The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Zcash has more advanced crypto, but it takes nearly a minute to generate a private transaction on a normal computer.
My favorite "privacy" coin is PIVX. It uses the zerocoin protocol and is fast with low fees. Die-hard privacy advocates don't like it because it uses Masternodes, but I consider that a plus from an adoption point of view.
Here's a privacy coin comparison of these & others, if anyone is interested.
https://www.bitcoinbeginner.com/blog/privacy-coin-comparison
>Zcash has more advanced crypto
I suppose by "advanced" I meant new. It's equally fair to say "not as well validated by crypto researchers".
If Bulletproofs and the new CT format come in and the mandatory ringsize is increased to a level providing some privacy, the fees would be very worthwhile. But with ringsize 5 they are certainly excessive! We should hope they increase to at least 10. After ringsize, the difference between 1/2 and 2/2 txn continues to be an issue.
Or at a minimum a wallet update could fix some of these things issues. Better ring member selection that does not include odd ring sizes or in/out numbers.
If you are a seller and receive 2 payments from a user then you send that money to a known place (maybe exchange) you have are now near 100% traceability! This is because even with high-ring-size, the chance of both known-bad inputs happening in one tx is very low.
Currently Monero is doing a great harm to users by not having a prominent warning. Monero should adopt Tor Project attitude and tell users: Making a Monero transaction does not give you full privacy. Then link to a bit more nuanced discussion about churn and traceability. Especially for people that receive multiple payments! Monero may encourage people to rely solely on Monero (without churn) for privacy, to their downfall.
And even churn has a big disclaimer from MRL. They say in some <vague> conditions churn is statistically detectable. Maybe a big issue for dark net vendors that often receive payments then churn then send to their exchange...
Disclaimer: I am running an extrajursidictional company and dealing with payments will become a major focus as we start to pay out dividends and need to do so in an untraceable fashion. Plus...in a few months I will need to draw salary so this is very near-and-dear to my heart!
It is not for tax evasion: we fully intend to comply with tax law everywhere we offer service, though there are some practical issues. We chose EJC vehicle due to worldwide laws on sex work and unregulated securities. For example: In the U.S. mere advertising sites run the risk of legal persecution. How much more so for a full escorting platform?
Escorts spend a huge amount of time (up to 70% or more) doing non-billable work. We aim to cut that time down significantly, while making things smoother for everyone involved.
Where is your money kept? Pretty sure that country has legal jurisdiction over your company.
A smart contract / contingency procedures sound great but aren't bulletproof. When people are threatened with jail or losing everything they tend to cooperate.
If you run with people's money, you will discourage anyone else from attempting this. But if you're genuine, then this could be the start of a unique kind of model.
Best of luck, assuming you're honest.
I have no opinion on your specific company. It's more interesting that you're using ICOs to fund your operation, and that you seem to have a chance of succeeding.
One tip, though. Be prepared for unfair behavior. If LEA decides to contact the NSA to help track you down, they can probably figure out some way to trip you up.
Also, it's probably important to show some kind of hard progress. Hopefully you'll release something soonish.
The parent is doing an ICO for an escort service, if I was to say do an ICO for an assassination service would the people who invested be in anyway liable? Is it legal to raise funds for an expressly illegal purpose?
My amateurish take is that, for instance, a smart contract could work as an untraceable distributed Silk Road with escrow and everything else. Because there is no one machine where everything runs, it's impossible to shut down the server; there is nothing that links these transactions together, except for the commonly used Solidity code.
Scamming was rife, but largely mitigated by the fact that the dealer cant effect their reviews and nor can the buyer. The dealer has the choice to not sell to you based on your history, the buyer has the choice to not buy from a dealer with a bad history.
Other than that, bitcoin had little to do with its security apart from providing anonymity. If it was possible to do so anonymously you could have just post them cash.
For example: We want to prevent underage users and duplicates. We do that by manually screening IDs. Hard to do that on a decentralized system...
Another major issue: In sex work, clients present a significant threat. An abusive client needs to be reliably banned. Having them put up a deposit is just not a substitute. E-commerce do not have this as client only receives what seller sends and poses no risk to seller.
