So this isnt an argument against anything you said specifically. Just commentary that was inspired by it.

If you add a 1% tax the effect wouldnt be to reduce miner profits from 5% to 4%. 5% is the marginal rate at which new miners tend not to join in and existing miners tend not to bail, generally. miners would still take 5% profit, there would simply be fewer of them is all. We would in essence be trading network security in exchange for development. A worthy trade off so long as our network was not at any point in the future 1% less secure than it needed to be inorder to resist an attack.

The important point, i think, to be made is that perhaps good and correct arguments may be lost on the crowd. It may not matter whether the arguments are correct if the crypto public views this as sufficiently scandalous.


this would be awful. we must not breach the trust that there will be X number of monero in circulation on x given date. people who invested, invested based on those assumptions. They made very crucial financial decisions based on those assumptions. x percent of what goes to the miners in the future is different, we have no pact with those miners, they can jump on or off at any time, its not as if they spent millions on cryptonight asics. investors have made a commitment that future miners have not. they can just react in real time based on constantly evolving incentive structures, just as they always have been doing. breaching the trust with people who have already invested is completely different in this respect.

well there is the crowd funding idea that i mentioned a few posts back. we could always try that first.

Thats actually a brilliant idea. Release a fork that pays part of the mining rewards automatically to the devs. If people dont like it than they dont have to use that fork. If the network splits into two, one where we have all of the devs being properly compensated and devloping appropriately, and another fork where its just some stubborn guys who dont like the proposal hording and sitting on coins that arnt being developed, than i think we know which would win out in the long run. If they want to fork and get their own devs and follow a more traditional funding model, than great we will have 2 competing cryptos that would both be pretty interesting. I might throw some capital into both.

Its not forcing people to pay you either. You provide some code, built in is what you guys want to be compensated for it, and only people who value your code more highly than what you are charging will decide to use it. Its totally fair. Just like a store putting a price tag on a product that they are selling. You either buy it or dont depending on how you feel about the price.

I obviously understand the drawbacks. We would be assailed for having an element of centralization. But i really think that when you weigh the costs and the benefits against each other, atleast superficially, we get to a point where we really really really should be atleast talking about this.

Also obviously this would have to be temporary. The devs would need to commit to weaning off of such a system after given features are implemented or a given period of time.

I guess ill go ahead and bring up my idea of crowd funding again. Tell us how much it will cost to have the database finished. Tell us when it will be completed if you do raise the funds. Then I will hold peoples funds in escrow until enough is raised. The moment the funding goal is reached i will deliver the funds to the devs as per the arrangement. If the funding goal is not reached than I will refund everyone’s money.

See rep thread in signature if you are concerned about whether I am qualified for this task.

I'll take a stab at it. I'll just take the whitepaper and try to cut out anything that isnt absolutely necessary for satisfying your request. Maybe we can bounce it around and crowd edit/redraft it. Ok so thats just a super rough draft. Please be tactful.

Monero in a nutshell

Inorder for an electronic cash to be private and anonymous it must satisfy two requirements. Untraceability: for each incoming transaction all possible senders are equiprobable. Unlinkability: for any two outgoing transactions it is impossible to prove they were sent to the same person.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin does not satisfy the untraceability requirement since all the transactions that take place between the network's participants are public. It is also suspected that Bitcoin does not satisfy the second property. A careful blockchain analysis may reveal connections between the users of the Bitcoin network and their transactions thus it fails the unlinkability requirement as well. We offer a solution that fully satisfies both untraceability and unlinkability conditions.

Inorder to satisfy the requirement of untracability, monero utilizes the concept of one time ring signatures. After signing a transaction the user provides, for the purpose of verification, not his own single public key, but the keys of all of the members of a group of users. An observer is able to then verify that the real signer is a member of the group, but cannot exclusively identify the signer. So long as all of the other participants in your group are valid signatures, and linked to valid ring signature groups, and all of the participants in those transactions are valid and link back to still valid ring signature groups... ect all the way back to the genesis block, than no doublespend is possible because for each and every ring signature group in the signatures progeny there is an equal number of inputs and outputs. All of this is accomplished without any need for trust, without any denial of service attack vectors, and without the need for any form of centralization. All members of a ring signature group are equal.

