Bitcoin Forum

It seems now that one altcoin, Monero (XMR), is under a constant barrage of attacks against its network + against the community.

It is especially remarkable, because:
- the coin is not in the TOP-10 marketcap,
- does not have a very large or very fast growing usership, and
- its price is not growing very fast.

According to the price history, almost nobody has made any money with it, because the all-time-average price is BTC0.004, and the price today is the same, with very little variation.

I am challenging everyone to find a reason what is behind this attack and hate. Note I am not saying that the attacks and hate are widespread as percentage of forum activists, but the people doing it certainly are very active.

Further, is it possible that the sea of shit in every Monero thread that the trolls leave behind, is giving such a bad impression to a casual reader that they buy into some other coin in its place. Can it be that paying for trolls and sockpuppets actually pays off?

Is the code in such condition that is can be defended against all attacks? Unfortunately it seems that the recent one could only have been pulled out by a person with much better understanding of the Monero code than Monero devs themselves. This is not very flattering towards certain people. (I write it out because not all are in the know: Monero is a community takeover coin that is based on CryptoNote protocol. Other CryptoNote coins are managed by the original CN developers, Monero is the one whose developers did not code the protocol itself.)

Moderation policy: This is an XMR-friendly thread. Any activity that is not furthering the discussion topics of this OP may be deleted and trolls banned. Don't even come if the reason of your coming is to wage the attack that we are discussing how to defend against.

The answer is rather easy to find if you ask me. There are plenty of XMR fans and, for some reason, not few offensively-minded at that. The competitive nature of the altcoin forum and the "fighting" among the defenders of various altcoins results in attack and/or hate. The more aggressive a particular projects' defenders promote their cause, the more hate they tend to receive accordingly.

Do the XMR fans go to litter other coin threads? (I don't know because I never visit such) There is a flood of trolls in XMR threads. Is it balanced?

Seems a simple enough explanation as to what is behind the hate part, anyway. Two big reasons that I can see:


1)
People who got into Bytecoin (and/or the Bytecoin creators themselves) will have a defensive emotional reaction to a derivative coin achieving more market success. They fail to admit the severity of the nastiness surrounding that coin.

2)
This is the alt-coin world. People here have far far less understanding of fundamental economics and market dynamics in general versus the bitcoin mainland. They give far less rational thought to why coins should attain and retain value, what "innovation" really means, and whether a specific technology solves a material need in the market vis-a-vis bitcoin. That's why so many in alt-space just jump from coin to coin, and think there's market-merit in nearly every tweak and "whitepaper".

So then when XMR comes along and gets strong support from people who who've done nothing but bash alts for years, they're left scratching their heads. That inevitably turns to anger, etc. They fail to see that privacy is the *one niche* that people who've thought long and hard about bitcoin/alts/crypto for years have identified as having potential merit. And that XMR is the first coin to implement technically sufficient privacy with a fair-enough launch. Without realizing any of that, I can see how Monero may look odd and lead some of the less diligent thinkers to unfortunate conclusions.

Frankly I don't know as I don't spend much time reading altcoin ANN threads either. I do however have a general impression that there's a 50/50 split of XMR enthusiasts (and those that don't particularly care) VS. XMR opponents but I'm not an expert on this

The day XMR was attacked, one of the more vocal supporters of Monero posted this on the Darkcoin thread


These things have been going on for a very long time. I just randomly picked up an example, the newest in my memory.

Self-moderated topics are just here to make the thread more easily to read. If some of you are paranoid about what is deleted, there is a bitcointalk mirror that saves everything that is posted. It's https://bitcointa.lk/ - Feel free to use it. Now that you are aware it exists, attacking a thread because it is self-moderated makes absolutely no sense.

If you ask me, I think most XMR threads should be moderated. Otherwise the constant trolling makes reading a thread very annoying.

Its under attaché due to busoni being coverów as Owner of it

I agree that there are more trolls than normal trying to discredit Monero. The rational for this is very clear, as laid out most recently on this thread

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0

However, to answer your question: will Monero survive? The forces that are trying to discredit it are only strengthening the coin and the community. Monero should be thankful that they are getting such a hard "peer review". This is something that most minor altcoins escape.

+1  The "attitude" of XMR supporters are quite frankly pretty obnoxious.   All they feel is that XMR is the ONLY coin that matters.   Dude, this is cryptocurrency.   Everyone beside Bitcoin is trying to become the #2 defacto coin, yet XMR people feel that they are #2 already.   That attitude really make the haters hate and some haters have skills that will be able to put a hurt on your coin.

You must've particularly enjoyed my post up-thread.

:)  Sorry was TLDR.   I just read it now.   

Perhaps I can explain why we believe that Monero is the only thing that matters.

You bet they do! You need to get out more, otherwise you'll get a distorted picture of what's going on. Monero is a good coin, but there are many others too, and everyone dumps on everyone else.

Only project that isn't at the moment is superNET. jl777 wants to accept ALL coins, except straight clones that offer nothing.

Guess which coin crew troll jl777 the most? Yep, you guess right ... monero!

WHY? There's a ton of crap coins to troll, it pains me when I see the good coins tearing each other apart.

This entire subforum is a cesspit of greed, jealousy and hate.

Every coin I have been involved with in recent months (XMR, XC and BC) have all had to withstand substantial FUD and smear campaigns.

The volume was about 2-300 BTC a day on Poloniex for a few weeks, as was well documented on this forum.

To say nobody has made money on it, and quoting an average price is absurd, especially from someone regularly using market terms and speaking about XMR as if it was an exciting investment opportunity.

http://i62.tinypic.com/2ise2ps.png

As you can see from the chart, there has been quite a large gulf between high and low. The volume today is being quoted as $120k  (which I believe is about average for the last month). The market cap is quoted as $6,3m, which is quite a bit higher than the $2m it it was valued at in May.

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/

So either people have made a bundle, or the trading has been fake.

I agree. OP is plain wrong on that point.

Market cap though is determined by coin quantity too which has increased massively since May. Even if price did remain the same, the market cap still would have increased significantly.

On the first exchange you could buy/sell XMR on the price was hovering around 10. But the trade volume was low. It's around 40 now. That 4 times increase is a nice gain but pales in comparison to what I have made off other coins that I bought early that went on to be winners.

The point OP is trying to make is the coin is fairer than most coins.

Sad but true, soon this forum will be so full of toxic coins & people it will collapse in on itself. Too many coins now, impossible to find & follow the goods for anyone who isn't full time crypto investor now. This is a day I welcome!

So many decentralised coins with massively concentrated ownership. Makes as much sense as Chinese communist party officials running largest capitalist market based economy. It can't last much longer. Once the alt coin forum on BTT implodes valid coin communities will need to setup their own forums. That is the day crypto becomes truly decentralised.

edit: how many big investors own single digit % stakes in multiple contender coins? Some guys probably own 1-5% of all the good ones by now. It's insane, but I bet it's true.

As someone who's mostly a wall observer and who thinks anon will be the next big thing if there is a next big thing.  (I'm actually REALLY interested in the effects of having an anon coin with high liquidity.  I believe it will shift power dynamics back to individuals.) I've been paying some attention to Monero & BBR.  There's XC, DRK & BTCD.  But I really kinda have a beef with partial closed source and PoS because I feel like it inhibits the possibility of widespread adoption.

I'll say from an objective observers perspective.  Monero seems a little like a long term holders groupie coin.  It's probably my biggest beef with it.  Whenever people push something as hard as it's pushed you have to wonder what's really going on.  In addition to this - I posted this in the XC thread when people accused me of being a Monero shill.


Why are people pushing the coin this hard when it has this many problems?  Please PLEASE don't accuse me of being a fudster.  If somebody does that one more time I will lose all confidence in the idea of objective observation.  There is intentional hatred on whatever coin is successful (IMO litecoin gets the most of them).  So I'm not sure there is a concentrated effort on destroying it.  I think the proper question is

"Why is this coin not taking off when so many big names are supporting it"

Okay, Mr Random, you're right about the coin market cap.

In saying that, I'm not sure how much XMR is being introduced daily by miners. the last time I bought some it was quite a bit cheaper, and i sold it at about 10% profit.

I find the figures quite staggering at Poloniex, but it seems to be dropping off a bit. So we either watch it decline or burst back. XMR does not strike me as a coin to just muddle along at average price.

My previous long post answers this:

Fair launch. It is just so precious. And never before happened as well. So that the largest holders are not there by accident (or more likely planning by the dev), but because they wanted to buy a crappy coin at a high price. Monero's history is special.

Just tell me one example of a coin where the dev is not the largest owner.

I believe it is very good that the coins are not dev pet projects.


I can only say that if something should happen, but has not yet happened, there is a good chance that it will happen.

People are pushing this coin because it really is the best option in anonymity/privacy (you name it). Its not only monero. Other CN coins too. The rest is just not relevant as anonymous/private coins. We dont know if something better comes out soon. Zerocoin/Zerocash will come one day and we will see what it has to offer. But for now the other solutions are just not relevant.


This coin is not premined/ninjamined. Its actually one of the most fair distributed coins. Sure some have much more that others. But its like 10 times more fair than other coins. Why? I think 1 block diff retarget helps a lot. Much discussion on that one...Private miners? Yes but the already sold everything. They didnt hold. Noone has too much of it in order to hold it for a while, wait for the price to bubble and then dump it. This is what happened with most other premined/ninjamined coins. The emission is high enough in order for it to be cheap and stay cheap for a while. Monero is not going to go 10x in a month time. At least until emission is slower and a market for it opens and some more whales jump in. Its just not another fast high profit gamble. Though all cryptocoins are gamble of course.

You will soon see ducknote go bubbling. Because emission was extremely fast and noone gave a damn about it. I believe it was on purpose named like this and they never tried to market it even a bit so they can mine the most by themselves. They they will probably remarket it with a better name and do some marketing and everything is fine for a nice pump&dump. Hopefully i will sell my ducknotes 5x if i am fast enough.


As for BBR? I hold BBR too. Its like 10:1 . Thats the odds i give it to succeed better.


Anyway, thats how i see things.  I may be mistaken. Do you own research.

