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

[GTO911]

A domain worth big bucks would be http://mone.ro however some guy just want's to say "Salut!" to the world.

Honestly none of these domains are worth big bucks because:

1. Monero itself is an early stage project that may or may not really go anywhere.

2. There are a countless variations, all of which are nearly perfect substitutes for the others, which means any one of them is worth next to nothing.

Yea thats why these domains are selling for cheap now. If Monero goes somewhere, it surely will. You are the devs, trust yourself. These domains will be worth so much more. Only the speculators will buy these domains

Hey fuck you for laying siege on cool monero domains and then trying to pat the devs on the back.

What a goddamned hero.

Your post was reported.

Its better to keep your mouth shut when you dont know shit. I am no sqautter. Been a long term supporter of monero, go check my posts on the first monero thread. Lost my stash to a drive format. Theres no other way i can make it back, its work for some people. I am not selling these to just anybody, be glad, its better if core team acquires them.

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[fluffypony]

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I can't stand "infinite scrolling" either. It's a feature I find to be very annoying for the most part (there are exceptions where it can serve a purpose, such as google image search). The problem I have with it is that I can't go to a particular page without scrolling endlessly. There are times when I want to lookup a discussion, and say there are 50 pages, I know it's likely to be somewhere around 30-40, with pagination I can make some guess and narrow it down fairly quick, but with infinite scroll I will have to scroll endlessly through page 1-30 or 50-40 before I can start my search. Another scenario could be you're reading a thread and are on page 30 (or in this case, far into your "scroll") and by accident you close the page or (god forbid) you are stupid enough to click a link without "open in new windows". Now you're left to wonder where you left of.

Heh - the Markdown thing was a jab, but seriously it's so much better than BBCode and raw HTML for posts, and it's a LOT easier for us to handle security implications.

On the infinite scrolling thing, we already handle pagination if you browse with JavaScript disabled:

JS enabled


JS disabled

We can definitely add a user setting to disable infinite scrolling in lieu of pagination.

We'll have to give some thought as to how we highlight jumped-to comments in short threads.

[dEBRUYNE]

Hey gents,

I decided some days ago to propose my previous Reddit writings in a more standalone version. They are now available on my website, and you are free to change the CSS for something more adapted for offline reading, for sharing with people curious about Monero, for advocacy, whatever.

http://david.latapie.name/static/cryptos/XMR/monerodocs-threepillarsofmonero.html
http://david.latapie.name/static/cryptos/XMR/monerodocs-whatisopenalias.html
http://david.latapie.name/static/cryptos/XMR/monerodocs-whyistheofficialguiwalletnotreleasedyet.html

And I just published a fourth paper (I will create a standalone version later), the value of Privacy http://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/2vofl9/the_value_of_privacy/

Privacy is a virtue, especially when you can turn it on or off at will.

If you utter the word “privacy” regarding Internet (and thus, cryptocurrencies), some people will immediately think "drugs" or even "pedo-pornography". And you will hear the famous "I have nothing to hide". Let’s debunk this.

First, whether or not we have something to hide, we almost certainly have something to protect. Second, not only is privacy nice, but privacy is actually necessary for society. And third, privacy is a right and like any right, you can turn it off if you want - and this is exactly what Monero offers, optional transparency.


Something to protect
Let me show some perfectly legitimate reasons for privacy.

As an individual, you may not want to be targeted based on your spending habits or your location. Perhaps you don't want your family (or ex-family!) to know with whom or at what you are spending your money, especially some sensitive things. There are many reasons, (not comfortable with it, spoiling relationships, blackmailing/kidnapping-magnets...), you may prefer people to ignore how much you earn. You'd rather avoid "neighbours gossipping that you don't give enough to your church or that you spend too much on porn" (Gregory Maxwell). Your landlord should not be able to scan the blockchain to discover you got a raise and so decide to increase the rent, nor should your employer know which NGO you support.

As a company, you don't want competition to know that you signed a contract or to be able to discover trade secrets just by analysing the block chain (customers, supplies purchases, payroll, margins...).

