Such an honor to be able to go on @WhatBitcoinDid for this one and be able to cover the immensely important topic of digital privacy with @PeterMcCormack.
#Monero is such a valuable tool for freedom, I hope more people will take the time to see how it can fit into their toolkit.
And if you want to start taking active steps towards personal privacy more broadly (there is a lot more to privacy, and thus freedom, than just Bitcoin/Monero!) this should be a great place to get started:
If you have any questions after listening to this episode, please don't hesitate to reach out -- I'm always happy to chat about things in a nuanced, honest, and meaningful way:
Attempted to make a semi-exhaustive list here, please read through and let me know if I missed something, misspoke, or need to add more detail to any of the proposals:
2/ For the Bitcoin node, I simply exposed the Dojo bitcoind node's RPC that I already had up, and was able to easily access it across my home's network:
It's *very* early, but I've started collecting resources, open questions, and proposed efforts to explore how trustless zk-SNARKs could be useful for a potential future #Monero protocol update:
If you have useful resources or questions, please reach out!
The goal here is to build a go-to resource that marries the promise of trustless zk-SNARKs with the specifics of Monero's payment protocol to ease potential research and interest by Monero developers and researchers, not to push for implementing zk-SNARKs ASAP.
I'll be working on a blog post to detail why they're worth exploring in more depth and what the associated pros/cons are, but a few notes:
- Seraphis is still the path forward for Monero, we're focused on that
- Ring signatures are still working very well in the real world
1/ I'm really tired of responding to lots of comments from DERO people claiming they've solved the worlds problems and scamming people with false marketing, so here's a thread breaking down all of their grandiose claims 👇
2/ DERO claims to be using "fully-homomorphic encryption" to prevent nodes from being able to see transaction information.
Not only is this nonsensical (zk-proofs allow verification without revealing data simply) FHE is absolutely unusably inefficient:
3/ For DERO to claim that they're using something that is thousands of times less efficient than more common encryption methods, and that has yet to be implemented in any other fashion due to this inefficiency should discount the rest of their claims off the bat.
2/ First off, no mentions of tracing Monero or tracking it's usage, despite Ciphertrace having used social-engineering to collect XMR addresses from known ransomware entities.
3/ Monero's acceptance (either only-XMR or XMR and BTC) has rapidly risen, and those who accept Bitcoin generally charge a 10-25% premium due to it being "easily traceable".