It is highly believable. No one attacks an unsuccessful coin.

Haters are the world's way of letting you know that you are doing something right. In fact they mean you are doing a lot right.

I'm glad we got your (and 1000 of your compatriots') not always so friendly attention.

Still you're welcome here though.

That's actually fine with me. If they want to return with an improved product without the scam launch, more power to them. If they want to focus their work on improving Monero, that's fine too. There was no premine or other launch scam here; none of us has any huge financial interest in it. As I said, the world benefits if they deliver something useful, with a healthy business model.

Actually that's fine. The world benefits if V2 really does heavily improve on V1. A warning though. Sometimes its Windows 8 and does not improve on Windows 7 just because the version number has been incremented. It has to stand on its own merit.

As far as putting them in the box, that is not the case at all. This coin is an entirely volunteer effort. There are no owners or bosses here. Whoever delivers good work that others view as worth following is effectively in charge. That could be the bytecoin developers if they choose. In reality it looks like most of them have just moved on for whatever reason (perhaps life changes or other interests, one can only guess) and only a small subset or offshoot was behind the premine scam coin. It's largely abandonware at this point. Again given their apparent preference for secrecy we can only guess at the true reasons. I'm told, by the way, that bytecoin was not the original name of the coin, and that label was added recently, further suggesting some sort of split or offshoot. I can't yet confirm this.

No one will stand in the way of good work. If the intent however, is to pull off a hidden premine scam (and/or hidden de-optimzied miner scam), well we all see how that turned out. Probably worked in several well-known cases in 2013. Does not and won't work any more.

Form whatever opinions you like but don't be so presumptuous as to claim to know other people's motivations. You don't.

I can't speak for anyone else but in my case there is no financial advantage. I was already making a lot of money mining bytecoin, both keeping some of the coins I mined and selling some. (In fact this was the first clue it was a scam, because a coin in widespread adoption with stores and services using it and thousands of nodes on the network, as claimed, should not have been that easy to mine.) If bytecoin had been successful in terms of adoption, I would have done extremely well. In fact I still have some of those coins, and I'd still do extremely well if bytecoin somehow managed to make it. When Monero started, and for quite some time (really until the recent value jump), my BCN holdings dwarfed by MRO holdings.

What I saw from BCN was not just a premine but also an extremely dishonest scam to try to "sell" the premine as being something other than what it was. I also saw what was very likely an organized campaign of sock puppets and FUD intended to block the community from figuring out what was actually going on and putting a stop to it. That rubbed me the wrong way and encouraged me to focus my efforts elsewhere, even though initially that was to my own personal financial disadvantage.

I'm funny that way. I will speak out even when it is to my disadvantage when I feel something is just not right. Perhaps you have seen some of that here.

As I have said before, the bytecoin developers are welcome here. If they want to develop the technology they are free to do so, here, without a hidden 80% premine. This was not an attempt to steal anything from them, it was just a relaunch of an otherwise good coin without a premine scam, nothing more. They can have everything they had with BCN, except 150 billion coins stashed away somewhere. If they choose not to participate, then we will continue to build a team of interested and highly qualified developers and move on without them.

Slight differences but not enough to bother with in my opinion. Compared to those you are better off just sticking with Monero at this point. I'd say that even if I weren't involved with Monero, and I have said so with respect to other shitcoins. However, you should make your own judgement about whether their changes are worthwhile and likely to get any kind of traction.

I agree with everything you wrote. But let's try to keep it on topic here.

BTW, 100 million difficulty, wow!

It's actually 0.3 and it is almost certainly profitable over the cost of electricity (unless you pay an awful lot).

If you solo mine you will probably get a higher effective hash rate than the pool. Most days or even weeks you will get nothing though, so this requires a somewhat different mindset.

I had nothing to do with the logo contest. In fact I had a wallet for holding the a logo bounty (I hold most or all the bounties for MRO), but it was empty.