Someone had posted this the other day, I think it was in the Monero thread and I'm wondering if there's any truth to it.

http://da-data.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html


I don't know much about the history of Monero but what little I know leads me to believe what Melbustus had to say is a big part of it, especially #1.

Or I have mis-evaluated the situation somehow.  Is the other possibility.  And I think this is the spot people are at with this coin (based on your original post)

I want to be quite frank here. I think Monero is not the best implementation of CN. It also does not have the best emission schedule.

But what it does have is the fairness. If anyone has 10,000 XMR, everyone knows that he has acquired them on equal terms with anyone else. This is very important to many people. There is really no comparison. And even Monero mining was crippled in the beginning, but is sorted out now.

I can buy any coin. But there is no other coin that I could buy and feel good that it is fair.
 

As for destroying Monero? Well something seriously better might come out. A huge bug may be found. The team may stop creating what they have promised. Such investments have big risks.

But i am not afraid of FUD and someone who entered poloniex a week ago and posting all day long 'My coin is better'. That's typical of every coin. Bitcoin/litecoin/namecoin was a scam, useless, ponzi, bubble etc.. And that may be true. But not because someone is verbally attacking coins all day long on trollbox/forums...

Why are you so fucking concerned? (scared) You reek of doubt. This entire thread reeks of doubt.

Go away. I am feeling sorry for you. You know that I forgive you if you just ask.

I want to say this with as much respect as possible.  But how many alt coins have you been involved with?  How many have you seriously taken a close look at?  I've seen you saying you have had no use for alt coins until Monero which leads me to believe you never took a serious look at previous alt coins. 

I want to say this with as much respect as possible. Show me a coin where the dev holds less than 1% of the coins in circulation.

Of course I respect the devs, but I have to say that equally important is that the devs respect the whales. The whales make the economy. Economy is the reason why the coin exists. I can support Monero without even having a functioning wallet (wrong OS), because the distribution of coins is right.

that guy is right. busoni is behind it so peopel hating poloniex attack it

Interesting question that I don't know the answer to.  Is it possible to know the answer to that question?

Do you think that that one factor - even if true - is enough to make the coin successful?  Or that factor plus technical merit?  I guess in the alt world isn't it kinda difficult to say with authority that a coin is going to be successful?  Is that where the frustration is coming from - that the factors you thought would make a coin successful aren't?

Satoshi has > 1% of bitcoins in existence.  I have no idea how many litecoins Charlie holds and don't know how to check.  Those are the only two coins I view as successes (although I think lite is dying).  So I don't know how you can claim that THAT is what it takes to make an altcoin successful with as much definitive certainty as you seem to have.

I don't think tech matters much. It should be easy to use, that's all and even that matters only when there are 10M's of users. By then the winner is probably chosen already.

The prospective devs should understand that a successful coin is ultimately the money supply of the world. You cannot premine 30% of the world. The world will not buy it. If you premine, it means to me that the coin is not even designed to have any long-term chance. And it is true. Very few even try.

NXT! BCNext does not own any NXT afaik.

NXT started with ~8 whales, a few dolphins, and many big fishes. Very fair launch too, over two months long, very public. As it was the first 'IPO' people didn't see NXT for what it was, but they do now.

NXT launch has all the criteria for fair process, just the outcome people didn't like. Same as bitcoin ... and XMR too

http://kolinevans.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/cryptocurrency-to-cryptocurrency-ipos-are-a-completely-corrupt-deception-the-simple-technical-guide/

That guy thinks otherwise...But i dont have a personal opinion.

No one can really answer your question since we're not sitting in the devs house watching what he's doing.  I do know that 100% of Qora was distributed to something like 150 investors via an IPO.  But for all we know, the dev could have bought in as well.  Frankly, it makes me nervous if a dev doesn't have a sizable stake in their own coin as I don't see them being as married to the long term success of the coin if they don't.

You've gotten a bit off topic here lol

It's really difficult for me to think of PoW coins and PoS coins in the same way.

Only successful PoS are "smart coins" that can do things.  Not coins of value.  It's really tough for me to even think about NXT and XMR or BBR and compare them.

Yeah most people think NXT IPO was bad, but IMO it was great, but it can only happen once. No other PoS coin will ever get away with a coin IPO like BCNext had - too many scams now, too oversubscribed so no upward potential for price, not enough whales created who make things happen etc

NXT distribution was an act of genius, and look, it worked. NXT is thriving.

Some things are so crazy they end up working perfectly, and NXT distribution is one of them. Plenty of people will try and find another method for a PoS distro, but none will ever beat NXT. For mine, the NXT distro worked for two reasons:
1- The IPO had enough detail, and BCNext appeared so weird, that it attracted crypto true believers, people interested in innovation, and the legacy of bitcoin. IPO's since attract greedy people, but NXT IPO was almost like a fundraiser for a mad scientist working on a garage project
2- The whales NXT created mostly accepted their roll, and co-operated to get things done. This was a natural consequence flowing from point 1

It was a stroke of genius. Find a core group of people really interested in crypto, and then make them millionaires, but only if they work together to make NXT viable. No other coin could do this now, because everyone wants to think the next IPO will make them rich. The NXT whales didn't join NXT IPO to be rich, but that's what happened. Genius, but a one off, and never to be repeated.

edit: I think NXT is very relevant to monero, same point risto made - fair distribution, enough whales, dev owns small stack

Yeah, that's the standard criticism :)

Probably your point is believed by many, but NXT is still doing well. NXT is a bit like company stock in the platform, so I don't think too many people care now. If the distro 'problem' was going to dent NXT it would have by now.

Point I wanted to make was monero and NXT are both accepted by most people, that's why they're at the top of CMC, not the bottom.

If both still exist in 3 years (which I think they will) you will own both. I'll bet you on that.

And how do you ABSOLUTELY know for certain that the Monero dev have under 1% of the coin?   Do you have proof that the dev have no other address that they mined with at the beginning nor any other friends that mined at launch?   

OMG XMR people will never get it...  see how that work?

Dude... he said that the dev has under 1% coin...  That's the condition he mentioned as one of the BEST thing about XMR.   MANY altcoins where the dev has no premine nor instamine...  that's the point.  It's not only XMR that have that "fair" condition.

You really haven't been around the block much right?  The only coin you ever mined was XMR?

What are these features you talk about?  No gui wallet, huge blockchain, forking from attack, etc?

All I know about XMR is that supposedly they have anon.   What OTHER features??   All I hear about XMR these days are the problems above.   Please do tell us that aren't investor nor expert in XMR....

Exactly. There never was a perior where you could have created value out of nothing. In private placements (pre-IPO) we do it all the time. Company is owned by its directors who typically paid not much for their own shares. Then investors come and it's marked up +10000%. This is fine and pretty much the only way to do things in that world. But coins are not stocks, and doing it with a coin hurts the coin.

The devs have had the same chances to buy it as anyone else. The devs' average buyins are in the same BTC0.004 range. The devs own a lot compared to their total stash, but none of them is even listed in the TOP-5 holders. This is rare. This is precious. This bodes well for the economy because it creates the possibility for those interested in economy to take the leadership, which is lacking in nerd-controlled coins.

Fallacy again using the modal verb "should". This is a tactic of the XMR people.

"if something should happen, but has not yet happened, there is a good chance that it will happen."

There is no "should" about it, no reason to believe it will do anything at all. You are bestowing it with an "end", like it can be measured. But this is impossible in crypto.

Actually, scrub the last comment. Of 1000 coins, only a handful have made a wave, and only bitcoin and perhaps litecoin have had a meaningful impact in market terms and popularity.

So if we throw "should" about, we have a duty (should) to use it properly. XMR should crash and burn, or just muddle along or disappear.

Rpietila, could you please elaborate on the network attacks against Monero? A summary or a thread where I can read it up would be good. I had no idea that the network is that vulnerable.
I personally am staggered as well by the hate against Monero when it has such a slow price increase and calm movement. Compared to BTCDark for example which has exploded in price recently and of which I am still trying to find any solid criticisms but it looks like nobody even tries to take a serious look at the coin it's all pump, pump, pump.
People here have talked about the large problems monero has but what are these? I've only ever read about the potential large blockchain bloat, nothing else? That would be hugely positive imho.

Edit: Oh right, and there was some article about a guy who mined like $150k of monero with amazon or something.

In my mind, the fairest launch mechanisms of any alt in recent memory was demonstrated by CounterParty.

Bitcoins were destroyed in exchange for shares.  No single entity had a guaranteed opportunity to earn at that stage since the raised funds went into the ether, instead of to a marketing foundation or pockets of the devs. The burn period was clearly enforced by a protocol, not an entity which could arbitarily adjust the time limit to invest, the amount allowed to be invested, or the number of buyers. It also had the side-effect of decreasing the total amount of BTC that could possibly circulate.

More detailed write-up is linked here: https://www.counterparty.co/why-proof-of-burn/

From our OP -

Announcements

September 7 - Block 202612 attack patch released (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8710031#msg8710031), please update immediately
September 4 - Block 202612 attack (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8677607#msg8677607), technical update
September 4 - Block 202612 attack (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8667761#msg8667761), update 1
August 25 - Blockchain Spam Attack post-mortem (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8527258#msg8527258), part II
August 24 - Blockchain Spam Attack post-mortem (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8519146#msg8519146), part I

With regards to dga's article, it's important to read it thoroughly to understand that there are no negative implications for Monero: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8578519#msg8578519

People do tend to forget that coins are not stocks.  It's a great point.

Is it possible to destroy Monero?  I recently quoted Warren Buffet in a thread.  Now I'm going to go with a philosophical predecessor of his, Benjamin Graham.  Graham said that in the short term, markets are voting machines.  In the long term, markets are weighing machines.  In the short term, people can have opinions, and FUD can rule the day.  Price can be driven down, and that may be happening with Monero. (Or it may not.)

In the long run, though, if Monero has true advantages and innovation, the short-term price "destruction" that results from FUD, hatred, etc... simply gives us a buying opportunity.

This is where it's important to realize that cryptos are NOT stocks.  They are MORE resilient and LESS subject to pressures like bankruptcy, de-listing, etc...

