I want to pile on here, because you’re responding at least in part to @jmsjsph .
I believe that what both Monero and Zcash are working for is genuine 21st century financial privacy. Monero is an “ally” to Zcash, therefore pointing out weaknesses is a process to undertake when the aim is to help… to fix or mitigate the weakness.
That’s my stance, at least. Here’s a suggestion:
Buy-or-earn some Monero. Put some of your skin in the Monero game. Does that shift your perspective?
I like fluffy pony and Magic Crypto Friends, I even reference a talk give at MCC and a complimentary MCP episode where they praise zcash. - I don’t care about social politics or infighting between crypto coins. What in my post lead you to believe otherwise?
Thank you for taking the time to offer some kind criticisms, zancas et al.
To be honest, I’m not interested in using Monero because it cannot send memos. Also, the concept of mixins do not inspire me to transact freely.
I must admit that the thought of transferring $1b+ of capital from Monero into the zcash project by enabling price discovery through user education, thereby accelerating the MGRC, really gets my juices flowing. I do not point out Monero’s weaknesses only to undertake them…
I think we would all agree that users want, no - NEED, to attain privacy nOw. money & messages are the “last straws”. what’s better than tor + z2z?
While I applaud Monero’s efforts, and believe we should continue to support a broad range of solutions to arrive at what i imagine to be “privacy for good”, I cannot recommend their product to anyone actually seeking a private store-of-value or a private means of exchange when safer, more effective and accessible means are available in cash and Zcash today
We wouldn’t want our doctor to prescribe us a sub-standard form of care!
Likewise, in regards to any fiduciary responsibility one might have, Monero shouldn’t be touted as a store-of-value because it cannot offer a “100% no holds guarantee on its supply [sic]”.
I just wish our favorite regulatory compliance analyst would
admit that “Alt-Coin Traceability” is not a pre-print and BreakingMonero isn’t enough - people need to know that it may be STILL BROKEN. begin a motion to peer review
answer my yes-no question to finally clear the air amongst Monero users as to whether Monero can offer a 100% guarantee that it’s supply is less than any number greater than the number of xmr coins minted
all of the above as fluffy founder attempts to promote xmr to regulatory agencies for listing after declaring the “terrible codebase” his personal “pump-and-dump” scheme [sic]
What about xmr tech is particularly fascinating to others, other than its mining capabilities? I am curious to hear…
Look at the points I raised about zcash. how do they apply to monero? - monero is a very different project than zcash that tries to solve the same problem but with different trade offs.
here is a great talk on both.
Starts talking about zec at 3:30 mins.
anyway, I am going to bow out of this thread now. I dont think there is anything for me to gain here.
Ok, this thread has been going for a while. I think what we do is make Zcash as good as we can. There are people in the Monero community I like and some I don’t. Same as Zcash.
Monero has a vibrant community, they aren’t a scam, and I think we can learn a bit from them.
Monero has two problems:
Collectively, a very poor attitude when responding to security flaws or criticisms. Effectively shooting the messenger. This is one of the things @zooko has done really well with ECC and Zcash. And this thread isn’t really aligned with that spirit.
A complete utter inability to acknowledge the very severe limitations of ringCT and decoy based privacy approaches. (see my talk at Zcon1/2/devcon 4 or this blog post ).
But guess what, Zcash also has a massive blind spot. We have a “perfect” privacy system which accounts for less than 4% of all Zcash transactions. And we have prominent voices in the community saying they are ok with increased transparent transactions!!! While this is still better than ringtCT because the anonymity set is cumulative, we still refuse to acknowledge its a problem that needs immediate attention. Or that we need to add network privacy.
So fix these and nighthawk, zcash, zebra, etc will speak for themselves.
Also remember, we aren’t fighting monero or anyone else for market share. The goal is the next few million people who are yet to adopt cryptocurrency. Those people won’t care who said what on forums or even twitter.
When facing attacks from high ranking community members (developers, major moderators, core team etc), what is in your opinion the best way to respond? Mokusatsu might be most civil and dignified, but this essentially leaves the stage to them.
I don’t have all the context on the post, but on a very quick skim it looks like a reasonable blog post. What’s the problem?
In general, the response to Monero is not to respond to Monero, it breads toxicity and alienates people and a valuable community. And again, it’s not some holly war, we all want privacy. So make it a discussion of privacy technologies.
