It seems that my previous memo was quite popular to the point of causing people to post it to Twitter and argue about it, steal my content and run it thru an AI slop machine to market it as their own (against the license of this content) and even run a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack against git.hush.is, which is still on-going as I am writing this. Over 1.6 million requests so far today from thousands of IP addresses, how exciting! This memo will serve to clarify some of my points which are either accidentally or purposefully being misrepresented.
Firstly I will state my agenda for anybody that actually reads primary sources and is not fooled by whatever shills are using my content to further their own boring/stupid agendas: Privacy is Human Right, all humans deserve privacy and I desire to further the knowledge of using privacy technology to give people back their privacy in the current surveillance regime in which we all live. This means making people better informed about technology used in privacy coins. While I do work on specific privacy coins like Hush and DragonX, I am not trying to shill you on using them, even though I know they have much better privacy than Zcash, Firo and even Monero. I would rather all people be better informed and make their own decision on what privacy tech to use.
If you are using my content to shill people to use Zcash/Firo, that is not what I said nor what I intended and I certainly never said to use either of those optional privacy technologies. Both of those coins have a vested interest in the "old regime" and for instance both of them attacked the privacy of their own users by implementing exchange addresses AKA "supertransparent addresses" which only allow receiving funds from another transparent address. The only purpose of this anti-privacy technology is to reduce privacy of both their blockchains and proves that both of those coins will do whatever exchanges force them to do, so they can stay on those exchanges. Binance threatened to delist Zcash/Firo without this bullshit and Zcash/Firo dutifully listened to their masters to prevent delisting. Monero has the right idea, delistings are a feature, not a bug! Centralized exchanges are the number one attack vector against privacy coins. Monero privacy and the privacy of any other coins is stronger when they are delisted. Keep the delistings coming! Decentralized exchanges are the future, centralized exchanges are the past.
I see some people saying or implying I am a bad actor, that using two wallets is completely useless and that everything is fine, just ignore everything about MAP Decoder attack and keep using Monero in the same way. Firstly, my suggested "Monero opsec" to use two wallets was a thought experiment to increase privacy for people who want to keep using Monero. Shilling them to use some other coin is not an option and many places support Monero but not Zcash, so it is a nonstarter. I gave specific mathematical reasons why using two wallets increased privacy. Monero dev ArticMine agreed that it did indeed increase privacy, listen to the podcast I did with him for more details about that. Most Monero GUI wallets do not provide a way to "churn" and that is technical slang that most users have no idea about. The opsec approach of using two wallets is similar to churning, but better. By using two wallets you isolate your Outgoing wallet to never ever directly receive a poisoned output and also your Outgoing wallet can never be spam attacked. By using two wallets, you can continue using Monero and actually increase your privacy above 1 of 16 effective ring size.
I still have yet to see any Monero dev say that anything I wrote was wrong or incorrect, including the estimate of an effective ring size of 1.3 when combining the MAP Decoder attack with, for example, the 2024 Black Marble attack that we know happened against Monero. If I am actually wrong about something I want to know.
I have seen some confusion or misunderstanding related to what I said specific to Monero, hopefully this clarifies:
Zcash is run by an evil company funded and controlled by venture capitalists that just want a return on their investment. Providing privacy tech will always be secondary to that. The fact that now Zcash world is actually a constellation of for-profit and non-profit entities circlejerking each other is extremely concerning. Zcash has optional privacy and most places that support Zcash actually ban the use of shielded addresses. Their latest activity is to migrate to Proof-of-Stake, which has nothing to do with privacy tech and most likely will hurt privacy, just as I predicted in memo #1 years ago.
Let's not forget (at least one of) the reasons Zcash developers and community members dislike my ideas and have a vested interest to manipulate what I say to shill Zcash: CVE-2019-16930 was an attempt by Zcash to secretly fix an egregious bug (any shielded address could be de-anonymized to find out the IP address of the wallet it was owned by) which went hilariously wrong when I was the first person to actually read the code of the "emergency release", realize what was going on and tell the world about it. Zcash really did not like that and not long after (when I still used Twitter) I was blocked by every single person working at Zcash Company for spreading inconvenient truths. Various memes were made about Zcash that may have also played a part. The Attacking Zcash website probably didn't help them like me any more either. They dislike me so much that they actually rewrote git history to delete the fact that I am the original author of ZIP400, which you can compare to the version they host here.
I will repeat, my previous memo intended to help Monero users by giving actionable advice to those who wanted to continue using Monero privately in light of the MAP Decoder attack. I specifically avoided speaking about any other privacy coin, which makes it even funnier that I seem to have ruffled feathers in both Monero world and Zcash world. If you are someone that does want to know about other privacy coins to learn about, well I have a treat for you.
The reason I study privacy coins is because I am a mathematician fascinated by the math behind privacy tech, which includes basic building blocks like elliptic curves, or TLS that powers almost every web connection but more specifically the bleeding edge of adoption, which is how privacy coins work and are used. There is no other faster moving research area which is also used in real life. Most academic research is just that, research which is published in some paywalled journal and never used or read ever again. Working on privacy coins is fascinating because this is bleeding edge math and technology that has real world use.
If you want to learn about alternatives to Monero that actually have the same ethos as Monero world (unlike Zcash/Firo) then I recommend looking into
DragonX and Hush both come from the same codebase and share a majority of privacy features, including Sietch which hides how many parties you are transacting with, mandatory TLS1.3 peer-to-peer connections and disabling transparent addresses. DragonX is newer and using RandomX proof-of-work from Monero world, while Hush is much older and uses the same ASIC Equihash algorithm as Zcash and Pirate. Due to DragonX being CPU mineable and there being no mining pools currently, it has very good decentralization and increased mining privacy because no mining pools knows metadata about miners. You can solo CPU mine it right now, in a GUI, without ever using the CLI.
If you don't like these options, we respect that and actually make it trivial to launch your own privacy coin via Hush Arrakis Chains (HACs). We need more privacy coins, not fewer, as some of the latest revelations make clear. More HACs are on the way, you can be sure of that. The only way we get better privacy tech is by privacy coins evolving and that means more of them.
My intention with memo #6 was genuinely to help increase the privacy of Monero users in light of a new attack. Hilariously it lead to some Monero people calling me a bad actor, getting DDoSed and Zcash shills using it as propaganda for people to use their honeypot mainnet. I hope that this memo gives people more context and that it educates people who, in good faith, are attempting to understand the landscape. No doubt some people will do more of the same behavior with this memo, oh well. Remember, Hush Is Privacy.
-- Duke