Somebody wrote this about me in private. Lol. I guess I sort of played that role for Dash. I remember that.


Btw I did receive some remuneration and small angel investment from a few in return. Mucho gracias.

Any way now is time to really get healthy and make something happen. Need to decide on a direction. And I don't have any ill feelings towards any coin nor group. My challenge is figuring out where I fit in.

Lead developer is the best role for me because I like a free reign to innovate. Some people had asked me to consider contributing my anonymity algorithm to Monero and so I made this thread because of Shen's Reddit announcement. I have since discovered that Shen's design can probably suffice for Monero at least for a first version. So I don't think it is really that compelling that they need my design. I think the Monero community is contented with their progress and team of contributors. Don't you think guys it is sort of a waste to take a very creative guy like me and try to get me to conform to the larger inertia already in Monero? That is not me. I am a free bird. I go off and tinker and sometimes (not every time) produce very creative products. Wouldn't it be better for our community if I am off taking a stab at the other problems such as block chain overhaul that are not going to be on Monero's radar for some time yet?

I am curious what smooth thinks about this, because seems like up thread he was arguing that forced upgrades are destabilizing and I assume because they violate the trust that user has that the protocol is decentralized and thus doesn't die by any expiration date or reliance on any controlling entity.

Btw, this feature makes me wonder if you guys are setting yourselves up to be more culpable under investment securities law, as you are clearly forcing the product to rely on your ongoing control, unless I misunderstand the implication of the stated feature.

Not to spread FUD but seriously if a coin is undergoing hard forks then it really isn't decentralized in the purest/strictest sense.


Clients in the system retain messages for a couple or few days. But they are only stored opportunistically decentralized and not on any deterministic, globally coordinated ledger.

P.S. happy that we entered a respectful dialogue.

Clarification about what I think is legal and not legal.

Crowdfunding a product (where you give out coins in the product as the reward) appears to be not an investment security as long as you as the lead developer (or his controlling group) does not continue to exclusively manage the coin as a controlling entity. In other words, you are selling only your programming services and are not managing an investment. Thus you must complete your development work and debugging before you accept the funds from the crowdfunding. Any ongoing work would come from anyone who wants to submit patches, and the decentralized nodes in the system can decide whether to upgrade or not (thus no hard forks can work). For features requiring a hard fork, then create a new coin.

So I would still be able to submit patches as well as others could for as long as I don't try to control some master copy of the open source and commit access (thus not acting as a controlling entity for the product), i.e. as Linus explains about decentralized version control Git, everyone can have their own local copy of the changesets they have merged.

Seems the ones that stayed in the Top 10 actually have some useful features (even if for example Dash's anonymity has the holes of swiss cheese and users don't comprehend nor care).



I wouldn't want to be Evan. I doubt he registered with the SEC, he is a USA citizen, and he apparently sold securities to non-accredited investors where he retained interest in the venture promoting himself as the lead dev of the controlling group hence. And there seems to be considerable evidence he was not truthful in the prospectus. Looks like the man could be in heaps of legal trouble in the future. I believe the powers-that-be are simply waiting for as much fraud as possible to pile up in crypto currency and then when they are ready, they will sweep down and wallop the industry in order to take control. They seem to be purposefully allowing a wild west to proliferate so that as many people as possible can incriminate themselves.

I would advise not resorting to illegal activity to earn money.

I think as long as you disclose what you are doing, then you are not culpable even if some people didn't grasp the ramifications. That is if you are not selling securities; otherwise the law requires more extensive disclosure. My interpretation of the USA securities law is if you remain as a controlling group of a product that has shares and thus you are essentially operating as an unregistered company entrusted to grow the value of investment securities.


I haven't looked but Bitshares has produced a fair amount I bet.

Just because someone hasn't yet combined the best of honest investment pumping with the best of open source coding, doesn't mean Monero's performance is the optimum we can achieve.

Seems Daniel Latimer got closest to merging both strategies, but so far he has pursued some designs that could not work such as BitUSD and now the incomplete anonymity upgrade. And the DPOS also appears to be flawed (at least the last time I looked at it, but let's delay that technical discussion until I am ready to get into it).

Charles H. who was originally partnered with Daniel went on to help form Ethereum. Charles was talking to me, but I wanted to have a product already and not rush in with all my ideas still up in the air unsettled. It wasn't surprising to me that they went the bloated research direction. I could feel intuitively that was the leaning. So apparently there was some incompatibility between Daniel's direction and Charles. According to Charles, they created reasons to oust him. Maybe he stood in the way of the pump with the Chinese or was dispensable. Never a dull moment in crypto land.

So what is unsettled from my view is whether a methodical model such as Monero is superior to a model that raises a lot of capital and market awareness via enabling the speculation pathway of concentrating ownership and pumps to raise liquidity for the whales to cash out. Appears that Bitshares settled back down to its non-pumped value as the core users were still using it after the China pump. And Bitshares afaik just isn't really that great of tech but not the worst either. So what if that was excellent tech that was generally considered to be the best out there. Then those market pumps might be like staircases lifting the valuation and ecosystem network effects. I don't think this model has been tested yet, except maybe Bitcoin is that model.

