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

[aminorex]

Please see the Monero economy thread if you can contribute to a discussion of the fundamental present value of MRO:

In another thread...

[ibleed100s]

im getting about 2-3 mro an hour at minergate

[ImI]

This is what Pliskov, the developper of the Cryptonote technology, just said regarding its integration within the code of bitcoin:

CryptoNote's main privacy features adoption into Bitcoin and its forks is not so easy as it seems at first glance. If somone desided to do it he would have to rewrite cryptographic functions, change the tranzactions’sctucture, and add a lot of new functions to process it. Thus it would be a hardfork. Of course you can do it from scratch but you’ll have to wait till all your users update their binaries and suppport a lot of exceptions for the old blockchain part. This is arelly difficult task. Nevertheless what benefits do you want to get by getting CN’s code inside the BTC’code?

source: https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=192

You can pretty much forget about anything significant being added to BTC, unless there is a major change of leaders and philosophy. BTC in the year 2100 will look about the same as BTC of 2014. Maybe the side chains thing will go in, but even that seems questionable.

This is normal, and probably healthy. Technological progress often happens by leapfrogging, not evolution. The idea that "we can just merge the features" don't work once something because mature and (often well-founded) conservatism sets in.

bitcoin may evolve and innovate more features in the future and will very well be the no1 crypto for quite some time.

BUT bitcoin wont adopt any anon-technology, at least not decentalized in the qt-wallet. bitcoins main goal at the moment is to seek law compliance and to become truly legal in important economies. no way they will adopt anon-tech and shoot themselves in the foot.

bitcoin will stay anon-tech free for quite some time and another (illegal) crypto will emerge and fill that gap. maybe drk, who knows.

[eizh]

Yes, but if the protocol is giving you away if you don't use IP obfuscation, then how is that anonymous in itself?

Anonymous is an ambiguous term, it means different things to different people, in different contexts

Look back at the first post on this thread. Monero (really Cryptonote, on which it is based) does not promise anonymity. It promises things like "blockchain analysis resistance." The Monero team in particular is not promising "anonymity" to anyone. We are saying that this technology protects your privacy much better than alternatives such as bitcoin, which it most certainly does.  

Used carefully (which includes care about revealing your IP address), it can probably maintain anonymity, but no one is promising that. Who knows what back doors there might be in any encryption algorithm, your computer's chips, etc.  IF you go far enough down the rabbit hole,  you can't promise -- nor be confident about -- anything.

So let's keep the straw men to a minimum and focus the conversation on what MRO does, is trying to do, and might do in the future.

These are all correct points. Tacotime wanted the thread name and OP to use the word privacy instead of anonymity, but I made the change for marketing reasons. Other coins do use the word anonymous improperly, so we too have to play the marketing game. Most users will not bother looking at details to see which actually has more privacy; they'll assume anonymity > privacy. In a world with finite population, there's no such thing as anonymity. You're always "1 of N" possible participants.

Zero knowledge gives N -> everyone using the currency, ring signatures give N -> your choice, and CoinJoin gives N -> people who happen to be spending around the same amount of money as you at around the same time. This is actually the critical weakness of CoinJoin: the anonymity set is small and it's fairly susceptible to blockchain analysis. Its main advantage is that you can stick to Bitcoin without hard forking.

Another calculated marketing decision: I made most of the OP about ring signatures. In reality, stealth addressing (i.e. one-time public keys) already provides you with 90% of the privacy you need. Ring signatures are more of a trump card that cannot be broken. But Bitcoin already has manual stealth addressing so the distinguishing technological factor in CryptoNote is the use of ring signatures.

This is why I think having a coin based on CoinJoin is silly: Bitcoin already has some privacy if you care enough. A separate currency needs to go way beyond mediocre privacy improvements and provide true indistinguishably. This is true thanks to ring signatures: you can never break the 1/N probability of guessing correctly. There's no additional circumstantial evidence like with CoinJoin (save for IP addresses, but that's a problem independent of cryptocurrencies).

[smooth]

Yes, but if the protocol is giving you away if you don't use IP obfuscation, then how is that anonymous in itself?

Anonymous is an ambiguous term, it means different things to different people, in different contexts

Look back at the first post on this thread. Monero (really Cryptonote, on which it is based) does not promise anonymity. It promises things like "blockchain analysis resistance." The Monero team in particular is not promising "anonymity" to anyone. We are saying that this technology protects your privacy much better than alternatives such as bitcoin, which it most certainly does.  

Used carefully (which includes care about revealing your IP address), it can probably maintain anonymity, but no one is promising that. Who knows what back doors there might be in any encryption algorithm, your computer's chips, etc.  IF you go far enough down the rabbit hole,  you can't promise -- nor be confident about -- anything.

