ianmiers

11 ms·

31.
by ianmiers 6y ago
A very good point and one I've learned over the years with Zcash. But the social problems, maybe, can change: someone can launch a new coin that fixes them or an existing one can get its act together. Or maybe not. But it's at le
32.
by ianmiers 6y ago
For zcash currently, yes. But for the underling tech, no. You scan the blockchain in Zcash to be notified of a payment. But the sender could just as easily send you an out of band message with everything you need to know to spend the money
33.
by ianmiers 6y ago
In terms of protocols, not specific coins, privacy is clearly technically viable. Take Zcash: for its underlying protocol, known as sapling, the performance issues went away. It's about 2.5 seconds to make a fully private transaction o
34.
by ianmiers 6y ago
You got sources for that being how the construction works? From various telegram groups with the devs in them , my understanding is 1) rings are constructed client side 2) uploaded to the server inside SGX. This has two major weaknesses 1)
35.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Most of those attacks, as the paper points out, are fixed. The one that is still relevant is the issues around sampling decoys vs real spends. At the time, with high probability you could assume the most recent tx in the set of decoys was
36.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Auditing the supply would mean transaction amounts were public. That kills privacy. Theres a reason exactly none of the privacy coins, including Zcash, Grin, Beam, Monero and Mobilecoin do it. Hiding transaction values is table stakes for
37.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Crypto tribalism aside, you got two technical points fundamentally wrong about the cryptography: 1) snarks are fast now. It takes 3 seconds on a pixel phone for Zcash. 2)The decoy based approaches Monero uses are subject to all kinds of pas
38.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Assuming whatsapp uses the same message franking mechanism Facebook's encrypted chats use, no. Ciphertexts are authenticated so that the contents of them can be verified using a key held on Facebooks servers (and crucially that key all
39.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Zcash and Zcoin are two very different things run by very different groups with very different protocols. The poster was talking about Zcoin, and you responded with a canned line about Zcash.
40.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Secure systems cannot use either a signature or authenticated encryption. Signing a message is not sufficient to prevent tampering that leads to an attacker reading the message by seeing errors in processing the tampered message. You need e
41.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Uk CS PhD: spend one year figuring out what you are doing, 1/1.5 years doing research. 1 year writing up. Thats the summary I've gotten from several faculty. On top of that, you have to go do a few postdocs if you want to do acade
42.
by ianmiers 6y ago
Its hard, we get a lot of emails and ignore most of them. You need to find some interesting insight or question, not "can you work with me." Making me think about research is a welcome thing. Making me think about managing people
43.
by ianmiers 6y ago
CS Professor here: Depending on the institution, it's possible to get a PhD without an undergrad or meet alternative requirements to get an undergrad along the way. The trick is you need to get admitted to the program. This is harder b
44.
by ianmiers 8y ago
The issue with cryptcurrency is it's twitter for your bank account. Everything you do is public to everyone. Imagine there was a database where given the serial number on a $20 bill, you could look up everywhere it's been ( and wa
45.
by ianmiers 8y ago
It really doesn't help with that unless you use a completely different protocol and assume trusted setup. At which point, just use zcash, it will have smaller and faster to verify transactions. Trust me, I've been working with RSA
46.
by ianmiers 8y ago
The coins are public but with a hidden monetary value. When you spend one you explicitly identify it and include it in a transaction that produces a new coin. After they are broadcast there are ways of compressimg individual transactions to
47.
by ianmiers 8y ago
The biggest privacy issue with grin is it doesn't hide the transaction graph. See their own write up[0] which offers a very good and nuanced privacy discussion. This means, for example, you can be tracked by colluding vendors. Or can b
48.
by ianmiers 9y ago
Privacy is indeed the main motivation. But you're missing the threat model. Facebook,Google, Target, etc all run sophisticated customer tracking programs. Target was predicting if their customers were pregnant based on spending habits
49.
by ianmiers 9y ago
By the way, the backdoor comments are taken out of context in a very inaccurate way. For Zooko's, literally the next tweet explains that he means for transfers in and out of fiat. "And by the way, I think we can successfully make
50.
by ianmiers 9y ago
Technically, you could also break the encryption used in the memo field. But thats bog standard cryptography
51.
by ianmiers 9y ago
If it's self hosted, then DMs cannot be private from the company/organization since they literally have root on the box.
52.
by ianmiers 9y ago
Whats the throughput on PRIVX? Last I checked, Zerocoin transactions were 25kb and the deployed versions were limited to one anonymous TX per block.
53.
by ianmiers 9y ago
Here's the problem with cryptonote: if I play 10 hands of poker at an online casino, with money I bought on an exchange, I have very little privacy. Anyone who can coerce or compel the casino and exchange's cooperation can get my
54.
by ianmiers 9y ago
The UK is probably the shortest in that regard and its worth pointing out that they are actively trying to transition away from that model. See the push to setup centers for doctoral training.
55.
by ianmiers 9y ago
Truly anonymous would mean if you bought $100 worth of anoncoin under your own name from an exchange and then played two hands of poker at an online casino, there would be no way for the casino and the exchange to collude and identifier y
56.
by ianmiers 9y ago
Privacy for cryptocurrencies is in its infancy. So no one has lost yet. Moreover there's space for more than one private coin. It's not zero sum. And yes, Bitcoin should probably take the most cautious path. But one of the things
57.
by ianmiers 9y ago
If Alice gives you a coin and then you spend it to Bob, what stops Alice and Bob from identifying that they delt with the same person? This isn't an issue of addresses or values, but the transaction graph. The only thing that hides tha
58.
by ianmiers 9y ago
The assumption isn't that the entire blockchain is stored forever, its that users who keep year old coins can 1) receive blocks (either as they are created, or in some batched process where the batch size could be as large as you like
59.
by ianmiers 9y ago
So the model is as follows: This network holds the last n blocks (where n is something on the order of months or years.). Spending coins within that time period is unchanged. For every coin outside of those n blocks, the user must hold abo
60.
by ianmiers 9y ago
You have a choice: use a trusted party (obviously bad) or pass around partial aggregates and have someone add on to them ( this is the standard proposal). Problem is, you can trivially attach to almost every full node and observe those tr

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