‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Saturday, June 6, 2020 9:18 PM, Punk-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote:
"other.arkitech" other.arkitech@protonmail.com wrote:
Monero, AFAIK, makes it difficult not impossible to trace transactions. So it adds some obfuscation.
Well, I never said monero is 'impossible' to crack. I'm certainly not the nsa-mosad-gchq-etc mafia, so how knows how they could attack it.
Yet monero is pretty much the only system which seems to take privacy seriously.
Saying that it adds 'some obfuscation' sounds like a (big) understatement. Amounts in monero are encrypted using a 'homomorphic' crypto trick. And the ring signature makes it impossible to tell who signed the transaction. By the way, public keys for the ring signature are taken from the blockchain so in this case having a bloated chain does have at least one advantage. On chain destination addresses are all unique and can't be linked to the public address of the user either.
so, I'd say that any 'second generation' cryptocurrency has to have a level of privacy that is at least as good as monero's.
My take on Monero is that it is an overengineered solution. Mu understanding of an anonymous public system includes: *I should be able to see in clear all the money in circulation, all the public database. *I shouldn't be able to link anything to a particular person or group. Monero fails the first one, bcs they focused on making it difficult to analyze the money flows, the cash in circulation, and macro-economy parameters that are of public interest. they instead made an opaque public system. The privacy problem coming from having the flow in clear is obvious. Behavioural patterns can be used to identify the person behind. The solutionm in my view, is not overloading the network, but instead by using a flow-break mechanism (like a mixer), which forms part of the public services offered by the platform. The monero's trick is probably limiting its scalability as well. but I am not an expert in monero's details. Just speak by intuition, somehow educated guess, as my knowledge comes from coding a comparable system.