Normally one would say open source methodical approach wins in the end, but we are talking about here is which code base gains the most momentum in the most effective areas. In my design, the anonymity can be added without a hard fork, so everything is much more plugin oriented. Monero will have to hard fork.

Writing a lot of code can be good or bad. Bad if you end up having to throw a lot of it away and start over. I am not saying that is the case for Monero. I haven't actually looked at the code that much or thought deeply about Monero's code structure and the future implications. I doubt I have time to go on that tangent unless I want to be a Monero developer.


Yeah Dogecoin was able to get network efforts with pumping. So take the best of tech from Monero, best of merging production with pumping from Bitshares, and the best of marketing network effects with pumping from Dogecoin. And package it with a block chain scaling that threatens Bitcoin. Then maybe we see a unique result.


Yup. That is why is I said it is difficult to hang the hat on anonymity as a coin's main purpose at this time. And how to gain size so that there is enough demand for securing the networking. I think anonymity is a longer range goal, although I wish we could accelerate it.


I meant of those coins still in the Top 10, most where pumped and did not fall out. The difference between those that fell away entirely appears to be they have no unique feature at all. Vertcoin has Scrypt and stealth addresses, but then along comes Dash and Cryptonote with far more anonymity features than stealth addresses.


I might be dead in 10 years.

Users need solutions in the next couple of years as we head into the sovereign debt crisis global collapse.

I care about the near-term as well willing to sustain for the long-term for as long as it is still the best opportunity.


There are scenarios though where they fall away entirely but their example influenced the one that replaced Bitcoin. I am dreaming you know.


Old people are not typically investing in highly speculative altcoins.

I've tried to educate readers about economics and investing, but you know people will not listen. They have to learn for themselves the hard way. There is probably a reason that nature does what it does. I am not here to fight nature, but rather to find the most efficient opportunities and look for large markets that have an unmet need. Then find the most efficient way to meet that need.

Speculative investing is not holding a gun to anyone's head. Everyone is free to make their own decisions.


My meaning that once you have an anonymous networking then messaging on top of it is anonymous.


They shouldn't perhaps and my point is the long wait ahead for anonymous messaging to be perfected by others or the demand to grow sufficiently.


Bitmessage doesn't use a block chain. It uses only the idea of Proof-of-Work to make sure each sent message has some CPU power behind it. Because spam is very costly to the network performance of its "send every message to everyone in the same channel" design.

Agreed eventually open source produces over 10 years or so the likes of Linux and Gimp which compete effectively with commercial OSes and top-of-line Photoshop.

But if you were going to pick a coin to work on as a starting point, why not pick the one that already has most of the major issues resolved in its design. When Linus started, he didn't port FreeBSD or other Unix OSes, I guess because he saw fundamental inertia there that would prevent him from reaching his goals for great design. (Linus is really good at smart delegation and managing design)

I assert no such starting point exists today. All the Top 10 have inertias and incorrect designs that can't serve as the platform for the next 10 years. I have some very big specifics in mind but I won't enumerate them yet, because other may try to copy me.

And what is wrong with pumping up the product, getting the market cap up there and then proceeding with donations? If that is what it takes to produce the best starting point, then so be it. As long as we as a community get what we need in the end. What ever is most efficient in the market. Markets don't lie.

Ideology killed the cat.

Again I think the only correct way to do ongoing development for both legal and economic reasons is the person who sells the coin product (awarding coins to people who purchased the product) must not continue as nor transfer control to a controlling group. Or the "fair distribution" approach but that appears to diminish speculation cycles which are necessary to create investor excitement and media play. The coin must run on auto-pilot after fixing the bugs and completing the contract for delivering the product and being paid. Independent developers can solicit donations to make changes in the source code, and nodes can adopt which ever version they wish (meaning that hard forks are very unlikely). This means a decentralized model of non-vested development. Any developers that try to act like controlling group, will thus face the possible ramifications under securities legislation. Thus I think developers should instead focus on paid tasks by decentralized donations. Foundations may form websites to teach about the coin, etc.. and again not by a controlling group. They can pay for their efforts by linking to products & services, and other monetization methods that don't involve being a controlling group.

If there is some major features that need to be added in a hard fork, then someone can go create a new coin. Simple as that.

There is no way to really force an upgrade on an established decentralized community. As we discussed the options up thread, it became clear to me (after I slept) that the concept of an organized upgrade doesn't exist in a decentralized consensus protocol because the protocol didn't have an expiration date in it. If we build in a burn capability for upgrades, then we create instability of an unknown expiration in that trust and consensus model (that no one is in control and no party has a favorable position in the protocol which is what I meant to write when I was so sleepy). Also burning for upgrades provides no funding for the developers who want to attempt some radical new features that justify a hard fork. Thus creating a new coin (even with the same name and calling it version 2 or what ever since no one owns the name in a decentralized system and only the community will decide how to refer to something) and funding it with crowdfund again in order to ascertain the level of interest probably is the most sensible.

