Spot on - looks like they charge £110 for a submission.


If we release press releases it will only ever be on the website, and it would also be put on the sub-reddit and possibly to the OP in this thread.

The only people that can speak publicly for the Monero core team is the core team (in no particular order) - tacotime, eizh, smooth, fluffypony, othe, davidlatapie, NoodleDoodle.

If we were going to say anything particularly important or official or ask for major funds or do anything like that we would ALWAYS have a GPG signed confirmation of it so that you know that it is coming from us. My GPG key is on the GPG key servers and in the Bitcoin-OTC WoT, GPG fingerprint is 7455C5E3C0CDCEB9. All of our GPG keys will be included in the Monero source as well in future. If it is not accompanied by a GPG signed confirmation from us you can ignore it as not being official.

That's nothing to do with us, we have not released any press releases. We can't control what other people do or force anyone not to do something.

Edit: also, there is no "XMR promo team". There is the core team, whose job is to advance XMR primarily from a technical perspective. There are contributors, who are almost entirely devoted to either contributing code to Monero, or to building related projects. We have neither the time, the money, nor the time to do ANY sort of promoting at this stage. In future when we have achieved a modicum of maturity and ease-of-use, sure, but right now it would be wasted effort.

We publish the Monero Missive every week. All of the previous ones are linked in the OP of this thread.

When you say "weekly growth" are you referring to the emission? There's a "Coins in circulation" chart here: http://monerochain.info/charts

In terms of historical exchange rate, you can use BitcoinWisdom if you're looking for more analytical tools: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/poloniex/xmrbtc

For general history I'd suggest looking at CryptoCoinCharts: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/coins/show/xmr - clicking on the XMR/BTC pair for each exchange will show you a chart and other info.

Well, BCX says they are evaluating it:




I'm not sure what I should expect to see on that graph over the past 24 hours.

An excellent question!

Implementing ring signatures in Bitcoin is possible, but it would also be extremely clunky. Combining stealth addresses + ring signatures in Bitcoin would not only require a soft fork (possibly a hard fork if you're rejecting tx's on broadcast), but also seems somewhat incompatible with Bitcoin's current positioning and stated goals. It is unlikely this functionality will ever be added to Bitcoin. Even if it was added to Bitcoin, the reality is that an output that used a ring signature group of >1 would potentially be compromised when used as an input on a transaction with a ring signature group of 0, and this would invalidate the entire effort.

Thus, it has to be done outside of Bitcoin. So, then, the question becomes: do you fork Bitcoin and add stealth addresses and ring signatures? You could, of course, do that. The problem you'd face is that you'd forever be chasing your tail trying to merge upstream changes to implement bugfixes and features, some of which are incongruent with the design goals of a private, untraceable cryptocurrency. You'd constantly be trying to shoe-horn functionality in (SPV-style thin clients, for instance), and chances are you'd end up doing more harm than good and unwittingly compromising users.

Therefore, knowing that it can't or won't be done inside Bitcoin, and forking Bitcoin is a pretty bad idea, the academics behind the CryptoNote protocol were faced with an interesting prospect. "What else is potentially deficient with Bitcoin?" I can imagine them asking. They set out to create an alternative cryptocurrency that had the stated aims of privacy and untraceability, whilst fixing other parts of Bitcoin they thought could do with improvement. For instance, they theorised and then built a PoW that reduced the performance gap between CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. They also created an emission schedule that is constantly and slightly decreasing rather than halving at a particular point. All of these improvements, along with very detailed mathematics for the private and untraceable transactions, are detailed in the CryptoNote whitepaper: https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf. If you are academically inclined, you may prefer to look at the raw annotations our mathematicians and cryptographers created during their peer review: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_annotated.pdf and follow that up by reading one of our mathematician's review of the whitepaper: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

As to why Monero, specifically, exists: the reference code for CryptoNote was originally delivered in the form of a cryptocurrency called Bytecoin (not the Bytecoin you may be familiar with, a "new" one). Unfortunately for the CryptoNote developers, when this was made available publicly in March of this year, 82% of the coins had already been mined under the guise of it being launched "on the dark web" 2 years ago (which is disputed by some people in the know). Given the nature of this ninja mine / instamine / premine / whatever situation, thankful_for_today took it upon himself to fork this CryptoNote reference code and create Monero. He has subsequently left and things have blossomed, leaving us where we are today: a 7 member core team, as well as a whole host of contributors. There is no premine or instamine with Monero, we are completely supported by donations.

