Fair I guess dc won’t eradicate altcoins but will end the excuse to create altcoins.
Discussion
I think it, DC, will eradicate them over time for sure. But to remove XMR's argument for Asic resistance, we would need something like stratumV or other tech that guards Miner centralization.
Ring sigs and bullet proofs in Monero, are unnessary with a straight forward Zside on DC.
Agree. Zcash tech is better for sender privacy and should be used instead (or something similar). If implemented in a DC and adopted I would use it.
But seems like it's such a long shot in my opinion... By the time this happens, if it ever does, Monero will already be that much further along since it is also constantly being improved. Seraphis full membership proofs will obsolete ring sigs. It is already being actively developed by Koe and other Monero devs for some time now. Maybe 2+ years or so away. Which isn't very long.
There is an additional uphill battle. Just as lightning/liquid adoption struggles vs on chain Bitcoin - DC would have to build it's own network effect from scratch.
Monero is a project i like and respect very much. It is the easiest currency to use privately or just in general for normal use. With a feather wallet it is a better experience than metamask, and several other networks.
It also has a bug at its core so serious no one talks about what it is, in detail: OSPEAD
The solution to Ospead may entail something hat damages what we think monero is.( It may need a key ceremony like ethereum.) Because of oversights and inexperience by early devs. Ospead is on the roadmap btw.
Bitcoin is far ahead of monero in that it has more eyes and capital searching for problems like Ospead.
A DC sidechain inherits all this work on bitcoin, all this liquidity and exit ability.
Sidechains also inherit bitcoin network affect. Wallets, after bip300 can "simply" add the zside chain already created to mimic Zcash. A "send using zside" option is easy.
All the current popular wallets WoS, Electrum, Atomic ect, have to simply add this as a security default or "mix" option.
It's the network gain similar to starting your own messaging app with a new function from scratch, such as push-to-talk, versus just adding it to What's App.
This is called a warm market, in business.
Seraphis and many other updates are band-aid solutions to the shortcomings of Monero AND Bitcoin. With DC and bip300, those go away.
Randomx is Monero's last claim to fame in a post Drivechain bitcoin world.
RandomX loses out to saturnV or a better mining decentralization solution (if possible)
Again, i deeply appreciate Monero and the community and their values.
Yes, I agree with you about OSPEAD is what I am speaking of the relative weakness of ring signatures for sender privacy (...though in practice this has been robust enough for now. There has never been any busts or criminal trials because ring signatures were broken)
The only disagreement I have is that DC automatically inherits all Bitcoins eyes/capital/network effect.
We can clearly see this is not true in the community split and controversy. DCers are the minority. There is huge resistance.
We can also see L2s like Lightning and Liquid that have been around for sometime already and only have a tiny fraction of Bitcoin onchain adoption. Just because you accept Bitcoin onchain doesn't mean you accept lightning or liquid. More likely than not you dont.
I'm curious why you think Seraphis is a bandaid? Are you speaking of the initial large increase in ring size (128)? Then I agree that is a temporary bandaid. Though I was specifically referring to full membership proofs that will come after. It is essentially the same ZK proof as Zcash. It is not effected by OSPEAD afaik.
From my understanding of Ospead, seraphis is not meant to fix it. The fix and problem itself has not even been released publicly, because it's so central to the way Monero was designed. That's kind of scary if you think about it. Nothing about bitcoin or its flaws are hidden.
FMP in xmr is a band aid solution because it is further closing a wound caused by monero ring sigs, continually increasing the size of rings. Maybe stiches is a better term. Its going to be great, but its playing catch up to a problem zcash does not have. (A default privacy z cash anyways)
Zk does not rely on full or partial rings to hide or create an anon set, so a dc zside is a different approach entirely. Since it has the entry and exit of bitcoin it would have all of bitcoin as an anonimity "crowd" to hide in, versus Monero much smaller one.
Ok, i appreciate your point about the slow adoption of DC.
Optimist like myself believe that unlike Liquid or Lightning, Drivechains are a much simpler ecosystem to deploy.
One op code gives you the ability to recreate free market conditions and innovation.
In other words, Liquid is like the Italian papal states. Lighting is Renaisance Europe. Very, litigious, very complicated and incompatible laws, custodial money in the case of Liquid.
They are not appropriate comparisons to what DC will do or can be simply because DC is early Capitalist America, compared to them. The hidden hand of the market is more powerful than Blockstream or the pet project of engineering Nerds.
The lack of demand for those two projects you mention are incomparble. Apples and oranges. Liquid requires multisig, trust. Lightning is a mess and has entirely different incentives and goals.
Appreciate the diologue
The way I understand Monero's ring signatures weakness (sender privacy) is from sophisticated statistical attacks (because it is the only part that is not hidden, only obscured). OSPEAD was started to find the best way to optimize how decouys are chosen, and thus diminish these kinds of attacks (still in progress it seems).
Now you honestly got me thinking I have misunderstood Seraphis somewhere (and maybe I did)...to my knowledge Full Membership Proofs greatly diminishes this statistical attack relative to the current state of things, but I see you might be correct that it is a different approach and not a complete solution to the problem.
This is a good article that explains it succintly: https://localmonero.co/knowledge/seraphis-for-monero
Great analogies 🙂
I guess we will have to wait and see what happens with DCs. I'm somewhat neutral, mostly because I don't know enough. But a lot of maxis seem to loathe the idea of it, so it seems like it is in for a rough fight.
"Notice the change here: linkable ring signatures are replaced with a combination of membership proofs and authorizing proofs. Roughly speaking, membership proofs show that a consumed output is part of a larger set, similar to what happens in RingCT. But unlike RingCT, membership proofs don't involve the linking tag at all! Authorizing proofs show that the linking tag is valid and are used to sign the final transaction."
https://localmonero.co/knowledge/seraphis-for-monero?language=en