Latest / Monero Talk / Ring Signatures for Secure Online Voting w/ Vasilii Rogin of CryptoPoll / EPI 305

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Ring Signatures for Secure Online Voting w/ Vasilii Rogin of CryptoPoll / EPI 305 · Monero Talk

• Vasili Yes, Douglas Doug Welcome to Monero Talk. How are you? Vasili Good? Thank you. Thank You. Yes How about you Doug Good good. Good. It's a little early for me. I like these morning ones though, you know, it's it coffee I'm fresh in the morning. Just takes me a minute or two to get started Once I do I actually enjoy these morning sessions sometimes more than the evening ones So, how's it go? Doug Why don't you quickly introduce yourself and then we'll get into cryptopoll? Vasili Yes, I'm Vasili. I am a software developer living in Helsinki. I was interested in cryptocurrencies from a technical point of view. And I also was learning about Bitcoin, Monero, and I found a really nice but an underestimated concept in Monero, this kind of ring signatures, and we'll talk about this. Doug How long have you been in crypto? I mean, you obviously don't have to give us exact numbers, and how long you've been on the field? Vasili Oh, maybe, like, I'm aware about the scenes that Bitcoin have started, but like from technical point of view, maybe like last year I started to learn all this, kind of like, from the mathematical point of view, how it happens, how actually the encryption there, the signature happens. Doug And are you doing things like developing in crypto or? Vasili Well, I'm software developer, full stack developer Node .js TypeScript React. So basically, my, what I am working in a company, we're doing some kind of business application. So just a just usual developer developer and like you the crypto and learning this is kind of my hobby Doug Okay, and then so that you went I you when ahead you discovered Monero You got interested in the ring signature portion of Monero and what was it about that aspect of Monaro that interest you? Vasili well, as I mentioned it's when I've understood how powerful it is. It's a pity that it's underestimated. So if you ask people, maybe developers, they will know about the key, ED25519 signatures, okay, we can have a public key private key. Vasili We can add a message, you can sign it. And we all get used to this. But when we talk some kind of advanced concepts, that's okay. People are not aware of this, but surprisingly, and how many things this kind of signatures can unlock. Vasili It's really surprising. And if we can, I can actually start to talk about that direction. Doug Yeah, yeah. Let's go into it. So, crypto poll is the app that you developed. Vasili Yes, yes. Let me say, are you aware about this? I'm pretty sure that your are, but should we talk about what is ring signature and like how it's used in Monero? Should we have this introduction? Doug Yeah, go ahead. Go for it. Give us your take on our ring signatures. Vasili So maybe I can even share some slides. Yeah go for. So I had a talk about WebAssembly, but like this just slide from this presentation and ring signature, signature like correct me if I'm saying from we don't have list of public keys. Vasili So we have a private public key infrastructure and ring is a list of public keys. And we'll have message which is signed by one of them. It's impossible to know by which one and also key image is the same as signer is same. Vasili So that's basically it. Like if you talk about what ring signature is and yeah, it's developed in the CC++ code from Monero. In Monero it use it to hide actually the transactions. So if you have a coin and you try to spend this coin, you just take some other like Great ring of 16 coins and then sing sign it and it's impossible to know who exactly was it So which coin it was so this way the Monero actually performs this anonymously and Privacy in Monero, right? Doug Manera uses ring signatures for yes obfuscating who the sender of a transaction is. There's other technologies involved in obfuscation, the amounts in officiating the receiver and ring signatures comes in for the purposes of obfuscated in the center. Doug Cause you never know who the true signer of the transaction is it's always, you know, one out of X amount of signers. Vasili Yes, yes. Basically, if you have a dirty coin and then you send this dirty going to someone else, This person can always say it was like not this it was I had a few there are 16 possible Options for this going to be and the 15 of them are clean and this only one dodgy I don't know who it also I just was taking that one. Vasili So Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, correct? Doug And now so you're using this concept of ring signatures for a different application not for cryptocurrency or for Monero purposes, but for Vasili Yes, yes. So actually, surprisingly, this is used in Monero. And just the original paper is like about 20 years old, it was published in 2004. So that's 2020 years, old this kind of ring signature, the mathematics behind this in Monero, always like six years older, some kind kind of like this or quite old one tested and the use case, exactly. Vasili So using this one, we had a solution for such a problem like elections and voting with zero trust, because cryptocurrencies, they are have zero trust by defaulting, these kind of they were developed having a zero -trust environment. Vasili And we can use it for having real elections, and like have real voting, which is not possible to fraud, which is trusted and the election result is trusted. And meanwhile, you're not able to make something wrong because even it passes the whole encryption or it's not. Vasili So you can perform it in an absolutely zero trust environment. Another use case is to use the anonymous survey in organizations, because it is quite often when some organizations want to have an anonymous survey and every employee, gets a link, and they got a personal link. Vasili Everyone got a unique link and all the trust, this is it kind of anonymous or not, is just by the company who performs this survey. And having this, you might close some important feedback, probably negative