I've been somewhat offline but my understanding is that the current plan is to use one of the leveldb forks. The last estimate I saw was at least several months at current usage (after pool fix) to even reach the BCN blockchain size so no immediate urgency to deploy a database but there is urgency to work on it and that work is proceeding.

Please try to submit payment addresses ASAP. I would like to do as many as possible at one time and I plan to make thi first batch of payments in approximately 24 hours

I did not collect anything for this bounty. I collected for the pool bounty (already awarded) and GUI bounty (not yet awarded).

I did personally pledge toward both the ATI and nv bounties. As far as I'm concerned tsiv has earned the nv bounty and it should be paid once someone steps forward to manage the process (I can do it but not for the next week or so) or unless someone has a counterargument.

There is a setting you can change on windows to get 3gb and buy some time.

There may be, as pool operators can configure it however they want, and a few pools may still use the old code that did not delay payments until the threshold is reached (even though this is strongly not recommended). However, you are probably better off just waiting for the threshold because if you receive too many small payments you will have trouble spending the coins and have to pay higher transaction fees to do so.

There were many Monero private trades before it was listed on the exchange. If you check the old OTC trading thread you can find the names of people who traded a lot and may be trustworthy. Obviously check their feedback and even then be cautious as accounts can be hacked or sold.

Poloniex, bittrex, bter or mintpal.

If it wasn't secret then present some verifiable third party evidence (as I have done for bitcoin) to demonstrate that it was was available and public. Not available and public = secret.

This is really at the core of your post, because if it were impossible to change, then no point in discussing it, I'll agree with you there.

I disagree with this statement however, I believe a change would be possible prior to ASICs being widely deployed if the stakeholders (miners and users) wanted it.

It seems no clear consensus has emerged on whether ASICs are a good or bad idea though. Perhaps a coin that resists centralization by massive GPU and ASIC farms long enough to provide some basis of comparison will help form that consensus (if there is one).


This statement is quite interesting because the longer term role of botnets is as yet unclear, and all we have at this point is speculation about their eventual scope. If mining ends up being dominated by large botnets that isn't really any different from any other form of centralized mining, and not very interesting. But if smaller individual miners play a large role, that would actually be something new.

The interview sounds like a load of shit.


Is it a large number or is it a circle of a few? They need to make up their mind. The problem you have is that circle of a few makes it a clear premine and a large number makes it not credible that no one with a respected reputation can come forward and vouch for having heard of it.

I can't speak for "gaming" but claiming that it isn't in the nature of people in the "educational" and "scientific" industries to post on the web is laughable. Those industries created the web and people in those industries have been prolific posters on the web since day one. And besides posting on the web, how about talking to other well known people who could vouch for it? People in scientific and educational industries are in the business of sharing information. They are not (all) hermits who never talk to each other. Again, all that is needed is for some well-respected academic or scientist to come forward and vouch for having heard about it in 2011. Where are they?

The more of this nonsense gets dredged up the shadier this whole thing looks.

That's certainly interesting. With one second blocks you would expect 1000 blocks in about 15 minutes. Yet the timestamp on block 1000 shows it being minded about a day later than block 1.

This is a misconception of how p2p coins work. The users and miners have to agree to upgrade, and this is a decentralized, not centralized, decision. They can refuse to upgrade, ignoring the developers. Inevitably new developers would come forward to take over maintaining and developing the old fork, as has happened countless times in open source when the original developers made some decision not supported by a significant portion of the user base.

With bitcoin it is much too late, because the miners already have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in ASICs and the users simply want security and stability so they would likely stay with the miners. The devs' fork by adopted by no one and would die.

But this is not necessarily true for a coin if the change were made before a large investment were made in ASICs. In fact miners might well prefer not being arms-raced into giving money to ASIC developers for no real gain to themselves and support the fork. Users would likely support it as well, since ASICs would lead to increased centralization and many users are likely also small scale miners (especially for a coin where CPU mining remains viable, as with this one).

