Re: [Taler] Monero

[Jeff Burdges]

On Mon, 2016-11-07 at 16:22 +0100, Klaus Schleisiek wrote:
> Did anybody ever look at "Monero" (https://getmonero.org/home), a new
> crypto currency?

There are many issues with blockchain based currencies, especially ones
based on proof-of-work.  It's plausible one could build a blockchain or
whatever on a non-proof-of-work based scheme, including notary based
schemes, but that's a deep topic that sounds like a distraction.

There are several interesting non-blockchain based schemes, like the
work by Tomas Sander and Amnon Ta-Shma that inspired Zerocash, and more
recently BOLT by roughly the Zerocash academics.  

Yet, these do not seem competitive with Taler's for simplicity,
correctness, or performance.  

All require pairing-based crypto that remains unstable.  In particular,
the zerocash curves BN just went from 128 bits of security to 96 bits of
security, so conceivably some mathematicians could break it a bit more,
break the system parameters, and mint all the zerocash they wanted. 

BOLT requires transferring hundreds of kilobytes, greatly reducing
anonymity when using Tor.  I suppose one could transform this into
minutes of computation time per transaction like Zerocash does, but that
sounds even more painful. 

Imho, anyone who wishing to run an anonymous bitcoin transaction system
should simply deploy Taler with bitcoin as the currency.

Jeff

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