RE: Is Monero’s (or All) Anonymity Broken?
And lying (or denial?) continues (Edit: just groupthink & shock I think, not intentional lying)…
EDIT: please also read this other answer wherein I summarized with a more fair to Monero appraisal.
goin2mars. wrote on Bitcointalk.org:
Specifically in this latest iteration, I can't imagine a situation where Shelby wasn't capable of linking the facts that there is no zero subsidy in Monero, and there is also an adaptive block size, I give him far more credit than that.
I guess he can’t read (also archived).
Or they will just make up some shit that isn’t true and repeat it enough times that the n00bs forget to fact check.
Apologies, I was having a drink when writing that.
And why do you do the irresponsible action of trying to post about a complex topic such as my blog while being slightly inebriated.
ArticMine wrote:
You may wish to follow the discussion in https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/6r2xsm/is_moneros_anonymity_broken/ The bottom line: The attack proposed fails in Monero because of Monero's adaptive blocksize and tail emission. I see little point in discussing this here any further since the author of the blog in question has been banned on this forum.
ArticMine must have wrote that before reading the above linked reply of mine. He has not yet replied to the above linked refutation.
fatlever wrote:
He's saying in order to break Monero's anonymity complicit miners basically need to control a good part of the network and create a ton of fake transactions in order to mark other users transactions.
And as the blog explained and the link above further clarifies, this is quite economic. It costs virtually nothing to create zillions of transactions. The only costs are the transaction fees which is again—quite economic.
Any way, you deserve to remain in the honeypot where you belong. Stay there please!
and they will be able to afford to do this by "selling your identities"? Catch 22?
There’s no catch 22. The perpetrator of the honeypot does it because there is some value in doing it. Duh.
and would very noticeable as the transaction volume spikes up.
That has already been refuted 3 times. You obviously haven’t read everything on this blog and the comments. The Sybil attack could already be 80% right now and you would have no way of knowing. The transaction volume doesn’t have to suddenly spike. The perpetrator would raise the transaction volume over time necessarily because Monero’s adaptive block size adjustment algorithm requires him to raise it slowly in order to minimize penalties (the perpetrator pays no penalties ongoing once the desired median block size has been achieved).
The scenario basically is that the government takes over Monero mining, doing massive number of fake transactions and big data analytics and it's game over. That goes for every crypto right.
You are conflating separate concerns. No single nation-state government alone can regulate all computers that run the blockchain nor all on and off ramps to crypto. You need a world government for that at least. But a very strong government such as the USG (or Five Eyes or Russia or China) can muster the resources to make Monero a honeypot. In fact, I linked in my blog where the FBI already said they were concerned about Monero.
And who is busting the WannaCry? The powerful governments. And maybe they are using the Monero honeypot to help them trace down the dark markets and see money flows.
Is it me or is the recent news of WannaCry where every researcher and blockchain analyst said Monero is completely anonymous
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that all of the cryptographers of Cryptonote and Monero are anonymous.
And you fools fall right into the honeypot and can’t read. Lol.
The Story of the Pointless and Witless applies in spades. Please do(n’t) fall into the woodchipper.
thejaytiesto wrote:
If it crashes really low and these problems can be fixed, that's called a buy opportunity, but he's describing it as design flaw.
Correct it is a design flaw that afaics can’t be fixed as the link I’ve provided in this post explains in more detail. And my next blog will really hammer it in with more details.
For instance that Risto guy that owns a fuckton of BTC
He has a high IQ (and is formerly my business friend), but he knows nothing about computer science or computer technology. It is entirely useless to listen to his opinion about technology.
Febo wrote:
To return to anonymint, He claims PoW is fail and all PoW coins including Monero and Bitcoin are to fail.
Correct. My next blog post is going to homerun that into an indisputable checkmate.
I dont think there is any coin in existence he would not find a point of failure.
Except Bitnet of course, which will not be PoW nor PoS and does solve these problems. I’ve been contemplating on the Bitnet design for 4 years (the meat of it within the past 2 years; whereas, further back in 2013 I explored anonymity and consensus concepts such as proof-of-storage which is what Sia and Storj became after I abandoned that idea). It finally all came together in a whitepaper with 255+ references in Q4 2016, but then I was delayed for 6 months on an agonizing liver toxic TB antibiotics cure (which more or less knocked me out for 6 months).
Ring CT is important part that provides anonymity in Monero
I explained in my comments at the Reddit linked herein that I thing RingCT is entirely unnecessary with the design I proposed and I think it is probably harmful and ill advised. Find my comment there that explains my reasoning on that point in more detail. Before RingCT was created, I had already created Zero Knowledge Transactions which had accomplished the same thing but with the more efficient CCT (instead of CT because I had improved CCT to remove the proof-of-square which made it more efficient), but I abandoned it once I realized that Zerocash technology was far superior for the reasons I am finally explaining now in public carefully (was too sick before to write all this down even though most of it was already in my delirious dreams-like mind when I was chronically ill).
stupid_seb wrote:
I agree, but Dash and Monero are more and more being challenged by coins like XVG.