So let's keep the straw men to a minimum and focus the conversation on what MRO does, is trying to do, and might do in the future.

These are all correct points. Tacotime wanted the thread name and OP to use the word privacy instead of anonymity, but I made the change for marketing reasons. Other coins do use the word anonymous improperly, so we too have to play the marketing game. Most users will not bother looking at details to see which actually has more privacy; they'll assume anonymity > privacy. In a world with finite population, there's no such thing as anonymity. You're always "1 of N" possible participants.

Zero knowledge gives N -> everyone using the currency, ring signatures give N -> your choice, and CoinJoin gives N -> people who happen to be spending around the same amount of money as you at around the same time. This is actually the critical weakness of CoinJoin: the anonymity set is small and it's fairly susceptible to blockchain analysis. Its main advantage is that you can stick to Bitcoin without hard forking.

Another calculated marketing decision: I made most of the OP about ring signatures. In reality, stealth addressing (i.e. one-time public keys) already provides you with 90% of the privacy you need. Ring signatures are more of a trump card that cannot be broken. But Bitcoin already has manual stealth addressing so the distinguishing technological factor in CryptoNote is the use of ring signatures.

This is why I think having a coin based on CoinJoin is silly: Bitcoin already has some privacy if you care enough. A separate currency needs to go way beyond mediocre privacy improvements and provide true indistinguishably. This is true thanks to ring signatures: you can never break the 1/N probability of guessing correctly. There's no additional circumstantial evidence like with CoinJoin (save for IP addresses, but that's a problem independent of cryptocurrencies).

Thread name is fine, its just a headline before you get into details. I mean privacy is vague term too, compared to say "unlinkable transactions" which can at least potentially have a precise definition.

I don't agree that one-time addresses are enough for privacy and/or anonymity (as those terms are loosely used). Without ring signatures or some substitute such as mixing, the recipient of a payment can trace backwards, even if third parties can't. If I receive my salary payment and then pay my rent, the landlord can trace that payment back and see how much I was paid in salary.

[Djinou94]

Any news about the GUI?

[othe]

Any news about the GUI?

Work on  a _native_ QT wallet has been started.

[sorryforthat]

Any news about the GUI

Work on  a _native_ QT wallet has been started.

I kinda like it the way it is to be honest. It just kinda offers a delicate balance and offers to teach others how to actually compute.

[othe]

sure, the gui will be just an alternative good to have but not a must have.

[Djinou94]

Any news about the GUI?

Work on  a _native_ QT wallet has been started.

Cool take your time hmm wanna buy more before the booom

[xxnirvana69xx]

[18:18] <xxnirvana69xx> !calc 225
[18:18] <MoneroBot> With 225 H/s you should get 2.80 MRO per Day

I WISH I was making that right now. I've gotten 0 from solo mining for 2 days and .5 for pool mining lol.

What pool, I get about 3-4 a day with 300h/s

about 2.7 yesterday

Unless minerd is giving me the wrong hash rate

Usually stick to minerpool.org. What one are you using?

[David Latapie]

BUT bitcoin wont adopt any anon-technology, at least not decentalized in the qt-wallet. bitcoins main goal at the moment is to seek law compliance and to become truly legal in important economies. no way they will adopt anon-tech and shoot themselves in the foot.

bitcoin will stay anon-tech free for quite some time and another (illegal) crypto will emerge and fill that gap. maybe drk, who knows.

People tend to forget there is a market (and a huge one) for traceable transactions.
- Public spending
- Donations

I have the feeling people are implying anonymity is better than transparency. Fact it is one is not superior to another. They are different. And, dare I say, complementary.

And it is not even a matter of good guy and bad guy. Just read about sousveillance and you will understand how traceability may help the society as a whole as much as anonymity can.

[emontmon]

if you happen to mine booberry and monero on same machine, your hash rate on monero will be cut in half.
4 cores mining monero only 110 and 4 cores idle
4 cores minining monero  63  and 4 cores mining boolberry.

just to let you know.

[igba]

Buy and sell your MRO at https://cryptonote.exchange.to

Don't use Poloniex. Had several withdrawal issues, site constantly fails to load...

I've had some withdrawal issues with cryptonote coins as well. They seem to be working out the bugs and their support has been helpful. So far no funds have been lost. So I would say be cautious but would not make a blanket statement to avoid the exchange. This is my personal opinion.

Cryptonote exchange is def the way to go, I always get my coins and they do "not host funds in hotwallets." Plus I think MRO is cheaper on there if I'm not mistaken.

[emontmon]

what is the best method of converting bitcoin to usd.

I see that there are methods to buy bitcoin. but the methods to convert bitcoin to usd are wire transfer and that costs too much money.

I dont own any bitcoin and would like to buy some mro. hate all these conversion stuff. thanks.

[eizh]

smooth, good point about recipients.

