Comment by grapevines | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grapevines | Hacker News Reader

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Monero, even with the addition of RingCT, is vulnerable to transaction graph analysis (intersection attacks) that can de-anonymize users.

Your comment is highly misleading. RingCT solves 4 of the 5 remaining, known, privacy vulnerabilities in Monero ## The last remaining vulnerability has to do with transactions made with very little turnover, i.e. an amount is received and then immediately spent again. The privacy is stronger as the amounts are held in the wallet for longer.

Monero is useable on a magnitude greater scale in 2017, and a full node can be run with small CPU and memory. Zcash on the other hand requires minutes to send anonymouse transactions.

In other words, Zcash provides 100% privacy at the expense of scalability while Monero provides privacy approaching 100 percent as variable with time.

## http://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1495/what-privacy-...

You misread my comment. There _is_ an oustanding privacy issue in Monero, one that is often overlooked by its proponents. Transactions involving the same individuals will appear closer together in the transaction graph, and this remains the case so long as Monero's transactions have so few mixins.

My favorite example of anonymity is Richard Stallman's description of an anonymous currency: you should be able to pay a publisher for every article you read on their website, without them being able to associate the payments.

You can do that with Monero right now (within a cryptographically negligible, but plausibly deniable, risk) and it doesn't require crazy unreliable cryptography, a (badly done) trusted setup, or 8gb+ of RAM and 60 seconds on a Xeon.

What exactly is "badly done" about their trusted setup?

The "trusted setup" is a permanent unfixable security hole. While it's partially secure in theory, it goes against the core value of Bitcoin and cryptography where you trust he math and not some person. It will be a constant cloud over Zcash. (I still see great academic value on the work behind Zcash with zkSNARKs, but as a cryptocurrency at the current state it's way too risky for real use)

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