They are, sort of, in the sense that it was reported to run out of memory upon reaching a certain block number (and therefore fail to sync to the entire current block chain). I have not confirmed whether this is correct though.

A work around would probably be to configure 32-bit Windows to 3 GB user space mode, but that is non-standard.

No you have that exactly wrong. Difficulty tells you how many hashes you have to do (on average) for each block (not per day -- your formula is fundamentally incorrect).

Go back and recalculate with difficulty correctly applied per block and you will get different (correct) results.

Interesting perhaps, BCN difficulty spiked up quite a bit after my previous post (maybe the botnet owners are learning something here), but it is still more profitable than XMR.


And what I told you is that if you look at almost every single coin chart, it looks the same. Some have botnets, some don't. The trend for almost every coin is generally a slow downtrend, except when there is some sort of spark to speculative interest that drives it up.

This is the nature of mining -- it doesn't really matter who mines the coins or how many people compete to mine, the supply is fixed and constant. What varies (and therefore determines price) is demand.


Of course. Nobody is praising botnets here. As long as they exist though, they operate within the same economic laws as any other miners. When I say I consider them to be just another form of mining rig, I mean that in terms of economics, not morality.

Who knows. It seems that a coin with built in strong privacy and fast growing adoption (at least for an altcoin) might well be something a botnet owner would very much like to use to store wealth or to otherwise conduct business. I might even speculate they prefer to mine XMR over BCN despite the worse immediate economics because they prefer to store wealth in XMR (and trading via an exchange might increase exposure).  But I have no idea really.

I have exact calculations I'd rather not post but I'll do a back of an envelope here.

BCN block reward in coins is about 6400 times the XMR reward. The value of XMR is about 40000 times BCN. Combined these make the BCN reward worth about 16% of the XMR reward. The difficulty of XMR is about 10.5 times the difficulty of BCN. So by these numbers if you do 1/10.5 as much work you can get about 1/6 of the reward. Better to mine BCN. 

This ignores other second order factors such as orphan rate, etc.


From the point of view of the rest of the network, it gets the job done and is indistinguishable from any other gear. If I owned a computer that was botted, I'd sure have a grievance, but no one else can really tell the difference. BTC or LTC do not suffer from being heavily mined on botnets at times (even currently to some extent in the case of LTC).

Your rape analogy is a bit strained, but to strain it further, if a rape occurs and a child is born, do you continue to associate the child with the rape? Coins are coins, and where they come from doesn't really matter to anyone else. That's what fungibility is all about.

Coins generated are either sold by the miner (almost always in the case of large scale professional miners) or held (sometimes by small scale miners and occasionally by large investors who have their own mining operations). That is the distincton that matters in terms of economics, and even that one doesn't always matter (if there are investors who prefer to buy than mine), as I explained earlier.


No.

By this logic a "neutral" allocation would be 99.9% in fiat (denominated assets). By choosing bitcoin at much more than 0.1% of your assets you are already actively managing. A lot.

Also, I'm not sure whether the better measure is the eventual supply or the current circulation. That doesn't change the picture for bitcoin much (somewhat over 50% of eventual supply is already released), but definitely changes the relative position of many alts (in both directions).

I sort of agree.

However, the question I would ask is whether distributed global consensus has actually been "solved." Bitcoin has significant issues with centralization (i.e. not necessarily distributed in practice) and also significant longer term issues with how to support distributed mining (if that even still exists at all) once block rewards go away (or drop to insignificance). Finally, true digital "cash" is probably less traceable than bitcoin.

Further, it is not clear that even today mining (costing several hundred million dollars, i.e. a large percentage of total capitalization) provides a robust and persistently useful trade off between cost and security.

It seems possible that in 20 years there will be a better solution that was 50 years in the making, with bitcoin as one piece that fell into place just as others fell into place over the last 30.

I agree with you. The important distinction is not really between botnets and anything else, it is between professional, commercial-scale miners, using whatever equipment they are using (including botnets) and everyone else (mostly small scale hobby miners or people who enable mining in the wallet because they are already running the wallet so they might as well).

All professional, commercial-scale miners will sell most of what they mine, and they will generally mine the most profitable coin or coins (at least, 100% of the truly professional ones will).

Even then, what matters is not so much whether the miners sell, it is the balance between buyers and sellers. If there are enough investors who would rather buy from professional miners than mine (often because it isn't their expertise or interest), the price will still go up. There is nothing wrong with specialization and therefore trade; it is part of any modern successful economy.

Yes, that is exactly what I considered.


Your estimates are incorrect, by a wide margin.

I have no idea why the difficulty of XMR is so much higher than BCN (and others), but it is. Apparently people want to mine XMR because they like the mascot or something, because it has nothing to do with relative profitability, monetary costs, opportunity costs, or any other economic considerations.

I actually consider this healthy for XMR, as commercial miners (whether they are using a botnet or any other equipment -- in case it is not clear I consider a botnet to be just another form of mining gear) motivated by immediate economics are more likely to sell, while miners who do so for non-economics reasons might be mining and holding, or just mining without really thinking about economics. Apparently XMR has a lot of these.

