Digital Cash Rundown 188 with Nate ESC: Polymarket Governance Attack, Ross Ulbricht’s eBay Problem

In this show, Nate and I dove into Monero’s privacy woes, talking about how a statistical analysis and flooding attack could slash its anonymity set to 1.3, according to a researcher I’m working with on Dash stuff. We agreed it’s still fine for grabbing coffee, but its criminal fanbase and design quirks had us scratching our heads.

We reminisced about Monero’s old beef with Dash and Zcash. Back in 2014-2017, their crew crashed our Dash meetups with “scam” flyers, and they went hard at Zcash when its tech outshone them. It got us wondering if spooks let Monero slide as a honeypot to snag bad guys, knowing its weak spots.

Then we hit some crypto wins: Tornado Cash dodging sanctions and Ross Ulbricht walking free. His eBay ID struggles had us joking about a Silk Road reboot. We broke down a Polymarket mess—some whale with 25% of the votes rigged it for profit—showing prediction markets aren’t foolproof. Hyperliquid’s $200 million fix came up too; they rewound it, but running their own validators makes that “decentralized” tag dubious.

We talked Thorchain shedding its old baggage for a simpler setup after lending and savers flopped. Bitcoin’s Samurai-Wasabi wallet rivalry got airtime—Wasabi’s address reuse bug might’ve nabbed the Bitfinex hackers, and those crews don’t play nice. Governance was next: Nakamoto consensus bombed for Bitcoin Cash, DAOs like Compound’s are a mixed bag, and Zcash, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash are inching toward less control.

We tossed around ideas of intelligence agencies lurking in Monero and Zcash, maybe via nodes or darknet snooping. Threat models came up—I’ve been rocking GrapheneOS (X app’s a pain now) and Signal, but we debated privacy versus practicality.

We wrapped with updates: my team’s crafting a censorship-resistant launchpad at Token Dynamics, and I shilled NanoGPT—crypto-paid AI with anonymity. I’m hitting conferences in May: Amsterdam, Toronto, Switzerland, Vegas—catch me there. Follow us on X (@official_ESC, @thedesertlynx) for more.

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