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

[David Latapie]

(discussion on smart mining)

As a reminder, it is part of the decentralisation pillar of Monero.

How about implementing automatic mining with donations to development the default and a secondary setting where auto mining turns on after passing a default yet user-adjustable threshold where one pool has over x% of the network?

That's why we have an Ideas subforum on the official forum. It is part of a "feature workflow", along with Open tasks, Funding required and Work in progress. I suggest anyone interested with smart mining creates a smart mining entry on the official forum.

[canth]

If  you liken it to a lottery etc, is the assumption then that smart mining will be solo and not as part of a p2p pool?

Initially sure because there is no p2p pool. If a p2p pool gets developed then smart mining can certainly support that. There is another novel solution that gives something of the best of both worlds (currently nonexistent in any coin) but that certainly won't show up right away either.

I'd think it would be wise to get some sort of p2p pool going with smart mining. The chances of finding a block solo with a small hash rate are such that people may be tempted not to bother.

The whole point of smart mining is that it isn't something people bother with at all. It just happens, and it is unobtrusive enough there is no reason for people to turn it off. It's just part of how the software works, like nearly every p2p system in existence with the exception of bitcoin.

Pool or no pool, a single computer will yield next to nothing and there is no reason for people, individually, to bother. This is not about "being a miner" it is about harnessing the power of (many) people who aren't miners doing mining.

Yeah, I agree. But whats unobtrusive enough. 10% of cpu 30%. What about the time I need all my cpu power and it becomes intrusive, I turn it off and do I bother turning it back on again. I'm completely on board the idea I'm not trying to discredit it. I'm just thrashing some POV's around.

5% of CPU with low priority would never cause much of an impact on performance or power drain. Start there and see how many people would contribute.

[smooth]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

[opennux]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

[smooth]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

Yes one or more big mining farms running on off-peak power are another possibility for sure. In fact we started to see these oscillations around the same time GPU mining became available, so there is some weak evidence for that.

[Eastwind]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

Do you believe these large farm guys will turn off their miners during peak time? That means their miner are off 10-16 hours per day. There is little chance of ROI.

[smooth]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

Do you believe these large farm guys will turn off their miners during peak time? That means their miner are off 10-16 hours per day. There is little chance of ROI.

There were definitely large GPU farms that already existed when Monero was getting off the ground last year and at the same time the bottom had fallen/was falling out of GPU mining generally. As far as whether those are mining XMR then or now I don't think anyone really knows.  Certainly it doesn't help your ROI to mine 24 hours/day if some of those hours aren't profitable

[macsga]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

Do you believe these large farm guys will turn off their miners during peak time? That means their miner are off 10-16 hours per day. There is little chance of ROI.

There were definitely large GPU farms that already existed when Monero was getting off the ground last year and at the same time the bottom had fallen/was falling out of GPU mining generally. As far as whether those are mining XMR then or now I don't think anyone really knows.  Certainly it doesn't help your ROI to mine 24 hours/day if some of those hours aren't profitable

I'd go for another explanation. This seems like an utilization of one or more University clusters. There's a great chance that someone (or many) are using the embedded VMs for mining (I'm currently under academic licence of a node that contains up to 255 CPUs). Never used it for mining, but believe me, if someone wanted, it would fit the needs of XMR harvesting just fine...

[smooth]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

Do you believe these large farm guys will turn off their miners during peak time? That means their miner are off 10-16 hours per day. There is little chance of ROI.

There were definitely large GPU farms that already existed when Monero was getting off the ground last year and at the same time the bottom had fallen/was falling out of GPU mining generally. As far as whether those are mining XMR then or now I don't think anyone really knows.  Certainly it doesn't help your ROI to mine 24 hours/day if some of those hours aren't profitable

I'd go for another explanation. This seems like an utilization of one or more University clusters. There's a great chance that someone (or many) are using the embedded VMs for mining (I'm currently under academic licence of a node that contains up to 255 CPUs). Never used it for mining, but believe me, if someone wanted, it would fit the needs of XMR harvesting just fine...

Yes could be that, or same thing with corporate clusters.

