Quote from: pvk444 on February 14, 2018, 08:10:22 PM

Quote from: djpitagora on February 14, 2018, 01:36:56 PM

Quote from: pvk444 on February 13, 2018, 10:07:25 PM

But no other privacy coin - NONE WHATSOEVER - has an unknown development team. Think about it: should a powerful government want to crack down on Monero or DeepOnion, for instance, they could infiltrate or even eliminate and replace the development team, since the project members are publicly known. XSPEC is protected even against such personal attacks.

Really amazing stuff, if you ask me.

monero is at a point where it has a very large community with some 200+ individuals contributing code. It would be virtually impossible at this point to track down the entire "team" and prevent somebody to fork the project and carry on. It doesn't even matter now who started it. And generally that is the best approach because to be honest tracking an individual nowadays is pretty easy. Real anonymity is very hard to achieve these days and only through very illegal means. Even then it's a matter of how hard the said government is trying to get you and if they are willing to play dirty or not

FYI there are other coins with anonymous devs (see skycoin) and it's not generally perceived as an advantage.

A large community of developers is not necessarily a good thing: aside from loss of agility and flexibility (there is a required overhead for coordination and governance to ensure the work of 200 developer are aligned), having that many developers means there will be specialization as well, which means it's possible to compromise the entire system by compromising a small group. Having 200 developers is NOT the same as having 200 levels of redundancy (which indeed would give some form of security against compromising).

And "virtually impossible" is not impossible for a government agency with pretty much unlimited resources.

Curious what you think the link is between achieving real anonymity and taking illegal actions? Why would one be related to the other?

I agree that in general and for "usual" project anonymity is a disadvantage. For the ultimate privacy, I am still convinced it's an advantage.

Well real anonymity is very hard to get. First of all tor is not anonymous. It offers some degree of protection but there are many known attacks (starting from corelation attacks on corrupt exit nodes and zero days vulnerabilities in tor browser to isolation attacks on hidden services) that can be used to reveal both users as well as hidden services as evidenced by the large number of arrests and raids related to darkweb websites. I think they close a marketplace every month

That being said if you want to be truly anonymous you will always combine several measures such as
- tor (which is probably the only legal one and least secure + most likely to get spied on corrupt exit nodes)
- chaining proxies on hacked servers (that you know for sure keep no logs) - this is the easiest
- renting compromised machines from botnet owners and proxying traffic
- rent "bulletproof" hosting from the likes of Russian business network (and you would have to trust some really shady people)
- war-driving around town and using unsuspecting people's wireless networks (hard because you would need to avoid cameras and not frequent the same areas)
- buy prepaid cards with 3G/4G from the dark web (getting a sufficient number of cards will be expensive + you will need to be on the move as cell phone towers log locations)
- sniff gsm traffic and clone phones around your cell and use their data plans (you will be on the move again + buying expensive equipment to spoof cell towers + having an adrenaline rush when you get the said equipment which is illegal to own in most countries from your postoffice + I don't think you can inject anything more then GSM traffic since anything newer then GPRS is encrypted)

As you can see most of the methods above are likely to get you into trouble themselves, so I guess if you have a real reason to hide from the government you need to put in time, effort and money. The internet is not designed for anonymity.

Let me know if I missed something obvious that would let you hide from a warrant or worse a determined government agency willing to play dirty