Decoy based privacy systems aren’t private, they are obfuscation and that doesn’t work so well give AI/ML or even a little thought.
Ask the audience what their intuition is about the privacy of a decoy based system.
Then shatter their intuition. Pick some example attack to prove the point such as the KNACC or flashlight attack: repeatedly pay some vendor (e.g. of banned books) then hack/coerce records from their exchange. A number of people will have received one of your payments as a decoy, but with overwhelming probability only the actual seller will have gotten all of them.
Make clear that this is an obvious example of why its flawed, not the only flaw. There are others and they are harder to find.
These also apply to Bitcoin’s coinjoin, etc. Which is probably the bigger competitor anyway if you insist on thinking that way. Again, it’s not about Monero.
By the way, a shorter, pithier version of the flashlight or knacc attack would go a long way to making an argument. I don’t have a version of it that is anywhere near as effective as “Bitcoin is twitter for your bank account.” We should fix that. Would anyone be interested in working on that?
The blog posts is mine. @sgp banned me from “neutral, fair and balanced” /r/Cryptocurrency subreddit for posting it (see the header for a link that includes removed posts). But posted that as a point to @zancas 's assumption that this is somehow a personal duel between me and sgp.
Call it cynicism, but after 3 years of dealing with those people I don’t see a bunch of “it was just community members”. I see a finely tuned machine to extract money from people, Zcash Foundation included. Sgp is just a small cog in that machine. From that point of view - as sgp put it himself [ 1 ], the blog post is very disruptive.
The way to deal with online identities that post true statements and do not respond emotionally.
People tend to be tribal creatures that like to root for what they picked or backed - much like rooting for a favorite sports team or technology. They want to feel that they made the right choice and picked a winner (thus likely to survive). This is an emotional response.
Instead of starting an internet debate or fight - which never really helps - just respond factually and say anyone reading this should fact-check the statements made. If you respond emotionally, you give power/control to the other person(s) as they now know they can “push your buttons” and make you respond or feel some kind of way.
First, admit the truth, be it good or bad for whatever “side” you support. For example, admit that Monero is good because of private by default and admit Zcash for privacy reasons does lack this trait.
Now explain the logical pros and cons - Monero’s privacy has possibly hurt its reputation and availability on exchanges due to regulation. On the other hand, Zcash gives users the option and is more likely to be picked up by exchanges.
The fact is that there will always be “trolls” on the internet, spreading misinformation for whatever reason.
Those people do not matter. The people that do matter are going to be educated and make decisions based on reputable sources.
Win/Lose - We have to accept that things are almost never truly fair. We are here on this forum supporting Zcash, but who knows if it will be the de-facto top Privacy coin. While it could be the best technically, there are other factors in the world that could come up (another privacy coin, a flaw in the protocol discovered, a pandemic, etc.) There also have been other wars in technology where the technically more advanced option loses (such as BetaMax vs VHS). It comes down to money and adoption.
The best thing we can do is address the issues as soon as possible and put our best work out and let the people decide if the solutions meet their needs.
idk, i think ciphertrace is going to get a lot of innocent people put in jail.
because it targets monero and funded by govts, they will use it. it seems they have created some arbitrary “scoring” mechanism to justify tainting addresses as being involved in undesirable to that govt behaviour.
Just listen to Dave Jevans responses…
The enthusiasm of governments to misunderstand tech in the name of putting people in prison is worrying. I can see the nuances of the plausible deniability getting lost at a trial, the more authoritarian ones are going to have a field day.
I don’t think you quite grok how modern data-trawling forensics works. 90% sensitivity is more than good enough. In fact it is brilliant. Pair it with a high specificity test, like for example, in case of DNM whether there was indeed a delivery to that address and you have a winner. You just caught 90% of the bad guys.
what about the 10% innocent guys? their scoring is pretty arbitrary, with no open review.
I agree, I dont think i do either. I saw your other post and didnt really follow it, if you can give me more info or a link I would be very grateful. (the wiki link wasnt too helpful)
for me this is the core difference between monero and zcash. monero is plausible deniability, you have no control over the mixins. where as zcash is actual deniability with z2z. however if z2z gets broken then you have no deniability.
its why I think we need more privacy coins using different methods. Some peoples circumstances might mean they are better off using monero and others zcash. Ideally we can have a world where both work and exist.