[shaan.is.one]

Monero is multinational crypto currency it's awesome secure so not have any doubts about loss...can use fearless. 

[fluffypony]

Monero is multinational crypto currency it's awesome secure so not have any doubts about loss...can use fearless. 

[Hueristic]

There are some reasons which are not public, as far as common sense would tend to not mine something not profitable (or even reaching null balance)

What determines not profitable?

Look, people have different costs. I recently learned there are places that have electricity rates of around 0.001 USD/kwh (not a typo). I certainly don't have rates like that and still I'm mining profitably right now.

Mining will never be profitable for everyone, but it being unprofitable for everyone is pretty hard to imagine too.

Plus as the previous post said, people really do enjoy mining as a hobby and to support the coin/network even if it isn't profitable so your idea of "common sense" doesn't actually predict very well how people behave. You might reconsider it.

Also You can mine as a speculation of a price increase.

I have setup my 7950 and will dust 4 r9-270's later today. My electric is monster though 0.1958439201451906 k/Wh

That's why we have an Ideas subforum on the official forum. It is part of a "feature workflow", along with Open tasks, Funding required and Work in progress. I suggest anyone interested with smart mining creates a smart mining entry on the official forum.

Ive been meaning to ask, is this like POS without weight? Or is there a current acronym for it in another coin or will this be a new thing for all coin types?

5% of CPU with low priority would never cause much of an impact on performance or power drain. Start there and see how many people would contribute.

I would recommend 1%(or less if possible) on one core with the option to vary your settings. I run a AMD 1600T which is not conducive to cryptonote algo.

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

How would you setup a miner to adjust with diff like this?

[opennux]

The daily oscillation of the difficulty is very consistent (http://chainradar.com/xmr/chart). Is there an explanation how that happens?

Nobody really knows for sure. There are a variety of theories including one or more botnets in a particular geographic area that only mine when people leave work at night, one or more botnets in a particular geographic area where the computers go to sleep at night when people leave work or go to sleep, instability in the difficulty adjustment (it takes 12 hours to adjust fully, so if difficulty goes up, miners drop off, it then takes 12 hours to come back down, miners come back, repeat), and probably a few others. Maybe some or all of these in combination.

The difficulty adjustment part at least, is something we're working on improving (it is on the design and development goals document).

Some places you can also bargain for cheaper electricity rates outside peak-hours (i.e. in the night time).

Do you believe these large farm guys will turn off their miners during peak time? That means their miner are off 10-16 hours per day. There is little chance of ROI.

I think smooths and magscas theories are most probable, and I wasn't talking against them. More just saying that someone also could be running off-peak. If I were to put XMR on it, I'd bet that it's uni/school/large organisations idle hardware that is being put to use.

But I'm sure someone somewhere has calculated he can make a profit running his old gpu's (that were collecting dust otherwise) during cheaper hours.

[macsga]

Any reason for the price increase?

This currency is just very unthervalued and now discoverd by big investors I think.
This is just a correction for the low levels we have seen and I say keep you XMR and do not take short therm profit.

For no reason,no new wallet,no big surge of net hashrate. 

There's a common belief that XMR will be the top "alt-coin" among all the others for several reasons. If you're into crypto for a long time (that counts at least over 3 years) then you may be able to understand the semantics. If you don't and want to ride the train, it's a good thing to observe who are among the top followers.

Please do not misunderstand me, I'm not saying "oh look, macsga is on the train, let's ride on", I'm saying that most of the people involved are already holding a "good" amount of BTCs as well. It's all speculative of course, but as it's boldy previously written on this thread:

"It's better to hold some XMR, than not to hold at all"

[jehst]

I really respect the Monero community because it:

a) respects consensus

e.g. Despite well-argued debate between proponents of opposing viewpoints re: a change of the emission schedule, the vote was unanimous in the end. The community members knew that whichever solution was chosen, it was more important to have the whole community behind it. The outcome showed maturity, long-term outlook, and willingness to sacrifice. This was around the time when I first began investing in XMR.

b) is pragmatic

The XMR team is focused on building a well-documented, user-friendly, power user-friendly, and business-friendly product with an actual present day use case. 

c) extremely active

Monero devs talk to anyone and everyone including trolls every day. Whenever the subjects of Monero or fungibility concerns you will see an XMR  dev or community member respectfully debating or explaining something in the comments. Research shows that a person needs to hear a word several times before he will finally explore it or make inquiries. It was certainly true for me. I first saw the name Monero in Summer 2014 and I dismissed it, but I kept seeing the threads and kept seeing the name so one day I finally decided to read about it. All because of how active the community is.