My take is that the advantages of 1) talented and deep team of devs, 2) fair launch, certainly compared to many cryptos, 3) innovation with regard to anonymity, 4) maybe even whale support--in the long run, I think the weighing machine theory makes it unlikely that Monero will be destroyed.

Makes me want to accumulate more, in fact, because the short-term price pressures might make buying more attractive.

Thank you for this elaborate answer! I'll make sure to read it.

I really would rather not delve back into the whole BBR vs XMR argument again; the bickering is getting tiresome and I'm a supporter of cryptonote in general. --  it's a plain fact in both cases certain entities were operating at some advantage at some point in time. It's not surprising whatsoever.

With that being said, how can you say this of XMR launch without being disingenuous?
"It is just so precious. And never before happened as well."
"Monero's history is special. "

As far as I see, It's just a false statement- The gap between the fastest BBR miners and the average BBR miner, compared with the gap between the fastest XMR miner and the average XMR miner was smaller for some time. Considering the emission rate differences, less of the total BBR supply was up for grabs to those in an advantaged position too.

Sure, this

https://github.com/NoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoo/bitmonero/commit/3cc45e9324a402aee91e2f46861b2ca393d711aa was a slight oversight, because took a while after launch to spot. It would of been ideal if the proof-of-work had a few eyes over it prior to the coin launch,

Reference:


But to the credit of XMR dev team, the fix was pushed less than 30 minutes after it was spotted.   I understand it was something which was introduced by TFT, and monero developers were not familiar with the code at that stage, when they "relaunched" it under a new name. It is not like they themselves crippled it, on the contrary they managed to fix it after a tip-off.


Personally, my opinion is In the grand scheme of things it's barely a hiccup at all and pales in comparison to some of the shenanigans that went on during early BTC days - even forgetting satoshi, ( artforz owned 30% of net hash from early days- continued on to run gpus, fpgas and s-asics, before anyone else and then proceeded to launch crippled scrypt- have absolutely no doubt he knew the weaknesses in that implementation) for instance.

As you say it's also pretty well documented a lot of XMR changed hands in the early days from such miners taking profit from their advantaged positions, and those are freely disbursed in the market very early on. -- I do remember buying some XMR in the OTC days prior to it being listed on the exchange, I got a small quantity, checked back and the price had already shot up 10x. There really was not an opportunity to buy in big quantities as significantly lower prices than the general populous that I saw,  So yes, people were paying more or less the same price for these coins which is a good thing indeed.

Good discussion guys.. couldn't say better so here are some great quotes that i found interesting...

I feel that Monero will forever be under attack, there will always be smaller coins where the users amase mega cheap stacks and then they are incentivised to wage war against the bigger coin.

You could replace Monero with Bitcoin in your sentence above, going by that logic.

Except that Monero offers an order of magnitude more capabilities than Bitcoin.

Also, what rpietila said is true, because of the price of monero rising relatively fast it means there are no mega stacks out there, other coins sat low for too long allowing few to buy them all up.

On two counts, monero is more advanced than bitcoin and more fair, most other coins lack the advanced and for certain lack the fair.

Several that I've been involved in mining - Boolberry, Riecoin, to name a few.

If you want an example of a truly admirable launch, look at how Gatra handled Riecoin.  Others should learn from it -- soft launch with a tiny block reward that slowly ramped up to full to reduce the "first day adopter" benefit.

(What Riecoin got wrong was the difficulty adaptation, compared to something like DGW, so when jh00 released his super-optimized miner, there was a brief splurge, but it wasn't a classical instamine.  The diff was already elevated, at least, well above the release value.)

I give him huge kudos for doing it in a very ethical and transparent way:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=446703.0

Thank you.  I think this might be why rptelia comes off wrong to some.  He has bragged about never being involved in an altcoin before this one but makes broad assertions.  Which lead people to question his other assertions.  

I think it's possible that we'll look back on this time, when the main threat to Monero is other alts, as a honeymoon period. When an anonymous coin separates from the pack, it will become a lightning rod for the enemies of financial privacy and freedom. This may take some of the heat off of Bitcoin, which will be seen as more friendly to the powers that be. Monero is Promethean, and may be subjected to the same punishment as that Titan, but it may also endow humanity with the fire of freedom.

Disagreed: Whales don't "make" the economy. If they were to, the whole economy would be a cartel, or at best a club.

Whales (if clever enough) just profit the most from a working economy. Don't forget "with great whale comes great responsibility"--

That devs hold >=1% of the currency is probably due to accessibility (first-come first-served) and economic thinking paired with an emotional attachment (love your growing child).

Whales = passive, developer = active:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Graham

+1

Maybe we need to redefine the terms. In my parlance, "dev" is somebody who knows how to code but that's it. Whales are the wealthy and well-connected businessmen that make things happen. With this definition, the more whales, the better.

The devs need to do their job, they don't have time for the economy, and they are not competent in it (also whales often suck at coding, like me).

If too large % of coins are in dev hands, the whales never get interested. This is the situation with most coins, they have no investors that have outside-crypto assets worth $1M or more. If a coin totally lacks such people, its economy lacks an essential component.

When talking about Monero, it has quite a handful of such "whales" and therefore the possibility for a very vibrant economy. Whales are in a unique position to drive projects because of their business acumen, connections, and financial backbone (a typical whale does not need to change the brand even after losing an entire altcoin stake).

Monero is starting a new workgroup for "whales" under this definition. It will rock  ;D

Blah blah blah - do u know how to kill xmr?  KEEP fkn scamming the front page with SELF MODERATED threads.

If Monero is 100% different than bitcoin why not start ur own forums?  this is what all the big coins do (pos PoS coins that have bigger market caps everybody is active on their own forums.  u can post as many of these threads as u want without turning this into the "official Monero forums"

or just keep spamming and kill ur own coin castle guy  ::)

OT - did u ever sell all those goxcoins u were trying to sell for 90% of their value way back in the day?

Monero is not a big coin and the devs have made a decision to stay here instead of moving to own forums. Now we the "whales" are slowly starting our own forum as well as a result of the Workgroup.

Are there any Whales in Monero?

Maybe, but the term is used so readily. Mark Karpeles was a Whale, someone that could affect big markets on a whim (or scam).

Maybe these Whales spoken of today are people with a fair amount of money, but really nothing more than sharks in a big pack.

This thread stays on 4 pages forever. i wonder why?

A whale in Monero would be one with at least 50k XMR, we have about 7-10 such players. Monero differs from some coins in that for the big holders Monero is still a portfolio investment, they have not gotten "rich" via Monero. They were wealthy, and put the required BTC200 and now own Monero. If you are dev-rich, you don't have other wealth and are not a "whale".

Bitcoin is bigger than the players. Monero, at least now, is smaller than many people who are playing it. That makes it interesting.

My own take is simpler. This is a locale that's supposed to prize peer-to-peer and decentralization. The ideals, admittedly given a lot of lip service, neverthess attract people far less likely than most to defer to the opinions of the old reliables.

So, even the best endorsements more-or-less fizzle around here. When "it" does happen, Monero itself will capture people's imaginations.

like  party for greedy people? I guess this is a project for people that made money by doing nothing very much in 2011.

If you don't mind, what would you recommend as the best GUI Monero wallet for Windows 7 64-bit? I'm afraid I'm not technically adept, at least for now, and I'd deeply appreciate it if you could drop a link to a binary that you think would be best for the likes of me. :)

There are some true believers here, but you're right, some guys who made a load of paper wealth through nothing more than luck and good fortune hearing about bitcoin earlier than others do seem to think that their success was actually due to their above average investing abilities. A bit like taking investment advice from someone who won powerball jackpot lottery.

Same can be said about the ones who bought Apple shares or bought gold in 2001 when it was 260 usd/oz while it gone up to 1767usd/oz in june 2012.
Investing is about investing into something at the right time.

I also had Bitcoin in 2011 and sold most for cheap, way too cheap. Risto was way more clever, he profited from people like me.
There were a shitton of people with Bitcoin in 2011 but most of them were like me, so its not only about knowing about something, its about making the right decisions.
Even if you guys did know about BTC in 2011 i bet you didn´t hold them through all the bubbles, like most people.

Go away with your straw man arguments...

I've responded to this sort of ugliness before, but I'll do it again now because it's so offensive. Yes, there are probably a few people who bought hundreds or thousands of bitcoin on a whim in 2011, properly secured it, completely forgot about it, then came back years later, remember they had it, remembered their passwords/whatever, etc...

But most of the people who held (or bought) through the 2011 crash were different. They did the math on the potential bitcoin represented, and continued to hold a *very* unpopular position, and a 90% mark-to-market loss for many. That's really not easy at all. And contextualize yourself to the timeframe: the media was declaring bitcoin dead (yes, quite more strongly than now), it was almost embarassing to talk about in polite company, no reputable public figures, VCs, or tech people had come out with much support, and it wasn't *that* hard to think that the experiment was just that... Most of the "whim" people bailed. It took considerable vision (and risk-tolerance), backed by solid analysis, to hold or buy more.

But I guess if you hang around the alt-forum too long, you just auto-assume that everyone is a shallow-thinker making snap-decisions...


It's been theorized for years that if bitcoin achieves its success case, we're going to get scads of people dismissively calling the early folks "lucky". Well, bitcoin's volatility actually strongly minimizes the luck factor vs other really high ROI assets... It's *much* harder to psychologically hold through massive down-up-down swings than it is to hold through stocks like Apple and Google which may go down 10-20% then up 50%. Bitcoin has been far more brutal (and that's just price-action; nevermind the public/professional opinion and social forces one must overcome). It's taken real analytical conviction to make the right call all these years. Don't bloody call it luck.

Sorry you see my opinion as 'ugly', I didn't mean to offend anyone. What I am saying is someone who looked at bitcoin in 2011 and invested 1-2 thousand dollars, and had sense to hodl doesn't automatically become an investment guru. Maybe some do have useful skills, but risking 1K USD is nothing to get too excited about.

I'm more impressed with a guy like jl777. He discovered bitcoin when it was ~1000USD, and during the period its dropped by more than half, he's turned 2 bitcoins worth of capital into a few million dollars worth. He did that by creating very useful software, and from organising many useful projects, some finished, but many in the works. Some of the people you're defending (the bitcoin hodl'ers from 2011) have very blatantly tried to smear him as a scammer. That most definitely is ugly.

