I am not - please let me know where I've been purposely abrasive, tongue-in-cheek poking notwithstanding.

I've posted in this thread already clarifying our official position on this. Do you want me to link those posts or can you browse to them on your own?

The anonymity set is more reduced than that. Let me give you an example: say you want to transfer 123.456 Bitcoin. No matter what method you use, if someone can observe you sent 123.456 Bitcoin from your address and 123.456 Bitcoin appeared in another address within an hour or two they can make certain conclusions. These inferences can be cryptographically proven, and this is called "reducing the anonymity set". Eventually the anonymity set can be reduced to the point where you can ascertain undoubtedly prove a certain address sent a transaction regardless of the intermingling and intermixing that occurred.

Now in order to make this really difficult, you have to start with a VERY large anonymity set. In other words, there need to be to very many people potentially involved in a transaction that any reduction is practically meaningless. Mixing typically requires point-in-time availability of people or nodes, and the higher the mix the longer it takes (since you have to go through "rounds" of mixing). Darkcoin gets around this, I believe, by "premixing" your coins. The downside to their approach (and to most of the other approaches I've seen) is that you have massive address churn in your wallet, and any practical use will require you to back your wallet.dat up constantly. Secure and anonymous cold storage is thus observable to anyone with a blockchain explorer (when it really shouldn't be).

One of the solutions Monero and other mixing systems employ to blind amount correlation is it splits inputs (and outputs) by powers of 10, so the earlier example would mean inputs of 100, 20, 3, 0.4, 0.05, and 0.006. Now because of the way Monero works (ring signatures!) you specify you want to mix with, say, 50 other people. So it takes that first input (100) and goes and finds all the unspent transaction outputs (ie. those not spent with a mixin of 0) that have ever occurred in the past and have a value of 100. As you can imagine, this is a pretty huge set, and is growing every day. It can then pick 50 of those at random, add your signature to the ring, and voila. Now it does the same for the other 5 inputs. This means that the total anonymity set here is massive - 51 * 6 = 306 people that could have possibly been involved in the transaction. Most importantly, because all of these are stealthed transactions (Monero uses stealth addresses permanently) some of those outputs you mix with could even have been created by you previously! Thus the potential anonymity set grows and grows even if the userbase stays stagnant - a feature that is not shared by any of the Bitcoin-derived anonymity solutions.

Finally, because Monero uses stealth addresses, you never need to backup anything more than a 300 byte password-encrypted keys file (or just write down the 24 word mnemonic seed you get when you first create a wallet). That 300 byte file will never change no matter how many transactions you do. You back it up once and you are safe from data loss forever.

Replied to you in that thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=751095.msg8482531#msg8482531

I commented on that post elsewhere (Anotheranonlol has been cut-and-pasting that everywhere, so I had to dig around to find my reply, and turns out it wasn't even a reply to that comment specifically).

Basically, the difference between the two in terms of usability is incremental. We did not build the 0.8.8 release statically as there were too many boost issues on various platforms, and we needed people to be able to dynamically switch one boost version out for another. The next tagged release will have boost linked in statically. With regards to the GUI, there are already a number of GUIs for Monero. They are all just as usable as the Boolberry one, which makes them all equally useless to anyone outside of the very small circle of technically proficient people on this forum. They're not intuitive or natural for a non-cryptocurrency native.

In other words, you have to split target audiences in two. Firstly, there's a relatively group of people (no more than a few tens of thousands) who know or use this forum (check box one), are interested in cryptographically sound software (check box two), don't buy into gimmicky "features" (check box three), and have a degree of technical proficiency (check box four). Secondly, there's the rest of the planet (check box one), who may have a peripheral interest now or in the future in using digital currency (check box two), and who may run malware-ridden systems or be unable to use a computer without the simplicity of an Apple product (check box three). In-between these two groups is a sliver - a very tiny third audience - who know or use this forum (check box one), are very opinionated and express their opinion loudly (check box two), and have a technical proficiency below what one would expect (check box three - and that's an observation and not meant to be an insult).

