Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by tribby on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @01:27AM
(#16058956)
monero has become popular in this space, but the average (illicit) user is still probably making operational mistakes while buying, using, and selling it. in the case of monero a lot of people like to skip the step where they download a 30GB+ blockchain over tor, and I can't blame them. when the privacy-oriented cryptocurrencies are effortlessly private, that's when they will have arrived so to speak. I'm fairly optimistic about moxie & co's recently-announced mobilecoin (https://www.mobilecoin.com/whitepaper-en.pdf) for that reason -- if it's going to get adopted by whatsapp, the user experience will necessarily be pretty darned simple.
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Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by EwanToo on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @02:21AM
(#16059197)
MobileCoin might be an amazing user experience, but the odds of Facebook choosing to implement an external blockchain as a currency is pretty much nil as far as I'm concerned.
If it does work, FB will simply reimplement it with a Facebook pre-mined set of coins before launching.
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by catamorphismic on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:03AM
(#16060610)
Why would you need to download the blockchain over Tor? There are many people downloading the blockchain and that in itself does not incriminate you. It seems sufficient to only send out transactions using Tor.
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by phpnode on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @09:05AM
(#16061020)
A relatively tiny number of people will ever download the blockchain, a relatively tiny number of people use Tor, how many bits of information does a state level adversary need to deanonymize someone?
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by radicality on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @08:34AM
(#16060796)
I'm interested too, hope the OP or someone can answer. Also, why does the transaction itself need to be sent over tor? I thought Monero's feature is that you can't tell from a transaction who the recipient is (ring transactions or something?) but maybe I don't understand the end-to-end flow and the math well. What is incriminating when you publish a transaction without tor?
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by the_stc on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @10:22AM
(#16061677)
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.
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by fsiefken on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @04:24AM
(#16059630)
DAG based coins don't have a blockchain to download. Byteball offers Blackbytes for privacy right now over Tor
http://freebe.byte-ball.com/
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by albertgoeswoof on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @04:57AM
(#16059764)
Does byteball require a centralized conductor for security? (like IOTA)
Re:The Criminal Underworld Is Dropping Bitcoin for Monero
by Geee on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @03:43AM
(#16059460)
I'm confident that we won't need something like MobileCoin, which is based on secure hardware which you have to trust. I'm pretty sure someone will come up with some kind of combination of RaiBlocks and Monero, for example. Also, SpectreCoin might be onto something if they are able to implement stealth staking.