toknormal I read through your post, and I have spent some time thinking about it and researching it.
Hello Debora
I also read through your post and appreciate your points which are clearly made in good faith so I'll respond in kind.
Without going through it point by point, I understand that you think that any form of service oriented functional diversity in a cryptocurrency network amounts to "centralisation" by the definition you cite, and is therefore "bad".
So I did some research on decentralization.... 'A centralised system is one in which a central controller exercises control over the lower-level components of the system...Doesn't that sound like MasterNodes?
What you've done here is start with your conclusion (centralisation) and worked back to the hypothesis. If you do that with almost any aspect of modern information systems you’ll get a “result”.
Lets be specific. A single Dash wallet may use several, randomly selected network peers (running exactly the same daemon) to provide it with a ‘service’. In the specific context that that one node depends on those other nodes to deliver the service, then there is some interdependency which you are free to interpret as you see fit. If you call it “centralisation” then you must at the same time dismiss any kind of service oriented functional diversity in the network as such. I’d see that as the “functional” aspect of the debate.
As far as the ‘structural’ aspect goes (the network composition), it’s academic. The network is in no way, shape or form centralised because no recourse to a central authority is required to operate a deamon in a service capacity (with ‘masternode=1’ in its config) and their function is reproducable as many times as you like. Nor can they be characterised as centralised by their hosting profile. Regardless of the hosting service, nodes remain functionally independent and secured by coin collateral. You can’t “take over” a masternode without having access to the private key that collateralises it. Even Vertoe himself endorsed this view:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=939072.msg10344491#msg10344491What he alluded to as “centralised” was the fact that that the project has a lead dev who is probably irreplaceable. Well I won’t argue with that - at least in terms of his ideas - but I’m happy to accept it and take the risk for now as long as he looks both ways when he’s crossing the road.
You do the cryptography in Monero a disservice when you describe it as off-the-shelf. Ring signatures are not new cryptography but the application in Monero is definitely innovative.
Fair enough. I’m happy to accept that there’s something distinct there, but all I’m aware of is viewkeys and a database to hold the blockchain bloat. The problem here - at least for an investor - is that Cryptonote is a tiny market thats getting ever more crowded and my ‘off-the-shelf” remark refers to the fact that all the players subscribe to a common approach. For example
here comes Bytcoin with a spanking new GUI wallet, the lack of which XMR holders have lamented for the best part of a year, but the anon-tech is stock.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1008146.msg10939927#msg10939927
If I had to guess I'd say 99% of the merchants out there use Bitpay or Coinbase or one of the others for interacting with Bitcoin, so I am not sure this is much of a problem, if at all.
I also think it's very cheeky of you to make a statement like this as if attributing the API compatability or the Dash GUI wallet to Evan's hard work. You and I both know that he hasn't worked on any of that from scratch. Maybe we can give him credit for minor changes to the Bitcoin GUI.
There is a much bigger point at stake here than what your alluding to.
A financial system is inherently a public asset. It is at once an economic continuum and a collection of private interests that have to be protected. The revolution of Bitcoin was to bring it into the open while anonymising its participants which it has done with incredible success (to see that, try tracing any of the heists that have taken place). People love the ecosystem of blockchain analysis tools, transparency, sense of participation and simultaneous preservation of their financial anonymity. It is the “holy grail” of money and it isn’t going away now that it’s “out there”.
What we don’t need IMO is to throw that entire revolution down a cryptographic black hole and send ourselves back to the dark ages - specially in the name of “disempowering the “elite”. Make no mistake, the “elite” will find it far easier to usurp a system where nobody can see anything than one who’s mechanics can be observed by everyone, that’s in the ‘ownership’ of everyone and that’s statistically accountable to everyone.
What bitcoin is missing is the ‘cash drawer’ metaphor that optimises its fungibility and protects anonymity at the same time. You don’t make an electronic monetary media more fungible by making it “invisible”. To be fungible, cash has to be visible otherwise what’s the point ? A viewkey that only lets you see a single address is ok for that one person, but you can’t run a financial system on that basis. If it's decentralised and free of counterparties (a banking system) then the economy as a whole has to be able to see it and audit it.
I’ve heard the arguments about cryptography vs Dash’s mixing algos and - although I accept that cryptography can do a better job of ”hiding” a transaction - they don’t convince me as to their practical merits because; A) the practical difference in detectability is so marginal and B) they always compare 1 single pass of cryptographic ‘protection’ with a single pass of mixing which is totally unrealistic and always works in the Cryptonote’s favour. The reality is that in an open system with pre-emptive mixing the entire coin supply is being continually anonymised in the background. This IMO does justice to the twin objectives that Bitcoin had of an open, publicly accountable and owned financial system, combined with optimal preservation of its participant’s privacy.
That is what I meant by “legacy compliant”. The ability to take advantage of mobile wallet tech, commercial API’s and reporting tools are a handy bonus.
I used the People Behind Monero page on the Monero website,
https://getmonero.org/knowledge-base/people, and I researched all the people there. They are mostly people who have been in the cryptocurrency community for years
Again - I don't doubt that they are all interested in crypto. I just don't see anyone who's a full time dev turning out core new features month after month. I see people who are either full time marketing or may "dip into the code" now and again. I don't know that to be categorically the case - I'm just saying what it looks like so happy to be corrected, but maintaining a code base is a very different skill to developing original work.
When I first bought my monero on the old cryptonote exchange I used a crappy old command line wallet to download it. That was the first “hint” I had that this project wasn’t ’very customer oriented’ and lacked developmental capacity. When I came back 9 months later I still had to use that thing and, despite what the websites say, getting simplewallet to run on a Mac under Terminal is murder - even if your a coder. What I was expecting was something like this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1008146.msg10939927#msg10939927That roadmap at least alludes to some basic, user-oriented principles and adoption-oriented priorities (difficult to deliver on) as opposed to a load of downloaded academic quotes, graphics and theories (easy to deliver on).
You are passionate about Dash
I’m passionate about most of the tech in crypto - even cryptonote beleive it or not. What prompted me to contribute in the ‘tribal warfare’ of late was that I’d had enough of the Monero core team crawling over every thread that discussed Dash for the last 3 months and smothering any constructive discussion with a stream of emotive terms such as “broken”, “scam” and “fail” while incessantly maligning a perfectly good dev for being “incompetent” and even “fraudulent”. It’s been a campaign of defamation which has bordered on a witch hunt at times and is odious to watch.
Another reason the wars and mud slinging is unnecessary is because, as I’ve described above, it’s an apples and pears product comparison like Concorde fans berating 747 fans for being too slow. The real comparison gets totally lost (which may be their intention) and that is:
[1] - an open, transparent financial system that’s accountable to both the individual and the collective economy VS a closed one who’s only observable facet is a single account by a single individual
[2] - functional diversification of cryptocurrency networks into service oriented architectures VS mono functional, high redundancy ones
You pays your money and takes your choice. I don’t mind which one you pick, but if someone tries to convince me that the choice is between a “broken” and “working” architecture when the reality is much more profound, then I can only assume they’re trying to disguise the poverty of their own offering.
