Titanium: Project to prevent criminal use of the dark web and virtual currencies | Hacker News Reader

Titanium: Project to prevent criminal use of the dark web and virtual currencies

cordis.europa.eu

43 pointsmbgaxyz16 comments

tldr: "...develop efficient and effective forensics tools enabling the reasonable use of different types of data from different sources including virtual currency ledgers, online forums, peer-to-peer networks of underground markets, and seized devices."

Bitcoin isn't really anonymous. Transactions are in a ledger. Isn't think why people use rollers to redistribute coins?

this is why I'm surprised zcash and monero haven't taken over the markets.

Zcash is anonymous by option only (transparent addresses and secret addresses). If you ask me that kind of defeats the point. It will raise questions like 'why did you choose an anonymous address?'. Optional privacy hurts the people who need to be private.

Zcash also relies on a trusted setup: a master private key was used to initiate it, and that you have to trust the key was destroyed. If someone had a copy of that key, they could create infinite coins without detection.

People have to decide whether they want to trust that a copy of the key wasn't made, or if they want to use a trustless setup.

Monero doesn't require trust, and it's also private by default.

There are actually more problems, but I didn't want to go off topic. Like about how the developers get paid a certain percentage. Someone made the calculations to be about $3m a year for all the developers combined each year. I know that they deserve to get compensated, but that goes completely off what cryptocurrencies stand for.

Like the whole thing seems to be riding on the concept of zk-SNARKS, but the fact of the matter is, there is already Monero which offers the privacy aspect that zcoin advertises (but fails to deliver on that too)

What ktta is talking about is the 10% Founders Reward that goes to the company and its investors.

For those that may read this who don't know, Zcash is a company. It's Founder and CEO wrote this on Twitter:

> I think we can successfully make Zcash too traceable for criminals like WannaCry, but still completely private & fungible.

https://twitter.com/zooko/status/863202798883577856

*zcash, not zcoin. Too many 'coins' these days.

Monero...

"We have to have faith that at the very least, the primary developer of this project is not acting directly in bad faith. And IMO, we can no longer be certain of that."

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/6d5yt5/what_fluffyp...

"What company wants to adopt Monero as payment when a representative lies about announcements for his own enjoyment?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/6d5t7x/fake_news_fl...

You're submission history here is heavy with Zcash-related links.

(My history has a bit of Monero-related posts if anyone wants to know my interests in this.)

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It's open source. If you think someone is writing malicious code, take a look for yourself. If you think the developers are no good, fork it.

He never lied. He made an announcement, and he was right about it being major, as evidenced by the speculators' reaction and posts on Reddit. Deflating the bubble before it gets even bigger is good in my opinion.

Right after that announcement, there were a lot of brand new accounts and accounts that didn't have any Monero history in them posting in the Monero subreddit. Supposedly, there was even an account or two that just had Zcash post history.

I think Monero is just fine, except for the opponents of Monero that are misrepresenting the truth (creating new accounts on reddit to fake outrage, companies with competing privacy coins posting BS reports about Monero on the day of routine hardforks, etc).

If you think something is wrong with Monero, you're welcome to join the open source project and help fix it.

Trolling the parasitic money-changers who are only interested in cryptocurrencies for profit potential is a good thing. I'm at a loss for how anyone can regard fluffy's actions as anything but commendable.

buy bitcoin for cash to a paper wallet. anonymous

also for the adventurous there is tumbling where you send your btc to a service which mixes them all up with others to make it more difficult to trace. exit scammy so choose wisely

>funded by the European Union aimed at developing technical solutions for investigating and mitigating crime and terrorism involving virtual currencies and underground market transactions.

Has there EVER been a terrorism situation that involved the dark web and/or bitcoin? This smells like a power grab feeding on fear.

Will they require some kind of license to purchase and/or sell crypto currency?

This de facto criminalization ad then licensing the privilege (nay right) to utilize these tools is a step in the wrong direction.

You need a license to operate a currency exchange why would digital currency be any different?

The large bitcoin exchanges already comply with many if not most financial regulations.

You can't setup a shadow economy valued in the billions without governments taking note and moving to regulate it.

To me It sounds more like a some kind of AI which will scan public ledgers, compare them to dark forums/markets and try to figure out who are people behind transactions.

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