Getting the market to accept XMR is important but it's going to be a harder task than most realize. Only BTC and to a certain extent LTC have managed to get this done.

It isn't enough for an application to be developed for merchants to accept payment in XMR. It also depends on the merchant wanting to accept XMR as a form of payment OVER all other forms of payment. A market for XMR has to be developed in close relationship with merchants for this to work.

Take for example the gun market say in the U.S. where its actually legal to own guns. (Now I don't want to discuss the legality of buying guns or the politics/ethics of buying/selling guns but merely using it as example).
Someone can buy guns with cash, or credit cards, wire, or any other traditional forms of payment. But how do you get people to want to buy with XMR?

People will want to trade if the only acceptable form of payment is XMR. So if a merchant only accepts XMR as payment, then people that want to buy that particular product will have to acquire XMR, either they already have it, mine it or buy in on the open market.

It almost makes me think of the Bitcoin ASIC market. People desire Bitcoin ASIC, they trip over themselves at the chance to be the firm to get that ASIC to literally "print money". But many Bitcoin ASIC companies prefer to take BTC as payment only. This creates a demand for BTC where there was non before. This pushes up price but more importantly creates a real demand and use case for BTC (i.e. the need to buy ASIC). Now Bitcoin ASIC companies take in payment in BTC as revenue and can use those BTC to pay people's salaries, equipment, contracts with suppliers, etc. creating a ripple of BTC usage along the way.

Now the question is how does XMR get to have a model of the "Bitcoin ASIC" model? The one I can think of is the gun market example, but only if a large, reputable gun merchant decides to take XMR as the preferred form of payment, where people that will want to buy those desired goods will have to use XMR to acquire what they want, creating the cycle of usage that will create a real market.

One problem is that XMR's price is VERY UNSTABLE. This does not make it encouraging for a merchant to use it, but if XMR can get the support of a major specific sector of the market.

Other examples are the pharmaceutical market or the commodities market.

Of course I'm no economist and my opinions may be way off but I think if Monero can focus on making buy/selling or the transfer of money easier for a certain type of market (like the ones previously stated), then it can become huge.

Yes, this is true but most people that complain about the existence of botnets or whatever are not concerned about the security via mining but rather the rewards gained through mining. If a botnet is mining, it is actually securing the network but people don't like it because they are "stealing" the rewards.

What I was implying is that for a coin to have a future, it needs to focus on its uses in real life. If in 4 years I can buy something with XMR, then it is a success, but if I can still mine it profitably in 4 years that is less a measure of success to me.

Putting so much emphasis on mining is unnecessary to the long-term usefulness of a coin.

Yes, mining is important because that's how crypto ensure a "fair" distribution but this becomes less and less important as time goes on.

Almost all coins have diminishing coin emissions, either in the form of block halving, or the continuous decreasing award per block like XMR but eventually, all mining stops creating new coins and you are left mining the scraps of TX.

This means mining becomes less and less dominant as time goes on and the focus should be placed on the value such network has on facilitating transfer of value or storage of wealth.

Ideally for a miner, they would be able to mine forever, so you either want a coin with unending emission or you jump onto the next pump and dump, which XMR is neither of these.

Although I commend the pool operator for its efforts at supporting dev, pool development is probably not high on priority.

May I suggest you take that 20% and create a reserve fund which will award work being done on a thin client wallet for XMR. (If I'm not mistaken, the same dev that crated pool program is also making thin client)

People need to be compensated, even if its through donations. Why? Because it give VALUE to their work. If you don't assign value, then people will take any work for granted.

Can't you read the 477 pages of this thread to come to a conclusion?

Unless reading is too much of a pain, you should invest in ANY coins.

This is one of the wallets that won part of the Monero open source GUI bounty.

Is DRK still closed sourced? If so, people shouldn't trust it.

The community should only embrace IPOs if all the coins used to buy the IPO were burned instead like in XCP.

Is there any chance for Windows binary?

Isn't "stealth addresses" essentially what CryptoNotes coins like Monero have already by default? It's what the whitepaper refers to as "unlinkable payments" and part of the reason why CryptoNote addresses are twice as long as Bitcoin addresses.

But Monero also has "untraceable transactions", using one-time ring signatures, which other coins are trying to use coinjoin to get the "same" effect.

Awesome work! Wolf delivers again.

Have you benchmarked it yet? What type of speed are we talking about?

