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New Digital Currency Spikes as Drug Dealers Get More Secrecy
- hclgckxjtxjfxur 10y agoBecause you must be a criminal if you believe in a constitutional right to privacy in your personal effects.
- kang 10y agoRing Sigs are coming to bitcoin too.
- semiel 10y agoReally? I haven't heard about this. I'd love a link if you have one.
- brbsix 10y agoI'm curious as to the OP's source as well. I found a recent investigatory paper at https://github.com/AdamISZ/ConfidentialTransactionsDoc/blob/master/essayonCT.pdf?raw=true https://github.com/AdamISZ/ConfidentialTransactionsDoc/blob/... but nothing official.
- tromp 10y agoNote that Confidential Transactions (CT) are a different technology. While ring signatures hides sender/receiver identity, CT hides transaction amounts.
- divbit 10y agoConfusingly, plain CT actually uses ring sigs as part of the crypto, but not the kind that hides sender / receiver, rather as part of the commitment scheme.
- kbody 10y agoNot really unless you know some inside info. Most probably you refer to Confidential Transactions, which RingCT of Monero was based on. The privacy advantage of RingCT over plain CT is that you can even hide the transaction amounts of IO.
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y agoExcuse my lack of economic sense, could this be a pump and dump?
- VMG 10y agoIt would not be out of character for the cryptocurrency scene. Quite the opposite.
- Nursie 10y agoOn the one hand, yes, on the other.... If so then the market that made the announcement risks its reputation and its ability to function. But this sort of reputation leverage could be the people running the market making one last big hit of cash before leaving the game. Or it could be real. Very hard to tell.
- gwbas1c 10y agoLooks like Monero was created to solve tangible problems in the Bitcoin experiment. Remember the phrase "Bitcoin experiment." The initial Bitcoin proposal claimed that it's an experiment, and implied that it wasn't designed to scale to general-purpose commerce.
- wyager 10y agoIt implied that it was an experiment, but it never implied that it wasn't suitable for general purpose commercial usage. By all reasonable metrics, the experiment was and continues to be successful.
- gwbas1c 10y agoLooks like Monero was created to solve tangible problems in the Bitcoin experiment. Remember the phrase "Bitcoin experiment." The initial Bitcoin proposal claimed that it's an experiment, and implied that it wasn't designed to scale to general-purpose commerce.
- cloudjacker 10y agoYeah sure, or sell to people that need Monero later Monero traded at around 45 cents for the better of two years, and had trended up to around 2 dollars, still a good investment before Bloomberg, Oasis and Alphabay found out about it. It is $8 now, with market cap of around 100 million, but bitcoin had a marketcap greater than that when Silk Road was the only marketplace in town. Dark net markets are much much bigger than when Silk Road was around, and two of them are adopting Monero Price, meet math.
- dang 10y agoAnother article about this was posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12389536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12389536.
- hackcasual 10y agoAlphaBay announced on Reddit last week. “We expect this to cause a spike in the price, so if you are an investor, now is the time to purchase Monero.” Bloomberg publishing investing advice from a criminal enterprise
- x3n0ph3n3 10y agoWell, they do publish from Goldman Sachs, so...
- plasticmachine 10y agoI wonder if they could be sued for that:-P
- sushid 10y agoThey also linked directly to a black market subreddit without a warning. I'm pretty sure I don't want to be asked by my HR as to why I was visiting an illegal drug marketplace forum.
- gcb0 10y agodoes monero deals with privacy? last i checked Bitcoin solved the centralization of currency, not anonymity
- tobias3 10y agoYes, how the amounts paid are kept anonymous is particularily interesting: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt The involved parties are kept anonymous by enforced mixing, I think.
- wyldfire 10y agoThis link is confusing because it describes the proposal to add "Confidential Transactions" to Bitcoin. Some concepts are related/similar to Monero's but it's not the same.
- tobias3 10y agoMaybe you could point us to a similar (succinct) description of the involved cryptography? This one e.g. https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf ?
- wyldfire 10y agoTo some extent, yes. Ring signatures effectively make transactions more difficult to trace. Large exchanges of value will likely be much easier to trace given their rarity over time.
- plasticmachine 10y agoValues can't be known, after the RingCT hard fork. See: https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf
- s_q_b 10y agoDoes anyone know if there's a vehicle to short Monero?
- tinkerrr 10y agoYou can do it on an exchange called Poloniex. Just remember, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Good luck!
- sushid 10y agoMargin trading is risky in a regulated market and doubly so in the cryptocurrency marketplace. I would advise against it, but as another sibling comment mentions, Poloniex would be your best bet. Be careful though, as Bitfinex, another popular margin trading website, was hacked and lost $60 mm a few months ago. Polo has also been hacked before, although they incurred a much smaller loss due to their hack. When you margin trade through your brokerage, you don't have to worry about the firm shutting down and/or the US government not repaying your money. With these websites, there's a very real chance it'll disappear overnight.
