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Comment by TD-Linux | Hacker News Reader

This coin uses Stellar, which is not a decentralized consensus like Bitcoin, but rather federated. It's not really surprising that it has performance advantages.

Also not sure how I feel trusting the fate of a cryptocurrency to the strength of Intel's SGX.

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"MobileCoin does not rely solely on SGX for maintaining transaction privacy. Transactions are designed to employ CryptoNote1 one-time addresses and onetime ring signatures, so MobileCoin will still maintain transaction privacy through unlinkable addresses if an attacker is able to defeat SGX and view transactions on the network."

https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf

Other than that, i very much share your concern..

It also says that the clients transmit private keys and PINs to the SGX nodes, which presumably allow spending of their coins. Maybe it's designed in a way that they lose their money, but maintain the privacy of their previous and other transactions going through the node.

Users have to transmit the private keys to their nodes, but not the PIN. This tradeoff was taken to prevent people from losing their money by losing their phone. If the secure enclave were broken, nodes could, theoretically, be able to brute-force the private keys.

I think that in reality, there will really be just a few nodes: Signal, WhatsApp and some bots/banks/businesses. The trust system in place is ideal for this.

This is what the whitepaper says:

> At install time, Alice's client performs remote attestation with its Mobile-Coin node, establishes a secure communication channel into the remote enclave, and transmits its keypair along with its recovery PIN.

Interesting. So it has the same privacy protections as Monero, the only cryptocurrency with a track record of being untraceable so far?

I wonder if the Stellar network is "leakier" than a decentralized network would be, though.

Here's the problem with cryptonote: if I play 10 hands of poker at an online casino, with money I bought on an exchange, I have very little privacy. Anyone who can coerce or compel the casino and exchange's cooperation can get my real identity simply by looking at intersections amongst potential ancestor payments. This is because in cryptonote, each payment only has e.g. 4 potential ancestors. While each of those themselves have the same property, you can still look at intersections and deduce linkages with very high probability.

>>So it has the same privacy protections as Monero, the only cryptocurrency with a track record of being untraceable so far?

I wouldn't call Monero "untraceable" even though I am a very big fan of XMR. It takes work to put a lot of steps between you and the payee at more levels than simply the transactional one.

How do you mean? Why would you need to, if the payment is untraceable? Are you talking about what happens after you purchase something?

How is zcash's track record with regard to untraceability?

It's fantastic, but it takes a lot of memory to generate a private transaction (no mobile wallets for that!) and because private addresses are opt in, not many are being used in the wild

using a lot of memory is still better than monero's requirement that you synch a 30+GB blockchain

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