Can you (or someone else) explain what Boolberry did to allow pruning and why it works? The solution I knew of was to make old outputs unspendable. This quote from crypto_zoidberg:

For this reason in Boolberry we changed tx identification from whole blob hash to tx_prefix hash, and when blockchain entry will be covered by checkpoint the ring signatures could be cutoff.

[coine_smithe]

what is the best method of converting bitcoin to usd.

I see that there are methods to buy bitcoin. but the methods to convert bitcoin to usd are wire transfer and that costs too much money.

I dont own any bitcoin and would like to buy some mro. hate all these conversion stuff. thanks.

Coinbase.com is the easiest, quickest, safest method for noobs. All you need is a checking account and a credit card and you could probably buy up to $1000 instantly today.

BUT bitcoin wont adopt any anon-technology, at least not decentalized in the qt-wallet. bitcoins main goal at the moment is to seek law compliance and to become truly legal in important economies. no way they will adopt anon-tech and shoot themselves in the foot.

bitcoin will stay anon-tech free for quite some time and another (illegal) crypto will emerge and fill that gap. maybe drk, who knows.

People tend to forget there is a market (and a huge one) for traceable transactions.
- Public spending
- Donations

I have the feeling people are implying anonymity is better than transparency. Fact it is one is not superior to another. They are different. And, dare I say, complementary.

And it is not even a matter of good guy and bad guy. Just read about sousveillance and you will understand how traceability may help the society as a whole as much as anonymity can.

David I think you have a really good point! Althought, I think in the end the market for anonymous money will be bigger. I know myself I have never had any desire to have my transaction history be knowable to others. I definitely think you're right though that there will always be a place for non-anonymous currencies. Perhaps Bitcoin will continue to fulfill that roll in the future if an anonymous currency like Monero attains dominance.

[emontmon]

what is the best method of converting bitcoin to usd.

I see that there are methods to buy bitcoin. but the methods to convert bitcoin to usd are wire transfer and that costs too much money.

I dont own any bitcoin and would like to buy some mro. hate all these conversion stuff. thanks.

Coinbase.com is the easiest, quickest, safest method for noobs. All you need is a checking account and a credit card and you could probably buy up to $1000 instantly today.

thank you. and it is easy to convert back to cash with coinbase from your experience?

[orinoco]

Ok, so I finally got the shits with cpuminer-multi putting out booooo all the time after a certain point, and did something about it.

Its not pretty, but it works..  here's a shell script which checks minerd is running, and if it starts saying "booooo" it kills it and restarts it.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

coin=QCN
pool=bigpool.com:1234
wallet=1234blahblah4321
minerpath="/home/ubuntu/minerd"
minerdcmd="minerd -a cryptonight -o $pool -u $wallet -p x -q"
maxboos=2
looptimer=15

while true; do
        running=`ps -C minerd | grep minerd | wc -l`
        maxnum=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`

        # check minerd is running
        if [ $running -lt 1 ]; then
                echo `date +%H:%M:%S` - $0 - No minerd found: starting miner on $coin @ $pool
                $minerpath/$minerdcmd  2>> $minerpath/minerd.log &
        # sanity check to make sure no more than one is running
        elif [ $running -gt 1 ]; then
                echo `date +%H:%M:%S` -  Too many minerd found: killing and restarting
                killall minerd && sleep 5
                $minerpath/$minerdcmd  2>> $minerpath/minerd.log &
        fi

        # check for boooo in the minerd output
        boos=`grep 'boooo' minerd.log | wc -l`
        #if there's fewer than allowed, just say so
        if [ $boos -lt $maxboos ]; then
                echo `date +%H:%M:%S` - Found $boos / $maxboos boos
                sleep $looptimer
        else
        #otherwise, there's too many, so shoot the miner
                rm minerd.log
                echo `date +%H:%M:%S` - FOUND TOO MANY BOOS - $boos / $maxboos
                #restart minerd
                killall minerd && sleep 5
                echo `date +%H:%M:%S` - Restarting miner on $coin @ $pool
                $minerpath/$minerdcmd  2>> $minerpath/minerd.log &
        fi
done;

(Note - the above script is pointing at a QCN mining pool, but this works for MRO ones too)

I run it with this command:

Code:

nohup ./alive.sh &

Then you can look in nohup.out for output when it restarts etc., and in minerd.log for hashrate and yay's

And here's my MRO address in case you find this helpful
4BJgMQLr4d3XwqxzZsQrmvXHF2RXXGWuJSDqhtyQUebA2zz4G4Xa32S4rp8UTMb9kh2cVPCwoGZfUMT KvtFpBFN6AaU6kYR

[strangewildthing]

Get regular payouts at the rising pool known as...

www.extremehash.com


https://i.imgur.com/IAFd1JB.jpg