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

[Johnny Mnemonic]

If the Monero GUI can make the slope of the learning curve so easy to climb that Your Mom Can Use It, it will be vital in propelling the success of XMR that all of us are so eager to witness.

Even if Mom can use it, she won't, because she can't actually get any XMR.

Sorry I'm kicking a dead horse here. I'm not saying promotion/advertising is useless, but without accessibility it seems like we're all just circle-jerking each other.

We need some brilliant ideas... how can we make it absurdly easy for a normal, non-regular person to acquire XMR? Can we give XMR away with the purchase of something else?

What useful service can we offer Mom or Grandma that would improve their lives with XMR?

I think it's time we start thinking bigger.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

In Europe, you can already send money to Bitfinex using SWIFT, and then transfer whatever the equivalent is in dollars as TetherUSD to Poloniex, correct? Poloniex has low volume on the XMR-TetherUSD pair at the moment, but this should definitely be further popularized here if it's possible. I can't go this route, as I can't send money from my US bank to Bitfinex using SWIFT, but there should be a good number of international people who can.

SWIFTing money to one exchange to buy one crypto then transferring it to another exchange to buy another? That doesn't sound like an easy and dedicated solution to me. Mom certainly couldn't do it.

I'm talking about a single page app with a big empty field that says:

I want to buy _____ XMR

and a huge button that says:

---> PAY NOW <---

Now that's simple. It's the holy grail. If we could do that, then we could dominate every other cryptocurrency in existence. We can't do it, of course, but we need to start getting creative so we can deliver something close.

[mmortal03]

That said, it's simply not acceptable for us (to echo your words) to put lipstick on a pig and ship a GUI that is pleasant enough, but takes 4 days to sync from scratch, requires 6+gb of RAM, sucks a ton of bandwidth, and is accepted nearly nowhere.

We will deliver a proverbial work of art, but it requires building out parts of the foundation that we had previously viewed as less of a priority (until the 202612 attack). Oh, and we're doing it on like no money, so there's that.

So, there's Jojatekok's Monero Gui .NET, in which I actually uncovered some odd transaction bugs that he hasn't been able to solve. If he ony had a little bit more direct support from the Monero devs on this, this could be solved. He has since redirected his time to a cross platform GUI, which he is building from scratch, which is great and all, but the original version is *almost there*.  

Also, for the time being, the daemon setting in it could be *defaulted* to remotely connect to node.moneroclub.com, avoiding the blockchain RAM bloat issues, and be distributed *as a lightweight wallet*, until the database issues are completely solved in the main project.

[iCEBREAKER]

I'm talking about a single page app with a big empty field that says:

I want to buy _____ XMR

and a huge button that says:

---> PAY NOW <---

Now that's simple. It's the holy grail. If we could do that, then we could dominate every other cryptocurrency in existence. We can't do it, of course, but we need to start getting creative so we can deliver something close.

Yes, Circle for XMR would be great.  I'd install the shit out of that app.

[monero]

GINGEROPOLOUS's POOL SHAME LIST

List updated on the OP. Sorted first by mixin, second by percentage of donation.
updated by David Latapie

[mmortal03]

In Europe, you can already send money to Bitfinex using SWIFT, and then transfer whatever the equivalent is in dollars as TetherUSD to Poloniex, correct? Poloniex has low volume on the XMR-TetherUSD pair at the moment, but this should definitely be further popularized here if it's possible. I can't go this route, as I can't send money from my US bank to Bitfinex using SWIFT, but there should be a good number of international people who can.

SWIFTing money to one exchange to buy one crypto then transferring it to another exchange to buy another? That doesn't sound like an easy and dedicated solution to me. Mom certainly couldn't do it.

I'm talking about a single page app with a big empty field that says:

I want to buy _____ XMR

and a huge button that says:

---> PAY NOW <---

Now that's simple. It's the holy grail. If we could do that, then we could dominate every other cryptocurrency in existence. We can't do it, of course, but we need to start getting creative so we can deliver something close.

Of course not, but it could be rails to implement what you are suggesting, without involving Bitcoin, simplifying the books of your simplified exchange idea. But we need the volume from people here to close that XMR-TetherUSD buy/ask spread on Poloniex, or it won't even get that far.