Are we closer to agreement now?

This post is very very helpful to me! Thank you.


Makes sense. And I guess the first ASICs were produced in China too so someone perhaps mined a lot of coins cheaply.

But I think the underlying base of support of looking at LTC as a safe diversification from BTC (and the use case for laundering money and GPU mining) is what provided liquidity for suckering greater fools into the pump. It seems you need both the good illusion of a reason and the also the control of some of the money supply by those who will pump it up to increase liquidity so they can cash out.

Do you disagree?


I had heard that, but again there was an asset there with features that provided justification that along with the pump will bring in liquidity. I don't you think you can effectively pump some copycoin with nothing to get investors excited about other than the attempted pump? There has to be some illusion of legitimacy.


What do you mean by 300k? Do you mean the pump group invested 300k BTC (certainly not satoshis which are 100 millionth of a BTC) moving the price up before they started selling?


Is it evil to invest a lot of money in your own coin in order to drive up market interest?

Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.

Fair and homeostasis are the antithesis of the definition of openly traded exchange markets. That is one reason securities are regulated (because the government is always asked to fix nature, i.e. to fix what can't be fixed).


Bingo! As I have always said, the "fair distribution" was the initial death blow to Monero. I have said that so many times. There is no incentive to create any momentum, neither in capital structure nor in development (my point being paradigm shifts in development strategy don't come from group action but rather highly motivated individual creativity).


Armstrong has a few words for people who say markets lie. I reduced it to one word: delusion.

Markets tell you the reality. Holier than thou intellectuals wish reality was more amenable to "well-structured top-down sparkling academic cathedral of vastly superior theoretical minds".


Something that works is to be criticized  


Fixing I2P and Tor is interrelated with making Bitmessage scale. Who else has the financial incentive? I am not saying necessarily XMR should do that work, but rather my point is that anonymity is difficult to complete holistically.


I wasn't thinking about using the block chain to do anonymous messaging. Anonymity of the on chain rings is unmasked in theory by an omniscient observer such as the NSA if the connection to the internet is not anonymous.


Encryption is not anonymization. That secure messaging doesn't obscure the IP address of the sender and receiver. It is known they are communicating to each other. It is not known what they communicated.

In the case of Cryptonote, knowing the IP address of sender is in theory enough to do holistic correlation chain analysis and break down the anonymity combinatorially.

I don't think my white paper can turn the fate of Monero. The only advantages I see for mine over Shen's are potentially a performance boost (but need to actually dig in to quantify) and this obscure notion that in the holistic sense of combinatorial chain analysis by entity that can see many output values, then the unlinkability of the hidden values is I allege "not strictly enforced" ("broken") at the holistic chain analysis perspective (not broken at a per transaction perspective). In Cryptonote the values are always equal so values never lead to combinatorial unmasking cascade. One example of seeing many values is when users send many transactions through large entities such as Coinbase or Bitpay. The NSA might have tapped that data for example.

So while mine may have those advantages (no one can verify until they see mine) and if so is worth a minor increment in payment perhaps, it is not enough to turn the fate of Monero to justify that level of intrusion into Monero's coin distribution. The potential benefit is out-of-proportion to the tumult suggested.

Also neither smooth nor rpietila are fully qualified to judge the value of cryptography white papers (smooth could perhaps digest it but with much effort that he is probably too busy to do). They would be relying on the opinions of others experts. I have lost too much time due to talking and such. I'd prefer the paths of least resistance and clear paths to production asap.

Although I'd like to get something for my anonymity white paper, unless I am going to join Monero as an ongoing developer, then it doesn't seem like there is enough value that can be extracted by me relative to the tumult of the different personalities, past history, etc.. I mean I could release my paper then after seeing it they could argue it is not significant enough difference, then later they basically sneak in my advances in some other equational transformation that makes it look like they didn't take it from mine. I think they already have Shen's which is close enough so it is difficult now to do any deal.

I could see my whitepaper being more valuable to a coin that has no strong anonymity yet and which has the funds or market size to pay me. Bitshares and Nxt are probably the strongest candidates for getting my white paper if they are interested because they have weak anonymity thus far and at least the SuperNet (although they are working it, mine is I think superior than what they came up with and I do know what they were working on) has the funds available (haven't spoken to them yet on this issue) and if not just keep it for my own coin. Boolberry may still be affiliated with SuperNet so perhaps SuperNet would fund the addition of my algorithm to both BBR and any other coin on the SuperNet.


Imo, the bet you should be making is on block chain scaling.

Ah yes. I remember that now that you mention it. I remember specifically people citing that reason.


I do remember people mentioning exchanges as their form of anonymity when I was pushing off and on chain solutions integrated into a coin (which became Dash and Cryptonote). But I never thought about that being a main driver for LTC. You taught me a datum I didn't know about the largest LTC exchange allowing anonymity.

