This post of Alex's ended up here so I am replying here, not in the dark thread...


The vision was to bring CryptoNote to the masses without the two year ninja mine.


The main focus at the moment is to make the software usable. At the moment the memory usage, transaction dust and blockchain size must be focused on. At the moment CryptoNote is private enough. They will work on adding I2P at some point, but core usability is the focus right now.

Alex, they are not going to add fluff to pump and dump, this isn't dark. The anonymity in CryptoNote is working as it should, it doesn't need more features for features sake.


Actually the timing is a reaction to the public release of Bytecoin, not Dark.


At the moment the aim is to get the Monero blockchain scaling at a linear function to Bitcoin. I personally think that an anonymous chain can be about five times larger. The extra size is worth the anonymity, just like Bitcoin requires several million times the space on your PC as mastercard requires, the extra function of bitcoin makes it worth it. The same goes for monero. If the monero chain can scale in a linear fashion albertly being larger we'll be fine.

We're talking about real anonymity here, the chain is going to be larger.


Actually it's not 90% Monero will have an immortal coin release, coins will never stop being minted.

I argue we need a release of about 1% a year, some others think a lower amount. This discussion is ongoing and not set in stone.


No currency in it's first few years will be a good store of value, so many uncertainties. Even Bitcoin is not a good store of value at the moment. There has been no evidence of a nation state trying to attack Bitcoin, so we are in the dark as to how secure crypto currencies really are.

Alex, if you're truly looking for store of value, diversify into bonds, property and gold.

Cryptocurrencies will one day be a good store of value, but it's too early days to call it case closed. You make it sound like one crypto offers store of value whilst another doesn't.


Monero is still very experimental, so don't buy if you're afraid to lose it. I haven't seen 10 bitcoins destroy monero yet, let someone try, 10 bitcoin isn't a lot.

At the moment many Governments could easily take down bitcoin, let alone monero or darkcoin.

Also by the time it's commonplace to have a multi million dollar investment in Monero, many bugs and attack vectors will be ironed out.


Monero makes the transactions from the perspective of a third party doing blockchain analysis anonymous.

However at the moment IP sniffing could render some information leakage for analysis of real time transactions. That is why using TOR like with Dark and Bitcoin is advised for now.



The specifications are superior? How so?


It might be, who knows. I heard the team split up, who knows how good the leftovers are?


The monero team have identified many areas that need improvement and are working on them, as the monero project goes forward, one can hope more people will join the core team as more people get skin in the game.

As far as I can tell the team are working on many issues and I have confidence in what they are doing. I don't have confidence in the Bytecoin team due to their deceptive past.


Normally with white papers and code, you look into it yourself, if you can't then perhaps leave of investing for a few years.

Did you invest in Dark just because of "assurances"?


Right now no, no and no. Although please don't forget that even Bitcoin is a pain to use by average people. In fact average people can barely get a printer to work.

If bitcoin use becomes more widespread (and is not banned outright), I imagine that the police authorities (FBI, CIA, and their brethren in other countries, Interpol, etc.) will create public databases of "bad" coins, which in their view are associated with tax evasion, crime, terrorism, unfriendly governments, etc.  Citizens of a country would be required to look up any bitcoins they receive in their government's database, and immediately transfer any "bad" coins to a government account, under pain of being suspected accessories to those crimes.  All outputs of any transaction with any "bad" input will presumably be "bad" by definition. 

Such a database, even if it worked only imperfectly, would pretty much end fungibility.  There will be "clean bitcoins", "child porn bitcoins", "drug bitcoins", "Iran Guard bitcoins", "Israeli bitcoins", "Ross Ullbricht's bitcoins", "Wikileaks supporters' bitcoins", and so on.  In particular, that database would allow governments to block bitcoin funds, for practical purposes, and virtually seize them, even if they don't have access to the keys.  If certain bitcoins are officially declared government property, moving them or knowingly accepting them without their permission would be theft of government property.

Note that this schema is viable with bitcoin, which assumes online internet access at every transaction; but not with cash, since it would be impractical to require the database check for every cash transaction.  Note also that the schema does not require control of the bitcoin network or changes to the protocol, and transactions with "bad" coins can be monitored by any government no matter where the parties are located in the world.
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Also I'd like to add, that monero was originally made by tft, who has some relationshop with the BCN devs (they probably wanted to control the market of forks), who then stopped working with the community

And the anonymity isn't flawed like CoinJoin's one (which is essentially the tech of drk, even if eddufield don't want to credit gmaxwell)
And we shouldn't forget, that through CoinJoin the blockchain of drk and co will also meet the same problem, though not as big. following moore's law, disc space is the least of our problems, only internet speed could potentially be a problem, but that's increasing too

First off, it won't be 90%, but 80% with a long-term inflation not being implemented, but, as drawing the sun said, this is planned

Just to remind you Alex, Bitcoin is still mined and has an inflation much higher than 2%, als, as stated, nobody wants a inflation of 2%, but one of 1%. Even then, a currency can still be a store of value

Not trying to be unfriendly, but you should really read first the either the whitepaper or atleast get some basic understanding from the cryptonote website
The problems drawingthesun has described also occur also with the centralized mixing drk is using, while still having a flawed anonymity


And how are they seemingly more active? As far as I can tell, they are far more commits on Monero's repos


You could argue the same with Litecoin/Bitcoin. Of course, neither dev teams, would try to destroy drk, but maybe there is a bug in the wallet, which then get's fixed, but a user is then exploiting it in drk's codebase


The BCN code was widely obfuscated and the miner deliberately slow and the only mining pool closed source. This clean start is offeringa way better "floor" for investors and coders. Since then the Monero team has developed open-source pools, tx-auto-split, determistic wallets, 50x times faster miner, and many, many bugs

BBR team has 4 people now: 1 designer, 1 marketing, 2 devs

Now this is the stuff of legend. For you to make this claim you must actually know nothing about CryptoCoins.

If you do, I'm sorry to tell you that you don't. Please unlearn and relearn as you missed something the first time around. Good luck and be open minded.

I think it is generally helpful for the particulars of these differences to be well-known.  Can you provide a reference?  Or even just high-entropy keywords?

I still don't know enough of the coin, so I'll stick with XMR. The little I know does not warrant a switch.

ADD: Boolberry is so stupid a name that it must be changed before I'll consider

I'm going to disagree with #2 - I think the issue with aliases is that they haven't been yet pushed hard enough.  For example, there should be an alias rebinding mechanism (perhaps using a tx fee and a signature from the originally bound key).  But aliases are optional, just like publishing your view key is.  Many recipients may wish to be publicly known but be able to have senders retain their anonymity, and aliases fit into this use model.  Aliases are an interesting, though fairly unimportant in the big picture as of now, exploration of the use of the blockchain.

update: Rebinding is apparently coded, just not available via external commands yet.  Sorry for the partial mis-information.

4)  You left off a discussion of transaction identification by prefix.  Comments?  As a mechanism to keep the blockchain smaller, this seems like one of the most technically relevant ways in which BBR departs from XMR, given that the blockchain size is one of the big deals with the entire cryptonote family.

I couldn't help but notice that you have an XMR address in your signature.

It amounts to the same thing.  Public disclosure and reuse of an address coupled with mixin=0 respending allows (limited) tracing of spends in all of the cryptonote family.

The only real difference is that the address disclosed in the blockchain is completely public.  I believe that's the intent of the aliases, no?

But this is a fairly unimportant distinction in the grand scheme of things.  XMR could easily add aliases if they prove successful, BBR could probably rip them out, ... these don't strike me as a fundamental thing to bring to the debate.