It's not a "CPU currency", and efficiency improvements in the PoW hashing were open-sourced and merged into the main repository as they were done. Remember: we are not the CryptoNote developers (who wrote and released the PoW in the CryptoNote reference code), and we would simply not have had the time or ability to make optimisations to the PoW fast enough to give us an advantage.

We are completely, 100% donation supported. None of the core team members have any noteworthy stash of Monero, otherwise we'd just be covering costs ourselves instead of raising funds through donations.

The growth is not exponential, it's linear. Currently the blockchain grows at about 10mb per day. Do the math.

And you're acting like this is a problem we need to solve today. It's not.

Additionally, a larger blockchain is a tradeoff that users running full nodes will gladly accept if it means enabling a degree of privacy that Bitcoin simply cannot provide right now.

As pointed out, you can see the current distribution on the MoneroChain graphs. Here's the expected graph (which it's roughly conforming to, as expected) -

After 2 years:



After 8 years:

The number of inputs used in a tx depends on the unspent outputs available to you (ie. what's been received and is in your utxoset). A lot of this came from pools sending dust to miners, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't occur if you charged 25 XMR for something, and 200 people bought, and then you wanted to move the 5k XMR somewhere. It would require 200 inputs.

Bitcoin can have similarly large transactions, and that's just fine: https://blockchain.info/tx/574d77eb277974ca1000b154023940c3e366d5bf4dd06b7fe3b0d92eea54e0c7

It's funny how Bitcoin has an even worse problem - their blockchain is about to break 20gb, it'll never go mainstream.

Quick, everyone, sell your Bitcoins and buy Monero, our blockchain is only 750mb!

At the moment most of the urgent / important tasks require an in-depth knowledge of cryptography and C / C++, but as things progress there will be things that will come up that will require more soft skills. As and when we have a need for that we will definitely put the call out:)

Just wanted to pop in and thank everyone for their donations:)

If there are any donations that have to be confirmed, just ping me and I can confirm receipt in the donations wallet. Thanks again!

Thanks:) We are strong believers in doing things in a way that is sustainable and holds value for Monero in the long run, so it's really just an embodiment of those values.

Tails already pushes all traffic through Tor, so it should "just work". If you're not terribly comfortable mucking around in the command-line, I'd wait a little until we have a release with more ELI5-level usability:)

Yes - it builds up a set of already spent key images from the blockchain. You can't know the balances of anyone else's accounts except yours.

Speaking as one of the Monero core team members, I can assure you that there will NEVER be a Monero Foundation. If anyone starts something like that we will reject it, and will encourage the community to reject it.

We are rapidly moving towards a point where every effort - including features, peripheral projects, lobbying, and so on - will be completely community driven and community funded. We will have no control over this process, other than to influence a particular goal by means of weighing in rationally on debates. Any shilling we try do for a particular idea or goal will quickly be called out. We will not have "our" way - the development and future of Monero will be as decentralised as the cryptocurrency itself.

If you're interested in decentralised, encrypted storage, then Tahoe-LAFS already does this. And if the communications layer is an issue, it's perfectly usable over I2P. The only thing Tahoe-LAFS lacks are dead simple end-user tools, but they'll come with time. The core of the application works, and it works extremely well.

You're being disingenuous - a statement of fact is NOT the same as hyping or a social engineering attack. Like I said, do your research, talk to Gregory Maxwell (Bitcoin core developer) or Risto Pietila (a large Bitcoin holder) and let's touch base in 6 months.

Hrrrrrmm. My point is clear and obvious: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Original_Bitcoin_client/API_Calls_list - a daemon that syncs up to a p2p network should have no concept of "balance",and should thus not be able to "getbalance". Seriously, this is not FUD, and the fact that you don't know that the Bitcoin core team is working on this as a matter of importance is quite shocking. Have you seriously never used any of Bitcoin Core's RPC calls? These are extremely basic concept we're discussing here.

smooth is one of the core team members, he was being sarcastic.

The reason there are "looooots" of Monero topics is because there is intense interest from those that are knowledgeable about cryptocurrencies, as well as those who were early Bitcoin holders. It would likely be in your best interest to investigate why this keen interest exists (and the subsequent threads) before "avoiding" it.

The underlying Monero software is still in alpha, so anything "final" is still many moons away:) In the meantime, the two GUI wallets listed in the OP are the ones that we recommend:

GUI
All current GUIs are in beta, but they should be fairly safe to use because they work through bitmonerod and simplewallet from the main code.

• Qt GUI (Cross-platform) by Neozaru
• Windows GUI by Jojatekok

Unless it causes your daemon to crash or shutdown you can ignore errors like that - they're typically errors caused by errant peers.

The Bitcoin API is fundamentally broken - it assumes that the daemon (that syncs up to the network) and the wallet are the same thing. Monero has complete separation of concerns, which means you can run multiple wallets on the same physical computer, and we can have a CLI wallet (simplewallet) and a wallet for automation (rpcwallet) as separate binaries. In this respect alone, Monero has a superior architecture to Bitcoin's, although this is something that Bitcoin is hoping to do in Bitcoin Core at some stage.

Over and above that, the Bitcoin API assumes that you have a single wallet with multiple addresses, and all the RPC calls are designed to check addresses and so on. This is fundamentally at odds with Monero, as you don't have multiple addresses (it uses stealth addresses, effectively) and have to track payments using a payment ID. This means that sending funds is similarly different.

At any rate, I fully agree with drawingthesun - merchant systems will adapt to accommodate the Monero RPC API, just as major altcoin exchanges have done so.

There's a testnet that's WIP at the moment: https://github.com/mikezackles/bitmonero/tree/testnet - there's still a bit that needs to be done before it's merged in, but it'll be quite soon as there's stuff that needs testing on testnet.

Don't worry, we don't write things off just because it appears ill-suited at first glance - it's on the testing list:)