[smooth]

Recently a close friend of mine asked me how she could acquire some xmr. I agreed to get some for her, but should I instead have replied, "oh, monero isn't popular enough among crypto geeks for you to be able to buy it with your dollars. Instead you have to buy this other much more popular crypto first, and then trade it on a complicated exchange that won't make sense to regular folks like yourself"?

Valid point IMO.

Even something like retail prepaid cards would be much better.

Everyone always says this for every coin. Fact is the demand isn't there. Nobody noticed that polo offers usdt, nobody noticed how hilarious the volume is.

USDT is fairly useless. It's still crypto and you still need to buy USDT with USD somehow unless you are trading crypto-to-crypto.

It's not useless if people here start to use it to buy XMR directly.

You can't use it to buy XMR directly. You have to buy USDT first, which means going through another intermediary and then still using an exchange. USDT is not USD, you can't transfer money from your bank account to Poloniex and get USDT. it is a USD-pegged crypto "token" (I think Nxt-based[, but I'm not positive) Correction: mastercoin-based.

EDIT: On the speculation thread someone pointed out this simplifies tax calculations if you treat USDT as having a fixed value (it really doesn't have a fixed value, but that's a subtlty and maybe the taxman doesn't care). So that is one non-useless thing about it. But as far as number of steps to get from USD to XMR it is the same as going through BTC.

[mmortal03]

Recently a close friend of mine asked me how she could acquire some xmr. I agreed to get some for her, but should I instead have replied, "oh, monero isn't popular enough among crypto geeks for you to be able to buy it with your dollars. Instead you have to buy this other much more popular crypto first, and then trade it on a complicated exchange that won't make sense to regular folks like yourself"?

Valid point IMO.

Even something like retail prepaid cards would be much better.

Everyone always says this for every coin. Fact is the demand isn't there. Nobody noticed that polo offers usdt, nobody noticed how hilarious the volume is.

USDT is fairly useless. It's still crypto and you still need to buy USDT with USD somehow unless you are trading crypto-to-crypto.

It's not useless if people here start to use it to buy XMR directly.

You can't use it to buy XMR directly. You have to buy USDT first, which means going through another intermediary and then still using an exchange.

I mean it in the sense of buying it directly with a USD equivalent, which makes calculations much easier in a number of ways, including for tax purposes, and, without going through bitcoins.

USDT is not USD, you can't transfer money from your bank account to Poloniex and get USDT. it is a USD-pegged crypto "token" (I think Nxt-based, but I'm not positive)

They use the OMNI layer (Mastercoin), which is built on the Bitcoin blockchain, and back all TetherUSD with real USD. There's an actual dollar guaranteed there for every TetherUSD that you hold.

[mmortal03]

EDIT: On the speculation thread someone pointed out this simplifies tax calculations if you treat USDT as having a fixed value (it really doesn't have a fixed value, but that's a subtlty and maybe the taxman doesn't care).

That might have been me on the speculation thread. USDT has a fixed value, it's backed by actual USD. It doesn't work like Nxt or BitUSD.

So that is one non-useless thing about it. But as far as number of steps to get from USD to XMR it is the same as going through BTC.

Exactly, I care about making my taxes and math easier, not about a few extra clicks on a couple of websites.

[smooth]

Recently a close friend of mine asked me how she could acquire some xmr. I agreed to get some for her, but should I instead have replied, "oh, monero isn't popular enough among crypto geeks for you to be able to buy it with your dollars. Instead you have to buy this other much more popular crypto first, and then trade it on a complicated exchange that won't make sense to regular folks like yourself"?

Valid point IMO.

Even something like retail prepaid cards would be much better.

Everyone always says this for every coin. Fact is the demand isn't there. Nobody noticed that polo offers usdt, nobody noticed how hilarious the volume is.

USDT is fairly useless. It's still crypto and you still need to buy USDT with USD somehow unless you are trading crypto-to-crypto.

It's not useless if people here start to use it to buy XMR directly.

You can't use it to buy XMR directly. You have to buy USDT first, which means going through another intermediary and then still using an exchange.

I mean it in the sense of buying it directly with a USD equivalent, which makes calculations much easier in a number of ways, including for tax purposes, and, without going through bitcoins.