feedback because people, especially their developers, their security oriented developers they will not trust anyone, they do not try the companies who perform the survey, so will they keep with keep this anonymous or not. Vasili In that case, you just can miss some feedback. But if you use the ring signatures, you will absolutely show that it's absolutely clear and absolutely reliable. And another like option which you can talk is an anti -muffin investigation. Vasili And in a case when we had like people want to start the anti muffi investigation, they want to report a crime, but they're afraid to do this. And because if they do this, my fair will kill this kill them, or maybe like kind of post will fire them. Vasili But they want to start this kind of discussion and they can use the ring signature for these two so they can start and say, okay, I've seen this. There is a crime, they can sign the message and we can know, okay this probably was some someone from this company but we don't know who it was like. Vasili So this is kind of the problems we have in this in our world. and yes, we already have solutions for them. Doug Wait, I'm sorry, go back to the anti -Mafia thing, the Anti -mafia part? Vasili Yes, yes. Doug Well, explain that a little bit more. I am missing how it can be used for anti mafia investigations. By the way, how's my sound? My sound is okay? I was, okay, okay. Vasili Let's imagine we have an organization, like government organization and the boss of this organization is involved in some kind of crime, in crimes, I don't know, he's like stealing money from the government or just do something bad. Vasili And let's assume that this organization is a software development company and every developer have their public keys on the GitHub. So in that case, a developer can take a ring, they can all the public key from all employees from this organisation and create a message. Vasili Like I've seen that my boss like doing this there and it's not correctly, and he can publish this message. Doug Okay, okay. Vasili Yes, the other guy from other department, okay, you can also write a message, okay I also send this to, he signs this, it is a ring signature, it not impossible to know who it was, but because of the different key image, we can absolutely show that they are different people, so it a difference. Doug So like a way to anonymously whistle blow collectively as a group? Okay I got it. Vasili Yes, and at some point when you have enough people, which when I have different key images, knowing that, okay, there are different people we're talking about this, then you can start investigation and actually having this yes, yes. Vasili Because if it's only one person who starts, he will probably be punished and just fired or even killed. So it kind of a way to start the discussion, Yes. Doug That's a very interesting concept. I like that last one. I've never thought of that as a use case for voting anonymously. I like that, that's interesting. That could be used in corporations, that could something that every federal employee is given the opportunity to do this, right? Doug As a way, as a check on government, as way to whistle blow. That's pretty interesting, go ahead continue, continue. I'll let you continue with your thought processes. Vasili Yes, and the cryptopole .org, the website, it's from the technical point of view, I just took the code from Manero, just copy pasted it, compiled to WebAssembly, and have a kind of demo for this. So right now we can play around with this, and I pressed the wrong button. Doug It's okay, go ahead and do present again. Vasili Yes. Yeah, here's a web page, cryptopole .org. And let's begin with, I want to create a public key, key pair. So we want a sign a message. We can generate a private key. The private key is saved in local storage, like from the technical point of view. Vasili But here is our public key. Nice. Okay. There are some other public keys, and I will just copy past them. So, for example, this is my public key from my GitHub. This public from this guy from GitHub, and, oh, I'm sharing the wrong. Vasili Yeah, so this public key is from another guy from GitHub and he like, he was an easy software developer in Monero. He's involved in monero development. So I just went to this link, went through this thing and... Doug Explain to us what's going on here. So you're... Vasili Yeah. I've just shown that having a link like this, you can go to GitHub. You can get the public keys from a developer or from the GitHub having this one is exactly as this one, but just in different format. Vasili So it's a public key for this user on the GitHub, I just want to show that we have a place where we can get public private key infrastructure. We can have keys for the developers and we we can hide between some of those people. Vasili So let's have a ring. So our ring will be containing of four public keys. So there are some free public case which I don't have access to them like this. I do not have private key for those and this is my public key, which is this one. Vasili Let me check that I'm sharing yes correctly. And let us hide it somewhere here. And lets write a message. Hello. and we have a sign, so we actually just created a ring signature from this ring of four public keys and let's do a verification, this is pretty cool, yeah so, we take the message, original message we'd take a list of the public keys which can be actually distributed with the message, but for the use case of voting, the list of public keys have to be fixed in the beginning. Vasili But I will talk about this in a few few moments. And let's click verify. So yes, verification successful. We definitely know that this message was signed by someone from those is four, but we don't know who. Vasili And what we see, there's a key image. So let's try last time, my keyImage was this one. We create a new message using the same key, using this same ring. And, what happens? We see that the key Image is the Same. Vasili So it's exactly the value, value, which means that if the same person tries to create different messages on the same ring, we can link them together. So this is kind of