Bitcoin Forum

My idea of a perfect cryptocurrency, in order of importance is:

1 - Secure from hacking etc (obviously)
2 - Privacy by default. I am mainly interested in coins such as Monero, Dash etc. I am new to cryptocurrencies and am of the impression that Monero is the most secure of the top 10 coins by market cap. I'm happy for you all to tell me otherwise.
3 - Transaction fees should be a percentage IMO. This is one of my main issues with just investing in Monero now, I think it makes much more sense to have transaction fees as a percentage of the transaction total. What that percentage should be I dont know. Somewhere between .01 and 3% probably is what is required to be workable.(I know thats a massive range :) )
4 - Inflation - I think there should be either a hard cap of the total amount of coins. Coins with very low pool inflation rates are acceptable to me, but, I would prefer the hard cap (another reason I dont think Monero is quite perfect for me)
5 - I think the idea of proof of stake is better than proof of work for the purposes of just simply not wasting huge amounts of electricity for a currency. However, my current understanding is that there is no particularly secure proof of stake option currently, so, maybe thats something that would need to be implemented later. I guess the question from me here is could Monero (or whatever coin you are recommending to me) switch to a proof of stake later if a secure one came out?
6 - Current market cap, I dont want anything too small and obscure.
7 - Good GUI's, apps etc for peer to peer transfers etc. I believe this is another current Monero issue, though I do know they have a GUI wallet now.
8 - I am concerned about transaction speeds, though my understanding is that more mining = faster transactions so its an issue that can be resolved later if it becomes a serious issue with higher transaction fees yes? I am definitely after a coin that has the potential to go mainstream in shops etc, so im not interested in any coin that could not facilitate sub 30 second transactions by any method.

So, as you can tell by my post I am currently leaning to Monero but I do have a few issues with it, the main deal breaker being the fixed transaction fees. I think secondly I am leaning to Dash, then ShadowCash (though whenever I look up stuff about ShadowCash I keep seeing the words "scam" everywhere its putting me off)

What do you all recommend, for me and my preferences?

Thanks in advance,
AusKipper.

Monero, Shadowcash, or Spectre, which used Shadowcash's code but improved upon it.  Those would be my choices based on your criteria.

Hi, I think you identified most of the right attributes for a good altcoin.

In my view, you are missing 3 of them:
- Scaleability
- Risk of government scrutiny
- Intentions of the coin creators upon launch (slow start, private IPO, etc)

Your initial thought on Monero makes sense and I take it as good coin.
My concern with Monero is that:
- it won't benefit from any development effect of bitcoin as it is too different from it. All apps have to be developed from scratch which will take time.
- anonymity by default could be the kiss of death if the authorities want to ban anonymous coins. Any change of the algorithm would take years to be arranged.

Don't forget that Monero boomed because of Alphapay onboarding it.

You may want to buy MNR but you could consider others coins like Zcash (ZEC) or Zclassic (ZCL) that have:
- scalability
- optional anonymity
- in the case of ZCL only, no private IPO

MOONERO, NO SAY MORE

 ;D ;D 8)

Monero.

#5 in market cap

No one can see what you're doing unless you let them.

Wanna know my balance? Nope. You can't.

Wanna see my a specific amount to a transaction? Nope. You can't.

Wanna see if you can find me? Nope. You can't.

Wanna not have to worry if your privacy function is 'on' or 'off' like other coins? Yep. You can.

Is every transaction private. Yep.

Functional(fantastic) GUI. Yep.

Can I increase my privacy level? Yep.

Can I have transactions process faster? Yep.

Monero.

There is no ideal coin.  It is not logical.  You cant be tallest and fastest man on Earth.  It is not mathematical possible. Each coins have advantages and disadvantages. So you need to think which advantages are more important over other advantages.  How coins will evolve. Some things cant be changed, some can easily be changed.

Most important in this stage is to have solid development. Without that even currently perfect coin would be worth nothing in few years time.

You could check this little well hidden gem called PIVX. I think it's exactly what you may look for. The more the supply is spread the better it is. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1262920.0

Good luck in your quest.

