Hacker News Reader

Comment by tribby | Hacker News Reader

monero has become popular in this space, but the average (illicit) user is still probably making operational mistakes while buying, using, and selling it. in the case of monero a lot of people like to skip the step where they download a 30GB+ blockchain over tor, and I can't blame them. when the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies are effortlessly private, that's when they will have arrived so to speak. I'm fairly optimistic about moxie & co's recently-announced mobilecoin (https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf) for that reason -- if it's going to get adopted by whatsapp, the user experience will necessarily be pretty darned simple.

View on HN

MobileCoin might be an amazing user experience, but the odds of Facebook choosing to implement an external blockchain as a currency is pretty much nil as far as I'm concerned.

If it does work, FB will simply reimplement it with a Facebook pre-mined set of coins before launching.

Why would you need to download the blockchain over Tor? There are many people downloading the blockchain and that in itself does not incriminate you. It seems sufficient to only send out transactions using Tor.

I'm interested too, hope the OP or someone can answer. Also, why does the transaction itself need to be sent over tor? I thought Monero's feature is that you can't tell from a transaction who the recipient is (ring transactions or something?) but maybe I don't understand the end-to-end flow and the math well. What is incriminating when you publish a transaction without tor?

A relatively tiny number of people will ever download the blockchain, a relatively tiny number of people use Tor, how many bits of information does a state level adversary need to deanonymize someone?

There is no solid guide on how to use Monero operationally in a safe manner. Everyone will yell to churn, but there is no official information on how much and how to churn. Ringsize 5 is dangerously low. Lack of proxy support in the wallet makes using Tor much harder. Bad decisions with offline signing mean it is difficult to use a separate transaction pusher.

Ringsize dominates all because the blockchain is totally persistent but not all IPs will be recorded by every attacker.

DAG based coins don't have a blockchain to download. Byteball offers Blackbytes for privacy right now over Tor http://freebe.byte-ball.com/

Does byteball require a centralized conductor for security? (like IOTA)

I'm confident that we won't need something like MobileCoin, which is based on secure hardware which you have to trust. I'm pretty sure someone will come up with some kind of combination of RaiBlocks and Monero, for example. Also, SpectreCoin might be onto something if they are able to implement stealth staking.

I'm less confident. It's hard to combine those two, as one doesn't have a unified ledger and the other needs it.

only way to acquire 100% private crypto is to mine it yourself and then always use a full node for transactions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com