linkable part of the ring signatures and we know that, okay, it's there from the the same person. Doug So you could see if somebody voted twice, essentially. Vasili Yes. And the voting itself is Doug For those listening on podcasts, I think this is a good episode to watch the video of on YouTube, so you could better see everything that's going on here. But basically, you're demoing this crypto poll app that you built using the ring signature component of Monero. Doug And you fork this from the Monero code. It's not like you rebuilt a ring signatures application on your own. You actually use the ring signature application of Monero itself to build this? Vasili Yes, exactly. And it's possible to implement this in JavaScript. In my first implementation was in JavaScript to have it on the front -end. But in crypto and in the security, it is better to test the verified code. Vasili That's why I use Monero. So for me, it was very important to take the same code, exactly the code as in Monara. And the output is exactly the the as we have in monero. Because let's say we have the crypto code and they have a cryptocurrency, the bug bounty for the cryptocurrencies is extremely high. Vasili So if you find a bug in Monero code, you can sell this bug like extremely, extremely expensive. You can did the anonymized someone or you like steal the money from steal crypto. So this code is already tested. Vasili This code has already proven to be secure. And this is very, very important. Doug Very exciting. Very, cool. cool. I like that you've made it very usable. Obviously, this kind of just allows people to demo. How useful is it currently as an app if somebody wanted to start using it for these purposes? Doug I don't know, somebody in a business wanted to set this up to allow their employees to have started voting anonymously or somebody wanted run a local election. Where is this at in terms of development and usability for people to interact with in those ways or is it really just kind of at the demo stage at this point? Vasili Yes. If you want to have it, write me a message and I can build the rest. Speaker 3 Oh, very cool. Vasili I need more feedback. I need understanding what actually people need and what kind of use. But of course, you're correct. It's just more a demo for this, a proof of concept. And like to use in a business case, it have to be a dashboard when we can enter, for example, emails, click a button, then invitation links is sent to everyone. Vasili So like where it will be possible to do a voting to answer surveys for non -technical people. And also to make it easy for not technical people and also make it possible for the technical people who wants to ensure that this is exactly how it happens. Vasili And so, yes, there is some work have to be done and if you want to perform just let me know and I can do it because I'm a software developer. Doug It'd be cool if we hooked this up with even something like Twitter, right, where people can vote on Twitter but anonymously using their user names or user accounts as the public keys. Does that make any sense? Doug Could something like that word? Vasili In Twitter, we don't have already generated the key pair. So like, the initial step for the voting, like in this, have to gather the public keys from everyone. So everyone first have generated a key payer, then they publish their key, public key and then we freeze the list of voters. Vasili So say, okay, these are the people who are able to vote, eligible to work. If we talk about Doug So that's a problem that is not really solved by this, right? So the issuing of the public keys or the creation of key pairs, there needs to be a trustful way to create that, so that you know that the keys that your giving out are the people that want to vote and people aren't creating multiple keys, right. Vasili Yes, yes. And you have to generate because usually people do not generate private keys public key pair And the only way I found is the developers who have a GitHub, who will have an SSR access to GitHub. Vasili They generate the key pair, they have private key of their computer and they use this to connect to GitHub so that's why we can take the existing public key but usually it's not so distributed. Maybe, for example, if everyone uses some kind of encryption system or signature system, When everyone have a key player generated and we know okay this public key belongs to that person this can be used But for now we had to have this initial step to generate the keys and gather the public keys for the vote for that Doug Sounds like you got a team up with world coin I'm just thinking outside of the box here. This is this is really cool Actually, so we interviewed somebody on the show three years ago I was looking back in the archives because I remember somebody was working on this. Doug We had a group in Italy, at least three years ago, that was working with the local government there, actually a local political party, and they were building a tool using ring signatures to do essentially this anonymous voting. Doug I don't know if they ever got it off the ground. I never saw anything in this regard where they actually had a working demo of it. But yeah, so this is obviously something that's been thought about for a while. Doug I think actually even the concept of ring signatures itself was originally devised with that in mind for voting purposes, I believe, before it was actually implemented in cryptocurrencies like Monero, correct? Doug Give us some history there on the on concept itself of using ring signature for for voting. Vasili What I know that the original paper like 20 years old were all the mathematics and like describing them ring signature and yes they mentioned the applications like voting and leaking the stickers. Doug So do you know if we're seeing this out in the wild? Like I said I saw this group in Italy years ago they were trying to similar to you use the Monero code base to essentially fork in and create a system. Doug Do you know of any other systems that are out there live working that people are actually using for this purpose? Vasili That's kind of a pity that I don't know and