We from our central point-of-view can detect rings, ban money launderers and traffickers, investigate and appeal if needed. Decentralized system that adds such a feature is ripe for gaming.
And yes: Single point to make money, campaign, run ads, provide incentives (sign-up-friend, get-$50-credit) and organize labor...this is an important aspect as well.
On the other hand, money can be made from supervision.
This seems exactly the kind of applications Ethereum was meant for; however, is there a dispute resolution organ?
I'm not sure of the details, but this blog post may answer your question about dispute resolution (& malicious actors)
https://blog.district0x.io/introducing-the-district-registry...
Coding on Ethereum is hard, and this project is ambitious.
Bitcoin supports smart contracts, and has done so since launched in 2009. Even the simplest Alice-pays-Bob transaction is actually running a smart contract written in Script, a Forth-like language custom built for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin also supports metacoin protocols that create tradeable tokens, and has done so for a long time (e.g., ColoredCoins and MasterCoin).
Only a fraction of Bitcoin's full range of features are used today. This leads me to suspect that Ethereum's much-hyped VM will turn out to be mostly unused.
And, the majority of the interesting use cases for smart contracts require extrinsic (non-blockchain) state to operate. The price per barrel of Brent. Whether it rained over a piece of farmland. Randomness. Notice of the publication of a death certificate. All of these applications rely on a trusted server (or a federated system of them) for input. And they can be corrupted or shut down by a powerful adversary. Ethereum might be able to free itself from oracles to a small degree, but the difference will be negligible for many practical purposes.
In other words, Ethereum offers little more for day-to-day use than Bitcoin does. Ethereum does, however, enjoy a massive marketing advantage.
Interesting point, but can't randomness be read from hash of the next block? I'm not familiar with Ethereum's VM - does it not have access to that?
Miners can get into the act to twiddle the next block hash. There are some ideas on this topic here:
https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/191/how-can-i-s...
Except for faster transaction confirmations, and lower fees.
A network with close to three times (28756 versus 11788) as many nodes behind it.
If you want to look at fundamentals, Ethereum is offering more for day-to-day use than Bitcoin does.
That may well turn out to be a temporary feature. Until 2015 (its sixth year of existence), Bitcoin had negligible transaction fees.
Ethereum and Bitcoin are subject to the same limitations: namely that every node requires every transaction to fully validate the chain.
Both systems are also subject to the same limitations that will throttle "mass adoption:" the need to secure cryptographic material from network-based attacks.
Ethereum is effectively a generalized distributed computer -- so new types of contracts can be written, tested, and iterated on readily, without requiring a change to Ethereum itself.
> Ethereum does, however, enjoy a massive marketing advantage.
I really don't think that's true. I'd wager that the majority of the public that is aware of Bitcoin has no idea what Ethereum is.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script
Opcodes and values can be combined to yield a vast array of possible contracts, just like any programming language.
Templates are not used, except to activate the full language capabilities (i.e., P2SH).
Ethereum is effectively a generalized distributed computer -- so new types of contracts can be written, tested, and iterated on readily, without requiring a change to Ethereum itself.
Bitcoin is not a generalized distributed computer, but it does allow new types of contracts to be written, tested, and iterated on readily, without requiring a change to Bitcoin itself.
I really don't think that's true. I'd wager that the majority of the public that is aware of Bitcoin has no idea what Ethereum is.
Nevertheless, Ethereum - through the Ethereum Foundation and is sizable war chest, has a far more concerted marketing effort.
It's not Turing-complete and doesn't even have loops (or goto to provide an alternative). Definitely not "like any programming language", you could as well try to use Brainfuck (which is, BTW, Turing-complete).
If it does work, FB will simply reimplement it with a Facebook pre-mined set of coins before launching.
Ringsize dominates all because the blockchain is totally persistent but not all IPs will be recorded by every attacker.
On zcash, there was this discussion:
http://jeffq.com/blog/on-the-linkability-of-zcash-transactio...
which suggested that nearly 31.5% of the hidden transactions in Zcash has some transparent parts to it.
The dirty secret of crypto is that there is almost no economy that exists for any of the altcoins, and relatively little even for Bitcoin (which functions as the reserve currency due to its lions' share of the economy).
