master.on
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Has anyone used it instead/besides a btc tumbler?
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Monero (XMR)
- Thread starter master.on
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master.on
New Member
Absolutely ALL bitcoin transactions are public
So monero (or any other fully anonymous cryptocurrency)
could be used to break the traceable link
Thus bitcoins can be transferred to a bitcoin/monero exchange
and slowly be split at random times at another monero/bitcoin exchange
Even if flagged as suspicious
it would be hard to prove in court
Info provided just for information/entertainment purposes only
not intended to break any law in any country
So monero (or any other fully anonymous cryptocurrency)
could be used to break the traceable link
Thus bitcoins can be transferred to a bitcoin/monero exchange
and slowly be split at random times at another monero/bitcoin exchange
Even if flagged as suspicious
it would be hard to prove in court
Info provided just for information/entertainment purposes only
not intended to break any law in any country
master.on
New Member
MONERO, THE DRUG DEALER'S CRYPTOCURRENCY OF CHOICE, IS ON FIRE
FOR THE CRYPTOCURRENCY community, 2016 was a very good year. Bitcoin doubled in price. The far-out Bitcoin alternative Ethereum shot up by a factor of 10. But another, once-obscure cryptocurrency called Monero outpaced all of them, multiplying its value around 27-fold. That's a windfall not just for cryptocurrency speculators, but for financial privacy advocates everywhere—including a few suddenly wealthy dark web drug dealers.
Over the last year, the value of the hyper-anonymous cryptocurrency Monero grew 2,760 percent, making it almost certainly the best-performing cryptocurrency of 2016. Today each Monero is worth around $12, compared with just 50 cents at the beginning of last year, and the collective value of all Monero has grown to close to $165 million. The source of that explosive growth seems to be Monero's unique privacy properties that go well beyond the decentralization that makes Bitcoin so resistant to control by governments and banks. It's instead designed to be far more private: fully anonymous, and virtually untraceable.
Those features have made Monero a budding favorite within at least one community that has a pressing need for secrecy: the dark web black market. In August, the darknet market site Alphabay began offering its thousands of vendors the option to accept Monero as an alternative to Bitcoin. A quick browse through the market today shows dealers of everything from stolen credit cards to heroin to handguns accepting the stealthier cryptocoin. That increase in illicit users also illustrates Monero's privacy potential, says Riccardo Spagni, one of Monero's core developers.
"That uptick among people who really need to be private is interesting," says Spagni. "If it’s good enough for a drug dealer, it’s good enough for everyone else."
Not Another Bitcoin
It's tempting to think of cryptocurrencies in terms of Bitcoin—in part because many cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin derivations. Monero's fully its own entity, though. First outlined in an October 2013 whitepaper by the pseudonymous figure Nicolas van Saberhagen and called Cryptonote, another pseudonymous individual known only as "thankful_for_today" later coded those ideas into a currency called Bitmonero. When open-source coders on the Bitcointalk forum disagreed with thankful_for_today's directions for the currency, they forked it in 2014 to create Monero, whose name means simply "coin" in Esperanto.
Its structure solves several key privacy vulnerabilities that dog Bitcoin, which despite its reputation for secret transactions has long been stuck in a strange privacy paradox. Unlike commercial services like PayPal, Bitcoin allows anyone to spend money online without providing identifying details. But if someone's Bitcoin address is linked with their real identity, any transaction from that address is entirely visible on the public blockchain, the accounting ledger that prevents fraud and forgery in the Bitcoin economy. Hiding those transactions requires taking extra steps, like routing bitcoins through "tumblers" that mix up coins with those of strangers—and occasionally steal them—or using techniques like "coinjoin," built into some bitcoin wallet programs, that mix payments to make them harder to trace. "If I pay my rent in Bitcoin, it wouldn't be that hard for the landlord to figure out how much money I earned if I don't take extra precautions," says encryption and cryptocurrency consultant Peter Todd. "Then they can decide whose rent to increase. You’re giving away information you don't want to make public."
