Based on bandwidth alone and no other metrics (as we don’t capture any metrics) - it’s very possible we serve twice as many Monero users daily today than we did just 6 months ago.

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[–] Saki@monero.town 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A Cake contributor or contributors are also running, or related to, a blockchain analytics provider, Moonstone Research, specialized in tracing difficult-to-trace payment methods such as Monero, proudly saying, “Moonstone Research can provide leads when no other blockchain analysis firm can.” How? Maybe because their technology is so great, and/or unlike other companies, they’re running major remote nodes themselves, monitoring and recording a lot of things.

The positive side is, this Moon-Cake duality could help Monero improve, become more private, more untraceable. They simply may have tried to help solve the recent incident, never using it as a promotional opportunity of their unparalleled blockchain analytics.

Postmortem of Monero CCS Hack: A Transaction Graph Analysis https://monero.town/post/996649

That said, this reminds me of Team Cymru, a company basically selling its skill to deanonymize netflow data. Someone from Team Cymru had managed to become an important board member of the Tor Project, hosting TorProject.org website and several bridges to the Tor Network. The Tor Project admitted the conflict of interest, and quickly fixed the issues once discovered.

Like mentioned above, the Moon-Cake duality could work positively for Monero. Nevertheless, one might want to think carefully about the potential ramifications of using Cake Wallet, related services, and especially their remote nodes. Nothing personal against Cake, its contributors, developers, supporters/users. On the contrary, I genuinely thank Justin Ehrenhofer (sgp/SamsungGalaxyPlayer) for revealing (at least part of) what they can do, what they’re doing as a side business. Thank you!

[–] vikrantnyc@monero.town 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Justin is no longer with Cake. He left to work on this project. It has nothing to do with me or Cake.

[–] Saki@monero.town 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Thank you for confirming that there would be indeed some COIs between Cake and Moon, and that at least one of Cake’s contributors or ex-contributors has started this anti-Monero (?) blockchain analytics provider.

A dilemma is: if Cake is not a honeypot, of course you deny the claim that it’s a honeypot; if Cake is indeed a honeypot, of course you deny the same claim. If Moon and Cake are totally unrelated, you say, “They’re unrelated.” If Moon and Cake are secretly or subtly collaborating in some way, you say the same thing. So asking or answering a question about something like this is largely pointless.

Probably an ideal solution is not trust, but math and technology. Yet pure P2P doesn’t look very realistic, so a centralized big player like Cake may be necessary to some extent. There is always a trade-off between privacy and convenience.

As of writing this, GitHub shows Justin Ehrenhofer as your contributor. You may want to erase the past to avoid “misunderstanding” about what happened. Things must be much easier on Reddit or Twitter 🤭 sorry about that, but this is Monero.town.

[–] vikrantnyc@monero.town 2 points 11 months ago

Yeah I'll say it again. We have no relation to what Justin is doing. As far as GitHub goes, Cake is open source so anyone can contribute to our repo and he has contributed in the past. There are 10 "members" of our repo at GitHub and Justin is not there. I don't believe we can delete "contributors" as I said because anyone can be.