USDT is not USD, you can't transfer money from your bank account to Poloniex and get USDT. it is a USD-pegged crypto "token" (I think Nxt-based, but I'm not positive)

They use the OMNI layer (Mastercoin), which is built on the Bitcoin blockchain, and back all TetherUSD with real USD. There's an actual dollar guaranteed there for every TetherUSD that you hold.

Yes guaranteed by a startup company that objectively speaking isn't all that credit worthy.

But as I said for small transactions and probably for tax purposes that can be ignored.

[G2M]

... Vice ...

LOL, i was actually in Vice NYC with one of their PPM's chatting Monero up. She said she'll talk to the motherboard guy about it. This was months ago, maybe it's time to ask again

[fluffypony]

If he ony had a little bit more direct support from the Monero devs on this, this could be solved. He has since redirected his time to a cross platform GUI, which he is building from scratch, which is great and all, but the original version is *almost there*.  

Also, for the time being, the daemon setting in it could be *defaulted* to remotely connect to node.moneroclub.com, avoiding the blockchain RAM bloat issues, and be distributed *as a lightweight wallet*, until the database issues are completely solved in the main project.

He's in #monero-dev often, and we answer his questions as he asks.

More specifically, he has a direct line to me (I even designed the Monero X logo for him), so access to us is REALLY a non-issue.

Connecting to a remote daemon is a bit icky at the moment, it doesn't handle scale beyond a handful of simultaneous requests, and the daemon's RPC API is going away in favour of 0MQ (which will still allow a remote TCP bind, but ill-suited for general-purposes connections). We will look at providing an RPC layer of abstraction for remote clients, but it will be in a separate binary that won't affect the daemon if it dies. I've actively discouraged Jojatekok from relying on remote daemon functionality, as that API isn't frozen and *will* be going away soon.

[macsga]

It seems that XMR follows right behind the DRK pump today (Poloniex). I presume we're heading for upper levels (for this 0.003 must become support). Let's see...

[saddambitcoin]

... Vice ...

LOL, i was actually in Vice NYC with one of their PPM's chatting Monero up. She said she'll talk to the motherboard guy about it. This was months ago, maybe it's time to ask again

What's a PPM?

Alex Pasternack is the Motherboard editor I believe. alexp at motherboard dot tv

[smooth]

If he ony had a little bit more direct support from the Monero devs on this, this could be solved. He has since redirected his time to a cross platform GUI, which he is building from scratch, which is great and all, but the original version is *almost there*.  

Also, for the time being, the daemon setting in it could be *defaulted* to remotely connect to node.moneroclub.com, avoiding the blockchain RAM bloat issues, and be distributed *as a lightweight wallet*, until the database issues are completely solved in the main project.

He's in #monero-dev often, and we answer his questions as he asks.

More specifically, he has a direct line to me (I even designed the Monero X logo for him), so access to us is REALLY a non-issue.

Not to disagree at all with what fluffypony said but the bigger picture here is that there are almost always core devs and major contributors on #monero-dev and lots of people drop in to get answers to questions about projects they are working on. No one should be reluctant to work on a Monero-related project because they need help. Help is there for you. It is incredibly exciting to see how vibrant and dynamic the third party development surrounding Monero has become.

That to me is more of a positive indicator than the core stuff (which nevertheless continues to move along steadily). The core team can't do it all ourselves, especially without a big war chest from an ICO or premine, but the more we facilitate a vibrant community of Monaro-related development, the more useful Monero will become.

[Anon136]

So I just had an idea. I literally just thought of it like 1 second ago so i haven't really thought it through. So i was thinking about this post.

Monero gets you closer, but it's not perfect.

The problem with Monero's ring signatures in this situation is an exchange can notice that one of the pubkeys in your ring signature comes from a "stolen" coin and tell you to resubmit the tx with that pubkey left out of the signature.

What really solves this thoroughly is Zerocash, where essentially the "ring signature set" is all unspent Zerocash, and you can't leave any coins out of that set.

And hes right of course. But what if there was a way to prevent transaction authors from being able to chose which mixin partners they used. So for an extremely rough example of the idea. Certainly not saying we should do this, just to demonstrate the principal in a very abstract form. What if for a given transaction to be considered valid you had to hash the destination address + the block header of the previous block and then select the mixin partners that are numerically closest to that hash in terms of absolute value. That way transaction authors would have no choice in who their partners were. This would completely solve the fungibility concerns.

