[...]Monero [...] i like a lot of what I'm hearing/researched about the coin.
Did you research my thread speculating that the technologies in Monero are a waste of time:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1211093.msg13143507#msg13143507Cryptonote (even RingCT) can't obscure your IP address. Zerocash can. That was painful for me to admit, given I had expended a lot of effort to design a technology similar to RingCT based on the more compact CCT.
None of those can do microtransactions. Even Dash Evolution's instant transaction feature is afaics highly flawed and can be reverted by an orphaned chain (where orphans are a normal occurrence in a PoW coin).
And afaik none of them have any viable plan for attaining million user adoption.
Comparing coin plans and features can turn into a war. So that is my 2 cents. I will not continue. Suffice it so say that investors are relatively blinded and uninformed, because they don't understand the technologies (which are always changing too because we are still in R&D phase of cryptocurrency).
Also, regarding bolded, you are saying this because you assume both I2P and Tor (Monero will have I2P integrated, but you can also run Monero over Tor) are "flawed" and don't protect your identity (IP).
That is one of my main reasons. Also, their designs can't protect against DDoS (at least not a microtransaction scale volume) when the sender's IP address is obscured by the mixnet. But worse than all that is simply the fact that users can't jump through those hoops regularly in perfection. And that includes you and I. It simply isn't realistic to obscure the IP address. I tried my best to find a way to perfect obscuring the IP address and then in shame I realized I was stupid for even wasting so much effort trying to. Because conceptually it (obscuring the IP address) doesn't make any sense[1] and it violates the end-to-end principle of the internet.
Okay I am stopping now. I don't want a war. And I don't really care what this forum thinks is the best coin. I am somewhat concerned about speculators being ill informed, but that isn't my job to make sure they are informed.
[1] I covered the logic on that in my recent debate with smooth which is saved in the Zero Knowledge Transactions thread.
As for a potential solution to the IP address obfuscation issue, there is a white paper that I was first introduced to by jl777 this year and now someone else has asked me about it in a PM:
http://dedis.cs.yale.edu/dissent/http://bford.info/pub/net/panopticon-cacm.pdfSection 3 explains very well some of the major attacks against the onion routing (OR) in Tor and I2P.
The problems with this Dissent protocol some of which they admit in the section "5. Challenges and Future Work":
- It requires N2 communication for N participants. If the entire network isn't included in one grouping, then next problem results. They offer a federated server "solution" but this I believe puts jamming (and anonymity?) at risk of collusion of the servers?
- Same as for any mixnet (incluring OR and Cryptonote), if there are multiple groupings (or rings) then users can be unmasked by (a form of an intersection attack whereby) correlating which groups they participated in. This same problem results from one grouping and the fact that different users are participating at different times. This is a fundamental problem for mixnets (including on chain mixes such as Cryptonote) that caused me to realize the problem was unsolvable.
- Anti-jamming is based on an identity. Per the criticism I made against CoinJoin in 2013, we are creating anonymity so identity can't be insured. Perhaps we could tie identities to specific UTXO and confiscate those who jam. I would need to look into the details of that change to their design, as to whether this would violate the anonymity (and I assume yes it would until shown otherwise because of what I've learned over the past 2 years).
- It has a simultaneity requirement (similar to Dash's mixing), more so than Tor or I2P.
Why use this complex mixnet stuff (that won't really work well) when Zerocash elegantly solves the problem and is entirely autononomous. To quote smooth (he was referring to Cryptonote but he should have been referring to Zerocash), "a pidgeon could carry your transaction to the block chain and it wouldn't matter". Let me rephrase that, "a truck with your name painted on the side could carry your transaction to the block chain and it wouldn't matter". With Zerocash, everything is hidden so even if you put your name in the transaction packets, it wouldn't affect your anonymity because no one can see any of the details of the transaction. All they will see is you put your name on this encrypted blob of data. So you are worried about the compromised key of Zerocash leading to a hidden inflation of the money supply (I was too), but it doesn't affect the anonymity in any case. Well even that has solutions, e.g. make multiple sets of keys and sign all transactions with more than one signature so you have more assurance that all of the keys weren't fraudulently generated. Or run Zerocash only as a mixer and net out all the coins in/out periodically to be sure it is not creating coins out-of-thin-air.
So Erik Voorhees waves the flag for Dash - so what?
A. Antonopoulos agreeing with E. Voorhees is
an amazing sight. And yet they are now saying things that I was writing back in early 2014. Wonder if they got the idea from me?
Note A. Antonopoulos isn't arguing that Dash is the right answer per se, rather he is just agreeing with my bi(or multi-)furcation concept:
I am not arguing that Bitcoin won't go up in price (although it is remotely possible it could be entirely defeated by an altcoin, the more likely future is Bitcoin prospers while an altcoin might also due to a bifurcation on the principle of strong anonymity).
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And we need decentralized currency and payment in order to prevent the internet from being dominated by an advertising funding paradigm and few large corporations.
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We concluded in upthread discussion that for Bitcoin the easier attack vectors are regulation (since anonymity can easily be universally broken ex post facto with coin taint) and taking control over the few large pools.
Designing defenses against the 51% attacks is more relevant to the proposed altcoin that would be more impervious to regulation and pool centralization.
So above it appears I was also thinking about micro-transactions even though I explicitly articulated the anonymity feature. Seems after the altcoin community focused on anonymity, but meanwhile I have focused on micro-transactions also so as to compete with the advertising model of internet funding.
Below we can see I was already thinking about IPO distribution models and also how to scale decentralized mining.
So of course I think Dash, Monero, and Aeon are all behind me in terms of insight and creating the killer altcoin. Time will tell. I don't feel any great need to convince anyone on this forum of anything nor do I really care. I just don't think the arguments here in this forum about which coin is better are relevant. What is relevant is how many users your coin has and will have. Or what unique function it will serve for a smaller market if that is the intention of that altcoin (in which case arguing in this forum as if you are concerned about usershare derived from this forum is an indication that the intention is not to serve a smaller market).
See one of many famous price predictions as well:
Yes Ethereum is one of the possible serious challengers to Bitcoin, and
I've been aware of it for months behind the scenes.
I am doubting the economics of how they tied their scripting into the mining. I fear it may be a fundamental flaw that could cause it to fail over time. Other than that, I think contracts changes everything in the crypto-currency paradigm.
Also IMHO Ethereum's
planned IPO model for starting a currency is flawed.
In the meantime, I expect something better than Ethereum will come out. Hopefully with a better name too (Etherium.com is a game, what the heck does ether mean to the average person).
I hope I am wrong about Bitcoin crashing to $300 or below, because it would be much more positive for the ecosystem of serious altcoins.
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