Monero in its current form (command-line, optional GUIs you may have to compile yourself) is perfectly useable by the first audience, as is Boolberry. In the future Monero hopes to be perfectly useable by the second audience, but right now both Monero and Boolberry are completely useless for that target audience. That tiny sliver - the third audience - are not catered for by Monero unless they are willing to ask and learn, whereas Boolberry appears to "work out the box" for them.

It is not worth our while expending effort and doing something half measure to incrementally improve usability for that third sliver. We will, as a natural order of ongoing development, make things easier for that group, but most likely not to the level Boolberry has. Instead we choose to focus on improving the stability and usefulness for our current audience (the first group), whilst also pursuing a long-term goal of making Monero useable by the second group. Between now and when we reach that long-term goal, those that are in the third sliver will either disregard Monero until it accomplishes that long-term goal and is useable by them, or they will apply their minds, ask questions, and move into the first group.

Are you running a private pool? That's a complete edge-case for a normal user - there are issues with getwork and it not obeying OS limits. You have to ramp your ulimits up at the very least, and to the best of my knowledge most pool operators have a scripted daemon shut down and restart every few days. I find it odd that your blockchain is corrupting - the daemon only writes to disk every 8 hours, so unless it is crashing during write a crash wouldn't inherently corrupt the blockchain.


The whole blockchain is loaded in RAM, so that's understandable. We are working on moving to an embedded database, you can follow the progress on tewinget's branch: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/bc2


Ah yes - the benefit of inheriting 5.5 years of amazing development in improving and tuning the Bitcoin protocol. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years time Monero will meet or exceed that level of functionality whilst providing cryptographically unlinkable and untraceable transactions.

They're linked in the OP:

August 16 - Monero Missives #11 includes an update on the GUI, breaking the 600 subscribers barrier on reddit, pre-announcement for a donation system that also benefits donators directly, using "account" instead of "wallet", a Twitter campaign, an open-source stratum proxy, QoS bandwith control, easier compilation on Windows.
August 10 - Monero Missives #10 includes debriefing the Monero Fireside Chat #1, state of the art for the GUI, reminder about donations, a price ticker for websites, the move to Continuous Integration for faster development and moving to unmetered downloads
August 05 - Monero Missives #9 includes the announcement of Monero Fireside Chat, market and download statistics, inclusion in CoinsSource's Trust Index and cleaner builds.
July 23 - Monero Missives #8 includes Poloniex adding XMR trading pairs for a number of altcoins, and license changes to Monero.
Archives: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7

Unless you're on a very entry-level VPS and the daemon is being killed by the host OS' oomkiller this is incorrect. The daemon is reasonably robust and does not just crash and corrupt the blockchain.

The issue with sync speed is because catch-up is done on an absolute consensus basis - it requires blocks to be received and confirmed from all peers to ensure that those peers are whitelisted (peers that fail to meet this consensus or serve bad blocks that do not verify are dropped and graylisted). This makes it an incredibly robust consensus network, but it also means catch-up is slow and chunky. Bitcoin's catch-up mechanism is based on the longest chain rule - pull blocks from only 1 peer that has the longest chain. The upside is that you'll eventually figure out which peer is honest, as the one that is feeding you bad blocks will eventually be dropped from your peer group when you reach the point where their PoW fails to verify. The downside is that you'll potentially go through huge blockchain reorganisations during this process. We are trying to play with a middle ground that is faster than our "absolute consensus" right now, but also reduces the amount of reorgs needed to catch-up.

I wouldn't say Monero is impossible to use. Download the blockchain from the Bitcointalk OP (which is never more than 8 hours behind), start the daemon, and then use simplewallet to create and transact with your wallet. When a new wallet is created you're given a 24 word seed that you can write down and store somewhere - that's all you need to backup your wallet. No more "just backup your wallet.dat" nonsense:)

I'm one of the Monero Core Team members, so I'll only speak about Monero.

