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

[nioc]

Sorry if this has already been asked and answered.............any time frame on RingCT? Months?...Weeks?

As I understand it it will be included in one of the next scheduled hardforks, so either September or March depending on how testing goes.

[GingerAle]

Sorry if this has already been asked and answered.............any time frame on RingCT? Months?...Weeks?

As I understand it it will be included in one of the next scheduled hardforks, so either September or March depending on how testing goes.

as described in some missive long ago in a galaxy far far away (this one: https://getmonero.org/2016/06/20/monero-missive-for-the-week-of-2016-06-20.html ), the rolling hardfork occurs every 6 months. So, there needs to be some time for people to upgrade before the fork takes hold of the system. So there's not much buffer time for the september window, so the actual hardfork could be in March (but the code will be in the next release I guess).

[smoothie]

Talking about commits, this one caught my eye: https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/ebf97d76f0020eb027175818ebbdafd6d578aa77

wallet: new {ex,im}port_key_images commands and RPC calls

They are used to export a signed set of key images from a wallet
with a private spend key, so an auditor with the matching view key
may see which of those are spent, and which are not.

finally the view-key functionally is optimal.

Very useful.

Nice find.

[antanst]

i would like to donate to the devs working on the Trezoro. can you please point me to the devs names or their groups' donation address?

thanks!

It's just NoodleDoodle's work. I can ask if he'd like to accept donations for it. He said he doesn't want to release the source for the current version with RingCT coming so soon^tm.

Thanks, I missed that update from NoodleDoodle. Do you happen to have a source?

[luigi1111]

i would like to donate to the devs working on the Trezoro. can you please point me to the devs names or their groups' donation address?

thanks!

It's just NoodleDoodle's work. I can ask if he'd like to accept donations for it. He said he doesn't want to release the source for the current version with RingCT coming so soon^tm.

Thanks, I missed that update from NoodleDoodle. Do you happen to have a source?

Yes. NoodleDoodle.

[QuantumQrack]

The Monero StackExchange Is Now In Private Beta

http://monero.stackexchange.com/


"XMR Weekly Technical Analysis" - by bullbearanalytics

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/4trzhb/xmr_weekly_technical_analysis/


"Trezoro: Trezor for Monero - The basics" - by dnaleor

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@dnaleor/trezoro-trezor-for-monero-the-basics

i would like to donate to the devs working on the Trezoro. can you please point me to the devs names or their groups' donation address?

thanks!

It's just NoodleDoodle's work. I can ask if he'd like to accept donations for it. He said he doesn't want to release the source for the current version with RingCT coming so soon^tm.

Donate [ 47AYtJeNKJjYNZLj71nBW938mbFSFwq1x4qVcNhBmdfUjhaqiGN7wqpVjH419eLYPzHFeF3TgzY2fDi vz5EyGBYUSbAXwed ]

(from his initial post at forum.getmonero.org)

https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/2495/experimental-trezor-firmware-testing

[antanst]

Thanks, I missed that update from NoodleDoodle. Do you happen to have a source?

Yes. NoodleDoodle.

Hah. Well, I actually meant if there's like a forum post or something offering more details on that. Anyway, cool to hear some news on that front.

[luigi1111]

Thanks, I missed that update from NoodleDoodle. Do you happen to have a source?

Yes. NoodleDoodle.

Hah. Well, I actually meant if there's like a forum post or something offering more details on that. Anyway, cool to hear some news on that front.

Nah, it was in a direct conversation.

[DonYo]

Original abstract painting
Ready to hang on the wall
Price 250 USD
Summer SALE,NOW 150 USD
NOW 100 USD
Monero accepted

I like that painting, I can't believe that no one has bought it yet.

If i had space for it, sure I would buy it

[aminorex]

The audience for the painting is basically XMR enthusiasts with the right color scheme in their man-cave and a high tolerance for abstract expressionism.  (Merciless gender stereotyping intended.)  It's not a huge market, and I've already filled a wall, so...  best of luck to "start the art".

