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

[uvt9]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

[rpietila]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

Monero has more important purposes than that.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

Unfortunately (for Bitcoin), a Monero sidechain would do nothing to improve Bitcoin's fungibility, nor would it be nearly as private.

[rpietila]

It makes me sad too but it has enough other things going for it to allow me to get over the fact that it is senselessly destroying resources. If some competent developer were to come along and fork over to pos, I would move a portion of my holdings over to that fork. So long as block authors were selected randomly and not with something like peercoins coinage concept.

Some of the following questions may apply:

- Have you found the way to secure the network without expending resources?
- Have you found the way to secure the network with only a part of the value of new emission?
- Have you found the way to code this to the p2p software?
- Have you found the way to create value out of nothing and distribute it fairly?
- Who gets the newly created value?



PoW has its issues, but from the theoretical standpoint PoS issues are even greater if we are to build a system for the future where all can participate and have the incentive to do so. CKG has tried to alleviate these issues, yet is not a crypto, because securing a crypto takes energy. PoS is also not a decentralized crypto, it is a centralized fiat.

[iCEBREAKER]

There was talk about the missive being ready to go out the door weeks ago... any hints on when it may show up?

welp, with fluffy back, we did a recap of his magical monero mystery tour, so workin on that one.

I got a rough draft done. Any volunteers for transcribing?

PM me and I'll get yah a link.

PM sent.

I can transcribe at least some of it, if not all.

If anyone can recommend a decent voice to text program, I'm willing to help check and correct its output.

[DaveyJones]

There was talk about the missive being ready to go out the door weeks ago... any hints on when it may show up?

welp, with fluffy back, we did a recap of his magical monero mystery tour, so workin on that one.

I got a rough draft done. Any volunteers for transcribing?

PM me and I'll get yah a link.

PM sent.

I can transcribe at least some of it, if not all.

If anyone can recommend a decent voice to text program, I'm willing to help check and correct its output.

http://www.nuance.com/for-individuals/by-product/dragon-for-pc/index.htm ?

[iCEBREAKER]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

At present, Monero is the only serious game in town for privacy-coin speculation.  When available, I will try to be among the first to acquire NullCoins.   

https://people.xiph.org/~greg/confidential_values.txt

Monero's technology and utility stands to benefit greatly from gmax's laudably innovative Confidential Transactions.

The e-cash pie is more than large enough for both BTC.CT and XMR.  Sidechains are only the end of the beginning, as BTC's Mother of All Blockchains assumes its rightful place as THE settlement backbone for any number of subordinate side/tree/daughter/alt chains.

No matter what, altcoins (esp. battle tested ones with independent codebases and vibrant ecosystems) will always have residual value as a hedge against catastrophic BTC failure.

Monopolist Maximalist Supremacists like Frap.doc may emit all manner of 'BUT BUT NETWORK AFFECT' flummery in protest of that idea, but crowds are fickle and entirely capable of turning on a dime in response to emerging/changing conditions.

[nakaone]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

(un)luckily sidechains are an incentive disaster due to the two way peg and its core developers wrong assumption regarding digital scarcity.

when they solve this ideological problem, which will probably never happen, altcoins could lose much of its credibility.

[dEBRUYNE]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

(un)luckily sidechains are an incentive disaster due to the two way peg and its core developers wrong assumption regarding digital scarcity.

when they solve this ideological problem, which will probably never happen, altcoins could lose much of its credibility.

This only applies to Bitcoin clones, however I still see a future for non Bitcoin clones. Regarding XMR I still see a bright future for us. One still has to go from BTC -> anonymous sidechain -> back to BTC, so a three letter agency can still see if you went on the anonymous chain and thus making yourself not fully anonymous. Fluffypony told me he would write a more extensive post regarding this matter later this day, so let's wait for that as well

PS: Miners can also censor transactions coming from that chain, sidechains don't change a damn thing about the, in my opinion, flawed fungibility from Bitcoin. Regarding fungibility, check this post -> http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/374ss5/the_problem_with_bitcoin_that_everyone_seems_to/ (credits to dnaleor).

[GingerAle]

POS grumblings = go find pebblecoin. He's doing POS nonsense on cryptonote. Good luck with that.

