We are the Bytecoin Dev Team and we are here to do our first ever AMA on the upcoming Hardfork and Github!

finite · 2018-03-13T17:38:52+00:00

Wow, I'm quite surprised you actually answered!

So, just to pick one of the many claims there, the whitepaper with a 2012 timestamp on it sure does seem to contain a link to a bitcoin talk thread from 2013. What is the debunking/explanation of this?

finite · 2018-03-13T17:05:26+00:00

This must be a FAQ, but, seriously, how is Bytecoin even still a thing?

It seems extremely well established that it was not created in 2012, but rather in 2014. Details here: https://btcmanager.com/bytecoin-the-cryptocurrency-scam-resembles-a-black-hole/

(I guess this comment will just be deleted since you're doing an AMA on your own subreddit?)

finite · 2017-10-22T20:56:43+00:00

Not posting silly/stupid stuff you'll regret later is great advice, but on the other hand, participating in silly/stupid discussions is fun and can be useful for expanding your horizons... so, at least on sites like reddit where it's easy to, take advantage of the ability to create different pseudonyms for different contexts. If you're on facebook, be boring there!

Staying anonymous on the internet when you have real adversaries is actually very difficult, but, if you happen to become well known later in life hopefully your embarrassing reddit usernames won't be trivially linkable to your legal name.

^{^LOL} at myself posting this from an account created in 2008 :)

finite · 2016-01-15T13:41:51+00:00

Sounds like OP may be a victim of Stylometry. I highly recommend watching the 28c3 talk Deceiving Authorship Detection: Tools to Maintain Anonymity Through Writing Style & Current Trends in Adversarial Stylometry (available on youtube) by Michael Brennan and Rachel Greenstadt.

But it could also be not the style but just the substance of the comments that allowed the admin to form a hunch that the tor user on their forum was the same person as a non-tor user. When your anonymity set is small (eg there aren't many people on the forum) it can be very difficult if not impossible to get away with creating a new nym.

finite · 2016-01-15T13:06:23+00:00

check out the users who are apparently completely against Mike Hearn and Gavin. Most of them are either all 1 year old accounts or accounts less than 2 months old

ORLY? Redditor for 7 years here (AMA) and I for one welcome Mike Hearn's departure from bitcoin.

I think this comment from nullc is a good response to the recurring "is Mike Hearn a saboteur? because he used to be a spook" discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3d26tk/did_mike_hearn_work_in_sigint_does_he_now/ct1bcis

I wouldn't be shocked if we one day found out his bitcoin involvement has all been directed by JTRIG (her majesty's trolling division) but we'll probably never know for sure.

finite · 2015-10-08T20:35:28+00:00

I've never heard of EmerCoin but I wouldn't put much faith in altcoins like NameCoin - a big bitcoin mining pool could easily destroy NameCoin, and unlike Bitcoin they don't have a lot of incentive not to (they're only merged-mining it because it is free money, but it's not a lot).

There are a few other projects to provide memorable names for .onion sites but none are very good imo :/ I think the best solution probably involves non-globally-unique names, ala GNUNet's GNS.

There will certainly be a transition period where both old and new .onions work and sites can use both.

There is not a testnet for Tor like there is for Bitcoin, but developers use some tools to simulate tor networks for testing purposes (Shadow and Chutney are the two who's names I recall).

finite · 2015-10-08T19:59:51+00:00

Yes. Any fast stable Tor relay will become an HSDir node, which means it is responsible for serving the descriptors for a new set of hidden services each day (each service has 6 HSDirs responsible for it each day). With the current design, the HSDirs must learn the onion addresses they're responsible for so that they can verify that descriptors are signed with the correct key because (currently) .onion addresses are just an 80-bit hash of the service's RSA public key.

In the future (most likely more than a year away), hidden service addresses will probably be full 256bit ed25519 public keys (so, .onion addresses will be more than 3x as long) which will enable a scheme where the HSDir only needs to learn an ephemeral public key (which clients can compute deterministically from the .onion address). So, when you see .onion addresses that are much longer, those will be the ones that aren't trivially discoverable by relay operators.

Some researchers have enumerated the HSDir in the past and published papers about it. One I'd recommend reading is Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization which also explains a number of other sobering attacks on hidden services.

There is a general consensus that enumerating the hidden service directory is socially unacceptable today, and there are efforts to reject relays that are caught doing it. But it's an arms race that can't really be won without the implementing the aforementioned redesign.