Thanks for your reply.

I am too new to currencies to have realized scaleability was an issue. Obviously I want the thing to be fully scaleable up to and including replacing a national currency if it was called upon to do so (Venezuela i'm looking at you).

I'm not really too concerned about government scrutiny as long as the thing is secure and private enough to resist to a degree the scrutiny.

The past is the past in for me, not too worried about initial launches etc as long as all the fundamentals are right now.

I did look into Zcash prior to my inital post but rejected it for some reason, cant remember why, but I know its out. I'll have a look at Zclassic

Is that like Monero but only for when we colonize the moon? i'm confused :S

I couldnt find it on coinmarketcap either....

(jk, thanks for the reply, still leaning towards Monero for now.)

Looks interesting, cant find out all the information i'm after about it though,

Is there a finite number of coins? According to the link there is a limit in the "mining phase" but on coin market cap the number of coins listed in circulation is higher than that number, and the thread goes on for 288 pages so its probably in there but I dont have time to read 288 pages lol....

Using bitcoin code means its not going to be as private as Monero with cryptonote and ring signatures correct? not the end of the world as long as it is private enough I guess but i'm not positive how private it is.

It is pretty small and obscure, so thats another issue, not a total deal killer but it is an issue none the less.

Certainly one to keep my eye on though

Thanks everyone for the replies so far.

I am still mainly looking at Monero, I saw something called MaidSafe which looked interesting to me but isnt really "released" properly yet (cant host the files) and there is a surprising lack of info on this forum on it given how high in the market cap it is.

PIVX looks interesting, just need a bit more info on it and need to monitor it make sure it is climbing in market cap and coinmarketcap capitalization ranking.

https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/category/safepodcast

This guy made 33 podcasts about MaidSafe.  If you are interested you should watch them. But what is most confusing is that even he did all this I dont think he fully understand what Maidsafe is. Seems nooen was able to explain him so far.

Thanks. I'll do more research on MaidSafe once its actually more released, i'll see how its going at that point, anything I research now i'll probably forget before its properly out.

Have you heard of PIVX yet? Seems like a very promising new coin... focuses on all the right things form fungibility to governance with a purpose... I dove in already and am loving every second of learning I am doing.

www.pivx.org will have a brand new re-branded website online in 10ish days so you'll be able to learn alot then without hunting everything down.. 

Yes, it was mentioned a couple of posts prior, and I did find it interesting.

I did have some questions about it though which remain un-answered:

I have ideal of the combination of these:

1. Bitcoin - as a reserve of the world currency
2. Monero - as the most anonymous coin
3. Decred - the most advanced governance in crypto space
4. Dash - the best PR and marketing.
5. Magi (XMG) - the most friendly community.
6. Ethereum - the world supercomputer, smart contracts and dapps.
7. Waves - fiat gateways.

i don't like the third point about the transaction fee being at %, because if i want to send a big amount i would pay a very big fee, like for example sending $1000 would result in $10 in fee, if you want to put 1% for the fee
The other point about pos vs pow, pow is better because it is backed by real power and electricity, pos just incentivate the dumping on the market, why holding if you get coins for free each day?

 8)


you should always come and ask your questions on the main PIVX topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1262920.0), the devs are so gracious and kind, what ever the questions. But I hope that I will be able to answer you simply.

there was first a mining phase (PoW) like bitcoin or monero where the coin supply grew to (Max Coin Supply - PoW Phase: ) 43,199,500.

Then as you can see the coin went PoS (a few months ago) and since then the additional incremental supply is decreasing regularly to

PoS Phase 1: [blocks 259201-302399] 50 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (Complete)

PoS Phase 2: [blocks 302400-345599] 45 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (Complete)

PoS Phase 3: [blocks 345600-388799] 40 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (Complete)

PoS Phase 4: [blocks 388800-431999] 35 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (Complete)

PoS Phase 5: [blocks 432000-475199] 30 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (Complete)

PoS Phase 6: [blocks 475200-518399] 25 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (Complete)

PoS Phase 7: [blocks 518400-561599] 20 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system) (In-Progress) (where we just entered),

as you can see it's planned to go to infinity :)


