31–40 of 116 posts
I can’t find a date on this article. And this is exactly the type of content that needs a date.
Great article, and I'm glad to see privacy being a focus in a cryptocurrency, but I would like to see some other sources that aren't also promoting the token. That said, I do think it's got the brightest future of any coin besides BTC for the very reason.
Preface this by saying I am not a fan of any cryptocurrency, but I really struggle to understand why Monero has a smaller market cap than BTC. It has to be inertia related right? Monero just seems like a fundamentally better piece of technology. Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?
tl;dr every method from the private sector and the state has resulted in nothing, or an upgrade to the Monero network
for anyone interested in using Monero, consider using Feather Wallet. This wallet implements some better best practices than the community's wallet.
Feather Wallet does initial syncing over clearnet for speed, and then connects to TOR and then only connects to other nodes hosted over Onion network. So you aren't even needing to connect to exit nodes.
It also hides the root address which starts with 4, and only shows you subaddresses that starts with 8. I always felt it was important that nobody ever could distinguish between a root address and subaddress.
It ensures you don't re-use addresses, which is an ancient and still relevant best practice that most cryptocurrencies and wallet have avoided for user experience. Feather Wallet makes it easy though.
Timing attacks are still relevant. For anyone aiming to use Monero as merely a conduit, wait 1 week or 2 before moving funds out, and move them out in different denominations than you put in. (In comparison, if you put $50,000 of XMR in, and a couple ours later moved $50,000 of XMR out in one transaction, this could realistically deanonymize you.)
The more people using Monero for benign but equally as private purposes, the more it improves the utility of Monero for everyone.
A simple and surprising limitation of Monero and any other decoy-based approach is that if you repeatedly withdraw money from one exchange and then deposit it to another, those transactions are not private (edit: even if we ignore payment value). This is a form of Eve-Alice-Eve attack.
Monero uses decoy transactions to obscure the transaction history on-chain, but it does not remove the history. There's a reason every other major privacy protocol (Zcash, Tornado Cash, Railgun, Aleo, Penumbra, etc.) does not use Monero's decoy-based approach, and even the Monero developers are moving to the standard zero-knowledge proof over an accumulator (IIRC a merkle tree like everyone else) based approach that they call Full Chain Anonymity Proofs.
As a meta-comment, this is one of a genre of Monero "privacy" analysis documents that are circulated as a way to claim there are no known actively used exploits. This is little better than the classic "my scheme is secure; here's a bounty for anyone who breaks it" form of cryptographic analysis we often see with flawed encryption schemes. Breaks will not always be public.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preface this by saying I am not a fan of any cryptocurrency, but I really struggle to understand why Monero has a smaller market cap than BTC. It has to be inertia related right? Monero just seems like a fundamentally better piece of technology. Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?
Yes, it scales much worse: * node resources scale with the size of the UTXO set (unspent outputs), which in Monero's case balloons to the entire TXO set (all outputs, orders of magnitude larger) * a typical 2-input 2-output transaction is 4 times larger * wallets have to track all outputs to choose random decoys for transaction inputs One can argue that this is the price to pay for significantly better privacy, but t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Preface this by saying I am not a fan of any cryptocurrency, but I really struggle to understand why Monero has a smaller market cap than BTC. It has to be inertia related right? Monero just seems like a fundamentally better piece of technology. Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?
BTC is not about usefulness. The Bitcoin community has abandoned all of the original principles that made them. It is now just about line goes up and make money.
Great article, and I'm glad to see privacy being a focus in a cryptocurrency, but I would like to see some other sources that aren't also promoting the token. That said, I do think it's got the brightest future of any coin besides BTC for the very reason.
Preface this by saying I am not a fan of any cryptocurrency, but I really struggle to understand why Monero has a smaller market cap than BTC. It has to be inertia related right? Monero just seems like a fundamentally better piece of technology. Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?
A constant rate of printing means the supply is uncapped but the inflation rate will approach zero.
Monero's choice is arguably better for actual use as a currency, as the printing will prevent deflation from lost coins. But it makes it less attractive as an investment.
This is by no means a comprehensive analysis. This analysis misses the most major limitation with Monero's decoy based approach to transaction obfuscation: Eve-Alice-Eve attacks (also known as ABA attacks). It also misses an analysis of the possible insecurity of churning and a significant history of randomness implementation errors and flooding attacks specific to Monero. The exact consequences of some of these atta…
> repeatedly withdraw money from one exchange and then deposit it to another
right, don't do that. Withdraw to your wallet. Wait several days. Transfer elsewhere in different denominations.
Problem solved for everything you wrote, and its been nearly the same for the entire lifespan of Monero, 11 years now.
> Breaks will not always be public.
There are court cases that give the confidence necessary. It is also something to stay abreast of. Always just ask yourself who the transaction is intended to be hidden from.
I can’t find a date on this article. And this is exactly the type of content that needs a date.
Great article, and I'm glad to see privacy being a focus in a cryptocurrency, but I would like to see some other sources that aren't also promoting the token. That said, I do think it's got the brightest future of any coin besides BTC for the very reason.
Preface this by saying I am not a fan of any cryptocurrency, but I really struggle to understand why Monero has a smaller market cap than BTC. It has to be inertia related right? Monero just seems like a fundamentally better piece of technology. Are there scaling issues with Monero, similar/worse than BTC?