Particl's xmrswap repository: github.com/tecnovert/xmrswap

if this is legit, does it change cost of atomic swap CCS?

is it legit? I see some doubt about the trustworthyness of the Particl team

the current showrunners of particl have their hearts in the right place, but I think are quite deluded into the feasibility of their product

Did anyone look at other major cryptocurrencies as to the feasability of using the same atomic swap fucntionality as is proposed for xmrbtc? I would expect LTC and ETH to be able to support similar semantics for example?

Who would even want to swap their perfectly fungibly XMR to potentially tainted BTC/LTC/ETH?

sarang i really love all you have already done for the monero project, its sad to hear your news but first and foremost is your health so i hope you can charge back up and we can welcome you back soon (tm)

I just opened my CCS proposal for the next 3 months. It's the same as the last one: repo.getmonero.org/monero-project/ccs-proposals/-/merge_requests/175

please leave a comment or express your vote using the thumb up or the thumb down

UkoeHB_ fwiw they are using a python ed25519 library in their implementation that has timing side channels.

with regards to working for MRL, and being a citizen of the USA, how much does the lack of bundled healthcare insurance play a role in terms of added difficulty/stress? I grew up in Europe, with a national health service that can be relied upon in terms of emergencies and basic illness. So my understanding of the US healthcare system is limited.

Presumably a US citizen would have to pay for their healthcare plan privately out of their research funding. Whereas if they were employed by a large company, it would be provided (often?) in addition to their monthly salary.

Is it as simple as healthcare being an added monthly cost. Or, does one actually lose out in terms of healthcare plans by being self employed. I.e. company healthcare plans are typically better than private ones?

Often employees also must pay some of the healthcare premium in addition to an employer subsidy

and that is in addition to copays, deductibles, coinsurance, etc., and of course care that is not covered by the health plan

which can be surprising and unexpected

But for self-employed people, they must find their own health plan and pay out of pocket, and it's often quite a lot more expensive because there is no employer paying part of the premium

The healthcare system in the United States is an absolute joke

Thanks for explaining. Ok, that was what I suspected - self-employed healthcare having the potential to work out more expensive. So then in addition to monthly bill like rent/mortgage, utilities and food - one has to factor in continued affordance of the existing healthcare plan - in a situation where community funding dries up. Presumably this is just par for the course as an American, but as

an outsider, it's a piece of the puzzle I hadn't factored in by default.

Well, even if you have a more traditional job, you still need to budget for possibly expensive healthcare

The premium often isn't even _close_ to the amount you still need to pay out of pocket for healthcare

There are some options for people who are unemployed, but it can be exceptionally difficult to access this under such circumstances

Crazy system. If you have money, you can afford to survive. Otherwise, good luck to you.

To say the system is complicated would be a massive understatement

It's not just complicated. It's an insult to human dignity.

I was in a cycling accident a while back (hit by a car) and good heavens, the number of hours of mindless paperwork and phone calls I had to do because of a single emergency room visit was just absurd

It went through at least two insurance companies and a state insurance organization, as well all the separate healthcare providers during that single visit

I had to refuse an ambulance multiple times because it would have cost hundreds of dollars

They offered to send a fire truck to have a fire serviceperson do a quick examination, and even then I had to ask multiple times if I'd be charged for this

Juxtapose that with national healthcare systems of other countries, where for emergency room visits there is essentially zero paperwork done by you, the user. For sure, national healthcare systems are full of faults, but paperwork is not one of them (at least of the ones I'm aware of)

(the answer was no, fortunately)

I ended up having a police officer drive me to the emergency room in his patrol car

again, after asking multiple times if I'd be charged for the service

If your employer is paying for healthcare... they are still paying it out of your ‘nominal salary’. It’s similar in so-called universal plans where payment comes out of taxes. Can’t avoid paying. Not that the various systems aren’t all completely doomed.

Wow. Absurd

"Healthcare bankruptcy" is absolutely a thing in the United States

Sure, if your employer subsidizes your premiums, it's factored in to the total value of your benefits

But there are also tax implications for how the premium is paid

Hence doomed

e.g. if you're self-employed, you can deduct your premium under some circumstances

if you're not, you can't deduct that if you use standard deductions

UkoeHB_: Even if payment comes out of taxes in some universal healthcare system, the amount of taxes is nowhere close to the money you would pay in the US. Beside, in Italy, if you have a very law or non existent salary, you don't pay even those taxes

I could complain about italy for days, but at least healthcare is assured to everybody. Maximum i remember i have paid for emergency situation was 14 euros, but that happened only once

There are ‘hidden taxes’ consequent of the overall economic burden on the production structure. Universal plans have other problems though even if they consume less dollars. Rationing, for example, since economic calculation is impossible for allocating resources without a high fidelity feedback mechanism

