Quote from: preshpr1nce on March 06, 2018, 05:19:34 AM

Quote from: d0d15 on March 06, 2018, 02:55:26 AM

@preshpr1nce,

I have a question regarding your observation related to Tor pluggable transports. I mean you already knew what obfs4 is? What did you expect you will find jbg's implementation of obfs4 if you already knew what is it? You expected him to reinvent the wheel, or what did you exactly expect to find in code in this regard? Why wouldn't he use exe file, because you know it is how it is meant to be used with Tor.

I am disappointed he didn't improve the support for pluggable transports, and didn't added support for fronting and meek, but he never promised that, or claimed it has been implemented.

That coin already has a solid base, worth maintaining, and some unique features, no other coin (that I am aware) has
so even maintaining it, taking care of bugs and updating libraries is a good job one can do.

Which unique feature is that you might ask? Integration with Tor. All nodes/wallets are inside of Tor network as onion services, thus no exit nodes are used, which is very important, and what many coins ignore.

Ring signatures are known issue, known to most of the members of the community, which cannot be solved until stealth profile becomes default. Reasons is there are not enough stealth users in the network, and without them Ring signatures don't work. Because of this he implemented option in the wallet which sets Ring size to 1, what disables security feature of rings signatures, but it enables the usage of stealth addresses IIRC.

I expected to see some code for obfs4, not taking ones executable and using it yourself, sure don't reinvent the wheel but at least take the effort of implementing it in to the code rather than calling an exe, I consider that lazy.

Also one of the key points in outlining this is it's part of the whole "so little work done" picture, the Tor work you mention came from Shadow Cash, not XSPEC.

Shadow Cash also had Ring signatures working with a ring size of 2, so this excuse of reducing size to 1 makes no sense, even more so if it was done due to a future change which isn't out yet, but would change the way ring signatures work, why make a network insecure prior to a release?

I don't think you've even looked at the work he's done, bug fixes? hardly, upgrading libraries you could do in your first year of uni, the work has been highlighted on page 1.

I have studied information technologies and telecommunications, in something similar to the university of applied science, and we had much more programming hours in different coirses compared to regular uni computer science student, but I met no person who learned to code there. Many students, almost all who didn't already have a job as software developers, or at least did it as a hobby remained unskilled coders.

What you said about ShadowCashe and ring signatures doesn't make sense. How do you know it worked for them? Ring signatures as technology require enough participants using them. Monero never had issues with it because all wallets are using it. This is the reason XSPEC has announced that stealth trx are becoming default with version 2.

Tor, could you point me to the Tor implementation/code of the ShadowCashe? I wasn't aware ShadowCash has implemented Tor? Not that I would mind it, but everything I saw points to the XSPEC developers, not necessarily jbg.

Tor pluggable transports is Tor pluggable transport. Everyone who heard about these obfuscation methods knew what to expect here, and was aware jbg didn't develop obfs4. Making Tor, and xspec wallet to work with obfs4 was the point, not demonstration of coding skills.
He could have automate/make it better, but this is also working. Despite his or project's shortcomings, there is a solid base, worth maintaining IMO, and it looks like some steps in the right direction are being made by the community (hiring new developers E.G.), so I don't think this is how scam necessarily looks like.
Most people exaggerate, or lie if you will. I met like two persons in my life who didn't lie in their CVs, yet that doesn't mean companies where these people who lied work are scam.

Things are not always black and white. One can in theory delude community in some things (like most of anon crypto currencies did at some point.) yet still deliver, with intentions to maintain the project long term. Basically as long as people are using, buying xspec, and are ready to support its development, project should be ok and prosper. I think that you have actually helped xspec as a project, because awareness that project needs more development and developers had been raised.

While I think you had some nice observations regarding the amount of work, I can just repeat that I consider ShadowCash code solid even nowadays and worth maintaining. With more and more developers interested in code, probability that new bugs/issues will be discovered is increasing, and as I already mentioned, it looks like xspec community decided to hire new developers.