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

[e-coinomist]

Since Bob will have read through the basics of the currency that he is using as payment method, Bob will most certainly know that he can optionally expose the necessary information so that Alice (or any 3rd party) can decode the transaction.

Sidenote: I just realized that Bob and Alice are most definitely the largest Monero whales in existence!

Another snippet known: Must be a couple, since Alice always pockets Bob's spare coin.

[smooth]

2) Another question is how this transaction will appear on the blockchain?

Look on chainradar, moneroblocks, etc.

You can see the transactions, which look rather similar to bitcoin-style transactions with the usual inputs and outputs except when mixins are used, the inputs are shown as untraceable, and in all cases addresses on the blockchain are one-time (a new address is automatically created each time for each output). In fact the inputs on the blockchain are seen as coming from "one of" the mixed inputs (just not which one), but the block explorers don't show that list of candidates.

Re. 1) There were recently features added to the wallet to facilitate the proof-of-payment methods that others mentioned.

[smooth]

Just made aware of this site:

http://moneronodes.i2p.xyz

Yeah, it's definitely a good addition to Monero resources and it reminds us how important each of our full nodes are.

On this topic, is there a wiki with a list of resources? I find that there's a fair bit of information spread out in various Bitcointalk threads but otherwise very hard to find.

Yeah, this is a recurring problem in the monero ecosystem - distributed, sparse collection of information. https://moneroeconomy.com/ was being developed by the MEW, and there might be a central bunch of info there.

getmonero.org should become out tome, because fluffy maintains it, so we know its in good and dedicated hands. Things can be added to the site via github. I started some stuff and then got sidetracked... kinda embarrassing the current level of my effort on their.

monerobase.com is also nicely developed - clean and to the point, and also can be crowd source developed similar to getmonero.org

There's also monero.org , but no one knows who is developing that.

With i2p support coming soon™, this type of analysis should be a bit more complicated.

Indeed, though I think we'll still be able to detect # of peers, but not necessarily their country of origin.

Yes that will be true. Also, i2p (especially turning off regular IP) will be optional, so there will still be plenty of nodes that advertise a regular IP and can be counted, geolocated, etc. Only people who want to be 100% hidden will be exclusively on i2p. Those people probably don't allow incoming connections now so they don't get listed on that site anyway.

[odysseas10]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-06/life-cashless-world-how-cash-became-policy-tool-%E2%80%93-interview-dr-harald-malmgren

One of few policymakers I've heard talk of Btc's transparent Blockchain as a potential problem. It will be interesting to see if his view gains any traction.

[noms]

 Crypto Kingdom News

Heard of Crypto Kingdom? Never heard of it? Perhaps you've even forgotten it exists! A lot of people are still waiting for the GUI version to come out (release is now imminent!).  If you are still thinking of playing, one thing that you may want to look at is a carriage for your character. I am part of an in-game company that is the sole provider of carriages for players. You can get one for as little as 7 moneros, so if you haven't looked at CK in a while, it may be worth your time to revisit the thread and check out what we have to offer.

[dEBRUYNE]

In case someone missed it, the work MoneroMooo has done in the latest 45 hours of his 260 hour part-time contract:

I reached 90 hours now, and with the following to show for the latest 45:

-64 bit encrypted payment IDs: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/a2d7a5fb49dedd6c7e024701eefc4c0beade1edd

-misc fixes for print_tx being broken: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/1d678b1ee286b07fbe3904e5f282354b4ffc3810

-use of smooth's triangular distribution to select fake outputs in the DB code: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/275894cdefeb80095b4b3463ec732c6e728f91b9

-misc fixes to bring the new code closer to the original CN code to diminish the risk of accidental hard forks: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/533acc30eda7792c802ea8b6417917fa99b8bc2b, https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/e63b85496790b458ac8b49d9d26c9de75b84859c, and a few more

-A command to refresh spent status for your outputs: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/aa5bc351d422fd31e66e01a46b166952ef91e958 (this leaks information to the daemon, so not for use with a third party daemon, there will be a flag for this later)

-Per tx keys can now be optionally stored in the wallet cache, and retrieved later: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/6c995710d8cdc8dbbb3da2d11dc8dfe335074ec9. https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/e20a3ae011dcc8724d8131ba245141a6ef2c16e3

-the cache file is now encrypted, as it contains private information: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/f19759992cbd70db8736e1485138f0af647cc047

-misc other small fixes and improvements, the full list of commits is at https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/f19759992cbd70db8736e1485138f0af647cc047

[medusa13]

taken from here:https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1175752.msg12385667#msg12385667

...
In the process of that, I did discover the more remote potential to unmask anonymity of Cryptonote using combinatorial unmasking which I relayed to smooth. And for which if I am not mistaken I was reward 10 BTC by the trio smooth, jl777, and rpietila because I we had that agreement before I revealed the weakness I had identified.
.....

I did not know that jl777 was involved. is it true? did he support a solution because of bbr or is he involved in monero too?
thanks for the clarification.

btw. github looks freezed and healthy. if there is a freeze there do not seem to be any bugfixes, which is nice 
should i compile this version and test? i have some time now on the weekend.

[smooth]

I did not know that jl777 was involved. is it true? did he support a solution because of bbr or is he involved in monero too?
thanks for the clarification.

He has not have any direct involvement with Monero but was supportive of Monero, and has even made some constructive suggestions privately occasionally. At the time his primary involvement was with BBR, and were it not for that he probably wouldn't have been part of that conversation at all. I also can't recall a time when he has done anything to stir up conflict between BBR and Monero.

[dEBRUYNE]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

[luigi1111]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

Sweet, donated a few.

[XMRpromotions]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

Sweet, donated a few.