PoS Phase 8: [blocks 561600-604799] 15 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system)

PoS Phase 9: [blocks 604800-647999] 10 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system)

PoS Phase X: [blocks 648000-Infinite]   5 PIV (90% distributed to staker and masternode - 10% available to budget system

Remember in PoS there are transactions fees but they don't go to stakers or masternodes, as such it's necessary to have a flow of new coins to get the system going. Actually there is around 1450 masternodes (http://178.254.23.111/~pub/DN/DN_masternode_payments_stats.html) and growing with a chance to get a "block" Expected Payment per Masternode: every 1.01 days. which means that the 5 would be splitt between the masternode and the staker meaning around 2.7 which is 0.027% return on your masternodes daily  (because the rate of splitting between staking and masternode evolves too).

the actual supply is 51833610 DNET with a return of 11 DNET daily per MN (of 10k). As you can guess all depend of the number of MN of stakers :D.

Good luck in your quest. again, Arvydas77 is into something with no1 :D. but PIVX as all it takes to be the real no2. will see as it's just the beginning.

Please join the main topic here, or the slack

These two are in direct conflict with each other. A privacy protecting coin reveals no information about transaction amounts, and therefore cannot make fees dependent on them.

3 is really a bad idea...

I suggest that you do not buy any XMR (or any other currency) until you do a lot more research.  As others have pointed out there are some problems with some of the criteria you are looking for (for example in terms of how they may impact privacy or scaling).

I suggest you start by looking at this site with 100+ Q&A already

https://monero.stackexchange.com/

There are also 30 or so questions comparing Monero to other alternatives based on some of the criteria you specified:

https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cryptocurrency-comparison

If you have more questions, please ask them on Stack Exchange!

Take a look at Ardor (ardorplatform.org). It is still alpha (testnet only) but is perhaps the only one that can fulfill your requirements - with the exception of point 3 (it has variable transaction fees) and 8 (~1 minute confirmation time), and it has an a little bit weaker privacy mechanism than Monero, but with Coin Shuffling you should be OK. It is proof of stake and secure (it doesn't need checkpoints like Peercoin-based currencies).

Its predecessor, NXT, has almost the same features, but will soon be outdated when Ardor releases.

A comment to your requirements 3 and 8: Fix "percentage" transaction fees will lead to spam if the currency grows and to scalability problems. Very low confirmation times lead to worse security. For example, a coin with a 30 second block time won't have even the same security with 20 confirmations than one single 10 minute confirmation in coins like Bitcoin, because the risk of orphan blocks is much higher.

Thanks, I havn't heard of a couple of those but i'll look them up shortly. I thought Dash had one of the best, if not the best government structures so maybe i'll look up Decred see how that differs.

If the transaction fee is a fixed fee and the value of the currency skyrockets, suddenly to  buy a $2 cup of coffee you have to pay a $10 transaction fee.

Current systems (PayPal, MasterCard, Visa) use a fixed fee percentage hybrid system, but I think just a percentage is perfectly viable.

In my idea of the PoS perfect coin you would only recieve "free" coins if you where processing transactions (thus earning the fee), so, noone with a really low end machine sitting around holding the currency would be receiving any free coins. Maybe what I mean isnt a PoS but something that doesnt exist yet, where the people who process the transactions and keep the network secure are the ones paid, using the transaction fees. I dont think you should get free coins for simply holding them in a wallet.

Like I say i'm new to cryptocurrencies so maybe I have my terminologies confused, thats why i'm here :)

Alright, that was kinda too confusing for me to follow perfectly lol, but the gist of it is that there is an unlimited coin supply with gradually decreasing inflation over time. Kinda not ideally what i'm looking for but as I said low inflation (ie, Monero) is acceptable, but I cant really figure out from that if it is low inflation or a bit too high.

Regardless, at the moment, it is still too small and obscure for me to be super interested in, but I will continue to follow PivX for a while at least.