Yes, the bounty for open-source miner needs to be increased but I think there needs to be more activity on the miners to get things like this done.

For example, instead of waiting for someone to take up the challenge, how about scouting someone with talent?

I have already tried to convince someone that maintains another mining program unrelated to XMR to try to adapt his miner to hash XMR but was unsuccessful in getting that person to try.

Does someone out there have other connections, know some people that knows how mining programs work and try to adapt an existing miner to hash CryptoNight? (Personal think its easier to adapt an existing program rather than writing it from scratch).

Don't think "Double-Spend Proof" in the context of CryptoNote means protection against 51% attack.

I'm not an cryptographer or a mathematician but I just read the CryptoNote whitepaper and the double-spend protection is with respect to the sender, not the network.

The sender can't sign more than one signature with the same key when sending the transaction.

But the network is the one that verifies whether double-spending of ring signature occurred. And if an advisory controls more than 51% of the network, he can forge the Image Key. The Image Key is what is kept track of to prevent double-spending of ring signature but if the spender is also the same one has 51% of the hash, the can skip the verification step or forge this key, allowing double spending to occur.

The Monero team is doing amazing stuff. Although not enough credit is given, it's ok, the fundamentals of this coin are solid. No need to hype or brag, just continue on building the core.

P.S. are the core Monero team in contact with the CryptoNote guys? Any chance for deeper collaboration or are they just as secretive?

280x 3GB 1.1KH/s (LG 8 R 2560)

R7 240 much better

According to Wolf, his miner gets at least 1.2kH/s on an Amazon EC2 instance (didn't say which one but lets assume its EC2 c3.8xlarge)

"I ran a test, LucasJones' repo against mine. Each had the exact same CFLAGS (-Ofast -flto -fuse-linker-plugin -funroll-loops -fsplit-ivs-in-unroller -fvariable-expansion-in-unroller -falign-loops=16 -falign-functions=16 -falign-jumps=16 -falign-labels=16). Each were run with 21 threads for a period of time over 20min. I can't be more accurate than that, because I didn't sit and time it. They were run at seperate times on the same machine - a 32 core Amazon EC2 instance with 58GB of RAM. The results? Lucas' cpuminer reported 627.58H/s - but only pulled 600 at the pool. My miner reported 1021.73 and pulled an impressive 1.25KH/s at the pool. Now, even with vardiff causing high share difficulties and luck contributing to inaccuracy, this shows a clear 100% increase. I have screenshots to prove it, but before I post them, I have to warn - I was too lazy to crop out my wallpapers, so they are NSFW."

thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=632724

Wondering if you can try to implement CryptoNight algorithm into your miner? There is an open source bounty out: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656841

CryptoNight is suppose to be memory intensive, so it might be like mining YAC.

Just to benchmark, on a single core one thread cheap Pentium CPU, I got 25H/s using the non AES-NI enabled CryptoNight miner. (AES-NI enabled CPU hash is much higher) On your CPU Yacminer mining YAC, I got 55H/s.
The high end GPU only get 500H/s, but for YAC even the low end GPU get 1KH/s at current Nfactor. (low end currently not so good at CryptoNight, r7 240 only gets about 50H/s when I tested)

Even at current N = 15, GPU is still more effective than CPU at mining YAC, but for mining CryotoNight coins like XMR, there is no advantage. But I think its because the code is not optimized.

Can you take a look at this algorithm and see if its possible to make open source miner for it?



Edit: Here is Wolf's open source CPU miner for CryptoNight as reference: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=632724

I'm assuming you can try to decipher how the hashing function works in his miner and try to port it over to your miner.

I'm also assuming that the way that your miner talks to the pool doesn't change even though it would need to talk to a pool mining a CryotoNote coin and not a Bitcoin protocol coin.

Thirtybird, how hard is it to modify your miner to incorporate new algorithm?

Yes, we need to have open source miners but it isn't all about "unfair" advantages too.

Open source allows many other people to make optimizations where the original author might not have thought about or noticed.

Although I'm no coder, I believe that the current CryptoNight GPU miner is poorly optimized. (This is from personal experience, I've mined coins that are much more memory intensive than XMR i.e. 8MB vs the 2MB of CryptoNight and GPUs are definitely still faster than CPU, but again I'm not a coder so this is just my opinion) If it were open sourced, someone else might be about to spot the deficiencies and make improvements.