Quick update on the "Monero kidnapping case" - today the police have arrested ... *wait for it* .... *drums* ... The husband.

the norway one?

ok found the article at dagbladet

yeah

Inge-: :D

midipoet: ^ just fyi

Inge-: the husband? that's quite an elaborate cover up if it was indeed that.

it was the butler

midipoet: We are not surprised.

but yeah, amazingly elaborate if so. and took 1.5 years before he was apprehended

This is might be an interesting movie script

Inge-: can you link the source?

I want to google translate it lol

selsta: there is almost no info yet. aftenposten.no/norge/i/rA2gKe/anne-…abeth-hagens-ektemann-er-paagrepet?

he was apprehended in his car, car taken away, his office building cordoned off.

press conference in 30 minutes

is this about the "they kidnapped my wife and demand bitcoin" guy?

s/bitcoin/monero/

yes

interdasting

its always the husband

i wonder what evidence appeared

Inge-: ty, keep us updated

azy: still pretty elaborate for a 68-69 year-old

hes an engineer billionaire

still, Monero is pretty greek for most people

look how rich he looks

He is charged with murder or assisting in the murder of his wife

i wonder why he did i

t

sounds like a movie plot

09:56 < Inge-> This is might be an interesting movie script

they basically added nothing else. 4 weeks incarceration while they continue to secure evidence

he'll likely have researched all what he said the kidnappers used

his google searches will fuck him

so he manages to come up with a Monero solution, and perform cryptocurrency transactions, without being caught for it - but his google searches will foil him?

how do you learn about such things without having investigated them?

DDG? Tor? Tails?

all he said was that he received a message from the kidnappers demanding monero. whats to get caught with? at what point do the police check his computer history?

Hey, quick question: is the following a valid attack (for a global adversary with loads of $$)

Consistently create loads of small transaction, sending money to one's self using plenty of accounts (not sure if even needed)

Thus producing plenty of key images that other normal users use in their ring. Wouldn't this make tracking way easier given enough transactions?

If this is a valid attack: Does it have a name so that I can do some more research? If it's not a valid attack: Where is my mistake in thinking?

sort of like a Sybil attack

deluding users into thinking their anonymity set is larger than it is

hmm, not an expert, but it sounds plausible. One caveat is that you'd have to do a lot of transactions, and it'd be quite obvious

"why is our transaction volume up by 25x"

flooding attack

already discussed in a couple different papers

Thanks for that term! Well, transaction volume would have to look at least somewhat organic

Can you link me some of them by any chance? @hyc

look on monero research lab webpage

will do, thanks!

Guest74: MRL-0001 and MRL-0004 iirc

Those papers describe similar attacks

Let's say the transaction does indeed increase by some large factor (e.g.x10). How do you think would the community react? Would all (legit) users just stop using monero? Wouldn't that effectively result in "destroying the project" if an adversary holds it up long enough, thus creating loads of doubt inside the community?

@deb

Thanks! dEBRUYNE

There are some mitigations in place to alleviate any potential impact

With respect to community behavior, basically impossible to predict

As there are a variety of factors on which it depends

Fair enough regarding the community. What mitigations are you talking about? Is there a way to somehow detect the adversary-transactions and kind of exclude them from being picked as decoys?

dEBRUYNE: what are these mitigations?

Trying to find the relevant commit

The mitigation is in curbing exponential growth essentially

makes sense to me, although it doesn't prevent adversaries that can pretend to look like organic growth (not sure how feasible this is). But I'm guessing that's simple a gamble on organic growth always being (significantly) bigger - essentially the same gamble TOR takes by hoping most nodes are not controlled by a single adversary?

Tor has systems for preventing Sybil attacks

interesting! (still pretty new to all of this)

hello anybody here?

hi

is this the real xmr irc ?

yep XD

indeed it is. as far as it goes

There's another secret channel. We only filter out who gets to go and who doesn't.

Vitalik Buterin didn't make it in. He failed at the basic knowledge of thermodynamics.

test

test OK

nvm test failed

hi folks

last time i used my monero wallet, i used monero-wallet-cli to access it, and when I started it up, I had to wait a few minutes for the refresh to complete -- i.e. it said "starting refresh" "Height 1968272 / 2086877"

i am confused because, then today I go to use it again, and when I open it again, it says the same -- not unusual -- but, the block height last time i used it was definitely higher than 1999999, because i remember it being "Height 1xxxxxx / 2xxxxxx" last time

so i am wondering, why would the refresh start from something lower than the block height from last time the wallet was used?

*maybe* i am just mis-remembering, but I could swear..

Henry151: maybe you didn’t save properly?

maybe? i didn't know that there was any saving to do; I think i exited with a keyboard interrupt

how do you save?

should be ok normally

i know that i left it open, running, on screen for several days

then i closed it a few days ago

maybe 2 days ago.

i don't know if i did a keyboard interrupt, or maybe, i had it open in an ssh terminal window, and i just closed the terminal window on my local side

if it didn’t close properly it might be the issue

anyway, it is rather annoying, because getting from block height 1976479 all the way back up to 2086878 is taking a long while

so i would prefer to close it properly next time

is there a command from moner-wallet-cli to tell it to close correctly?

exit is ok, ctrl+c is ok

you can also type save to save the wallet

ah.

ok, great, thank you. I will save a couple times and exit properly, next time, because this is absurd

any reason it doesn't autosave?

also, why is this happening anyway? I don't really understand -- I have a monero node running, the block height should be current

i thought monero-wallet-cli just sorta interacted with my running node, so i figured if my node is up to current height, what is happening?