Decred is far better at governance than DASH. In fact Monero is better than Dash at governance. Not just according to Monero community members that have witnessed multiple large scale failures for expensive masternode voted budget items but in the eyes of Charlie Lee, creator of LTC:

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/lamassu-update.10266/
https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/825138178591821825

I'm pretty sure if Monero has a way to obscure transactions without anyone know who is sending transactions or how much they are, they can obscure the fees too. You may know someone on the network has just transferred a transaction worth $x, but you wont know who at all.

You didn't elaborate on why you think 3 is really bad idea, and noone as yet has given me what I think is a reason that would make percentage based transaction fees an insurmountable problem.

I have a feeling that who has the best governance could be debated and argued forever with no clear winner ever being determined, and its something I haven't really looked into as much as I probably should as yet.

Transaction fees should be the cost to store the data and has nothing to do with the amount being transferred.

Anonymity coins need artificially and excessively high (fixed) fees in order to prevent spamming the anonymity sets as a way to unmask the anonymity.

Thus anonymity coins need to reveal the amount of the fees.

I have already done a lot more research on crypto-currencies than I did for any of the stocks I have ever purchased lol... and I still haven't decided yet.

I'm still leaning Monero, but didnt buy any as yet, still researching, if Dash over-takes it in the next couple of weeks than that will definitly throw a spanner in the works, but probably wont change my decision in the end...

Can anyone just tell me what will happen to Monero transfer fee if Monero suddenly shoots up in value in a big way? can it be lowered? how is it lowered if it can be? That fixed transaction fee is still my main sticking point for Monero.

Did you not read my post? The fixed fee is absolutely necessary in order to keep the level of anonymity from collapsing.

Do you not understand what an anonymity set is?

If noone is doing any transactions then the coin is dead. The percentage of the transaction taken in fees needs to account for the storage of the data etc.

Another way to overcome this that would be acceptable to me is a small "tax" on holdings that goes to miners, ie, every 3 days the equivalent of 3% per year gets removed from wallets and given to miners or something like that, although that may not work because it would make millions of transactions that would need to be processed so maybe I didnt think that through....

I dont mind the bitcoin fee system (the user sets the fee they are willing to fee, the lower the fee the longer their transaction will take), in fact I would probably be just as happy with that fee structure as a percentage structure.

That is largely a function of your capabilities and knowledge, not the project you invest in.

You have to set up a hardware wallet, and follow other best practices.

I am not saying there aren't differences of security with different ecosystems, I am just pointing out that primarily (largely) it is a function of your effort and capability.


In terms of security of the blockchain against 50% or 33% selfish-mining attacks, that would probably be Bitcoin.


Proof-of-work has a tragedy of commons failure without a perpetual block reward. Recent published white papers have proven this.

I will be making an altcoin that has a perpetually shrinking money supply (infinitely divisible so it never reaches zero). I can do that because mine won't be proof-of-work.


Only proof-of-work can remain unstuck without whales. Only proof-of-work doesn't have nothing-at-stake and other problems of Byzantine agreement.

However, I am about to introduce a radical new consensus algorithm which doesn't waste electricity and doesn't have those problems.


Stay away from mine then, as it is currently vaporware.


Dash may have these, but the anonymity of Dash is a joke.


Incorrect. Transaction speed will only be improved with a radical new consensus algorithm. Dash's InstantX is seriously flawed. I found a high school level math probability error in its web page "white paper".


Then there is nothing you can invest in at this time. Well maybe Steem...but there are other issues with it...

Fees are a mechanism for letting miners prioritize transactions and weed out spam; thus the amounts need to be visible to miners.

Your post wasn't there as I was writing that reply that you commented on.

No I dont understand what an anonymity set is, I'm new to all this, I think I said that a few times somewhere.

Can the minimum Monero tx fee be changed in any way? ie, if hypothetically the value went to $10,000 per Monero coin, and the TX fee was still .02 xmr, then using the coin for day to day purposes would be impossible.

Thanks for that, probably one of the best replies I have had so far.

In your opinion (iamnotback's) if you earned an average income and where going to "invest" $1000 on a semi-speculative play (ie, its a bit of money, not ideal to have it go to 0, but not a major crisis either) and you where going to put it into one of the following:

Bitcoin
Monero
Dash
PrivX
MaidSafeCoin

What coin would you chose?

