Recently there was a post on this subreddit concerning Monero, titled As a Bitcoin Cash supporter, here is how I view the rise of Monero..
I wanted to write a reply back then but I was so busy that it slipped my mind. So I'm going to write it here instead. The sentiment around Monero in this subreddit has definitely changed in the last couple years, and while it may seem like a good thing, I believe that its not. Monero used to be widely panned in this subreddit, mainly because for years the monero community engaged in bad acting and disingenuous behavior, similar to what George Donnelly has engaged in.
An example of this behavior is this thread I posted from two years ago While they flood this sub with their shilling and tipbot, the Monero community ROUTINELY LIES about Bitcoin Cash to newbies! . In that thread I exposed the fact that while Monero advocates and members were beginning to flood this subreddit with sycophantic comments, in their actual subreddit they were attacking Bitcoin Cash and spreading lies about this community.
Also, another thread I posted 4 years ago exposing Monero's bad acting and terrible tokenomics was well-received here as well, indeed I was requested to post that thread by a member of this community:
Reasons You May Want To Avoid Monero – Posting By Request
My point isn't to necessarily rehash those old topics. Rather its to contend that “the rise” of Monero is actually bad for the cryptocurrency space and BCH as a whole. The monero community often engages in shilling and bribery of key positions in communities in order to not say anything bad about their coin. Even though there's a lot of bad that can be said about it.
Strictly speaking, Monero's privacy is heavily flawed and ineffective. Monero's privacy was broken for at least the first four years of its existance, and in fact Monero's privacy still doesn't work. u/Rucknium himself posted research on the OSPEAD attack that is barely 7 months old that he claims is an untenable sacrifice of user privacy.
Developer of OSPEAD here. AMA!
What I'm saying here is: (1) Fix the statistical issues of ring signatures to the maximum possible extent, or (2) accept that user privacy will be compromised, or (3) move to a completely different model. You may be interested in some recent discussions in #monero-community IRC/Matrix regarding the feasibility and advisability of doing (3) eventually. Meanwhile, I am working on (1). To me, (2) is unacceptable.
So here, the researcher who developed the attack clearly states that it is so severe that the privacy of monero's users is compromised to an unacceptable degree. That is a severe indictment. As a reminder, researchers have shown that Monero's privacy was broken in the past several times in many different ways. Another link:
Tracing Cryptonote ring signatures using external metadata
What are the general properties of metadata analysis?
A single expression that I would use to describe is “churn killer”. Since the anonymity set provided by a ring signature is fairly small, a very naive and stupid advice would be “just send money to yourself a couple times”. Metadata attack turns churning into incriminating evidence in a scenario where you are trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a transaction occurred between Alice and Bob.
Another interesting property of metadata analysis is that larger ring sizes are more incriminating. It can be only countered with smarter output selection. For one such idea, see section 6.2 here.
What can be done to prevent it?
First of all let’s get one thing out of the way. No amount of real-time traffic obfuscation will put you in the clear here. It does not address the root issue — that your activity and transaction happening are temporally correlated.
In Monero you are double-screwed. It has a non-constant fee that will leak information on when you signed the transaction, even if you delay its broadcast.
Finally the real solution is to have protocol level way whereby the broadcast can be delayed while keeping the transaction anonymous.
In this viral r/btc thread Thanks to CashShuffle I can finally add Bitcoin Cash to the List! – Cutting to the chase or how to properly evaluate privacy coins! three years ago, I amended my previous work at identifying the strongest privacy coin by their anonymity set. There I showed that Monero actually has one of the weakest anonymity sets of all privacy coins at 11. And the privacy bugs that monero has like those mentioned above, actually DECREASE monero's anon set considerably.
So unlike the original post I referenced in the beginning, I think that “the rise” of Monero is a bad sign for the cryptocurrency market in general. Some of the things in that post were true, like you must pay for privacy. But Monero's privacy is the MOST EXPENSIVE per byte! You get one of the smallest anonymity set sizes for the cost, and its privacy is traceable in several different ways which means you're actually paying to have your privacy broken!
The rise of such an anti-tool will only lead to anti-adoption and the destruction of Satoshi's true dream, digital cash for everyone. As I showed in the thread above, its not “privacy by default” that matters, rather its the SIZE OF YOUR ANONYMITY SET that determines the strength of a coin's privacy offering. Finally, Monero has infinite inflation which is a definite no-no in cryptocurrency. Satoshi explicitly wanted to get away from the inflation in fiat currencies when he created Bitcoin.
Monero is a slap in Satoshi's face. Monero also has an extremely bloated chain at over 130GB, this despite having very little adoption or actual usage (I showed with evidence that Monero's recent spike in daily transaction count was just fakery using scripts Evidence the monero community is faking their recent spike in transactions in order to manipulate their fair value and appear more used than they are a post that curiously despite all the vote brigading the Monero community engages in, is still upvoted to this day).
So I wanted to start a dialog on what “Monero's rise” actually means for cryptocurrencies. I don't think it means anything good. In fact, I think that Monero rising means the death of Satoshi's original dream, and thus the death of cryptocurrencies (the casus belli for forking BCH in the first place).
Thoughts?