Why the monero/bitmonero/MRO/BMR/XMR Cripplemined Fastmine matters

[smooth]

And we also have a "catastrophic" problem with PoW:

No, it you read what I wrote it was a hypothetical, modified version of AES which does not diffuse to all of the output bits, which is specifically not what real AES is designed to do. No one has identified an actual problem.

[AlexGR]

And we also have a "catastrophic" problem with PoW:

No, it you read what I wrote it was a hypothetical, modified version of AES which does not diffuse to all of the output bits, which is specifically not what real AES is designed to do. No one has identified an actual problem.

Ok, let's make it more practical then. Citing the experts below:

Which file in the source code contains the proof-of-work algorithm?

I've tried to locate it and can't seem to find it quickly.

I want to analyze the cpu-only claim.

src/crypto/slow-hash.c

On quick glance, I see AES code. Is this the MemoryCoin algorithm and not the one described in the CryptoNote whitepaper which is memory latency bound?

I do not think it is the memorycoin algorithm.

Analyzed it.

It is employing AES as another means of defeating GPUs (in addition to the memory latency bound), similar to MemoryCoin.

https://cryptonote.org/inside.php#equal-proof-of-work

3. GPUs may run hundreds of concurrent instances, but they are limited in other ways

See prior analysis of that strategy, which concluded that GPUs would be 2.5 to 3X faster but would perform no better in hashes per Watt:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355532.msg3976656#msg3976656

I pointed out that ASICs would implement AES much more efficiently:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355532.msg3977088#msg3977088

Here follows my conclusions.

• slow and thus DDoS prevention will be hampered, which will also likely eliminate any chance of supporting 0 transaction fees
• roughly both memory latency and computation bound (instead of the ideal of being only latency bound), thus if Tilera CPUs or GPUs add dedicated AES support or if ASICs are mated to large fast SDRAM caches, the cpu-only claim will fail.

• it is not leveraging hyperthreads

In short, it is too computation heavy, not maximizing the CPU's hyperthreads, and thus not only will it not be the best cpu-only PoW algorithm possible, it will also fail to be remain cpu-only if it becomes widely adopted.

Also being computation heavy, it is consuming more electricity than the ideal cpu-only PoW algorithm.

There is another egregious flaw in the proof-of-work algorithm.

AES encryption is being employed as the hash function and assumed to be a random oracle with perfect distribution in order to provide the randomized memory access. Problem is that AES is not suitable as a hash (certainly not when employed as encryption) for it has too small of a output space (repeating patterns will be over a few number of bits), thus it will be possible to attack this with an algorithm to reduce the scratchpad size significantly from the 2MB.

Monero #REKT  

[smooth]

And we also have a "catastrophic" problem with PoW:

No, it you read what I wrote it was a hypothetical, modified version of AES which does not diffuse to all of the output bits, which is specifically not what real AES is designed to do. No one has identified an actual problem.

Ok, let's make it more practical then. Citing the experts below:

As I said above, no one has identified an actual problem. His concerns are theoretical and other experts disagree. No one has identified an actual problem.

EDIT: I'd add that the DoS issue is a potential problem, but is somewhat mitigated by the optimizing of the algorithm and the code that occurred. Initially (when that comment was written), it took hundreds of milliseconds to verify a hash which is indeed a lot of time and a big DoS vulnerability. These days with the optimized hash code and multithreaded verification, the effective time is well under 10 ms, which is close enough to network latency to serve as an effective throttle on DoS.

[MasterMined710]

how many monero were mined between the launch and july 1st 2014?
seems like an easy question for you monero experts to answer.

[smooth]

how many monero were mined between the launch and july 1st 2014?
seems like an easy question for you monero experts to answer.

moneroblocks.info, as with all questions about the blockchain.

[megges]

Monero has a highly inflationary emission curve where around half the coins were mined in the first year and will have "Roughly 86% mined in 4 years".

By comparison, Bitcoin is almost 7 years old and only has 75% mined. It will take them another 4+ years to get to monero's 86%.

So it will take BTC & LTC ~11+ years to get to ~86% and monero only 4 years. It will take DASH ~ another 20 years to get to 86%.

Are you actually suggesting that in the long-run DASH has a more fair emission rate than BTC, LTC, and XMR?  This is an incredibly disingenuous statement to make because you ignore the fact that masternodes allow the original instaminers to approximately maintain or even increase their share of the total percentage of DASH in existence, year after year.

