Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

https://masteringmonero.com/book/Mastering%20Monero%20First%20Edition%20by%20SerHack%20and%20Monero%20Community.pdf

by Frisiavones • 3 years ago

167 153 3 years ago

Crypto content on HN... this is either gonna go really great or the opposite of that.

jrm410• 3 years ago

Yup. It's always felt like there's a disproportionate amount of hate for crypto -- not that people should like it or love it, but that I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability.

So it seems like they treat it as something to be killed (impossible) as opposed to something to buckle up and get ready to manage (more or less like they correctly do with AI.)

birdyrooster• 3 years ago

We are so familiar with the technology we have actual informed opinions in either direction. The only dispassionate people are those who don’t know yet.

toppy• 3 years ago

Call it "programmable money" and we're good to skyrocket.

tibbetts• 3 years ago

I think of it as a bunch of bad early implementations that are being used for dubious financial purposes and outright fraud, fueling a bubble. The same could be said for joint stock corporations in the 1600s. Something can be inevitable (maybe it is maybe it isn’t) and the current situation can still be bad.

Someone in the 1600s saying that joint stock companies are terrible, solve a problem that doesn’t really need solving, and are being used to rip off investors and fund unethical colonialism would have been right. It took a while before people used them in good ways. And even today they are questionable.

psychoslave• 3 years ago

No hate, but no interest either.

After all these years, all scam stories apart, what crypto allow its users to do that they would not be able to do otherwise with less resources? Really I don’t know, and I admit I never wanted to dig the topic as there are many other topic I will never have the time to learn and yet doesn’t seem to have such an issue of what is at best a tremendous noise/signal ratio.

HideousKojima2• 3 years ago

inevitability

I think it's the crypto bros who misunderstand it's "inevitability." Crypto has far, far fewer practical applications than the people pushing for it it claim. There are two useful situations for crypto:

1) Where you need a trustless distributed consensus method or database (and where the Oracle Problem doesn't get in your way). Trustless is the key word here, 99% of the time that someone proposes a potential use for crypto it would be better served by traditional databases like Postgres, or traditional consensus algorithms like Raft, because being able to handle such things in a trustless manner isn't actually as desirable as crypto bros suggest.

2) Where you need to bypass financial regulations, sanctions, laws, etc. Crypto has shown some real utility for buying illegal drugs and guns online, for example. Whether or not you see this as a good or bad thing depends largely on your political leanings.

nicholasbraker• 3 years ago

I think tech people are in the best position to judge that in most cases the technology doesn't bring any benefits that a current / non-ledger like technology doesn't bring already. Use-cases are few and far between. I doubt it's actually inevitable. (again some use cases are, especially in the utility realm)

AlexandrB2• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that tech people here don't appear to understand its inevitability.

All progress depends on the "unreasonable man". I don't think it's inevitable at all, nor have I seen any evidence that it will be. Thus far non-government blockchains have proven to be ill suited for applications other than speculation (and crime). Central bank "programmable money" is definitely a threat - but it's hardly inevitable if popular opposition is vigorous enough.

If you were to ask a tech enthusiast in 2010, they'd might you that 3D TVs were inevitable. Instead they fizzled out. Then there's "the Metaverse", which seems to be on bumpy terrain as well. SPACs seem to be doing not so hot[1]. Not every tech/financial trend sticks around if the value proposition isn't there. And the value proposition for cryptocurrency is very poor in my view.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_co...

Yizahi3• 3 years ago

Inevitable for law avoidance? Sure. We know quite well that humans like very much systems which allow them to avoid laws of any kind, so of course such a system will survive for a long time.

Inevitable for lawful daily usage? Nope. Fundamental problems and lack of benefits will prevent blockchain based ledgers to be deployed in any useful scalable way. Actually not "will" but rather "did". Token proposals had a decade of time already and all failed (except for law avoidance of course). Any legitimate proposal has failed spectacularly:

1) Legal currency - failed due to no privacy, bad performance, atrocious UX, unstable exchange rate, shady providers;

2) Distributed storage - fail

3) Distributed calculator - fail

4) Distributed network (Helium) - fail

5) Smart contracts - neither smart nor contracts, very pricey, limited functions (on chain only), oracle problem unsolved

6) NFT - one big lie, impossible to implement any promise made about them because they don't facilitate transfer of the ownership

7) Supply chain ideas - fail, the problem is not securing the DB but securing the humans doing data input in the DB

Anything else I've forgot? Basically most of the good ideas on paper turned out to be either impossible or impractical with blockchains.

imtringued3• 3 years ago

I don't see cryptocurrencies as something to be killed. I think the vast majority of them are illogical, based on wishful thinking and severe ignorance or outright scams. People will point out one among twenty thousand without realizing that the exception proves the rule.

