Congratulations! Most academic economic tracks in the last 50 years or so have been slowly corrupted by truthiness and bias towards the status quo (after all, the universities manufacture the academics that justify the status quo for the populus). The argument that the economy needs a small inflation to function has been repeated ad nauseatum and rebuked just as many times. It does sound plausible, but it simply is not true.

First, inflation does not mean increasing prices. Inflation means an increase in the money supply, and increasing prices is just an effect. For example, since 2008, the USD went through a massively inflationary period, but prices did not increase because all the excess cash stayed far away from common goods. Indeed, the self proclaimed purpose of the FED is to create price increases in RE and stocks ("wealth effect"). I use the FED example because I'm more intimately familiar with the matter, but everyone else is doing the same thing (ECB, BoJ, BoE, etc). Bending the meaning of words like inflation only serves to hide the real significance of their actions.

Secondly, let's get to the meat of the argument. You claim that increasing prices are necessary to make people buy stuff, because otherwise they would not and the economy would collapse. This can be shown to be wrong with two simple examples:

1. If the prices for necessary goods (i.e. food, fuel) were decreasing, you would not starve, but postpone purchase until you really need it. Thus, you end up paying less for a larger utility gain. Decreasing prices of necessary goods encourages mindFUL consumption instead of mindLESS consumption (consumerism).

2. If the prices for leisure (unnecessary) goods (i.e. from sports cars to cell phones and boutique cupcakes) were decreasing, you would not buy less of them, but more. Since we assume they are unnecessary goods, you have no NEED for them anyway, so you buy them simply for hedonic/aesthetic reasons. If you can get more of them, you will. A very good example for this are tech products like smartphones and laptops. Their nominal price does not significantly decrease (but it does), however their price normalized for performance/capabilities decreases inversely proportional to Moore's &co. laws. This does not make people postpone their purchases "because they will forever be better off if they wait for the next generation", but instead makes people buy them more often.

As prices drop, at some point the gained utility from an upgrade is larger than the lost utility due to price, and that's when you buy it. This is valid for the  next purchase too. This also price-discriminates buyers based on their early/late adopter traits, which is compatible with how prices work now anyway.

So, good luck in your studies, but make sure to read other schools of economic thought as well, because economics is far from an exact science. There are a lot of politics, a lot of manipulation and a lot of simply bullshit floating in the field.

Spoken like a true student of Bernanke. Macroprudential, right?

You're not describing adoption, you're describing a Ponzi.

whoops, FAIL

Thanks equipoise

Some error messages need to be sanitized because they leak information:



EDIT: Actually the errors are triggered by my actions (i.e. failed send, also got similar errors for get_blocks() or similar). For some reason the wallet could not talk to the daemon anymore. That path does not exist on my computer. Any clues?

Smooth is right, my bad.

That must be a slip. If you use zero, then you don't use ring signatures but only stealth addressing. Thus, for a starter, the recipient of the XMR knows your public XMR address. The public at large knows you spent the money but not the destination. I would suggest using 5-10 for personal privacy, depending on paranoia level. The optimum for the network is hard to decide, my preliminary studies indicate that 24 should be sufficient to make deterministic identification NP-hard. This might be wrong, this might be too high or too low, this does not say anything about probabilistic inferences, but only about deterministic ones (i.e. I think you are guaranteed, given no abuses of the network, that you may maintain plausible deniability if everyone used 24 or higher). A very high mixin means at this point only a larger (in bytes) transaction record. This, compounded, leads to blockchain bloat. In the future, transaction fees will be proportional to transaction sizes (in bytes), but that is not the case at this moment.

Hope this answered your questions.

Actually, let me not be accused of silencing criticism.

Visit a feelings specialist for treatment (caution: medicine might need to be applied directly to butthurt).

C'est la vie and other platitudes.

No, definitely not. Apparently there are also BBR trolls now (hint, hint). Or is it Rune? Or is it RuneBerry? Or is it WindjcDecidesTheNameCoin?

But it's so warm and cozy up here.

Damn guys, do you hear that? Dump XMR and buy BURST or something.

No, he's clearly above that level.

Half of the forum is mindless trolls or possibly more (more than trolls? more than half?? is it true???)

Indeed.

Indeed.

Hear that Slave Latapie?

Told you Slave Latapie, you should be the capricorn of crypto.

I'm sure that, if he doesn't do anything and pays others to do the devving, then the dev funds go to the real devs, don't they?

Slaves are not allowed to.

Power to you.

Hear that Slave Latapie? Hope Risto practices proper pubic hygiene.

"Erotic" is what I had in mind.

Judging by trade volume, market cap, liquidity, old timers, whales, trolls, I would venture to guess money already chose where to go.

So, in any case, to break the ice, I think exhausting crowdfunding via Kickstarter and Anon should be a priority and DEFINITELY precede any further discussion of more controversial funding methods.

What does this mean??

First?

Firstly, please read my previous post again, I have written more.

What is your argument exactly? I don't care about Bitcoin, that's why I'm here. Bitcoin left the sanity world a long time ago.

I have argued above that the bolded phrase is meaningless. Please read my post again.

EDIT (to prevent double post): I proved maybe ~50 pages earlier that Monero's block reward is actually a simple exponential decay once you solve the recurrence relation. This means that the emission curve is really only defined by three parameters: constant term (premine, 0), reward of first block (17.something but can be normalized to 1 for this discussion) and base of exponential (reward "decay factor", which is 1 - 2^-something * 10^-something, a value very close to 1). I claim there are good reasons for the exponential form and should not be changed. Now let's consider our options:

1. A post-mine changes the constant factor and a posteriori (i.e. for later adopters) it is the same as a premine, which is frowned upon. A 1% premine seems to be acceptable, but one of Monero's main selling points was ZERO premine. Even 0.1% is much larger than 0. As I noted before, I would accept a 1% post-mine but only if other methods of fundraising have failed.

