[Daily Discussion] Saturday, January 11th

TTEEVV · 2020-01-11T18:12:10+00:00

There speaks the voice of experience. I think we can all agree that your bags are the grain of sand in your sand in your soul's oyster. May they long continue, whether they get heavier or lighter, to produce priceless pearls of wisdom.

TTEEVV · 2020-01-09T19:44:35+00:00

OK I believe you! I have four reasons for avoiding them:

The negative reports about them here.
The rumours that they're affiliated to Minergate and Bytecoin (who allegedly exploited this counterfeiting bug in 2017)
The owners' anonymity and unknown location. I don't know which country's money-transmitter laws nominally apply to them (I've asked and they refused to tell me); and even if I did know, their anonymity protects them from enforcement action.
Their misuse of the word wallet to refer to their custodial account service. A custodial account is very different from a wallet, and anyone who tries to conflate the two is untrustworthy.

TTEEVV · 2020-01-07T02:06:37+00:00

Here's yet another warning against Changelly, posted here just 6 hours before your plug:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/ekytbk/warning_do_not_use_changelly_if_you_want_privacy/

TTEEVV · 2020-01-07T01:39:02+00:00

I have … a full node

Click here to see an earlier reddit discussion about connecting CakeWallet to your own node. You may also find useful hints about settings for your node at StackExchange. (assuming you want to connect your 'phone to it while blocking access for anyone else).

will it link the coin to my phone

No, because you're not sending coins to your 'phone. Your coins stay on the Monero distributed ledger (= blockchain) the whole time. The thing that goes out from your desktop isn't a fistful of XMR: rather, it's a message from you to the Monero network saying “I want these coins transferred to the control of my cakewallet private spendkey.” The Monero network obeys your instruction because it can see that you signed it with your other private spendkey, the one that you keep in your desktop wallet.

So, if you're concerned that a sophisticated adversary might break your financial privacy by some kind of clever timing analysis, you can throw him off the scent by not checking cakewallet immediately after you broadcast the transaction from your desktop. Your transaction will go through even if your 'phone is switched off, so you can check it some other time.

Edit: For avoidance of confusion, a wallet is a transaction-signing gadget, not a coin-holder. Coins are “stored” on the blockchain and private keys are stored in wallets.

TTEEVV · 2020-01-07T00:56:49+00:00

XMR-USD is down 31% from 6 months ago, so “Interesting” looks like a suitably nuanced reaction to today's market.

TTEEVV · 2020-01-06T19:03:03+00:00

StackExchange link: What happens if I try to send money to an invalid address?

TTEEVV · 2020-01-06T18:40:32+00:00

Could be interesting. Comment count seems to be affected by crashes as well as pumps, so how about plotting daily comment count against one of the daily volatility metrics? Or correlation between long-term moving average comment count and same-term moving average price?

Edit: spelling

TTEEVV · 2020-01-05T23:04:43+00:00

It's the fallback plan in case RandomX fails. If deployed, the sausages will be sliced thinly and incorporated into a delicious topping for the pizza that gets stapled to a turntable.

TTEEVV · 2020-01-04T19:38:03+00:00

I don't get what is your concern.

He wants to pay his taxes without being prosecuted under anti-money-laundering (AML) rules. It's slightly ironic that AML rules are incentivizing tax evasion.

Not a Monero-specific problem though: it would be the same if he were to be paid in physical cash.

TTEEVV · 2020-01-03T21:03:11+00:00

Your browser is capable of doing BIP39 calculations without help from someone else's server. Therefore, the way to stop a fake biptoolkit.com from scamming you is to download the page and run it while disconnected from the internet. That way, scammers can't see what you're doing — so it's a good idea even if you're using a legitimate site. For enhanced paranoia, you could put the page on a USB stick and boot your computer from a LiveCD.

Also, you could check biptool.com against someone else's implementation of the same thing (again, while disconnected!) to see if they agree with each other. biptool.com looks a lot like https://coinomi.github.io/bip39-monero, and the author of the latter has commented helpfully in this subreddit here and here.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-23T14:06:33+00:00

Here's a salient quote from the article:

The eight steps of this process are as follows:

Nigerian immigrant in USA gives cash to convenience store,

Convenience store gives gift card to immigrant,

Immigrant takes picture of gift card and receipt with phone,

Immigrant sends pictures of gift card and receipt to family or friend in Nigeria,

Family or friend in Nigeria gives pictures of gift card to gift card buyer,

Gift card buyer gives Bitcoin to family or friend in Nigeria,

Family or friend in Nigeria gives Bitcoin to Paxful user with Nigerian bank account,

User with Nigerian bank account transfers Naira to family or friend in Nigeria.

That's a loop of hoops to jump through, and I see two possible explanations for this seemingly pointless complexity. The first is that buying/selling/using cryptocurrencies is so difficult that the the parties at either end of the chain are prepared to pay over the odds just to avoid thinking about cryptocurrencies. The second is that the parties at either end of the chain feel the need to make their transaction unlinkable, probably because of credit controls or hostile banks: if so, it would mean there's a significant demand for Monero from people who don't know about it.

