the_stc

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.

An extrajurisdictional company operates outside of existing jurisdictions. It might be helpful to think of us as being headquartered in space...if our opsec is correct, we might as well be! (Otherwise I'll be arrested and our contingency procedures will kick in to work with the successor.)

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?

The problem is that miners cost in USD but Monero fee is set in XMR, fixed. If fee goes down 80% but XMR/USD goes up again 5 times then the problem persists. Not an easy thing to fix!

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!

At my company (details in profile, sex-work related), this is exactly why we are centralized. Some competitors go on about smart contracts, and how people will meet for services and exchange escrow keys...it is far-fetched!

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.

Left my job and legal security behind, and decided to take the full startup plunge. Started a project that will increase sex worker safety while providing a smoother, faster experience for everyone involved: https://pinkdate.is.

shapeshift publishes all trades

Thank you.

This is not correct. If the tumbler is compromized then your records are trivially known. It is a bad assumption to think tumblers are not honeypots or do not sell their records to LE.

Yes, a combination of Tumbling and Monero is a good step. I do this as part of my living. To bootstrap our company it took me over a month to get linked-bitcoins to unlinked-bitcoins.

Monero is not a magic-cure-all! Monero needs a very big warning like Tor Project says, how Tor is not alone going to save you.

Another big piece of management is a tree-shaped wallet-graph. You want to split your money regularly, then churn and obfuscate each wallet. And NEVER JOIN THEM. Even with Monero there is no safe way to join amounts. If you split into Wallet1 and Wallet2, then 10 transactions later they are running low and you want to consolidate, then you run a high risk of correlating all those transactions.

At this time, there is no official guidance on how to use Monero safely.

This does very small amount to enhance your privacy. Whatever exchange you use will track those trades. If the exchange is not tracking you then making multiple trades will not help very much.

Most ICOs are playing off these things, trying to avoid the SEC, and in turn, hurting investors by giving them a bad deal. Tezos, for example, calls their investors donors, giving them donations. This is disgusting.

We (see profile) are doing the right thing by issuing an unregulated security. With privacy tech this will not be a problem for investors, and we absorb the risk along with the other risky things we do. Our contingency system will allow the platform to continue even if we have an accident or fail our opsec and are outed.

I do not quite get this article saying that ICOs are riskier when they issue shares or equivalents. Investors are at a better position if they own part of the underlying company instead of a token that could simply be replaced. Nothing stops Filecoin or the other storage companies, for instance, from pegging the value of the token very low, or outright issuing new tokens or just accepting ETH/BTC/XMR like they should.

IOTA made their own crypto, then when got called on it they denied it mattered at first. Then they backed down and said it was intentional! So that they could destroy anyone else using their open source code. When pressed to promise that they had not left more backdoors in, they refused. Of course they had to refuse, these were accidental bugs rolling their own stuff.

That looks totally incompetent to me. Then mention centralized coordinator and they throw fits. Refuse to discuss it because it is only temporary.

But judge for yourselves. Look at this nice comment by Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum) and the childish retorts from the IOTA people: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/72l7kp/why_...

But the PoW is for small IOT devices right? Or at any case it is for regular users, and does not take them minutes to compute. I cannot see how that is resistant to an adversary with dedicated hardware.

My company (details in profile) relies on Tor. We help people, but governments would like to shut us down. We actually will expose everything via a non .onion, then proxy it to our HS (SSL term done on the hidden service). We'll expose via .onion as well and get a cert. We are hoping with HS v3 the rules will relax. For now, Digicert told us they were not going to issue any more. Maybe if we push.

Being undiscoverable is a big help. For our ancillary services, we're taken to using Tor2Web to auth mode HS servers because some random domain is less likely to look interesting for people to poke at. Publishing a .onion, especially with some general-purpose software hosted on it screams that there is something of interest there.

Can not a database or simply digital signatures do the same thing? Why does Maersk need a trustless system?

Exactly! We do not play that game. We're clear that our app uses traditional tech and isn't some magic dApp fairy dust.

Very few ICOs do right by investors. We're one of the few offering equity positions and dividends. The law conveniently provides an excuse to them, see Tezos even outright calling it a donation! As an EJC the laws don't apply in the same way, so we directly offer shares in our startup.

Few ICOs are willing to do the ethical thing because they're just cash grabs. Hire a small team to try to make your whitepaper vision into code. If it fails and you were not too far fetch in using company funds, nothing bad will happen to you. It's disgusting.

This is accurate. My startup is blockchain funded, but we have a serious money-making business model. But some people still want the sexy smart contract tech decentralized sound clips to get really hyped.

People give us a hard time because our core team is anonymous (key part of being an extrajurisdictional company). It's a fair criticism! And the most obvious.

Bancor had a bunch of smiling faces making up their top team. Does not help investors at all.

>Why would you expect an email provider to also provide a calendar?

Because calendar has become a key part of a productivity suite and Email is the keystone. We use Protonmail right now to avoid Google or Fastmail or someone serving up all our emails in a warrant. We keep sensitive stuff off Protonmail of course but every bit helps LE build their case against us.

Protonmail should have calendaring, wiki, and on and on. An encrypted replacement for Exchange eventually. We disable all audiovideo hardware for core members but I can see even secure voice being useful for our contractors to use.

Our company is not legal (details in profile). We chose Protonmail to start because our biggest concern was getting our emails served to the government on request down-the-line. We pay a significant monthly charge to use their services and feel it is worth every penny.

