[XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency

[binaryFate]

Anyway, I never realized there was something about the cryptonote (CN?) outfit itself that is fishy. they seemed pretty corporate to me, but never did quite understand their biz model. Is there some URL with specific info on what sorts of things they have done?

If you are not aware of the full story, you'll have some fun! It would work perfect as a movie:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112

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[aminorex]

Well, Peter Todd was right.  It's politically incorrect, but he's not known for tact and charm.  He's known for creative technical solutions.

And frankly, if IBM were doing its accounting with crayons and monkeys, and you didn't inform the stakeholders, you'd be very irresponsible.

[DogTheHunter]

If you want to be taken seriously (I have no idea) then you need to educate yourself at least a little about the history and status of this project.

1. We have always described it as alpha-quality software. Perhaps some day we will promote that to beta-quality.

2. We took over the project, which was a fork of a promising coin with a fraudulent hidden premine. It turns out that they guy who did the fork was probably in collusion with the original group of scammers. The project only became anything other than a scam when a bunch of interested people from the community decided that despite the mess there was enough promise here to take it and run with it. If any of this makes you uncomfortable, this is most certainly not the coin for you.

3. I don't give a fuck about pandering to investors. They are free to speculate or short terms swings or to invest in the long term possibility that we are able to develop this project to something much greater than it is today. You are also perfectly free to do neither.

Have a nice day.

1) Can you already rule out that the same (or similar) attack can be mounted again?

2) Can you already rule out conclusively that no lasting damage was done (as in: according to the pre-attack ownership situation)? Any chance that some subtle damage was done that'll be discovered only later?

I'll answer both at the same time. This particular attack can't be mounted again. We haven't pushed out the official fix yet, but exploit it requires growing the blocks sizes, which takes time. We'd never let that happen. The full fix will be out soon. This hole is plugged.

Any software can have vulnerabilities and exploits. This is exacerbated by the fact that we got the code from a bunch of lying scammers who despite that character flaw, happen to have some talent when it comes to cryptography and to a lesser extent coding. We are reviewing the code and paying qualified people to review the code in order to identify and correct problems to the greatest extent possible. Further we will be restructuring, refactoring, and/or replacing some of the code in order to further increase its robustness and trustworthiness (removing obfuscation for example).

I think you need to take a break. You are unintentionally saying stupid things.

This particular attack can't be mounted again.

Implies - so other attacks are still possible?

Any software can have vulnerabilities and exploits.

Implies - don't trust Monero with your anonymity just yet.

we got the code from a bunch of lying scammers who despite that character flaw, happen to have some talent when it comes to cryptography and to a lesser extent coding.

Where do you start with this statement.

Implies

- We didn't have the technical skill in the first place, so we are just using anything we could find
- Quality assurance in the code was never a priority

We are reviewing the code and paying qualified people to review the code in order to identify and correct problems

Implies - We haven't got a clue. So we are paying for temporary help.

Get some sleep. For investors, this sort of loose talk, from someone that is an established part of the team, gives zero confidence in the project.

I was trying to be helpful. Clearly, I wasn't.

Clearly my views and investment are not welcome.

[smooth]

I would have thought that Peter Todd (previously a core bitcoin dev) would have enough on his plate as he recently (few weeks ago) joined the Viacoin dev team.

We had already talked to Peter about consulting for us before that. He does various consulting work, especially open source projects. He explained on reddit (go find it if you care) that one of his consulting clients happens to be Viacoin, and he didn't even know much about what they are doing. In typical pump-and-dump fashion, Viacoin quickly turned that consulting gig into him being their "chief scientist" and promptly put out a slicked up press release about it.

In short you are reading too much into it, and for what its worth we won't be wasting any of our donation money writing press releases and trying to promote a consulting gig as something more than what it is.

[Deagle21]

Is it safe to mine or should we wait for a fix to come out first?

[oda.krell]

I would have thought that Peter Todd (previously a core bitcoin dev) would have enough on his plate as he recently (few weeks ago) joined the Viacoin dev team.

We had already talked to Peter about consulting for us before that. He does various consulting work, especially open source projects. He explained on reddit (go find it if you care) that one of his consulting clients happens to be Viacoin, and he didn't even know much about what they are doing. In typical pump-and-dump fashion, Viacoin quickly turned that consulting gig into him being their "chief scientist" and promptly put out a slicked up press release about it.

In short you are reading too much into it, and for what its worth we won't be wasting any of our donation money writing press releases and trying to promote a consulting gig as something more than what it is.

Alright, makes sense. That's not really the question that's on my mind though.

The abrasive style aside (I can even see some virtue in that), this...





... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

[xulescu]

boiled down it is simple, if you (we) don't believe that a majority is able to make meaningful decisions, based on common sense we are doomed anyway, no matter what tech we are inventing/using.
stating that a blockchain should be always immutable is an indicator for the need to pass/deny decisions/responsibilty to another kind of centralized leadership, in this case, the swap to the blockchain.

i will stop here, because i don't want to derail this thread but i am very interested how this social experiment will evolve over time and if people understand they can't have both.

I agree with you. I believe you also agree that "centralized leadership" means fundamentally different things when applied to a blockchain or a central bank? One should also not forget that participation is voluntary.