Furthermore if the decision is made ahead of time, or even just left open as an option ahead of time, there is no loss of trust, because there was no commitment to not change, and therefore no breach of trust. While there is no stated commitment on the part of the developers of this coin to change the PoW for any particular reason, changes have been considered. At one point there was thought given to throwing out CryptoNight and replacing it with one of the functions in widespread use (but of course keeping the rest of the cryptonote functionality such as ring signatures, etc. -- the two are in fact not linked at all).

There is no change under consideration at the present time, but don't count on there never being a change.

1. I never said that it was bogus, I said that the dates it in could have been faked and the chain could have been mined in a much shorter period of time given that less than 10 computers would be required to mine it in two years. Simple math shows that if 10 computers could mine it in two years than 120 computers could mine it in two months, or 1000 computers (say on EC2 or in a lab) could mine it in a few days. I also said that there is no verifiable evidence of anything related to this coin existing prior to late 2013 or early 2014. There was certainly no public launch two years ago. If you don't want to call that a premine, call it something else, like a private mine.

2. I think you will find that my skepticism of the story behind this coin and the blatant campaign of sock puppet accounts (some stupidluy created within minutes of each other) promoting it predates the existence of Monero. It was my comments that in fact helped encourage others in the community to start Monero as a clean public launch (I joined later).

3. Comparisons with bitcoin because you personally may not have known about it are totally off base. Bitcoin was publicly launched and I have provided links that verifiably prove that bitcoin existed and was public when it claims to be.  No such proof has been offered for BCN (almost certainly because it doesn't exist).

4. There is at least one other person who has said the chain may be bogus (in fact I think he said it more strongly than I did). It was someone on the coinmarketcap thread. I have no connection with that person or account and I don't know who it is. Whoever it is came to his own conclusions that matched (or even go beyond) mine.

I would like to comment briefly on awarding the bounty since I am responsible for the largest pledge (I think).

From what I have seen, tsiv should receive a bounty payment. I'm not sure he should receive the full amount quite yet. (Though I am also not saying he should not.)

I would like to hear public comments on the following points before reaching a conclusion.

My criteria for awarding the bounty are:

1. Quality. Is the miner 100% reliable, or does it crash or hang?

2. Compatibility. Does the miner support a full range of operating systems, hardware devices (limited to the specified family -- AMD or NV), and drivers? Hardware, operating systems, or drivers which lack some essential features for acceptable performance can be excluded, as can obviously obsolete ones.

3. Open source, maintainability. Is the code provided in a full open source manner, such that others can contribute improvements?  Is it well documented, well organized, and easy to understand?

4. Performance. Does the mine provided competitive performance (i.e. does it make sense to actually use it).

100% perfection on every one of these points is not necessary or practical -- certainly not to receive a partial bounty. These are guidelines for evaluation, not specific requirements.

If there are significant deficiencies in any or all of these areas, then the original developer should have the opportunity to address them in order to qualify for the full bounty. Failing that, others may contribute improvements to claim part of the bounty.

I would like to hear substantive comments from any stakeholders or community members addressing these points.

I can't vouch for the screen shot of a message claiming to be me, but I can confirm that I have one and only one identity on this forum. Any other identify claiming to be me is a fraud.

+1

Well said. As I have explained before, there is a role for GPU mining, which is why I am currently the largest individual contributor to the bounty for an open source GPU miner. However, GPU mining is not dominant for this algorithm the way it is for most others, merely competitive (as you correctly explain, by design).

DP xeons are really, really expensive compared to desktop CPUs. I don't know the most efficient recipe for a CPU mining rig, but that's certainly not it. Also consider power usage. The most power hungry CPUs are 130W, most are less. Every high end GPU is higher.

Reward per block is a largely meanigless statistic. It depends on the size of the pool. If the pool grows and difficulty stays the same you will get more blocks but less reward per block for the same overall reward. (In reality difficulty is up a lot recently).

The remaining funds in the XMR (MRO), BCN, and BTC pool bounty wallets have been distributed to archit.