I don't know who does and how the fee is set, but I presume it can be adjusted.

The high fixed fee is necessary to prevent transaction spam, which is especially important in Monero's (and any anonymity coin's) case because:

a) Blockchain bloat is higher due to the large ring signatures.

b) The anonymity set is all the other transaction outputs as fake inputs for your anonymity ring. If all those were transactions of the attacker, then the attacker knows which input is not fake and he knows it is you. Even if the attacker only has a percentage of those fake inputs in your ring signature, he can use this to make it easier to combinatorially factor out who you are and de-anonymize you:

This is my opinion, so please feel free to consult with others. For now, I would invest 80% in Bitcoin and 20% in Monero but that is not a prediction of whether the price will go up or down. If you want potentially more upside (also downside), you might weight more to Monero, but since I think you want to be reasonably conservative then I suggest those weightings.

And I am not factoring in hype mastery, which Dash seems to somehow be very good at. Or maybe they are buying their own token, manipulating the market. I don't know.

And if my project reaches its stated goals and is not just some vaporware and meets your requirements at that time in the future, then I would consider adding to the list you invest in.

I haven't been following Zcash past few months, but that anonymity seemed to be a high quality alternative, but there were other problems with the distribution and such.

Ok, well if there is no way to have a percentage based fee in a privacy focused coin, then I would like the fees to be the same as bitcoins where the user chooses the fee, and if they choose a fee too low then their transaction will take forever.

Thanks for the clear explanation that I could understand.

Also, thanks for your second reply indicating the 20 Monero 80 bitcoin split.

I only threw Bitcoin in there as a "mainstream" alternative, I personally dont like its near complete lack of privacy, so i'm still looking at 100% Monero.

My cryptocurrency investment is not exactly trying to be conservative, its:
1. An educational exercise learning about something I have nothing of, and know little about, but that interests me
2. A thought in my head that thinks "what if suddenly .5% of global investments decide to go into a crypto-currency, or what if a country with a failed currency suddenly adopts a crypto currency, the value could absolutely skyrocket many many %

I have some physical gold, silver, and quite a few ASX listed companies as my conservative investments, so this is more of a "play".

Pretty confident at this point now, if I can confirm somewhere that the Monero fee can be changed by a reasonable method, i'm going to have a go of that.

Yes it can and it was decreased at least one time in past. it will decrease with higher value of Monero. Same as it happens with Bitcoin.
So as it was raised once because of that "spam attack".

I hadn't clicked on that link, but I have now.

I do understand that a major government force of a major power can most likely figure out who users are, or, do something to shut the coin down if they feel they need to (USA gov, Russian gov, China gov, something like that), however I still think privacy is valuable to prevent joe up the road, or small company B that you just purchased something off from finding out about all of your transaction history.

My understanding currently is that Bitcoin does not have that level of anonymity.

Do you know who controls the price? and how?

Is it a vote of miners? dev team? Fluffy Pony has unilateral control?

thanks.

With my design for a "blockchain", there is no such thing as spam. The more the merrier. The entire data doesn't need to be downloaded in order to prove a transaction. Miners aren't subjected to the entire volume of transactions.

Thus afaics the only reason to make tx fees higher than costs+competitive level of profit (or to make them public) is for some groupwise (collectivized) reason, such as needing to squelch the spamming of anonymity sets.

Looks like that already happened.....

Dash definitely has better marketing than Monero thats for sure.

Marketing or market manipulation because a few guys own all the tokens and buy from themselves at higher prices? I'm not sure.

Btw, our discussion about txn fees caused me to realize that there may be another attack that can be done on Monero's anonymity.

Off the top of my head (and I am in a rush out the door to go to the grocery store), if the attacker controls x% of the mining hashrate, then he wins x% of the blocks. When he wins a block, he can pay the txn fees to himself, thus he can spam as many transactions as he wants, up the block limit. Thus he can spam the anonymity sets x% of all transactions and aid in demasking the anonymity of other users.

