Can Trezor tackle the current requirement of an underlying 64bit architecture? To my knowledge, no cant.

you sir never let go of this humor, in this abrasive troll world of scams and failed shitcoins its always refreshing seeing something like Monero being led by someone like you (the same to other members of the core team, smooth, david, othe, tacotime, eizh)

Yep it seems to be dead. None of the commands do anything. Who is running the tippero bot?

get your history right then.

Monero miner originally inherited from Bytecoin. Bytecoin miner was deoptimized, let them create the illusion of having a 2 year old blockchain. Where's Dr. Bookmarks?

It's not entirely clear from that post unless you read it very carefully, and especially if you correlate the story he tells with the monero github commits, but what was happening was we were finding optimizations to put into the public code over the same time period that he was (starting with the NoodleDoodle one he mentions that was done before he even started).

He was a bit better at it and kept somewhat of an edge for a while, but the improvement to the public miner kept that edge modest (for example, the AES instruction thing he mentioned was also fixed by NoodleDoodle a short time later). There was a constant game of one person optimizing trying to outdo another, and I'm sure there were other miners doing that too. The exact same thing happens with every other coin, although I frankly doubt the core developers of every coin throw their optimizations out there on github right away the way we did.

No, it wasn't "insiders" at all, it was an expert computer scientist (dga) and his miner partners, who were able to spend a lot of money and make more money from that, but the overall supply curve was not affected at all. Plenty of other people (including me) were able to mine with the regular miner and still be profitable, which was quite remarkable, but the market was very hot at the time too. It's all well documented (including the non-involvement of the insiders; in fact we were thwarting their efforts as quickly as we could) on his blog somewhere.

EDIT: here:

Monero is a shitcoin and that won't change unless competent developers take over. You guys are clowns. Mere copycats. You can't even compile static bins.
You don't even care. I know for a fact all developers combined don't hold more than 100k xmr. You have no incentive to continue work on xmr so please leave and let others/my team take over...

Cryptsy refuses to add XMR, feel free to tell them to add it tho.

Internet Relay Chat ... something people very much used in the late 90´s and still is in use today.... some may remember the famous QuakeNet from their youth gaming times ( if you are in your 25-40´s )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

What are the weaknesses--can you point me to a resource?

What does 2015.75 refer to?

I hate to say this but sub 0.001 is now a possibility.

I honestly don't think it's that bad. If/when Monero becomes more popular and easy background mining is implemented in the core wallet/daemon, then it will be much less of an issue, but even at the current levels of popularity and usage I don't think it's such a big deal. Would you rather have shady botnet operators collecting 10-80% of coinbases, or would you rather have shady operators like KnC, Butterfly Labs, Gaw Miners, etc. collecting a significant fraction of coins? It's a tradeoff, for sure, but one that I don't think is necessarily a negative compared to ASiC-only coins, leaving aside GPU-only coins.

I dont think Botnet mining will stay a big danger, in the long term.

Only the very worst botmasters, really choose to install crypto currency miners on their victim machines.
There are several other sources of income, like DDoS attacks, theft of confidential information, spam, phishing, SEO spam, click fraud and distribution of adware and malicious programs that are paying better in total and have better risk/reward-ratio mining.

Have a short look at:
http://old.securelist.com/en/analysis/204792068/The_economics_of_Botnets?print_mode=1
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/10/the-scrap-value-of-a-hacked-pc-revisited/
https://www.iseclab.org/papers/cutwail-LEET11.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.0522v1.pdf


Besides making way more money with other streams of generated income (with less work).
What are other reasons why is mining a bad choice to monetize your botnet?

- the big, permanent full CPU usage even noobs will notice (and raise infection concerns or lead to OS reinstall, buying new PC, bad because new install is not infected)

- the introduced new CPU usage from mining could harm other services or tools you run on the victims (that are not usable with new permanent usage load, like webcam spying, RDP usage on victim, ...)

- cooling problems

- it often slows the victims computer to strongly to be able to do general computer work

- antivirus software is actively searching for findings (files, traffic or process activites) are related to mining (adds big unessacry AV detection risk)

- risk of victims provider or mining pool admin noticing the botnet mining and informing the victim

- u cant run out-of-the-box mining software, because you need encrypt the well known binaries (obfuscate it so much) so you dont get dectected by AV software (i think with most working crypters that make your suspious binaries undetected by AV you lose at least factor 4 in performance vs. unencrypted standard mining software)

- botmasters want to automatization as much so possible, a mining operation on the big botnet is to much work (selling the coins, switching pools, avoiding bans by pools, advoiding frozen exchange  accounts, finding correct time to sell the CC, updating mining software encryption, optimizing whats possible for you, choosing the right hype coin, which change often, ...)

