zcash requires blind faith, which makes it a cult. twitter.com/hyc_symas/status/1066948524405940224

.faucet

Cricket: This command is disabled in this channel.

calling it a technology is grossly presumptuous

lol

it requires the good heart and desire to buy Zooko groceries in perpetuity

I believe Justin should have his access to the @monero twitter account revoked. He clearly can't delineate between being a trusted community member and shilling for his employer.

if I run monerod in my terminal and then open monero-wallet-gui, if I set it to use Local Node to enable mining, will it know to connect to the existing monerod or should I connect to the running monerod with remote node? I won't be able to enable mining that way tho

drew: it should connect to the running monerod

apotheon: I can't find it. I can find a report they funded that basically said it's too awful to actually use for money laundering. But that's not them talking

artefact_: can you repeat test with monerod from the latest release-v0.17 branch monerod with disable ssl (--rpc-ssl=disabled) ?

yanmaani: That report could be fun. Would you mind linking that?

apotheon: rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR4418.html

basically, zcash paid them to make the report

and so they have to be very polite to their sponsor

nice

but basically, their conclusion is "nobody uses zcash for criminal activity, the reasons for this are entirely unknown, they may be related to the fact that nobody uses zcash for anything"

"Zcash is relatively unknown in the academic research community, and the links between Zcash and illicit or criminal activities have not been substantially researched."

"Users engaged in illicit activities may not fully understand the Zcash operating model. They may also not understand the value in Zcash's privacy-preserving features, or else are not aware of or confident in them."

interesting

you have to admit, "relatively unknown in the academic research community" is a very nice euphemism for "irrelevant shitcoin"

har

LOL

Then again, it may be that even Ethereum is relatively unknown in the academic research community, I guess.

It seems everyone has heard of "Bitcoin", and . . . that's about it.

it's a pretty damning evaluation of their zksnarks research

the report mentions monero several times FWIW

at least bulletproofs etc *are* known in crypto and math academic circles

"unlike zcash, people do seem to use monero for criminal activities ... we do not have any idea why ... it may be related to zcash's marketing"

got the PDF

Now I just have to find time to read it.

not worth the time imo

Shouldn't we be calling any law-evading use of Monero "wellicit" instead of "illicit"?

?

just a pun

well vs. ill

The paper's all about "illicit" use of cryptocurrency, after all.

holy fuck, this PDF

The text is tiny, which is a problem when reading it on a laptop. I could handle this better if it wasn't printed in a two-column format, but the two column format means I'd have to scroll back up to the top of every page after reading half of it if I zoomed in enough to make the text more easily legible.

This is why EPUBs are better for plain ol' text. Pagination is less harmful that way.

Over the last year or so, academic interest in Monero has skyrocketed. MRL literally cannot keep up with the flood of papers being published.

first transaction flood, now this :D

I still suspect that zksnarks is just a flashy gimmick, like quantum teleportation

How so?

Moser et al. (2018) "An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain" alone now has over 80 citations and counting.

entangle two photons, then move them a distance apart, view one photon, and magically the other one changes to match.

Granted, most of them are references in passing, but a good number of the referencing papers are entirely focused on Monero.

information didn't teleport or travel at superluminal velocities. it was already present in both photons, and moved at the speed which you separated them

with zksnarks trusted setup, the knowledge is carried in both the prover and verifier at creation time

it appears that zero knowledge is exchanged at verification time, but only because the information was already present...

my sneaking suspicion is that it all cancels out and amounts to proving 0 = 0 ...

Somewhat analogous to a one-time pad?

yes

information is not present in photons hyc

A one-time pad can be pretty useful.

sech1: this is more relevant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

"However, all interpretations agree that entanglement produces correlation between the measurements and that the mutual information between the entangled particles can be exploited, but that any transmission of information at faster-than-light speeds is impossible"

is that quantum entanglement stuff even real? or is it just hot air, like "oh, technically, it teleports"?

Modern day snake oil

goddamn these virtual sms things are crap

I kinda believe it will still be useful for telecommunication, just in a very limited fashion

imagine you can create e.g. 100 pairs of entangled photons

then you put half of each pair in one box, and half in another box

then you can give those 2 boxes to twp people and they can travel arbitrarily far from each other

and they can communicate privately, instantly, sending up to 100 "messages" to each other

after the last photons are used up they would need to return to a single charging station to refill both boxes

It's remarkably similar to how securely employing one-time pads would work.

it's years away from being practically useful, but I think it will get there

yes

Combine OTP with that, and you've got a pretty secure messaging system.

. . . fuelled by periodic inconvenience.

(also, that charging station might be a MITM)

heh good point

gotta make your own

People treat WhatsApp like "secure" comms, though, so . . . why worry about the charging station for WhatsEngangled?

(secret message buried in that name)

to be easily useful you'd want them in bit arrays, like a DRAM. collapse one photon = on bit, uncollapsed = off bit

then you can actually encode binary messages

I don't know if anyone's ever considered entangling more than 2 photons at once

so currently you're only able to do point to point comm

but it also means it's impossible to eavesdrop

if there is a way to do multi-photon entanglement then you could conceivably do group comms. or eavesdrop undetected on a 2-party comm...

It's easy to bring a box with entangled photons with you on a trip, is it?

no idea really. i think they need to be supercooled tho

but it's early days

compare an early vacuum tube to a modern transistor

hyc scientificamerican.com/article/chin…-space-based-quantum-communications

you still have to generate a random key to be used by a OTP, and that is always the rub (the generation and distribution of the key)

vtnerd_: dice, if nothing else

Distribution is a much bigger problem, in practice, than generation.

(at least in use cases that come to mind)

generation is a big problem if lots of data needs to be encrypted. The key must be equal length to the plaintext, and the key cannot be repeated

so using dice will work, but oh man is that a pain for encrypting a pdf or something

yep

Obviously, utility of OTP is situational.

OTPs are generally not necessary except for communications (as opposed to local storage), so the constraints of bandwidth often make the constraints of generation less of a problem than those of delivery.

That's my observation so far, anyway.