It also ignores that in the long run Monero's emissions become very flat over time due to the tail reward. Bitcoin will eventually become more front-loaded the Monero, and Dash already is of course. See chart on the first page or two of this thread showing the effect.

You are also correct that paying coins to existing owners is not distribution and should really be factored out of the curve. That applies not only to Dash but various other PoS-ish coins that pay interest, stake-based rewards, etc.

"paying coins to existing owners is not distribution" ... what an argument ... do you care to explain why this not applies to every coin? - you do realize that almost every miner is not just mining one block, but instead uses his miner to mine for a certain time - which means that he is already an existing owner ...

so how do you distribute coins in your view? - do every user needs to verify his name and DOB, so that we can distribute new coins only to verifiable new users?

[smooth]

"paying coins to existing owners is not distribution" ... what an argument ... do you care to explain why this not applies to every coin? - you do realize that almost every miner is not just mining one block, but instead uses his miner to mine for a certain time - which means that he is already an existing owner ...

Sorry, that was not as clear as it should be. I meant not paying to existing "owners", but proportionately to existing ownership. That is effectively a "stock split" and does not distribute anything. There are other issues with how Dash does it but they are out of the scope of the overall rate of distribution so off topic for this thread.

With mining, it is not in any way proportional to existing ownership. In fact your example demonstrates this as if you continue mining (without selling) your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not.

so how do you distribute coins in your view?

There are many different ways to do this with various positives and negatives. As long as they are not proportional to ownership, they actually accomplish something, at least.

[megges]

"paying coins to existing owners is not distribution" ... what an argument ... do you care to explain why this not applies to every coin? - you do realize that almost every miner is not just mining one block, but instead uses his miner to mine for a certain time - which means that he is already an existing owner ...

Sorry, that was not as clear as it should be. I meant not paying to existing "owners", but proportionately to existing ownership. That is effectively a "stock split" and does not distribute anything. There are other issues with how Dash does it but they are out of the scope of the overall rate of distribution so off topic for this thread.

With mining, it is not in any way proportional to existing ownership. In fact your example demonstrates this as if you continue mining (without selling) your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not.

so how do you distribute coins in your view?

There are many different ways to do this with various positives and negatives. As long as they are not proportional to ownership, they actually accomplish something, at least.

ok, and not ok
"your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not." - i do not exactly agree with that ... i guess i see what you want to say with "ownership", so if i mine bitcoin i have bitcoin in my ownership and if i buy new mining hardware, to mine even more bitcoin, i decrease my "ownership", right?
But that seems only like a word play.
In the end the profits from mining are also increasing the hashing power because you could buy new hardware, even if the ownership is going down for the purchase of new hardware it's just a question of time until you got a 100% ROI on the new mining hardware and so in fact your ownership and your mining rate goes up, too !!

[smooth]

"paying coins to existing owners is not distribution" ... what an argument ... do you care to explain why this not applies to every coin? - you do realize that almost every miner is not just mining one block, but instead uses his miner to mine for a certain time - which means that he is already an existing owner ...

Sorry, that was not as clear as it should be. I meant not paying to existing "owners", but proportionately to existing ownership. That is effectively a "stock split" and does not distribute anything. There are other issues with how Dash does it but they are out of the scope of the overall rate of distribution so off topic for this thread.

With mining, it is not in any way proportional to existing ownership. In fact your example demonstrates this as if you continue mining (without selling) your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not.

so how do you distribute coins in your view?

There are many different ways to do this with various positives and negatives. As long as they are not proportional to ownership, they actually accomplish something, at least.

ok, and not ok
"your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not." - i do not exactly agree with that ... i guess i see what you want to say with "ownership", so if i mine bitcoin i have bitcoin in my ownership and if i buy new mining hardware, to mine even more bitcoin, i decrease my "ownership", right?

No, not right, because in a proportional system, everyone else with a similar number of coins receives a similar payout, whether they mine or not. Second, mining has costs, and only your profits (which might not even be positive, but in any case probably not the same as every other miner) can be reinvested.

So they are not the same at all.

[generalizethis]

"paying coins to existing owners is not distribution" ... what an argument ... do you care to explain why this not applies to every coin? - you do realize that almost every miner is not just mining one block, but instead uses his miner to mine for a certain time - which means that he is already an existing owner ...