Henry151: your node is current height but your wallet has to get scanned

hmm

ok

the wallet scans blocks from the node for your outputs

the daemon does not now anything about your wallet

maybe if i leave my monero-wallet-cli running in a tmux or something, that way it is always ready-to-go when i need it

know*

because like, i.e., right now, I have had to let a transaction time out that was waiting for payment, because this is going to take a while. Fortunately this time there is not any real urgency but I would like to be able to access my monero rapidly in a time-sensitive situation

if you open the wallet once a month or so

then I don’t think it should take longer than 1-2 minutes

unless slow hardware

or slow internet

ok. I see. I had figured the same, but then i guess because i failed to save or failed to close properly, it didn't work and is reloading from all the way months and months ago

23:23 <shillo> any reason it doesn't autosave? <-- we will probably add auto save to GUI, I don’t know if CLI has this feature

hardware is reasonably fast, this is running on a home webserver, gigabit internet, many processors, it's an older webserver but it is able to for example transcode several 720p video streams at once, while serving a half-dozen websites, without any problem

and the client hardware?

scanning is done client side

a $1500 laptop i bought a little over a year ago, lenovo p51

decently quick

ok, and how long did it take?

well it is now at 1987318

i think the "client" is still the webserver

because i access it by doing ssh into the server, then from the server prompt, i run monero-wallet-cli

ok, yep then it is the webserver

selsta: afaik there isn't any reason to not have it auto save. Seems like a really bad ux design to not have it do something incase the pc crashes or terminal window get closed for some reason

maybe there is some reason for it not saving

i would definitely say, that an autosave feature would be *great* in the cli interface

i had assumed, the first time that I waited while it synce from 19xxxx to 2xxxxxx that i wouldn't have to wait like this again

its basic ux

but, apparently, because I exited in a non-clean manner and without typing save first, it didn't.

its 2020 not 1990 lol

like I said, there might be auto saving

I think it is fairly reasonable for an end-user to assume that it will automatically save when the block height reaches current.

yes, I recall having problems with this too

whenever it is synced, if you close it normally, it will save it

I see.

I would recommend altering that, so that instead the logic is, when it reaches "synced" state, it saves automatically.

that way, it doesn't matter how you close it, it saves as soon as it has reached a "synced" status.

it should save it at intervals

or that, sure.

yes GUI will add every X minutes

or catch any interrupt event and save on that

is there a gui presently? or is that in the pipeline?

yea there is a gui

interesting

maybe i will take a look at it

but i generally prefer to do my things from cli whenever it's not a big inconvenience

I think it does catch signals like SIG_HUP or SIG_KILL

the gui basically a front end for the daemon. Its not a standalone app. At least it wasn't a year or two ago when I last tried it

not really a frontend for the daemon

shillo: well that makes sense, that describes the basic relationship between bitcoind and bitcoin-qt, doesn't it?

it’s like monero-wallet-cli just with GUI

it can do basic daemon things like start stop

oh yea. Forgot it comes in a bunch of executables

but otherwise it’s just a wallet

but the gui version does things different.

for my bitcoin node i am running bitcoind and then i connect to it with armory wallet. So i'm not sure really how bitcoin-qt interacts with bitcoind or what but i know my armory wallet is talking to my bitcoind

bitcoin-qt used to compile as a single executable. Not sure if it still does or not.

i want to see bitcoin turn into monero over the course of time... personally i think that bitcoin has such a big headstart that even an alternative like monero, that has some significant advantages over the original bitcoin, still has no chance of ever overcoming the headstart bitcoin has in terms of established infrastructure and public perception etc

bitcoin is a giant bloat ware. XD

i would like to see bitcoin change, over time, incorporating the features that monero has that make it preferable, like the stronger privacy protections

i was a very early user of bitcoin, I didn't buy a bunch and hold on to it and get rich, but, I used it because I didn't have access to traditional banking services, i.e. western union, bank accounts, debit cards, etc

for several years

it was extremely useful. However, I wish that it had the privacy features monero has

dito. I used Bitcoin to pay my vpn provider that had limited access to fiat payment provider - because Visa did not like them.

in 2015 or so

fiat payment beyond borders is still a bit problematic.

I did all my christmas shopping December 2012 using bitcoin... still look at those receipts from bitinstant sometimes, and get sad

Henry151: woukd be great if bitcoin had the privacy of Monero. But nobody can see that happening. Monero is what the noob thought they bought, when they bought Bitcoin. Maybe Bitcoin is a better "digital gold" and better "programmable money" - except for the fact it is the Panopticoin.

bitcoin is doing some of the stuff. Mimblewimble, schnorr sigs, etc

Probably not enough to be useful. But perhaps enough to stop the blacklisting of KYC-free monero exchangers.

Bitcoin could not scale on a global level without loosing it's decentralised nature. A world dominating crypto currency forced on you with a giant block size - No thanks. Crypto scales very good by diversity. Smaller blockchains and choice - because different use cases need different solutions.

Same true for Monero.

monero is held together by elbow grease and prayers, though

if you look at the confirmation times for $X of security, they're absurdly long

giant block size was what Nakamoto envisioned, it may interest you to know