Yeah sure keep speculating on your "digital gold" I don't care. Unlike holding dollars as demand deposits or cash, you can't hijack the economy. You are accountable for the risks you take but that doesn't mean anyone is going to use Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay their groceries, especially since so many of the crypto credit card companies love operating in jurisdictions where they are completely unaware about the tax implications of their product. What a well thought out business model...

Even though Europe/EU is embracing a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and making it easier to do business, crypto exchanges operate in regulatory safe havens, engage in shady practices or get hacked and lose your money.

mouzogu• 3 years ago

its inevitability

crypto's new paradigm is always just around the corner.

i've been involved in cc for long enough to know that it's popularity (and price) are not driven by utility.

as vb said, it's the linux of money.

step 1: install gentoo
step 2: install xmr wallet

sircastor• 3 years ago

I’m kind of surprised it made it to the top of the page. HN is certainly divided about crypto, not recently it has felt to me it’s slipped the wayside in favor of AI stories.

StingyJelly2• 3 years ago

There are aspects to hate about crypto but monero is not one of them.

duckqlz• 3 years ago

From the first chapter:

“The first two chapters of this book are friendly non-technical intro- ductions to key topics and skills. For readers curious to learn more about behind-the-scenes details, chapters 3 and 4 contain conceptual non-mathematical explanations of Monero's privacy features and blockchain. Later chapters dive into complex technical details for understanding, developing, and integrating Monero.”

helsinki• 3 years ago

Monero is the only crypto I hold, really.

diegoholiveira• 3 years ago

Why? Asking because I know nothing about crypto yet.

HideousKojima2• 3 years ago

Monero is supposedly untraceable, or at least far harder to trace than Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other "traditional" cryptocoins. It's untraceability has made it receive even greater scrutiny and attempts to regulate it/ban it than other coins.

saesdev3• 3 years ago

to me it's because I see how it's properties are valued by the markets it is transacted in, giving me enough safety that I can find a p2p seller to acquire some Monero without being identified (no-KYC), which then I do not risk being part of data leaks and becoming a target of attacks, and I am able to move some funds to a cold storage, which means funds I don't need to touch or connect its keys the internet, as I know in months or years from now I'll still be able to transact those as I need them, as it retains its properties and all coins are always interchangeable no matter where they come from (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungibility)

lawn7• 3 years ago

My main reasons:

- Private by default. With most other cryptos you can see all transactions on the blockchain (although you'll only see address hashes instead of names).

- ASIC resistant POW. Meaning you don't need specialized hardware to mine it but can do it with your PC (assuming it's fairly powerful).

- Transactions are cheap and fairly fast.

- Development is focused on the primary use-case of making transactions for payments, instead of making a "decentralized computing network" or similar.

nailer3• 3 years ago

Monero is cool - the ring signature mechanism is something i’d never heard of before. Its a way to be possibly, but not provably, be involved in a transaction. Ie plausible deniability.

At real-world crypto recently the zcash people (MIT and Tel Aviv cryptographers) found a way to massively speed up the process of finding your balance (privacy chains are often very slow because they have to sum up all the transactions you were potentially involved in).

I also want to do a deep dive into light protocol - which is a privacy mechanism on top of solana, so transactions go at reasonable speed and you can use mainstream dapps (solana has the most amount of developers outside eth and is a lot faster and cheaper).

lagniappe• 3 years ago

its provable, you have the keys to prove a tx is yours if you want

nailer3• 3 years ago

Indeed. But not provable to others, which is the point.

once_inc• 3 years ago

I feel like Monero is in a tough spot. Not enough network effect to compete with Bitcoin, and new scaling layers like Arc and Lightning actively building out to provide privacy.

bboygravity• 3 years ago

The network effect will come when the FED and ECB "save" everybody from their manufactured hyper inflation (give or take 2 years from now) through CBDC.

mrangle6• 3 years ago

Unsure about the network effect, but you are spot on about the rest.

jpmattia• 3 years ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted, it's an entirely valid observation. And as I type, it's the only comment mentioning lightning as competition.

Moreover, my greater sense is that the nuts and bolts of crypto is not an HN strong suit. It usually brings out religious-type arguments with little sense of balance. <sigh>

saesdev3• 3 years ago

Actually I think that thanks to Bitcoin coming first and being bigger, Monero is able to rise in its shadow, because bitcoin as a crypto people use is like giving governments a safe environment of still being in control, with its traceability and ASIC mining by corporations that can sanction addresses and etc, if Monero was the first ever cryptocurrency it would be way more regulated and attacked as a tool for criminals and would never reach mass adoption, so it's way easier to move from Bitcoin - the coin for social media and legal tender - to Monero - the anonymous alternative -, than from your regulated and enforced fiat currency to a "criminal coin" everyone is afraid to have, making it impossible to spend and use. If Bitcoin continues to grow, so will Monero

kinakomochidayo• 3 years ago

Well, except Lightning UX is horrible.

lawn7• 3 years ago

Lightning isn't a real threat because:

- The UX is horrible.

- To be user friendly, you need to reintroduce trust into the system, defeating the point.

- It's still more expensive to lock up Bitcoin in Lightning than to use Monero.

- The privacy of Lightning is poor compared to Monero.

The only thing Monero lacks compared to Bitcoin is the amount of speculative network effect it has, which is indeed what's holding back Monero's popularity.

qzx_pierri• 3 years ago

I think Monero is awesome because it's actually designed to be an anonymous payment system. Unlike Bitcoin, anonymity is built into each transaction. No need for washing your coins via sketchy "tumbler" services.

capableweb• 3 years ago

I think Bitcoin is awesome because unlike cash, digital transfers are built into the system.

Now, just like cash wasn't built with digital transfers in mind, neither was Bitcoin built with anonymity in mind, so not sure why Monero would be better/worse than Bitcoin for a thing Bitcoin was never made for in the first place.

The purpose of Bitcoin was never that all transactions were anonymous. Monero is great for this (or zCash), but it's a bit misleading to say Monero is "better" at something when what you are comparing it to, was never built for that "something" in the first place.

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

Unlike cash, Bitcoin keeps a public log of everything you've bought though.

lawn7• 3 years ago

Anonymity is absolutely an integral part to digital transfers.

johtso• 3 years ago

Really not sure what you're trying to say here. People use Bitcoin for anonymous transactions and jump through various hoops to try and achieve this goal (for example using tumbling services). It seems perfectly valid to say Monero is better for anonymous transactions than Bitcoin. I'm not sure why it matters what it was "made for". All that matters is what it is used for in practice. This does not seem like a misleading statement.

vitehozonage3• 3 years ago

The bitcoin whitepaper is titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System'. Cash is private and peer-to-peer. Peer-to-peer is impossible if chain analysis companies are required in the middle, as it is now to make sure you don't get 'bad coins'.

Other issues are opened up like the possiblity that a coalition of mining pools will censor transactions in the future.

Bitcoin has clearly failed at its originally intended purpose and monero is now what it wanted to be

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

The feature set of Monero is strictly larger than Bitcoin's.

In other words: everything you can do with Bitcoin can be done with Monero while the converse isn't true.

Strikes me as a pretty decent definition of "Better".

(unless of course, you consider the lack of anonymity a "feature". I'd bet most people don't unless they work in law enforcement or for the IRS).

StingyJelly2• 3 years ago

You probably should add the year (2019) to the title. It's still a great book that made me understand ring signatures. Everything is well explained but some bits may be outdated (eg. monero now uses randomx for ultimate asic resistance.)

EscapeFromNY3• 3 years ago

Monero is perhaps the only cryptocurrency that both works as advertised, and has gathered a self-sustaining userbase.

No $20 transaction fees. No influencer pump and dumps. No VCs who need to extract value. No fork drama. No unrealistic roadmap. No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep. It's not trying to be an investment. It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

No charismatic leader boiling the frog with scope creep.

LOL

It's actually private. It's actually anonymous. This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.

Yes indeed. I sometimes daydream Satoshi knew about ZKP's early enough to integrate it into Bitcoin ... we would have had the perfect storm.

No $20 transaction fees.

This one isn't a structural guarantee of Monero, but rather a side-effects of being a late-comer to the game. In other words, it might come to pass that tx fees get in the $20 range.

EDIT:

This is all a lot of us ever wanted from a cryptocurrency.

Agreed, except maybe for this: I've come to value the finite supply of Bitcoin more than it's value/usefulness as an actual currency.

I initially loved the idea of cryptocurrencies as a currency that would be used in everyday life.