For anyone, there is the risk of accidentally stumbling on tainted money (like what happened to this coinbase user). Go explain to a judge that "you didn't know". After all, if anyone can trace the money, this means that you should have traced it too, right?

And finally, for the cryptocurrency itself, lack of privacy means giving more power to miners than they are supposed to have. If they can identify via the chain, they may "start to impose blacklists, whitelists, redlists, and other intrusive requirements on transactions. [...] Too much mixing? No "SafeChain approved" tag? Etc. Sorry, your transaction never gets into a block." (smooth, who also explains here why we have a tail emission).Remember: evil bit doesn’t exist.

Countless studies have proved that people behave differently when they know they might be watched. Sure, it means they will think twice before committing heinous acts, but it also means they will think twice before acting freely.


The value of privacy
Privacy is not just comfort. Despite all of our rambling about its deliquescence, most of us live in a wealthy First World nation. War-torn countries and totalitarian regimes are places where freedom of press is punishable, sometimes by death, for the journalists but also (and we tend to forget it), for the local informants. When we say we want Monero to be scalable, this also means that those people can use it.

We put so much care into making the blockchain technology resilient from technical failures, but make no effort to make it resilient to political and social failures.


Optional transparency
Privacy is not black and white. There are some cases when you do want transparency. Your company may need to be audited, and a charity or government may wish to, or even be required to, make its accounts publicly visible. Here a transparent blockchain would be acceptable.

But what if you don't want anyone to find out, just a restricted set of persons, like the tax office, the auditors, the shareholders or the charity members? Or, for individuals, what if, as a parent, you would like to monitor what you kids are spending the money you gave them on? You would certainly not want other person to know (this would avoid the drama of children comparing their spendings in the playground, too). In all of these cases, a mandatory transparent blockchain is not a solution.

Monero has a mechanism to address these two situations - the viewkey. A viewkey is a simple file that allows someone in his possession a read-only access to the wallet. This will tell you the balance, the deposits and the withdrawal, but still won't give you the origin and the destination of the transaction, so that the rest of the network is not compromised. If you want to audit a transaction, you can ask the viewkey of both parties and you're set. And if complete access to both wallet is too much (if you only need to verify a given transaction), details of a transaction can be revealed via a similar mechanism on a per-transaction basis. So, you can decide the level of access: everyone, someone, no one.

What does it mean, on top of additional freedom? This means that since Monero plays fair with everyone, governments wouldn't need to outlaw it, as law enforcement could still be given the tools to investigate illicit transactions (although they'd need to ask for the person's viewkey first, but that's no different than asking for someone's password to reveal incriminating evidence on their computer). It is of particularly importance considering attacking a major crypto is surprisingly easy and within a State's reach (and even more so in the case of a coalition).This is what real privacy is about. Caring for all parties involved.



Oh, one more thing: in our blockchain-powered internet of things future (IBM, [Szabo](unenumerated.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-dawn-of-trustworthy-computing.html)], opaque blockchain would help avoiding the pervasive monitoring Snowden revealed to us. You would certainly not want every burglar to know when you are home just by scannng the blockchain, right? Just give the viewkey to selected devices and you’re fine.

Privacy matters.

Very nice article! Keep up the good work.

[smooth]

I knew, I knew. I saw david talking about registering domain names in public and was counting the hours to some parasite register them all and come back asking for a ransom, here is my free sugestion to the devs: dump all other domains and stick to monero.cc subdomains and consider all other aside mymonero and xmrmonero a potential scam.

There not "all" registered. There are countless other variations of equal or better quality to those being spammed on the thread. None of them have any value until someone uses them to develop valuable content.

[GreekBitcoin]

I will start by stating that my writing skills, both in Greek and English are terrible. I am trying to be 100% friendly and when something i write looks like complaints, for me its more like chatting with a friend.

Fluffy i am not complaining. Criticism and discussions are not bad. You maybe say that because i had asked about the wiki before. You answered me. Your reply was fine with me.

Thing is we all know, as you have said, that resources and time you (the team) are dedicating to monero generally are and should be finite. And you guys have great ideas with great background thinking BUT finite time to make EVERYTHING work flawlessly.