Well, I can tell you for an emergency room visit consisting of a few x-rays and an examination by a doctor, the total cost was something like $3000

For some ungodly reason, part of it ended up being paid by my auto insurance company

Auto accident? There were wheels :p

the rest was billed to the driver's auto insurance, but since her coverage was subpar, apparently the state insurance pool paid it

What's crazy is that apparently none of it was actually paid for by my health insurance company _at all_

It's just nuts

At least we can all rest assured every system will continue to get worse at a measured pace :)

Clearly there are degrees of badness here

I call them flavors of badness

Trying to treat health care as a free market makes no sense

For example ‘ew’, ‘eW, and ‘Ew’

Free market is mostly a misnomer, the us system is highly regulated and protected from the market in various ways

lol

You could say the high prices observed come from the will of free market participants squeezed into a monopolistic structure

have you ever seen a healthcare bill

You can't determine how much your care will cost until months after you receive it

You can ask, and they will not tell you

Yes, and at Amazon all the prices are pasted on everything

You often can't even determine if your providers are all even covered by your insurance

You can be the best-informed healthcare consumer in the country, and you still can't make properly-informed decisions about your own care

Most of the direct prices are encapsulated by insurance, so premiums are a proxy for healthcare costs

But you can't even determine the covered prices

those are proprietary

Yes it’s quite doomed

I was optimistic when that Bezos/Buffet/Dimon organisation "Haven Healthcare" was proposed, but it seems they haven't made any progress yet in improving things

(at least from what I've read)

binaries for CLI 0.17.0.1 are out on getmonero.org

<kinghat[m] "reason.com/2020/09/29/th"> Good article

wowario[m]: It's in Python. There's already a working PoC in Rust which was discussed in the proposal.

oic

Inge-: BTC is replaceable with LTC/ETH, but not BCH. It requires being able to chain TXs, and BTC codebases can only support that with SW. ETH's SCs remove that need thanks to the more complicated logic available.

XMR is also replaceable with other coins as well, such as MR/NANO/GRIN

Ouch :( You have to run their CLI tool with each command

Like every prepare message/publish tx...

Research report is available: reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/j2oncd…_monthly_report_from_sarang_noether

good bot

So now it's time for Chainanalys to try "Crack" Monero 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Not entirely sure what 'awarded' entails here

Does it mean the grant was awarded to develop a tool, or that a tool was already developed?

Probably just a contract to develop

Given that 22 firms applied, it is probably the former, yes

I have many issues with CoinTelegraph's reporting, but kudos to them for fixing their earlier article about that Monero payment ID (and noting it in the linked Chainalysis-related article)

I had emailed the reporter about it, and perhaps others did too

but what about Ciphertrace?

What about them?

DHS != IRS

Didn't they crack Monero already?

They said... many things

The term tracing also shouldn't be seen as binary

Because, in effect, you can claim that you can trace something, even if it only relates to a specific (negligible) subset of the total amount of transactions

My opinion on that hasn't changed. I don't think they uncovered anything fundamentally new, but are using external information, targeted transactions, and statistical analysis to try and build likelihoods for transaction linking and graph analysis

Or at least, _could_ be doing this

They haven't demonstrated or provided evidence of _anything_

'trust us' :p

dEBRUYNE: sure; all the provided was a press release, which is worth precisely nothing on its own

s/the/they

However, I think the idea that someone _could_ be using such known techniques should be taken seriously

Regardless of whether or not anyone actually has

Oh, they did provide a random screenshot of a graph on reddit too =p

Definitely, we should remain vigilant

can't fake that :D

Haha

yo, sorry, left my home so I'm missing any above messages since my last message

Triptych (if implemented) will fortunately alleviate (or strengthen, depending on the view) some of the weaknesses

I've come to assume that Dave Jevans intended that interview to be PR, but was taken aback by the level of detail in the questions (but this is only my assumption)

I do not regret asking at the level of detail that I did

It is warranted, imo

Triptych/Arcturus would weaken the usefulness of their statistics, sure

About Particl: They seem to have the proper cryptography, even using rfc 6979. That said, they also have a dleq test which just prints dleq() and then done...

Oh, the DL equality proof?

