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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Technology
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I think there's utility for digital cash. Fungible cash online.
I personally use Monero which is fungible, private, online digital cash. Just yesterday I donated to doctors without borders, I pay for my VPN, I pay for my email hosting, I donate to signal, I donate to graphene OS, I donate to the briar project, I donate to the Tor foundation, I fund software development bounties, I pay for video game hosting, I paid for dropout.tv.. all using monero.
Why? For the same reasons I use cash. I want to have a transaction, I want to be done with it, and I don't want to have an ongoing relationship. I don't want third parties to be involved. If I put $5 in the local temples donation bin, or if I donate $5 in crypto, that's nobody's business but me and the Buddhists.
Great description!
Some people live in countries where some of those things are illegal. Another example of this is banned books. I can pay for entry into a private torrent tracker through a VPN to access books banned in my country.
If you need 0 connections between the cash in your bank account and what you buy online then you need something like Monero.
Or like buy a pre paid card with cash at a corner store.
But you could do that with just about any digital payment system. Crypto doesn’t have anything to do with that. Hell, if you want it to be anonymous use a pre paid gift card you buy with cash.
That’s actually anonymous rather than pseudonymous.
Monero is fully anonymous, not just pseudonymous.
Cash-redeemable prepaid cards you buy for cash, are not available everywhere, or may require you to go through the equivalent of a KYC, and/or may have a monthly fee, and/or abusive transaction fees, and/or ridiculous monthly recharge/spending limits... on top of getting recorded on camera while buying them.
At least where I live, I've found no anonymous prepaid cash cards, but if I get my credit card and buy some Monero in my name, then send it to another account, nobody can link it back to me ever again.
If it is a block chain, that records transactions to specific wallets, then those wallets can be linked to an individual.
Monero works hard to make sure that wallet contents and transactions are private.
https://www.getmonero.org/get-started/what-is-monero/
The sender, receiver, and amount of every single transaction are hidden through the use of three important technologies: Stealth Addresses, Ring Signatures, and RingCT.
Because every transaction is private, Monero cannot be traced. This makes it a true, fungible currency. Merchants and individuals accepting Monero do not need to worry about blacklisted or tainted coins.
Can the block chain of the system be viewed by anyone? Is the wallet ID listed on the blocks?
It doesn’t matter how many fancy protocols are thrown up. If the history of the block chain is viewable and verifiable, then the history of transactions can be tracked to a wallet. Thus it is not truly anonymous.
Yes, no.
The IRS currently has a $600,000 Bounty for anyone who can deanonymize monero transactions.
That money is yours, just show us the way.
The wiki explains it better than I ever could, even have animations wiki
The transaction outputs, or notes, of users sending Monero are obfuscated through ring signatures, which groups a sender's outputs with other decoy outputs.[12] Encryption of transaction amounts began in 2017 with the implementation of ring confidential transactions (RingCTs).[6][13] Developers also implemented a zero-knowledge proof method, "Bulletproofs", which guarantee a transaction occurred without revealing its value.[14]
You did not answer my question, is the history of transaction on a block chain? Are the transactions listed to wallets?
Yes or no?
Yes to your first question no to your second.
The ledger is open in public and verifiable.
The wallet IDs involved in transactions are not including the transaction amounts. I'll reference you to the wiki.
I'm not a mathematician, I'm not a cryptographer, so I cannot defend the mathematics with you. I referenced the bounty to indicate that the problem has not been solved. I referenced the Wikipedia for more details. If you want to ask them specific questions about the protocol, you can join the matrix conversation, or even the Reddit community is pretty active.
So, all transactions are listed on a ledger? That is publicly accessible?
Then it is not anonymous. Flat out.
Verifying a transaction exists, and verifying that the transaction occurred is not the same as making the destination address, and the amount public.
This goes into the crypto note bulletproof proofs. Kind of like homomorphic encryption, I don't have to trust a third party to do cryptographic operations, as long as they don't have the key they can do the cryptographic operations and I can trust the outputs.
