cowtools

I suppose the monero userbase has similar attitudes as the early bitcoin userbase, but monero/cryptonote is not a bitcoin fork in the same sense that zcash/zerocoin is.

>we could just iterate on existing ones, and have our userbase intact without having to 'gain traction' for an entirely new alt-coin.

I think there are some fundamental limits to the throughput of a single cryptocurrency due to network latency and bandwidth. Perhaps the solution to scalability is simply to have multiple cryptocurrencies and to facilitate atomic swaps between them. So in this sense, the creation of new cryptocurrencies with minor feature changes (litecoin, bitcoin cash, wownero, cheapeth, etc.) is actually good for network diversity.

That being said, the owners of existing "big" cryptocurrencies will usually want to make changes that increase its usability to compete with these "trivial forks"

Bitcoiners have been soured by the idea of a hard fork since the XT dispute, while the monero userbase has commited itself to regular hard forks every 6 months to upgrade the network.

No, it wasn't.

Let's not speculate:

https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/privacy/

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=770

It seems like satoshi thought pseudo-anonyminity was sufficient. The integration of zero-knowlege proofs into cryptocurrencies was not really well understood at the time.

It is possible but unlikely. It is likely that clearnet use of monero is monitored, for example. But in terms of security, monero users are very cautious. The code has been independently audited, and has generally succeeded where other cryptonote-based cryptocurrencies have taken fatal missteps.

I suspect that most monero black markets are taken down by sting operations. The black markets all have a limited shelf life and these days they tend to intentionally retire before getting "silk-roaded"

He may be referring to opsec more generally (onramps, offramps), or he may be specificially referring to poisoned output attacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM

TL;DR Ring signatures, like all sender-obfuscation methods, have a limited anonymity set: it limits you to a pool of possible senders. If Alice frequently sends funds to Bob, who frequently sends funds to Carl, who frequently sends to Alice, she can see that Alice->Bob->Carl->Alice is one possible outcome. She does this because she can trace the coin she associates with Bob to a coin she associates with Carl. There is a ton of plausible deniability at first, but the relationship between Bob and Carl becomes more obvious the more Alice->Bob->Carl->Alice continues to happen.

Alice can be multiple exchanges collaborating using KYC.

How to resist poisoning: limit your risk, churn, bigger ring-size/anonymity set, do atomic swaps (this severs chain of ownership, but is not generally sybil-proof), do multi-output transactions if you are sending to multiple people at once who can co-ordinate (this reduces the number of coins they can co-ordinate).

The privacy characteristics of the lightning network are probably worse than that of the traditional banking system, but this depends on implementations.

It is quite difficult to compare the obfuscation features of lightning network with that of "conventional" systems like cryptonote-style ring signatures. Consider two different situations:

A) A user picks the economically best peer to open channels with, or chooses peers randomly. Neither of these are sybil proof, which basically means you are transmitting your requests publicly.

B) A user only opens channels privately within a cohort of peers that privately agree not to keep logs, have special means of transmitting requests privately, etc.

I would assume that most users follow some of A's heuristic and some of B's. To the extent that situation B offers privacy, it prevents you from transacting with other users globally in a more general sense.

In other words, it is useful as a privacy mechanism only if you trust your peers not to keep logs, but don't trust them not to double-spend, and also you are not worried about guilt-by-association of owning a channel with these peers. If you were running some sort of dark net market or something, it would be easier to implement some sort of (cryptocurrency-backed?) chaumian cash, as you already implicitly trust the marketplace's sysadmin to some extent (as they can simply MITM your relationships unless you establish them by keypairs out-of-band (this is another sybil problem), which is probably more dangerous than double-spending).

They are not subject to chain analysis, but they are still subject to analysis.

Almost any use of bitcoin will de-anonymize you through some heuristic.

As much as I appreciate the sentiment, ring signatures are not a perfect solution for sender privacy at the moment given current ringsizes.

Almost every cryptocurrency with sender-obfuscation features bumps up against "poisoned output" attacks for low enough anonymity sets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABIcsDJKyM

But it is good enough for many purposes. The goal is to provide a high level of plausible deniability for the sender.

How is tether considered a cryptocurrency here? It's centrally minted and controlled.

Not my house. I use kraken so I think I will remain less affected than users of other, less credible, exchanges.

Cryptocurrency has been working just fine before tether, and it's going to work just fine without it. We've seen ups and downs. So I don't think it's that crazy when the house has failed many times in the history of cryptocurrency.

> Tether plugs on through things like the Terra collapse with zero issues

Being more stable than Terra is not a very high bar.

>This is why I'm strongly against spam filtering for email. Spam filters are fundamentally security-through-obscurity. I mean, they don't protect your email from targeted bombing attacks or phishing. If you need spam filters to operate your email on a day-to-day basis, then the security of your email is fundamentally broken.

You kid, but this is completely true Email is simply an incredibly flawed, outdated and broken system, especially when used without PGP. Phishing is a massive problem, and it has only continued to grow in scale because spam, uh... finds a way. At the same time, spam filters regularly create false positives, making email an unreliable transport (leading "oops, it got lost in my spam folder").

>Blocking Tor isn't a security measure, it's a nuisance reduction measure.

You should block all IP space, this will reduce nuisances by 100%. In fact, this will save you from having to consider any real security practices or do your job properly.

There was article here the other day on a project by herb stutter to improve c++ syntax, I can link it to you if you want.

But I get the impression that the syntax is a fixable problem. Usually critics point so something like the template system or something.

I think the solution would be to just make the down-vote do nothing but increment the visible counter, and also make it so that users that can't comment if they already voted. This allows people to simply signal their disapproval without fighting repetitive flamewars in the comments or suppressing content they don't like.

