Sent 1000, bringing my total to 2500.

Now I have an important question: What happened to the


that used to be in the original post?

I want my second crate of diamonds.

It's wrong because the difficulty lags behind the hash rate, but it is a good estimate of what you will be getting over time if the hash rate stays at the current level. You do need to subtract something for pool fees, stales, orphans, etc.

Correction. This is not fluffypony's campaign.

If you are referring to multisig which enables on-chain escrow, that will definitely be supported in Monero. Whether or not the other project's code turns out to be useful or if we implement it another way remains to be seen.

If you are referring to something other than multisig, please explain because I'm not aware of a specific trade escrow feature being promised.

There is no "analysis" in claiming the launch was "very close to perfect" when it clearly was not.


You obviously have not been paying attention. I've recommended buying and paying attention to this coin as interesting and innovative (though I disagree with some of the most hyperbolic claims as to its advantages long term over Bitcoin). Still I'm hardly one you want to question when it comes to recognizing the coin as worthy.

That the launch was not perfect does not invalidate the value of the coin. I've said many times that the long mining schedule and high total supply makes the launch issues -- which were real -- not particularly important, in my opinion. Nevertheless other people clearly disagree with my opinion on this matter and continue to be concerned about it, so I'm going to address the facts as I see them and call out bullshit like claims of a "near perfect" launch when there were in fact major missteps.


If you are interested in discussing another coin I suggest you go to the appropriate thread where you can in fact find some very good graphs showing the relative insignificance of the early mining issues. It is likely that similar graphs can be produced for this coin except that the tooling to do so easily doesn't yet exist.

The game is not over. But if DRK in fact continues to be worth far more than XMR you will turn out to be right. Ultimately though, what you personally give two shits about doesn't matter. What matters is what helps or harms adoption over time, ie the growth rate, and any stigma that attaches to the coin, particularly when easily backed up by hard facts including charts, will continue to hurt growth rate more or less forever. Every one of these coins is currently very small in the grand scheme of things, even including XBT, but certainly all the alts.

BTW, I'm not sure DRK is still much bigger than XRM when considering the future capitalization at the current price (which I have argued is a better measure than current cap), given that XMR is less fully mined than DRK. I haven't worked out the numbers though so I don't know.

EDIT: looks like DRK is currently 1.47x more mined out than XMR, so the difference in effective market cap is less than a factor of three.

Our strategy is always to evaluate changes and features from the other cryptonote-derived coins and decide ourselves whether to incorporate those changes more or less unchanged, incorporate them in modified form, or not incorporate them at all.

Stop your absurd cheerleading. It is a joke already, and gotten to the point where it probably has the reverse effect you intend (unless you are in fact trying to make the coin look bad).

The launch was nowhere near perfect, and the developer has said so. Releasing a GPU miner after a week is about the worst possible approach. If a GPU miner were months away from development, with no way to speed it up, I could see pushing the launch ahead anyway, but for a something a week away, a closer-to-level playing field is much better. This is true not only for "fairness," but also from the pragmatic perspective of getting more GPU miners (of which there is a large number) involved with the coin before the difficulty goes up so much it becomes uninteresting to those operating on a small scale.

Another reason to do a GPU miner at launch is so the developers don't end up looking like they don't know what they are talking about (or worse look like they are being deceptive even if they aren't) when they claim GPU miners won't give much advantage, when in fact after just a few days of optimizing, a cheap GPU is 10x faster than a high end desktop CPU.

"Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

The stigma is the point. Stigmas exist for a reason, which is to punish and deter socially harmful behavior. Fucking up coin launches is not something that can be excused. Even if (and this is a big if) there was nothing fraudulent in this case, merely incompetent, an atmosphere where such things are considered acceptable only opens the door to further fraud (which by its nature is almost always disguised as something, sometimes incompetence).

Coins with bad launches should be shunned and to the extent of their technical merit, if any, relaunched, cloned, learned from to do better, etc.

Why are you spamming?

It is not trivial. We think it is solvable.

However, there is always a work around which is to surround the traceable transaction between two untraceable ones. (In some cases only one is needed.) That prevents tracing, though at some increased cost in transaction fees.

I do not believe that assumptions of rationality are needed here, nor is "the long run" needed. My comments about displaced demand are supportive of the model. That is, an attempt to explain a possible mechanism behind what is ultimately a structural model, not a behavioral one. Perhaps my attempt fell short, but if that mechanism is incorrect, then there must be another one, possibly unidentified.

I do agree that if mining serves to attract participants that can have the secondary effect of popularizing the coin, creating promoters, etc. which then can have a feedback effect of increasing demand.