I've changed my stance on this completely: I think that Bitcoin (or something like Monero, with indeed a neat advantage over BTC) is way more valuable as a financial instrument with is own unique characteristics and super-sharp edges than it would ever be as a currency

tromp4• 3 years ago

I've come to value the finite supply of Bitcoin more than it's value/usefulness as an actual currency.

I think finite supply is overrated [1] ...

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...

m348e912• 3 years ago

Yes indeed. I sometimes daydream Satoshi knew about ZKP's early enough to integrate it into Bitcoin ... we would have had the perfect storm.

Can't read SN's mind but I don't know if transactional privacy was a priority for him when developing bitcoin. One of the downsides of Monero's anonymity was that it quickly became a target of censorship so large exchanges like coinbase don't offer it anymore.

Before transaction fees increased, Bitcoin had a capability of enjoying a pretty good mixing feature that is now only practical with similar but lower fee proof of work cryptos.

forty3• 3 years ago

I'm curious, what are people purchasing with it?

renata• 3 years ago

Mullvad accepts VPN payments in Monero.

lordofgibbons2• 3 years ago

The whole point of monero is that it's none of other people's business what I buy with my money.

bunabhucan• 3 years ago

We are seeing an emerging trend where ransomware actors first demand payment in Monero at a discounted ransom amount,

https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/news/252512142/Ran...

ajot• 3 years ago

I've donated to some projects I like (e.g. Radio Paradise)

movapx• 3 years ago

Personally, MDMA and cocaine.

roenxi4• 3 years ago

If you look for purchasable things there isn't much. But the current US president is effectively identifying some of his political opponents as traitors [0]. it isn't that clear which exact opponents he is referring to (does it include Trump, who was a slim margin from being the US president?). We've seen bank account freezes deployed against that truck protest in Canada too and it isn't obvious why any of us have a more fundamental claim to safety from the government than a trucker. Trucking always seemed pretty respectable to me.

In such an environment, being able to donate money with anonymity quickly starts to look like a political necessity. And being able to support people directly if the financial system is further activated as a political weapon (I suspect not much has actually changed, just the records are more easily available - but for the sake of argument lets say this is a new phenomenon that we happen to have also just developed a method for resisting).

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/08/biden-mag...

user6723• 3 years ago

I bought a car that was listed on Craigslist with XMR.

superklondike• 3 years ago

Pretty much anything: https://monerica.com/

i2cmaster• 3 years ago

For a long time I renewed my domain name with crypto because my bank's anti-fraud system got hung up on it for some reason (it does that with crypto too but buying more crypto is less time sensitive.)

I used it when originally trying jmp.chat out so I wouldn't have to worry about recurring charges/fraud etc.

I've bought some electronic components with it just to see it work.

Taek2• 3 years ago

I hate to burst the bubble but strategies to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2019. It turns out that the general strategy of mixing a subset of outputs together is insufficient to provide robust privacy, even if the mix set is large (like in Lelantus).

The only strategies that can provide strong anonymity for on-chain crypto are full anonymity set currencies like Zcash.

beachwood23• 3 years ago

ZCash is insecure by default. It is a honeypot for people who wish to use the default privacy settings of Monero.

On June 8, 2020, Chainalysis added support for Zcash to their Chainalysis Reactor and "Know Your Transaction" (KYT) technologies.[22] This permits Chainalysis to trace and provide transaction values and at least the sender or receiver address for over 99% of Zcash activity.[22] Chainalysis explains that it is able to accomplish this since most Zcash users do not use privacy-enhancing features.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zcash

kossTKR• 3 years ago

I don't think you're bursting his bubble. The post is 100% sinister marketing especially when it's a huge lie, and has been for 4+ years.

cedws2• 3 years ago

Ok, so where can I see a deanonymised version of the ledger?

friend_and_foe4• 3 years ago

Do you happen to have sources for this claim?

timbit42• 3 years ago

That would make sense if you knew who was putting Monero in the mix but you don't. This is a good reason why mixing Bitcoin mixing doesn't work.

pavlov• 3 years ago

And Monero’s relative lack of popularity shows how limited the market is for a cryptocurrency that actually works.

People don’t want private transactions. All they want is those pumps and unrealistic roadmaps and charismatic leaders and investment promises. They want to dream of massive financial success, not to pay for coffee anonymously through a clunky UI.

cedws2• 3 years ago

It's one of the first technologies in history that enables completely private exchanges of currency. Whether you're a cryptocurrency hater or not, that's pretty cool.

krainboltgreene2• 3 years ago

It's one of the first technologies in history that enables completely private exchanges of currency.