Price stability is not going to happen with Monero any time soon. It's a rapidly evolving space, and in spite of the current trade volume it's still relatively easy for a mid-sized trader to move the market. This is also possible with Bitcoin, so market manipulation shifting the price is something you're going to have to live with one way or another.

Monero also has a completely different RPC API to any of the Bitcoin-derived coins, so integrating it into an ecommerce system will require work, and you won't necessarily be able to just re-use a plugin written for Bitcoin.

Finally, for end users Monero has a high barrier to entry right now. Amazing usability is coming, but it will be a few months before we get to a point where general usability by non-crypto types is possible. You can see some of our efforts to date in the preview of the Monero GUI: http://imgur.com/a/ERheR

On the flipside, Monero is among the very few cryptocurrencies that truly do have cryptographically sound unlinkable and untraceable transactions. Even with a high mixin level (the level of ambiguity used to mix your transaction inputs with other random ones) of, say, 100, your transaction will go through in a minute or two. Our aim with Monero is to make it useful and usable as a medium of exchange and a store of value, not merely to provide an investment vehicle, so that fits in with your goals. Finally, you'll have the advantage of speaking to a technically proficient, generally intelligent community, so there is a marketing benefit.

Original CryptoNote whitepaper: http://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf
Our mathematicians and cryptographers raw (and sometimes snarky;) annotations are here: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_annotated.pdf
The review of the CN whitepaper as presented by one of our mathematicians is here: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

I don't think what he was asking for is, necessarily, sockpuppety:)

We don't have a roadmap right now, because it's hard to peg dates down, and a roadmap is a constantly shifting target. If you want a grasp of what we've achieved and where we're going then reading through the previous Monero Missives is a good start:)

I appreciate you being willing to give it a chance:) It is some time away, but I'm sure you'll be sufficiently impressed with it when it officially launches!

If you had a negative trust rating from Mark Karpeles should I view you as more or less trustworthy?

I'm sorry, but what you see as the difference between "hard to use" and "easy to use" is completely nuanced. You're like a fandroid arguing that sideloading with adb is much easier in 2.3, and everyone should just use 2.3. Usability is not an overnight exercise.

Are BBR's binary builds significantly easier to use for the handful of somewhat technically capable cryptonerds on this forum? Absolutely. Why is Monero not matching those? Because we're exceedingly busy overhauling the core of Monero: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/tree/development to make room for improved usability. To wit: our next tagged release will include static compilation, but will not include a GUI.

Why? Because a good GUI is not thrown together in a vague attempt to be "first". A GUI requires pragmatism, forethought, and careful planning. Here's an example of how that process works: http://imgur.com/a/ERheR

We do support XP - we just don't support XP 32-bit until the embedded database is out (due to memory constraints).

Yes - I'm busy fighting with building static Qt on Windows, managed to get the Mac one done quite easily. I'll see if I can't get it sorted this evening:)

We've had the bounties discussion before (in this thread if I recall correctly) and decided against them. By and large it leads to extremely poor code being rushed out just to claim a bounty. More often than not we end up ruffling feathers of those writing good code, but not having it ready fast enough to "win" the bounty. And, most importantly, we are the ones that end up maintaining the poorly thought out code.

As mentioned previously, we are putting together a system that will allow for more direct funding of specific efforts/features, but in the interim bounties are not going to attract the right type of developer. Contributors are attracted to the project because of the quality of the architecture we're continually designing and the quality of the code that is being written. Having bounties will only serve to negate that.

Per the tenth Monero Missive:

"There is still a lot of work to be done, so we are unable to provide a release timeline, but we are working on it as hard as possible"

Last one for today:

Knowing C does not make you a "dev"
Much as chefs don't cook Chicken Kiev
You need crypto knowledge
From a well renowned college
Then you won't promise "in the next rev!"

And just for muddafudda's benefit...


fluffypony wikipedia did quote
muddafudda, upset, said "take note -
wikipedia is shit,
so don't believe it,
instead read this lim'rick I wrote"