Verge is Tor/I2P honeypot same as CloakCoin.
There is a reason I wrote “no recommendation at this time”. Afaik, all of the anonymity cryptocurrencies out there as of now are not acceptable to my standard-of-excellence. Zerocash technology is afaics (so far) potentially acceptable but only in the right design as I proposed, with a robust trusted setup, and with sufficient usage.
Monero’s RingCT can probably/possibly be acceptable (i.e. diminishing probability of deanonymization) with an exceptionally high-level of mixing, but this would be inefficient compared to doing it with Zerocash technology. With my non-PoW and non-PoS design that removes the ability to Sybil attack it (because transaction fees are burned), RingCT would be acceptable with lower levels of mixing, but afaics it still woudn’t be as fool-proof as Zerocash technology in the same setting.
The_Dark_Knight wrote:
callback wrote:
One more thing:
Ring CT has a single point of failure, once its exploited the whole thing is blown.What you mean by what is the point?
What he probably means is that if the ECC is cracked, then Monero tokens can be undetectably created out-of-thin-air by the cracker and no one would ever know (except I guess by the declining price if the cracker was dumping them). Note this would apply to Zerocash technology also, except I proposed a special design to mitigate the risk and effect of such a crack. You really need to read all my comments on Reddit.
Whats your point being open source?
A project that is closed source cannot be audited and you need to trust the developers, a project that is open source can be audited and many talented programmers can tell if there is a bug or a backdoor in the code, being open source is key for any project, especially one like monero.
He probably means all the cryptographers who created Cryptonote and Monero are all anonymous.
And as for peer review, (the mathematically smart) @gmaxwell is a reality distortion field expert (meaning he bends reality with babble and obfuscation) who sulks and disappears when he is losing an argument he can’t railroad. Remember Gregory Maxwell hoisted onto us the Mt. Box fractional reserve Lightning Networks/SegWit scam, the Sidechains which are insolubly flawed and can never work (I heard from someone that even he has come to realize that), and the CoinJoin clusterfuck that became Dash even though I told him in early 2014 it wouldn’t work.
Again Gregory is technically very astute (and he knows areas of math I do not). No doubt about that. The main qualifier with Gregory is that his holistic design skills and judgement are not very good apparently. Afaics, he is not well rounded enough to be in the position of responsibility he is in. He should be the backroom cryptographer, where he excelled in the past for example helping to create an audio codec. It is actually quite typical that academics (PhDs), etc are not well rounded enough to succeed in the real world scenarios. They usually fail to be able to incorporate economics correctly (archived here and here), marketing, and other aspects. Now someone might think, “that blowhard, he is also not well rounded and can’t work with others” or whatever. But they will just be deluding themselves again as they did when they presumed all my talk about Monero and anonymity was just noise chatter to be ignored. They’ll learn.
Image sourced from Wikipedia
IconicShade wrote:
whats monero?
Sorry for their misspelling. It is moAnero.
Just go to discussion threads which are totally dominated by most shilling about how they are the smartest, can’t be beat because they have anonymous PhD’s on their donations payroll, and have the killer advantage being open source and entirely decentralized development. The are invincible! Except the worse honeypot Dash kicked their ass in marketcap. So I guess it just goes to show how dumb the entire cryptocurrency speculation thing is. Enjoy.
Note this (mostly humorously/deadpan intended) comment of mine doesn’t seem to apply to @ArticMine who appears to have been very conscientious up this point. I’ve tried to be respectful in my replies to him. Ditto several others who appear to have taken the high road in their discussions with me on this issue. That has been a breath of fresh air and is much appreciated.
cryptohunter wrote:
PIVX looks to be pretty strong from here especially with their latest version.
I can’t speak about speculative price, because that seems to have nothing to do with technological fundamentals.
As for technology, the PIVX design (also archived in case they edit it like sneaky weasels!) is not state-of-the-art and probably capable of also being a honeypot (although I would need to analyze it more to have some idea about probabilities).
That is zerocoin, not Zerocash technology. There are significant differences which enable timing and correlation analysis (because there is no spending inside the mixer, also denominations are not hidden). And they didn’t mention Stealth addresses outside the mixer. Also they mention I2P which I already explained all onion routing is a honeypot.
Also being it is PoS, the power-law distribution of resources (i.e. stake) insures it is controlled by whales who can Sybil attack the transactions.