Monero pre-dates dead drops?

roenxi4• 3 years ago

Might also consider https://www.getmonero.org/library/ which has links for both both Mastering Monero and the more technical "Zero to Monero" [0] where they go through the maths in detail.

Monero really is quite something. It is eye opening to realise there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No. A powerful tool for liberty.

[0] https://www.getmonero.org/library/Zero-to-Monero-2-0-0.pdf

ur-whale4• 3 years ago

It is eye opening to realize there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No.

Well, this is what the promise of Bitcoin was, but the lack of anonymity in BTC missed the mark by a few inches.

Monero (and it's competitors: ZCash, Grin, Beam, MWC, ...), which IIRC uses the Mimblewimble [1] principle to preserve anonymity) bridged that gap a few years after BTC was launched, but by that time, Bitcoin had already grown to a huge size.

What I would really like to see in terms of innovation in the crypto world is Mimblewimble being actually added to BTC or ETH. Things would get truly interesting.

OTHO, if BTC and ETH had Mimblewimble, they might become a much bigger targets for folks that stand to benefit from controlling free economic transactions between people (governments, etc ...), so who knows, the lack of ZKP in BTC/ ETH might be a blessing in disguise.

[1] https://www.coingecko.com/learn/what-is-mimblewimble

tromp4• 3 years ago

Grin and Beam use Mimblewimble, but Monero uses ring signatures to obscure the transaction graph (with every real input hiding among 16 decoys), and Zcash uses ZK-SNARK zero knowledge proofs [1].

This makes the latter two chains grow at a much faster rate [2] and leaves nodes unable to identify the UTXO set of unspent outputs, making them more resource intensive.

[1] https://electriccoin.co/blog/explaining-halo-2/

[2] https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart/8114

friend_and_foe4• 3 years ago

I personally Love Mimblewimble. I'm a Monero user mostly, but I love Grin.

John Tromp has a proposal for an interactive coin shuffling protocol for Grin [0] that would negate a lot of the privacy concerns, I personally haven't fully tried to understand it and it seems pretty cumbersome to me compared to Monero. I hope to see it in action so I can get an idea of how it compares.

[0] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal/8322

tbrownaw• 3 years ago

It is eye opening to realise there has never been a situation where one person could simply transfer wealth to someone else without anyone in the middle being able to say No.

I believe the traditional tool for this is a suitcase full of either cash or jewelry.

tikkun• 3 years ago

What's considered better these days: Monero or Zcash, and why?

nailer3• 3 years ago

The researchers involved in zcash are a combo of DJB acolytes (in a good way) and Tel Aviv infosec researchers. Plus Ed Snowden was one of the people that participated in their keygen ceremony. *

* Slightly off topic, wikipedia for zcash is terrible, it's written by people that don't understand that a 'ceremony' is part of any asymmetric cryptosystem from your Linux package manager to the CA that signed the cert for the website you're looking at.

lawn7• 3 years ago

Opt-in privacy is poor because most people don't bother, and this drastically reduces the privacy for those that do. Even if something has perfect privacy features, this alone is a deal-breaker.

With Zcash you get opt-in privacy, with Monero it's enforced with every transaction, for everyone.

saesdev3• 3 years ago

there's way more to those crypto than just privacy, Zcash for example is moving to proof-of-stake, they also want tokens and smart contracts on their chain, while Monero is focused on also being more broadly distributed/decentralized, and harder to take down, with a CPU based proof-of-work to enforce that

vitehozonage3• 3 years ago

Zcash has directly admitted that it already had a catastrophic inflation bug [1]. Nobody can prove if it has been hyperinflated by an attacker. Developers linked to DARPA and the Israeli government had the knowledge, capability and opportunity to do so - do you trust them?

https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/zcash-counterfeiting-vuln...

mrangle6• 3 years ago

Investing in a coin for the purpose of privacy is not a good investment. This is because the government has to criminalize every private currency and privatizing method with any significant use. If it hasn't been criminalized yet, it is just because they haven't yet gotten around to it.

I'm not saying that one can't hope for privacy. Only that the investment risk is extremely lopsided in this moment. Expect that the government can ramp up their criminalization efforts faster than a coin can reach escape velocity should its use become more common.

Private coins may be inevitable, but it is going to be a bumpy road to get there.