So i dont get why we cant have forum.monero.cc that is going to be exactly what you have envisioned in the future (and take your time to create it) and tempforum.monero.cc that is going to be an insecure(with a big warning that this is an insecure forum), temporary, non scalable, old school, everyoneknowshowtouse,mostly bug free forum...

Because you ask me to list critical things. There is nothing critical about a forum. But right now the ones we have are just not productive. And personally i would prefer time allocated to other things than the forum. I think you also want this. I dont want to bother you about the forum. Thats also a reason why i want a typical oldschool one... (ofc i am NOT the one that i am going to say to you where you are going to allocate your time!)

At last, if you dont accept that, tell me conservative. But remember, i am not the only one. I would argue that half the people here wont take the effort to learn how to use a new forum and prefer the one they already know.

We need a community for many reasons. And we need a community as early as possible. More people aboard mean more help, more ideas and also not having 50% of XMR allocated to 100-1000 people. Right now we have great guides, great posts (especially davids posts) and great discussions all over the internet. I personally want them at a single place. Random people wont get attracted easily without that. And a stronger community can bring even more people aboard. I know that software isnt yet ready for the broader crypto community. But let us be sincere and tell them this and they can decide by themselves.

But if you want a complaint , here have one: Where is the official webpage that was supposed to be coming in 2-4 weeks(that was in June if i am not mistaken). At least some updates! Because whoever gets on official webpage right now might thing that the project is abandoned! Hell, there is a 'NEW' there from May

tl;dr. My opinion is that you must not try to create EVERYTHING from the scratch and PERFECT simply because you dont have the time and because nothing can be perfect. Some things have to be done half right, at least for now. And again, if we were talking in person i could be better at explaining what i mean and you could better understand that it is positive chatting.

[jehst]

tl;dr. My opinion is that you must not try to create EVERYTHING from the scratch and PERFECT simply because you dont have the time and because nothing can be perfect. Some things have to be done half right, at least for now. And again, if we were talking in person i could be better at explaining what i mean and you could better understand that it is positive chatting.

So true. XMR is a lot like a startup. Limited money. Limited time. "The Lean Startup" is all about scientifically figuring out what's going to work without wasting time and money. According to that book, one of the biggest pitfalls is in spending lots of time and effort trying to make the perfect thing with all the perfect features from the start.

MyMonero was a great success here. It's clean looking and functional. It doesn't have address books, and accounting features,  non-English mnemonic accounts, etc. but it doesn't matter. That can all be added later. Actually having a functional webwallet now that I'm actually using personally is great.  And maybe so few people will be interested in some of those additional features that we'll realize that we don't need them this year. And maybe we won't need them next year or ever.

[GTO911]

Selling all of them - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=954512.0

Im not after huge profits, i dont care if 10500 XMR amounts to 10 BTC or 1 BTC, i just need monero

[nakaone]

greek has made a point here - I am with the crew that the core of monero should be as close to perfect as possible. but with the rest there is room for gradual improvement.

at this point of time xmr is seen at best as an elitist project and at worst as a lame duck (no gui, old looking internet presence) - the core group knows why, especially regarding protocol it all takes time, but there is nothing wrong with a better website.

I am not close to computer sciences but I know two professional groups who build nice websites for 600-800$ - I think within the community there are people who would do it for much less and also would reach a sufficient outcome.

mymonero for example has a nice layout.

[David Latapie]

If anyone has a forum based domain name, Monerotalk/Moneroforum, for ex, then I may be able to help with constructing a forum on it(You can lease the domain name).

It's MoneroTalk. Personally, I'm not fan of the reddit layout the official forum is using. A forum and reddit serves two different functions.

Change your sort order in your user settings to Oldest First and you have a traditional flat forum (although no need to deal with pagination because infinite scrolling ftw.

Unless the comment is about Markdown, but anyone who prefers BBCode to Markdown is clearly stuck in the 90s and needs to get with the program;)

Users first. If users prefer solution B and you advocate solution A, what will you do? Decide for the user? Bad user, change user? I don't see it as the proper way to cater for user.
The good thing, though, it that it doesn't matter: What matters is to have a  WYSIWYG editor when replying. For the moment, when I reply, I do not have one. Lot of people don't edit Wikipedia because of the wiki syntax. WYSIWYG just fix that.