I can attest that the material and workmanship quality on my own selection was as expected, and shipping was very reasonable. +5 vendor.

[bobabouey2]

Greg Maxwell asking about privacy and fungibility concerns on reddit/bitcoin here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4v28jl/how_have_fungiblity_problems_affected_you_in/

In response to the following question (permalink: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4v28jl/how_have_fungiblity_problems_affected_you_in/d5uv26v)

So much greatness here! What about ring signatures like in Monero?

Answer:

That list was far from comprehensive. I mostly don't think of the ring signature stuff as a high contender because of its adverse impact on scaling (it adds a perpetually growing spent coin accumulator, and makes the utxo set perpetually growing).

Any Monero devs have any responses, the answer is beyond my technological knowledge?

[GingerAle]

Greg Maxwell asking about privacy and fungibility concerns on reddit/bitcoin here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4v28jl/how_have_fungiblity_problems_affected_you_in/

In response to the following question (permalink: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4v28jl/how_have_fungiblity_problems_affected_you_in/d5uv26v)

So much greatness here! What about ring signatures like in Monero?

Answer:

That list was far from comprehensive. I mostly don't think of the ring signature stuff as a high contender because of its adverse impact on scaling (it adds a perpetually growing spent coin accumulator, and makes the utxo set perpetually growing).

Any Monero devs have any responses, the answer is beyond my technological knowledge?

the most I could grab on accumulators that makes the most relevant sense is here: https://wiki.anoncoin.net/Cryptographic_accumulator

Ah, here is where he expands on the concept: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1064860.msg11427078#msg11427078

So it is what I thought essentially - a spent coin accumulator is our ever growing blockchain. The Monero blockchain can't be pruned like the bitcoin blockchain, because no one can really say for certain which coins are spent or not. So if you're running a full daemon (meaning, you are mining), every transaction has to be fully validated, and the validation requires checking the validity of outputs dispersed all over the blockchain (because ring signatures). So, basically, we couldn't say "yeah, these 1000 outputs in the first 500 blocks have been spent, so there's no need to keep them in the database." because we don't know if they've been spent.

Actually, in some cases we do because of the mixin 0 transactions that exist on the chain, so a "cleaned" blockchain could be possible, but this would be a one-time size reduction.

And I remember seeing someone mention that the pruning implemented in Aeon is somewhat similar to SegWit, however if I remember you can't mine on the pruned aeon (or something).

Honestly I am not concerned about an ever growing accumulator. I think a lot of the peer to peer aspects of cryptocurrency networks has received very little attention when compared to the other components. I mean, bitcoin just started getting serious about light blocks or xthin or whatever. This is such a painfully obvious means to reduce bandwidth that it really seems absurd that it took this long - IMO, this exemplifies the lack of true concern for scaleability that needs to be addressed by the code itself (i.e., the infrastructure will naturally evolve or people will force the infrastructure to evolve - hell, some people in bitcoinland built a high speed block relay network. So instead of fixing the p2p code that was meaninglessly broadcasting transaction data twice, people just built a secondary network).

And I don't mean this in a negative way - it just points to the fact that there are better things to spend time on right now than worrying about how large the blockchain is, or how quickly a block propagates the network.

Arcticmines signature is a great example of how ..... superfluous this concern is. Something like "it once took the finances of a superpower and 400 acre warehouses to store 4 gigs of data".

Someday the monero blockchain, from the genesis block onward, will be stored in a strange blue crystal the size of an eraserhead.