And this goes right to the point of my prior post, where I said that educating users about anonymity is difficult. Don't these naive users understand that if the exchange is anonymous, then it might be the NSA! No they don't understand, don't believe it is likely, or don't care!

Marketing is not about what is correct and most intellectual, rather about what people think and the path of least resistance. This is what I mean when I say coins that have horrible marketing in that they don't pay attention to the things that really matter in marketing.


Excellent point. The synergy between the two modes you raised.

Do any readers concur or disagree?


No I didn't mean Scrypt was an innovation in the sense of intellectual correctness. I meant in terms of marketing timing. The GPUs had to leave Bitcoin and so Scrypt meant Bitcoin mining ASICs could not mine Litecoin. So combined with the other modes you mentioned, this mining hash feature ended up being another factor driving the synergy of the timing.


Well because X11 is nonsense. And because GPUs were doing fine thank you in other coins with unique mining algorithms once the LTC mining had become saturated. And also probably most GPUs had been amortized and no one was buying more GPUs since ASICs were the hot new thing to buy. So LTC was the transition for paying off the GPU amortization.


I see. And being first in anonymity gave them the illusion of being hot in innovation while the masternode actually tied up the money supply so that that market cap appears much larger than the actual liquid float, which thus caused more stampede in on the way up the ramp to $53 million. May explain also why PoS coins have had ramps?


I will correct you because now you are in my area of expertise which is evaluating technology. Your expertise above of having more time than I do to observe all the goings on in different markets of crypto, explains that it is difficult for a core dev to be omniscient in marketing if he doesn't have input from astute others he trusts.

Cryptonote does wipe ass on one aspect of anonymity, but anonymity is more of an all or nothing proposition in that if you can't anonymize the path over the internet, then the on chain anonymity is broken against the NSA. I argue I2P and Tor are broken against the NSA. And CN did not anonymize values (until Shen and my inventions) thus it required equal denominations in transactions with bloated and complicated with power-of-10 denominations splitting of transactions. And all of this too obtuse for your average investor and user. And anonymity isn't the feature most investors are looking at in terms of expanding the ecosystem to the other entire world. Anonymity is an idealism/ideological feature and even some investors would prefer not to have it because they think it hinders mainstream issues.

Surmounting the anonymity space is not going to be easy. For example, Bitmessage sucks and Monero hasn't done anything about that. There is so much work that needs to be done. I2P and Tor must be replaced. And many other work to do. Complexity. Slog. Slow. Lose momentum.


Nope. The block chain scaling issues have more to do about the latency of propagating transactions to all nodes, resultant orphan rates (or centralization of mining to deal with it) and implications on double-spending probabilities and number of confirmations needed, security of 0-confirmation transactions, vulnerability of 51% attack, etc..

Also balances design doesn't stop the block chain from growing. So it doesn't really address scaling, rather it only addresses the point in time where scaling becomes a crisis (as is the case now for Bitcoin). Rather to address the scaling of the block chain data size, then not having to run a full node and download the entire block chain is more important. Yet not having mining become centralized by encouraging that.

All of these above are the sort of issues that my block chain scaling designs solves.

Note I wrote up thread that a balances design is incompatible with rings, but now I remember that may not be true. I think I remember I had thought of a way to do rings with balances.


I will have millisecond transaction time  

And I am only 1 person. Vitalik and the others are extremely intelligent. Too smart (joke, but it can be true. Any way, appears to be bloated and not focused because they are having fun with research)


Your definition of innovation is different than mine. For me even using masternodes to limit supply is a clever innovation. You are thinking idealistically that the goal is to produce technology. But technology is useless if it doesn't produce market results. So thus I have more open minded perception of what innovation really is.

What I bring to the table is a geek combined with a realist. And a proven ancient history of doing 1 man projects that reached million user adoption (because I combined those two aspects of my attitude and ability). There are times where I have let myself get too far off into never-never land of idealism and research. But when I realize I need to get back to what I did best, I need to be a realist about producing market value (while also being able to inject high tech where is makes an impact on the former not just for idealistic delusions).

That would correlate to my point in my prior post that Monero had a difficult time selling that their tech was superior enough to Dash that Monero could overtake Dash's "first mover" momentum on the feature of anonymity. But I am not sure a layman's white paper would have overcome that Dash was "first mover".

How many investors actually understand the math in the Cryptonote paper? I'd guess almost none of them. This is another problem with making anonymity the main focus of a coin right now. Very difficult to educate the users as to what is important. But this new hiding of values along with rings to hide sender, is perhaps a new frontier for anonymity. But who will explain to newbies so they understand well. I know I can, but I am also not sure if anonymity should be my first priority. I think block chain scaling is #1 for me. For Monero and Dash, they need to protect their market share on the anonymity feature, so they have more incentive to make it a #1 priority.


It can be implemented on any coin that wants to implement it and has UXTO. Will probably be a hard fork and the entire ecosystem has to be upgraded, so it is surely a non-starter for Bitcoin. Only those few coins that have a balances-only design would be technically ineligible.