The WYSIWYG appears some time, but I could not reproduce it yet. In any case, get a WYSIWYG toolbar and most people will strop complaining about the underlying language.

[Hueristic]

I also agree with greek, I have no use for reddit or that style board.

[bitspill]

I also agree with greek, I have no use for reddit or that style board.

The people has spoken, what will the devs do?

jokes aside, I dont think demands have much say in an open source project.

Why does the dev have to do it? As argued here already why doesn't the dev focus on Monero itself then a user, perhaps one of you who want a classic forum, can go start a classic forum. Rather than complain, execute.

[GTO911]

I will setup an SMF forum or something else just like bitcointalk for monero on monerotalk.com as a freebie with my domains

[Hueristic]

Dedicated XMR Forum should be the responsibility of MEW, but they are too interested in playing a game.

[jwinterm]

I will setup an SMF forum or something else just like bitcointalk for monero on monerotalk.com as a freebie with my domains

There already was a SMF forum setup for monero by Anon336 (or whatever three numbers postcede Anon), I forget the URL (maybe it was moneroforum.org, and now that redirects to forum.monero.cc?). There's also this forum which predates the SMF one: https://monerotalk.org/ .

[GTO911]

I will setup an SMF forum or something else just like bitcointalk for monero on monerotalk.com as a freebie with my domains

There already was a SMF forum setup for monero by Anon336 (or whatever three numbers postcede Anon), I forget the URL (maybe it was moneroforum.org, and now that redirects to forum.monero.cc?). There's also this forum which predates the SMF one: https://monerotalk.org/ .

I can make a mybb one too, ill transfer the ownership to the core team

[Hueristic]

I will setup an SMF forum or something else just like bitcointalk for monero on monerotalk.com as a freebie with my domains

There already was a SMF forum setup for monero by Anon336 (or whatever three numbers postcede Anon), I forget the URL (maybe it was moneroforum.org, and now that redirects to forum.monero.cc?). There's also this forum which predates the SMF one: https://monerotalk.org/ .

Is there a system for linking BBS's?

[jehst]

I also agree with greek, I have no use for reddit or that style board.

The people has spoken, what will the devs do?

jokes aside, I dont think demands have much say in an open source project.

Why does the dev have to do it? As argued here already why doesn't the dev focus on Monero itself then a user, perhaps one of you who want a classic forum, can go start a classic forum. Rather than complain, execute.

We could put up 10 forums tomorrow or 10 websites tomorrow.  We already have 2-3 of each. Executing is not hard. We're trying to build a consensus here. Consensus is the hard part in an open source project.

It took 7+ months or so to build consensus and finally settle the emission issue, right? And that had nothing to do with any extra work. It was just a decision. So consensus is an area where XMR is struggling a bit. I'm not talking about work or execution

[Indefinitely]

I knew, I knew. I saw david talking about registering domain names in public and was counting the hours to some parasite register them all and come back asking for a ransom, here is my free sugestion to the devs: dump all other domains and stick to monero.cc subdomains and consider all other aside mymonero and xmrmonero a potential scam.

I am not apart of the core team, nor have I any close affiliation with Monero. But, I've taken precautions against just that, I'm willing to give free domains (Yes, they are high quality) to anyone wanting to build websites revolving around Monero, simply to combat domain ransoming this early on in the game.

[GTO911]

I knew, I knew. I saw david talking about registering domain names in public and was counting the hours to some parasite register them all and come back asking for a ransom, here is my free sugestion to the devs: dump all other domains and stick to monero.cc subdomains and consider all other aside mymonero and xmrmonero a potential scam.

I am not apart of the core team, nor have I any close affiliation with Monero. But, I've taken precautions against just that, I'm willing to give free domains (Yes, they are high quality) to anyone wanting to build websites revolving around Monero, simply to combat domain ransoming this early on in the game.

I Dropped the price

[Quicken]

I Dropped the price

How about dropping the ransom attempts?