Monero has since diverged from the reference code, and we are constantly and continually improving the codebase. It is the first cryptocurrency that I am aware of that uses an Electrum-style, 24-word, mnemonic seed, making backups as simple as writing down that seed when you first create your wallet. The excellent design decision to keep the daemon separate from the wallet has allowed us to maintain a CLI wallet (simplewallet) as well as a wallet specifically designed for automation / merchant systems / exchanges (rpcwallet). Multiple wallets can be run on the same machine, with only one daemon keeping in sync with the network. We are completely unencumbered by Bitcoin's monolithic design and historicity, which means we can reinvent things and improve on things as and when it is possible.

That is why we bother making and continuing to make Monero. And that is why we won't be "vanishing" regardless of Monero's valuation - price is irrelevant to our continued ability to improve Monero, because we're out to build something useful and useable. If these are not a "damn good reasons" I don't know what is.

That's exactly what I alluded to earlier in this thread - here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg7986694#msg7986694

Hey BCX. I'm one of the Monero core team members, so I wanted to respond to this, because I find you to be a reasonable guy.

First things first: Monero isn't forked from Bitcoin, so (thankfully) there's nothing in the way of gimmicky junk to try differentiate us from every-other-scammy-clone. Monero *is* forked from the CryptoNote reference code, which means that there is stuff that we've inherited. The difficulty retarget is interesting, as it's something defined in the CryptoNote whitepaper:


This is implemented in the code over a window of 720 blocks (12 hours), but it's a little more complex than a straight up retarget as one would get in a Bitcoin clone (as you can ascertain from the quote above). Now, I'll be honest with you, the difficulty retarget is not something we've analysed in massive amounts of detail. If you have found an implementation problem or a problem in the theory, then I encourage you to please bring it to us so we can fix it sooner rather than later. It's tough for us to individually or as a core team and group of contributors grok the codebase and figure out every possible attack, both nuanced and apparent, so any input would be greatly appreciated:) Thank you very much!

I'm in South Africa...



Of the rest of the core team, they are from France, Germany, Canada, and the USA.

Key contributors hail from all over: Russia, Canada, Hungary, Portugal, Finland, and the USA (just off the top of my head).

Yes, you would have to compile it on Windows to get the latest binaries. In future we will have a more automated build process and will offer nightlies for stuff like this. In the meantime you will either have to wait for our next tagged release (which will be coming once the new daemon stuff has been tested more rigorously) or build it yourself.

The XMR/BTC pair on Poloniex alone did 330 BTC in trade volume over the last 24 hours. In the same period, HitBTC did 51 BTC on the XMR/BTC pair, Bittrex did 47 BTC on the XMR/BTC pair, Mintpal did 24 BTC on the XMR/BTC pair, and Bter did 20 BTC on the XMR/BTC pair. That's a combined total of over 470 BTC in trade in 24 hours. This precludes the Poloniex announcement, and is nothing new. It's no wonder that this is the state of the Monero right now from a trading perspective:


Now, the markets we're both talking about are completely new trading pairs: BCN/XMR, DIEM/XMR, DRK/XMR, IFC/XMR, MAID/XMR, NXT/XMR, and QORA/XMR. This is new and unprecedented, and is not a pump-and-dump - it's a natural progression. Instead of attacking and dismissing it, why don't you spend a bit of time researching Monero and figuring out what - if anything - makes it appealing. It's not cloned from Bitcoin, which immediately separates it from 99.9% of the cryptocurrencies that are released, and (let's be pragmatic) separates it from Litecoin. That fact alone makes it worth of some consideration.

Normally I don't engage with stuff like this, but I'd like to point out that those 8 markets went live - with no pre-announcement - 3.5 hours ago. People had to react to the sudden announcement, move their XMR or altcoins on to the exchange, setup their structured orders, and price finding had to take place before the first trade even happened.