But in reality, in most cases today, I just don't believe many miners behave as you describe any more, getting attached to coins and such (though they used to, with DOGE probably being the peak of this). I see most miners today just jumping to whatever is profitable, not really knowing or caring what it is, and then leaving when most of the hash rate gets taken over by pros. Look at XCN now, and its only been a week. The top 3 miners on 1GH (the only pool) have 50% of the total hash rate. I'm too lazy to add up the top 10 but that must be a huge percentage. Many of the early miners have already moved on to something else.

Probably not, I don't know, I didn't even start mining at all until later.

The miner in question was still getting a very high percentage of blocks (in some cases several blocks in a row) well into the thousands (i.e. days later) when the hash rate had gone up a lot.

Somewhat, and who knows maybe they really are that brain dead.

But remember at the time Monero wasn't worth much. It was just a clone of BCN. I remember not even being sure that Monero would overtake BCN, though I thought it a good possibility. BCN hadn't cratered yet, and indeed the best evidence of the premine scam may not have been been presented yet. So Monero now looks like it would have been a great target, but at the time it was just another clone shitcoin.

But we can only guess why they don't seem to have mined that much. As I said you can find all the data on monerochain.com. The charts make it pretty obvious.

No it couldn't because:

1. It probably didn't happen at all for the reason explained by drawingthesun a few posts back. Many regular folks were able to mine a lot right from the start and for several weeks going forward. The amount that could have been skimmed off couldn't have been much.

2. The difficulty was low despite a good adjustment algorithm that kept the rate of blocks close to the target (<10% overshoot on the first day, other days probably less). If someone was mining with a high hash rate it would have increased the difficulty. It didn't happen. Take a look at the difficulty chart on monerochain. It barely even budged for two weeks.

3. Even over several weeks the total amount mined was not that high. The TOTAL amount mined in the first three weeks was about 2.5%. Since we know that many independent miners got significant amounts, the amount any secret scam miner could have taken out of this 2.5% total would have been very, very low. Almost certainly well under 1%

That does not compare to DRK, not even close.

In fact I have mentioned that the Bytecoin folks could have mined the other cryptonote coins using their optimized miner. That indeed could have been part of their plan from the start. There is no way to know.

The difference is that the rate of mining was not affected and only a tiny number of coins could have been mined in this way. It is simply not material, certainly not compared to DRK. Monero mined about 0.15% of its supply on the first day.

Was the testnet version stripped of symbols and debug tags (on all OSs)?

Was the PoW design discussed with other people? That could have been enough to put together a rough miner to be tweaked with details upon release. The miner in question did not start mining until approximately block 150. That would have been enough time to finish a miner that was already mostly implemented.

I guess it is also possible that someone with experience and a good library of GPU hash functions and bignum multiplication could have thrown a miner together in 2-3 hours without a head start. That's another possibility I suppose.

It was exactly right if you wanted to maximize the effect of the instamine.

Don't think that scammers are stupid. The best scammers are very, very smart.

In response to both aminorex and AntonyMint, the problem with the argument of mining driving up price is that it also withholds demand. A miner who is willing to hold a coin (or even willing to mine given the realistic possibility of holding the coin) someone who values the coin enough to have otherwise bought it given frictionless exchange. But having mined it, the miner need not do so (or need only buy less), thereby reducing demand (i.e. downward pressure on price).

Equations can probably show that these two effects exactly balance in the presence of constant supply difficulty retargeting, in fact I'm fairly sure of it, but I hate math now, so I won't be one to write them down.

1. My speculations are not "baseless." As I said, I have direct evidence pointing to a day one GPU miner. I do not wish to release this evidence because I think more may come out about this situation over time and I'm happy to let the secret miner make statements contradicted by the evidence, further pointing to deception. And further because doing so may give future clandestine GPU-on-launch miners some ideas on how to avoid detection. However, I might be convinced to share the evidence with a trusted third party, in confidence.

2. Was the testnet version stripped of symbols (on every OS) and compiled without debugging tags? The default Linux build I got from github upon release included debugging tags. If you used this build configuration for the testnet version, disassembly and/or decompilation would have been fairly trivial.

3. Even without disassembly or decompilation, is it possible the PoW could have leaked? Did you treat the PoW as a tightly guarded secret and not discuss it with anyone nor collaborate with anyone during development?

4. I agree with you that in reality this is not that big a deal in terms of the number of coins mined, the overall integrity of the coin and so forth. There are coins where FAR more than 1% have been deceptively mined (82% in one case that comes to mind). However, if people are concerned, which clearly some are, I disagree with dismissing out of hand the substance of their concerns, especially when I have some confidence that in fact a secret GPU miner was used.