The last mandatory update was on June 10, we only started tracking downloads on July 15. The binaries that everyone is downloading are not nightlies, they are the last stable release, which is the June 10 one. Also, if it was mandatory updates people were downloading, we'd be seeing a lot fewer blockchain bootstrap downloads.

That having been said, we are moving to a distributed download cluster, and will be using a more feature-complete logging platform (since we'll have multiple, geographically distributed instances of nginx), so we'll be able to weed out things that are skewing the stats once we've rolled over to that.

Once we have the entire interface completed we'll do interface testing with testing groups made up of people in multiple countries from all sorts of backgrounds, so we'll have a good cross-section. Typically they have a series of tasks to perform with no education or training on how to use the product or even what it is. We film them over their shoulder to see how they react and where they get frustrated. During this process we can do A/B testing with the privacy bar on/off between two groups, and then we'll have some tangible feedback as to what works and what doesn't. Should give us some direction as to what to do with that:)

When we move to per-kb tx fees then there will be a linear relationship between the mixin level and the fee you pay, so that will discourage that. Ultimately, though, if someone makes a bunch of high mixin transactions, all they're doing is adding to the utxoset, and thus widening the anonymityset (which is a good thing:)

We have #monero and #monero-dev on irc2p. It was being mirrored to and from Freenode, but rfree's bot is hiccuping at the moment. He said he'll fix it when he gets a moment:)

If you hop on to IRC on Freenode, then there's a channel for OTC trades - #monero-otc

Here's what you're referring to (I think) - http://gigaom.com/2014/07/24/researchers-find-serious-flaw-in-i2p-an-anonymizing-layer-used-in-amnesic-os-tails/

Basically the attack was a Javascript-based cross-site scripting (XSS) attack that could deanonymise i2p users who have JS enabled in their browser and visit a malicious website. It would not have affected AnonCoin or Monero users, as neither cryptocurrency uses an in-browser interface. As we all know due to the many exploits that anyone that have followed a similar strategy, anyone using Tor or i2p for web browsing with JS enabled is looking for trouble;) Either way, this has been patched in i2p.

I'm no good at TA or anything like that, but I can tell you that price movements are part of the market, and so is market manipulation. It only takes a kitty of a couple of hundred BTC to control the XMR trading market right now, so you can't take price shifts as indicative of anything. I mean, let's not forget that Bitcoin's flash crashes have typically settled at 50% of the high before the crash, with the worse taking Bitcoin's value down by 80% in seconds in February of this year.

The only time one should pronounce Monero as dead is if we (the core team) suspend development and walk away. The price genuinely doesn't matter to the core team, and it shouldn't matter to anyone who views Monero as having long-term potential. That long-term potential will take many months to be realised, and it will require a lot of the current efforts to fall into place before utility and usefulness can grow.

It's a stock CN fork. If you look his commits: https://github.com/jl777/privateNXT/commits/master he's created the genesis block hash on July 3 and nothing else. It's completely stock, unchanged from the CryptoNote "starter kit".

You're still not demonstrating even the slightest understanding of Monero's technical underpinnings. If you want to have a discussion, tell us about our technical shortcomings, not the actions of users. That sort of butthurt strategy hasn't stopped Apple from being successful (in spite of anyone who uses an Apple product being labelled a "fanboi"), and it won't stop Monero from being useful and useable.

I read the whitepaper, although I struggled to get through the ridiculous analogies that seem shoe-horned to fit with the "pirate" metaphor instead of being suited to task. Oh, and the lack of references by footnote is extremely frustrating (an appendix of reading material is not a footnote).

He acknowledges that the ring signature implementation in Monero "'is absolutely spectacular’ and the advances it offers groundbreaking". I do think he misses the point when he claims that "weak correlations are still possible", as ring signatures in Monero are combined with always-on stealth addresses. Thus, practically speaking, his example of 1.23 RingCoins if sent with a mixin of 15 would not actually just have 15 ring signatures. It would be 15 for each output, thus a total group for that transaction of 45 signatures, and unless you can crack the stealth addresses (ie. brute-force a 256-bit hash, which would take more energy than exists in the universe to crack just 1) for at least 42 of the signatures you simply have no way of knowing which of those signatures is real and which are fake. Even if you did know which was real by some miracle, you still only have the stealthed destination and not the actual address. Those outputs will be used in future both in ring signatures and in an actual transaction, but since there is no way of knowing if an output is real or not it will forever be considered unspent (spends at mixin=0 notwithstanding). Therefore, even weak correlations are not possible due to the combination of stealth addresses and ring signatures.