Or maybe if you're running a forum where you want to promote controversial content and hide boring content, just make the downvote act identical to the upvote, so users are incentivized to downvote and argue if they think it is argue-worthy and just ignore if they think it is too boring to discuss.

The answer depends on the type of service you host. I don't know what you need to do, but I do know that filtering IP space is merely security-by-obscurity, it is a cheap and broken solution to the hard problems of sybil resistance. If you need IP filtering to operate on a day-to-day basis, then the security of your service is fundamentally broken.

Tor users do not have any special properties over clear-net users besides low accountability for their IP space. There are other ways to acquire this type of setup that don't involve broadcasting a public list of known exit nodes as an act of good faith. Any sophisticated attacker will be able to easily get ahold of the IP space and bandwidth they need to do their work, whether it's through a botnet or simply because they operate out of some less-accountable country like China or Russia.

IP filtering: now you have two problems!

modeless: it's impossible to install native code on the device you ostensibly own without Apple's ongoing permission.

fingerlocks: here, just run these two easy commands to ask apple for their ongoing permission!

> In the current model, the barrier to entry is pretty low. $99 gets you xcode, plus you need done hardware.

Hundreds of dollars in apple hardware and software compared to zero dollars for MSVC community, zero dollars for android developer studio, zero dollars for linux toolchain or whatever.

>Once you've made something you need to reach a market. A good market place (like a regular super market) brings together suppliers and customers. That market has costs.

The cost of hosting the app store is essentially the cost of hosting a web service that lets you download and buy programs. The developers could easily host their own app store as a web page if iOS just facilitated running programs downloaded from the internet or loaded externally. Apple has built themselves a dam upstream and is charging everyone downstream for water-rights-as-a-service.

>One model for costs is to charge each app the same amount. Say, for example $5000 per app submission. Lots of successful suppliers would like this model because it raises the bar for completion, and means they pay less money.

>Another model is free-to-enter, but takes a cut of the sales. Successful products end up paying much much more than stuff no-one wants.

The only fair model here is the one where 100% of apple's income comes from hardware sales alone. That is the only situation where you don't set up the user to be exploited by erecting these walls around what they can and cannot run on their own hardware.

> If you develop for iOS you know the rules.

They know the rules, and they know the rules are bullshit. What do you want them to do, throw their hands in the air and say "welp, them's the rules, I guess we can should never try to use our leverage or negotiate better rules cause that's just how it is I guess."

>Code signing identity

>Please refer to the Apple documentation on how to get a code signing identity and certificates. You can check that you have a code signing identity correctly installed by running the following command.

It has a secure chain of trust in the sense that the machine is secured against user control. Face, meet boot.

>Political debates are the same way, right?

I think a debate is something you can only have between parties that have similar goals (axioms) but different methods. Like a scientific debate, everyone shares the same information and same the goal of reaching understanding but they are split on the methods to interpret that information.

Usually in politics, opposing parties enter a debate with irreconcilable goals, so they are are incentivized to disagree with each other no matter what, this leads to a situation where the discussion is centered around "zingers" and rhetoric to give the impression that some side is winning and "gaining ground" against the other. The presidential debate, for example, is not really so much a debate but a platform for candidates to state their viewpoints and signal to their demographics.

I mean, if anyone can get ahold of fake passports...

>there's no way teenagers are interested in political discussions. Maybe they are, but the people I get in flame wars with speak and act like angry adults

pretty much describes how I used reddit as a teenager.

Yeah but there are also a lot of losers like me here so it averages out

By what mechanism will fees increase?

It's true that nobody knows for certain what will happen. I am skeptical of the idea that bitcoin in particular will be able to scrounge up enough fees on "L1" to keep the network secure, especially given its small throughput.

As the author mentions, the "L2" scaling solutions like LN still require security on "L1". However, to the extent that "L2" is scalable, it will not increase "L1" fees.

Sure, but I would argue that blockstream and others control bitcoin not by forcing upgrades, but instead by preventing upgrades to the network and creating commercial solutions to easily fixable problems.

I'm not saying that blocksize, LN, etc are solved problems. But I am saying that the indecision and lack of community involvement is slowly killing bitcoin. It is succumbing to corporate capture. They continue to invent increasingly custodial methods of using bitcoin.

Good. Money invested in someone's mattress does industry no good.

> no one knows for sure, it's still too early to tell.

This is true, no one knows for sure. But I am betting against bitcoin here. At some point the fees are just too high and it become prohibitive towards most people using it at all. So despite the fact that the fee/tx is higher, the total fees collected are lower than an equivalent cryptocurrency with more L1 bandwidth.

As the article I posted says, the real problem with bitcoin here is that the "L2" systems like the lightning network reduce load on the "L1", but also you need the "L1" to collect enough in fees to keep "L2" secure (and that's with L2 middlemen taking their own fees). It is a very delicate balancing act.

>the papers suggest it's possible to update the protocol/consensus to detect and thwart that type of attacks, and while Bitcoin is slow moving, it's not static and there's still plenty of time to find a decent fix to that issue.

Yes, it is quite possible to make these technical improvements to bitcoin. But it may be socially infeasible to convince bitcoiners to do this. The BTC/BCH fork was quite disastrous: not because it forked the cryptocurrency, but because it forked the community. The remaining BTC community is strongly anti-hardfork (they are opposed to any non-reverse-compatible changes). The part of the community that was proactive about change died with BCH. But attitudes may change, who knows really.

In the stock market, the money you invest into a company is used to pay for workers, equipment, etc that generates more dividends. Anything you invest in staking is competing in a zero-sum with other stakers.