Quote from: TanteStefana2 on July 20, 2015, 02:18:11 AM

Quote from: smooth on July 20, 2015, 02:09:28 AM

Quote from: toknormal on July 20, 2015, 01:34:39 AM

Quote from: canth on July 20, 2015, 01:30:06 AM

Toknormal has an opinion that any math stronger than addition and subtraction can't be used to verify cryptocurrency based balances

An account balance IS the result of addition and subtraction - nothing else.

So yes, what the public needs to see as an audit of an account balance is addition and subtraction - nothing else.

In that case every single cryptocurrency fails your standard because it is impossible to verify the balance of an address without using actual cryptography to validate tranasctions. Yes you can add or subtract tx amounts, but you may be adding and subtracting invalid transactions, making the resulting total incorrect, invalid, and meaningless.

There is no escaping cryptography to audit any blockchain. Period.

I don't think you're following. Sure, the transactions are valid in that they have ownership verified and approval from the miners to spend, but every coin has a pedigree you can research, and you can verify every transaction in a bitcoin like blockchain. In the case of DASH, it looks exactly the same, only because DarkSend coins were broken down to look exactly alike (with same amounts) then mixed, you can't tell which coins came from where, preserving privacy and fungibility. I can't audit a cryptonote blockchain. At least not the way I can figure. This is what I need to learn if it's possible. And it must be audited without cryptography. Because cryptography only validates ownership, not pedigree. Or at least as far as I can understand at this moment.

As I explained to you earlier, you can do exactly the same type of audit. Every single transaction except coinbases have inputs exactly equal to outputs (if fees are included in outputs), and that is entirely visible. Coinbases can be verified to match the published reward schedule in every instance starting from block 0 all he way to block infinity (unlike Dash, BTW), again all visible. Thus you can be assured that coins are not and never have been created out of thin air.

You further need to verify that transactions have valid signatures (for which all the necessary inputs are, again, visible), which is finally exactly the same thing you need to do (but with slightly different mathematical equations) with every other cryptocurrency.