Again im not saying, HEY LETS GO DO THIS, i just want to get the gears turning in peoples heads. maybe be inspiration for some idea that is similar in some way but better.

[othe]

What he describes is basically MRL-0001 and what MRL-0004 fixes

[binaryFate]

So I just had an idea. I literally just thought of it like 1 second ago so i haven't really thought it through. So i was thinking about this post.

Monero gets you closer, but it's not perfect.

The problem with Monero's ring signatures in this situation is an exchange can notice that one of the pubkeys in your ring signature comes from a "stolen" coin and tell you to resubmit the tx with that pubkey left out of the signature.

What really solves this thoroughly is Zerocash, where essentially the "ring signature set" is all unspent Zerocash, and you can't leave any coins out of that set.

And hes right of course. But what if there was a way to prevent transaction authors from being able to chose which mixin partners they used. So for an extremely rough example of the idea. Certainly not saying we should do this, just to demonstrate the principal in a very abstract form. What if for a given transaction to be considered valid you had to hash the destination address + the block header of the previous block and then select the mixin partners that are numerically closest to that hash in terms of absolute value. That way transaction authors would have no choice in who their partners were. This would completely solve the fungibility concerns.

Again im not saying, HEY LETS GO DO THIS, i just want to get the gears turning in peoples heads. maybe be inspiration for some idea that is similar in some way but better.

Doesn't work as a malicious entity spamming the blockchain during few blocks would own all unspents to be used after that for a while. (and then cascading from then on...).

Anyway I disagree he's right with the issue. You can spend the "blacklisted" inputs into others that are not. In the extreme case you end up with what is described in one of the reddit answer:

The thief can just cycle the stolen coins to a new wallet in every single block, thereby mixing the coins with every other coin sent in those blocks.
The thief can easily afford the transaction fees to do this for a week.
The exchange cannot afford to reject every single deposit from every single customer for a full week.

What he describes is basically MRL-0001 and what MRL-0004 fixes

+1

[Anon136]

So I just had an idea. I literally just thought of it like 1 second ago so i haven't really thought it through. So i was thinking about this post.

Monero gets you closer, but it's not perfect.

The problem with Monero's ring signatures in this situation is an exchange can notice that one of the pubkeys in your ring signature comes from a "stolen" coin and tell you to resubmit the tx with that pubkey left out of the signature.

What really solves this thoroughly is Zerocash, where essentially the "ring signature set" is all unspent Zerocash, and you can't leave any coins out of that set.

And hes right of course. But what if there was a way to prevent transaction authors from being able to chose which mixin partners they used. So for an extremely rough example of the idea. Certainly not saying we should do this, just to demonstrate the principal in a very abstract form. What if for a given transaction to be considered valid you had to hash the destination address + the block header of the previous block and then select the mixin partners that are numerically closest to that hash in terms of absolute value. That way transaction authors would have no choice in who their partners were. This would completely solve the fungibility concerns.

Again im not saying, HEY LETS GO DO THIS, i just want to get the gears turning in peoples heads. maybe be inspiration for some idea that is similar in some way but better.

Doesn't work as a malicious entity spamming the blockchain during few blocks would own all unspents to be used after that for a while. (and then cascading from then on...).

Anyway I disagree he's right with the issue. You can spend the "blacklisted" inputs into others that are not. In the extreme case you end up with what is described in one of the reddit answer:

The thief can just cycle the stolen coins to a new wallet in every single block, thereby mixing the coins with every other coin sent in those blocks.
The thief can easily afford the transaction fees to do this for a week.
The exchange cannot afford to reject every single deposit from every single customer for a full week.

What he describes is basically MRL-0001 and what MRL-0004 fixes

+1

right you are sir. thanks for a good post.

*edit* i was thinking the other day, if monero's anonymity is not sufficient for your needs you can always run monero through a tumbler like bitcoin fog. its crazy to think about the difficulty of tracking monero that's been through a tumbler.

[smooth]

hash the destination address + the block header of the previous block

Two problems here. One is the the destination address is one time and the sender can change it with a different choice of r. The other is that you could just wait for another block.

Something like this might be possible based on the key image. That's something I've thought about a bit for another purpose.