They certainly could, it's just the argument that someone providing relay services for free is suggestive of questionable intentions does not apply to i2p the same way it might for Tor. Most of the time it is simply an indicator they are an i2p user.


I have no idea how many i2p users there are. I certainly don't expect Monero to drive i2p adoption to a large degree. Monero is just one small application that will be using i2p.


Here is one claim of an 85% success rate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23655243/nat-traversal-probability-of-success-using-stun

There are no dedicated relay nodes in i2p the way there are in Tor. I2p relies on a bit of social engineering for relay nodes, which is that relaying is turned on by default. So if you are using i2p, you are a relay node by default, and it can reasonably be assumed that most never change defaults. Even if a few do, the rest provide a large relay network sort of for free, but sort of in exchange for the benefit they receive by using the system.

I don't think Litecoin can really be 3rd. If it loses 2nd it will rapidly drop a lot more. It's main selling point is "alternative to Bitcoin."

Since you asked, I just looked in the log file on a 4-year old Xeon server I'm using as a node. It takes approximately 0.14 seconds from the time a new transaction arrives until the time it is relayed. I believe most if not all of this processing is single threaded, which suggests approximately 7 transactions per second per core on a 4-year old CPU.

Again, reading comprehension is important. The question was about scaling to the current rate of Bitcoin transactions, which is to say something that a comparable system has been demonstrated to be able to handle, thus a realistic basis for comparison. Scaling Visa rates or anything close to that has not been demonstrated by any comparable system.

Bitcoin runs about 60K transactions per day which is less than one transaction per second. Even allowing for the fact that transaction flow is not constant throughout the day this is not even close to being a serious issue.

I don't know what went wrong but you can recover it the same way. Delete your wallet binary file and recover the wallet from the keys file (or mnemonic word sequence). Be sure your wallet keys file is securely backed up

Then try sending again. Perhaps break up the transaction into smaller pieces.

It is happening and it will happen, but learning on social scales takes time.

As in generations. Eventually people will learn that rain dances don't really work and you are better off with weather satellites, irrigation, etc.

Some are impatient. They want the everyone in the world to figure everything out instantly. Won't happen. Shitcoins will be with us for sometime to come, and only the passage of time and long, repeated experience will ever end it.  There will not be successful operation shitcoin cleanout, ever. Being a control freak rarely leads to actual control.

Monero is going that direction as well, though there is healthy debate about the exact amount and structure. We don't however believe (as bitcoin does) that transaction fees alone supporting miners is a good approach.

I don't agree with zero transaction fees for the most part, but I'm not sure.

That image is just an illustration that uses the common practice in cryptography of attaching alphabetical pseudonyms to the participants. The participants there are just transaction outputs on the network. In reality none of these outputs on the network have names attached to them, and it is extremely difficult to attach such names because the entire network is protected by unlinkability (hard to tell that any two transactions are to the same person) and blockchain analysis resistance (hard to determine various relationships between participants that might facilitate such identification using the sorts of techniques that have worked for Bitcoin).

Or to put it another way, the problem with talking to Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave is that in order to even identify each of those people before you talk to them, you need to go and talk to a bunch of other people, and likewise each of those people is difficult to identify for the same reasons. That rapidly becomes combinatorially prohibitive.

This is easy to explain. There are not "coins" in your wallet, there are "outputs" corresponding to transactions you have received. These outputs can only be spent in their entirety. So if you have an output of 10 that you received and you use it to send 1, then a transaction of 9 is sent back to you as change. As with any transaction, this one coming back to you takes time to confirm. Until that time the wallet reports that 9 of your balance as locked.

Mostly agree, but one comment. Ring signatures do not make up the entire block chain, so using a mix factor of three (approximately 3x signature size) does not mean 3x in terms of blockchain size factors. Perhaps you are already assuming a mix factor of 5 or something, and the 3x number includes this.

It depends. If you think this is going to replace Visa (or perhaps larger, by including micropayments that are currently handled "off-chain" with Visa) in its present form that then that is probably in the PB range. If you are thinking about Bitcoin today and in the foreseeable future then that is not PB.

Anonymint to his credit wants to "think big" and focus on the former. I think that's entirely reasonable, but I also think it is fairly useless for him to be doing so on this forum, because there is little indication that Bitcoin-derivied technologies are going to do that and certainly he is going to get very little useful collaboration here because few if any in the Bitcoin space are currently making any serious effort to implement it.

The rest of us are (or at least the Monero team is) focused on incremental improvements on what already exists and adding value in the near future. So adding some level of privacy to Bitcoin which currently has essentially none, improving scaling even if that doesn't mean scaling to PB, fixing bugs, improving usability and performance, etc. It is entirely possible that all this work will be made entirely obsolete someday by what Anonymint envisions, but it won't be soon.

Usually this suggests sending with an obsolete version of the client that uses too low a fee.

The solution in that case is to get the new software, restore your wallet using the keys file, and then resend.

That's very interesting.

What is also very interesting is how we have two separate accounts showing up to comment on it within a few minutes. The accounts were
created with a day of each other four months ago, and both have the same history of one line posts written with the same style.

What a coincidence!

I agree with both of you. If you could really get "enough" of the users on board, miners would not want to mine a coin that has greatly reduced value for long, so the same incentives that cause altcoin miners (say scrypt miners) to jump around to the most profitable coin would cause more and more bitcoin miners to jump to the more valuable chain as well. Its difficulty might be lower for a while, but that would rapidly attract miners to the superior profitability.

However, in practice this "enough" probably needs to be a huge, largely unrealistic, percentage, probably 90% or more (possibly even something like 99%). I doubt you could even get 90% of bitcoin users to upgrade their software quickly even if it weren't controversial or risky. As I understand it, there are still people using quite old versions. It just doesn't happen.

Anything less than near unanimity from the users and you get complete chaos, with both miners and users unsure of what was happening, what was going to happen, or what they should do about it. The loss of value/stability/confidence in the entire thing would not be restored for a long time, if ever.

Type

start_mining 1

in the wallet

This will mine with one thread. Depending on model of MacBook you might want to use more threads for better performance (though this may slow down other computer usage). Experiment. You can check your hash rate in the daemon window with show_hr (hide_hr to stop it).

The total coin supply for XMR is 18.4m (plus some likely small perpetual inflation to support mining) so the fully-mined market cap is 18.4m times the current coin price. That would be around $46 million. The current market cap is around $6 million so what needs to flow in is the difference: roughly $40 million.

My previous comments about speculative bets apply equally to XMR.

At his point I see all of these coins as purely speculative assets. Meaning people investing in them are doing so entirely as a bet on their future success, where such success likely needs to be fairly large (>>$18m).

So my questions would be:

1. Is there $18m of speculative money that could flow into such a coin that appears likely to become a success? I think the answer is yes.

2. Is the coin likely to appear likely to become a success? I have no idea.

It certainly does not seem impossible.

If the fork is done to add or improve some useful technical feature, and is done well, users would not see it as a negative.

If done for some politically contentious reason like rolling back the chain after an exchange hack, that would be a disaster.