Combine this with afaik Monero never fixed the problem I told them about in 2014 wherein overlapping anonymity sets hypothetically creates a potential combinatorial solution to unmasking the blockchain.

Monero may not be as anonymous as we think it is.

I warned many times not to assume that these anonymity coins are sound. The peer review is highly lacking. Mostly you've got the same few guys who are looking at this stuff who are also the ones vested in it. And I don't have enough time to spend on doing very detailed peer review and research on every single coin and its protocols+algorithms.

The assumption with the dynamic block size is that most blocks will be close to full with customer transactions (or at least, not mostly empty). If the spammer/miner wants to spam transactions, paying to himself doesn't help because that still displaces transactions from paying customers, so lost revenue.


Neither you nor anyone else has shown this hypothetical actually happens. It's worth asking though, just not any sort of demonstrated vulnerability or attack.

So you are claiming Monero will refuse to process transient spikes in the transaction load? It is sort of like Communism instead of a free market, in that participants have to get in a rationing line and wait. No dynamic headroom. Like Communism, everyone must be equal, and no one can rise up higher.

(Maybe irrelevant or relevant, isn't @ArticMine (apparently one of the designers of Monero's blocksize adjustment algorithm) a Communist at least evident by his stated preference for CopyLeft licenses?)


If I had, wouldn't I have logically sold my methods to the NSA and GCHQ already instead of informing you since ostensibly they can pay a lot more than Monero's community would?

(Obviously smart people can realize I am not necessarily asserting what I would do, but what a logical, self-interested Ayn Rand follower would do. The implication is that the fact it hasn't been shown to us publicly, doesn't necessarily have any meaning/bearing/relevance. It is a game theoretic retort.)

Another issue with Monero's anonymity occurred to me tonight when I was at the grocery store and I was thinking about how can we have anonymity yet also comply with the need to report our earnings and expenditures for government tax compliance. If everyone is reporting, then the anonymity sets collapse and so does the anonymity for everyone (even those who didn't report).

So I got to thinking (yeah all inside the grocery store) that from my work in designing Zero Knowledge Transactions (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1211093.0) (my unvetted design which competes with and predates Monero's RingCT and which is based on Compact Confident Transactions which in theory are more efficient than Blockstream's CT which RingCT is based on), that I am pretty sure we can do a NIZKP (zero knowledge proof) of a total of all payments sent and received using CCT (not sure if can also do it with CT). Thus we could prove to the government how much we expended and earned without giving the government the detailed amounts for each transaction, thus not breaking the anonmity sets.

But then I realized this won't work with ring signatures, because ring signatures require that the sender isn't known publicly. Thus there is no way to prove the sum without revealing which ring signatures are yours, thus unmasking your anonymity.

So I realized that instead we need offline anonymity mixing like CoinJoin. Then I remember that last year in my discussions with @jl777, I had revealed my invention for how to remove the jamming problem from CoinJoin and make them scale and work properly. I specifically figured out how to let the signers sign independently of each other!

So I am thinking I might have the best anonymity solution after all! But I will need to think out the details more later. How ironic would that be if I win in the end against @Shen-noether. Oh how sweet it would be after how he was so condescending to me when I did peer review with him on Reddit. I had pretty much put anonymity on the low priority queue because it seemed like Monero and Zcash had it all wrapped up (and it seemed to me that anonymity wasn't the huge market to drive millions into crypto, yet here in this thread I can see it is important to some investors). But hmmm, maybe they don't! My only interest in anonymity lately (in 2016) was to contemplate how to make it lightweight and compatible with microtransactions. Hence the invention I had sort of explained to @jl777 (but he decided to clone Zcash instead).

Any way, I'd like to get some feedback on the issue I've raised?

P.S. I am going to try to ask someone to vet my ZKT soon, so I will know if my method of removing the onerous "proof of the square" was valid or not. Removing that proof which was added when Andrew Polestra found a flaw in CCT (not my work), was what caused CCT to be less efficient and less viable because it then required huge elliptic curves 768-bit or larger.

I also favor Monero, However, we don´t really know if the early developers still hold big amounts. Many people are saying they do, or at least someone does, and that a big dump is eminent.

