Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: [XMR] Monero Improvement Technical Discussion
by
TPTB_need_war
on 20/01/2016, 21:30:25 UTC
...
FUD. The ceremony is only to computer a public key, nothing else. No other software has to be audited. Only need to confirm that the private key was not communicated from the computer to any one. Period.

How do you know that the public key you see on the screen is the one that was computed and not one that was pre computed before the computer was "placed in lead"?

Edit: DRM in the OS has everything to do with this since it is the perfect place to hide the private key. That is what DRM is designed to do hide private keys.

The hardware has to be audited. But we also have to audit our hardware that we use to run Cryptonote. If Intel is planting spies in the hardware, then we are screwed.

100% trust is impossible. And this is another reason I deprioritized anonymity. It is a clusterfuck.

Also I think perhaps Zerocash was working on a way to generate the public key decentralized, but I haven't kept up with progress on that.

Indeed Zerocash could end up being a Trojan Horse (a way to get fiat in the back door) and that is why I made my proposal to use them only as ephemeral mixes that die periodically, so then we will know if the key was compromised or not.

The result of my proposal is:

  • Stolen coins isn't systemic to the overall coin (same as losing some coins to Mt. Gox and Cryptsy isn't), and at least participants get ongoing ceremonies to get better and better at auditing the hardware.
  • No anonymity is ever lost.
  • No NET coin supply is ever created out-of-thin-air (instead some people lose coins if they chose an insecure mixer that had a compromised key), which is also the case for both Zerocash and RIngCT where coin supply could be created out of thin air and we would never know it due to a bug in cryptography.

That will kick ass on Monero, because if I pass through the mixer, I know my anonymity is provable and I know I didn't lose my coins. It is only people who still sitting inside the mixer who risk losing coins. Everything has a risk. I would much rather the microscopic risk of a compromised key (causing me to lose some coins) to the sure risk of meta-data correlation in Monero which can send me to jail! Surely I would be judicious about not mixing all my coins at the same time and not all in the same mixer.