Nice! I haven't heard about this yet. Would you say these are good articles to get an idea of what this is? Or do you have links for better info?

http://www.3dincites.com/2014/02/samsungs-v-nand-flash-2014-isscc-ye-distant-spires/

http://www.gizmag.com/samsung-v-nand-flash-chip-ssd/28655/

I'm still on the fence either way. As far as at least keeping the door open, it's a good start to have some form of debasement (right now that's being set up to be accomplished with a constant emission). Can you break each of your four points down and discuss why having a fixed inflation, rather than a fixed emission would be beneficial? I know you've mentioned that it's only a temporary fix. I think I agree, but I'm also not 100% on a 1% fixed rate either.

I feel this way specifically because a difference between the two isn't readily apparent (according to the provided simulations) until some years/decades after they are put into practice.

I believe both myself and smooth (edit: I just saw Johnny Mnemonic also mentioned this above, but for a different point) have mentioned off-chain transactions would limit bloat (though this opens up many other doors). Aminorex and maybe someone else has mentioned that the chain below a certain time can be eliminated.

I'm seeing that the consensus is that it's not the biggest issue here right this second (as the bloat itself being a relatively speculative issue), but it would be great to hear the ideas you can bring to the table?

Awesome simulation! You guys make great points. The fixed rate is technically a variable interest (edit: i meant inflation ..) as well, just going down all the time ... it took me a minute or ten to make the correlation which your simulation makes incredibly clear .

Having the fixed reward will set this apart in a great way, and does solve a whole lot of issues.

I like the direction we're headed in. Thanks for the discussion!

Expanding your point that the amount of gold is finite ... I would think we might be able to use variables like our cumulative difficulty. To me, that means overall demand for the coin. Compared to gold, there is no real limit to the amount of MRO that can be produced.

Maybe taking that variable, as part of total demand, could be used to set up a differential (applied over a certain time period ..week,month,day,or year) that we can put toward coming up with a targeted emission/inflation rate (per week,month, day or year). When demand is (edit: accelerating to a high) high, we set the inflation/supply higher and when it is low we can set those numbers lower. as far as the actual rate I'd like to hope for something lower than 1% ... but maybe a low limit of .1% and a high limit of 2%?

I'll try to think of real world things what we could use to further define the bounds, but making any particular choice (edit: probably 1%, hopefully lower) wouldn't be a bad place to start. Right now while we're producing so many coins I wouldn't want any more inflation honestly, so i hope it would be something that kicks in in 4-8 years.

I see where you're coming from, and I still have a lot of reading to do that can convince me that banks can totally be ruled out. I've said before that there's nothing really stopping anyone (third party) from issuing promise notes in order to facilitate high volume off-chain transactions. All it would take is just a few people who are willing to accept the tender .. and the day that someone accepts it and then returns the note to the issuer and is rewarded the amount of MRO on the bill is the day that will become a reality.

I could ultimately see that leading to fractional reserve banking. How could we ultimately deal with this, other than slowing the evolution of something like that to a crawl?

Having the value of the coins not approaching infinity (with some form of debasement either through a constant emission, or interest rate) is a good start, but also not having the value approach zero (by having either of those two features not be too aggressive). The only way I can see this happening is with a variable emission (you seem to favor a fixed one) or variable inflation rate .. but you may very well be right about a fixed emission (I don't have the depth to fully understand the long term effects)


At some point, the constant supply will be small enough that the value of the coins would approach infinity .. I can't see out 1000 years but .0001% seems an awfully small number that can easily be overcome.

I can definitely agree with you that security cannot be sustained solely by transaction fees.


I was only trying to offer it as an example of a natural restriction on inflation. There's no way the inflation has been a solid 1.5% for 6000 years .. it changes with our ability to produce and mine it (and want it). I would think the 1.5% would be a maximum, and agree that the amount in the ground is finite.

