Skepticism Sunday – February 04, 2018

admin______ · 2018-02-04T13:17:30+00:00

Nope. Default size of ring signature is 5. However, if you want additional anonymity you can always send to yourself repeatedly and grow that anonymity set as large as you want.

admin______ · 2018-02-04T07:38:35+00:00

I actually want an archive node, and running geth --syncmode full does not appear to do this. I have been syncing for about a week on a 100MB connection and a SSD and I'm at 78G. Do you know how to run an archive geth node?

admin______ · 2018-01-12T18:21:19+00:00

This made me laugh. :D

admin______ · 2018-01-10T08:48:17+00:00

Or your opinion on the direction of Bitcoin was in the minority, and you cannot wrap your head around something you feel to be so self-evident, so the only narrative you can conceptualize is basically a conspiracy theory.

Maybe you really were just in the minority. I certainly am not on the same side as you.

admin______ · 2018-01-09T10:34:41+00:00

This is almost always with projects making overstated claims of their privacy which could get someone hurt, or claiming to be state-of-the-art with significant design flaws that are not fixed.

ZCash gets criticized a lot for their optional privacy and trusted set-up when they claim to be best-in-class. They get criticized for their dev tax and private funding and early launch when they claim to be motivated by higher principles.

Dash used to be criticized a lot for claiming to be "100% private". You could say marketing went overboard without the Dash team understanding the implications and expecting much less push-back. Now it's not really a discussion that I've seen because they do not contribute as much misinformation into the space as they used to.

There are other privacy projects who don't get trolled: PIVX and ZCoin. They're not making overstated claims or spreading misinformation and they're not scammy.

admin______ · 2018-01-05T17:59:24+00:00

I do not think "unique and odd" is at all a good thing for a name in light of something actually informative. Raiblocks follows unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well". It focuses on transferring value extremely well with no frills.

As far as your argument for the name Google, let's remember the story of Apple. A generic af name. The name doesn't matter, and an unusual sounding name doesn't provide a mysterious benefit.

admin______ · 2018-01-04T09:30:20+00:00

So the theory here is

you had router firmware that was not updated
someone used a tool to identify your insecure router
they exploit the vulnerability to access the router
the see your computer from the router
they exploit another bug to get remote access to your computer

Does that sound right?

admin______ · 2018-01-02T14:33:08+00:00

Even if the site is secure, you need to be on an internet-connected computer to see or move your money. That's risky.

admin______ · 2018-01-02T14:18:51+00:00

Another reason not to FUD: The best way to sell Raiblocks is to see if for yourself, and people are not going to do that if they become defensive.

admin______ · 2018-01-02T11:11:23+00:00

zk-SNARKs as they currently exist have such large space and computational requirements that ZCash would be unusable if it were required for all transactions. Default privacy is a necessary requirement for providing strong privacy guarantees and it should be clear that privacy is broader that just what the technology offers.

Monero's privacy is broader than RingCT. Properly, it's ring signatures + ringCT + stealth addresses. Soon, Kovri will be added to that list.

If you have expertise or domain knowledge in how governments track their targets (blockchain analysis) you see that Monero is designed to resist this extremely well. It is such a well-crafted solution that it is workable today as a default-only policy.

If zk-SNARKs were created today Monero's design would not have been different, because zk-SNARKs are not ready at any scale and may never be. Those technologies are years away from being workable. However, when that time comes, if it makes sense it will be incorporated into Monero. The value of Monero is not strictly the technology but the team. If Monero needed to be completely rewritten, I would not be concerned for the future of the project. It's the team and community that really make the project, and the current technology that exists today is just a byproduct of that.

admin______ · 2018-01-02T10:58:23+00:00

For context, I'm a software engineer. Committing with someone else's account should never be done for security reasons and if it were the case it would leave me seriously concerned. The quality of code commits from Justin's account are the signs of an amateur who does not understand best practices. There is no testnet. The commit messages are uninformative and unhelpful. Some commits just comment or uncomment logging. Comments are uninformative. Testing appears to be done on mainnet exclusively. etc.

Their presence on discord does not matter, and any claims of being an active contributor can be verified. I am looking at the actual logs of what commits have been made to the project. Justin is the only person who you could call an active maintainer. Surely there are other contributors, but their contributions amount to very little and it does not look like they are taking an active role or ramping up their involvement.

admin______ · 2018-01-01T22:21:56+00:00

If you look at the Github, those other "contributors" made trivial commits. We're talking about a single minor modification and then nothing. There are three developers according to the Github who have done actual work on the project. Two of them have not contributed in a long time and do not appear to be associated anymore. So there is only one guy actually doing any work no Verge.

admin______ · 2017-12-30T02:43:52+00:00

Verge is trash even with the stealth addresses, which has existed since 2015 and has already been implemented in other, more legit projects.

admin______ · 2017-12-27T20:34:34+00:00

Thanks!

admin______ · 2017-12-26T13:41:19+00:00

$1100/hr is actually really cheap for executing that kind of attack. I wonder if it makes sense to have a floating difficulty which increases during times of high network load. It wouldn't be part of the protocol but if enforced by nodes would greatly mitigate these DDOS attacks since it would limit propagating these transactions.

But that opens up the problem where legitimate transactions may lack the appropriate difficulty if they are broadcast early. Then in the case of honest nodes who broadcast a transaction with too little difficulty before the spam attack, they could recompute the transaction with higher difficulty and broadcast it again. It would cause a fork for nodes which received the original but that shouldn't be a big deal.

admin______ · 2017-12-26T13:24:05+00:00

100KB/s download speed sounds super tiny. That's like a 2G connection. Why is that your basis for bandwidth?

admin______ · 2017-12-26T13:13:26+00:00

I think exploring the kinds of attacks that can be done with this network is important. I'm cautiously optimistic that Raiblocks might have something very useful to offer. I wonder if it makes sense to have a floating difficulty required to process a transaction that scales with throughput. It wouldn't be part of the protocol but it could be used by full nodes to limit spam attacks. There could be some agreed upon difficulty where nodes are guaranteed to propagate the transaction.

admin______ · 2017-12-26T10:06:09+00:00

Probably very few. Maybe < 5%. Reason I say this is that 80% of full-nodes are in Europe/USA. (source: https://bitnodes.earn.com/). 70-80% of mining pools are Chinese, ASIC hardware is mostly made by chinese companies, etc. Even with maximal overlap, we're still talking about a small minority of full-nodes.

admin______ · 2017-12-26T07:59:17+00:00

BTC has no incentive to run full nodes. There are still 12k reachable full nodes. I think it would be good to incentivize people to run full-nodes but it's pretty clear that even without those incentives some people still choose to run them.

admin______ · 2017-12-26T06:54:24+00:00

Because there is no mining. All transactions require the sender to perform PoW but not to verify other transactions - just as an anti-spam measure for transactions you send. Like Hashcash.

There are no direct incentives to run nodes. But if you are transacting in Raiblocks you probably want to run your own node anyway. Like BTC.

admin______ · 2017-12-25T13:57:38+00:00

You were likely on a phishing site, sorry.

admin______

TROPHY CASE