The way you "win" is by getting to parity (where neither can significantly beat the other) and there a level playing field so mining is maximally decentralized instead of concentrated with the one or two people with the best miners.

32 bit windows has a 2gb user address space not 4gb and hasn't worked with xmr for months. Don't wait for this.

+1

4) Organize fundraising to crowdfund releasing a faster miner. This is really a good fit since there is an objective way to measure it. "2x the speed on such and such hardware, you get X amount of coins."

Stop expecting people to do free work and hand you free money by helping you mine. It is pathetic and stupid.

I agree BTW that 50% is not atrocious. It is probably still quite profitable over the cost of electricity or compared to most other coins you could mine.

I think it is attractive at 1000-1500. That puts the eventual constant price market cap at about $10 million, or alternately in the millions over the next few years. That leaves room for upside as the gains awareness, recognition, and maturity. That is assuming everything goes right. I also think the coin is a good candidate for the first high profile catastrophic block chain corruption where nobody knows who owns what. That plus the risk it just goes nowhere means you want to see a lot of upside to invest.

I don't even think the price right now is terrible, just not attractive. I think it goes down more as miners continue to dump.

I never wrote an obituary, I said I would consider buying it! But only after the price goes down. Since I first said this, the price has gone down. A lot. It has more to go.

You're missing the point. The price doesn't need to go up AT ALL for the market cap to reach into the millions and easily break the top 100, and even (in a few years at least) the top 10. The new coins will increase the market cap automatically.

The coin a week or so old. In 10 weeks it will have 10x the market cap with no change in the price at all. In two years it will have 100x the market cap, again with no change in price.

I'm not suggesting by the way the the price can't go up. I agree with you that there is potential for increased awareness, hype, maturity, etc. But it is very hard for a large bubble to develop from current prices given the high rate of new coins that needs to find a home every single minute.

I have said that when the price drops to what I consider to be a sustainable price given the constant emission, I will consider buying it, for largely the same reasons you state. It is actually fairly close now, certainly much closer than it was at 5k-10k satoshis when I first started saying this.

This is false. Yes, you are personally identified once you buy the land, car, etc. This would be true even if you paid with magical pixie dust coins that are fully anonymous in every sense of the word. This identifies where the seller got the coins from.

However even if you are forced to reveal your private keys, this doesn't unmask where you got the coins from, at least not in the cryptonote design with ring signatures.

Current market cap is irrelevant given the emission that won't significantly decrease for several years. If you think the current price (or even worse the price a few days ago) is sustainable then you are betting on a market cap in the relatively near term of many millions of dollars.

No I wasn't assuming that, I was merely stating that I don't see huge (and certainly not super-linear) improvements beyond what is readily implementable in Bitcoin as the need to scale presses. As with SPV clients, for example. A few years ago they didn't exist, now they are common. Pruning will likely follow a similar trajectory if needed, though may not actually be needed due to other obstacles both technical and to economic scaling.


Because there is already an installed base of maybe a million or so users, an increasing number of merchants accepting it, reasonably high quality hardware and software wallets, and countless other reasons that a strong network effect not only already favors Bitcoin itself, but also favors approaches that break the fewest parts of that machine. A new technology with small advantages won't overcome that either within Bitcoin as a reimplementation or as a competitor replacing it. It will take very large advantages for that to happen.

The bigger issues I see with Bitcoin have nothing to do with scaling of storage and everything to do with centralization. Mini-blockchain itself does not solve that, although I woudln't rule out that it could possibly enable some complementary approach that might. Cryptonite certainly doesn't though, at this point.

You are right, it probably isn't fair, but it is my opinion. Conversely you could say that it isn't fair to compare an unused coin with one that already has a lot of adoption.


That requires that the indeed effective address different parts of the economic pie, and that each do so in a sufficiently better way a to overcome the natural network effect advantages of one coin instead of two.


That would be all well and good if I believed that Bitcoin wasn't as scalable as XCN, but I don't.

I do agree that other features of XCN may be more valuable, but their value at this point is quite speculative.

I still consider it overvalued, but getting closer to speculatively attractive.

This is an interesting discussion, but not really fitting with a FAQ format at this point, right?

You don't need an account to read twitter.

Cryptonite keeps a full block chain for, I believe, two weeks, after which it assumed that chain forks are never going to happen. Bitcoin pruning would need to do something similar

I might be wrong about the details though. I didn't really study Cryptonite very much after concluding that it adds little to Bitcoin with SPV and pruning, and also after seeing it grossly overvalued relative to its maturity. When the price comes down to something I might consider potentially attractive as an investment I might take a closer look.

Yes, merkle tree hashes are small and not that many are needed.

One hash is required for each complete branch that has been pruned (the extreme being the entire tree being pruned, in which case only the root hash in the header remains). The worst case would be one remaining transaction in a block with a long chain of hashes all the way from the transaction to the root. If there is more than one transaction, then fewer hashes are needed per transaction (the extreme case here being all the transactions present, in which case again only the root hash remains).

Hashes are 32 bytes each. Transactions average very roughly 500 bytes. The block header is 80 bytes. With 8 million transactions per block (obviously impossible with the current 1 MB block size, but let's assume that gets increased, and Visa scale is, somehow, reached), the tree is only 23-deep, so this is 736 bytes of hashes and 80 bytes of header for each unspent output, roughly a factor of 2.5x in total chain overhead. This is the worst case, which won't be reached for every block (some older blocks may be fully spent or expired by demurrage fees, and newer blocks will have more unspent outputs).

There are other optimizations possible within Bitcoin. For example, it isn't necessary to store input scripts once the transaction is "fully" confirmed. These likely require a fork but they don't certainly don't require a whole new coin, nor does switching to a new coin really offer any advantage if this sort of optimization (which is effectively what the mini-blockchain is doing) is seen as a valid tradeoff against security.

There is no fork.

Since pruning does not change the block hash, anyone can just go ahead and unilaterally prune blocks and either store them locally or serve them up to other nodes that request them. The blocks still form a valid chain, and although changes to node logic are obviously needed, permission from pools is not.

A node that receives pruned blocks can still verify transactions and mine on top of a pruned chain. Blocks mined this way are indistinguishable from blocks mined on top of an unpruned chain, so pools can't discriminate against these blocks. Of course concentrated pools can shut out anyone not part of their cartel, but that is independent of pruning.

The efficiency advantages of the mini-blockchain relative to Bitcoin with pruning are quite small, certainly not order of magnitude. Given this I seriously doubt a mini-blockchain can defeat Bitcoin without other advantages.

Yes if there are straggler unspent transactions in old blocks then there will be some merkle branch hashes that need to be kept. Once all the transactions in an old block are spent that goes away and all you have is the header, which is exactly the same as MBC.

This may seem implausible if there are many transactions per block. Except that to keep the ledger from filling with dust and abandoned outputs, MBC suggests (though Cryptonite does not yet implement) some per-account demurrage (idle balances eventually decay to zero and can be pruned). If you do the same thing in bitcoin then you can clean up the old blocks as well. In the end they seem comparable.

It is more than plausible, it is explained in the original paper. On the surface less efficient if addresses are reused (which is often not recommended), but not dramatically so. Both end up with block headers plus UTXO.

Cryptonite has some other nice features though. The 10 year reward halving schedule is unusual, perhaps valuable, and will never be adopted by Bitcoin. At least it pushes very-low-reward issues out several decades.

You really should tag that stuff NSFW specially on threads where people don't know.

Interesting discussion over on the technical thread.

It would be helpful to state your assumptions (GPU cost, power cost, etc.)