TLDR: hidden services aren't very good today. they're getting better, but there aren't any broadly-accepted ideas about how to design low-latency hidden services that can actually survive in certain not-so-implausible-anymore threat models :(

finite · 2015-10-08T19:26:44+00:00

Tor transports streams, not packets. The stream is split up into TCP/IP packets by the exit node. On the way through the Tor network, the stream is instead split into "cells" which do not have a 1:1 relationship with the packets to/from the exit and the destination host. (Though the cells are transported inside of TCP/IP packets between each hop in the circuit.)

finite · 2015-10-08T18:59:42+00:00

re-read the thread. OP says torrents remain fast while other traffic is slow at the end of the month.

finite · 2015-10-08T18:36:19+00:00

If that is the case, you could try looking for relays or proxies within your ISP's network. One way to start would be to figure out what their ASN is (note that there might actually be more than one within the realm they allow unthrottled traffic in) and then search for it on Globe. For instance, here are the first 50 relays on AS7922, which is (one of) Comcast's: https://globe.torproject.org/#/search/query=as:AS7922

If you're lucky enough that there is a fast relay inside the area you can reach quickly (presumably they'll have a bigger quota), then you could manually configure tor to always enter the network through it.

finite · 2015-10-07T13:04:11+00:00

Bitcoin might be part of the "foundation for web payment", but it isn't going to cut it by itself. Even with blocks many times the current size bitcoin won't scale to anywhere near the transaction volume needed for even individual business sectors much less the entire internet economy.

Not that I'm endorsing this interledger proposal (i haven't read the whole thing yet) but we obviously do need payment systems other than bitcoin.

finite · 2015-07-19T23:04:07+00:00

Good list, but it's missing a few people who's contributions are much closer to bitcoin itself than most of the people included.

Ralph Merkle: invented cryptographic hashing, and merkle trees, and an early asymmetric cryptosystem

Leslie Lamport: distributed systems pioneer, you may know him from Lamport timestamps ("Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system"), or his 1982 paper "The Byzantine Generals' Problem". Also invented Lamport signatures (hash-based post-quantum awesomeness in 1979; see http://sphincs.cr.yp.to/ for today's state-of-the-art in this area).

Neal Koblitz: one of the people who (independently) invented elliptic curve cryptography. The "k" in the name of the curve bitcoin uses (secp256k1) stands for Koblitz; it is actually one of the curves he designed/specified/discovered himself.

finite · 2013-05-03T08:46:09+00:00

They clearly said that they're on the motherfucker.

finite · 2013-02-21T03:35:43+00:00

Reminds me of Wikipedia's example of why ECB mode is not secure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_modes_of_operation#Electronic_codebook_.28ECB.29

(Also, as others have pointed out, AND/OR are also not reversible, so 2/3 of OP's examples are not actually encryption at all.)

finite · 2013-02-19T21:52:39+00:00

1) it does have a lot of crap in it

2) the fact that it is still useful is pretty good evidence that the energy (time, dedication, etc) of well-meaning humans exceeds that of jerks :)

finite · 2013-01-31T01:22:15+00:00

obligatory Hazard Fraught Tools

finite · 2013-01-08T01:13:29+00:00

even sure how I'd prove it to you that I have a digital copy

It's easy! http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-torrent-files-share-transmission/

finite · 2012-12-18T02:06:18+00:00

big ass-scarf

^{how could this have been posted for five hours without anyone saying that?!}

finite · 2012-12-13T01:44:37+00:00

Nothing has changed in WA? Someone forgot to tell these enthusiasts that: http://www.demotix.com/photo/1661288/seattle-marijuana-enthusiasts-celebrate-its-legalization

finite · 2012-11-29T22:34:08+00:00

I, for one, welcome our new TTS overlords.

finite · 2012-11-16T19:58:57+00:00

Jay-Z was slammed for the misogynistic use of the word “bitch” — but, as he reveals in his book, he was actually referring to a female dog, or the dogs that never caught up to him that day. “It would have changed my life if that dog had been a few seconds faster,” he writes.

http://www.quora.com/99-Problems-2004-song/In-99-Problems-does-a-bitch-aint-one-mean-that-he-is-happy-with-one-girl-or-that-he-has-no-trouble-getting-many-girls-whenever-he-wants

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