I agree, 1% fixed probably isn't ideal. I also agree that the problem may be solved with an emission rather than a targeted inflation. But I still feel that there should be some years where the inflation is much less than 1% or the emission should be a number much less than the targeted emission, regardless of which method is chosen. A variable rate based on constantly changing variables. I think Aminorex mentioned that we should look at transaction volume, as the number of transactions, and use that as a factor as well.

I think a decent comparison might be made with gold here. Comparing the total amount of gold in the world (estimate) to the amount produced per year may yield some interesting numbers.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21969100

This page (year old article) seems to indicate estimates of 171,300 tonnes

http://news.goldseek.com/Dani/1309290922.php

and http://onlygold.com/FAQ/faq_factsandstatistics.htm

Indicate there's about 2500 tons produced/year.

If we're looking for possible inflation rates based on real world numbers/decent estimates, that might be a place to look. Right now that's giving an inflation of around 1.456% or so. Of course that changes over time, and you may find better number in looking at the % of gold mined per country or something .. but again I'm just trying to offer something to base ourselves on. Anyone have a better comparison or can offer ideas on why this wouldn't be a good place to look at?

Thanks for the update! I'll try it out now too. Maybe you or someone explained this already, but how does the regular update work? Does it restrict tx sizes by denying large size transactions and couple the larger ones with the higher fee? Or are all tx's going to have the same fee you set regardless of size now? What's different with the experimental update 0.8.8? Does it scale on the medium block size or something?

Truth. Are you trying to steer toward a conversation about the market price? I'll bite.

What I see happening now is that the markets (and us) are paying for those who have overextended themselves. End of the month bills are now due and that includes rent, power and especially amazon. Altcoin markets are filled with this and I've seen this repeat at usually the last week of the month for a lot of 'overmined' alts. Not to say that this doesn't deserve the attention, but surely historic volumes tend to cause some people to go a little more nuts than they would not have otherwise.  I just hope that people reading this, that are in that situation, can learn from this overshoot and maybe reach a little less far in the future. Just my thought is all.

Thanks, I'll stick to these guidelines when I send transactions from now on.


Thanks for the great news! Do you have any reliable literature you (or anyone) would like to share regarding i2p and what it is/does? Wikipedia only goes so far, so I think it would be nice to see if you have anything educational (even technical is great) that you would like to share so what we can understand what this is?

Thanks, this clears a lot up. So would it be a decent practice to periodically send all mined coins (multiple small tx's to one address) as one lump to another wallet I control with a low mixin count, rather than let them pile up and then use them continuously for future small scale transactions .. in order to decrease the size of the tx at that time? Or would this have no real effect on traceability/tx size? IE: Apart from the fixed tx overhead, is the size of the tx dependent on the just the origin, or more than just the previous origin?

What kind of mixin count were you using for that? I've been trying to put together an idea of some kind of responsible use of the mixin count, taking into consideration the fee that will be imposed and the size of the transaction to be carried out.

What would be really interesting to see is a graphical comparison of the amount transferred + the mixin count vs the resultant tx size that it yields. This would definitely be a great tool for people trying to send transactions but don't want to cause the tx to be unnecessarily large. I get that high mixin count gives a higher degree of anonymity, and that a lower one gives a lesser degree ... but can't really put together what happens between let's say <2 and >9. Of course, with speed at which things change maybe this would be premature?

OK I get it, this can be fixed by an API and infrastructure to trade untraceable coins, rather than being something that rests solely on us. Thanks for the explanation. It's neat getting to rely partially on a world that's more willing to support cryptocurrencies. Things that were once considered major selling points are now just as easily taken care of by a third party. For example, http://targetmoon.com/ has recently added support for MRO.

They offer price monitoring and email alerts for many coins. Most people have email right to their phone. I can remember specific apps for each coin used to be a major marketing point, now handled with ease. This is one of the things that I feel can add to the fundamental valuation of the coin -- a world that's more prepared to receive these currencies.