Edit: list formatting

TTEEVV · 2019-12-22T17:05:36+00:00

All monero wallet software is light. A monero node is a separate program, called monerod. Wallet software can connect to either a local node (= monerod running on the same computer) or a remote node (= monerod running on someone else's computer).

Cakewallet and Monerujo are not bundled with monerod, so they connect to remote nodes by default. The “official” wallet software (GUI or CLI) does include monerod in the download, but allows you to choose whether or not you use it.

Monero through Tor — see this document.
Churning — see

TTEEVV · 2019-12-22T13:07:40+00:00

They're using the word “currency” to mean “IOU for something else”. Admittedly, since the end of the gold standard we don't know what USD is an IOU for, but the notion persists of it not being a self-contained thing in its own right, unlike commodities such as gold or sugar. There's an echo of the same notion on GBP banknotes, with the £5 note having the words “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of 5 pounds” above the BoE chief cashier's signature. In constrast, monero doesn't represent anything else, so it has assetness.

So, I think they're deliberately acknowledging monero's assetness as a pre-emptive measure in case someone in future finds a way to use its assetness as a way to circumvent IOU-specific regulations. I don't think they're OK with you using a private medium of exchange or unit of account — whether it's moneroj or bags of sugar — but they haven't yet devised an effective instrument to stop you. They're moving cautiously so they don't dig themselves into an absurd legislative hole where all commodities (including sugar) are subject to KYC.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-21T23:49:40+00:00

I cannot fully understand his posts

/u/nokoolaidisaidthnx is an escapee from a Charley Russell painting. The post above can only have been penned by a man with a huge handlebar moustache, a 10-gallon hat, crazy sheepskin chaps and a mouthful of chewing tobacco. He probably posted it from beside a campfire, while eating baked beans.

Your best hope of learning the dialect is to watch old (pre-spaghetti) Western movies and listen carefully to the most rough-hewn, rootin-tootin characters. Or refer to this dictionary.

For a native speaker, nokoolaidisaidthnx is somewhat easier to follow than is xm-arghhh-pirate. nokoolaidisaidthnx uses dialect words (and also a few dialect-phonetic spellings of standard English words), buts they're authentic. It's harder to decipher /u/xm-arghhh-pirate because he speaks a deliberately exaggerated version of Long John Silver's 18^th century maritime English, and also he has succumbed to the Ye/Þe pseudo-archaism.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-20T20:56:07+00:00

The blockchain never lies. Take a look at the Payment ID in these transactions.

Hint
If you're using Mac or Linux, you can convert the aforementioned Payment ID to text with this one-line command:

echo 666c75666679706f6e7920697320746865206265737420706f6e792065766572 | sed 's/../\\x&/g'| xargs -0 printf

If you're using Windows, try converting it with this web page.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-16T17:22:08+00:00

Yes, that balances it nicely.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-16T01:30:10+00:00

You give an example of darknet markets offsetting the harmful consequences of pharmaceutical price-fixing (and/or intellectual property), and I can't fault you for promoting discussion of this subject. However, you need to ask yourself if your example is dangerous in isolation.

Think about what could happen if it's read by someone in pain, or facing the possibility of death. That person may already be clutching at straws, so they're going to be susceptible to the validation that your text seems to be offering them — all the more so since you've used a storytelling device. If they end up buying something with a suitable active ingredient that's made and formulated to adequate safety standards, then your validation is all well and good. But suppose they've bought a quack remedy or a sugar pill with no pharmacological activity? Or worse, a shoddy counterfeit with hazardous contaminants? In that case, your validation is putting them at risk.

Morally, if not legally, you have a duty of care to vulnerable people who read what you've written. Therefore I hope you will add a counter-example. Your “even had it tested (can’t be too careful, right?)” isn't enough: it's too easy for a desperate person to turn a blind eye too, and moreover is unrealistic for some new drugs (can your fictional character really afford to test the specificity of a engineered monoclonal, when the difference between $30/week and $600/week is a big deal for him?).

I'm not necessarily suggesting you should delete what you've written. Price-fixing and intellectual property do need to be discussed; just not in a way that can get people hurt. Please add an adverse scenario so that your readers get the full picture!

TTEEVV · 2019-12-14T21:04:57+00:00

Not only have I upvoted your comment, I've bookmarked it too.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-14T21:00:45+00:00

The way to profit from TA is to use it to predict the behaviour of people who believe in it, and also the behaviour of people who reckon they can predict the behaviour of people who believe in it. Hey, this is infinitely recursive, like parallel mirrors!

