I have to split the post, the forum doesn’t allow me to write a single long one!
Important preliminary note: "Monero" and "whoever released the cryptonote whitepaper" are two *completely* separate entities.
The cryptonote people also released "bytecoin"; though the exact nature of the link between bytecoin and cryptonote is not completely clear, probably a team split of some sort, or somebody got his hand on the new tech and decided greedily to make something scammy out of it, or... Anyway, bytecoin was the first actual implementation of the cryptonote idea. The issue was that it was ~80% premine (and trying to hide it!); the fact that it was not honest is the reason Monero came to existence and flourished. An investigation about the cryptonote/Bytecoin scam can be found
here.
The distinction between "Cryptonote/bytecoin" and "Monero" is important, in my answers below I'll try to make clear what came from cryptonote and what came from the Monero team/community.
1. The White paper by Surae Noether which is meant as a third party audit and annotation of the the original white paper (which I will get to in a sec). It is not a professional audit, it reads like a puff piece in most places. White papers are academic presentations, this paper attempts to make a case for Cryptonote instead of being a presentation of the tech. Why is this important? In my experience, cons usually try to have "third party authorities" vouch for them.
I would like to add that the original paper, by Van Saberhagen, is by and large a well executed, very well thought out and documented piece of writing.
Fun activity: compare the quality of both White Papers and see which one you believe was written by an engineer and which one by someone trying to lead opinion,
Context: This audit was made/mandated by the Monero team, in order to assess whether we could rely on the promising cryptographic principles detailed in the cryptonote whitepaper (authors unknown, and since they were involved in the bytecoin scam, it's pretty natural to have doubts and a wish to double-cross-check everything).
What is professional or not is subjective and I respect your opinion. In my eyes, the review is very much what I would expect as a review of a scientific paper, especially if the idea is to check whether the crypto is sound or if there are some shady aspect/potential backdoors of some sort. I am a researcher in computer science in academia, though I didn't have the expertise to check the cryptographic/mathematical aspects of the paper. I welcomed both the idea of a review and the outcome of it.
Again, this is subjective. Let me simply add that other peoples who also studied the cryptonote whitepaper were Andrew Poelstra and Gregory Maxwell. Together they used this knowledge in their
paper. Subsequently, Gregory Maxwell&co within the Blockstream company proposed the "confidential transaction"
sidechain concept, a so-called "major improvement for Bitcoin privacy and fungibility", assuming you use this sidechain, if this sidechain ever comes to existence.
Yes you read it well, the cutting-edge state-of-the-art way to improve Bitcoin privacy and therefore fungibility from a 30M$ funded company employing several bitcoin core devs is very largely inspired by cryptonote.
(Adaptive block size proposals floating around are also inspired of it, see
here, but it's yet another topic...).
Kristov Atlas is a real name of somebody making a living in the Bitcoin world.
Surae Noether is the nickname of a person who works in academia and for some personal reasons doesn't want to reveal his real name. I can understand it, being associated with a cryptocurrency might not be easy in a possibly pretty conservative/competitive environment, when we frequently see all this negative mainstream articles about Bitcoin. Anyway, it really doesn't matter, because of point 1. above.
Surae Noether and other people involved in the research side of things are doing a very high-quality job by the way, anonymous or not, anybody is free to review it. You can read their reports here:
https://getmonero.org/research-lab/
All information about the core team members (pseudonymous or with RL identities) can be find here:
https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/people
2. .Fuzzy new algorithm described by Von Saberhagen, Noether says:
"It’s absolutely unconscionable to to come up with a new “Proof of Work Al-
gorithm” and then refrain from including any sort of pseudocode to describe that
algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh."
I'm not sure if/how this was resolved on the current Monero Code but it bears making the point.
You are right it's one of the "weakness" of the cryptonote whitepaper, it describes what the proof-of-work function *should* do, but not how to do it. The actual proof-of-work used in Monero comes from bytecoin, which fulfills pretty well the idea: reduce the gap between each technology CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> ASIC. You can read an interesting story about how the bytecoin code was voluntarily crippled (to hide the 80% premine...), and how people quickly improved it during the first month of existence of Monero
here.
3. The belief and publicity given to an "unamed large, Finish corporation who is buying Monero at high rates and already owns 1%". This is another normal trick of the con, the "secret investor" scam. It lends credence to the coin that a "corporation would invest in it" and that it is a "large and foreign corporation". I could also claim a large Afgahani corporation is buying Dash and holding 20%; noobs will rally on that but it doesn't mean anything to the coin except that interested parties are manipulation the market. This seems to be a widespread belief from my review of the forums and makes this an important point.
This quote is from Risto Pietila, who is a well-known businessman and a member of the Bitcoin community since 2011 (I think? I arrived a bit later...). He was always very vocal and passionate about what he believes are good investments. It was the same with Bitcoin, you can read all his posts about Bitcoin from the old years... He got enough money from his Bitcoin investment to buy a castle (that he called the Bitcoin castle). This castle is now a hotel and a famous crypto professional/conference hub. You can accuse him of many thing, but not of being secretive. Besides, he's not associated with the Monero team, he's just a supporter since very early on. I believe Monero is the only coin he owns besides Bitcoin, he explained in details why, you can read more about it,
here.
Anyway, post from a single person should not be interpreted as a trend of a community, be it from R. Pietila or anybody else.
4. There seems to be a cutlure of "closed source" in Monero. I read a couple of posts on the Monero forum regarding the public wallets (not the full node). People who ask to review the code of this wallet, which is meant for day to day users are told "hey, did you pay for development? go build your own!" That is in opposition to Dash and Bitcoin where the most used wallets are open source, think BlockChain,info, et al.
All monero wallet software are open source. Because of
this post (from a competing coin's developer), you are referring to mymonero.com, a company operating an online plateform that similarly to blockchain.info, allows you to use an online wallet without ever revealing your private key to their server. The client-side code is open source, the server-side is not. This was not developped by the core team, it is a private initiative that cost money to develop, and as such I think it's reasonable they don't want to release all their efforts right away. Using them is free anyway. It never knows your spend key and thus cannot spend or steal your funds. If you're paranoid, then just use one of the open-source local software.
Also I believe you are mistaken, blockchain.info is closed source. Otherwise we would have helped them to fix their broken software by now...
See next post...