Monero not only bakes anonymity features into the cryptocurrency itself, but implements a few features that Bitcoin still can't offer. It uses a technique called "stealth addresses" to generate addresses for receiving Monero that are essentially encrypted; the recipient can retrieve the funds, but no one can link that stealth address to the owner. It employs a technique called "ring signatures," which means every Monero spent is grouped with as many as a hundred other transactions, so that the spender's address is mixed in with a group of strangers, and every subsequent movement of that money makes it exponentially more difficult to trace back to the source. And it uses something called "ring confidential transactions," which hides the amount of every transaction.
"Even with big data analysis, the ability to farm anything out of the metadata is cryptographically negligible," says Spagni. In future implementations, he notes that Monero will add the anonymity software I2P to mask not only users' transactions on the Monero blockchain, but also the internet traffic underlying those transactions.
All of that makes Monero a significant upgrade for a cryptocurrency user's financial privacy. Todd, for instance, says he keeps a small Monero account, but transfers bitcoins into it when he wants to spend his cryptocurrency more stealthily, using the exchange tool Shapeshift to transform the coins from Monero back to bitcoin before they reach the recipient's account. "I basically use Monero to pay people with bitcoin anonymously," Todd says.
The Monero Market
That strict secrecy also helps explain Monero's darknet popularity. After Alphabay and a smaller dark web black market, known as Oasis, integrated the cryptocurrency last summer, its value immediately increased around six-fold. Alphabay told Bitcoin Magazine last month that the currency now accounts for about two percent of its sales. That's a small fraction, but still likely amounts to millions of dollars in annual revenue, given Alphabay's dominant position in the dark web drug market and estimates of that market's total size and growth.
Spagni says he expects Monero will no doubt be used in other potentially unsavory ways, too, like ransomware, and as currency for the gambling and porn industries. But he argues it will also be used for more innocent forms of financial privacy, like keeping your net worth secret while making routine purchases, or buying contraband like outlawed books in oppressive regimes. He also argues the uses of Monero are out of his and his fellow developers' control. "I’m in no position to judge what people should or shouldn’t do, and no one else should be either from a code perspective," he says.
Monero isn't the first cryptocurrency designed to offer a financial privacy panacea: Dash, formerly known as Darkcoin, integrates the "coinjoin" technique that allows bitcoin users to mix their transactions with a few other spenders in what Todd calls a weaker form of anonymity than Monero offers. More recently, Zcash debuted with the strongest anonymity promises yet—it uses cryptographic tricks designed to make tracing a transaction not only unlikely, but mathematically impossible. Zcash has yet to be integrated into dark web markets, though, and still requires wielding the command line to use.
Despite the currency's sudden spike in price, Spagni denies that he or any of the other core Monero coders are sitting on a massive pile of wealth. "We're just working on this to see where it goes," he says. But the promise and peril of Monero, of course, is that no one can check that claim. The stashes of the Monero developers, like those of its growing base of users, will stay secret by design.
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/monero-drug-dealers-cryptocurrency-choice-fire/
FOR THE CRYPTOCURRENCY community, 2016 was a very good year. Bitcoin doubled in price. The far-out Bitcoin alternative Ethereum shot up by a factor of 10. But another, once-obscure cryptocurrency called Monero outpaced all of them, multiplying its value around 27-fold. That's a windfall not just for cryptocurrency speculators, but for financial privacy advocates everywhere—including a few suddenly wealthy dark web drug dealers.
Over the last year, the value of the hyper-anonymous cryptocurrency Monero grew 2,760 percent, making it almost certainly the best-performing cryptocurrency of 2016. Today each Monero is worth around $12, compared with just 50 cents at the beginning of last year, and the collective value of all Monero has grown to close to $165 million. The source of that explosive growth seems to be Monero's unique privacy properties that go well beyond the decentralization that makes Bitcoin so resistant to control by governments and banks. It's instead designed to be far more private: fully anonymous, and virtually untraceable.
Those features have made Monero a budding favorite within at least one community that has a pressing need for secrecy: the dark web black market. In August, the darknet market site Alphabay began offering its thousands of vendors the option to accept Monero as an alternative to Bitcoin. A quick browse through the market today shows dealers of everything from stolen credit cards to heroin to handguns accepting the stealthier cryptocoin. That increase in illicit users also illustrates Monero's privacy potential, says Riccardo Spagni, one of Monero's core developers.