Sidechains - my take on sidechains, and I'm surprised no one really mentions this, is that common transparency with optional privacy (future bitcoin with sidechain) is not the same as common privacy with optional transparency (current monero with viewkey). Bitcoin with a private sidechain will be the same as you going to a bank and withdrawing $500k in cash. Your privacy is probably compromised. Now, this could be due to an assumption regarding the mechanisms of side chains, but as far as I understand things, you would send your bitcoin to a magic address (which is visible on the blockchain) where they would be locked, then your sidechain coins pop into existence, and off you go. Now you're telling me thats going to work? In what world of blockchain analysis / data scraping is that not a piece of data itself?

"Oh Jim put 500 bitcoin into a private transaction sidechain. No need to worry about that guy. He was probably just scared of being robbed. And now that his 500 bitcoin is invisible, I'll just forget that he ever had them"

I mean, I guess the only possible utility it could have is if you essentially stayed in the sidechain. And who knows, maybe the sidechain is ultimately a trojan horse for bitcoin becoming opaque (if everyone's on the sidechain, what happens to the main chain?)

[wpalczynski]

If i open my wallet 7/24/365 i got rewards from network??

No, you would have to run a miner and contribute some hashrate. 

I have coins mined from pool. or i need to mine direct on wallet?

You can do both I believe although I've always mined in a Pool.

[smooth]

I mean, I guess the only possible utility it could have is if you essentially stayed in the sidechain. And who knows, maybe the sidechain is ultimately a trojan horse for bitcoin becoming opaque (if everyone's on the sidechain, what happens to the main chain?)

The rewards will continue on the main chain so for the next 100 years or so miners will continue to mine the main chain (and then move their rewards to the SC) even if no one else uses it. Of course, this makes the whole system far more needlessly complex and far less secure than a coin that just uses one chain (since it relies on merged mining with very dodgy security assumptions).

[iCEBREAKER]

Check this out...

Request for comments

http://voxelsoft.com/dev/sumcoin.pdf

Abstract
Sumcoin is peer-to-peer electronic cash where transaction amounts are
only visible to the sender and receiver. In each transaction, the output
amounts are encrypted with the public keys of the respective receivers.
Only the transaction fee is publicly revealed, to allow miners to prioritise
transactions. A homomorphic commitment for each transaction proves
that the sum of the transaction inputs matches the sum of its outputs.
A short Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proof (NIZKP) for each out-
put also convinces all veriers that the sum does not over ow. Address
construction includes an additional public view key to allow senders to
encrypt output values. This approach practically resolves a core privacy
issue in Bitcoin[1], but without overwhelming implementation complexity.
The required commitments are an order of magnitude smaller than those
initially proposed for Condential Transactions[2].


In addition to standing on its own, Sumcoin can be implemented as a sidechain[42]
or integrated into the Monero (or Bitcoin) protocol as a hard fork with a new
transaction version. Unspent transaction pruning[43] is possible in Sumcoin

[Patel]

Blockstream just released testing environment for sidechain. The actual implementation is still a long way but i'm curious could sidechains theoretically kill all altcoins (including Monero) ? Let's say someone would copy Monero into monerosidechain, people can move value from bitcoin to monerosidechain with a fixed rate to take advantage of anonymity. Would that leave the purpose of holding Monero only for speculation ?

Unfortunately (for Bitcoin), a Monero sidechain would do nothing to improve Bitcoin's fungibility, nor would it be nearly as private.

Theoretically, yes, sidechains can obsolete altcoins. Probability, no, sidechains probably won't obsolete altcoins. But I do think it will take a large chunk of it in the future.

A Monero sidechain wouldn't improve Bitcoin's (protocol layer) fungibility, but it would create a larger network effect by having it's value pegged to the value of BTC and having the properties of XMR. Thus, eliminating the fear of holding XMR and having it's value drop. Personally, I think if Monero was on a sidechain, more people would use it because it's value would always be same as their BTC was.

[sleepdog]

WARNING - these are not "official", as in, someone from the core dev team didn't compile them and gave them the a-ok. I'm putting them here for testing purposes. I compiled following the instructions on the github. Perhaps they are static? Perhaps you can run the LMDB version of bitmonerod on your win 64 box and only use 50 megs of ram?

https://mega.co.nz/#!5YNACDTJ!N0pIow27_Tfsx4dMfMq4HA11ZSlEt7L135HvYEOuBU8

perhaps you can swap in the relevant .exe files from the above into the /resources/software/ folder of MoneroX you can have a monero GUI on windows 64 that sips RAM like a fine wine?