[5w00p]

Let's talk Payment ID's and use-cases of Monero...

Let us imagine a scenario:

 ...An online storefront that sells all kinds of widgets, in varying styles and quantities, and to everyone from Bob and Alice (regular individuals) all the way to large organizations. This Monero Mart needs to be able to take orders from a website and process the payments in order to credit customers' accounts and ultimately package and ship the widgets to them. Some of these customers, although the widgets are all perfectly legal and uncontroversial in every known jurisdiction of every state, province, territory, and nation on earth, still have a desire to keep their purchases anonymous and untraceable to any prying eyes who might peruse the Monero Blockchain. The only two entities that should be privy to the widget order details, most relevant in our scenario is the total cost, are the Customer and Monero Mart.

So, as of now, I see in a thread on the Monero Forum that some individuals in our community have publicly shared their preferred Payment ID's. As I understand it, this is to identify incoming payments from one of these individuals to someone else.

OK, so now Monero Mart is open for business, and they are taking orders for widgets, running a steady flow of orders and outgoing shipments. Each Customer is assigned a Payment ID, as Monero Mart uses 10 XMR wallet addresses for their roughly 500 total customers. So, each wallet address receives about 50 unique Payment ID's for incoming orders. These Payment ID's show up as visible, and even searchable, in the pubic Monero Blockchain.

What are the ramifications of a customer's Payment ID being leaked (in regards to past orders, assuming it is changed once the leak is discovered) and what effect does mixin count have on the anonymity of a Customer whose Payment ID is publicly known?

Does mixin count increase the time required for confirmations? Does a transaction with a higher mixin count have to "sit and wait" for additional transactions to occur on the blockchain, in order to mix with them? What if in a given minute or period of minutes, there are no additional transactions, only the "mined block reward(s)?" Can a high mixin count transaction mix with block rewards?

Let us discuss...

[smooth]

Any reason for the price increase?

This currency is just very unthervalued and now discoverd by big investors I think.
This is just a correction for the low levels we have seen and I say keep you XMR and do not take short therm profit.

For no reason,no new wallet,no big surge of net hashrate. 

Plenty of Newbie trolls though.

[smooth]

How would you setup a miner to adjust with diff like this?

It easy to script something that works off the difficulty reported by the 'getinfo' API for example. Better still might be using the 'getinfo' API from a node and a price API from an exchange.

[GingerAle]

What are the ramifications of a customer's Payment ID being leaked (in regards to past orders, assuming it is changed once the leak is discovered)

As mentioned above, I think the payment ID being leaked could only indicate that someone made a payment for that specific amount at that specific time. Assuming the info is leaked with identifying information, then yes, you'll know that Jane paid a particular amount at a given time. You wouldn't be able to do anything more with this info, unless Jane continues using the same payment ID.

Does mixin count increase the time required for confirmations? Does a transaction with a higher mixin count have to "sit and wait" for additional transactions to occur on the blockchain, in order to mix with them? What if in a given minute or period of minutes, there are no additional transactions, only the "mined block reward(s)?" Can a high mixin count transaction mix with block rewards?

Let us discuss...

As far as I understand cryptonote (and also bitcoin), the mixin count does not increase the time required for confirmations - the ring signature stuff is passive - its just pulling information out of the blockchain at the instant the transaction is created. It doesn't have to go anywhere to get ring signed.

and what effect does mixin count have on the anonymity of a Customer whose Payment ID is publicly known?

Hrm, I think it wouldn't do much do to the stealth addresses.

[Jamil.Kamil]

We suppose to support Monroe for rise up this is trustful and secure currency