Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Joined March 2009
Can anyone tell two 40 USDT payments are equal? Not by comparing their commitments. They match with probability 1/q, about 2⁻²⁵⁶, whether the amounts are equal or not. No complete proof came in, so it's on the card. Can anything else give them away? Challenge 2 coming soon.
Two payments of 40 USDT on a confidential chain. Can anyone tell they are equal? Pedersen Commitments Challenge 1. Proofs in the replies; the first clean one gets credited in the solution.
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Two payments of 40 USDT on a confidential chain. Can anyone tell they are equal? Pedersen Commitments Challenge 1. Proofs in the replies; the first clean one gets credited in the solution.
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New to the notation? A quick primer: • Points on an elliptic curve can be added. r·G means G added to itself r times. • G generates the group: adding G to itself again and again reaches every point, q of them, and q is prime. Then it cycles: q·G is the zero point, so a·G = b·G exactly when a ≡ b (mod q). • H₁, H₂ are fixed public points, one per token. C = v·H + r·G hides the amount v behind the random r. • Going back from r·G to r is the discrete log problem. Nobody knows how to do it fast on a 256 bit curve. This is the math under hidden amounts in confidential payments. Levels 2 and 3 here: xitter.cf/msbrogli/status/211339…
On most public chains, every payment shows who paid whom, how much, in which token, and where the coins came from. Analysts follow that trail to real names. Privacy isn't on or off. It comes in levels. Six levels, what each one hides, and what still shows. 🧵
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On most public chains, every payment shows who paid whom, how much, in which token, and where the coins came from. Analysts follow that trail to real names. Privacy isn't on or off. It comes in levels. Six levels, what each one hides, and what still shows. 🧵
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Level 6: hide the network. Your wallet sends each payment to a node, and the first nodes to hear it can guess your IP address. Tor or I2P hides that address. Dandelion++, used by Monero since 2020, passes the payment along a random path before it spreads. This one works at any level: Bitcoin Core supports Tor and I2P.
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At level 6, what's left is that a payment happened, when, how many inputs and outputs it has, and the fee. Most levels add proofs, and every proof costs every node work to check. Which level would you pay that cost for, and where would you stop? The names, to look up: Pedersen commitments with range proofs (Bulletproofs), asset surjection proofs, stealth addresses, ring signatures, zk-SNARKs, Dandelion++. Used in Liquid, Monero and Zcash. How the trail is followed: the café thread (xitter.cf/msbrogli/status/211226…). Try it yourself on Hathor's privacy testnet: xitter.cf/HathorNetwork/status/2…
PRIVACY TESTNET IS LIVE! ⚡️ You can now send, receive, hide and reveal your transactions on Hathor Mobile Wallet! Watch the tutorial which summarises: 1. Update mobile wallet to v0.40.0 2. Switch to shielded testnet network 3. Get tokens: faucet.testnet.hathor.networ… hathor:native
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Our privacy testnet is live: try hiding a payment's amount and token in the mobile wallet. Privacy isn't on or off. It comes in levels, and the more you hide, the more work every node does to check it. I'll post about them soon. What would you want hidden next?
PRIVACY TESTNET IS LIVE! ⚡️ You can now send, receive, hide and reveal your transactions on Hathor Mobile Wallet! Watch the tutorial which summarises: 1. Update mobile wallet to v0.40.0 2. Switch to shielded testnet network 3. Get tokens: faucet.testnet.hathor.networ… hathor:native
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Marcelo Salhab Brogliato retweeted
PRIVACY TESTNET IS LIVE! ⚡️ You can now send, receive, hide and reveal your transactions on Hathor Mobile Wallet! Watch the tutorial which summarises: 1. Update mobile wallet to v0.40.0 2. Switch to shielded testnet network 3. Get tokens: faucet.testnet.hathor.networ… hathor:native
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You pay $1 for a coffee with a stablecoin. Your barista can see you hold $100,000 and earn $12,500 a month. If the café uses one address, so can anyone who buys a coffee there. And see when you come in: Mon, Wed and Fri, around 9 am. That's blockchain forensics. Here's how. 🧵
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If you pay on a public chain: 1. Pay from a small spending wallet, not your savings. 2. Receive each payment on a new address. 3. Send through your own node or Tor, not your wallet's default server. The catch: each address has to be funded on its own, and bringing funds back together costs fees and links them again. It takes discipline. They make the trail longer. They don't hide it.
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With a credit card, the café sees the last four digits; your bank and the card network see the rest. On a public chain, anyone sees every amount and every address. If the café uses one address, mapping its regulars costs a stranger $1: buy a coffee, open that address, list who pays and when. Researchers already link Ethereum addresses by the hours they are active (arxiv.org/abs/2005.14051). Criminals already target crypto holders in person: 86 logged attacks in 2025 (list by @lopp: github.com/jlopp/physical-bi…). No public case says a victim was found through the chain. A public ledger hands anyone the list for $1. Next: Bitcoin has no accounts, only coins (UTXOs). So how do analysts find yours? Then, which fixes actually work.
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In 2018 the BMJ published a randomized trial of parachutes. Jumping from a plane with one was no safer than jumping with an empty backpack. The trial was careful and correct. The planes were parked. Many blockchain speed records are set the same way. Here's how to tell. 🧵 Average altitude 0.6 m. Average speed 0 km/h. Nobody in either group died or was seriously hurt. The trial ran in the BMJ's Christmas issue, and its lesson is serious. The point: a test can be done right and still say nothing about the hard part, if it runs where the hard part can't happen. Tempo's published benchmark is one example. Its methodology page: "two local validators in consensus on a dedicated bare-metal server."
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Five questions to ask any blockchain benchmark: 1. On chain or off chain? 2. A short peak, or did it last? 3. How much work does each transaction do? 4. How many validators, and where? 5. How long until a payment is final? For Tempo: on chain; 90 seconds across regions; transfers use token code built into the node, not a contract; 2 validators on one server or 10 across three continents; time to finality not on the benchmark dashboard. How high did the plane fly, and for how long? Tempo has started to answer. We will publish ours against the same five questions. Which benchmark should I put through the five questions next?
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Another lens on benchmarks, the spherical cow: xitter.cf/msbrogli/status/210827…
The blockchain industry loves big TPS numbers. 10K. 100K. 1M. Now Sui's 40M. A nerd joke: a farmer asks a physicist how to make his cows give more milk. The physicist finds a perfect solution. There's just one catch: it only works for spherical cows in a vacuum. Many TPS numbers are like that. They are true, but only under conditions that real networks don't have. The joke is about simplifying a real problem so much that the answer only works on paper. 🧵
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