I mean this concern really, to me, indicates how old the concerned individual is or how they feel about the future of civilization. If you think storage is a concern, then you weren't downloading mp3's in 1999 from napster onto your 500 MB hard drive and transferring to zip drives. If you think storage is a concern, you might feel that human civilization will crumble and that 4 TB hard drive you just bought is the last hard drive you will ever be able to buy because Japan just got blown out of the water by space aliens that swooped down on earth to punish us for how terrible Independence Day 2 was.



http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9901/21/honkin.idg/

The top size of the most expensive desktop drives could easily be nearly two times the 16.8GB that IBM reached in early 1998 with its DeskStar 16GP drive. "We're looking at a 30GB drive by the time the year 2000 rolls around, and for $200," predicts Martin Reynolds, another Gartner Group analyst.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/18/amazing-facts-and-figures-about-the-evolution-of-hard-disk-drives/

This video is amazing

https://youtu.be/zOD1umMX2s8

[Hueristic]

Lets not forget there are things called compression algorithm's as well if need be. I think the bloat bullshit is being BLOWN way out of proportion!

[CTTE]

The audience for the painting is basically XMR enthusiasts with the right color scheme in their man-cave and a high tolerance for abstract expressionism.  (Merciless gender stereotyping intended.)  It's not a huge market, and I've already filled a wall, so...  best of luck to "start the art".

I can attest that the material and workmanship quality on my own selection was as expected, and shipping was very reasonable. +5 vendor.

I bet your wife/significant other/cat LOVE IT!

Edit: Sorry, I forgot the Monkey!

[ArticMine]

Greg Maxwell asking about privacy and fungibility concerns on reddit/bitcoin here:  https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4v28jl/how_have_fungiblity_problems_affected_you_in/

In response to the following question (permalink: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4v28jl/how_have_fungiblity_problems_affected_you_in/d5uv26v)

So much greatness here! What about ring signatures like in Monero?

Answer:

That list was far from comprehensive. I mostly don't think of the ring signature stuff as a high contender because of its adverse impact on scaling (it adds a perpetually growing spent coin accumulator, and makes the utxo set perpetually growing).

Any Monero devs have any responses, the answer is beyond my technological knowledge?

The short answer here is that this is a linear growth in the block chain in the face of an exponential decline in the resource cost of storing, processing and transmitting data. The combination of linear growth with exponential decline leads to an exponential decline over time in the resource cost of storing, processing and transmitting the Monero blockchain.  Furthermore even in a block chain that is in the clear one would still have the issue of dust outputs that would also grow linearly with time.

Now for the long answer. I will follow up on GingerAle's excellent post which covers very well the history of the mechanical hard drive. First I will quote my signature.

Concerned that blockchain bloat will lead to centralization? Storing less than 4 GB of data once required the budget of a superpower and a warehouse full of punched cards. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/IBM_card_storage.NARA.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

It refers to a punched card storage facility of the United States National Archives and Records Administration in 1959. The Wikipedia article estimates this warehouse held about 4GB of data; however by modern standards of what 4GB of data means this is a gross overestimate. This is because a byte in 1959 punched card and a byte today were very different since the IBM punched card had a very limited character set consisting of the digits 0-9, the capital letters of the alphabet and a handful of special characters. Lower case letters were in practice never implemented in the punched card for example. Furthermore the majority of punched cards were never filled to capacity. With that in mind I doubt that warehouse contained the equivalent of 500 MB of data by todays standards. The IBM punched card was standardized in 1928 and lasted for about 60 years as a "mainstream"  technology. By the mid 1980's it was an obsolete but still somewhat usable technology. Much like the 3.5 in floppy is today. The technology has its roots in the programming of looms in the 18th century and its application to data processing hails back to the 19th century.

The importance of understanding the history of computing technology is that it demonstrated the long term historical trend of an exponential decline in the cost of data processing storage and transmission. In the 20th century we for example saw the transition form the tabulating machines of the 1930's and 1940's to hybrid tabulating machine / mainframe computer systems of the 1950's and 1960's followed of course by the mainframe computers of the 1970's and later, mini, micro and personal computers, of the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's and later to the smart phones and tablets of today.

