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@Heuristic there are no significant known or reasonably suspected problems with Curve25519. I have no idea where you are getting that from.
I read it from a guy. So why is Shen recommending ed's Twisted? All Crypto eventually gets broken, we all know this. The question is what are the contingency plans.
In almost all cases of non-stupid crypto the "breaking" takes the form of theoretical weaknesses that aren't practically usable for an actual attack until years later if ever, but reduce the security margin to an uncomfortable level. At that point you replace it with something else and people have ample opportunity to switch over. Nothing like that is even on the horizon right now.
I know Shen has been looking at various things, even post-quantum stuff. I have no idea how far long that exploration is at this point.
You should continue... we are not cryptographers. Are you saying that they have a backdoor to XMR?. Is this curve reemplazable in a common hard fork?
If by reemplazable you meant replaceable as I think you did then of course, anything can be changed with a hard fork.
We're at $2.46 ... can we please not talk about $1000?
The most likely scenario is that XMR will fail.
How?
It looks to me like there will be a replacement as the development progress has slowed to a crawl. Not to mention Diffie-Hellman elliptic Curve25519 is considered not safe.
I no longer trust the constants. I believe the NSA has manipulated them through their relationships with industry
— Bruce Schneier
Should I continue?
you are underestimating the amount of effort to build something like Cryptonote, it blows Zcash away, the darknet has spoken and its going with Monero.
about the curve, looks like you missed
these commits.
A proposal to change to one of edwards twisted curves? Has this been voted on? Set for a hard fork date? Ignored? Left to be implemented in a competing project? Which really brings up other questions along the lines of the ones I had that fluffy stopped answering.
That's not a change at all. What was done there is replace separate copy of the crypto library in Monero with the exact unmodified crypto library from its original source. That eliminates the possibility that the Monero crypto library was somehow modified to introduce a back door (though it has been reviewed and wasn't, this makes that fact more transparent)