Sorry, that was not as clear as it should be. I meant not paying to existing "owners", but proportionately to existing ownership. That is effectively a "stock split" and does not distribute anything. There are other issues with how Dash does it but they are out of the scope of the overall rate of distribution so off topic for this thread.

With mining, it is not in any way proportional to existing ownership. In fact your example demonstrates this as if you continue mining (without selling) your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not.

so how do you distribute coins in your view?

There are many different ways to do this with various positives and negatives. As long as they are not proportional to ownership, they actually accomplish something, at least.

ok, and not ok
"your ownership goes up but your rate of mining does not." - i do not exactly agree with that ... i guess i see what you want to say with "ownership", so if i mine bitcoin i have bitcoin in my ownership and if i buy new mining hardware, to mine even more bitcoin, i decrease my "ownership", right?
But that seems only like a word play.
In the end the profits from mining are also increasing the hashing power because you could buy new hardware, even if the ownership is going down for the purchase of new hardware it's just a question of time until you got a 100% ROI on the new mining hardware and so in fact your ownership and your mining rate goes up, too !!

What you seem to be skipping here is that competition for cheaper electricity and hardware costs may or may not result in you getting your reinvestment back--AFAIK, Bitcoin has proved that early miners lost that competition to Chinese miners. With a coin like dash that uses a paynode scheme, all you need to do is keep reinvesting and you are guaranteed a greater percent of the stake--unless of course you can attack other node operators to lower the masternode count and increase the ROI%--which gives you the problem of having an inefficient system bent on cannibalizing resources.  

[AlexGR]

With a coin like dash that uses a paynode scheme, all you need to do is keep reinvesting and you are guaranteed a greater percent of the stake

There are masternode costs involved, security and technical know-how costs (if you don't have the skills, you have to pay others to do it for you) as well as investment dilution by PoW mining.

This is not proof of stake where you have 1000 coins and they are giving you interest, 'just because'.

[AlexGR]

And we also have a "catastrophic" problem with PoW:

No, it you read what I wrote it was a hypothetical, modified version of AES which does not diffuse to all of the output bits, which is specifically not what real AES is designed to do. No one has identified an actual problem.

Ok, let's make it more practical then. Citing the experts below:

As I said above, no one has identified an actual problem. His concerns are theoretical and other experts disagree. No one has identified an actual problem.

EDIT: I'd add that the DoS issue is a potential problem, but is somewhat mitigated by the optimizing of the algorithm and the code that occurred. Initially (when that comment was written), it took hundreds of milliseconds to verify a hash which is indeed a lot of time and a big DoS vulnerability. These days with the optimized hash code and multithreaded verification, the effective time is well under 10 ms, which is close enough to network latency to serve as an effective throttle on DoS.

Actually, my bad, this was a point that should be posted in XMR #badcrypto thread. Anyway. The reason we are here:

Wow, I just saw that. I agree with tacotime, it looks intentional.

So you mean the BCN engine was curbed all this time, and they just add to remove it to artificially increase it?

That's disgusting.

Blame BCN developers - instamine yourself. Nice catchphrase you got here 



And here i thought people went to MRO to have a “clean” start but nope! instamining it with a fast linux hash... Cool!

You're welcome to optimize your own miner if you're so interested; you have the source code. Artforz GPU mined Bitcoin for a long time on his private OCL code on 4870s and got thousands of them. Bitcoin survives to this day, or so I'm told.

You're the developers after all. It's a good approach for a developer: we're instamining - you can too, if you're good enough! Promising coin - no shit.

"Fair launch"  

"Disgusting"  

"You can instamine too"  

Monero #REKT  

[smooth]

In other words, people complaining about the unoptimized miner 19 and 20 days after the launch, when approximately 2.7% of the base supply had been mined, and one day before NoodleDoodle released his optimizations (which were his own work and his to do with as he saw fit) on github.

How is this news?

EDIT: Actually first quote above was after NoodleDoodle had already released the code on github.

[generalizethis]

With a coin like dash that uses a paynode scheme, all you need to do is keep reinvesting and you are guaranteed a greater percent of the stake

There are masternode costs involved, security and technical know-how costs (if you don't have the skills, you have to pay others to do it for you) as well as investment dilution by PoW mining.

This is not proof of stake where you have 1000 coins and they are giving you interest, 'just because'.