Inorder to satisfy the requirement of unlinkability monero utilizes a scheme which allows a user to publish a single address from which, in addition to some random data from the sender, a one time use public keys may be derived. Hence, there is no such issue as "address reuse" by design and no observer can determine if any transactions were sent to a specific address or link two addresses together.

Ok thats a relief. The other fellow saying that it was working for him had me start to worry that perhaps there was a problem with the devise. Good to know that the problem is probably server side.

Cant even view balance

anyone else having trouble with mytrezor.com? it just says that its loading forever for me after i enter my password.

When ever i see comments like this funny picture of solders with mickey mouse ears on their helmets pops up in my head. Anyway the point is that this mpaa is no threat to your liberty what so ever. They dont have a police force. They dont have a military. They dont have apache helicopters or nuclear submarines. What on earth are they going to do to force their preferences on you? oh wait thats right they are going to go to the government, who does have those things. So tell me who is the real threat here these guys



or these guys.



Without those guys pictured above, the mpaa or who ever you want to point at would have no capacity to do any of those things because consumers would simply switch to a network service provider who didnt do those things. only by holding competition out of the market can they get away with the terrible things you are talking about. and only by way of the jackboots pictured above can they do that.

Addresses on your trezor are deterministically derived from a seed. They arnt actually "on" the trezor. The bitcoins are on the blockchain. So long as you have the seed, than you can produce at any time as many of the addresses in that series as you feel like computing.

Can someone who sent without using escrow please explain your reasoning? I mean yea i charge for the escrow, but its not that much, and as far as i know it comes out of the devs end not yours. As far as i know, if you send 1 bitcoin to escrow its worth the same amount of stake as sending 1 bitcoin directly to him right? I just don’t get it.

Its not imposable to imagine solutions to this. Onion routing for example may not be perfect for doing things like downloading large files. But imagine how many times you could bounce around something as small as a transaction. Now imagine that monero could be used to incentive the network, how many entrance and exit nodes you could have. Imagine how much scrambling you could do then with such a tiny file, monetary compensation for nodes, then to top it all off, no need for a specific destination.

Also. My understanding is the devs are working on I2P integration for this purpose specifically. I didnt use i2p as my example because i dont understand how it works really. (something i should probably figure out)

Here is another idea. When people start their node they broadcast a public key and begin listening for other keys that people broadcast. They begin to develop a little temporary database of keys. When you broadcast a transaction you actually encrypt it in several layers of keys stored in this database. When you receive a transaction you check to see if your published key decrypts it, if it does you decrypt it and rebroadcast, then the same thing happens when it arrives at the next. To a third party observer they cant actually tell that a -> b is the same transaction  b -> c.

Im sure that idea is not perfect. I just thought of it off the top of my head. But it just goes to show that a small amount of creativity can go a long way i think.

All it means is that you were a world champion winner for many many years. And now you are just an ordinary failure like the rest of us.

I fail to see it. Perhaps you can make the case for me.

*edit* also notice that there are several different questions here that are sometimes treated as one.

1) can one create a crypto where if the nsa spends 10 million dollars trying to figure out the transaction history of 1 single person they still will not be able to uncover that information.

2) can one create a crypto where it is prohibitively expensive for the nsa to uncover the transaction history of large groups of people.

3) every point on the sliding scale between these two extremes

Eh. Private bank issuance of currency was a pretty good option before crypto. That is, providing there were few restrictions to entry into the market for currency production and producers were forced to compete with each other for customers.

Other than that I don't see anything wrong with your comment

Everyone will just use bitcoin with massive mixing when they buy monero. Worse case scinario is that we have to use darknet exchanges or exchanges that are censorship resistant by virtue of being sufficiently decentralized. It could push exchanges in general in a very positive direction. Remember when they government makes something illegal they dont get rid of it, they just raise the price. Sure they can spend huge amounts of money to locate the take down darknet exchange servers and operators, but just like the silkroad 2.0 another one will just spring up. And so long as there is demand this will continue to happen. If they do it enough times than it will cause the price of trading to rise. But thats really the best they will ever be able to do.

TLDR: if you are worried about monero going away because the government made it illegal, see how *insert illicit substance of choice here* went away when they made that illegal.

I'm not an expert, but im going to go out on a limb and say /s probably means sarcasm

Can you substantiate this claim? Or provide some sort of source.
 

I tried to look this up and i found a lot of pro agw sites dedicated to debunking this claim.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcanoes-or-humans/

here is one http://chainradar.com/xmr/blocks