as I mentioned, it's just under an estimate and Understood so there are lots of power in this technology and people just not aware of this So what I'm trying to like see it to bring this information to the world you can use it Yes. Vasili And actually, I think that it will take some time to get used to this in a voting, in like real voting. But what I see, like in the near future, it can be used for anonymous surveys in companies. So when it starts to be using this kind of environment, like for the small group of people, when the people understand, okay, it's useful, its used, trusted, there are no issues. Vasili And after this, it cannot be expanded to a bigger and bigger scale. But I think that the beginning will be on the anonymous surveys. And it's also nice to see, like in a cryptocurrency, that cryptocurrencies actually bring in the world forward in sense of the security, in terms of cryptography, because it is so nice to say that those technologies are really used and really proven. Vasili From that point, a few cryptocurrencies are bringing the word to be a better place. Doug Yeah, no, very cool. You just got me thinking, you know, I'm thinking of different potential applications. Actually, so I, and I looked back at my interview from three years ago, I spoke about this on that interview as well. Doug Many years before I actually even discovered Bitcoin, this is I think in like 2009 I was working on a project called GovTogether, which actually eventually led me to Bitcoin and led to the people who were talking about Bitcoin at the time. Doug And unfortunately, I was so focused on this idea that I didn't start to go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole that time, and I wish I did. But it was called gov together. The concept was to essentially implement a form of direct democracy through current representative democracy by getting a representative like a congressman to agree to use a polling system among his constituents and then to use that polling system to help determine how he votes in Congress. Doug So essentially giving all his constituents the ability to vote on every issue. And when I when I ran for Congress here in 2020, I that was part of my platform promising people that if elected, I would implement a way for all my constituents to essentially vote on Every issue, and that I will use That polling to Help determine how I vote in Congress, not the promise being that it would be something that I would use, wouldn't necessarily determine my vote, but I will help use it to help determine how I'd vote. Doug If 80% of my constituents all said, vote this way, I'll likely vote in accordance with them unless I was protecting some important minority opinion that I felt important about as a representative. I think that could be a potential great use case for something like this because it wouldn't be real voting, but it'd be a way for people to benefit from giving everybody the ability to poll and vote and in a secure way. Doug Whenever I would talk to people about the concept, obviously this issue would come up, but how would you ensure that it would be accurate? And my answer was always, well, it doesn't have to be 100% accurate because it's not real -voting at the end of the day. Doug It's just a polling system. But yeah, just curious your thoughts on that and any thinking there, how this, you know, if this could be a good fit for that, obviously, I think it could, but curious. Obviously, yes. Vasili Yeah. Yeah, the multiple use case saying that if you want to make it possible for people to share their opinion anonymously and secure, and we want it to also be secured from a double voting or any kind of fraud like this. Vasili So, yes, this is a solution for this. Doug So theoretically, I could hire you and have you build that system, is what we're saying. We can do that. Yeah. I think the hard part, once again, with something like that would be the issue of actually giving people the keys in a way where we can ensure that it's one constituent per key, right? Doug And that's a problem that needs to be solved outside of the network. any any thoughts around those those ideas I mean that's like you said like you say with the github thing that that kind of solves it but in general do you think this is a problem that can be solved if I understand you're correct Vasili that people want to participate in this they just have to go somewhere click a button and generate the key and save it on their device or like to have this private key personally. Yes and if I understood you right, do you want your voters to be able to vote only or do we want everyone who is eligible to elections to go? Doug Yeah and in this scenario would be that I'd want everybody living within the district that's a registered voter to be available. You know whether they're Republican or Democrat or whatever a legal registered voter living in the district to be able to create one of these public keys, and in a way where we know that the person creating it is actually the person, right? Doug Obviously, that's a hard problem to solve. Vasili Yes, yes. Of course, you have to have some kind of a list of people who lives in this district, and you're not able publish the whole list because it's private personal data. So, but of course it will be interesting. Vasili I don't know, maybe if you publish a list and somehow remove the personal data, just keeping an address by the home, for example. Say, okay, in this house, there are people, like 10 people or 100, I suppose it's a big city and we have a list of houses in these districts and, you know. Vasili Okay, these people like 100 people in this house and that house. And then you have a list of those and you'll have list public keys. Okay, this is public, and this also public. So you can go on web page, you check, okay, my key is there, I can say okay from this house there are about 10 people who registered their keys from that cause about ten people. Vasili But using this system it probably will solve this. Doug Okay so, yeah okay. Because obviously the end goal, right, would be to do this on a mass level and to actually have voters voting directly