As an aside you might or might not be interested in, majority as a function on boolean vectors returning a boolean also has a number of algebraic properties that make it interesting. In short, imagine you had a number of agents, voting yes/no for some arbitrary binary question. You need to construct a family of functions (from {0,1}^n for all n, to {0,1}) to aggregate votes into a group decision. You can practically invent any function you want. For example, a full dictatorship would be a family of projections f(x1, x2, ...) = x1 which always choose whatever x1 chose. Majority is another such family of functions. It has the advantages that is symmetrical in agents (each agent contributes in the exact same way a priori of other votes), symmetrical in range(*) (labeling all yes to no and vice versa does not change the function in any way), monotonic (changing any votes from yes to no cannot change a no outcome to a yes outcome), and some other more abstract properties. It is also interesting that from a computational complexity point of view, it is a counter-intuitively complex function to compute. One of the most celebrated results is that it is not in class AC0 (more or less the simplest computation class that people are interested in - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC0).

(*) this is not always desirable, and you can use super-majority in that case

[aminorex]

I was trying to be helpful. Clearly, I wasn't.

Thank you for trying.  It would be nice if you could decide how to improve your helping skills, and then try again.

Clearly my views and investment are not welcome.

Those who respond to your post are trying to correct defects in your views.  If they are not corrected, you are likely to injure yourself and others.  Please don't interpret that as meaning you should go away.  Try to incorporate the valid parts of the criticism into your thinking, and reject the invalid parts.  Some things taste bad because they are poison.  Some things taste bad because they are medicine.  This is not a candy store.  You are welcome, but if you wish to divest, we are also happy to accept your monero into a more nurturing home.

[myagui]

Is it safe to mine or should we wait for a fix to come out first?

It is perfectly safe to mine, as long as you pick a pool that is running on the right chain. I know that Dwarfpool is on the right chain, but about now, probably all pools are... To be on the safe size, you should check on IRC if your usual pool is on the right chain or not (or post the pool name here if you're not into the IRC thing).

Cheers,
~ Myagui

[Majormax]

I would have thought that Peter Todd (previously a core bitcoin dev) would have enough on his plate as he recently (few weeks ago) joined the Viacoin dev team.

We had already talked to Peter about consulting for us before that. He does various consulting work, especially open source projects. He explained on reddit (go find it if you care) that one of his consulting clients happens to be Viacoin, and he didn't even know much about what they are doing. In typical pump-and-dump fashion, Viacoin quickly turned that consulting gig into him being their "chief scientist" and promptly put out a slicked up press release about it.

In short you are reading too much into it, and for what its worth we won't be wasting any of our donation money writing press releases and trying to promote a consulting gig as something more than what it is.

Thanks for setting it straight.

[wachtwoord]

I would have thought that Peter Todd (previously a core bitcoin dev) would have enough on his plate as he recently (few weeks ago) joined the Viacoin dev team.

We had already talked to Peter about consulting for us before that. He does various consulting work, especially open source projects. He explained on reddit (go find it if you care) that one of his consulting clients happens to be Viacoin, and he didn't even know much about what they are doing. In typical pump-and-dump fashion, Viacoin quickly turned that consulting gig into him being their "chief scientist" and promptly put out a slicked up press release about it.

In short you are reading too much into it, and for what its worth we won't be wasting any of our donation money writing press releases and trying to promote a consulting gig as something more than what it is.

Alright, makes sense. That's not really the question that's on my mind though.

The abrasive style aside (I can even see some virtue in that), this...





... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

TBH the alternative code base (although it's likely weaker in quality) is a large factor in my investment. Redundancy is very very nice

[rpietila]

I was trying to be helpful. Clearly, I wasn't.

Clearly my views and investment are not welcome.

The thread is 670 pages long, and most of it is repeating the same unfounded criticisms over and over again by accounts that have been created during the short history of Monero, and whose posting history includes nothing constructive.

Since your post fell into this category, the answers by one of the core developers, in the day of intense fighting against an attack made possible by (B)CN scamdevs, may sound terse.

[smooth]

... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

At a high level there is a lot of merit in it. At the level of actual development, doing that would be a tremendous effort. We're not pursing that course at the present time, but we are always open to input (abrasive or otherwise) and we are also definitely open to dropping some of the parts that don't work well and redesigning them or replacing them with something better. In fact we have done some of that already.

[tacotime]

... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

I agree that the C in the codebase in insane and dangerous. In the least, we need to refactor to C++ and comment the code.

[cAPSLOCK]

Everybody knows that Dingleberry (BBR) is crap.

Stop it.

Yes, please.

Trolls are gonna troll.  But if you are just a supporter who favors one coin.  STAY OUT of their game.

[fluffypony]

... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

We've discussed this through and through, and the general consensus is that the effort it would take to port everything over is huge, and then we'd be stuck inheriting a lot of other stuff that would make what we want to do in future more difficult.

[oda.krell]

... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

I agree that the C in the codebase in insane and dangerous. In the least, we need to refactor to C++ and comment the code.

Whatever works.

But:

"glad to hear the devs had the same idea" sounds more like you were? are? considering changing the codebase entirely.

[Anon136]

words

other trolls could learn a thing or two from you.

[smooth]

... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

I agree that the C in the codebase in insane and dangerous. In the least, we need to refactor to C++ and comment the code.

Whatever works.

But:

"glad to hear the devs had the same idea" sounds more like you were? are? considering changing the codebase entirely.

There is no plan to replace the codebase entirely. We are open to input and considering ideas. Two very different things.

[oda.krell]

... kind of begs for a comment from the dev team.

I agree that the C in the codebase in insane and dangerous. In the least, we need to refactor to C++ and comment the code.

Whatever works.

But:

"glad to hear the devs had the same idea" sounds more like you were? are? considering changing the codebase entirely.

There is no plan to replace the codebase entirely. We are open to input and considering ideas. Two very different things.

Thanks for the answers to my questions. I have nothing to add.