Note Cryptonote is a technology that can be added to nearly any coin that manages UXTO. But CN required extra wallet complexity because the values are not hidden so the powers-of-10 balances need to be employed. Whereas this new improvement hides values, so that complexity of power-of-10 balances is removed.


Surprisingly I didn't think of that. I must be too focused on trying to find my direction.

I am observing that for those speculators who were buying/mining coins at the IPO, the flexibility, nimbleness, K.I.S.S., and low overhead of small development teams has trumped the large teams thus far in terms of payoff for the early adopters. Bitcoin was developed by one entity "Satoshi Nakamoto" (if he was one person or not we don't know).

As for innovation, all those were innovative at least is some facet (e.g. marketing for Dogecoin, and Scrypt hash mining for Litecoin), including Ethereum and Cryptonote, but Ethereum's inability to master all the technical details (and mired for months in expanding complexity of research) combined with their very bloated IPO valuation, in my and others' opinion makes it very unlikely most early adopters will see very large ROI. Monero in my opinion suffers from lack of momentum, because Cryptonote is not a technically complete solution to using something as a currency nor even complete for anonymity even though they tried by integrating I2P and now Shen's anonymity improvement coming (and noting anonymity being a smaller subset of the feature of being a currency as r0ach and Fuserleer pointed out). Anonymity is very difficult to complete and perfect (maybe impossible, but certainly a huge task relative to the fewer number of people who realize they really, really need that feature). I am not giving up on anonymity and I'd still like the best it can be, but I have to put my marketing hat on make priorities. What is odd for Monero is the first listing for market cap is $2 million and the highest is $6 million. Was there no way to trade XMR during the earliest days of mining so we can know the price of attaining it at its earliest adopter juncture? Monero had a very fast mining curve, so those who mined at the very start would have gotten more coins more cheaply than those mined by the time exchanges for it were ready. It appears the only way to have gotten rich speculating in Monero thus far was to have mined it very, very early. Hmmm. What does that potentially say about those devs who claim to have lost money on Monero? Where they not able to obtain Monero very cheaply in the early weeks of mining? Did they not sell the coins at much higher prices? I have not done the forensic research.

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/

Compare to Dash (DarkCoin's) rise from near $1 million to $53 million marketcap:

http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dash/

Why? Because Dash was first on anonymity? They were expert on marketing? Many early adopters had cheap coins to promote? Was the dev or some vested group selling the premine at the start to hold the price down and then hitting the ask sometimes on the way up helping to drive the speculative frenzy?

So I guess what I am observing is unless the coin is Bitcoin thus having the perception that the entire world is entering your ecosystem, then your coin is going to suffer from a boom and bust. If your tech can cross the Rubicon and seriously take on Bitcoin in terms of ecosystem adoption, then maybe you have a shot of rising up to that perception level (and actual network effects with perception being one of the effects). But other than perhaps Ripple (and maybe Nxt briefly or still amongst their large base of supporters?), I don't think any altcoin has gotten near to that widespread perception even for a brief moment. Litecoin was always a bet on gold/silver arbitrage, most everyone did not seriously expected it to overtake Bitcoin because it didn't really offer any compelling reason it would. Afaik, it's strong adoption came when ASICs arrived for Bitcoin and GPUs needed a coin to mine.

There appears to be strong correlation with being the first to present a hot new feature, e.g. Dogecoin with social networking, Litecoin with GPU mining (as Bitcoin lost it), Dash with anonymity, BitShares and Mastercoin with assets and features on block chain other than currency, Ripple with a totally different model, Peercoin with PoS, Nxt with building an ecosystem of developments around PoS. Ethereum on the generalized scripting of a block chain, but they never got the tech truly solved and their valuation was bloated from the start. Another point of evidence is that in spite of being technically superior Monero has had a difficult time selling the concept that on chain ring anonymity is superior to Dash and overtake Dash's market cap. They've had to try to correct people in other threads to try to get that point across, and I bet they feel like, "we have the higher intellectual tech, so why aren't we fully appreciated? Because there are scammers out there who fool the users". And thus they went on an anti-scammer cruscade at one point (but all this seems to have died down and they focus on their own threads now).

As for sustainability, none of those new features appears have been the killer feature that enabled challenging Bitcoin. And the follow through of implementation of their core features has been incomplete.

What I would propose is to create new coin with the killer feature that challenges Bitcoin specifically block chain scaling. And I would propose to focus on a core set of features and then find some way to follow it up with an upgrade, while letting the first version run on auto-pilot after delivering the debugged product and being paid then.

This is what I am contemplating now. Feedback is very much appreciated.

P.S. my health has been doing well past days especially considering the two all-nighters I should not have done. Hopefully soon I can shut up and code, so I can not get off on long tangents in these forums that cause me to lose any sense of time, lol.