AGAIN - don't trust these. Test them until you trust them. Make sure they do everything they should do. I tested them on the box I compiled on and another windows 7 box.

Hopefully someone will post the data.mdb download link.  

No joy here, the blockchain_converter crashes after two or three hours (roughly 35% complete) like so:



Running on Win 7. If I get the chance I'll try it on a machine at work tomorrow and see if I have better luck.

[iCEBREAKER]

No joy here, the blockchain_converter crashes after two or three hours (roughly 35% complete) like so:

Running on Win 7. If I get the chance I'll try it on a machine at work tomorrow and see if I have better luck.

Hmm, what about XP compatibility mode?  Run as Admin?  Safe mode(!)?  Turn off antivirus/updates, and misc crapware TSRs in TaskManager?

What is RAM use like?  Maybe increase swap file allocation?

[luigi1111]

WARNING - these are not "official", as in, someone from the core dev team didn't compile them and gave them the a-ok. I'm putting them here for testing purposes. I compiled following the instructions on the github. Perhaps they are static? Perhaps you can run the LMDB version of bitmonerod on your win 64 box and only use 50 megs of ram?

https://mega.co.nz/#!5YNACDTJ!N0pIow27_Tfsx4dMfMq4HA11ZSlEt7L135HvYEOuBU8

perhaps you can swap in the relevant .exe files from the above into the /resources/software/ folder of MoneroX you can have a monero GUI on windows 64 that sips RAM like a fine wine?

AGAIN - don't trust these. Test them until you trust them. Make sure they do everything they should do. I tested them on the box I compiled on and another windows 7 box.

Hopefully someone will post the data.mdb download link.  

No joy here, the blockchain_converter crashes after two or three hours (roughly 35% complete) like so:



Running on Win 7. If I get the chance I'll try it on a machine at work tomorrow and see if I have better luck.

I think you have to use a smaller batch size than 20k, maybe like 3,000?

[equipoise]

WARNING - these are not "official", as in, someone from the core dev team didn't compile them and gave them the a-ok. I'm putting them here for testing purposes. I compiled following the instructions on the github. Perhaps they are static? Perhaps you can run the LMDB version of bitmonerod on your win 64 box and only use 50 megs of ram?

https://mega.co.nz/#!5YNACDTJ!N0pIow27_Tfsx4dMfMq4HA11ZSlEt7L135HvYEOuBU8

perhaps you can swap in the relevant .exe files from the above into the /resources/software/ folder of MoneroX you can have a monero GUI on windows 64 that sips RAM like a fine wine?

AGAIN - don't trust these. Test them until you trust them. Make sure they do everything they should do. I tested them on the box I compiled on and another windows 7 box.

Hopefully someone will post the data.mdb download link.  

No joy here, the blockchain_converter crashes after two or three hours (roughly 35% complete) like so:



Running on Win 7. If I get the chance I'll try it on a machine at work tomorrow and see if I have better luck.

I think you have to use a smaller batch size than 20k, maybe like 3,000?

Using exporter and then the importer with smaller chunk size (2000) worked for me.

[sleepdog]

So don't use the converter at all? Export, then import?

There's no mention in the utilities' help about batch size or chunk size...

I doubt this is a XP compatibility/admin rights issue as it's getting that far before crashing, I'd expect it to crap out straight away if that was the case.


If anyone else has had success with this maybe they could write a brief step by step of what they did? Would be very useful.

EDIT : Now trying blockchain_export.

[statdude]

Selling the following domains.

BetMonero.com
MoneroForum.com
DiceMonero.com

Had plans for some sites that never got around to making.

If anyone knows the bad luck I've run across in the world of BTC knows I can use this $, so consider it a donation  

200 XMR each or
500 for all three.

Maybe can land in some better hands!

MoneroForum.com is sold.
Other 2 still available.

Final Special Offer for Bet Monero and Dice Monero .com:

BetMonero.com - 149 XMR
MoneroForum.com Sold
DiceMonero.com - 149 XMR

Last of the advertising for now. Thanks folks.

On that note, whats with the spectacular dump and bounce back in the market?