Other groups like minergate, though I know there is heavy negative pressure on them due to the closed source nature, has offered the simplest one-click mining opportunity that could easily be considered a holy grail in cryptocurrency mining. My point here is that this is a third party, outside the focus of Monero itself, who has offered mostly freely something that would have otherwise been a major burden for a community to come up with. Specifically i'm referencing this against the time it has taken to build functional open source pools .. which I hope we can all switch to. I'm not alone when I say that minergate is good enough for some people though, and as such they are supporting us as a third party.

Sorry to go off on the tangent, I'm just trying to make the point that the world is much more capable of supporting crypto in general .. and Monero is in a fantastic strategic position because of it.



Yes, completely autonomous. Specifically ... today if I wanted to pay my power bill with my money in the bank ... all I would have to do is sign onto the power company website and either punch in a debit card number or give them my banking information and then consent to their terms of payment and we're done. I have the ability to set this up to occur every time on a certain date a month. My interest lies in how that can be done with Monero. Maybe it's a little too far ahead to think, but the future's never a bad place to be thinking about. What led me to having this thought is -- how can pool users send directly to exchanges rather than to their own personal wallet first, automatically ... either without the tx extra field or based on a tx field recommended protocol?

I get that the proof of work is in the coin, but issuing promises(bank notes) based on gold reserves was still a reality at some point. The gold miners themselves don't really get a say on whether or not the person they sell to decides to issue promise notes based on their own holdings (in order to support things like a modern present-day economy) .. other than quitting mining. If that were to become our reality, then mining difficulty would just decrease to where anyone could sustain mining and continue issuing the same amount of "gold" to be produced otherwise. We've effectively blocked our own shot on this one (in a pretty neutral way).

As far as why anyone would want to issue promises for gold/monero reserves .. I can think of a few. The total supply of Monero is limited to 184.4 billion units. Currently we use numbers as high as 1000 trillion to define deficits of "promises". One number is bigger than the other, and we got there by issuing promises. Personally I don't see any specific reason (currently) to issue promises as well, because as you say the proof of work is right there in creating the monero .. but that same proof of work was also available by the very fact you have a 99.9% gold bar of "x" weight in the first place. All I'm saying is that I can see it happening again, because people will try to fit this into a world that they understand.

Ah, so it's more of a crutch that doesn't need to be necessarily part of the blockchain. I hadn't considered it like that at all.

How would you see payments from pool wallets direct to exchanges? That was a major part, along with the API, that I saw busoni in IRC talking about. Granted when one usually sends money this way -- it's for dumping onto the market .. but people are losing money either way and telling them to send to their personal wallets first is just an extra nuisance that can be figured out with code.

A correlation I might see here is how would one setup automatic monthly payments without the usage of something like the tx_id field? I would hope this could be totally outside of the blockchain for numerous reasons, but by what route would it manifest? Moreover, with previous posts in this thread regarding this as a store of value or a currency .. do we even view a scenario where automated payments happening as possible?

Either way, from what I'm gathering this would be best solved by a capable API?

Toward this I would only expect claims of people "getting something for nothing" from the Bitcoin (or any alt) community in respect to the amount of hurdles that had to be overcame in Bitcoin. I do; however, think you're correct in your rejection of this. The claim is founded on those that present their opinion that they were overcoming these adversities for their own currency, when in fact they were overcoming them for any future implementation of any cryptocurrency by the simple grace of the open source mindset that's prevalent here. Anyone saying differently is just worried about their market cap. Maybe I should spend some time understanding what these licenses are though before I say more about that.

To say that you appreciate, fundamentally, someone else's work and then continue it in your own way is by no means wrong or worthless. What makes value, here, is the ability to withstand whatever comes in future that you have created for yourself (and make sure that it will indeed be different than the one you've branched from), not only what those have done in the past. The key here is to never forget that you once or still stand on the shoulders of giants -- even in your own pursuit of becoming one. I say this under the presumption that if put into the same scenario, I would have made an attempt to overcome it in a similar fashion.

As far as being able to quantify a lower risk of failure, well that's an incredible concept. It's as if you're asking : What, of value, have we created here? Amongst a sea of questions, that is one of the biggest. To me, value is one of the major factors of calculating the "probability of a flaw or event fatal to the project". While what defines value, to me, is what Monero is quantified by.