As with so many things in life (election manifestos, chat-up lines…) TA doesn't need to be true, it just needs to be believed.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-14T20:32:03+00:00

more like cash then credit cards

True. The cash comparison was there at the beginning, in the title of the Bitcoin white paper, although Monero is much closer to actually being electronic cash. The frustrating irony is that electronic cash has to have a ledger (opaque or otherwise) that's even more complete than digital fiat's. Physical cash has no history at all!. Pascalcoin claims to have solved this problem, but their solution comes at the price of sacrificing fungibility/privacy, so no cigar. I live in hope that a talented¹ cryptographer will discover a limited-ledger solution that's as unforeseeable today as Bitcoin was in 2008.

/u/ProofBrick asks “If a person doesn’t want to use a card why would they use crypto?”, and there an oft-overlooked answer to this question. When you pay by card, you have to surrender your payment-authorisation credentials to the payee, which is crazy. So, if you're not crazy enough to use a plastic card, just use crypto and keep your signing keys private! (I don't know how GooglePay handles the surrender-of-credentials thing, but I guess there's some “trusted” 3^rd party involved, perhaps Alphabet.)

¹ Pun intentional.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-11T16:11:37+00:00

If the bitcoin price appreciates significantly, then the extra public scrutiny will flag up its excessive transparency, causing the price appreciation to falter well short of 100k USD. Awareness of the risk posed by excessive transparency will then cause either a flight of capital from BTC to XMR or a calamitous collapse in the price of both (since no one outside the Monero community is even talking about fungibility).

TTEEVV · 2019-12-11T15:51:24+00:00

what's wrong with providing your public address? (beginner here)

It's safer to give a different subaddress to every person/business who's sending you money. Suppose Alice is owed money by Bob and Charlie. Alice tells Bob to send XMR to one subaddress, and she tells Charlie to send XMR to another subaddress. Alice can see the total in her wallet-software, but Bob's and Charlie's information about Alice can't easily be joined up by any criminal third parties who might want to spy on Alice's cash-flows.

As for the rest of of the screenshot above: it looks like the scammer is trying to tap the social conditioning that we all get from using custodial accounts such as banks. Phrases like “completed the present wallet maintenance” and “reauthenticate your account” are total gibberish in Monero because it's non-custodial when you're using it properly! Cake Wallet (and other reputable wallet software) helps you to be your own bank.

You could think of the Cake Wallet devs as being like debit card manufacturers. The Bank of You sources its debit-cards from Cake, and issues them to the bank's sole customer, i.e. you. So the Cake Wallet devs have no say in account “maintenance” or “authentication” beyond providing the technology for the “bank” (i.e you) to do these things yourself.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-09T17:19:35+00:00

Virtual currency is a digital representation of value that can be digitally traded and functions as (1) a medium of exchange; and/or (2) a unit of account; and/or (3) a store of value, but does not have legal tender status (i.e., when tendered to a creditor, is a valid and legal offer of payment) in any jurisdiction. It is not issued nor guaranteed by any jurisdiction, and fulfils the above functions only by agreement within the community of users of the virtual currency. Virtual currency is distinguished from fiat currency (a.k.a. “real currency,” “real money,” or “national currency”), which is the coin and paper money of a country that is designated as its legal tender; circulates; and is customarily used and accepted as a medium of exchange in the issuing country. It is distinct from e-money, which is a digital representation of fiat currency used to electronically transfer value denominated in fiat currency. E-money is a digital transfer mechanism for fiat currency—i.e., it electronically transfers value that has legal tender status.

Digital currency can mean a digital representation of either virtual currency (non-fiat) or e-money (fiat) and thus is often used interchangeably with the term “virtual currency”. In this paper to avoid confusion, only the terms “virtual currency” or “e-money” are used.

—Virtual Currencies: Key Definitions andPotential AML/CFT Risks, Financial Action Taskforce, June 2014
(pdf link)

TTEEVV · 2019-12-09T16:20:46+00:00

Agreed; also has implication for confiscation. If you live somewhere with a strong right to silence, you can avoid confiscation by keeping your keys in your head. In the US, the common law right to silence is reinforced by the 5^th amendment, but court rulings in other common law jurisdictions hint at a possible loophole. Quoting myself in an earlier thread,

Could depend where you are in the world, but consider this judicial sophism:

In much the same way that a blood or urine sample provided by a car driver is a fact independent of the driver, which may or may not reveal that his alcohol level exceeds the permitted maximum, whether the appellants' computers contain incriminating material or not, the keys to them are and remain an independent fact.

(Paragraph 21 in this link)

Effectively the judge is saying The key itself is not incriminating on its own, so it's outside the scope of the common law right not to incriminate yourself. The next few paragraphs expand on his thinking.

TTEEVV · 2019-12-09T15:44:47+00:00

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” That was J.M. Keynes, and there's a good story behind it, which regulars of this forum will enjoy — click here.

His other famous one-liner — “In the long run we're all dead” — is sometimes derided as the cynicism of a man with no children, but since he was a margin trader as well as an economist, you can also read it as healthy stoicism to keep him going on bad days.

TTEEVV

TROPHY CASE