IMO, miners are pushing down the price because they have to pay for the costs, and that's the cause of the decreasing value, but I also believe there's someone out there with a lot of coins stashed just waiting for the right time to dump them. And this could wreak havoc on the currency. But, if that is so, why didn´t they dumped the stash when the coin was at its all time high???

Monero was never cheap. So whoever have lots Monero he paid them expensive.  The ones who got Monero cheapest was the ones that bought them on Poloniex a year and a half ago at $0.5.    What you said is so far from reality in Monero case. Monero is one of rare coins where this is not to be worry about. Coins were not almost free when Monero come out. I bought mine like 50 days after start and paid like $2-3. One year latter cloud get them 5 times cheaper.


And what is happening now is exactly the case. Everyone expect BTC rally. So people buy BTC with any alt they have. Alts with huge bagholders dont do that and crash price. alts with many small holders lose price. This will turn around soon.

All technical mumbo jumbo to me (but i'm sure you didnt want my response lol!!)

Storj seems to be doing ok similar to maidsafe but seems to be more developed but has lower market cap for some unknown to me reason.

Proof of Storage seems interesting to me but considering how far down the coinmarketcap index Burst is, there must be something wrong with it I dont know about.

I made two conjectures (and I stress they are only conjecture at this point, not proven facts).

1. The ability to spam a lot of transactions enables the attacker to know the anonymity sets and thus aids in deanonymizing. This is why we have high txn fees with anonymity coins, in order to (hopefully) make it too costly for spamming the anonymity sets. I conjectured that a miner with x% of the hashrate could fill up his blocks with transactions paying the txn fee to himself (since he is the winner of the block as the miner). @Smooth retorted that the blocks will always be nearly full (because of Monero's unique block size adjustment algorithm which tries to fit the block size to the exact rolling average of block sizes), thus displacing paid txns with the attackers would cause the attacker to lose the same revenue as if the attacker was not paying the txn fees to himself. Get the logic? Programmers think this way, with twists of deep logic. Any way, I retorted that if the block size adjustment algorithm works that way, then it means Monero is broken in that it can't handle transaction load spikes. So either way, I found a serious flaw in Monero. It can't be both ways.

2. I conjecture another serious flaw in Monero. Going forward, the only way anonymity will be compatible with a civilized society is that we need a way to declare (and for the State to verify) our tax obligations without destroying our privacy (and we can't trust officials with our privacy as they can be bribed and for example the TSA were caught masturbating to nude xray images from airport scanners). Any form of taxation other than taxing assets owned (e.g. not income but excise taxes) will still require at least reporting received payments (perhaps we could tax VAT only on tangible sales but still the payments might be via crypto-currency). The only way I can think of to accomplish this is to prove in zero knowledge the sum of our outgoing and incoming payments. In other words, we prove (separately, i.e. two proofs) the total of what we paid out and the total we received, but such proofs reveal nothing about the individual transactions involved except which ones they were. Yet note with CoinJoin-like anonymity protocol, the sending transaction is entirely disconnected from the received output. So identifying your outgoing and incoming transactions (but not their amounts) with CoinJoin does not reduce the anonymity at all (except to reveal you did a transaction but nobody knows how much and to/from whom). So I conjecture I know an algorithm+protocol that can do this (and I think I have a solution to CoinJoin's jamming or synchronization weakness), but Monero can't because Shen-noether's (Monero's upcoming) RingCT (or even just the original ring signatures of Cryptonote on which Monero is currently based) do not allow identifying the sender of the transaction. The entire point of ring signatures is the sender is one of many in the anonymity set. Thus Monero's form of anonymity appears to be incompatible with civilized society. But I conjecture that I know a way to do the anonymity that will be compatible with civilized society! This is a major revelation! On top of my recent (unpublished) work to develop the perfect blockchain consensus algorithm which solves all the other problems. So I feel like I am on a roll now, finally hitting full stride with my project plans.



Afaics, those decentralized file storage tokens have no value other than the misunderstanding of speculators:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1801241.msg17956009#msg17956009

Well thankyou everyone for your replies.

