_moncure wrote: post #85
sametmax wrote: post #57

Thank you, bloomberg.com, for giving us news from 6 months ago. I'm glad I have serious traditional media with professionals working to provide me with fresh information and insight. Tomorrow, they will tell us the amazing discovery on about how the economy of crypto is now influenced by massive master nodes holdings. Next month: the impact of Macafee tweeting. Seriouly, how are they still doing money when bloggers g…

Knowing that the general media and public are six months behind us is, itself, priceless information.

It is isn't it ? Especially with crypto currencies.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#107

Post by the_stc »

Avshalom wrote: post #90
nu-world-odor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you mean you're a pimp then

Well if they're worried about international sex laws they're presumably more of a sex trafficker.

No, we explicitly do not work with pimps or traffickers. Users must be of age, and we will do what pattern recognition we can to detect when multiple accounts are controlled by one entity.

Escorts spend a huge amount of time (up to 70% or more) doing non-billable work. We aim to cut that time down significantly, while making things smoother for everyone involved.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#108

Post by the_stc »

arethuza wrote: post #84
the_stc wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extrajurisdictional company operates outside of existing jurisdictions. It might be helpful to think of us as being headquartered in space...if our opsec is correct, we might as well be! (Otherwise I'll be arrested and our contingency procedures will kick in to work with the successor.) It is not for tax evasion: we fully intend to comply with tax law everywhere we offer service, though there are some practical is…

"extrajursidictional company" sounds like an oxymoron to me - companies are legal constructs (at least by any definition that I have heard) so having a company "outside" a legal jurisdiction would appear to be impossible?

Company can refer to a group or team in addition to the legal construct. As a thought experiment if someone winked into existence in orbit around Earth and started selling data, it seems quickly understood if they were to call themselves a company.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#109

Post by CyberDildonics »

paulmd wrote: post #10
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 tr…

Really? I've bought many things with bitcoin and now a few with etherum ( although its client software is good awful electron bloat ). I see this line repeated and it just isn't true. Computer parts, everything on overstock, gift cards, vpns, Vps, domain registration, nootropics, etc are all there for multiple cryptocurrencies. People who say this have their head in the sand. If Bitcoin core hadn't destroyed btc, steam, Newegg, tiger direct and dell would all be available.

Re: The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero

#110

Post by apo »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #81
apo wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to see the "Bitcoin doesn't do smart contracts" line repeated so faithfully - even implicitly as in your question. It's rubbish. Bitcoin supports smart contracts, and has done so since launched in 2009. Even the simplest Alice-pays-Bob transaction is actually running a smart contract written in Script, a Forth-like language custom built for Bitcoin. Bitcoin also supports metacoin protocols that create tradea…

> And, the majority of the interesting use cases for smart contracts require extrinsic (non-blockchain) state to operate. The price per barrel of Brent. Whether it rained over a piece of farmland. Randomness. Notice of the publication of a death certificate. All of these applications rely on a trusted server (or a federated system of them) for input. And they can be corrupted or shut down by a powerful adversary. Eth…

Interesting point, but can't randomness be read from hash of the next block?

Miners can get into the act to twiddle the next block hash. There are some ideas on this topic here:

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/191/how-can-i-s...

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