Let me put my opinion right before you. I think jl777 is a far better person to take advice from than many of the people you are defending.

This is too important to not make 100% clear.


I for example am competent at both. You were just lucky that I had been too sick to code.



Your model of the hackerdom, crypto-currency, the knowledge age, the future, and investing in decentralized technology is fundamental flawed.

Precisely Bitcoin and Monero are rich boy clubs and this is why they are going no where. It doesn't matter if Paypal accepts Bitcoin because users who are not investors (e.g. especially females and the billions of impoverished) have no incentive to convert from their unit-of-account (dollars) to BTC just to pay for something. They might as well just fund their Paypal transactions with their credit card or bank account. Bitcoin will not become the unit-of-account without the blessing of the government, because it has no distribution scale. Bitcoin and Monero are driven by investors, not by users. They are investment pumps, not currencies. Perhaps all of the crypto-currencies to date have been investment pumps. Perhaps BBR and James are experimenting to create features and try to discover what will drive user adoption. I am not saying they will succeed, because I am not following their work.

Lazy capital that wants to smoke a cigar while instructing the busy-bee worker devs doesn't build a damn thing. Here follows my canonical references. Ignore them at your peril. This is will be my final warning. I am doing this as a service to you and to try to earn the donation you made to me. A true friend is one who speaks up when he thinks you are wrong.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3514 (Those who can’t build, talk— Eric Raymond, the creator of open source)

http://www.coolpage.com/commentary/economic/shelby/Demise%20of%20Finance,%20Rise%20of%20Knowledge.html#FinanceabilityofKnowledge (2010)


http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy (http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy) (2013)


P.S. I am grateful to see the AnonyMint (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=88197) account is indeed inaccessible. Thank you to theymos.


Edit: I am reading the pulse of the community-at-large and I think you are Monero's worst enemy. You should recuse yourself from writing about it, because your model (world view) is the antithesis of open source, community development, and decentralization. Perhaps this is why the hacker attacks against Monero have been so expert (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8677607#msg8677607). You are insulting the hackers. Big mistake. They are now very motivated to prove you wrong. They will come out of the woodwork like unending worms if you persist with this feudal-era (Dark Age), aristocrat model of the future with Monero knights. There is a lot of work to do (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8715463#msg8715463) on the Cryptonote code base, so you need to show your respect for developers, not insult them. We don't work for a King and his court!

The Satoshi hacker is giving a warning to the powers-that-be such as Paypal.

Note I am not that hacker.

I posit that with the shear number of coins out their, some coins will be attacked just for the "hell" of it.

Some one will screw with it just barbecue they can, They will feel sorta powerful and then get invested in doing it, even though it take over a good portion of their time.

People are like this they over invest for psychological reasons in a project, Hell this feature of the human psyche is probably what allows humans to discover things and get a head.

The propensity to do something as a net dis benefit to ones self, just for the shear kick of it, allows lifetimes to be dedicated to aracne, abstruse etc. Then just so often a discovery is made and thier is a huge pay off for the individual and society.

It is probably genetic trait that is selected for to some extent.

in fact i view "autisim" to some extent [not going into the debate of what that means], to be a necessary trait in a good proportion of males for them to get ahead. I mean consider this age of specialization you almost have to go full "autistic" into a particular subject.

On a side an unrelated note I found out to day that using one ear bud head phone for sound over 4 hours can make your other ear desntitzed to sound after you take the earbud head phone off, to the point of the other ear almost being deaf.

This is not only a surprising discovery to me but the speed of the neural plasticity in a pathway I thought was set is quite amazaing. Or their may be a particular pathway to do this. This implies that we are not only hearing in at least stereo but can up-regualte and down regulate the gain on each ear.

I'm embarrassed for you, do you realise how ridiculous that sounds coming after your recent XMR pump fest? What you should be saying is whales are the corrupt exploiters that have almost destroyed our planet and human civilisation.

I do respect that you are not anonymous, and you say these things using your real identity. That is admirable, but crazy IMO.

Most people (the bottom 99% on the wealth scale) respect talent and ethical behaviour more than your definition of 'whale-ness', which to most people sounds vile and arrogant. Whales make things happen, mostly bad, and they try and use their position to exploit more money from the 'system', like you have been with your monero pumping.

The true followers of this coin will be glad to see you stop posting on monero.

The greedy 1% that owns most of the world's wealth are the whales you speak of, but most people hate them with a passion.

Look up the definition of communism—common ownership of the means of production—then re-read what I wrote about knowledge producers autonomously owning their work inherently and can't be financed. I will not reply again as you (and any others who) continue to make idiotic posts.

Edit: dga did not do the PoW work on Cryptonote for free. He made himself $150,000 for a week of work. He did not share his mining secrets.

I know this is hard for so many to understand because Gov itself is all most have ever known.

Bitcoin is the tech that allows a knew form of "government" in a decentralized way, an new kind of society and life. For most it will be better, for some, eg a large percentage of government "workers" they will be looking for new streams of income, as their host just found a way to be immune to much of their parasitic nature

It inverts that paradigm and the organization of capital.

The current form of government has no discretion in the issue.

It is not a question "will they allow" it is a question of if they wish to survive will they be able to adapt in time.

Already we are seeing the arbitrage of jurisdictions. Some make anti BTC laws some are pro BTC. The pro ones attract capital, talent energy.

Look at email, and what it has done to the postal service, indeed no gov could probably function without email now.

put simply the law of thermodynamics ensures that the fittest and most adaptable model wins. Any system including governments that are not the most efficient die and or are replaced. It not a choice or a decision anyone or thing has.

Its hardwired into the laws of physics of this universe at least in this local part of it at a macro scale.


Bitcoin, or bitcoin tech is over and order of magnitude more efficient than centralist banking/stateist model.

US, UK, EU, China they see this and are building a large stock of BTC just in-case, as well as every other nation that can. It cheap, on the table and why would you not do it?

Consider just one aspect. Banks themselves, their must be of the order of 1 million bank branches in the world. BTC tech replaces at least 10% of their reason for existence if not 50%. That 10% of the cost of running those branches, the IT costs, the staff the property cost, the ATMs, the maintenance. A branch would cost near $1 million a year to run.

That 10%~50% of 1T, a year in savings right their BTC tech arbitrages out. So at 10% circa 100B, a year in savings, thats per year. That there just by itself underwrites a market cap in the trillions.

And that is just one part of the whole picture that BTC tech is more efficient in.

People keep going on and on about intrinsic value, there it is, 1T plus market cap of intrinsic value.

The Byzantine generals problem that BTC solves is not just some small thing, it defied the collective ability of the human race until Pre-Satoshi. The applications and implications cannot be understated.

Another source of value is the un-seizable form of wealth. This is the first time in history you can store wealth against force

before this no matter what sort of wealth you had, it could be seized, by force, of, the state, through their "laws", eg tax, or whatever, by the invader, even by decay. Yes I know the lead pipe argument. But people would just send thier coins to a bitcoin eater if this happened to much makeing it an untenable model or thier would me some other n of m solution.

Now reason must be applied not force to make people part with their wealth. Full anonymity is coming. Bitcoin holds out the opportunity for the first time in human history to cross the threshold from brute force, blunt instruments of the blanket state laws, barbarism, to reason.

If I could encapsulate it in one phrase it is the "elision of sovereignty to the state/community to individual"

the only question remains is who or what will that individual be.

My statement holds, because Bitcoin (and Monero and all the others) are not decentralized. Adoption for use as a currency (without being an investor) is almost non-existent (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=557732.msg8684630#msg8684630).

The idea (PoW) was noble and idealistic, but the overall design sucks.

Most of the impoverished don't have a credit card nor bank account.

The Paypal plan.

The reason Paypal couldn't just issue everyone in the developing world an account is because of jealousy thus legal and political risk. Governments would resist take over of their financial control by an overtly fascist corporation.

Peter Thiel et al are more clever.

Issue everyone a supranational digital account that is "decentralized and controlled by no one", when in fact it is centralized and controlled by the fascist powers-that-be.

Use this to force other countries into submission when they attempt to offer their own top-down centralized digital currencies, e.g. Ecuador.

The people are trapped either way in a fully traceable block chain and NWO Technocracy.

Monero (portmanteau of money+dying euro?) offers no hope of scaling to avert this rapidly developing fascist outcome.

C'est la vie. Fait accompli.

If anyone offers you a solution, I suggest you snap out of your aristocratic top-down thought process (see Charlie Munger's Lollapalooza Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Munger#Lollapalooza_Effect)) and fund dozen(s) "let a thousands roses and thorns bloom" of bottom-up crypto-currency experiments in hopes of averting the outcome of the one who buried "for safety" his Lord provided stash in the Talents of the Parable (sic).

It is possible that you are very right and this is a great insight. There is a kind of group that I feel connected to, consisting of people like aminorex, NewLiberty, (I don't want to add the names of not-so-public supporters), and people whom I know locally in Finland. The defining characteristics are that we are typically not old money, so the Bitcoin rally in 2010-2013 has changed our life, but we are also not nerds, just ordinary 30-50 yo adults who could invest a few thousand and not panic about it, resulting in that we still have hundreds if not thousands of BTC.

The willingness to change the world is a great motivation in us. Now Bitcoin has given new resources. Many have been searching for altcoins, but what's been offered did not interest us for a long time, as with a few exceptions, all altcoins have made terrible loss in their lifetime, and the high hopes of newcomers typically gone in vain. We have been able to see if there is no staying power, and invested only little, if anything, and watched the scene in sadness.

Then Monero comes and either analytically or intuitively sweeps our market niche with a promise of an anonymous coin, with potential to change the world, with an upright devteam and fair distribution. Knowing the mind of each other in our "group" (the "group" is just defined by being a set of people that think likewise) we rush to buy Monero, since the others will certainly do the same and of course we make money by doing it first :) My buying only really started in July when the 231 bottom was made. The previous months I was observing, very positive, but unwilling to commit.