Bitcoin has absolutely capitalized on giving the impression of privacy, to those (most) not paying full attention, while offering the opposite. Without privacy, DCs are worse than cash unless you feel that you are under threat of seizure or you have a plan to abscond across borders sometime soon.

lawn7• 3 years ago

The biggest issue with cryptocurrencies is that people always seem to only view them as an investment, instead of what usage they may have.

mrangle6• 3 years ago

I was using "investment" as a catch-all for both speculation and use. As in one "invests" dollars into BC with either the intent of selling it for cash later, or the intent of eventually using it. See "with any significant use" in my second sentence.

ponymontana• 3 years ago

When someone try to hardfork bitcoin, bitcoin remain the same and the new fork is just a fork of bitcoin. Network effect and convergence over the open standard in action; the edge that protects bitcoin.

When someone forks monero, the new fork is called "monero" and all the small userbase moves over it. The old chain simply dies. No network-effect to resist changes because theres no network at all compared to bitcoin.

Same for all the crypto.

Its absurd to save money in monero or in all the crypto where someone can easily move the inexistent userbase and do hardforks. But if you cant save because the expected value of the cryptos over time is zero, what is the meaning of exchange these assets?

All crytpos that are not bitcoin (even monero) can only work on the informative asimmetry where some people ignore these facts and, scammed by promoters, holds these non-sense assets expecting returns that will never come. The promoters, instead, will make money dumping on them.

lawn7• 3 years ago

This betrays a complete lack of understanding of hardforks in Monero.

Whenever Monero upgrades to new consensus rules they indeed do so via a hardfork, but that only works because there's social consensus (both economic and mining wise). If the consensus would be to stay with the original rules, people would (and it has happened before).

Even in Bitcoin this works, and Bitcoin has even hardforked before! The difference is that in Bitcoin people want to stay on the original chain.

Keeping money in Monero is safe because you'll still keep the money after the hardfork, that's just how they work.

This is just Bitcoin maxi nonsense scary talk.

Taek2• 3 years ago

Going to mention this as a top level comment because a lot of people here seem to believe that Monero is an anonymous cryptocurrency.

Unfortunately, techniques to break Monero's anonymity have been known since 2018, and these techniques are effective at breaking essentially any partial-mixing based cryptocurrency. (Monero, Lelantus, CoinJoin, Wasabi, etc).

Initial attacks (famously The Flashlight Attack) were capable of breaking the anonymity of targeted individuals, but this attack was later generalized (by me) to break everyone.

These attacks never got a lot of coverage but they are highly effective. The only way to get strong on-chain privacy is to use a full-anonymity cryptocurrency like Zcash.

https://slideslive.com/38911785/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failu...

https://gist.github.com/DavidVorick/0dbd4906bfa50b7d8dba23f7...

The general idea behind each of these is that you can identify people by doing math that essentially asks "what is the likelihood that these N outputs are this close together in the transaction history graph" - and the answer ends up being "cryptographically unlikely" after just a handful of transactions from the same party. The privacy decays unexpectedly quickly. I never formalized the math but iirc you can get enough evidence to be convinced that two different transactions were by the same person after they spend something like 3 outputs total. The math is really nasty.

The only fix we know of is to switch to full anonymity systems. The privacy break is exponential in strength, and therefore even systems like Lelantus that use mixin sizes of >50,000 outputs fail to provide meaningful anonymity.

fastball• 3 years ago

I never formalized the math

Formalizing the math seems very important to underpin a bold claim such as this one.

lordofgibbons2• 3 years ago

If that's the case, why does the IRS still have a $625k bounty for anyone who can defeat monero's anonymity features?

And why have you not collected your money?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2020/09/14/irs...

__alexs2• 3 years ago

PoC||GTFO

dachri• 3 years ago

This problems have already been solved. Zcash is far away from being full privat its just opt-in privacy and not privat by default. And the structure that Zcash is a company is not good

vitehozonage3• 3 years ago

I solved the P versus NP problem too but I didn't bother to formalise the math. Do you believe me? That's what you sound like.

If what you write is true then please write the paper; it would be tremendously important. Until then it's impossible to take you seriously.

serhack_2• 3 years ago

Despite the name, I'm the author! Ask me anything :)

Frisiavones2• 3 years ago

Will you make an updated version?

serhack_2• 3 years ago

Of course :D working on it right now

chalanero• 3 years ago

Two questions:

1. Best monero wallets?

2. How to develop for monero? Links?

joreto• 3 years ago

1. https://www.getmonero.org/downloads/

2. https://www.getmonero.org/resources/developer-guides/

Or just join libera.chat (IRC) and hang in #monero-dev

Mastering Monero: The future of private transactions [pdf] (2019)

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