You mean people aren't just cutting most of these costs out by using Amazon hosting services? Also, these costs (as usual) skip the fact that 30% of the current coins were mined in two days at minimal costs, so not taking that as a factor in the centralization we are discussing is plain old ignoring the facts that matter most. We can see that Bitcoin's early adopters were replaced by the Chinese, who through competition, won mining power--with dash we have to make assumptions, and a lot of them, in order to assume that it is or isn't being redistributed through competition. I'd assume not--since it makes a lot more sense to hold the initial cheap coins and get a 10-50% APR. But my guess is you are assuming that people use OSPEC for hosting nodes and sold their coins without rebuying at lower costs--I would call this "the strategically incompetent redistribution plan" or "after the fact rationalization of best distribution."

[smooth]

With a coin like dash that uses a paynode scheme, all you need to do is keep reinvesting and you are guaranteed a greater percent of the stake

There are masternode costs involved, security and technical know-how costs (if you don't have the skills, you have to pay others to do it for you) as well as investment dilution by PoW mining.

The costs are negligible, as I think it was you who stated that a $5 VPS was more than sufficient. In fact you can probably run many masternodes on a $5 VPS with some knowhow.

This is not proof of stake where you have 1000 coins and they are giving you interest, 'just because'.

Actually it is. There is dilution, yes, but you would have dilution either way. The coins paid out in proportion to existing coin ownership is the portion of coin supply that does not count as distribution, which is exactly what I said earlier.

If this is not clear, imagine a corporation with 1 million shares. There is a 2-for-1 stock split on Monday, "distributing" (but not really) 1 million new shares in proportion to existing ownership, followed by 1 million new shares being sold to an outside investor on Tuesday. The effect here is distribution aka dilution of not 2 million shares, but actually 500000 (of the original-pre-split shares).

This is relevant in comparing between emissions of different coins. Since Monero has no coins-for-coins PoS-ish scheme, the full amount of ongoing distribution dilutes earlier holdings (including "cripplemined" coins). In coins that do have these schemes, ongoing distribution is in effect greatly reduced.

[smooth]

You mean people aren't just cutting most of these costs out by using Amazon hosting services?

Amazon is pretty high-end and not economical for a small masternode owner, unless they are using Amazon's free tier.

So the fact that many masternodes are observed on Amazon says one of two things: 1. Small masternode owners are using the free tier, meaning there aren't hosting costs; or 2. Many masternodes are owned by large masternode owners who can justify Amazon's higher hosting costs. Maybe some of both, but I suspect mostly 2, since the free tier runs out. Scamming is possible, though.

[MasterMined710]

how many monero were mined between the launch and july 1st 2014?
seems like an easy question for you monero experts to answer.

moneroblocks.info, as with all questions about the blockchain.

thanks but i can't make heads or tails out of that.
is there an easier way to tell how many monero were mined between the launch and july 1st 2014?

[GingerAle]

how many monero were mined between the launch and july 1st 2014?
seems like an easy question for you monero experts to answer.

moneroblocks.info, as with all questions about the blockchain.

thanks but i can't make heads or tails out of that.
is there an easier way to tell how many monero were mined between the launch and july 1st 2014?

there's some excel spreadsheet that I can never seem to find.

ah here it is

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qXi7zUSIh7F6UuSuhOryyFbHEy_LJuym3I3neAga_2s/edit?pli=1#gid=239466694

why is july 1st being used? I haven't been following this thread.

according to the dude that actually optimized the code (well, the second time around), he found his code release on May 28th, and as noted elsewhere, like in dgas blogpost, noodledoodle had already found one optimization like two weeks into it or something.

https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html

So by May 28th, there was 986k coins emitted.

here's a good discussion with dga about optimizations

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/2evd3z/was_the_default_monero_miner_slowed_down_on/

Christ, i guess i'm gonna get updated on this thread all the time now. I guess the point of this thread is to try and equate monero's unwitting inheritance of a de-optimized miner with dash's instamine. Sure, have fun.

Oh I just read your OP. So this is just abject fud. Well good on yah. have fun.

[MasterMined710]

You can't fastmine almost 13 million coins in the first 2 years and not expect volatility and big bubbles to form. Monero is proving to be very volatile due to its mining emission curve and lack of masternodes.

[smoothie]

LOL yeah Monero is the only crypto that has "volatility" and "big bubbles"...

What don't you also mention the first 48 hours of Xcoin? I think that fits your "fastmine" scenario a bit better than monero. 

Masternodes don't make a coin secure. Math/cryptography that has been very well vetted by world class cryptographers is.