I have learned a lot.

I have made the decision that I will go with:

$500 Monero (its the most private coin in the top 10 as far as my understanding goes and I think privacy is an important issue)
$400 Bitcoin and i'll just hope at some point in the future the issues that it has (privacy, transaction speed) are fixed
$100 Dash (Marketing is worth something, and its the only coin I regularly see advertisements for around the place, I know its marketing as a private coin and it isnt really one but I think its mainstream appeal could make it bigger than its fundamentals suggest it should be for a while at least)

So thats that, it will be done soon so no point trying to change my mind now, and I probably wont be back to these forums for a while.

Next time i'm back it will probably be me wanting to dip my toe into mining something, I still like the concept of the storage coins so maybe one of those.

Once again thankyou everyone who replied for your input.

Bye.

I was trying to influence you to not be so overly enamored with Monero wherein you would put all your investment in one coin. Crypto is complex. I think it is very wise to diversify. I like the mix you chose. Reasonable given the info you have, and that you are only putting in $1000 so you can't expend too much time+effort on this.

Personally I appreciate you sharing your process with us. Helps me understand the perspective of newbies like yourself.

^* Also you helped me realize two potentially important conjectures, so major bonus points for me.

More conjecture on Dash:


Relating the marketing of Monero as compared to your point about Dash marketing to mainstream:

I know I said i was going but I have another question that i'm going to ask in a new thread.

Anyway, regarding the above point, during my research on crypto-currencies I saw lots of paid dash advertising, mostly on youtube at the start of videos, but I saw some banner ads, and I know they are sponsoring events etc.

I saw absolutely 0 paid advertising for Monero or even Bitcoin.

My personal belief is that you can have the best crypto-currency in the world, but if hardly anyone knows about it, then it will go nowhere.

There is a thing on youtube somwhere comparing pepsi to coke, in blind taste tests pepsi always wins, but coke sells by far the most volume, because of better marketing.

I know you are planning on creating your own, it might be something to keep in mind :)

I think Coke had better distribution.

For me it is mostly in the logo and fact that I grew up seeing logo on gas stations in the Old South this so Coke is tied into my hot summer refreshing soda (i.e. it is tied into my tradition and familial memories):

https://i.imgur.com/Me4QU8Y.jpg

The Pepsi logo is horrible:

https://i.imgur.com/2NnV19E.png

Edit: confirmed my intuition:



And this is true also, that I drank 4 or more bottles of Coke per day in my youth, so I liked the taste was not too sweet and more acidic:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/rivalries/2013/08/pepsi_paradox_why_people_prefer_coke_even_though_pepsi_wins_in_taste_tests.html

My gf says Coke tastes better. So instead of marketing, it may be that Coke has the superior product and can just keep a consistent marketing and product, which is why they are more trusted and favored.

So please don't attribute too much to marketing.

This applies to pretty much everything, and another important thing is that marketing has to begin way before launch to be competitive.

I as I explained near the bottom of my prior post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1796575.msg17975304#msg17975304), I don't think advertising is what wins but rather a superior fit of the product to the market.

Dash is doing a very good job of explaining the reason crypto-currency hasn't been adopted (https://youtu.be/Tn2s6IHAL4A?t=90) and thus their marketing to speculators is excellent.

But afaik where Dash is failing is in actually solving the problem they correctly identified and enumerated. At the 7min point in the Dash video (https://youtu.be/Tn2s6IHAL4A?t=420), Dash is incorrectly applying a model of the credit card and Paypal advantages over prior payment systems.

But there is no way that crypto is going to be significantly more secure in the eyes of the masses than Paypal. And the switching incentives they propose are not powerful and sufficient motivators for the masses.

I have a plan that addresses precisely this chicken-and-egg dilemma. As I have said many times before, the way to bring the masses onto crypto is to provide something they want which requires or works significantly better than legacy systems in some important way with crypto.

So while we can say Dash is doing a good marketing job of pulling the wool over the speculators eyes, afaik they have absolutely failed in terms of achieving any adoption amongst those outside of our speculation ecosystems.