His main criticism of CryptoNote is that the blockchain bloat causes the Monero blockchain to be "an order of magnitude" larger than Bitcoin's. The first problem with the criticism is that it he uses completely incorrect numbers. He uses the actual Bitcoin blockchain data, but then for Monero he uses it's current on-disk size. Currently, the Monero blockchain is stored in an inefficient, duplicated, flat format. It is vaguely analogous to storing your holiday snaps in BMP instead of high quality JPG - the BMPs will take up a significantly larger amount of storage space for no appreciable advantage. We are moving Monero's blockchain to an embedded database precisely to solve this. If you use the actual blockchain data then you will find that, on average, excluding the dust transactions that came from pools earlier in Monero's history, the blockchain is 5.5x linearly larger than Bitcoin's (10x larger, or a single order of magnitude, only occurs if you include the early dust transactions). That means that in 3-5 years, ostensibly, if Monero has the same reach as Bitcoin and has achieved the same level of traction we should see the blockchain at around 110gb, hardly a figure to write home about when you consider that the majority of users will use web wallets and thin clients, and those that choose to run full nodes will most assuredly have 110gb of free space.

Beyond that, the lack of commonly accepted cryptographic terms makes it exceedingly difficult to understand what he's trying to achieve. There is no problem with making a term up, as long as it is thoroughly explained before use in the rest of the paper, but using the term "hyperspace" in a technical paper that has nothing to do with space travel just makes it illegible. Finally, anything that relies on "privacy servers" operated by amateurs volunteers will end up relying on a ridiculously small group of servers to not be compromised. That these servers are meant to be run by "anyone" on a VPS shows a distinct lack of understanding of the threat model. If Tor's exit nodes can be similarly attacked to find the location of SR's server (which they did, and then they compelled data centres in Latvia, Sweden, and Romania to hand over a copy of the data on the server - and since they had physical access to the server on-disk encryption would be irrelevant since they can just access data that is unencrypted in-memory) then you can bet that anything reliant on a group of servers for privacy is doomed to failure. Relying on a group of servers for convenience (eg. Electrum) is a vastly different exercise, this should never be relied upon for privacy.

Wallets themselves don't take up sufficiently large amounts of space, the issue is that the blockchain contains the transactions for EVERY wallet (including mixing transactions in the case of other anonymous coins). As smooth explained, most Bitcoin users are using web wallets (Coinbase, Blockchain.info, GreenAddress, etc.) or SPV-style wallets (Electrum, Multibit, etc.) where you don't store the whole blockchain, only the info relevant to your wallet (which is tiny). All of the backends to those services, though, are running full nodes with the full blockchain by necessity.

So let me get this straight. A group of people work to improve something from a reference implementation to a point where it actually has utility and value. Along the way they garner attention from people of all sorts with all levels of intelligence, education, and background. Those people express - sometimes quite vocally - their enthusiasm for the work that the budding group are doing.

You label their enthusiasm "shilling" and "a cult".

Don't you think that's a bit disrespectful to those people genuinely trapped in religious cults today? Don't you think your overly liberal use of terms that are clearly not applicable does nothing to prove your point, and only serves to reduce your own credibility?

If you want to tackle Monero, tackle us on a technical level. Point out where we are abjectly and unequivocally wrong on some technical approach. Show us the fundamental errors we've made with regards to implementation or cryptographic primitives or user threat modes or attack surfaces. Beyond that? Let the cryptocurrency live or die on its own merit if it is not fundamentally technically broken.

What you're not understanding is that transaction privacy is just ONE of the features Monero has and will have.

It is not our sole reason for existence, it is not the only feature we have.

If you want a one-trick pony, pick any of the scamcoins that exist and will exist. As for Monero? We're just making something useful, something useable. No more and no less.

blockchain size

The higher the mixin the greater the physical transaction size, so if everyone is using a mixin of 100 it would increase tx size (and thus block size) linearly with the mixin amount.

transaction speed

Zero impact. Unlike a coin that uses multiple stages of mixing, onion mixing, or CoinJoin (even with multiple mixing stages) a tx is the same speed whether it has a mixin of 2, 20, or 200.

Can we get GPG signed confirmation from both of you of the bet?

:-P

rg...dude...the people in #bitcoin-otc you lent money from want a word with you.

Maybe pay back the money you owe them first before you seek funding for this idea or pursue it in any way, people talk about you every few days in the room as they wait for you to reappear and sort out your loan repayments.

Don't you think this is a knowledge transfer / user education thing? I mean, after the first start wizard new users will see the tutorial screen (I'll show that off when completed), so before they see the privacy slider in the natural course of things they'll learn what it is.

Not showing the privacy slider effectively locks 90% of future transactions in at a single mixin (or even a random selection from a group), so this is something we need to keep loose so that the anonymityset isn't slightly reduced by a fixed mixin level.

This is something already changed in the next sprint, but didn't reflect in the one I showed off:)

Whoever is running this newbie-shill-train...this is getting more than a little tiring.

lol. Just because a coin is currently profitable to mine doesn't mean it has a "ninjamine".

To quote this: http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins#monero