on issues. What do you think of that concept in general? I mean, I personally believe in the need for representative democracy. Doug I'm not completely sold on the concept of a true direct democracy where constituents vote directly on issue for fear that you'd have tyranny of the majority potentially. I'm just curious your kind of political thoughts on that or philosophical thoughts on that. Doug Do you think that's ultimately something that society should move towards or do you think you need some kind of representative between the people and the voting? Vasili What I think and what I see in Finland, like society moves to that, already moves to that direction. In Finland. In Finland yes. There are some initiatives from the people, so you can, I don't know about United States, but in Finland, you can have an initiative. Vasili You can just post it and people will vote for this. And if it gets some kind of amount of votes, then government have to take this and to like, to take a look on this, there are lots of votes polls about where the city have to spend their money. Vasili For example, they're like multiple things. Do we have to improve this park? Or do we have to put that one? Do we have To build this one, and there's a platform people can, can go there and like, say their preferences, maybe write some other ideas. Vasili And this works in field. So yes, people who are interested, where the government money are spent, where their money is spent. They use this platform. So basically, Doug for for referendums, yeah, do you think it could be used on a level where all all government like the legislative branch of a government was essentially run by the people. I think, you know, even in the US, we have referendums on certain things. Doug But do you think that, do you believe that it would be possible or worthy to create a system where the entire legislative branch of the government was run directly by the voters? Vasili Well, I think it's important to get the opinions from the people, but as you mentioned, there's a risk that it will be a dictatorship of the majority, and it also will have to be a person which is elected and which responsible to make everyone's lives better, not just of majority. Vasili So, from that point of view, I think the system will work if we have some kind of a platform where we can, as people, we express our opinion, but in general, the final decision is made by the person which we elected. Vasili And then we see how it actually matches between what we think and what he's doing. Doug And like I said, as far as you know, we don't know of any governments that are using this to give their citizens the ability to vote online, things like that, right? That's not, do we know anywhere where that's happening and things like? Vasili Oh, well, I know that in Russia, there is online voting and I was checking the code, how it was implemented and like from the mathematical point of view it's pretty good, pretty good but therefore implementation is kind of closed system there closed list of voters so you like don't know who are exactly there. Vasili So you can vote you can see there your ballot here but you don t know who else so there might be like one billion of generated voters which will vote correctly so from that point a few it s not very trusted but anyway it It's possible to make it trusted, just make open source, clear, and have a clear list of voters who are eligible to vote. Vasili That's kind of the biggest problem in this kind system. Doug Yeah, I guess the other problem that comes up when people talk about voting online, obviously the security, but this this kind of solves that. We talk about the the issuing of keys, right? There's there's that that kind, of real meat space issue. Doug And then there is also the issue of ensuring that people don't start selling their votes, selling their keys. Vasili But I guess the same problem with the usual voting. So it's kind of this problem. It's not possible to solve. So it's always will be. Doug Yeah, yeah, even more. Go ahead. Vasili Even more, if you have a, for example, voting, usual voting when people go and write their vote on the paper, there might be some fraud from the government, like writing some non -existent people or maybe letting them in or like not checking the documents properly. Vasili So there may be something kind of fraud like this, if we have digital system and you have a list of illegal voter that it's not possible to do this fraud. So from that point of view, it is even more secure. Doug Yeah, but it just makes it easier for people to start selling their vote, their ability to vote. Right. So obviously we see that kind of happening in elections in indirect ways, but now it can be done directly where somebody could say, you know, I'm paying, i'm paying $5 for everybody's, per key, just give me your key. Doug and you know people might just say here you're like I don't care I don''t care about voting anyway next thing you know somebody bought up a bunch of a bunch -of keys to do voting right then they deserve this government so that that's back that''s back to the problem of the majority right like we want to give everybody the the ability to vote in the in a most pure way possible but the problem is when you have all of society doing something often it leads to some ridiculous outcomes especially in this country I'd be very fearful of it with the things that we see we getting discussed online some of the thing that do get that you see are popular it's like whoa whoah I don't know I dunno if I want the majority in charge of everything. Doug It's kind of a problem it is already happening in some kind Vasili of a way that maybe the election wins the guy who like promised the most and just look nice. So, yes, it's kind of the way how the system works and if people will just sell their vote or vote for the prettier guy, the guys who promised them all, then okay. Vasili But as I mentioned, that's what they deserve, so it is kind. Doug Tell us more how you got into this, obviously. You must have a real interest in this concept of is your interest in improving voting itself, or was it just the tech behind