I'll start by copying and pasting our responses on Reddit which aren't visible.
aeroverra
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6h ago
So this "hacker" group lumps in CP with marijuana users and other criminals. I wonder if their philosophy would change if they went to jail for criminally attacking things.
I'm sure their fellow inmates would love to hear they are on the same level as CP.
antidarknet
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4h ago
Never lumped in "marijuana" sale to CP. Read the text carefully. It clearly states HEAVY drug sales. Heavy referring to heavy substances. I mean did it really need clarification or did you want to make a non-existing point to say "fighting crime is bad"?
rbrunner7
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6h ago
XMR Contributor
What I wonder about a bit, as a Monero dev: How did they know that just driving up the number of transactions would already have such averse affects for their targets, those DNM and CSAM sites?
Well, maybe they didn't, just suspected as much and said to themselves "Let's try, we can afford it" ...
antidarknet
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3h ago
I answered it to someone on another forum here's the quote:
Noticed last year Monero blockchain was getting slower during different times. I figured that's when most people transact and asked the simple question what happens if everyone transacts at the same time. From there I modeled it and because Moneros' code isn't very enterprise grade on the wallet side the outcome was evident. I had help from a team member to put up the capital, wrote some scripts to slow down Layer7 on few markets and then executed.
On that forum (Dread) of course many weren't happy or claiming the attack wasn't real within 5 minutes of posting (much verification) most notably such as the admin of the currently top illegal Archetyp market known in the darknet circles as the ragequitter operator who some time ago had IPs leaked and has attitude of a 14 year old German CoD player know-it-all because it's finally his time... He alongside others felt butthurt (maybe rightly so considering they made a donation to us) so he made screaming responses where no validation was done or attempt to understand how and why. Unlike here where you as example rbrunner7 asked the question of how come? Truly amazing what times we live in where reddit potentially has a higher IQ than another board.
On a side note considering there is ongoing work against that specific market we decided to leave that markets name out of the release as part of our "donors". Guess no better image than forcing yourself to be exposed as an incapable, short-tempered and no substance shit-talking darknet market admin who fails at keeping your own market up while heavily relying on Cloudflare.
I'll also quote something I wrote on another board which also deserves to be looked at for scalability issues:
As a bonus to the developers if you're reading this is the official wallets are extremely unstable at 200,000 subaccounts if each has had at least one transaction in and one out. Try generating more subaccounts after 200k it takes many times longer to generate rather than when first initializing a wallet. The more accounts you add the slower it gets. Should probably fix that too. Don't take our word for it but test it yourselves.
sech1
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7h ago
XMR Contributor - ASIC Bricker
It is NOT a business for a hackers group.
But it is a business for them. They claim to have "earned" 300k USD from this.
antidarknet
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3h ago
It isn't a business for us more of a hobby at this point. I'll yet again quote something I posted to similar comment:
Fact #3
Our mission statement is crystal clear. We never took any profit from these attacks. All money were and are being put back into our new projects and operations which are ongoing targetting darknet markets, forums, fraud shops and so on.
I presume it's needless to say but here we go more quotation
We fight the illegal use and not against privacy featured coins like Monero that's why we're sharing all of it. We did indeed use it and possibly cost inconvenience to users however taking down illegal markets where hardcore substances are sold is a priority over making a payment now rather than in half a day.
u/aeroverra notice how it says hardcore substances not a bit of grass. In case of confusion once more.
Now with Reddits censorship out of the way lets answer some more.
Correct. In this instance there was no "DDoS" or spam really. Can be simple to interpret as a lot of users decided to transact at the same timenot420guilty
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2h ago
Technically a black marble on Monero isn’t illegal…
Nothing bad here. Why shouldn't we help "feds" catch pedos and heavy drug sellers? Because they are on the Internet and its safer? Flawed logic to those who said that.olPupper
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6h ago
Sounds like theyre just doing the dirty work for some feds but in the end should be good to develop the technologies which have been attacked
It's as simple as following the step by step guide provided by us and you will arrive at the same destination. You don't need to trust us, trust the data and the process. Otherwise no point in describing our process.not420guilty
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2h ago
I’m calling BS. They need to provide the view keys to prove this claim
Follow the process again. Let me add to this a quote from someone with similar concerns on another forum board that we don't know what we're talking about when we say enterprise grade software.ibmagent
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2h ago
Calls themselves “Antidarknet” but then says “We believe darknet websites, groups, or communities are a positive thing.” Hmm very strange.
On another note, I saw how this supposed group was responding to things on Dread and I’m not entirely convinced the poster is behind the attack. They made strange comments like saying they could carry out the attack because Monero wasn’t “enterprise grade software” which of course is a nonsense statement.
Here is our response to that quote.<The attacker doesn't know...> complains official wallet is so slow when 200k sub-accounts used
We stand by it. We're not saying the monero wallet software RPC functionality is not usable, we're saying it's not usable on an enterprise grade level yet. On that same board we also saidYou run an exchange. You have 10,000 making exchanges every day. 1000 of them use Monero in either direction. 1000 x 30 days that's 30,000 subaccounts for a month. In 3-4 months that wallet will be clogged up and won't be working correctly. And then you cry when shops or other places don't accept Monero. If it can't deal with high volume is it enterprise-ready? Basic logic says no.