- bad footprint on the mining network: because your clients arent using specific hardware options regular miners would turn on for there mining client (because you have to roll out a general setup that works everywhere)

- bad footprint on the mining network: you dont have the same hardware power as the general legitime CPU miners in average per machine,
the majority of botnet-member have old, slow hardware vs. the global average of deployed CPU - because the majority of botnet-members are old computers with old hardware (win 2000, win xp, vista) and in a typical botnet the majority of install are in poor underdeveloped countries (china, india, brasil, poor regions of turkey, ....) -> no money -> no fast pc
(another factor why alot installs are in poor countries because people use pirated windows the cant update -> security holes stay open forever)

- crypting is expensive; adding a miner to your current intalled malware will encrease monthly crypting costs (can be big jump, if u for example are currently reencrypt your malware every 7 days to stay undected and now with an added cryptocurrency miner you need now to encrypt daily, -> 7x your current crypting-costs)

- costs of changing your crypting-setup (establishing are working configuration & testing),
in most cases with more re-encrypts you need to invest in more botnet-infostructure, more C&C-servers to handle the increased work load (doing more encryption, serving it) and new proxy-server to roll out the new crypts (because increased traffics, avoid IDS dections by to often using the same proxies, which were enough, when there were old longer crypting-setup with with less routinly connections) needed with the new demands

- maybe your subscribed favourite crypting-service or software solutions doesnt even offer the possibility of your new encryption demand (alot have unchangable rules like: "re-encrypt only ever 72 h" or stuff like "only 4 re-encrypts per month")

- added of work managing thousands of different mining pools accounts or setting & running your own pool

- there are some AV-industry & IT-Security-people that actively fight mining botnet, because they want to support CryptoCurrency in general or a specific coin they support) a significant increased risk losing your whole botnet, vs. the small added benefits of adding mining software

- over 90% of botnet-members are multi-infected with typically being member from average 3 botnets and bad unpatched PCs that are members 7 or more botnets
---> mining cant get popular as income stream for botnets, because the victim has one CPU but alot of infections  



I think you get idea why long running mining operation in big botnets are very unlikely.

--> there always will be kids that are new to boting scene, that fool around and may run mining on their new SMALL botnet for 4 weeks or maybe 3 months before removing mining from there setup or giving up botting for various reasons (botnet get sold to serious operator or becomes inactive/be turned off)

--> no serious botnet-operation (the ones running the huge ones) will pick up mining because its endangeres their whole botnet, often being an $$$$$$$$$$-business they depent on and have certain responsabilites to third cybercrime partys they do business with

The result
In an scenario with Monero mainstream adoption they legitime miners will strongly outnumber the number botnet miners in the network.
Because the number of botnet miners is strongly limited by the fact that only small, new botnets with newb botmasters (kids) will mining clients on their victims computers for a small very limited amount of time.
(Also see, not all botnet miners will mine Monero, AFAIK the most profitable CPU-mineable coins often changes and is on alot of days not Monero)

Big text. I hope I did add some useful information to thread.

How do you short Monero?

Just a little analysis:

You can still see the inputs scraped for all the masternodes here: https://chainz.cryptoid.info/dash/tx.dws?1702385.htm

at least philosophically you own

It would seem that you actually do not understand what cryptography is in the modern sense.

A fundamental nature of information is that it wants to be freely copied everywhere to everyone. That any bit is equal and indistinguishable from any other bit of the same value and that any bit is eventually known to all who care.  Cryptography is all that technology by which we hope to confine and constrain the nature of information, to put up fences and direct it to our exclusive purposes, against all attacks and in defiance of the seemingly (and perhaps actually) impossible.  Digital signatures are cryptography by any modern definition and utilize the same tools and techniques (for example, a DSA signature is a linear equation encrypted with an additively homorphic encryption), and suffer from most of the same challenges as the message encryption systems to which you seem to be incorrectly defining cryptography as equivalent.  Moreover, the use of digital signatures isn't the only (or even most relevant) aspect of cryptography in cryptocurrencies-- e.g. the prevention of double spending of otherwise perfectly copyable and indistinguishable information in a decentralized system is a cryptographic problem which we address using cryptographic tools, and-- like all other practical cryptography-- achieve far less than perfect confidence in our solution. As are more modest ends like interacting with strangers but not being subject to resource exhaustion from them.