I was recently told that the people running the logo effort didn't think any of the designs were any good and decided not to adopt any of them, and therefore not to award any prize. The same thing would happen with the open source pool bounty or any of the other ones if no one delivered usable code


As far as I know none of the designs from the contest/bounty were considered any good and none of them will be used. If this is not the case, and your design is in fact being used, then you should be paid, and I will make sure that happens. Is this the case?

It is not clear there are any active developers at all. There has been very little done to the code since it surfaced. The relationship between cyptonode (publishing the papers and calling bytecoin their "reference" implementation) and the bytecoin developers is unclear.

No one has been written out. The original developers are welcome to join the Monero effort, anonymously or otherwise. In fact there is no way to know one or more of them haven't already. This is what they should have done in the first place -- viewed their unused and most likely unreleased coin as a testnet and relaunched it once released, not held on the 80% of the testnet coins and expect that to fly as a live network.

In any case, Monero is here, it is successful, and that has and will attract interested and competent developers. The forks of the forks will likely not succeed because they are not alternatives to an 80% premine. At most they are alternatives to minor launch issues affecting a few percent of the coins. That is not enough to matter.

You are certainly welcome to contribute, although in the end it doesn't really matter because useful code developed for any of the forks will be merged.

We can't really answer for the fact that the zerocash guys have an institutional effort behind promoting their work by publishing and circulating papers and speaking at conferences. How that translates in to exposure is somewhat subjective though. ZC may have seemed like a big deal to you because you are highly exposed to that channel. I hadn't even heard of zerocoin until a few months ago despite being somewhat involved with bitcoin since 2011 and highly involved since mid 2013.

We've done everything we can to get the word out about Monero, not just among altcoin speculators but to a wider audience on reddit, twitter, blogs, etc. It is extremely hard to stand out in a world of shitcoins, although we are finally, it seems, starting to have some success in that area. And a month is still very early too. If the word is getting out now, I consider that a success.

At 1kh seriously consider solo mining. You will average about one block per day. The pools have all sorts of software and deployment issues.

The formula is your hash rate times the block reward (currently a bit under 17)  times 86400 divided by the difficulty (currently 96 million)

1. open wallet

2. start_mining number of threads

3.. wait for coins

You can also start it directly in the daemon but in that case you need to provide your wallet address.

Please add support for the built in miner (start_mining and stop_mining commands in the cli wallet).

Many people who are not serious miners and don't want to figure out how to configure a pool can still solo mine in the regular wallet and help decentralize the network if it is as ease as a checkbox to turn on and off, with free coins occasionally being dropped into their wallet if they get lucky. A very successful coin could have millions of people doing this. This was Satoshi's original vision and unfortunately got lost in bitcoin but we can bring it back here. It is a game changer.

Do not use a payment ID for normal users.

Eventually you mine the last atomic unit and there is no more block reward. I don't know how long that takes with BCN. With Bitcoin it happens in around the year 2140. Miners would then have to rely on transaction fees. Many are skeptical this could ever work.

For now the wallet because all the other methods of mining seem somewhat buggy. They will probably get better over time.

It's being bought up ahead of being added to Poloniex (I think tomorrow), where MRO gained 500% or soemthing on its first day.

It isn't really broken in the case of spikes, it means you just have temporary congestion delays. You can prioritize your transaction by paying a higher fee or you can accept waiting for some available space (or even waiting until the block size grows). This part is much like bitcoin.

You are only looking at part of the system.

The block size grows if blocks are being penalized, and penalty free size grows as well. So you can't maintain high transaction fees.

Miners are supposed to limit transactions in each block. It is supposed to be profitable to include a small amount of transaction data that exceeds the penalty free size, because the penalty is initially small. This prevents bloat and serves as the feedback mechanism to the block size adjustment.

Currently I don't believe these mechanisms are even implemented correctly (as described in the paper). That should be fixed first.

Also, there is already a hard (but dynamic) limit on the size and number of transactions, so whether or miners limit transaction to reduce the penalty (as they should) the effect is essentially the same.

Whether the cost becomes prohibitive in practice remains to be seen. I don't think you can just guess. If it does, then yes a hard fork would be appropriate. By design this is supposed to be self regulating. An interesting experiment in any case.