Re: DRK vs XMR warez

Interesting, thanks for the insight. So it seems the main differences between the two, is that Shadow is on a bitcoin blockchain, which gives it some advantages. For example it can plug in better with existing infrastructure, and have benefits of both transparent chain and anonymous chain. Also since only about 1% of transactions are used for anonymity, it will have less blockchain bloat than Monero where 100% of the transactions are done using ring sigs.

If only 1% of transactions are used for anonymity you will have massive timing anonymity leaks and such. If you take transparent coins, convert to anon, pay someone, and he converts back (both of which are logical if most commerce is taking place non-anonymously) then the whole thing is quite obviously traceable.

I don't really see much advantage to a coin that is 99% transparent, and definitely see disadvantages. Just use Bitcoin, or if you really want PoS, use whatever is the leading PoS coin, probably BitShares I guess. BitShares has stealth addresses by the way.

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I wonder if this destruction and reminting gives it any privacy advantages.

It does not. The creation and destruction process is entirely transparent.

Smooth is right Shadow is very similar to cryptonote. I was reading cryptonote whitepaper, and its some genius stuff going on in there. We should be honest about what the system is and its pros and cons. I like Monero, seems like a cool coin, much better than DRK. I do think Shadow does have some advantages being on a bitcoin blockchain. Also I believe Shadow differs in the anonymity system in one major way from what I can tell, and that is the destruction and minting of SDC. To me it seems like this extra part of the system does something extra to sever the link between identities, but I could be wrong. Hopefully the review will help clarify that. Hope our communities can all be friends, as we all are striving for the same goal of privacy and anonymity.

Well i agree with you that the Bitcoin codebase and APIs, etc. are an advantage in terms of integration, etc. I don't agree that the minting/destruction add value to anonymity, and in fact I think the opposite as I explained above. But overall yes the more popular APIs and such are valuable.

I don't think the communities are or need to be unfriendly but there is some confusion that has been spread about the nature of the Shadow solution that has led to some frustration on both sides. We certainly share the goal of greater privacy.

I am not really yet buying that if only 1% of transactions in Shadow are used for anonymity there will be timing attacks. If you take care of the amounts of Shadow you are transferring then you can still maintain anonymity. Then that leaves timing attacks, and its only a problem if you are immediately changing to Shadow and then back. The risk for this attack is not much different whether 1% or 99% are used for Shadow. Admittedly if 100% was used for Shadow only then it eliminates it completely, but without the benefits of a transparent bitcoin blockchain. As the network grows 1% will be a larger and larger amount of transactions and that will help users to blend in.

Also I was reading the white paper on zerocoin. I found it very interesting how some of the ideas for ShadowCash are taken from zerocoin, and a big part of zerocoin is also the destruction and minting of coins. So there may in fact be something to the idea that the Shadow implementation of destroying and minting coins could have value for anonymity and privacy. It seems Shadow is a unique system taking ideas from both cryptonote and zerocoin. There is not much documentation on ShadowCash yet and their whitepaper could be a lot more detailed and seems like it was rushed out a bit. The devs are now working on providing better documentation. I think its going to take some time and peer reviews to come out before we all have a better understanding how these systems compare.

If anyone is interested to compare the white papers here they are:

http://shadow.cash/downloads/shadowcash-anon.pdf

https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf

http://zerocoin.org/media/pdf/ZerocoinOakland.pdf