Far more so than other sub-fields of engineering, cryptographic systems are doing something which is fundamentally at odds with nature and share an incredible fragility and subtly as a result (and perhaps all are failures, we have no proof otherwise).

A failure to understand and respect these considerations has resulted in a lot of harmful garbage and dysfunctional software.

This thread is moving pretty quickly (ten pages of mudslinging in half as many hours!) so I'm not sure you'll see this, but there's an important misunderstanding here. You're right that the human beings aren't cryptographic (e.g. the development team, market participants, etc) --- though it's important to observe that this makes them very unsuited to cryptographic functionality. gmaxwell had an elegant description of cryptography as "technology by which we hope to confine and constrain the nature of information" despite information respecting no ownership, borders or morality. He described this as "inherently subtle and fragile", which it is, but this indifference to political and social pressure also make it efficient (human trust is expensive to build and maintain!) and robust against a lot of political and social pressures that human systems are not. This robustness is the cypherpunk motivation for bringing cryptography into everyday life: anything we have the technology to do cryptographically rather than socially ought to be, since social systems can change quickly and unjustly. Nowhere is this more true than finance, so cryptocurrency is a perfect environment for this kind of thing. So cryptocurrencies try to eliminate human decision points wherever possible, and where not they try to set things up so others can't override each others' decisions (hence the value implied by buzzwords like "decentralization" and "censorship resistance" and "public verifiability").

I'm not entirely clear on what masternodes do these days, but I infer that their actions affect users' privacy, i.e. they are "confining and constraining" information. This is a cryptographic function too. Human decisions may factor into their behaviour, but they are still performing a cryptographic function; human involvement does not change this, only changes the failure modes.

All this to say that basically the entirety of cryptocurrency really is cryptography. Even many of the human parts. The network transport is part of the cryptosystem: it needs to be designed to prevent modification of data in transport, authentication of data even when endpoints are anonymous and spoofable, etc. A wallet is part of the cryptosystem: it's responsible for creating verification keys ("scriptPubKeys" in Bitcoin, which are usually abbreviated to addresses) whose corresponding private keys are controlled by the correct parties to the correct extent, and for correctly and securely storing these keys. Wallets are decoupled from the main cryptocurrency cryptosystem, and in particular are not part of the hard part --- consensus code --- but they are certainly cryptographic and are subject to the same sort of subtle missteps as other cryptosystems. (For example, the oft-cited BIP32 "bug" where a party in possession of a public key and chaincode can derive the secret key from a non-hardened child secret key; it would not be hard to come up with a plausible-sounding system which "unintentionally" exposed secret data through this mechanism.)

I'll repeat my above statement: basically the entirety of cryptocurrency really is cryptography. This is important. It's why things are so subtle, why complexity is dangerous, and why changing even trivial-seeming things can have drastic and hard-to-analyze consequences. This is where "a lot of harmful garbage and dysfunctional software" comes from. It's the default for poorly-thought-out systems. And in cryptography, "poorly thought out" means anything less than expert cryptographers spending large amounts of time and effort designing things to be both correct and clearly correct. (Given how few experts there are in the cryptocurrency space, I could tell you that almost all of it is shit just by the pigeonhole principle .)

This is not a cheap standard to hold a system to even if its designers want to; and falsely claiming that something is not cryptographic is an easy way to excuse not wanting to. But such claims do not change reality.


This is simply false.

He has cojones, you have to give him that. With that kind of trading strategy he will probably be either really wealthy or really poor some day. Not a whole lot of room for in between.

I can't wait for the break of that one, and hopefully it will go all the way to 0.0018..

Market...  

This is about as cheap as monero has ever been. We were very briefly as low as around 25 cents USD but are now hovering around 65-70 cents. I purchased some last summer in the $2.00-$3.00 range when Bitcoin was around $600 and XMR traded around .004-.005. How much cheaper can you ask for?

Sold all my XMR. i will buy back at 0.0020-0.0015

As always, it can go up, down, or stay put.

I tend to think that we are in an uptrend, and also at a low end of the trading range, so up is a better chance.

Well should I have said I felt scammed when I didn't?

Were you scammed?