Wow, that is about the worst example you could come up with. You know as well as I do that rpteilla couldn't explain that feature good or bad if his life depended on it.

We have added patches from BBR when it has made sense to do so. On multiple occasions, and will do so in the future. Some user-visible features from BBR will likely be adopted in the future. Though probably not that one because we don't buy into the tiny constant factor benefit as important enough to give up verifabilty, and also, as i've explained before, we know how to do much more effective pruning.


You obviously have no real experience in this area. For one thing, they don't say that because they don't understand or pay attention to design issues closely enough to do so, if at all, and for another, if they did, we would still dismiss such comment from "investors" as not interesting. By contrast, we do pay attention when you or Zoidberg or other knowledgable people offer technical feedback. See how that works?

The headroom is not knowable in advance. TFM frequently contradicts himself on this. He ignores the true wisdom of the bazaar.

i feel the entire cryptocurrency world is majorly screwed and nobody is for sure what will work because it's unprecedented (except for tulip bulbs & beenie babies).   So sometimes we reference technology & sometimes we reference currencies and just pull stuff out of our ass that sounds good to us at the time.  

but none of us really have a fucking clue (or that's what i feel like sometimes)

Was a design decision not made to not adopt BBR's compression.

Humans gain confidence by herding, especially when subjective decisions are involved. The decision was likely made so no one would have to admit BBR did something innovative first (note I realize the utility of that innovation is arguable). Then all of your herded together to reaffirm it to yourselves.

Of course you will spin it in your mind as not being so. And I am prone to seeing it another way.

As for "weighing in on Zoid," I fail to see what that has to do with anything. They are free to comment on anything or anyone they like, as are you or me.

This decision was made long before his involved, as I said. You may disagree with the stated amount of perpetual debasement, which is fine as these debates go, but it has nothing to do with rpietila. I don't remember the exact exchange but my guess would be that if he "become slightly flexible" it may have been because he recognized it was going to happen regardless of his opinion.


He didn't "agree" to buy anything. He decided on his own. It was as much as surprise to us as anyone else, perhaps more so.

It's actually quite easy. Seriously. You adopt the mentality of being an open source software project and not a get rich quick scheme and it pretty much follows from there. Attempts to influence from investors that lack technical merit (which is generally all of them) are treated with derision or laughed at.

I really can't believe that we are the only project to ever approach things in this manner, but given how hard it seems to be for people to get the concept, perhaps we are.

Except you were and are wrong. Investors have never had any influence on any design decisions, most certainly not reptilia and debasement, as I explained that was not only wrong, but chronologically impossible -- by the way, are are aware that the stated design explicitly includes the possibility of perpetual debasement, and we are unanimously in favor of it?

Nobody is going to argue that rpietila hasn't had some influence on the Monero market.
I can't say the same about any design decisions, however I do believe smooth when he says he hasn't.

Actually I believe you have had just as much (or close to it) influence on the market by divulging what so far appear to be undemonstrated vulnerabilities in the code.

I also believe you are hoping any attack on Monero is successful.

You are one strange individual.

His book The Bed of Procrustes summarizes the central problem: "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas". Taleb disagrees with Platonic (i.e., theoretical) approaches to reality to the extent that they lead people to have the wrong map of reality rather than no map at all.[17] He opposes most economic and grand social science theorizing, which in his view suffer acutely from the problem of overuse of Plato's Theory of Forms.

Relatedly, he also believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. He argues that knowledge and technology are usually generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering" rather than by top-down directed research.

Taleb's writings discuss the error of comparing real-world randomness with the "structured randomness" in quantum physics where probabilities are remarkably computable and games of chance like casinos where probabilities are artificially built.[66] Taleb calls this the "Ludic fallacy". His argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on Plato's Theory of Forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account, such as: the impossibility of possessing all relevant information, that small unknown variations in the data can have a huge impact, and flawed theories/models that are based on empirical data and that fail to consider events that have not taken place but could have taken place. Discussing the Ludic fallacy in The Black Swan, he writes, "The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort."