Ring Signatures that got you excited and you saw a use case for it that hasn't really been tapped into, only talked about, but hasn t really been built and you see a way to build, so that excited you. Doug What really motivated you to actually go ahead and build this thing? Vasili It's probably from the technical point of view. I was learning, I said, okay, it's really nice technology, not used. We have to bring the information to the people about this so we can actually understand what it is and why it was important to know that such kind of system exists. Vasili but yeah, so mostly from the technical point of view. And also I was interested to build something on the web assembly initially, and something which will do something useful on on web browser. And I thinking, okay, what can I use? Vasili Like any C, C++ code, which I can build and use on a webpage. So then I found, okay Monero ring silencers, pretty good one. And then all of them combined into the crypto pool. Doug Has anybody reached out to you yet with interest in trying to build a specific app for, application for it? Vasili Well, there is one person on the Reddit who wrote me about this and asked for like, how can it be used? Because what I did is on my GitHub, you can use it, you use like a library, so it's pretty easy to start to use in your own application. Vasili We live in an open source world when we talk about the cryptocurrencies and encryption. So yes, yes. So there was some kind of people were interested from the technical point of view and actually this guy also mentioned some interesting concept Regarding how it make it useful and the easy for the non -technical person. Vasili So I have to say Thanks Okay, I'm some ideas like Doug Can you give us any insights into that you mean for purposes of like creating the the key versus the What improving what aspect of it? Vasili Yes. Yes, mostly what he proposed is You have a dashboard, you have like a page, for example, we want to organize the vote, you write a list of emails of people who are eligible to vote. Then the system sends registration email to everyone. Vasili Everyone clicks the link, confirms, okay. Then, the systems gathers all the public keys from all of the participants. It's also quite a visible somewhere on some webpage. Then there are people, the person who created the poll, he can say, okay, now we start the polling. Vasili The list is freezing of the eligible voters. Then everyone got another message. Okay, now it's time for the vote. So that's kind of thing. Doug Oh, that is very cool. And then that would become, like you said, very usable for a company that wants to issue this to their employees. Vasili Exactly. In the same way as it works now for for the companies which performs anonymous survey, but just to bring the cryptography on the background rather than just trust you the company who organizes this. Doug Very cool, very cool man. So let's back up and we'll talk about crypto now a little bit. So what is your take on Monero? I mean, do you have an interest in it beyond the ring signature component? it? Doug Just curious what your Monero viewpoint is. Vasili Well, what I really like that is pretty stable from a financial point of view. So I have some savings on Monaro and the price of for Monero not like getting high or low like Bitcoin. And so I'm pretty sure that what i have now is probably the same as I will have like in a year or two. Vasili So it's kind of I used for the savings and like, I don't know, should I say about this? But sometimes if I need to transfer someone money, then I can use Monero just not to be visible. Especially when we have economics and as I mentioned, I live in Helsinki like six years, but my country for region is Russia. Vasili And sometimes I needed to transform money to Russia to help my mother, for example, or some of my relatives. And because of all this economic situation, all the sanctions, not possible, but using crypto and Monero, it's possible. Vasili So I can buy it here and then sell it there. It's not visible for the governments. Doug very powerful use case. And you see Monero as being good for that use -case compared to other cryptocurrencies? Vasili Yeah, Bitcoin is very transparent and I'm afraid that if I will sell Bitcoins in Russia then it will be visible here and then I might get some kind of problems here because of sanctions and everything and so on. Doug Yeah. Yeah I don't know why more people aren't or maybe they are. Do you know? Is that becoming a trend? Is there people using it for those purposes? services? Vasili Well, it's required some technical knowledge and understanding, so I don't think it will be used in a bigger scale, but I know that other developers which have to help their families which are left in Russia, they do. Vasili It's kind of the world, whereas no one can ban you, no can bring some regulations and everything. Yeah, Doug do you have any insight into the popularity or the awareness at least of Monero in in Russia? Do you know I mean, obviously I think everybody there knows Bitcoin, right? Is is Monero a cryptocurrency that that people are aware of in Russian? Vasili No No, so it's kind of the same people live their life They usually don't need this until they have a kind a freezle real reason for using those so People are pretty happy with what they right now. So And also I started to learn this because I was like interested in this like topic from a mathematical point of view but then I understood okay I can use it also for this one. Doug That's great that you've made that realization that means Monero's working as intended right? It's serving its purpose. Vasili Do we want this or do we not want these? This kind of is happening. Doug What are your thoughts on that? You know, obviously, I'm on the we want this side. Curious what you know. In your mind, how are you measuring these things? Vasili Well, what I think that the world is overly regulated and to have a system where the rules are clear from the beginning, like when you have the cryptocurrency and the roles of spending rules of having and there are fixed and they're not going to change during just