This accumulation to long-term hoards has continued all this time, price has been very stable, and volume brisk. My predictions that our group's purchasing pressure overwhelms the inflation from mining have been unfounded, and likewise the doomsayers' predictions of lower and lower prices have not materialized. What has happened instead, is massive concentration of price in BTC0.004, which is the all-time-average, the current price, and the wedge closing point from the trends of higher lows and lower highs. Technically, it will soon break. Up or down, but with a massive move. Unless it stays in exactly BTC0.004 forever.


This is not really the way things happen in life. It is part luck (to be born in 1st world), but most part your choice to hang out with friends who follow tech. Then they tell you about Bitcoin. It is part luck (if you are minor and absolutely broke), but most part your choice to have money to invest and developed skills to understand it. It is part luck (if this is your first investment ever in something you don't understand) but most part your choice to throw money in fringe projects in carefully calculated small quantities, and then not worry about it.

It is no part luck if you were able to see Bitcoin was conquering the world in 2011. For most of us, it was about the choices that we had made in life that accumulated and made it much more probable to invest in 2011, and then hold through the days that took the price to half even twice the same day, and other things that the newbies don't know. My involvement in Bitcoin was certainly not luck, I take a methodical approach in investing and even in 2012, I lost $80,000 in several investments that went badly. Without investing into these stuff several times a year, I would not have invested into Bitcoin either.

Maybe somebody got in lucky, first buying, then losing the keys being thus unable to sell until now.

But my odds were stacked in 10,000:1 in my favor. And after that guy has sold, I still own them.



You also have 1 sigma higher IQ than me, it is not fair to use yourself as an example. Also I don't rejoice in your sickness.


I have outlined above what kind of sound, established, (moderately) wealthy, intellectually curious, people started to concentrate in Bitcoinworld in 2011 and who have now changed the big toe of their right foot to Monero with 1-5% of their capital, ready to give that leg more weight if Monero can take it. We believe the leadership is there and MEW is one initiative to create an actual, functioning, governance in a coin, based on the wishes of the owners.

As for hackerdom, I am not too much into it. I am building an economy that grows bigger and is able to absorb the imploding dollar economy as soon as possible. I admire the hackers similar way as engineers - if they create something that works, and does it elegantly.


It is only your lack of experience that you think I am not doing useful work.


Once MEW gets up and running, we will have to select people to be the community public speakers. If the real opinion of the community is that I should limit speaking, I may do it. Voting does cost money, and requires that you own moneros, and that you are reputable. When these people decide somehing, I am very prone to listen. Currently obfuscation is the name of the game and all the trolling against Monero could have been bought by $500. MEW is really the answer to this.



By subscribing to a destructive ideology, yes. Those "whales" are a sad species, though. They are like "sheep-whales", led to slaughter by their puppet-masters. (Maybe I really need a new term, yes - ) my whales are dynamic, well-conncted humans, who know how things are handled in the outside world, cunning as a fox, innocent as a dove. The Leaders. The ones that anything, whatever it is, needs, to have any chance to succeed in this evil world that is quick to snuff all initiatives that threaten the status quo.

I have no idea what is XMR pump fest. Perhaps you can refer to some specific time in the market or anything..?


I cannot make it untrue that 50% of monero are also owned by 1% of the people. There is no mechanism that would preserve people's liberty and produce a different wealth distribution.

What is the source of this hate? I am among every 1% that can be calculated. I have never in my life scammed anyone or done non-voluntary transactions, or any other crime against other people. Everything that I own I have earned in trade with other people, typically so that they come to me. Why do you hate me?

Also greed is that "you desire something greatly that others have" Of course sometimes I catch myself from this sin, but never has the object of the greed been money or anything that money can buy. How about your greed? You ever wished to have something that does not belong to you?

I feel I must reply, because I don't think you are getting my point. It is as if we are talking past each other. You keep repeating the reasons you like Monero, and I keep trying to explain that is irrelevant to my point.

I had written that you picking the winners in the market at a nascent stage reminds me of China's solar debacle. You are not even close enough to the technology to make such determinations.


The $trillions are not going into crypto-currency but rather since the peak of silver and gold in 2011, been shifting into real estate and stocks (mostly in the Five Eyes nations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) who allegedly made an unpublished central bank pact (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=365141.msg8621544#msg8621544) to raise interest rates and stop QE). Armstrong has explained why. It is about international capital flows and liquidity. Bitcoin (and certainly not Monero) will not have enough liquidity within the requisite 2 - 4 years until collapse.


There is no lack of experience (I know I haven't built investment companies as you have and I know it is not relevant to what I write below). I understand the utility of trying to pick solid efforts, then rallying capital and inertia towards them.

Nascent stage developing mass appeal software projects is precisely my area of maximum expertise. Applying your model of building investment companies to this arena is bizarre and mismatched to what makes the development and discovery process work. And I surmise that is why you are running into friction.

There is a scenario where you succeed with that strategy with Monero, and that is where nothing else sufficiently earth shattering comes along that renders it irrelevant and unable to compete. But even within that limited success you may attain, it is very, very unlikely that Monero as refined by a committee will ever do anything earth shattering. For example, the genesis of Firefox was a teenager Blake Ross (http://sayaksarkar.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/from-netscape-to-firefox-the-story-of-mozilla-firefox/). He revolutionized the entire internet browsing experience. He is humble and downplays his role, but you as an investor should not. It is difficult now to find an article that accurately describes the leadership role Ross played at the crucial early stage. I had read about this long ago. Now most of the information paints it as a collaboration between him and Hyatt (and later others). But the fact was Ross drove the idea. Hyatt was a Mozilla/Apple developer who had been around a long time (and he and I fought some about his XUL ideas, etc, also I fought with his comrade Ian Hickson who is the lead on HTML5).

Don't get me wrong. Engineering refinement is extremely important, and one guy can't do that by himself. But the design and idea generation that defines the revolution never comes from a committee; I can't think of one example where it has.

So my point to you is your model of discovery of the creative ideas and developer that will change the world is wrong. In order to find that you have to look for raw talent, unrelenting drive, and luck of the draw. You can't play if you expect it to be all so well structured and visible.

It is a game of chance. You have to play as you do those real-time games of chance that you regularly score higher than me on.

Monero is safe and secure, but probably limited upside. There are other chances you might neglect because you want to only roll the dice on that which you can see with top-down clarity.

And this forcing-to-have-the-answer is what is alienating the Monero investors from the community-at-large. Monero has not swept the anonymity feature. There are many competing efforts out there and more to come. And ring signatures is not the end-all and be-all of anonymity. Plus anonymity is not even sufficient by itself to make a big wave of adoption.

People are here because of the excitement of the unknown. They don't want some top-down castle government dictating what is possible and impossible in this world of exciting possibilities.

It is not your 1% they hate, it is the way you try to lock everything down in structured molasses and don't embrace the world of possibilities that makes them feel you don't deserve to keep that 1%. And I believe they are probably correct. But randomness will obfuscate the outcome.

I don't think people (well at least not me) are jealous of you having the insight to invest in Bitcoin and change your wealth status. We are watching you do what most people of new found wealth do. They change what made them successful (the creeping from risky to later assured investment in Bitcoin) and become married to safety and controlling (erroneously applying a confirmation bias thinking that all those investment companies they did before the Bitcoin investment where relevant). Your Cryptocrypt forum had like 400 members in 6 months and this Bitcointalk.org wildwest probably gets that many signups in one day. You can't shoehorn a free market into a top-down structure voting system of ranks of competencies. The communication overload makes it impossible to scale top-down organization out to creativity which is born in the small from the large population of chance (http://unheresy.com/Information%20Is%20Alive.html#Algorithm_!=_Entropy). For example, I couldn't communicate all my ideas about crypto-currency to you even if I wanted to, much less trying to convince your investment board. I wouldn't even bother. Much better to drive adoptionally virally then much later you realize you missed out because you expected a Cathedral.

For example, why are you so harsh on BBR? It wouldn't hurt you one iota to send 0.1% of your capital towards his coin and boost his chances. More competition with Monero is better for you (makes your Monero devs less complacent and smug), and then you become a hero in the community rather than a villan. BBR's efforts are helping Monero since many of the source code commits get shared between the two efforts.

This arena is more like a wildwest Bazaar. Your (desire to reform it into a) Cathedral style is incompatible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar) with the open source and creativity.


As hard as you will try to avoid scammers, even your own group is profiting on your dependence on them. When you marry yourself to something, it can attract flies and also your "wives" can become complacent (and later demanding).

I heard you were ready to defend the Monero price with a stash. When I heard that I thought of how a couple that is headed for breakup, often try to make a baby first to double-down, e.g. Jason Hommel (http://www.silverdoctors.com/silver-guru-jason-hommel-arrested-for-assault-child-endangerment/) who is now a relative pauper (https://www.kitcomm.com/archive/index.php?t-129082.html) after once had 200,000 oz of silver and $12 million in pink sheets mining companies.

I actually advised you to not buy the castle and I advised Hommel not to buy that $1 million mansion in 2007 and not to make the baby. He opted to double-down and have the sure outcome.

(I should talk about my own mistakes, but don't have time to explain and it would muddle this post)


If you were speaking to me, you are incorrect. I am competent.

If someone's gonna own 1%+, who'd be better to have it than the dev(s)?

In a sense, this is an old difference-of-opinion story. :) Sorry that you took his take personally, Melbustus, but kennyP has a global-level point. For the record, I've implicitly defended guys like you, even though I looked into Bitcoin in 2011 but got scared off by all those hacking stories (The scaredy point for me was keylogger malware; I got logic-trapped and was either too skeered - or too proud - to join Bitcointalk in '11 to ask for help. I didn't jump into altcoins until I got Raxco's PerfectGuard.)

As a (personal) result, I have no envy of you guys and surprisingly little regret. The way I see it: had I pursued that alternate course, I would have either been: a multi-millionaire; robbed; a theoretical 'multimillionaire' ensnarled in the Gox bankruptcy; or, someone who took the bird in the hand in '12 like so many others. There's really no way to tell that's not essentially mental masturbation. So: the way I see it, there's really no point in worrying, fantasizing or whatnot. What was done, was done and that's that. Might as well enjoy what you've got; you'll certainly have no complaints from me!