Yeah I was thinking of the payouts to devs ongoing from mining debasement. All of these parasitic "features" can be removed by a competing forks, e.g. as Monero has apparently done to BBR. I don't dislike BBR's devs and competition, I am just talking about the reality of economics. The world will not agree to pay an ongoing fee that it doesn't have to pay, because the scale of the world is humongous so there is ample capital relative to demand for the technology to remove the ongoing fee from it via a fork. When we are talking about making a technology that can scale out to the world, then the only opportunity to make a profit is either adding services and products to the ecosystem or participating in the ramp up of the value via the adoption of (demand for) the asset.


One can form all the theories they want, but multi-national multiple-jeopardy is inherently rolling the dice on becoming a "convicted criminal".

Also even if one registers the securities (as Ethereum may or may not have done, I didn't check), this still doesn't stop the many nations from bringing civil and criminal cases against you due to varying interpretations of compliance.

Being a "controlling entity" in a widely adopted international security is in my opinion insane. And my father is a high-powered attorney, so hopefully the basic common sense of the way they think has rubbed off on me. You don't sweat the little things because contracts need to be fair, but you sure better sweat the unnecessary introduction of culpability within the scope of ill defined international securities law.

Also long-term investors and HODLers of coins in my view should also not be holding coins which have chosen the route of a "controlling entity" and sold coins or control a revenue stream from the coin (that is not an orthogonal product or service but integral to the control of the coin), which includes BitShares, Ethereum, and others. Sorry I don't want to want to express legal opinions on other coins, but users seem not to be aware or care that the G20 is rapidly getting organized on harmonizing their laws and enforcement and as we slide into the sovereign debt abyss a lot of angst and hunting for money is going to be accelerating. The bankrupted peoples are going to push the governments to be more proactive about going against all forms of illegality that deal in financial activities, since the people will always want to blame their problems on someone else who profited while they didn't.

Although it appears that Monero's core devs and cryptographer(s) are not a controlling entity because they never sold shares and they rely on donations, one could still fathom a legal argument made whereby it is shown the investors in Monero were relying on the capabilities, pronouncements, and activities of this ongoing group. The fact that this consistent core group responded to the BCX incident could be interpreted perhaps that they are a defacto controlling entity on the shares in the coin thus being a defacto company. But this will be much harder to prove, so I am not thinking this is likely.

For me, I'd much rather release a coin that runs on auto-pilot and managed by the community decentralized, and then just take occasional donations to refine any issues. If there are major improvements needed, then we need an upgrade model which is what we've been discussing (thank you).

The question is it possible to create a coin that runs on auto-pilot? Is Bitcoin running on auto-pilot other than bugs the core team fixed and the need to deal with the impending block size scaling issue?


Interesting.

So coins can run on auto-pilot if well developed.

Boolberry is perhaps not able to run ahead of Monero, because it is perceived perhaps that all the features needed for a crypto coin are not done, and that Monero has more people working on it, thus Monero has a better chance of adding the features needed to become a large market cap.

I think if someone creates a totally new block chain tech that scales, that coin can run on auto-pilot and run ahead of many other coins that exist in the Top 10 on coinmarketcap.com

The key is choosing the feature set to focus on first wisely.

Then following that up with another upgrade to address any features not addressed in the first version (because you can't do everything at once and still be fast to market and auto-pilot mode with all major bugs fixed). The remaining issue is how to best do upgrades. My next post will continue on that aspect of our discussion.

Edit: another interesting thing is that if BBR's dev is no longer working on the coin, then even though he is receiving a revenue stream, then he is not really a controlling entity. Hmmm. That is another funding model in the sense that although the world can eventually remove that parasitic fee, if it is insignificant enough to motivate others to do so and for as long as the tech in that coin is more compelling than what the world has created otherwise, then that parasitic fee can sustain and if the dev is not working on that fork any more (after the initial crowdfund and delivery of debugged product), then there is an argument that he was never a controlling entity and only selling a product in exchange for an income and feature in the product.

After getting some sleep, I came to the realization that Shen's solution is strictly speaking less secure than mine and thus it remains "broken" in terms of strictly fulfilling the unlinkability requirement of the original Cryptonote white paper (see also this explanation). All along I knew there was something missing in Shen's design and the result of that is conflating outputs and inputs in the signature. But before now I wasn't able to realize exactly what is "broken" by his design. Now it comes clear to me.

Context:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3oi16k/ring_ct_for_monero_a_work_in_progress_comments/cw5h9s0

Specific post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3oi16k/ring_ct_for_monero_a_work_in_progress_comments/cw67x1d

Was the coin not running live before he got paid?

If the coin was running, why couldn't the community keep it running?

The point is the developer should not be in a position to do that. That is why I mentioned crowdfunding where investors' funds are in escrow and get returned by the trusted escrow agent if the thresholds and deadlines are not met.

Crowdfunding for the first version of a coin seems like a solid idea. Upgrades after that which are troubling me. Trying to think of a good solution for that.

Need to find out asap.

Only Dogecoin and Bitcoin were designed to function as a currency. All the others have been designed for other things and mostly for speculation use only.

