• magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    9 days ago

    Yeah but without anonymous payments (xmr) there’s no good way to easily pay for diy estrogen or hosting for piracy services, or to anonymously pay my mullvad account.

    Granted if society wherent setup as a giant fucking fascist capitalistic panopticon we wouldn’t really need any of that.

    Any who, I mostly agree with the sentiment though. “Career” investors and venture capitalists belong against a fucking wall IMO.

      • Jack Riddle[Any/All]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 days ago

        xmr is a cryptocurrency which aims to make reading transactions from the chain impossible. Iirc the main mechanism of this is that they bundle a lot of transactions together and send out coins from that pool only once it is large enough, without preserving each specific coin. This repeats for a few proxies. You could trace a coin from origin to endpoint, but this would be pretty much useless as you cannot know whether the endpoint was the intended one or not.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          Interesting! So at best you could narrow down the purchaser to one of many possible sources.

          My first thought is that a large enough organization trying to demask you could do so by looking at repeat subscription purchases over time coming from the same wallet. You know, like a monthly fee for a VPN. The first month you’re one of a thousand people. The second month. Maybe you’re one of 500. Eventually they get you.

          But I know nothing about XMR, they probably solved for this. I just can’t be bothered to read :-D

          • Jack Riddle[Any/All]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            8 days ago

            I believe the way they deal with this is by having the recipient create a one-time address for every sender, so it is not possible to recognize patterns between senders and recipients. Another thing is that every wallet has two associated keys. There is a “spend key”, which is a write-only key that can spend money from the wallet, and a “view key”, which can be used to view the contents of the wallet. You can publish the view key if you want that to be public information, but you don’t have to.

        • danc4498@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          How does the mechanism know who to send the coins to? How can I be sure the coins I put in go to where I intended them to go? And can the sender prove to the receiver it was their transaction?

          • Jack Riddle[Any/All]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            8 days ago

            As I understand it, this happens cryptographically. Send keys can be added to form a larger key, which gets used to sign the pool of transactions. Because the signature used your key as well, the recipient can verify that they have received your coins(from a pool you signed). The important part is that it is impossible to tell who signed what part of the pool, just that one of the people in the pool did. Because all money is pooled together and sent at the same time, it is not possible to read from the amounts sent which transaction belongs to who.

            • danc4498@lemmy.world
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              8 days ago

              I think I get it (in theory). As much as people shit on crypto, it really is a cool implementation of math and economics.

      • Fmstrat@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        Not all crypto is the same. ZCASH uses an encrypted ledger. Monero combines transactions and redistributes to obfuscate.

      • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 days ago

        Okay, politely, fuck off. Its 2026 and I absolutely refuse to believe anyone educated on crypto enough to know what a blockchain is and how it works, even if just a basic understanding, doesn’t know about encrypted blockchains or XMR.

        You get to post this comment like once in your life, and after that we both know its in bad faith. I really doubt its the first time.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          There’s actually a surprising new discovery coming out of East Asia this year. After years of research, they’ve discovered that you can educate someone online without being a total dick.

          I too thought it was impossible. But I can’t argue with science.

          • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            8 days ago

            Normally I’d agree but this gets posted anytime anyone says something about anonymous crypto payments like some magic gatchya, and Its getting really hard to believe its not in bad faith at this point.

      • Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        Zcash has opt in anonymization. So it really doesn’t work because any offramp can just not accept any zcash that has been obfuscated. With monero, its all obfuscated by default.

      • magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 days ago

        Admittedly I’m not a hardcore crytography nerd, but I know they’ve been improving things for years, and that message on that mailing list looked like it was 10 years old.

        Not saying your wrong, but Id take it with a grain of salt. Anytime I see a newer encrypted block chain I see it and think whatever improvements have been done here, will eventually bleed into monero because of that. And that unlike the other encrypted blockchain, people will still actively be using xmr for real transactions.

        • Jack Riddle[Any/All]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          9 days ago

          You might be right, I have not followed xmr closely. You might also notice that this vulnerability is unlikely to deanonimise you, but the point was more that it is a mistake they shouldn’t have made. Their last audit looks fine, though it was made by a blockchain auditing company which I don’t know. I don’t think there is much harm in using xmr for this, groups who would be capable of exploiting vulnerabilities in this kind of project are unlikely to do so, unless an issue of national security becomes associated somehow

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 days ago

        I’m not sure I’d trust whatever that link is as a source that XMR isn’t secure… I mean, what even is that link?