But to get back to kennyP's point: he's essentially saying that you and the other whales are specialists. The trouble with specialization is that there's an inevitable echo-chamber effect within the specialty; at a minimum, it shows up in 'expertitis': using jargon terms as if they were all defined in a basic high-school-level dictionary. No worries, in and of itself, but specialists who strike it 'lucky' [<--- pls note inverted commas] tend to yield to that ole debbil that lurks in all of us: namely, vanity. Many are the specialists who, after getting fortune and prominence, fancy themselves as experts in politics plus the entire field of which they're only a part. Case in point: Paul Krugman.

Had I taken that opposite course and had gotten 'lucky', I'd take that lottery-winner categorization as a cautionary tale. One of the open and sad secrets about the lottery is that the typical jackpot winner blows his or her wad in about five years. The reason why is important - and it does pertain to kennyP's point. Many of them fancy themselves to be skilled and shrewd businesspeople stuck in dead-end jobs. If they only had the bankroll, they'd become loaded and esteemed! The world would finally know their real selves!

So, they start up or buy a small business like a restaurant, bar, or whatnot and spend lavishly on it. And within five years...

Anyhoo: to get back to the point, all of Bill Gates' billions can't erase his social maladroitness [which to some extent I share.] All of Warren Buffet's billions can't change the fact that he's been flat-out wrong about Bitcoin. All the wealth that an old-style goldbug had shrewdly accumulated in the 1970s in no way prepared him for the 1980s, when gold collapsed and stocks (and bonds!) became the place to be. And...

If you need a little peace of mind, Melbustus, this might help: 'luck' is really a myth - a thought-sparing heuristic for people who have neither the time nor the inclination to get to the truth of the matter. We all use myths of this sort to one extent or another to get us by in our everyday lives, else we'd have no time to act! You can content yourself with the empirical fact that people prone to use the myth of 'luck' are preponderantly people who won't make much of themselves socio-economically. In an important sense, they've installed their own glass ceiling. 

Thanks a lot! Just downloaded both.

With the high regard that I have to some devs of some coins, in economic matters I trust much more those who have actual success to show in being shrewd with money - entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, self-made men, the ones that have not succeeded by bootlicking governments, but who rather have a track record that governments have continued to attack them, closing their businesses, confiscating their assets, accused them in court on charges based on their own anti-competition laws, yet they have not lost heart, and still have an unwavering spirit to accompish what yet needs to be accomplished. The type Ayn Rand wrote about. The little that we must yield to central management of any kind, I would like to hand over to these men. If there are concentrations of private wealth in this world, I would sleep most happily if it is in the hands of these men.

I feel that you are needlessly patronising me. I try to find a place to function to the best of my ability, and in this case a little bit of creating that place also. This way I am happiest, and most productive. Not all the world needs to embrace the result, and as you said - potentially it does not even scale such high. It does not mean it is wrong, or even waste of time.

If you feel that I have tried to control you against your wishes, I am sorry. Every help that I have offered has come from the blessing I have received by being in Bitcoin in the right time.

You continue the miss the point. Capital in your hands is useless in this arena because you can't develop what we need. That capital needs to be out chasing those who can develop it. Spreading it around more gets it moving and not buried in a useless vault.

---

You are not controlling me. I am trying to give you feedback on the question you asked in the OP.

I don't really have a problem with what ever you do. Only you can win or lose, it doesn't impact me what you are doing.

I am trying to explain that your confidence in your ability to select the winners and losers at the nascent stage of development is misplaced. You'd be better off with scattershot than concentration.

But alas, I have to let go....

...this is my last post. Seriously.

Good luck. We will be in touch in private communications in the future.

Thanks for the link. Again, we're seeing "History Repeating (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE_1tCasi_Q)." Really, it comes with democratic capitalism. Both parts encourage people to think that they're stakeholders in anything they take an interest in, and they're typically not discouraged because  they're sized up (at a minimum) as potential customers or users.

"There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative ‘solution’ is ruined by misalignment of incentives."

+954.  no idea what this has to do w crypto but soooo true

r u irritatingmint or just imprsonting him?  u do a good job if u are.  accuse castleman of being a warlord with knights ramming top down w monero then later saying something about yabbering democratic masses is the problem.  aren't those two opposite things?? ???  :-\  ::)

good to see you back  :-*

I'm rather new in all this but i'm starting to see some patterns that i'll share here. My intention is not to offend anyone but i'll be honest and to the (my) point.

First i'll put supporters of different cryptocurrencies in two major groups
1. Old school investors, think of Wall Street investors as representatives
2. Little investors, that represent the ppl
And when you think about it these groups are naturally opposed, at least atm.

Will not comment the first group too much as i do now have experience in that, but whole CN concept (egalitarian mining and whatnot) is intended to serve second group. It is not surprising that original CN folks does not like the first group, and it should not be surprising that a lot of average Joes will have more sympathy for the second group. That is naturally because CN folks didn't invent second group, they just recognized it.

Another, and more dubious, point is the privacy oriented monetary platform does not mix with first group as well as with second group. Will not explain this, just think about it for a moment. One could stretch this so much to claim that first group and privacy for ppl is a oxymoron, but that is just a stretch.

And now something completely different, i personally liked XMR to the point when shilling and FUDing e.g. BBR surpassed my limit of a good taste. It may be the point when some e.g. DRK supporters switched to XMR, wouldn't know. And i do not claim that my good taste limit should be general, but my feeling is that XMR is going in to direction which looks like the reason why ppl were drown to cryprocurencies actually.

That are my 2 Sats

EDIT: At the average the first group is much more aggressive and thinks that clear winner is a must to see, yesterday. Second group is more inclined to idea to have something that works good, and consequentially like idea of few CN projects at this early stage as this will bring healthy competition and develop whole CN tech much faster. There are just basic differences of those two groups

EDIT2: I personally like the Darwinian process at work in CN, maybe even few projects will survive on different niches, which shouldn't be a problem if there is frictionless conversion between the coins, with SuperNet and OpenTransactions. And rpietila, I think you are correct person, do not take this post personally

I am also a business angel, funding people's things ever since 2004. One of the reasons I bought the castle is that people wanting to have funding can come there and make their way to my presence. After some time, I may discuss with them about financial cooperation. Such deals have already been done on these "castle terms" and results are expected to be announced in this month.

This is the way I want to make business and yes, many try to approach me via other channels and start communication by asking money, a loan or whatever. I try not to be rude towards them but the answer is "no", because there is no way for me to evaluate the other guy that way.

I am fine if you don't want to come to my castle but that is the necessary condition if you want to deal with me. Good thing is that world has millions of people with more money than me and you can ask them instead.

Exactly. And why wouldn't you want the devs to have sufficient financial motivation to continue their hard work? This is a very odd idea and goes against capitalistic principles in my opinion.

Not to mention there are coins other than Monero that the devs own less than 1%. That's a fact. In fact it's often been a problem with coins that devs not having sufficient stake in their own currency often need to focus on other things in their life in order to make a living and pay their bills.

That why they premine 80+ % and cripple the PoW, because they believe in egalitarian mining?



That is again absolute non sense, every big company wants to move money around anonymously and so do investors.



I am not sure what you talk about here, it´s pretty obvious that the other side is in no way better. XMR is by far the the CN coins which gets attacked the most without a concrete reason.

Now that you mention it...that's a good idea for a sneaky kind of evangelism to the bureaucrats. "Join the Wild Wild West in the safety and comfort of your own home! Live a little! Feel the excitement and peril! Learn what you can while having a Wild West blast! And PROFIT!"

Some of this has been discussed by Monero "enthusiasts".  One very possible reason for the lack of a "takeoff" is the fast emission.  One thought is if the devs can get the core functionality done in time:

-database overhaul
-code rewrite (clean up C mess etc.)
-harden code
-gui
-etc

the declining emission rate will slingshot the price up quite a bit.

What is the "in time" mean?  Are there any estimates / timeline goals for any or each of these things?

The database overhaul is required because the blockchain size is starting to be too large for older computers. I don't know thew exact amount of memory required, but my Windows box with 8GB of RAM had problems loading the blockchain over a month ago. I had to close all other apps in order to succeed.

The database size will eventually be too large for Windows with 8GB RAM (possibly Macs also). If that happens, new users with those specs will not adopt and current users may look for something else.

Pretty fucking obvious to me.


Obvious doesn't mean correct, but it often is.

However, I also don't think the motivations are that important. If Monero continues to succeed, it will eventually become a target for more attacks that are financially motivated (this last one could even conceivably have been carried out by a financially motivated independent actor, but I doubt it), and also attacks by non-financially-motivated enemies with far greater resources. By attacking us now they are doing us a favor, since the early hardening makes for a much stronger technology later, when it really matters.

I was referring to privacy for ppl. You are right, there are two groups needing privacy for different reasons. Tnx.

Rest i will not comment, except that you could see that there is scamy and non-scamy part of CN folks if you would pull your head out of the sand.

And that is shilling i'm talking about  ::)

You made money - amount not disclosed - from buying bitcoin in 2011. You are referred to in your country as the man that made money by buying bitcoin in 2011. So you got lucky, and you might want to play entrepreneur, but you're just a guy that bought bitcoin in 2011.

How is that a strawman? It's innuendo or inference at best, based on there being no demonstration of anything else in the closet, but plenty of talk and rhetoric regardless of that.

Taking things out of context like you just did, actually puts the strawman tag on you.

Utterly pathetic post, especially as you showed no reason to believe that a one-off success is reason to attach being "clever" to it.

You're a walking Fallacy, so I suggest you keep quiet.

I've noticed that many of the hardcore Monero "fans" have difficulty distinguishing between throwing out possibile scenarios to actually asserting such possibilities are not actually possibilities, but truth.

Unbelievable ignorance.

That to me says that these so called Monero "fans" are open minded and thoughtful, not zealots.

Personal attack, no substance, very much expected.

Really? I think you need a lesson or two in logic.

We start with swans, then it gets interesting, and hard.

Anyone who speaks of unqualified "truth" outside of mathematical abstractions is a zealot in my opinion, but maybe I misunderstood what you said.