A lot of people in our industry and others have this same model. It is not that the NSA is after you. It's local law enforcement. In our case, SEC and FBI. For average users, local LE will not have 0 days or anything special. Protonmail is out of reach for a lot of LE and that is important.

The best choice for us when we're fully operational is to run a Protonmail-like setup, self-hosted. Deal with mail issues and spam. It is a pain!

We may write up more when we have things stably working after a while. But we are very cautious mentioning any specific tools, as that gives attackers a head-start. We won't mention OS, stack, DB, etc.

But think something like secure boot, serve up a basic image, download full image from provisioning servers, turn on DB, restore from backups.

Calling it securities fraud is rather unfair if you ask me. Why do you say fraud? Sure, we do not follow the SEC rules. In fact, the SEC opinion on ICOs is what galvanized us to go all out and insist on offering real equity to investors. It's far better than the nonsense ICOs come up with to tokenize themselves.

People like the Tezos group, asking for donations... it is disgusting that investors go for that. Demand equity. We always choose morality over legality. Following SEC rules technically, while ripping off investors ... I'd rather be in the clear ethically.

The blockchain part is for payments, so not that big of a deal. Though to raise money, we'd be better off finding a blockchain angle to the platform! Truthfully though, our app is not breaking new tech ground, apart from privacy and security (see the link in my original post).

We are ambitious though! I think we'll be the first blockchain-funded unicorn. Escorting is fragmented and high friction, and we're going to fix it. Our VP of Product is an active sex worker and very tuned in to the real issues facing workers and clients.

Escorting might not be viewed as fundamental a right as driving, but yes, same idea. We put morality over legality.

Extrajurisdictional does not just mean criminal. It means that we operate in a way that no specific jurisdiction can apply itself to us. It isn't a wild card to just do whatever we want. We fully intend to pay taxes where possible. We want to be as transparent as possible to avoid money laundering. We have a strict no drugs policy. Strict age requirements, and, as far as possible, no coercion/trafficking/pimping. (If we see one device managing multiple accounts, we'll investigate/ban.)

Only a few people have access to the keys, plus a set of third parties (think lawyers) that have a shard of an SSS setup. Changing the boot key can be done now and then.

But we think it is feasible to drop the disks entirely for the main servers. So the disk encryption is an issue for the systems holding our CI and imaging platforms.

Our app has a somewhat Tinder-like feel, though it's paid (escorts). I don't want to go overboard plugging, so see my profile for details. For fun, here's how we score on the article's items:

1. No scammers. We require providers to be vetted in some way (references). Clients are going to need to provide screening to see providers.

2-A. We use our custom login system. Verifying your social media account is just a read-once thing we do; we don't ever have access to post. In fact, it is unlikely we'd even get approved for an API key on most platforms.

2-B. For launch we're pretty exclusionary :(. Focusing on cishet couplings, female provider. We're going to address that as soon as possible. Queer sex workers face additional challenges for sure.

3. Data safety. Due to our company's legal status (extrajurisdictional), we have to deeply hide all data. Our servers don't have persistent storage, RAM only. (At boot, it's a manual restore from something like Tarsnap.) Only a few people have root or raw DB access. This does not include most devops people - they go through a change approval process. Real access is limited to core members heavily vested in the company with a need-to-know. More at [1], please ignore the clickbait title.

Another key point: connectivity is heavily restricted. App servers only have inbound socket from their hidden service, plus outbound to the DB layer hidden service. DB layer only has that inbound socket. DB requests are rate limited globally plus per user.

4. We'll wipe your data shortly after deactivation if there are no abuse reports on your account. In which case we keep a photo ID and birthdate so you can't sign up again and get a clean record. This is needed to protect user's safety. But at least a photo is not so readily searchable. Maybe Facebook can do it, but if we were to somehow

1: https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for-ano...

Except they are shady as hell and have not published anything to establish that they are solvent. It is fine to use right now to hedge against small changes. If something crashes hard then people try to get out of Tether, it will fall apart.

No one has shown proof of being able to withdraw from Tether.

That's why a Tether that is done properly would be very valuable indeed.

That'd be swell. As an EJC, transacting in USD is more difficult, hence we must use cryptocurrencies.

Is Ripple pegged to USD? I do not want anything complicated, just a coin or token that has a 1:1 ratio with USD. Charge me 5% or 10% to buy them or 5% on cash out.

I do not really care about Bitcoin politics, but I will say as a user and business, the fees and confirm times are ridiculous and need a fix now, not in "18 months" when LN comes out (and then who knows how long until high adoption of LN).

Hopefully it will stabilize.

I do not mind having Bitcoin keep going up. But as a business owner that relies heavily on cryptocurrencies, I would really love it if things were more stable. We are building a business on privacy, anonymity, and cryptocurrency as a backbone. We're extrajurisdictional, so banking to USD or other fiat is very tricky. Tether is a great idea, but the current company looks very unstable. If there's a crash, they seem unlikely to be solvent.

Our company would pay a premium to get into a solid, pegged-to-USD coin. At least 5% if not more. Or even a coin that's pegged to an ETF. Of course we cannot satisfy KYC laws so it'd need to be a freely traded token, really.

I really hate the "hodlrs" and the complete lack of focus on how this is supposed to work for real businesses that use it as a means to an end, and not an end by itself.

I see this a lot talking about the 2x chain. People sometimes discuss it in terms of what's better for the BTC price. Why is that a goal at all? Other than the obvious reason of making current users richer?