Test it out with creating accounts, transaction in and out and then create more. Tell me it is supposed to work like that.As a bonus to the developers if you're reading this is the official wallets are extremely unstable at 200,000 subaccounts if each has had at least one transaction in and one out. Try generating more subaccounts after 200k it takes many times longer to generate rather than when first initializing a wallet. The more accounts you add the slower it gets. Should probably fix that too. Don't take our word for it but test it yourselves.
You could argue it is anti-freedom but there is a delicate line between security and freedom and all of us on Earth walk it every day with every decision we make or don't make. "Freedom fighters don’t care about the law of the land which is where most of the stench is coming from." - you mean like Monero being a privacy coin for freedom and all? The irony and hypocrisy on this one is not lost on me. We don't claim to be freedom fighters. We disclosed our findings as we believe privacy technology is good but not at the expense of doing all kinds of crime. To be clear since I'm sure some will jump the "comparing CP to weed" bandwagon type comments, we can have both privacy technology and stomp out the bad crime at the same time. We don't necessarily have to sacrifice one for the other and we don't propose that we do in any way shape or form.AnbuRick
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6h ago
Yep, it sounds like win-win if you take it at face value and don’t question that there is something deeply criminal, and hypocritical, about it. To start with, they’re pro-darknet and anti at the same time? Oh of course, philosophy, vision, state-like BS.
Impacting an entire network to pinpoint outliers with the consequence of penalizing users who don’t enforce their desires unto another is anti-freedom in my book.
There is a win here, of course, the strengthening of the network. I wouldn’t trust any entity who claim to have a righteous goal though. “If you’re good at something, don’t do it for free”. They certainly disclosed that they weren’t doing on pocket money and I can only wonder on what is not disclosed.
I am not inherently against such a cause, I just think many of us smell the BS miles away. Freedom fighters don’t care about the law of the land which is where most of the stench is coming from.
Sue away. Nowhere does it say it's illegal and even if by some obscure US law it is so what? bla_blah_bla is completely right though law enforcement don't do this because it's illegal and they'll be held responsible as a public authority. As private individuals it's different story. Yes if we get sued or go to jail at least we'll hold our heads high knowing we did the right thing. The world is so perverted nowadays people like yourselves will believe letting people peddle heavy drugs and engaging in pedophilia is alright because freedom or "my body my choice"? Nevermind it destroys neighborhoods and families no that's second thoughts right? Same idea when we let people steal and don't prosecute them because otherwise hitting on criminals is bad and you can go to jail for stopping a crime. We say fuck that logic. If thats the logic behind the laws, the laws need changing. That's our stance and it's final.bla_blah_bla
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7h ago
Win-win?
IMO this is illegal and the groups behind Monero and its network should sue them & ask for compensation. Local, federal and international police have way more than 30k for enforcement. They don't (openly) do what this collective does bc it's illegal, not bc it's "too smart".
The state has the monopoly of violence - or we want anyone with his "philosophy" to exert violence for whatever Robin-Hood style?
Out of all the comments it was nice to see some people with common sense discussing the attack itself & some of the little neat tricks used.
fluffyponyza
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6h ago
The cool thing is that if they'd been able to keep up the attack consistently for a significant period the dynamic block size limiter would have caught up to the "new normal" and it would have been like they weren't attacking at all.
Jpotter145
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5h ago
Because when the block size auto-increased, they lessened the attack until it came back down. Then repeated. So they gamed the block auto-adjust so they didn't pay excessive fees from it. u/Rucknium called this out in their analysis of the attack
https://github.com/Rucknium/misc-research/blob/main/Monero-Black-Marble-Flood/pdf/monero-black-marble-flood.pdf
The large volume of these transactions was enough to entirely fill the 300 kB Monero blocks mined about every two minutes. Monero’s dynamic block size algorithm activated. The 100 block rolling median block size slowly increased to adjust for the larger number of transactions that miners could pack in blocks.
Figure 2 shows the adjustment. The high transaction volume raised the 100 block median gradually for period of time. Then the transaction volume reduced just enough to allow the 100 block median to reset to a lower level. Then the process would restart.
With all of this being said I'd like to close out with several remarks that obviously need to be repeated since people skim manifestos and other important information and are more eager to comment than process and evaluate whats being actually said.
We aren't here to cause harm to Monero or privacy technologies such as Tor. Evident by our release of a guide how to such an attack is done, we leave the fixing to you. We're here however exclusively for the criminals. Not the pot-smoking ones but ones who peddle hard substances like heroin which infect communities as well as those involved in any way with CP. Don't lose your shit because we used CP and weed in the same sentence, we're not saying anywhere one is on the level of the other. That should now get through the thickest faded minds.
We did use the attack to generate money. Whether you were "smart" enough to see that we were jokingly saying we got "donations" is up to you. We did get that money from criminals who in the end fucked everyone else so who is to blame? And please don't say we affected everyone else because getting involved in criminal activity is YOUR choice you take the risks the good and the bad. Nobody to blame but be an adult and take responsibility. In the end all of that money has been used and is being used to attack other heavy criminals? Big deal?
We are ready to go outside of permitted lines where needed. Says it in our manifesto topic where police can't reach for whatever reason - we will. Doesn't make us better than the rest of them in eyes of the law maybe but our hearts are pure. That's what counts in life (at least to us anyway).
Appreciate the discussion some of it was tiring to answer other stimulating to engage. Talk soon until our next project release.
Antinet,
Admin AntiDark.Net