Of course it's possible.  I don't know how and if I did I would never be that malicious.  But I'm sure there are those that could succeed at destroying it.

A better question is how did this thread grow to 7 pages when the answer to your question can be answered with one word.  YES

Done in 127

Even though it's not sure whether Monero is getting any heat from the other CN coins.
Maybe one of the reasons is that whole story with the ByteCoin devs, which are allegedly
also behind some other CN coins?

Is that flame war with Darkcoin still ongoing? I haven't been active for a while, but beginning
of summer I had the impression that there was much attacking going on between the two
communities (both directions).

Slightly OT: what happened to Darkcoin since? Seems to be quite silent...

Sorry guys, Monero killer-
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=681725.msg8754756#msg8754756

Chandran signatures?  Seems good...
Premined?  Fail.
Proof of Stake?  Massive fail.

Wake me up when there is a fork that is 100% proof of work and 0% premined.

200K premine on 20M coins is nothing. The ledger is out in the open and those funds are only being used for the coins promotion.

I have no worries with a small premine, better then devs taking off with a 300 btc ipo?!?

Also, POW... that's so 2012. We're starting to think out of the box, no need to use all that electricity to mine coins anymore.

Anyway, I'm not here to sell anyone on xst, just pointing out that monero has many flaws and XST seems to have the solutions.

Sorry, nonsense.

Typical mix factors on ring sigs used in Monero are 3-5. Which means this technique reduces size of the ring signature portion of a transaction (not the rest of it) by something between a factor of 1.7 to 2.2.

What this will do is make it feasible for larger ring signatures to be used (say 10-25) in the same amount of space, improving untraceability. Monero will very likely implement this at some point (we've already had our cryptographers looking at it), which means it makes Monero better.

So the improvement is certainly nice, but its not a live or die difference at all.

And no it doesn't at all address the long term issues with blockchain size. If anything BBR's solution to that is better, and I say that a member of the XMR team, not the BBR team.

One last attempt to explain how I see that the rich buys club is incongruent with the future.

I could summarize all my posts in this thread with the following outcome in the movie Braveheart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdlL65LD6I4

You really should watch that and see the unexpected SWAN impale the rich boys British at the end.


Sorry that is just a constant size reduction and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ring-signatures can't be pruned, except by some other restrictions such as an expiry on coins.


There IS an obliterating black swan (i.e. Taleb's unexpected long-tail statistic event (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_%282007_book%29)) they don't see, whilst they be doing busy-bee grunt work of fixing databases for a broken design, making a gui, etc..


And this produced how many million user products?

I have produced (one as a co-developer) three separate "million user" level products since 1980s. With a lot of goofing off vacation time in between (mea culpa).


I suppose this was directed to me as well as any others who aspire.

This is analogous to the inefficiency of saying that anyone who wants to buy french fries needs to travel to Belgium.

Those who are truly capable don't need any money. There will be too much money trying to be rammed down their throat.

Money is the weak thing to hold. Knowledge is strength.

My suggestion to you was to be more friendly and spread an insignificant (for you) investments around on all promising endeavors in order to be respected for your 1% instead of resented by the community. Also to give yourself more chance on not missing the swan boat when it comes. Your "Rpietila's Altcoin" thread instead of being a jovial and spirited discussion of exciting developments, should be renamed "Rpietila's Monero Membership Club". I am not upset about it, I am just relaying to you how it appears to others who are not brainwashed by "Monero is the answer".

You've already been friendly to me and you even gifted me 2 BTC. There is no problem between you and I. I am writing to gift you feedback, because in my analysis you are in the process of committing a fail and possibly a mega-fail.

Expecting busy hackers to go through personal interviews with you is I am sorry to tell from the perspective of a hacker insulting. I am not insulted, but I am telling you what sort of actions and attitude breed animosity. We build our reputations by our code, not our talking.

"Talk is cheap, show me the code"— Linus Torvalds

"Those who can't build, talk"— Eric Raymond

Your stance is fundamentally incongruent with the open source movement. Open source projects will spawn more and more granularly (smaller teams) and stored capital and top-down organization will become more and more irrelevant.

This is a virtual new economy; we only need to click a button to make an investment. We don't need to travel across the world. And we don't need to invest everything in one thing or two things, thus we don't need to know all the answers before the questions can even be asked. Creativity spawns serendipitously not as planned (even my own work lately proves this is true, because I didn't plan all the ideas I discovered along the way).

Open source is the odds of large numbers.

"Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow"— Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds

"Given enough experiments, all possibilities are achievable"— Shelby Moore III paraphrasing Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds

Eric Raymond noted that is the only known positive-scaling law in software engineering, i.e. that efficiency improves the more autonomous N actors involved. Design by top-down grouping or committee is not the same scaling law.

We don't have time to waste on top-down bureaucracy.

Warren Buffett doesn't do angel investing, because he wants to evaluate companies based on well established metrics. Angel investing is a game of more risky probabilities. Thus efficiency of scattershot is more important. Angel investing will become less and less like an exhaustive evaluation and more and more spontaneous and small, e.g. KickStarter. Everyone gives a little bit, not one big whale slowing everything down.

The Knowledge Age is the end of the road for large stored capital. The power-law distribution of wealth will shift to stored knowledge. Actionable knowledge will be power-law distributed. It already is. Which is why when you are searching for a needle in a haystack, don't tell the needle to jump to your castle.

P.S. I do want to have friendships and vacation in nice resorts such as castles. But that is vacation time. I can't mix business with vacation, it doesn't work. When I am coding, I need to be where ever I already am where I can code now, not tomorrow, not after a conversation, not after a glass of wine, not after ... Procrastination is the bane of software development. My best work has come when I didn't have material comforts.

I have not taken a shower in 2 months. I haven't washed my clothes, they are stink like a pig pen. I have not been outside of my room nor seen the sunshine except to restock on food.

Time is of the essence.

---

And the competing and equally devastating Apple Plan (http://us3.campaign-archive2.com/?u=c39de4e536e5e86994c064566&id=c0b1873850&e=669377a4fb).

I think for the most part it is not rational, or it is out of fear (of something). I don't own any XMR and I don't think it is a scam I have chatted with you (on poloniex as "addi") and fluffypony here, and have found you guys helpful.
I think one just has to rise above it and with attackers the best, and accept that this is a wild and chaotic place at times. All coins get attacked and it's probably good because to survive, and be taken on by the masses the coin will probably have to a good community and honest unflappable people involved.

If we wish people the best we don't even have to understand why.

AnonyMint:

They are claiming ring signature anonymity with Visa level scalability. A.k.a your holy grail. Is what they say true?

They have no idea what they talk about and didn´t even understand the implications of that Whitepaper.

I guess they need some new ammo for their pump: https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-XST

Yes, the whole thing sounds like typical pump and dump rumors. The whole thing sounds way too good to be true: ring signature level anonymity on a Satoshi based client with transactions one fourth of the size of standard CN transactions? Definitely sounds like bullshit. But I'd also love to see someone like AnonyMint(neutral unbiased evaluation - nothing personal to XMR people) have a look.

Right.  Someone digs up a two-post conversation from the altcoin observer thread and then the next day there's a post in the Stealthcoin thread saying they're going to implement it.  Words are cheap.

Also, they're full of you-know-what when it comes to scalability.  As smooth already pointed out in the AO thread, and I think correctly, the real benefit of a sqrt(N)-scaling ring signature scheme is stronger anonymity through larger mixins.

As it stands, the Cryptonote family doesn't scale to visa sizes even with mixin=2 (for which there's no benefit from the cited ideas), and neither does Bitcoin.

yawn yawn yawn scam yawn yawn yawn empty promises yawn yawn yawn premine.

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

Duly noted and implemented. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=776479.0)

No. This is just stupid. XMR should be a currency, not some kind of company with profits to developers.

Hi.  There's this thing called politeness.  It works even on the Internet.

Second - your comment makes me believe you aren't familiar with the BBR model that I'm advocating.  In BBR, 1% of the mining output is sent to the developer as a revenue source for ongoing development.  This 1% "dev fee" has nothing to do with inflation.  It decreases over time as the block reward decreases.  (It's also subject to a vote by the miners.)

(Edit)
I see you changed your response to this:

Right.  Because high-quality software writes itself!  Woo!  Ponies for everyone!  Unicorns too!

Let me suggest an alternate view:  the 1% ongoing revenue stream is to incentivize the developers to keep writing good software that increases the value and utility of the coin, which benefits everyone in the ecosystem.  Cryptocurrency is not a closed system; its real competitors are things like cash, checks, and credit cards.  To the degree that improvements to the core software allow any cryptocurrency to be more competitive against those established methods of payment, the players in the cryptocurrency win.  Actually, everybody wins -- except perhaps visa. ;)

I like the crowdfunding approach and i think all investors should help with funding, they definately should have an interest in that.

The problem with miners deciding donations is, they don´t really care if the coin succeeds, they will just jump to the next if it fails.

Sorry, DGA. Yes I realized it does not add more to inflation. I edited my post before you posted this one.
A change like this would make XMR like a company, but XMR is designed to be a currency and should be so.

Developers should find other ways to make money, I have already proposed making a Blockchain.info clone and make money from it.
Blockchain.info today is already a company making money.

It would be really silly the more I think about it, if Bitcoin had built in 1% fee to go to developers I doubt anyone would take Bitcoin seriously if this was the case.

A change like this would centralize development.

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Indeed - why settle for a 1% ongoing dev fee when you can instead own more than 5% of the total number of coins that will ever be created?

I'd suggest looking to Linux as a better example of an alternate:  Most of the core kernel development work is done by people who work for companies (Intel, IBM, Google, etc.) that have collectively decided that Linux is so useful they want to make sure it stays around by subsidizing its development.  This isn't a bad model for Bitcoin either -- if, e.g., the exchanges all paid for one full-time developer.  But it doesn't work for a "startup" coin that doesn't have a well established ecosystem.

Perhaps rpietila's MEW is good enough - or better.  But coding takes money, because most coders like to eat and feed their families. :)

Satoshi mined the coins himself, everyone had equal chance to mine. So there is nothing wrong with his stash at all. He had to pay for mining to obtain the coins and so he did.