"That uptick among people who really need to be private is interesting," says Spagni. "If it’s good enough for a drug dealer, it’s good enough for everyone else."
Not Another Bitcoin
It's tempting to think of cryptocurrencies in terms of Bitcoin—in part because many cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin derivations. Monero's fully its own entity, though. First outlined in an October 2013 whitepaper by the pseudonymous figure Nicolas van Saberhagen and called Cryptonote, another pseudonymous individual known only as "thankful_for_today" later coded those ideas into a currency called Bitmonero. When open-source coders on the Bitcointalk forum disagreed with thankful_for_today's directions for the currency, they forked it in 2014 to create Monero, whose name means simply "coin" in Esperanto.
Its structure solves several key privacy vulnerabilities that dog Bitcoin, which despite its reputation for secret transactions has long been stuck in a strange privacy paradox. Unlike commercial services like PayPal, Bitcoin allows anyone to spend money online without providing identifying details. But if someone's Bitcoin address is linked with their real identity, any transaction from that address is entirely visible on the public blockchain, the accounting ledger that prevents fraud and forgery in the Bitcoin economy. Hiding those transactions requires taking extra steps, like routing bitcoins through "tumblers" that mix up coins with those of strangers—and occasionally steal them—or using techniques like "coinjoin," built into some bitcoin wallet programs, that mix payments to make them harder to trace. "If I pay my rent in Bitcoin, it wouldn't be that hard for the landlord to figure out how much money I earned if I don't take extra precautions," says encryption and cryptocurrency consultant Peter Todd. "Then they can decide whose rent to increase. You’re giving away information you don't want to make public."
Monero not only bakes anonymity features into the cryptocurrency itself, but implements a few features that Bitcoin still can't offer. It uses a technique called "stealth addresses" to generate addresses for receiving Monero that are essentially encrypted; the recipient can retrieve the funds, but no one can link that stealth address to the owner. It employs a technique called "ring signatures," which means every Monero spent is grouped with as many as a hundred other transactions, so that the spender's address is mixed in with a group of strangers, and every subsequent movement of that money makes it exponentially more difficult to trace back to the source. And it uses something called "ring confidential transactions," which hides the amount of every transaction.
"Even with big data analysis, the ability to farm anything out of the metadata is cryptographically negligible," says Spagni. In future implementations, he notes that Monero will add the anonymity software I2P to mask not only users' transactions on the Monero blockchain, but also the internet traffic underlying those transactions.
All of that makes Monero a significant upgrade for a cryptocurrency user's financial privacy. Todd, for instance, says he keeps a small Monero account, but transfers bitcoins into it when he wants to spend his cryptocurrency more stealthily, using the exchange tool Shapeshift to transform the coins from Monero back to bitcoin before they reach the recipient's account. "I basically use Monero to pay people with bitcoin anonymously," Todd says.
The Monero Market
That strict secrecy also helps explain Monero's darknet popularity. After Alphabay and a smaller dark web black market, known as Oasis, integrated the cryptocurrency last summer, its value immediately increased around six-fold. Alphabay told Bitcoin Magazine last month that the currency now accounts for about two percent of its sales. That's a small fraction, but still likely amounts to millions of dollars in annual revenue, given Alphabay's dominant position in the dark web drug market and estimates of that market's total size and growth.
Spagni says he expects Monero will no doubt be used in other potentially unsavory ways, too, like ransomware, and as currency for the gambling and porn industries. But he argues it will also be used for more innocent forms of financial privacy, like keeping your net worth secret while making routine purchases, or buying contraband like outlawed books in oppressive regimes. He also argues the uses of Monero are out of his and his fellow developers' control. "I’m in no position to judge what people should or shouldn’t do, and no one else should be either from a code perspective," he says.