just someone decides, okay, I need to do this. Vasili So in that case, having that system is really nice. And I think the world sooner or later you understand that we as a whole humanity of whole society, we need some kind of a system where the rules will be fixed from the beginning and not be changed during the game. Vasili Right, Doug right. So that's, you're kind of talking about the currency itself, right, being a secure store of wealth, a currency that can't be adjusted at whim by a government or those that control the government. Doug They can control the issuance of it, a non -fiat form of government that is decentralized that nobody controls. How about from the feature of like Monero, which obviously has those things as well, but then the additional ability to use your money without any corporation or government being able to see how you use it, when you're using it. Doug Obviously you were talking about the positive use cases that you used it for, but do you think overall it's a positive thing for society or, I mean, obviously people are out there making arguments against it right, there's politicians that are out their that say this can be used for financing terrorism, This can be used for bad things. Doug We know that cash is the most popular tool for that. But curious what your kind of philosophical viewpoint of those concepts are. Vasili Well, philosophical, we still have much more good people in this world rather than bad ones. And at least I hope so, I want to believe so. And yes, the limitations and kind of, I don't trust the governments, how do they solve some kind of problems? Vasili So sometimes they just, they can't find some problem, terrorism, but the solution might be absolutely ridiculous, which affects absolutely unrelated people. And so from that point of view, having some kinds of system, of course, will bring much will bring the society to the better place. Vasili Yes, we might say that this cash and the crypto can be used for some doing something illegal. Yes it happens, but it's not the problem of the of the cryptocurrency. It's another problem which have to be solved in another way. Doug So you believe in this in this idea of giving if a tool like Monero exists, and it does that giving people access to this, allowing people to freely transact is a positive step for society. Vasili Also, I know that by some rumors that people in Germany, they still use them cash. Because the rumor is that they don't want to let their government to know about where and how do they spend their money. Vasili And in that case, so we already have a society, like in Germany, when people cares about their privacy, and how do they spend their money? And of course, in that society bringing them an era into use, like, the whole country. Vasili So there is already need for this people already don't trust the government, they already want to be secure, or they want to let the government to know where and how they will spend their time. Doug Right, right. They understand the importance. They've learned their lesson, in, right? They've learned their lesson. Yes, yes. Um, yeah, for sure. For sure, uh, curious, have you been, how closely do you, do follow Monero? Doug Have you have you noticed what's been happening with the transaction count? Because this also ties into ring signatures. Have, you seen that there's in a large influx of transactions and then some people theorizing what might be going on. Doug One One of the theories being that it was an attempted flood attack on Monero, a way to essentially decipher the true spends in a ring signature. Vasili Yes, I've seen this, but let's say it's already happened a few weeks ago. Having this in the retrospective, I didn't notice any kind of problems with receiving Moneros or spending Moneros. for me, things work. Vasili And yes, there always can be a possibility to have some kind of a flood attack. And it's just the amount of fees, how it like, Bitcoin already had this problem, and they already solved this. So I don't think it will be. Vasili Or the worst thing which can happen is that the fees will rise in the price. In Bitcoin, like spending and transaction can cost like one euro or two euros. It's pretty expensive to use it for simple payments. Vasili In Monero, the transaction fees are quite small, so it can be used nowadays. What can happen? The worst thing which can just happen is the fee price will be increased, that's it. Doug Yeah, and Moneros is really built for its fees to stay low, given that it has a dynamic block size. So, as more transactions come in, the blocks get larger, you could put more transactions in each block. Doug It keeps transaction fees low, even with more users. Vasili And also in Monero, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I know, the mining is pretty expensive and it was built to be inexpensive and to be possible to mine only on the CPU. So every Monero, which we have, which remind they actually worth some electricity and some real money. Vasili So it's not something we in Bitcoin, you can have a miner like 100 GPU and have lots of like, so when the Bitcoin actually started to be popular, lots of people mined the bitcoins because of easy way to do this in Monero, the opposite every mind coin is a cost something. Vasili So it's also kind of bring the stability to the to the currency. Yes. Doug Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, in Bitcoin as well, every mine coin costs something as well. But the main difference there is you have specialized hardware that has an advantage. And then so that leads towards a form of centralization where you have large corporations that do the majority of the mining because they have this advantage where they have access to this hardware, or they have the capital to buy the hardware and have to access energy. Doug So it tends towards having just a few large miners that are doing all the mining. And then these large mining corporations become approachable by governments, as opposed to Monero, where it's built to be resistant to ASICs. Doug So the best miner in Monaro, our mining device in Manero is the CPU. itself. So whether you're mining with