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@internetarchive Torrenting is the only way.
@ml @internetarchive bittorrent (and all other current alternatives afaik) don't have any sort of anonymization, so ISPs can surveil torrent peers and cut off your access. it's not clear to me yet how to apply the consistent hashing used in most DHTs to tor's model yet, but tor may expose a sort of internal node ID that could be similarly used to achieve consistent hashing? @torproject has there been work to anonymize DHTs via tor or other alternatives?

@hipsterelectron Tor actually has a FAQ asking people to not use Tor for bittorrent because it stresses the network

IPFS has done some work in this space, we're not sure how far along that aspect is

@ireneista their website says ipfs is not private and to use something else if you want privacy i was checking it out yesterday

@hipsterelectron oh. drat.

I2p is an overlay network that does support bittorrent, although that falls significantly short of true anonymization, for reasons you can probably already see

@ireneista tor's anonymity via noise addition is less interesting to me anyway; VPNs can be used to interface but i recall hearing that some VPNs don't like being used for seedboxes. the level of privacy sufficient to mask participation in a particular swarm to an ISP seems less stringent than tor's guarantees and the consistent hashing needed for a DHT seems like something that could be achieved with any other identifier, but masking identity to all other participants in the swarm seems necessary as well and may be more difficult than i'm hoping :(
@hipsterelectron @ireneista Getting a VPS anonymously in a jurisdiction that you DGAF about to run your torrents and logging into it over Tor seems like the safest option that's currently practical.
@dalias @ireneista @hipsterelectron Anonymous payment to those has kept getting more complicated.

It also puts a hard limit on participation for those that can't justify the overhead of anonymous payments.
@Qbitzerre @dalias @ireneista For anonymous payment?

Zcash (which practically no one takes nor uses, so even just acquiring it will be a flag), Monero (I'm doubtful its security won't be compromised in the long term, I don't think anything is backed by proofs) or GNU Taler (which last I checked no one supports, but it otherwise also benefits from sound mathematical background like Zcash's zk-snark and doesn't have any of the cryptocurrency environment concerns).

So in practical terms you're basically left with money in a security enveloppe or Monero.

Privately acquiring Monero is itself a shitshow, and the best option at this point is peer-to-peer exchanges and a few intermediate transfers thereafter for obfuscation (which is subject to Monero's eventual failure, of course).

You certainly could say the situation is disappointing.

@lispi314 @ireneista @dalias @Qbitzerre re: Monero you're speaking from absolute ignorance. Monero's underlying technologies are all established, proven crypto primitives. Monero stealth addresses are built on Diffie-Hellman key exchange, no one is breaking those. Monero RingCT has been peer reviewed in a number of journals.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098
https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/321

To say its security lacks formal proofs is simply false, although you could accurately make that assertion about Zcash.

Ring Signature Confidential Transactions for Monero

This article introduces a method of hiding transaction amounts in the strongly decentralized anonymous cryptocurrency Monero. Similar to Bitcoin, Monero is a cryptocurrency which is distributed through a proof of work ``mining'' process. The original Monero protocol was based on CryptoNote, which uses ring signatures and one-time keys to hide the destination and origin of transactions. Recently the technique of using a commitment scheme to hide the amount of a transaction has been discussed and implemented by Bitcoin Core Developer Gregory Maxwell. In this article, a new type of ring signature, A Multi-layered Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group signature is described which allows for hidden amounts, origins and destinations of transactions with reasonable efficiency and verifiable, trustless coin generation. The author would like to note that early drafts of this were publicized in the Monero Community and on the bitcoin research irc channel. Blockchain hashed drafts are available in \cite{Snoe}.

IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive

@hyc @lispi314 @ireneista with the understanding that i don’t expect cryptographically relevant quantum computers any time soon - do you have any references to the implications for ringct and monero of that possibility?

all i’ve got at the moment is kearney & perez-delgado 2021, which seems to be more concerned with stealing than tracing money.

@tryst @ireneista @lispi314 in a post-quantum world the underlying ed25519 signature scheme would have to be replaced with something else. Lattice-based mechs get tossed around a lot but frankly nobody can really know until we get there. It's assumed that a quantum computer could break the current mechanisms, but when such a day arrives, many other more widely used systems will break and need more urgent attention - e.g. TLS, all banks and other businesses, etc.
@tryst @ireneista @lispi314 it's been researched before. Monero's proof of work algorithm RandomX (which I co-designed) is known to be quantum proof. https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/kcl547/ama_research_team_analyzing_the_implications_of/
@hyc @ireneista @lispi314 i’m specifically interested in the implications for tracing existing transactions. those already exist and are public-but-obscured. would a relevant quantum computer unobscure them?
@tryst @ireneista @lispi314 but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a quantum computer with sufficient qubits to break the Discrete Log Problem here any time soon...
@hyc @ireneista @lispi314 oh yes, completely agreed on that point.