Monero isn't the first cryptocurrency designed to offer a financial privacy panacea: Dash, formerly known as Darkcoin, integrates the "coinjoin" technique that allows bitcoin users to mix their transactions with a few other spenders in what Todd calls a weaker form of anonymity than Monero offers. More recently, Zcash debuted with the strongest anonymity promises yet—it uses cryptographic tricks designed to make tracing a transaction not only unlikely, but mathematically impossible. Zcash has yet to be integrated into dark web markets, though, and still requires wielding the command line to use.
Despite the currency's sudden spike in price, Spagni denies that he or any of the other core Monero coders are sitting on a massive pile of wealth. "We're just working on this to see where it goes," he says. But the promise and peril of Monero, of course, is that no one can check that claim. The stashes of the Monero developers, like those of its growing base of users, will stay secret by design.
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/monero-drug-dealers-cryptocurrency-choice-fire/
And that was 10 months ago... Today Monero is over $160 with a market cap of $2.5 BILLION
master.on
New Member
Compare that to $137 billion+ current Bitcoin market cap
if Monero is really as anonymous as they say, there's plenty of upside potential!
23inch
Member
Bitcoin tumblers are traceable, don't use them.
The only way to anonymize your bitcoins would be like:
1. Buy BTC from exchange;
2. Use shapeshift.io to exchange BTC for Monero;
3. Send the Monero to a personal Monero wallet (through TOR);
4. Use xmr.to to enchange Monero back to BTC;
5. Send that BTC to a clean personal wallet (once again, through TOR)
I recommend to use wallets through TOR servers, otherwise your IP will be listed on all your transactions at Blockchain...
This is why I still think everyone here should be forcing sources to use monero thus eliminating the need for steps 4 & 5.
The only way to anonymize your bitcoins would be like:
1. Buy BTC from exchange;
2. Use shapeshift.io to exchange BTC for Monero;
3. Send the Monero to a personal Monero wallet (through TOR);
4. Use xmr.to to enchange Monero back to BTC;
5. Send that BTC to a clean personal wallet (once again, through TOR)
I recommend to use wallets through TOR servers, otherwise your IP will be listed on all your transactions at Blockchain...
This is why I still think everyone here should be forcing sources to use monero thus eliminating the need for steps 4 & 5.
Sources aren't using bitcoin for the sake of the customers, they are using it because they are making a killing off of it. If they switched to something else they would lose a shit ton of profit as nothing else is increasing in value like bitcoin is. Any source that's been accepting bitcoin since September 2016 has made a fortune!
23inch
Member
That is true. But we are talking about privacy here and unfortunately this is the only way to accomplish that right now.
Besides, if they allow other payment methods, they could easily allow monero aswell and still keep bitcoin, then customers have a choice.
Besides, if they allow other payment methods, they could easily allow monero aswell and still keep bitcoin, then customers have a choice.
Most sources will pick profit over customer security any day. Any source that had 20k in btc a little over a year ago would have over 600k today.
23inch
Member
They can always take an altcoin and turn it into BTC just as fast as we send it...slight fee loss, however.
You make good points here...perhaps a necessary "hey sources on Meso" thread might be wise in the UG at some point. I wonder if its they are unaware or just keeping the crypto method as basic as possible (for the consumer)?
@23inch i quoted you but its not showing up for some reason.
@23inch i quoted you but its not showing up for some reason.
23inch
Member
Someone should do it, I'm just a troll.
Agreed! If monero is safer for us then we should all be using it for payments.
I'm not qualified for the job, but others here are.
Good luck with that. If anything, it will be the sources who force customers to use monero. Sources were prepared to use bitcoin long before the steroid consumer market came aboard. The ones who offered it as a payment option early on complained about the lack of demand for it. Consumers only slowly and often begrudgingly went along.
23inch
Member
Back then Bitcoin wasn't as popular and now with it moving mainstream more and more people are getting familiar with altcoins as well.
I can't see why having Monero as a payment alternative would ruin any business, in fact, it would be wise, as a source, to show care about your business/customers and being willing to take a step further in order to protect their privacy.
Perhaps if FCC succeeds killing net neutrality, people will then take a second to evaluate their OPSEC, hopefully not too late.
Straw man.
Of course, but don't expect it to be in response to overwhelming consumer demand/pressure.
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