your laptop or your phone, you are basically competing in an egalitarian way where you have no advantage over anybody else. Doug So it's kind of more of a one CPU, one vote outcome. Vasili Yes, yes. And yes, having an ASIC miner, like maybe not right now, but in some past, you can like invest and you have a benefit profit from this like 10 times, 100 times more than you spent in Monero. Vasili As far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong, the mining is not very profitable. So if you just calculate the price of the equipment and the prices of electricity and how much you will mine, you will understand, okay, it will be almost the same as you're just going to buy this Monaro. Vasili Which means that if we have new mining at Monero, that means people actually spend those those money to so it's not you're just not it don't buy like air or some nothing you just when you buy Monero you know that it was mined someone spent their funds so from that from like going forward it kind of an economical stable Doug for them for the Monero yes yeah yeah definitely definitely yeah any any other Any other Monero related thoughts or thinking are you are familiar with full membership proofs? That's coming to Monero Vasili No, no Doug Okay Full membership proves will Improve the ring signature component of Moner Oh that make it make him make Vastly superior to what it what a currently is effectively creating an anonymity set that would be the size of all the inputs in the network. Doug Right now, I think it's one out of 16, I believe, right now in The Rings. With full membership proofs, it will basically be one of the sizes of entire network, all of these inputs combined. I'm If you're familiar with that, I guess not. Doug Yeah, you should definitely look into that. That's a big deal for Monero. Cause actually, so that's what I was trying to get at with the flood attack. I mean, it is one of the one perhaps flaws of Monero is it's ring signatures has a limited ability to conceal who the sender is. Doug If enough, if you've have enough resources, There are things that can be done to pinpoint, attack a person, to try to gain some insight who the real sender may be. You'll never know deterministically, but probabilistically, you can kind of eliminate some of the false signers, some the decoys. Doug Full membership proofs eliminates that completely, and there's really no way to do it at that point. Vasili Yes, and I think there were some kind of stories when police was able to track someone because a person got money and they immediately spent them and the ring of candidates like 16 person ended it was pretty obvious that it just was enough to like just check them who can it be so. Doug Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of those examples are things that I think even, you know, perhaps full membership proofs wouldn't help with, right? If somebody sends you $999 .96, or whatever, if you steal $9 million, $996 cents, and then you send that exact amount to an exchange, they might be able to put two and two together. Doug It's also something called an E -Valice Eve attack that's been used to gain insight into what the true spend might among the decoys. So, yeah, just curious of your thoughts, but you're using ring signatures in a way where you see great value in the concept. Vasili Yes. In my examples, the ring will be not like 16 if we're talking about the survey, 100 percent. If it's a voting, it can be thousands or even more depending on how big district we want. So yeah. But it is kind of scalable. Doug All right, Vasili, Matt, thank you so much. I hope you stick around the Monero community, get more involved, and I hope, you get some more feedback for the Manero Community, some more interest. Maybe we see, what you built starting to be used in perhaps even in ways that could help the the manero community. Doug I don't know, maybe people build tools for for Manaro governance. I don't know, any thoughts there on using it as a voting tool among cryptocurrency communities themselves? I dunno, maybe there's better ways to do that, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. Vasili It will be interesting to, for example, we have a pull request and the reviewer is not known but somewhere hidden between the contributors, so I forgot the people who are responsible for the project. Vasili Like, for example, we have 10 people which are responsible for the project. Someone of them brings to the review to your pull request, which you want to change in the Monero code base. But we don't know who, but it was someone from them. Vasili Okay, fine. Doug That's interesting. Vasili I think it might be. Doug That is a very interesting concept. Yes, so very cool. I mean, I'll give you final word. Any other information you wanna put out there with regards to this? Vasili Yeah, if you are interested. That's it to all listeners. If you are interested to have this survey or something, please let me know and we can organize the system, which will be easy to use for the non -technical users too. Doug Very cool. And where can people find you, reach out to you? Vasili Webpage, cryptopol .org. There's all the contact information. They're linked to GitHub. There is everything's there. Doug Faciliy, very, cool, man. Thank you so much. Thank you for doing this. Maybe one last thought, maybe we see you at MoneroCon. Not exactly in your backyard, but it's going to be in Prague, so might be accessible to you. Doug That's happening in June. Are you aware of MoneroCon? Vasili Not yet, I will take a look. Okay, yeah, definitely take look, Doug it could be very cool and you could perhaps make some good connections there. Facili, thank you so much. Greatly appreciate your time. Vasili Thank you for inviting me. Thank You. Doug Yeah, and we'll be in touch. I might reach out to you for that gov together project. Who knows, you got me thinking now. Although, I don't need another project right now, but it's definitely a passion of mine, something I'd love to see happen. Vasili Take your time to think about this. Doug All right. Have a good one. Yeah. So long. You too. Bye. Bye and hold on, hold one second.