I think this effort will help attract new developers as it will make the source code easier to understand much faster than without documentation

[Drhiggins]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

After a shitty day at work I come to see some good news.  Just donated!  I suggest anyone who can contribute do so.  This is a project Monero supporters need to get behind.  I really like how this project will help future developers.  This is the stuff I love about this community.  I have watched it grow so much and it keeps getting better. 

Mad respect to all those doing the work whether paid or unpaid.

[AnonCoinTwitter]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

After a shitty day at work I come to see some good news.  Just donated!  I suggest anyone who can contribute do so.  This is a project Monero supporters need to get behind.  I really like how this project will help future developers.  This is the stuff I love about this community.  I have watched it grow so much and it keeps getting better. 

Mad respect to all those doing the work whether paid or unpaid.

3200/3600 xmr already. Close to goal!

[dEBRUYNE]

Worth a cross-post:

Snip of great post!

TLDR; These under the hood gear ups are truly making xmr pull far into the lead regarding technical prowess, should definitely be implemented before gui... and are well worth the wait. But it would be silly to expect an enormous influx of average-joe users without the gui, which means less usage and thus less incentive for merchants to spend the time to implement it as payment option.

About the bolded part. I know there is a Monero roadmap. But is there any insight in how many monthly hours are actually jointly spend on Monero development, beside the paid developer hours?

The obvious concern is that the vision and skills are there, but people are lacking time to achieve the set goals within a certain reasonable time frame.

See:

Where can I find status of Monero development? Things like:

1) How many "core" devs are working on it, and who they are (handles, plus real-names/social-media where public)?
2) Roughly how much time per week/month these devs are spending on it.
3) What the dev roadmap is.
4) What the dev roadmap *was*, and were the milestones hit on-target.

^ You know, basic project management stuff. Looking at git commits only gives hints as to most of this.

pa's answer was pretty helpful on 1, 3, and 4. 4 may be a bit unsatisfying (I find it so) but given that we have to work with very unpredictable resources it is difficult to ever have timed milestones. So we never have and can't measure against them. That's just how it is.

As far as 2, it isn't formally tracked, but it's a reasonably significant amount of time for a mostly-unfunded open source project when you combine across the core team, the major development contributors, and the research group. I would estimate very roughly 2-3 full time equivalents  (varies somewhat unpredictably over time though), and by that I mean just software development and testing, and work on research reports, not the work we put into communications, third party support, etc.

Smooth - would you estimate that the bolded part is still roughly accurate?

Yes I would say that is roughly accurate. There may be slightly less now, but I'm not positive of that because the effort is a bit more diffuse and some major in-progress work may not be so visible. For example, I really had no idea the amazing scope of Noodle Doodle's benchmarking, debugging, and optimizing effort until his recent commit (though I did know he was working on it).

There has been a bunch of work from the MRL on various crypto things including: strengthening anonymization both against combinatorial attacks and better hiding of amounts along the lines of Blockstream's CT, continued analysis of the problem of difficulty retargeting, and upgraded python implementations of more of the crypto.

On the C++ coding side we have NoodleDoodle's massive effort of course. MoneroMooo has been contributing more as well, mostly on a various wallet things (and his work will be now be funded for several months via the forum crowdfunding system), and let's not forget luigi1111's great work to define and implement integrated addresses. I know oranjuice is continuing to work on the API upgrade. I don't see commits (possibly I'm looking the wrong place) for it but he is regularly on #monero-dev discussing it.

So it is interesting that some people who previously put in a lot more work have been busy with other things and putting in less time recently, but others are now contributing to the development effort, and the overall effort fairly stable (that is also visible in the commit rate over the past 6-9 months, although that is an imperfect measure and doesn't include some things at all, such as most of the MRL work).

[MoneroMooo]

Quick overview of recent changes to master since last time:

And another update:

Development has now moved from master to the development branch: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commits/development

Here's a list of the noteworthy changes since last time:

- An overhaul of the whole RPC code to use 0MQ. The existing RPC is still available (and will be for the foreseeable future) using a proxy layer.

- a fix for the lingering crash due to not having file descriptors left. More of a bodge than a fix maybe, but the libevent code uses a lot of fds, and so we switched to using libunbound's internal alternative, which is a lot less demanding about this. There was no apparent leak, just high peak usage. If you're still getting this issue with the latest code, let us know.

- More fixes and changes to being the new blockchain code closer to the original CN code, to lessen the risk of accidental hard fork.

And of course more minor stuff like locking fix in simplewallet, the opimized slow hash enabled again with MSVC, misc improvements in the DNS utils code, etc. See https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commits/development for a list.

[Anon136]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

After a shitty day at work I come to see some good news.  Just donated!  I suggest anyone who can contribute do so.  This is a project Monero supporters need to get behind.  I really like how this project will help future developers.  This is the stuff I love about this community.  I have watched it grow so much and it keeps getting better.  

Mad respect to all those doing the work whether paid or unpaid.

3200/3600 xmr already. Close to goal!

Only 5% left to go now

[ArticMine]

...
Only 5% left to go now

It is funded in a little over a day. This is actually very good.

[dEBRUYNE]

...
Only 5% left to go now

It is funded in a little over a day. This is actually very good.

+1, I am intrigued. In addition:

<tewinget> I have other projects in mind that will be far more interesting, but this had to come first imo.

[owlcatz]

Hey people. I'm a github-noob. What's the latest release number for linux? I'm running: 0.8.8.7-b210b30

Also, is there a way to tell from the repo/files in it what the latest version number is? Thanks!

[GingerAle]

Hey people. I'm a github-noob. What's the latest release number for linux? I'm running: 0.8.8.7-b210b30

Also, is there a way to tell from the repo/files in it what the latest version number is? Thanks!

e5405@e5405-G31M-ES2L:~/mondev/build/debug/version$

in that folder. yours should be build/release though