Effectively, by volume most altcoins are held by either miners (who sell immediately), or daytraders who will pump and dump. A very small fraction is held by true believers (who will HODL under all circumstances), but they don't contribute to the economy either.
Such people don't care about anonymity, they're not actually using the currency, they're just traders, and traders mostly don't need to be anonymous.
I can’t argue with the value of these reminders, though.
Not sure I follow -- you suggest exchanges should send out who placed an order in the book, in addition to the price, amount, order type, etc.? Wouldn't that be a massive breach of privacy? Or are you not talking about exchanges?
https://seekingalpha.com/amp/article/4122695-bitcoin-series-...
This mainly appears to be due to transaction times and high fees.
I’d be interested to see a similar analysis for monero but that’s probably not easily doable due to its privacy features.
Zcash is a fork of Bitcoin with optional anonymity features. While transparent transactions are fully linkable, shielded transactions use zero-knowledge proofs to obscure the parties and amounts of the transactions. First, we observe various metrics regarding the usage of shielded addresses. Moreover, we show that most coins sent to shielded addresses are later sent back to transparent addresses. We then search for round-trip transactions, where the same, or nearly the same number of coins are sent from a transparent address, to a shielded address, and back again to a transparent address. We argue that such behavior exhibits high linkability, especially when they occur nearby temporally. Using this heuristic our analysis matched 31.5% of all coins sent to shielded addresses.
Funny, here I was thinking the burden of proof was on the state.*
* at least in most countries
Not every criminal handles bajillions, so most won't be investigated by young cyber-savvy hotshots.
Doesn't sound practicable.
I don't get this. How do you post fake entries? Wouldn't the ledger be out of balance, or unbalanced or whatever the correct term for that is?
And how are fake transactions identified by the faker?
Here's my understanding of Monero - It has the concept of ring signatures. I guess this is what the author is referring to. When a transaction is posted to blockchain it is assigns coins to a public key (generally known as the address). Now what Monero does is that it obscures the end address and hides who the transaction went to.
That said, blockchain doesn't exactly use the concept of double boook keeping. So, you don't really have things going to out of balance. I am writing an article on how cryptocurrency transactions work. It it still WIP.
A simple example that fits closely to debits/credits is the "vote fuzzer" on reddit. This was important back when reddit allowed you to easily access not just the point score of a post but also the count of up and down votes. The points are calculated as (upvotes - downvotes), but spambots could take advantage of that to figure out if their votes were really being counted, or being thrown away by the spam detection systems.
So suppose the score on a post is currently 20 points with 30 up, 10 down votes. Reload, and you might see 32/12. Or 37/17. The fuzzer would give back fictional always-increasing counts of up/down votes which happened to add up to the correct score. It would also add phantom votes to offset spambots it had detected, so a spambot might see 32/12, issue an upvote, and then see 33/13, where the 13th downvote was a complete fiction invented by the fuzzer, to cover up for throwing away the bot's upvote.
Apple's differential-privacy implementation in iOS does something similar; it boils down the metrics it will submit into a fixed-size data structure, then randomly flips some bits before submitting. But the weighting and occurrence of the bit flips is set up so that on average for every time, say, the third bit of a given submission flips from 1 to 0, there will be another submission that flipped its third bit from 0 to 1. This preserves the overall statistics while making it impossible to know which bits of any submission were "real" versus which were flipped by the fuzzer.
Let's say I was going to try to launder a million dollars in cash. How do you get that into an exchange and out of an exchange without setting off a million red flags, at least in the United States?
Good for long term investors and enthusiasts hoping for a grown up Bitcoin to achieve mass adoption and legitimacy as the worlds most standard digital currency.
Tomorrow, they will tell us the amazing discovery on about how the economy of crypto is now influenced by massive master nodes holdings.
Next month: the impact of Macafee tweeting.
Seriouly, how are they still doing money when bloggers give better, fresher, stuff than them ?
TLDR: BTC - the mob came, the mob went - XMR
Your comment provides little new information and looks like bullshit. Lots of people are predicting bitcoin's fall. For lots of reasons. People can rarely time the markets, I'd expect strong evidence otherwise.
Do you track all your predictions?
Historical volatility: https://bitvol.info/