[the_stc]

https://PinkDate.is | Extrajurisdictional | REMOTE | Monero Security Analyst & Engineer | Contract Work

PinkDate is an extrajurisdictional company that will dramatically improve the escorting [sex work] industry. We depend on privacy and anonymity tech, including Monero [XMR]. Monero has lofty goals and powerful privacy claims that fall short in actual operation.

As an example: All network communications are unencrypted which allows a passive adversary to easily de-anonymize many transactions. Instead: Monero should be encrypted and easily integrate with Tor to hide user activity.

Contract 1: We desire an engineer to contribute to the Monero open source project. This includes adding encryption between nodes, reducing wallet metadata leakage, and integrating Tor into both the client [easy] and the node software [more challenging].

Contract 2: We need someone to write a simulator and improve blockchain explorer tools to determine how well Monero's privacy claims truly hold up. To-date there is no public research on fundamental aspect of Monero. We want to be able to have answers to the questions of how private a user becomes when using Monero. How often must a user send money to themselves [churn] to effectively hide among X users? We want to make proposals to change the Monero network parameters to improve privacy and have the evidence to make the case.

All work will be published openly and you can take the credit with a note that PinkDate is the sponsor. You should be comfortable engaging with community and defending design decisions and research.

Note: PinkDate is an extrajurisdictional company and pays contractors in cryptocurrencies as a transfer mechanism. We price contracts in USD.

If you like the idea of working on an underground project: We often have contracts or positions available in legal, security, [counter]intelligence, devops and general software engineering. Drop me a line: [e-mail]

[DINKDINK]

>To-date there is no public research on fundamental aspect of Monero

What about these papers?

"An Empirical Analysis of Linkability in the Monero Blockchain" - https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04299

"A Traceability Analysis of Monero’s Blockchain" - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-66399-9_...

https://youtu.be/qpn9ICem5wk?t=704

[the_stc]

From what I remember, those rely on some older aspects of Monero no longer present. But more importantly, they do not provide positive guidance on exactly how much mixing [churn] with what ring-sizes are needed to achieve a certain anonymity set size. Monero project itself has no statements on these key issues [except for a sentence in one of their updates stating that churning is not sufficient].

The research you linked does illustrate some problems. And Monero's reaction, to not include any disclaimers, to continue saying it is private and untraceable... misleads users.

[DINKDINK]

>rely on some older aspects of Monero no longer present

My understanding is Monero recognized these weakness and patched to avoid them.

[st1ck]

While Monero is the most popular privacy coin, there are others, based on Zerocoin and Zerocash protocols, which are supposed to be easier to deal with, because they are based on Bitcoin core.

https://zcoin.io/zcoins-privacy-technology-compares-competit...

[jeffreyrogers]

I'm pretty sure a lot of this is illegal in many of the countries you plan to operate in.

[the_stc]

That is almost certainly how many people will view it, and is the reason why we are set-up as an extrajurisdictional company: it will make enforcement very difficult.

[dragonwriter]

> I'm pretty sure a lot of this is illegal in many of the countries you plan to operate in.

Which may also may make soliciting people to work on it (or hosting such solicitations) illegal in many jurisdictions, potentially including the one HN operates in.