The Bitcoin Core developers have discussed bounties many times, and come to conclusion it leads to people stressing out bad quality code just to collect the paycheck.

Yeah right.  All they have is  a whitepaper.  Talk is cheap but is good for a pump in cryptoworld.  Nothing more.

(a)  The ecosystem difference between 2009 and now is huge.  An altcoin cannot necessarily do what Satoshi did.  For example, fluffypony and tacotime did not mine substantial fractions of the XMR output in its early days.  Some annoying miner unrelated to the project did.

(b)  Ongoing 1% dev fee is very different from a bounty.  It incents longer term goodness.  I *think*.

But - gotta get back to real work.  I think we're starting to go in circles and agree to disagree.

You keep finding a way to write something so important that I feel compelled to reply.

I see some motivational advantages for this idea also versus a premine, but unfortunately it is insufficient. For any coin that does not have Monero's catastrophic design error of rapidly declining the block reward (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=585480.msg6405763#msg6405763), the 1% will be insufficient when it matters most at the early stage where all the critical work is done before inertia and vested interests prevent further radical improvements (e.g. Bitcoin).

The rapidly declining block reward is a design error because the early hodlers lock up the coin and the rate of velocity of money and adoption decelerate (e.g. Bitcoin and Monero).


Another problem with the developer fee: it is a resource to fight over and it can fund the development of a bureaucracy, e.g. the MEW foundation (just see what happened to the Bitcoin foundation and you can be sure the same will happen to the MEW despite the best intentions and will of the current participants due to the Iron Law of Political Economics (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=984) aka Mancur Olsen's treatise on the Logic of Collective Action).

Also it does give the appearance of being a corporation instead of an open source project.

The best funding model is still (as it was for Bitcoin) for the brilliant creator to take his stash and run after he has made the coin so popular that no one can refuse nor fork it.

Great thing about a premine is all those who obstinately won't buy the coin until AFTER everyone else does. I love that.

P.S. Did you know Satoshi perhaps limited the money supply to 21 million because that is what he could fit (http://cryptonite.info/wiki/index.php?title=Coinbase_account#64_bits_of_Granularity) into standard double floating point arithmetic with each coin at 100 million of the smallest unit (satoshi). Nice excuse any way.


Edit: for the math deficient, note that a slower declining rate of debasement means the relative value (as a percentage of total mined coins) generated by the fee is less early on than for a more rapid declining rate of debasement. And there is no guarantee to the developer that his hard effort early on will be rewarded 10 years hence waiting for the fee to accumulate. Timing risk comes into play when borrowing long to lend short. This is what killed the banks in 2008. Hommel did teach me that future's contracts are evil.

Proverbs - Do not be surety for thy friend.


And when the majority do not adopt the social contract, it is a catastrophic failure. It the money doesn't circulate, it isn't a currency, and there is no adoption. See the Quantity Theory of Money (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantity_theory_of_money#Equation_of_exchange).

Do you have any clue how fucking tired I am of writing that? I have only written that point about 50 times in my archives on this forum. Geez.

Good riddance to this forum! (I know it is not your personal fault, you did not read what I wrote in the past)


Absolutely false!

The magic show is coming soon to a theater near you.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke


Risto is correct, many or most people aren't skilled or well-practiced in math and or macro economics.

I created a thread to discuss coin distributions in general, and you and anyone else here might want to take a look and perhaps voice your opinions on why you believe XMR is the most fairly distrusted coin on the market.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=777213

I normally appreciate your posts but this one is wrong on many levels.

Designing a model of distribution, and that is what basically a block reward is, is a social contract. it can by definition not have catastrophic design errors, because no one is forced to sign this social contract. it basically does not matter if the block reward halves, doubles or does whatever it likes as long as people see the social contract as valueable.

Designs like monero or bitcoin give cash a store of value function which is probably a first order condition for money. I cannot imagine a system in which you would see a velocity without value.

hodling bitcoins or monero is neccessary for giving it value. the argument that they are hodled forever is wrong, because every person will find a point where he is willing to sell. the only argument against this fixed supply design is volatility.

I have to admit that I like bitshares idea of using a token to create a derivative which maybe has a somewhat price stability and is more useful for spending and using, but to call the design of bitcoin and monero a catastrophic design error is wrong.

regarding the idea of voluntarily giving 1% of mining to development I would strongly suggest doing it. the argument that miners do not profit from development is also wrong. 

Out of curiosity, how can a coin be destroyed? Isnt that one of premise of crypto currency that noone can destroy or control your coins?

QFT. 

No mechanism, perhaps, but there are people.  When the extreme wealth concentrators develop their relationships with other people, their hoards tend to dissipate.  This can be done well, in a generous, healthy and growth-positive dynamic, or pathologically, via thievery or guilt-trips, &c, creating unhealthy dependence relationships.


Jealousy is just another face of greed.

There is another reason to contend against the concentration of wealth:  The suffering created by poverty.  The injustice of extreme wealth divergence is plain, and for many of us, quite painful.  When I am in pain, I tend to lash out against the perceived cause.  When the pain reflex, the noble and just cause, and the venial jealousy are all aligned to a single focus, it is a powerful force, and difficult to effectively counter.  The solution is to factor the problem into its facets, and deal with them each individually on their own terms.

It is trivial to burn individual coins by sending them to addresses for which no private key is known.

It is possible to destroy a blockchain by corrupting it irremediably, if you can find an exploit in the code base.

It is possible to destroy a currency economy in myriad ways.  Many have been proposed in this forum.  Others are possible as well, but I am certainly disinclined to publicize any of them.

So we can close the thread? there couldn't possible be any other reason any entity would be against [Coin you invested in], aside from simple jealousy. Investigation over, I guess.  

Also good to see you have not just succinctly outlined the problem, but, provided a solution, which is to simply "factor the problem into its facets, and deal with them each individually on their own terms."  It's a little vague,  but seems easy enough on paper. Now we understand both the problem and the solution. Kudos!  the community should get started on making us all monero lovers asap.

 ::)

I'm now at peace with the fact that people will be trying to destroy Monero forever, I can't see the hate ever going away.

There will always be someone who has picked up some cheap fat stack of some coin and they will always do whatever they must to make their coin and voice heard. These people will always attack Monero because Monero sucks legitimate money from the alt coin space, the trolls will always want that legitimate money for themselves.

All I see, is every Monero hater being some cheap coin fat stacker, and now I understand why Monero is under constant attack. Monero is fair, and many people here do not want fair, because fair doesn't allow them to pump their fat stack.

Long live Monero.

in my language there is a very gentle distinction between cash or money and currency.

by no modern definition in economics bitcoin or monero is a currency, because certain characteristics of a currency cannot be given by definition in a decentralized system.

what bitcoin or monero basically is, is a payment network with a store of value function - this is probably much closer to the definition of cash or money. gavin andreesen uses the term electronic cash nowadays when he describes bitcoin. also the analogy to gold is much closer than the analogy to currencies.

since we are all vain I shortly come to your defamation regarding my economic skills: you are quite a smart guy who has massive skills and coding and great analytical skills. but this does not hinder you from using a theory in an area of application where it does not fit at all. but you are forgiven: even proper economists often fail to do that correctly. Keynes put it this way: Economics is the science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.;)

Can you drop the "I am a victim, they are jealous of me" koolaid? Next you will say they hate you for your freedoms  ::)

To trace back the decline in the interest of XMR and the now ever rising hatefest, one just needs to see how bad the shilling has been. You were yourself arguing with Evan Duffeld the day of the attack about how superior Monero is to Darkcoin in their own thread. My guess is you will no longer be going to that thread. There are other bad examples like this all over the place.

I am actually afraid people are not taking CN as seriously as they should be (and not Monero) because of this excessiveness.

People are losing interest? I don't think so.

Also the tech in Monero is still far superior to Darkcoin, a bug doesn't change that. (Unless the bug is permanent and cannot be removed)

Decline of interest? I don't see that at all. There seems to me to be an increase in polarization. Market cap does not seem to be suffering.

Anything that is technically vulnerable will be attacked sooner or later. This is not a 'proof' of Monero validity (as it seems from some comments here that assume: attacked, therefore feared, therefore good). On the contrary, if anything, it is a proof of the system fragility in the current state.

I just want to confirm I believe every day a bit less in XMR.
The noise level is just too high and anyway, the community seems totally immature and weak.

I also have several problems with the whole CN concept at its core but I suppose that's another business.

This looks like a troll post, because every sentence is a little bit wavering, and the profounding developments that Monero is going through at a breathtaking speed every week are twisted to the opposite.

So either you have no idea what's happening or you don't speak truthfully. Reader decide.

I openly admit I have no idea what I'm talking about. Because I cannot honestly figure it out. It might not be a problem for you... I would consider it a problem!

Here's a good read to get you started: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=721045.msg8477489#msg8477489

With all due respect, sir... your post history clearly reveals that you are a troll. But whatever. To each his own.

The attacks take effort, and there are a multitude of targets. Choosing one target over others implies some degree of perceived importance to the chosen target.

This isn't true, attacks require effort, and the attack that affected Monero could have instead been aimed at any other CryptoNote coin but this did not happen.

In fact the fact that only Monero was attacked proves that you are completely and utterly wrong.

I also have low respect for you mr. dude with a tie.

It proves nothing. Like smooth said, it does imply the attacker had some interest in hurting XMR.

Where are they going wrong? Stealthcoin that is.

Is it possible to destroy Monero (XMR)?

YES !

And you advertising nagging shills are doing it with your "signal to noise ratio" bullshit !

like mentally ill compulsive crazy bag holders who can't help themselves.. picking and picking..
this does not surprise me either..
user Come-From-Above posted a quote before showing the OP admitting here on the forum he was in a Mental Institution.
So really all this obsessive sick Monero harping and spamming sort of makes sense if you think about it..
their sick and they can't help it i think.

You've just bumped a month old thread.

I guess you should get some credit though, you're doing exactly the same thing Moneroman88 did, but at least you're doing it with your own account.

Still makes you a complete dick. Just a little less of one.