What is most shocking is that while technology has moved by leaps and bounds, business models in most cases have not. The music and movie industries for example are still stuck in the 19th century business models of distributing music on an Edison cylinder by sailing ship, and distributing movies on celluloid film also by sailing ship.  The credit card industry is also stuck in the 1940's business models of overcoming the data processing, storage and transmission costs of the time, by targeting payments made by wealthy consumers purchasing high margin luxury goods and services from high end merchants. This becomes apparent when we see Walmart suing VISA, over merchant fees and no longer accepting VISA in certain stores in Canada. On the other hand we do not see Tiffany & Co. at war with American Express over merchant fees. I wonder why? The critical lesson here is that we must not bake in the current costs of data processing, storage and transmission into the business model of a crypto currency. This is the very serious mistake that many in the Bitcoin community are currently making, and which Monero is avoiding and must continue to avoid.

A reasonable  model for the adoption of a new technology is an S-curve or Sigmoid function. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function. This starts out as exponential growth, then goes through an inflection point and finally reaches saturation. The adoption of most new technologies have followed this pattern. The issue of "pruning" addresses the linear growth after saturation. to place this into preservative. If we assume an adoption S-curve over say a period of 50 years, this would be comparable to the adoption of payment, credit and debit cards over the last 50 years, then pruning really only addresses a 10x increase in the block chain size over the following 500 years. Is this really an issue? History has indicated otherwise.

Edit: By the way I expect the mechanical hard drive, like the punched card that preceded it, is also after approximately 60 years heading fast towards obsolescence. Solid state drive technology is the likely near term replacement.

[aminorex]

Given the hard fork heart beat, it is not difficult to conceive of a fork which, when universally mined, burned all the XMR with mixin 0, and resurrected them on a pheonix chain, tabula rasa.  Thus, I don't think there is even a theoretical possibility of XMR dead-ending on scalability due to blockchain size, so long as the heart keeps beating.

[Hueristic]

@Smooth, what IYO would be the best approach to a decentralized market place? IIRC we were waiting on the multi-sig for that purpose?

Good question. It isn't a problem I've thought a lot about but I think something like my idea for off-chain messaging with on-chain fee payment is probably a good foundation. Listing items, making offers/purchases, etc. could all be messages. Identity, rating, reputations,  web-of-trust, etc. are a tricker problems and probably need some other solution.

Search is unsolved, and openbazzar got a lot of things about the infrastructure obviously wrong (running over UDP which is incompatible with Tor - WTF?, people need to leave their computers on to serve a store - WTF?)

I think it should be left off Monero's blockchain for reasons stated by Smooth in the past about the potential to "bloat" the chain or whatever...

I just think that this theoretical store would need people to run it's own software program and have it's own GUI and everything... like downloading, running a node, and web browsing through tor, in a way... I would assume...

The off-chain message proposal is a good model, in principle. It includes a mechanism for paying a fee on-chain (after all that's the only way you can pay a fee), but the content and most of the interaction is off chain. Even that might become unscalable if the volume of usage is extremely high (so too many fees being paid) but we can address that if and when it happens. For now the bigger issue with Monero is empty blocks, not too many transactions.

3 month bump!

@Smooth, are there any flags that could be set so that the added bloat could be temporary and pruned after a specific time frame or would a HF be required to add one? My mind is weird, I just remembered I never asked this question (I think I took off for a week and forgot about it)!

[novag]

The smooth increase in prices gives a greater probability of entry of the investor.

[smooth]

@Smooth, what IYO would be the best approach to a decentralized market place? IIRC we were waiting on the multi-sig for that purpose?

Good question. It isn't a problem I've thought a lot about but I think something like my idea for off-chain messaging with on-chain fee payment is probably a good foundation. Listing items, making offers/purchases, etc. could all be messages. Identity, rating, reputations,  web-of-trust, etc. are a tricker problems and probably need some other solution.