Incidentally, this was spotted in regression and testing and fixed: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/commit/e7a3bd19f61d047f3daa49910e0d7da41ef47a8b

The mistake was not realising that it wasn't rpcwallet-specific and needed to be fixed in master as well.

A formal test suite is lacking for RPC calls. There are some tests for the daemon, but not what we'd expect to see, so this is something that needs to be brought up to scratch in a big way.

Not at all. That merge is from May 25th, before there was a core team and any guidance with dealing with that and crediting authors. Which is precisely what I said if you read further up.

By exactly the same token, Bytecoin has merged changes from us (including the payment ID JSON RPC call changes that duckNote have ripped as well) and did not credit us, so there are some double standards for you.

We've never claimed we "made" payment ID. We added it to the JSON RPC call in the wallet. That's it. Simple.

And you used the code (as did Bytecoin) without crediting us. Simple.

As pointed out, we fixed that bug 8 days ago.

Also, exchanges and services are using stable releases, not compiling head.

Incidentally, this was fixed 8 days ago, but this branch is not ready to merge into master yet: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/commit/e7a3bd19f61d047f3daa49910e0d7da41ef47a8b

I guess that's what happens when you have an entire group of people contributing to a project instead of just one.

Well, I'll cut-and-paste my reply to you from Github:


Code gets committed to staging so it can be tested. The piece of code you're referring to is not in the 0.8.8 tagged release, and is thus not finalised. Thanks for pointing out the error, but nobody has lost anything.

It's still not necessary to do so right now. We need more information to make a stand one way or another, and that information will come with time. I'm not implying that we'll take forever to do so, but it needs a great deal of discussion and an analysis  of the PoW by more people than have presently done so. This has to play out over several months so that there are more eyes on the hashing code and a determination can be made.

I also don't agree with you that ASICs are inherently bad. The point of CryptoNight is to close the performance gap between CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. Not to eliminate GPU or ASIC mining. Not to satisfy some claim of being "ASIC resistant". But to close the performance gap, thus meaning that ASICs provide no centralisation of any note, as CPU and GPU miners can continue to mine semi-efficiently. I am personally of the opinion that if, and ONLY if, it is clear that it is going to fail in that singular task does it make sense to look at alternatives.

I also think there's a large degree of futility in pushing back on ASICs by changing the PoW (although I am intrigued by r0ach's suggested method, I think that gives pause for thought). What happens when 3D printers get to a stage where they can print 30nm chips? Then you fork an algorithm change, and everyone just downloads a new chip design and prints it.

As a final note: ASICs can actually have a very amazing purpose. If Monero were to hypothetically achieve some modest measure of global success, the expensive PoW could make lightweight mobile clients extremely heavy (if they're verifying blockchain headers on catch up, for instance). A CryptoNight ASIC built into the mobile device's SoC (or even the inclusion of AES-NI style extensions in the SoC) would alleviate this to a large degree. Pushing against ASICs makes this impossible, and I have yet to hear a reason compelling enough to sacrifice this end-user functionality.

That depends on the lay of the land as and when we get there. If, for instance, the performance gains are not substantial over a CPU with AES-NI, and if we have a sufficiently widely distributed mining network that is a mix of GPUs and CPUs, then ASICs won't provide enough gain. Certainly they would be no more of a threat than GPUs - any entity able to purchase millions of Dollars worth of ASICs can definitely purchase millions of Dollars of GPUs. In fact, if CryptoNight plays out the way dga and the rest of us expect it to, the addition of ASICs to the network will be substantially less bumpy than with Bitcoin and Litecoin.

On the other hand, if ASICs are able to be built that are many orders of magnitude more efficient (both on a cost-per-hash and watts-per-hash basis) than CPUs and/or GPUs, it may dictate a necessary change in PoW to ensure centralisation of mining power does not occur. These are decisions that don't have to be made today, though, as this requires time to play out.

I got the whole way through, tearing my hair out, before I realised what was happening:)

Are you having a tough day, my friend? I hope things start to look up for you and your day improves.

I'm heading to bed, but be assured that you will be in my thoughts.

All the best!