2. Changing the normalization factor is equivalent to a redenomination. This would have been acceptable in April (second option in my previous post) but I do not believe it is the case now. I think doing this will kill the coin with p > 0.5. Increasing the normalization factor is the second option in the previous post, decreasing the normalization factor is a posteriori equivalent to a fastmine.

3. increasing the decay factor is a posteriori equivalent to a fastmine. See (2) above. Increasing the decay factor is the same situation as decreasing the normalization factor.

So to sum up, any of [increase|decrease] the [normalization|decay] factor, as well as increasing the constant factor, clearly and directly affects one of [early|late] adopters to the advantage of the other group. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't. And in this situation, the only winning move is to not play.

During the April vote (around 200k MRO were mined) I and others strongly argued to make the emission twice longer and halve everyone's holdings. Alternatively, one could have doubled the emission forward (denomination) for the same net effect but without the "taking away half ma coins" factor. The second option was psychologically better.

I don't think either is an option anymore. We know the story of Monero's inception and how the curve is twice faster than it should be because thankful_for_today doubled the block frequency in the last moment without adjusting the block reward. In this sense, yes, the emission curve is wrong. However, how many of Monero's CURRENT users know that? Back then there were very few users so taking the first option would have been much less traumatic than now.

I insist that changing the emission curve is at this point to only be considered in force majeure (only if the alternative is certain death of the currency) because itself bears a tremendous risk to kill the currency. No matter what I or you or the early adopters think, for the crypto community at large changing the emission curve to favour the early adopters directly is taboo. It should not even be on the table.

Another issue that gets to me from time to time is any discussion about the "total" or "final" emission. We know and have always known that the "final" emission is infinite. Defining "final" as "when the tail starts" is inane as long as we don't know when the tail starts. The only metric we have is the emission curve (or its derivative, the block reward curve).

All three of (1) post-mine (2) moving emission around and (3) miner fee, even if they violate the emission curve, are strictly (much) more palatable alternatives to outright slowing the emission curve. And all three are strictly (much) worse than fundraising through any other methods. Even issuing MEW voting rights as a PoS asset is better, because it does not affect Monero the coin.

Sorry for the brash words but I feel this point is not getting across. Changing Slowing the emission curve is taboo. In this respect, the status quo is inherently better simply because it is the status quo. It's not my opinion, it's my opinion of the market/community opinion. You may disagree with this, but read the last pages again.

I am one of the first 50 if not fewer people involved in Monero and it is my only non-BTC holding. I will dump all and probably never touch alts again if the emission is slowed. In my mind, the risk far outweighs the benefits if things work OK. I am sure I am far from the only one in this situation.

@smooth and others,

Before the BCX episode we had a lengthy exchange on the subject of funding. I suggested (and others agreed) that before more extreme measures are deployed, we will attempt to crowdfund. I agree that donations in this form do not work out. I also agree that riding on transaction fees is a small amount. I have asked for that goddamn spreadsheet that takes little time and effort to make and it seems to me you just don't like the idea but don't want to say so out front.

My point was (and still is) that even regular donations would be more successful if there was some TRANSPARENCY on where the funds went and will go in the future. You countered that exposes you and the recipients to legal risk. Well, given that the community trusts (and has to trust) you already, the spendings do not need to be verifiable. And i can't believe that a simple explanation like amount x to hosting, amount y to developers, amount z to security/crypto experts really exposes you so much.

There are two main ways to crowdfund and both can be employed at the same time. Kickstarter for fiat and larger exposure, Anon's escrow for cryptos. It doesn't even have to be the core who organizes it (after all fundraising is really MEW's cup of tea).

Barring this, you can notice very strong opinions for and against the post-mine, for and against the miner fee, for and against changing the emission curve. I am not debating them, but it should be obvious to all by now they are very controversial and all damage trust in one way or another.

So why not just fucking do the noncontroversial stuff first? It was also semidecided that a month is sufficient time for the fundraise.

Seriously, what am I missing?

Well duh, my bad. If it verifies checkpoints then only the checkpoints need to be signed
Furthermore, even after abstracting, there is still going to be a file on the disk, even if that is a compact DB.
Finally, 'next few years' seems like a lot of checkpoints to me to be doing them manually.

But I understand there are other complexities involved with key management, so there definitely is a trade-off here.

My understanding is that the daemon doesn't verify the correctness of the blockchain when it's loading it from disk, and for performance reasons the intention is to keep it this way. In this case, shouldn't the daemon sign all the bin files (i.e. pool, p2p, chain)? Shouldn't it verify the blockchain if there is a problem with the signature?

I argue that automatic checkpoints should be treated the same way, not in case you guys disappear, but so that you don't have to do it manually in the future

Welcome, and let me point you to http://monero.cc/getting-started/index.html

Depending on your setup, make sure to read the OP and look for a list of miners. You might have to follow their threads to get more information about how to compile, run, configure them from their own threads (if applicable).

Post was removed.

I think the best option is that each client could create checkpoints itself for blocks old enough. In this context, all the files in ~/.bitmonero or %APPDATA%/bitmonero should probably self-signed by the client on exit. Clients could generate their own keys but that opens up other problems.

Is it plausible to make clients checkpoint themselves regularly? This would require the checkpoints to be saved in some external file that is integrity-verifiable.