In the second edition of The Black Swan, he posited that the foundations of quantitative economics are faulty and highly self-referential. He states that statistics is fundamentally incomplete as a field as it cannot predict the risk of rare events, a problem that is acute in proportion to the rarity of these events.

One of its applications is in his definition of the most effective (that is, least fragile) risk management approach: what he calls the 'barbell' strategy which is based on avoiding the middle in favor of linear combination of extremes, across all domains from politics to economics to one's personal life. These are deemed by Taleb to be more robust to estimation errors. For instance, he suggests that investing money in 'medium risk' investments is pointless because risk is difficult if not impossible to compute. His preferred strategy is to be both hyper-conservative and hyper-aggressive at the same time. For example, an investor might put 80 to 90% of their money in extremely safe instruments, such as treasury bills, with the remainder going into highly risky and diversified speculative bets. An alternative suggestion is to engage in highly speculative bets with a limited downside. He asserts that by adopting these strategies a portfolio can be "robust", that is, gain a positive exposure to black swan events while limiting losses suffered by such random events.[68] Taleb also applies a similar barbell-style approach to health and exercise. Instead of doing steady and moderate exercise daily, he suggests that it is better to do a low-effort exercise such as walking slowly most of the time, while occasionally expending extreme effort. He avers that the human body evolved to live in a random environment, with various unexpected but intense efforts and much rest.

In economics and finance, a Taleb distribution is a term coined by U.K. economists/journalists Martin Wolf and John Kay to describe a returns profile that appears at times deceptively low-risk with steady returns, but experiences periodically catastrophic drawdowns. It does not describe a statistical probability distribution, and does not have an associated mathematical formula. The term is meant to refer to an investment returns profile in which there is a high probability of a small gain, and a small probability of a very large loss, which more than outweighs the gains. In these situations the expected value is (very much) less than zero, but this fact is camouflaged by the appearance of low risk and steady returns. It is a combination of kurtosis risk and skewness risk: overall returns are dominated by extreme events (kurtosis), which are to the downside (skew).

Frankly I'm disappointed. I was expecting someone more like this:-

You apparently, because I did not state anything about anyone destroying Monero.

rpietila doesn't even have access to the repo, nor would he have any idea what to do with it if he did...

He's a user and self-appointed promoter.

If Mark Karpeles shows up here...

It might be possible to isolate which of the double-spends was seen by the majority by using a PoW consensus (which is basically a simple majority vote).

Then you must assume that any follow on txs to the attacker's double-spend were all his. But the problem is that consensus can't be reached always in one block, because the majority doesn't have 100% of the hashrate.

The attacker can also accept transactions, and spenders create txs autonomously.

True you could unwind some (usually extremely) smallish percent of valid transactions and be compatible with my fix.

Some will, but most won't (but as I said, "some" might be enough for your technique to be incompatible).

In selfish mining, you don't know if you are on the majority chain or not, so you don't know which of the double-spends was possibly sent by the majority and mixed by them

That does him no good. You still only have to unwind his spends. Him mixing with you does not affect your transaction one way or another.

The other ones that get unwound are spends that derive from his (obviously) or ones that mix with his outputs (likely a small number, or zero if he is mining on a private chain, and not something he has any control over).

You might also have to unwind some other (non-double) spends too though.

Not exactly. Selfish mining is an attack on Bitcoin.

You have constructed a different system that (may) be secure against such an the attack. That could be interesting, depending on the other tradeoffs.

If you can prove that the attack is not solvable in the first case (Bitcoin) that would perhaps be an interesting result that might get you some recognition (if you can convey it effectively). Even if no acceptable solution is provided or possible.

Congratulations you have invented Bitcoin (i.e. the first alternative here). If you have proven something novel about the broader distributed consensus problem, or fully developed a way to build something novel and useful based on the second, that might interesting.