- placeybordeaux 10y agoMonero is currently ranked 6th in terms of market cap[1]. It seems to be the highest privacy focused crypto currency beating out dash. Bitcoin still controls ~80% of the total crypto currency market cap. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/
- aminorex 10y agoMonero is #2 in volume, right behind bitcoin, turning over about 1/4 to 1/3 the volume of bitcoin on exchanges in the past 24 hours. Coming up fast!
- rampage101 10y agoA lot of people are only interested in crypto-currencies for use in the black markets. While probably a majority here are more interested in them from a computer science or investing perspective.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoI wonder how many people are interested in them for their ostensive purpose, which was to have a non-centralized currency for regular, every-day transactions. It seems that they're mostly currently being used for speculative investments (not a particularly good use for a currency) or for black market transactions.
- aminorex 10y agoYou can get a Visa card backed with Monero from bitwa.la or use Monero anywhere BTC is accepted via xmr.to
- mjevans 10y agoI'm interested in them from the perspective of eliminating morality police that charge predatory rates to 'risky' sectors of the economy. I see them as providing a more level playing field, though I do feel that competition among escrow providers with clear terms of service for both parties is an element missing from the equation.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago> I'm interested in them from the perspective of eliminating morality police that charge predatory rates to 'risky' sectors of the economy. Can you give some examples? I'm not sure what you mean.
- egypturnash 10y agoIf you make porn/erotica then a lot of payment processors want nothing to do with you. Same with marijuana. I live in a US state that's legalized it, and every shop requires cash payment because no payment processor will talk to them.
- apeace 10y agoAn exciting sub-project within Monero is the possibility of using I2P[0] as a transport layer[1]. I2P is an onion-routing network overlay similar to Tor, but different in that: - It focuses on internal services, rather than proxying out to the regular internet (though outproxies are available). - Tor is designed primarily for TCP-based use-cases (proxying to the web). I2P natively carries both TCP and UDP. - In I2P, every node is a router, unlike Tor where most nodes are just clients. Last time I checked, Tor had in the neighborhood of 6k routing nodes, and I2P had around 20k. I2P is a fascinating project with a hard-working team that has been maintaining and growing the network for a decade. It's worth checking out. [0] https://geti2p.net/ https://geti2p.net/ [1] https://forum.getmonero.org/1/news-announcements-and-editorials/208/why-we-chose-i2p-over-tor https://forum.getmonero.org/1/news-announcements-and-editori...
- droffel 10y agoOkay, not exactly true. I'm involved with the Monero project, and currently, the Kovri plugin (I2P Daemon in C++ as opposed to Java) is under development, and not in action yet. As of currently, connections are not run through I2P (though the plan is to integrate I2P communications in the wallet via Kovri soon™). If anyone wants more info on the integration of I2P into the Monero daemon, feel free to come over to #monero-dev, #kovri-dev, or #kovri on Freenode, and we would be happy to answer any questions that you have.
- apeace 10y agoMy apologies! Didn't realize this integration hadn't been completed. I'll correct the original comment.
- plasticmachine 10y agoJust chiming in here: Kovri is still a work in progress, and there is still some work to be done before it can be used more broadly or as a replacement for the Java router: https://github.com/monero-project/kovri https://github.com/monero-project/kovri
- 10y ago
- zizzles 10y agoThat advent of cryptocurrency such as Monero are a god-send to the underground. It is almost bread & butter. They serve their purpose of being a difficult-to-trace decentralized currency very well. Did any of you oldies imagine that in 2016, you would be able to have recreational drugs of your choice shipped to your doorway, anonymously? Paid for with a cryptographic medium of exchange? Although, there exists a con: Cryptocurrency as a whole is gaining a "dirtier" reputation thanks in part to it's new-found use as a black market medium of exchange. People had a vision of Bitcoin being an easy to use, mainstream currency for the general population (pipe-dream in my opinion) It is clearly not going in that direction. Governments can very easily outlaw Bitcoin if they so please at any moment. Any legitimate exchanges would be shut-down, no LocalBitcoin, no Bitcoin ATM's, no BitPay, no NewEgg and Overstock accepting Bitcoin payments, banks ceasing operating with Bitcoin copmanies (good luck converting to fiat)
- blackbagboys 10y agoMore likely is that governments will allow Bitcoin 'traffic' to be funneled through exchanges, like Coinbase, that are FinCEN-compliant and responsive to law enforcement, while cracking down hard on peer-to-peer exchangers and anyone else who isn't diligent about collecting user data and responding to subpoenas. IIRC, collecting information on customer's identities is a legal requirement of any money-transmitter with a nexus in the U.S., so any Monero exchanges are either going to need to collect user data (rendering the whole thing kind of pointless), blacklist all users in the U.S., or accept that they'll probably be relentlessly hounded by the feds.
- her 10y agoI wonder how though they could possibly target properly implemented crypto peer to peer exchanges?
- jbpetersen 10y agoSo what's the next step in the arms race when people move to decentralized exchanges like Bitsquare?
- shanusmagnus 10y agoI wonder if this could serve to make Bitcoin more palatable, via the anchoring effect -- Monero can be the currency for bad guys, as far as John Q. Public is concerned, and draw all that heat? Leaving Bitcoin seeming relatively benign in comparison?