But why are you skeptical when some have raised a lot of money. And some coins have had huge gains from their launch price.

Funding the initial coin has proven to be viable for those with interesting new ideas, solid implementation, and good marketing skills.

What I am skeptical of is whether there is a way to fund upgrades. The spin-off gives nothing to the developer unless debasement is added to the new coin or the developer just takes a cut of every coin. The crowdfund gives nothing to the developer unless it gives a high rate of coins for earlier birds than latter burns, with the developer taking a cut (which is perhaps more masked by the non-expectation of a unity conversion).

Also looking at it from the speculator and user's mindset, they are most motivated to switch if they can buy low and sell high. Or if they can get parity but with more features and the ecosystem switches over (do no dilution of the ecosystem).

Perhaps the best way to do an upgrade is crowdfund a new coin and let the others trade for it after launch. It is terribly disconcerting for HODLers because the value of their holdings can be changed by the decision of when to trade. But this rewards speculators, incentivizes developers, and users get the major features they want. And it is likely to limit upgrades to those features which are worth the tumult.

For refinements, probably a donation model is all that will work.


If the protocol is open to all to use and they don't have controlling entity status, then the profit margins should be driven towards 0 by competition unless control can be centralized. So any sort of revenue model seems to be the antithesis of decentralized, uncontrolled, and legal under securities law.

Excuse the poor quality of the last 3 posts. I am droopy eyes. Zzzzz.

What I meant earlier by "not have to trust" is that no one controls the protocol, so it would live on indefinitely as decentralized for as long as there remain coins and demand/use for them.

smooth I will reply after I sleep. I am very sleepy after eating.

cryptodromeda, I think that is very valid line of thinking for those who like smaller ROI. But remember this, it isn't always true that the largest team wins. And the more mouths to feed, the larger the crowdfund, thus the larger the initial market cap and the lower the potential upside. And larger teams may bicker more and waste more time and money. Google "The Mythical Man Month" to learn why larger teams are worse.

And most of all, remember the victors go to those who bet correctly, with the most discernment. The greatest gains for speculators on altcoins have come from the coins created by one or two guys, e.g. DogeCoin, Litecoin, BitsharesX. Maybe because creativity doesn't come from large teams, but rather from individuals. Perhaps you invested in Ethereum and Monero with their large teams and are sitting on 10 bagger gains?

Something didn't compute.

iamnicholas, I will catch up on private msgs soon. Wearing too many hats.

I suggest you create a coin with no features. Blandness has its virtues.

Again the point is upgrades need to fund developers and go smoothly. You have not offered a solution to those two objectives. You instead propose to set the ecosystem into Rigor mortis.


Upgrades shouldn't exist then. Because you are thinking that crypto is about not having to trust.

Let's create the perfect coin and declare it final.

Let's eliminate market moves and declare the business cycle dead.

Sound anything like socialism's aims for nirvana?


We are discussing the distribution of upgrades.


And that is why crypto exists. For speculators.

And for users, they need upgrades, because they have to use this stuff.


Market moves are part of how we bring our new features to users. Speculators want market moves. Users want features. Developers need funding.

I'll tie it all together in another post after I eat.

I encourage you to go reread my comments there. I admitted the same at that time. You are not telling me something I didn't state then. You apparently just choose to read it as me disagreeing. I conditioned my support on side-chains to needing my improvements for block chain. I specifically said that in cypherdoc's thread.

I suppose what has changed now is that I have become more realistic about how long it has taken me to get my designs out into the market. And because of that and as I have tried to figure out ways to accelerate coding, I realize that attaining perfection in the first version on every aspect is not the right goal. The right goal is hit the sweet spot K.I.S.S. asap. I removed my tech hat and put on my VP marketing and CFO hat.


You are rightfully concerned what happens to the stragglers who are still in the old coin as M becomes small. Some may miss the deadline and be stuck with a coin that no one wants to buy thus the market exchange rate has destroyed the value they had.

This can be solved by having an "auto-burn if X% burn" setting on each coin UXTO, perhaps set to a default of say 75%, and so even people on vacation won't miss out.

It is entirely in the community's interest to have compelling upgrades and for those upgrades to go smoothly and complete 100% as soon as the consensus to do so has been attained.

To have lingering two forks of the same basic coin tech in the market is very dilutive to the ecosystem and market momentum.

You tell me you know best about distribution but with its widely touted "fair distribution" did Monero ever raise hell in the market yet like DogeCoin, BitSharesX, and Ripple did? It has been real stable though, so perhaps that meets your design goal.

Think out the various options for organizing and funding upgrades. I think you will clearly see I am correct. Perhaps I will enumerate these after I eat breakfast (again another night with no sleep).

There is no wild swing likely because of arbitrage. Someone will be willing to pay below unity relative pricing to burn the coin.  After burning deadline, M is constant.

Whereas, if you leave users to apathy, they will only act during wild price swings and thus make them much more wild stampedes.

Hopefully you can see now I am correct?

