Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN][MRO] Monero - Anonymous Currency Based on Ring Signatures
by
eizh
on 11/05/2014, 03:05:05 UTC

CryptoNote / Monero et al

CryptoNote's one-time ring signature as a way of obfuscating who is the payer (the spender), is optional and can only be used when there are other payees who have the inputs amounts. In other words, it can't do any obfuscation for you on spending unless there are other coins that have the same balance as yours.

That very infrequent opportunity for use is coupled with constant use of elliptical curve cryptography which is known to be broken under quantum computing, as well is suspect to broken by the NSA or could be broken since it is number theoretic public key cryptography.


This is actually pretty easy to solve and CryptoNote already implements it: every transaction is broken up. There will always be outputs in the blockchain matching the broken-down components. Unlike CoinJoin, this is done without any participation from anyone else. The other matching amounts are not being spent at the same time; in fact they can be used as many times as needed as an ambiguity factor without actually being spent. This means the opportunity to use ring signatures isn't infrequent at all -- you can send any amount you want and it will be appropriately matched and mixed. (See section 4.5 in the white paper.)

No comment on the NSA/quantum resistance/etc.