Except this is false. The emission rate adjusted for hash rate (difficulty) is higher than XMR, not lower.

If so, they are apparently losing money over not mining BCN or something else, since XMR is hardly the most profitable coin to mine right now (and rarely is, outside of a few periods during price spikes). Why they would do that I have no idea. I guess running a botnet does not require an economics or accounting degree. Shrug.

In terms of economic decision making,  opportunity costs are usually equivalent to monetary costs. If you can rent your botnet out for $X per day (or do something else with it to earn $X), then it makes no economic sense to mine <$X per day of anything, you are better off renting it out. This has exactly the same effect on decision making as monetary costs of $X/day. More than $X of mining, you mine, less, you don't.

Logically the argument of not having to earn a margin just doesn't make sense, as described above. There is revenue level below which it makes no sense to mine, above which it does make sense to mine. This applies to every botnet and every other type of mining equipment.

This also applies to BCN or any other coin (at least the ones with mining, but especially CPU+GPU coins with limited captive investment). Yes BCN has lower rewards (proportionate to coin supply at least) but it also has much lower difficulty, so you can mine proportionately more of it with the same equipment (botnet or anything else).

Honestly I don't really see much difference between XMR's price action any just about every other coin. It goes down when nothing is going on (and coins which have nothing going on for a long period of time eventually go down to near zero). When there is some sort of development that sparks speculative interest, it goes up. Look across the spectrum of hundreds of coins and you see almost exactly the same pattern. Who mines or whether they are a botnet or not doesn't really seem to matter much.

Your paragraphs entirely contradict each other. If there are actual costs (for renting) or opportunity costs (for alternative use, or even renting out) then costs are not virtually zero. Furthermore anyone who "doesn't earn a margin" has no incentive to engage in the activity, since that margin would be the profit derived from doing so.

Botnets may or may not be the lowest costs method of mining, I have no idea of the actual numbers, and that's the only way to answer the question. Either way there is little to no difference in the economics of botnets (maybe) mining XMR and botnets (maybe) mining any other coin, especially other cryptonote coins such as BCN.

I'm not familiar with blackcoin, so please explain to me how it is more innovative than XMR and how these innovations result in valued added to the end user.

Here's your chance to do a better job than brilliantrocket in forming and presenting persuasive arguments.

I stand corrected. Many blocks are empty but they are small so they don't add too much to blockchain size growth. Though they do add to sync time, and processing latency (both being amortized over a tiny average number of transactions per block).

Nevertheless the block time should be increased significantly, probably not even to 2 but to something like 4 or 5. That is the only way to avoid an unacceptable orphan rate for a decentralized network, or the alternative (close to what we have now) of extreme centralization as everyone moves to the largest pools.

Bitcoin already has problems with centralization. By design (although in fact the block time was not really a design choice in the usual sense of the word, it was just one of the cut-and-paste tweaks that TFT did when he cloned BCN) XMR is far worse than bitcoin.

Also 2x the bitcoin bandwidth will not work. If transactions are roughly 10x as large (ring sigs plus breaking up by amount), that gives 1/5 the transaction rate. And bitcoin still needs to scale a lot to get a large scale use. This page envisions block sizes of half a gigabyte or more: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Perhaps you have more precise information than I do. When I google "64-bit market share" I get hits claiming that nearly 50% of computers were running a 64 bit OS in 2010. I would assume that this fraction has increased significantly over the past four years (for example other hits suggest than nearly all Windows 8/8.1 computers are 64-bit)

Even 32 bit computers can work with 3 GB setting (though that is non-standard)

Most of the current growth is due to empty one-minute blocks, which is not inherent in the design at all, and can (and probably should) be changed to a slower block target. For example, as I write this 5 out of the previous 6 blocks are all empty:


Very little of the actual current growth is due to the size of ring signatures. Increased usage will cause sub-linear incremental growth because the first thing that will happen is that empty blocks will have transactions added to them (reducing chain overhead from 100% to <100%) and the next thing that will happen is that block headers will be amortized over a larger number of transactions.

In some hypothetical future if XMR has transaction volume that is comparable to BTC, its block chain will be several times larger since its transactions are larger. If that happens, the market will have accepted that a constant factor (very likely <10x) of increased chain size is an acceptable trade off for increased privacy of transactions on the chain. I see no way to objectively predict whether that will happen.

I have all of the payment addresses except a BCN address from neozaru. I have PMed requesting it and as soon as that is received I will proceed to pay out.

Try a smaller amount

All cards? I'd say no. A good range if widely available cards is good enough.

As for the official thread with instructions etc. good question.

Re: payment id

Even if the merchant never changes your payment ID at all (or does so in an insecure manner) you can protect you own privacy by designating a single wallet for all transactions to the merchant and then funding that wallet from your "real" wallet using suitable mixing.

I've never been a fan of the pid feature especially in the half baked manner it is currently implemented but privacy-wise effective work arounds exist.