Search is unsolved, and openbazzar got a lot of things about the infrastructure obviously wrong (running over UDP which is incompatible with Tor - WTF?, people need to leave their computers on to serve a store - WTF?)

I think it should be left off Monero's blockchain for reasons stated by Smooth in the past about the potential to "bloat" the chain or whatever...

I just think that this theoretical store would need people to run it's own software program and have it's own GUI and everything... like downloading, running a node, and web browsing through tor, in a way... I would assume...

The off-chain message proposal is a good model, in principle. It includes a mechanism for paying a fee on-chain (after all that's the only way you can pay a fee), but the content and most of the interaction is off chain. Even that might become unscalable if the volume of usage is extremely high (so too many fees being paid) but we can address that if and when it happens. For now the bigger issue with Monero is empty blocks, not too many transactions.

3 month bump!

@Smooth, are there any flags that could be set so that the added bloat could be temporary and pruned after a specific time frame or would a HF be required to add one? My mind is weird, I just remembered I never asked this question (I think I took off for a week and forgot about it)!

If I recall correctly my off-chain message proposal could be implemented without a hard fork. It does require nodes to upgrade, or alternately a completely separate program could be used to transmit the "payload" (perhaps in the case of a commerce application this would be a better approach anyway).

As far as Monero stands today, there isn't really any way to put data on the chain that can be completely pruned. Limited pruning of signatures like what Bitcoin currently does (only storage, not addressing bandwidth) can be done with Monero as well (similar to what is implemented in AEON, but it would need to be redone for LMDB). As I understand it, things are reworked a bit in RingCT and more modes of pruning may be possible, similar to Bitcoin's segwit. I have not followed the coding for RingCT closely though, so I don't know the details.

[Hueristic]

@Smooth, what IYO would be the best approach to a decentralized market place? IIRC we were waiting on the multi-sig for that purpose?

Good question. It isn't a problem I've thought a lot about but I think something like my idea for off-chain messaging with on-chain fee payment is probably a good foundation. Listing items, making offers/purchases, etc. could all be messages. Identity, rating, reputations,  web-of-trust, etc. are a tricker problems and probably need some other solution.

Search is unsolved, and openbazzar got a lot of things about the infrastructure obviously wrong (running over UDP which is incompatible with Tor - WTF?, people need to leave their computers on to serve a store - WTF?)

I think it should be left off Monero's blockchain for reasons stated by Smooth in the past about the potential to "bloat" the chain or whatever...

I just think that this theoretical store would need people to run it's own software program and have it's own GUI and everything... like downloading, running a node, and web browsing through tor, in a way... I would assume...

The off-chain message proposal is a good model, in principle. It includes a mechanism for paying a fee on-chain (after all that's the only way you can pay a fee), but the content and most of the interaction is off chain. Even that might become unscalable if the volume of usage is extremely high (so too many fees being paid) but we can address that if and when it happens. For now the bigger issue with Monero is empty blocks, not too many transactions.

3 month bump!

@Smooth, are there any flags that could be set so that the added bloat could be temporary and pruned after a specific time frame or would a HF be required to add one? My mind is weird, I just remembered I never asked this question (I think I took off for a week and forgot about it)!

If I recall correctly my off-chain message proposal could be implemented without a hard fork. It does require nodes to upgrade, or alternately a completely separate program could be used to transmit the "payload" (perhaps in the case of a commerce application this would be a better approach anyway).

As far as Monero stands today, there isn't really any way to put data on the chain that can be completely pruned. Limited pruning of signatures like what Bitcoin currently does (only storage, not addressing bandwidth) can be done with Monero as well (similar to what is implemented in AEON, but it would need to be redone for LMDB). As I understand it, things are reworked a bit in RingCT and more modes of pruning may be possible, similar to Bitcoin's segwit. I have not followed the coding for RingCT closely though, so I don't know the details.

Do you have a link for your proposal?