I'll give my usual annoying reminder: that hasn't been formally proven, though I'm confident in its security if implemented properly

Yeah. No idea on if it's done correctly. just saying they tried the proper algorithm

ok

It's just a cross-group ring signature that's similar to how Borromean range proofs work

sarang: Thanks for warning us about using experimental technology in our experimental protocol :p

It should receive more formal treatment before being deployed anywhere

Heh, I didn't mean to sound patronizing... sorry if it came across that way

I just want to be super duper clear about this kind of stuff :/

Nah, all good :) I appreciate it

especially since Particl did... this

Nothing wrong with building interesting things as experiments, as long as that's communicated clearly

a python implementation where you manually do every command/file transfer

True

I noted some worry about being constant-time...

keep in mind that plenty of Monero code isn't constant time

I'm still of the opinion that for most purposes, if you have to worry about this, you're probably screwed anyway

I actually would appreciate another impl, don't get me wrong. I just think this is worthlesd unless they say it's to demonstrate/verify cryptographic accuracy

That being said, constant-time implementations are an excellent goal to have

I think our cryptographic libs are constant. no idea about our dleq proof. depends on branching

Our == ??

I don't know the algorithm at all :p I know it uses ring signatures and my very talented partner implemented it and it returns true when we use it

heh ok

But I also know enough to say any if check/match statements break constant time without work around them

So if our impl has any... I don't think we made them constant time. dalek should be though, so our elliptic operations should be

Is there a particular concern about variable-time operations in this use case?

If you're worried about side channels on a local machine, that seems to indicate you have bigger problems...

IMO at least...

Def agree, and not at all. just commenting as it's a good goal

got it

lol

Zcash or Tcash?

lol

For real, I'm curious

I think referring to them by distinct names helps to communicate that they are fundamentally different

and that transitioning between them has risk

Thinking of them as different assets with a built-in exchange is useful in my mind

fluffypony: When wXMR though

lol dEBRUYNE

the only wrapped XMR you'll be able to buy is me spitting rhymes to a sick hip-hop beat

when will that be?

lol

when I issue it as an NFT on ETH

right around the time ETH 2.0 launches

will there be interpretive dance also?

fluffypony: Hah, looking forward to that :D

lza_menace: NATURALLY

excellent

looking forward to this vid

fluffypony: twitter.com/IamNomad/status/1311348199991451648

lol

sgp_: reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/j2qel2…and_integra_fec_have_won_the_recent

Perhaps you can add that it is probably -> 'the grant was awarded to develop a tool'

I suppose I could type the comment myself

fair, I made the assumption people would know or just look at the contract haha

sgp_: Only took two minutes :-P old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/j2…gra_fec_have_won_the_recent/g76y0e4

lol, reposting before it gets worse

"Chainalysis and Integra FEC have won the recent IRS $625,000 contract for a pilot Monero tracing tool"

dEBRUYNE: ^?

What's wrong with that headline? It sounds accurate

They have a contract to build a tool

Similar to what CipherTrace did for DHS (but did not publicly demonstrate)

Sounds OK to me

We need to clarify that it is probably a grant provided to build a tool

Not a grant provided because the tool was already built

dEBRUYNE: old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/j2…d_integra_fec_have_won_the_recent/?

That also sounds correct

ty

kayabaNerve: cooø thanks.

For anyone who is interested, the stagenet hard fork happens today: community.xmr.to/xmr-countdown/stagenet

dEBRUYNE sarang sgp_: so $625K to implement parts of Breaking Monero - sounds like easy money 🤣

heh

right

I'd be very surprised if someone managed to invent some new graph theory for this purpose...

lol

MRL should just apply for these grants lol

no thanks

That kind of paperwork sounds unnecessarily irritating and wasteful

Stagenet hard fork completed.

Who is running stagenet.xmrchain.net by the way? Does anyone know?

gingeropolous I believe

What's this about wrapped XMR and popping beats n' rhymes?

rehrar luigi1111 luigi1111w etc: my current WIP CCS proposal is now complete and can presumably be closed

sarang: you got it sir.

Midi: wrap. now try with silent w. now add some rythms

midipoet: ^

thanks rehrar

Inge-: very good.

So, uh, if ciphertrace totally has a working tool, why didnt they get the grant 👀

Anyone want to help me understand this one? :)

sgp_: Btw, it is also interesting that CT wasn't awarded the grant

Did they apply?

Beat you to it debruyne

Sarang: if they had a tool, why wouldn't they apply

It's free real estate

I mean, I would

But perhaps there's some rule about non-compete?

Or they didn't see it?

etc.

<sarang> Or they didn't see it? <= I have a hard time believing that lol

Especially after all the press

who knows

businesses gonna business

governments gonna govern

XMR.to is sponsoring HCPP again, and hence we can have a physical booth there. But none of our team will be there. Is anyone from the community going there who can bring sufficient Monero material (stickers, books, swag, whatever) so we can fill the table and make use of it? Otherwise we cancel booth

As usual we're willing to make it a Monero table, not an xmr.to table. But it's unclear how we do that this time

oh sheet xmr moonin 🌕️

.barolo

mergerfs project added an xmr address: trapexit/mergerfs badf7e1

what'd i do now nioc

does that need updating?

normo asked but I don't know why

gingeropolous: ^^