IRS offered $625,000 bounty to anyone who could “crack” Monero; no one succeeded

IRS offered $625,000 bounty to anyone who could “crack” Monero; no one succeeded(twitter.com)

47 points by dsgriffin 5 years ago | 13 comments

Nextgrid 5 years ago |

Could anyone explain why Monero isn't more popular than Bitcoin? On the surface it seems to do everything Bitcoin can but adds privacy as a bonus, so why doesn't everyone use it?

rfd4sgmk8u 5 years ago | |

There are a few reasons.

1. Audibility. I know for certain that my BTC is safe, sitting in a UTXO that everyone in the universe can see. Counterparties can verify the provenance of the coin.

With Zcash and Monero, you face the risk of (invisible/unknown) inflation (a property of an unauditable supply), protocol bugs (such as failures in the zkp) and counterparty rejection due to lack of coin provenance. This risk affects the market price.

Both these scenarios have happened, and could happen again. The first generation of ZEC had a broken zkp, which could be traced back to errata in the academic paper. [1] XMR (and other CryptoNote deriv coins) were failing to check for low order keys, so you could 8x-spend tx's.

2. Lack of exchange exchange support for US people, eg: real USD into XMR. 'not on coinbase'. * Kraken does XMR, but they also do not have a bitlicense (NY residents are blocked). * Gemini only has ZEC

[1] https://electriccoin.co/blog/zcash-counterfeiting-vulnerabil... [2] https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2017/05/23/exploiting-low-o...

selsta 5 years ago | | |

As a follow up I recommend monero's blog post on supply audibility.

https://www.getmonero.org/2020/01/17/auditability.html

erdo 5 years ago | |

Back when I actually had some crypto, I considered Monero / Zcash / Dash more risky, precisely _because_ they were so focussed on anonymity.

Bitcoin's ledger is a dream come true for financial investigators and tax collectors, if there was one thing a government might decide to ban entirely (and I don't accept that governments can't ban crypto, of course they can!), it would be privacy coins.

For most people though, I think the brand recognition is what does it for Bitcoin

seibelj 5 years ago | |

It’s more difficult to use and build light clients for. Importing a private key requires a full rescan unless you remember when you created the key in order to rebuild your balance and limited history. It’s relative unpopularity compared to bitcoin means the network effect is weaker. And major exchanges like Coinbase and Gemini fear regulatory impact so it’s less supported.

That said Monero is my favorite cryptocurrency :)

uncoder0 5 years ago | | |

From my understanding the reasons it is difficult to adopt are also some of the reasons it's inherently the most secure / anonymous cryptocurrency.

fomine3 5 years ago | |

Another question: Why some sites still only accepts Bitcoin (without Lightning?) even though its fee is insanely high due to price increasing? It's no longer feasible payment method for a dozens of dollar.

alisonkisk 5 years ago | | |

Its a marketing gimmick and they don't really care about Bitcoin.

rchaud 5 years ago | |

Use it for what exactly? Speculation?

Certainly not for buying goods and services, as no one outside the black market uses Bitcoin for that either.

celloductor 5 years ago | |

it's not as speculative as bitcoin so not much trading compared to it

segmondy 5 years ago |

If a bad actor could crack Monero, do they stand to earn much more than $625k? If so, what would be their incentive to tell the IRS and accept the $625k? I see none. So that statement doesn't tell us anything about the strength of Monero.

erdo 5 years ago |

Well as far as we know, no one succeeded ;) if I was the IRS, the last thing I would do is tell everyone we could now deanonymize Monero.

(I'm mostly kidding, I don't think anyone can deanonymize Monero)

lern_too_spel 5 years ago |

Where does it say no one succeeded? It looks like a contract was awarded to Chainalysis, Inc.