Arbitrage is essential. It is lost in spin-offs that are not burns.


Hmmm they have a deadline to burn so their choices are to do research and choose the better fork, to wait until the deadline to see how many others burned, or to not burn and pay market exchange rate any time after burn deadline. None of that seems to be an issue in any possible scenario, except that there is going to be some loss of money supply because not everyone will burn by the deadline. But you've got ongoing debasement to pay mining to compensate for diminishing money supply due to upgrades.

I really can't see how this mark-to-market adds any risks that aren't just obscured otherwise. Marking markets to actual value sooner enables faster annealing of fitness. Allowing QE to kick-the-can causes stagnation and the entire coin ecosystem (both coins) is in a state of limbo longer.

If only a few coins are burned, then it means the upgrade isn't compelling so it may die. I mean for example if the upgrade adds anonymity and the only way you can use it is to burn, and very few burn in the months to deadline, then we know anonymity isn't that important to most users. But the developer will know this during his crowdfunding and thus never end up starting (or completing) the upgrade. The large crowdfunding commitment will help nearly insure the upgrade will garnish enough burns to be viable.

As the old coin gets mostly burned out before the deadline, it will also likely get totally burned out.

However, there is one factor which are those people who don't burn because they are not aware, on vacation, or not very tech savvy. But probably services such as Coinbase, will be making that decision for them. Not that I like that, but that is reality.


I have not changed my opinion that if the technical aspects of side-chains can be perfected, then arbitrage of side-chains can maintain the peg within a reasonable tolerance. But that required numerous improvements to coin tech, including eliminating orphaned chains and 51% attacks. Remember I have a novel block chain design that I claim does that. So side-chains may still be viable, but probably not with the tech Blockstream has available today. So my issue with side-chains is the complexity that has to be hurdled before they are viable (if ever) and the fact that crypto land will likely have already sorted out better solutions before that. So it is not really a rejection of my original analysis that arbitrage can work (within some tolerance band), but more a realism about timing, complexity, and that markets tend to find a K.I.S.S. solution before the complex solutions ever get entirely sorted. In short, complexity is a killer.

Complexity is the reason I don't like your open-ended spin-off. Giving everyone free coins creates no momentum in the market. Just adds and delays confusion. Why would anyone invest in the crowdfund, if they will get free coins instead by not investing. And without a crowdfund, how will the developer get paid? If the developer mints some new coins for himself, so each upgrade not only doubles the money supply, but adds more for the developer. But then the developer has not guaranteed income for doing the work. The really attractive aspect of the crowdfund model is the developer knows what he is being paid in advance. And the users know what features they are getting else they are refunded.

It requires movement of capital to start a trend. You propose to encourage people to delay any move.


Well I am seriously considering crowdfunding and the burn model needs to be precoded into the first version of the coin, so if you have any convincing arguments, I'd sure like to read them. Do you feel I don't appreciate just because I am not yet agreeing.


How so? Did you forget arbitrage? Spin offs delay manic stampedes, because users have no incentive to converge on a trend intellectually (research on the upgrade) until they are forced to by something that freaks them out, such as the price dropping or rising really fast on one of the coins.

So now I am asking all those who voted for donating, to please consider changing your vote to "I will not donate" since you can use Shen's solution which is already published.

However, consider that mine may be more efficient and may enable features which Shen's can't do. I mentioned some examples of features I think Shen's can't do at the Reddit post linked in my prior post here. I assume he will reply there and confirm or deny those trade-offs in his design.

I ask you to reconsider your votes, because I need to gauge how much interest there still is in my white paper. Because I need to determine how best to proceed.

Since Monero's cryptographer Shen has produced that solution, then I assume he can implement it in Monero, so they probably don't need me for implementation. The only question is whether they want my design's potential advantages over Shen's. I think if you are talking about being the best anonymous coin, then you want to have the best anonymity and $21k is nothing compared to a $millions market cap.

Then again Monero can just wait until mine is published as open source eventually. This is for you all to gauge your appraisal of "first mover" advantage and whether you think what I have might have advantages that are worth spending some bucks.

The past day as we've been discussing the crowdfunding option, I have become more interested in doing my own coin, because my coin plans are primarily focused on solving the block chain scaling and real-time microtransactions. The anonymity was secondary in my priorities. So I am okay with keeping my anonymity paper for my own coin. It gives me something else unique over all the other anonymous coins.

I am also willing to talk to any other coin about giving them "first mover" on my anonymity algorithm, but again I can't work for peanuts (few $1000s). I'd rather spend my effort on something that can pay reasonably well. So I think crowdfunding my own coin may be the only way to earn what I feel I am worth.

I will await for feedback.

Okay we have resolution!

Shen's white paper is a viable solution, but as far as I can see it has some significant downsides compared to my solution:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/3oi16k/ring_ct_for_monero_a_work_in_progress_comments/cw5h9s0

Quantification, confirmation, and elaboration will come with more work spent on writing down and not just roughing in my head.