In that mindset, Monero has a constantly growing team of developers, community members and speculators. It is based on CryptoNote technology. It has begin to provide the tools of mass adoption for the CryptoNote technology, rather rapidly in my opinion. Those three things I know for sure.

Other variables I'd like to see are a specific outline (in list form) of CryptoNote technology as it is now and what we can add to it (I know Taco already did something with MIP's on github - awesome way to start), and improve on it. I'd like to see a standard usage protocol for the tx_extra field, for at least until a time in which that responsibility can be dictated to other groups. It's data recorded on our blockchain and we should have a say of what it is, in my opinion. I'd like to see large sized businesses become a welcomed addition to the variables, as well as one man shops. I'm sure there's a lot of other things that can be added here, so I'd like to hear some ideas other ideas as well (I'll try to think of some more as well).


Talking about this problem, as constructively as possible (and learning how to tune out the noise when it comes -- it has and will always continue), will be one of the major innovations of this currency. A currency/store of value that knows what it wants and where its going will grow up quick.

This is a good point. If your initial trade into the currency isn't anonymous, per bitcoin's publicly available blockchain .. then your pursuit of anonymity is potentially (most likely) lost. You may still have private transactions that can't be traced if you were to trade into Monero, but the fact that you traded first into Bitcoin and then to Monero would be a weak link in the anonymity chain. I guess the question that would come up is exactly how one would obtain Monero (other than mining) in the first place without compromising identity? I've been told avenues using coinjoin over tor/i2p are only partially anonymous at best .. so that puts us back to buying into it face to face for now. Unless you have other ideas?



I'm trying to take understanding from your correlation. Are you saying there is largely no "good money" to drive out, in the cryptocurrency markets currently? If that's true, then I'm starting to see where you're coming from in your desire to pursue a store of value first rather than a currency for everyday use. I think I understand your stance now. The question that I'd ask here is : If we were to build a currency from the ground up .. would you start with having a store of value on which you may trade something representative of that value for value (notes for market goods), or would you start with a bartering system where the store of value is what is traded (rather than the value) for value? Let me know if I'm way off here.



With the massive amount already being produced daily, i agree that we have enough debasement for now. I think the main focus I see come up is how to handle it when the large block rewards are close to zero (quite a number of years)


Have you considered this in respect to the adaptive block sizes and rewards? Factoring in another scaling variable may prove problematic to tune correctly .. when the block size itself is still a factor in the equation. Would you support a move to this at the end of the high block rewards above 0.xxxx MRO (almost dust sized rewards), or would you see it as something that can be included and tuned well before that time. Where would transaction fees come into play here? Could they overcome the sliding inflation?

I think we all agree the tendency to accumulate could be offset with a form of inflation (static or dynamic), but I'm coming to see that the tendency to accumulate may still be there despite that (I'll have to do quite a bit more reading on this, and know right where to look). A perfect inflation would manifest as a constant balance to keep the marketcap approaching infinity at an uncontrolled rate. Presently I know that a certificate issuing agency, based off of Monero holdings would be highly critical of an inflation ... but at the same time I can see that same accumulation impeding the ability to keep it a "spending currency".


I hold the opinion that both a store of value and the need for it to be currency will come to be a central point in this currency. I could see many troubles with a $77 million business trying to operate within the confines of what Monero, being only a currency, and not a valid store of value. Imagine trying to use purchase orders, only to have your currency be worth 2% less than it was when you sent it out last year. I see that some form of debasement is necessary, but for it to do both value would have to trickle out very slowly. Maybe this is a malformed opinion, but perhaps you could share insight?

Large-scale botnets that are on the orders of magnitude higher than a few amazon EC2 instances are what I'd be worried about. I have seen them come up numerous times as being a limited resource, so my fresh opinion is mixed on the issue.

If something massively scaled were to pop up, I would think it would be interesting to see exactly what extent would be necessary to prevent them through whitelisting. Though there are currently far more dangerous aspects of the protocol that would cripple botnets.