Quote from: r0ach on October 17, 2015, 01:31:48 PM

I've talked to Smooth a lot about anonymity telling him it's not useful unless you can fix scaling first. If you only have enough TPS for a clearing mechanism between banks, on-chain anonymity doesn't do anything when most transactions will be done off-chain anyway. Since you seem to have the exact same viewpoint, how exactly would this design even help Monero? Does it at least reduce overhead to Bitcoin level?

I agree that you can't go after for example decentralized exchanges on chain if you don't have very high TPS. So there are certain markets you can't service without the high TPS solution.

However, the governments are coming after everything with capital controls, and for that and other reasons some people may want to really anonymize their transaction trails very well, so that is an example of one market that can use low TPS anonymity improvements and that market will be growing very fast in 2016. So Monero or other anonymous coin having the "first mover" advantage on the most significant advance for anonymity since Cryptonote and theoretical Zerocash could potentially significantly raise the market moment of that coin.

Also as I wrote to illodin, this reduces block chain bloat in terms of less transactions needed to transfer a balance as powers-of-ten (well that is not factoring in the cost of the Proof of Sums so perhaps not a size reduction overall, but you gain an important feature of hiding values) and wallet complexity/inflexibility of any existing Cryptonote coin.

Of course they would want to follow it up with more efforts to make their platform viable for more markets. High TPS are not the only markets. They are important to me, so I won't disagree about their high potential value, but low TPS anonymity is also a market. Also anonymity is already a developed and proven market whereas high TPS is a new unproven market.

When the next bubble comes back to crypto, anonymity can be one of those sectors that gets hot with speculators.

Caveat: make sure the low TPS anonymous rings are mixing properly with UXTO that are also spent into anonymous rings, otherwise the anonymity breaks down if only a few people are using anonymous rings (but I think Monero and others are already aware of this, even I think Boolberry had a special feature flag to force this).

Anonymity is a feature. For example what if Crypto Kingdom gamers want to be really untraceable to their other hacker gamers. Did you see that kid in Manila was mauled to death for writing "whew" on a girls facebook page. There are non-nefarious reasons for using anonymity.

Even businesses want to hide the values they are transacting so that competitors do not have that proprietary information. And that could be low TPS transactions for now.

I agree eventually we need to solve high TPS and block chain scaling, but anonymity isn't entirely useless just as Bitcoin isn't entirely useless. I'd hold more BTC if the damn thing was more anonymous. I have not trusted I could transfer over to Monero, mix, then come back and retain anonymity well. I'd rather have it on chain for the coin I am holding.

Quote from: r0ach on October 17, 2015, 01:31:48 PM

My opinion is that collateral bid systems using PoS where the top 100/500/1000 wallet addresses that choose to lock stake and act as deterministic nodes is the easiest way to solve scalability at the moment.

I think there is a better design but I am not ready yet to discuss that. I need to focus in this thread and time on the anonymity invention I created.

We will hopefully get there asap. But really I have been in such a whirlwind with my rollercoaster health, that I don't want to talk too much about the future. Let's get done what I can do now for now.

Quote from: r0ach on October 17, 2015, 01:31:48 PM

Larimer thinks you can have anonymity in such a system already:

Quote

Confidential Transfers hide the amounts being transfered while still allowing those who validate the blockchain to verify that the balances transfered sum to 0 and are not negative. Stealth transfers are used to automatically generate a unique key for every transfer. The combination of these two features means that it becomes pratically impossible for a 3rd party to identify how much you have sent or received or who is sending money to whom.

I had already responded to you about that in the past and explained it doesn't have untraceability therefor it is trivially unmasked via combinatorial analysis. It adds some obfuscation, but it is step backwards from Cyptonote except that it doesn't have the problem of equal denominations. And it can hide value. Mine combines all of Cryptonote (which includes both stealth addresses for unlinkability and rings for untraceability) with hidden values. I have the first complete on chain anonymity that doesn't have Zerocash's drawbacks.

Quote from: r0ach on October 17, 2015, 01:31:48 PM

Without achieving the scaling part first, won't this purchase be kind of useless when it will inevitably be overun by some kind of second tier anonymity system latched on top of a deterministic PoS network?

The opposite. It will destroy the anonymity aspect of the threat from Bitshares, by moving way beyond it on anonymity features. I'd say Monero needs this to stay in the clear anonymity lead.

As for whether Bitshare's high TPS solution will become more important to the market than anonymity, I don't know. Last time I looked, Bitshares was talking about what each CPU could process, not about actually network throughput on a real testnet. Perhaps more has come out since I last looked. I will look into it at some point in near future.