All it takes is one transaction on a wallet to be concretely connected to you and then every pervious transaction is clearly linked back to you. And that link does not have to be digital, it can be as simple as you being found in person with an item purchase through the system.
The strength of the encryption and cleverness of the protocols with in the system are irrelevant if there is a public list of transactions.
In your scenario that's not true. If you reveal yourself in the transaction. That reveals that transaction.
But using just that data in the public ledger, does not reveal your transaction history
This is due to the crypto note architecture, and their use of bulletproofs. Every transaction is verifiable, but the outputs and inputs of that transaction are not.
That being said, if you give up The wallet private read key, then somebody could use that Read key and go through the public ledger and find your transactions. But that's not publicly available, that private read key is yours, you don't give that up. Even if you accidentally tell people this transaction is yours
The way the value of a wallet is calculated is by the sum of previous transactions. For a transaction to be verified, previous transactions must be summed to show a positive balance larger than the payment. That means all previous transactions made by that wallet are publicly available and linkable.
If they were not, then there would be no way to verify that your wallet had enough value to make a transaction.
If all transactions are linkable to a wallet, than one real world link can be used to link all previous transactions.
Ergo, not anonymous.
https://www.getmonero.org/library/Zero-to-Monero-2-0-0.pdf
Chapter 5 page 43. Address how amounts are hidden. Commitments, and range proofs, but ring CT is the thing you really care about - The main mechanism by which transaction amounts and spend limits are verified.
Ring CTs, range proofs both rely on bulletproofs.
The zero to monero document references the bulletproofs, but does not go through the math and that document. If you want to also verify the bulletproof math here's the bulletproof paper https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf
All transactions are listed on the chain. All transactions can be linked to a wallet to prove the liquidity of the wallet.
Therefore all previous transactions made by a wallet are public record.
Not, anonymous.
The whole point of range proofs, and bulletproofs, is the ability to prove a transaction is balanced, without revealing the transaction history.
Ring CT, and key images, prevent double spend and prevents transaction history from being public.
I've given you the reference documents. If you'd like to read those documents and then discuss the details with me I will engage you in a reading group no problem.
But just repeating the same point back at me without reading what I've indicated or even acknowledging what I've said isn't productive for either of us.
I want to thank you, however, I've been meaning to go through all of the paperwork on monero. And this gave me an opportunity to do so.
You are hinging the claim of non-anonymity on a previous transaction on the wallet having linked a real-world person to the wallet, but that is not a given. Additionally, you could simply use a new wallet for each transaction to avoid (or at least massively minimize) this.
I don't like cryptocurrency, but your claim is kinda like saying that TLS between you and your bank is not secure because I shoulder-surfed you. That's not a failure of TLS (or in this case, their anonymization system), it's a failure of your own privacy practices.
First, that's not how crypto blockchains work. A "wallet" holds the private key to a bunch of possible addresses (2^128^ for Bitcoin, or something around that, arguably up to 2^160^, or technically infinity, depending how you look at it), there is no way to know whether two addresses belong to the same "wallet" until they get spent (transactions signed by the same key), and transactions get recorded between specific addresses, not wallets.
In an ideal world, people would never use the same address twice, always creating a new one... but people gonna people, so they started reusing addresses, publishing them along their personal data and photos on the web, shoving all that data into the hands of exchanges, and stuff like that. Bye-bye anonymity, hello traceable pseudonymity.
Still, fungibility means an address can receive coins from multiple others, then send them on without marking where each came from, so the more times coins get fused and split across more addresses and transactions, the harder it is to prove a given amount came from a given address some transactions away.
Monero takes that a few steps farther, and forces every user to use crypto as it was originally intended:
Meaning:
You can check that here:
https://localmonero.co/blocks/
Pick any block, any transaction, try figuring out who had control over the coins before the transaction, what is the target's balance, or even how much got sent to where.
If a single address gets de-anonymized:
If a whole wallet gets captured and de-anonymized: