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

[Vilawil]

I don't understand why the developers made integration with i2p. IMO, it is expedient, because CN technology ensures the safety of coins at a high level

[fluffypony]

I don't understand why the developers made integration with i2p. IMO, it is expedient, because CN technology ensures the safety of coins at a high level

It's the last little bit where you want to mask your traffic to the point where an attacker with access to your router can't even determine that you're using Monero. The CryptoNote protocol is VERY easy to detect in its current form.

[Rias]

I don't understand why the developers made integration with i2p. IMO, it is expedient, because CN technology ensures the safety of coins at a high level

It's the last little bit where you want to mask your traffic to the point where an attacker with access to your router can't even determine that you're using Monero. The CryptoNote protocol is VERY easy to detect in its current form.

Isn't i2p damn slow?

[titan86]

Can anybody describe to me perspectives of the Monero?

[cAPSLOCK]

We should avoid techno elitist attitudes. 

The fact the current CN code demands a 64bit system because it handles data inefficiently and clumsily.  This is embarrassing for Monero, and certainly it's biggest current flaw. 

Insulting the end users does not help the problem, and might damage the reputation of the currency.

The 32 bit thing is embarrassing. Also never insult the end user.

This needs to be fixed. Are any of the Monero developers able to fix it?

I know not everyone follows the conversations in #monero-dev on Freenode, so to keep everyone in the loop: work on this is already progressing. You can follow the progress by checking tewinget's databasing branch: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/blockchain

That's great news.  Thanks for posting it.

[Rias]

Can anybody describe to me perspectives of the Monero?

Until the block reward decreases twofold, botnets are not moving anywhere, as currently it is about 100% margin for botnet owners [no proof, sorry].

Ironically, I'm starting to believe that all CryptoNote currencies are way too immature at the moment. It might take a lot of time for any of them to take off, including XMR.

[cAPSLOCK]

Sir, you are completely wrong. Don't get me wrong, I love bashing the XMR codebase, which is pretty much the fault of the BCN devs - it's like a hobby. But CryptoNight needing a 64-bit system is NOT an example of the code's inefficiency, it's an example of the algorithm being designed to run quickly on systems that aren't ancient. Optimizing it for 32-bit arithmetic would slow it down by a lot, because it would only be able to process around half the data that it could otherwise (in general). So, the algorithm is made for 64-bit. That's not to say that CryptoNight can't be implemented with 32-bit arithmetic - it's just an ugly hack, and it's slow, and nobody wants to do the work to support a steadily decreasing amount of users - those being the ones on 32-bit.

Here's an example: A very large part of CryptoNight is a loop that is executed 262,144 times. Inside that loop, two 64-bit multiplies are done. Now, on computers, multiplies are fucking slow. The only really common instruction that I know of that is consistently slower (by a lot), is divides, which are ouch slow. Anyway, two 64-bit multiplies. And you can't shortcut it - both the high and low 64-bits of the result are used. Now, on a 64-bit machine, I need to do one or two register loads and a multiply. Done. On 32-bit, not even counting the register loading (and the possible memory accesses you'd need due to register pressure, depending on what else happened to be stored in them at the time), you need somewhere around this much shit: 5 bit shift ops, 5 adds, two AND operations, two logic operations, and the killer, four, yes - FOUR multiplies. Now, this isn't the absolute best implementation, it's what I have in front of me, but it's not absolute shit, either. You can knock off one multiply, I think, maybe a bit shift or two, but you're gonna have to do most of those ops, including the three slow-ass multiplies. This is an excellent example of how the limitations of the 32-bit platform cause issues.

Thanks for the reply.  And I accept 64bit is obviously superior and even arguably needed for the reasons you state above.  That said what the 32bit machines are currently crashing into is limitations caused by a database that is larger than necessary and fully loaded into ram, right?  So I think calling me "completely wrong" is a bit over the top.

I am not making an argument for 32bit.

I am making an argument against kludgy databases and insulting the user.

But I am super excited to see that the development is charging forward!

[titan86]

Can anybody describe to me perspectives of the Monero?

Until the block reward decreases twofold, botnets are not moving anywhere, as currently it is about 100% margin for botnet owners [no proof, sorry].

Ironically, I'm starting to believe that all CryptoNote currencies are way too immature at the moment. It might take a lot of time for any of them to take off, including XMR.

Thanks, it is an interesting opinion.
Why do you think that all CN currencies are too immature today?

[surfer43]

Dead wrong - I know two botnet operators mining it right now.

Why isn't the margin 100%?

[openyourmind]

What do you think about core of the Monero team?
I have a not good feeling that they have too much power and they can do with the coin everything what they want.

[Rias]

Can anybody describe to me perspectives of the Monero?

Until the block reward decreases twofold, botnets are not moving anywhere, as currently it is about 100% margin for botnet owners [no proof, sorry].

Ironically, I'm starting to believe that all CryptoNote currencies are way too immature at the moment. It might take a lot of time for any of them to take off, including XMR.

Dead wrong - I know two botnet operators mining it right now.

Dead wrong where exactly? Could you share some wisdom?

Thanks, it is an interesting opinion.
Why do you think that all CN currencies are too immature today?

Lack of infrastructure, lack of GUI, lack of use cases, and persistant network problems just to name a few reasons. And what's more, I'm not sure whether anonymous currencies do matter for the ordinary user to become mainstream. There's a huge lag behind Bitcoin at the moment, so traction is low.

[GreekBitcoin]

What do you think about core of the Monero team?
I have a not good feeling that they have too much power and they can do with the coin everything what they want.

Its an open source software. You can always help them and do what you like or just copy it and do what  you like.  Of course they do what they want since they are the ones coding/do stuff. Feel free to do everything you want about the coin. Propose what you want. People will chose.

[othe]

if you want it to become very attractive in a short time
contact some owner-commerce sites
who are in the tor network
and propose to insert XMR
you will see that in a short time
get to x30 than it is worth now

Nonsense.

XMR has a relatively narrow user base, as much of the coin is being mined by the botnets. For instance, 4 MH/s botnet was discussed on #monero-dev and this is one botnet only, which gives about 240M difficulty. God knows how many of them there are actually, but my guess is more than 80% of the whole hash rate.
 
I've been writing a week ago that as long as this is the case, the price doesn't have any fundamental drivers to go up. As you can see nothing has changed and the price is slowly going down as the botnet owners continue to downsell Monero. This is a very profitable short term business for them, and a bit risky too, so they have to make quick profit.

Indeed, external news may boost the exchange rate, but only in the very short term, since bear factors are dominant for this currency.

Hello Mr. Bytecoin,

your guess is plain wrong, you might want to talk to some poolops to know that the most mining is still from normal miners and cloudminers.
On a second note it makes no difference for a botnet to mine a GPU mineable coin or Monero, you can easily deploy cudaminer and cgminer there without issues.

Take a look at this Litecoin Botnet: http://www.coindesk.com/facebook-breaks-cryptocurrency-mining-botnet-lecpetex/

Using a Botnet for that kinda stuff, well their are far better way to monetize them...

I don't understand why the developers made integration with i2p. IMO, it is expedient, because CN technology ensures the safety of coins at a high level

It's the last little bit where you want to mask your traffic to the point where an attacker with access to your router can't even determine that you're using Monero. The CryptoNote protocol is VERY easy to detect in its current form.

Isn't i2p damn slow?

No, relaying transactions through i2p is not too damn slow, absolutely not - and using i2p strengthens bot networks. I2p is a great project so we really enjoy working together with them.

[digitalninja81]

I understand that all people in this thread mined XMR. Can somebody tell me the main competitive advantages of XMR?

[canonsburg]

I understand that all people in this thread mined XMR. Can somebody tell me the main competitive advantages of XMR?

Can't you read the 477 pages of this thread to come to a conclusion?

Unless reading is too much of a pain, you should invest in ANY coins.

[othe]

I understand that all people in this thread mined XMR. Can somebody tell me the main competitive advantages of XMR?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=665950.msg7732215#msg7732215

You already flamed us here Mr. Bytecoin and you are registered at the time where most BCN fake accounts registered, so you either already know enough or you should read the whole thread to get informed.

[Vanderi]

I understand that all people in this thread mined XMR. Can somebody tell me the main competitive advantages of XMR?

teh hodling ofc.

[celestio]

A lot of trolls are bought accounts, as one was exposed 3 pages back.

[sonoIO]

Well, if I were to build my own botnet (hypothetically), I could do it with almost zero costs. I could also expand it for free - free as in it doesn't cost money, but it does cost time. Wait for a new remote code exec vuln with a PoC to come out, then make a little program to randomly scan IPs and try the PoC against the service. If successful, I can have it do several things at the point: If I wish to put in a lot of time writing it, and spend less responding to alerts, I can code in some common methods of privilege escalation if I need it. Otherwise, I can have it alert me on a successful exploitation for manual processing. If my remote control software doesn't require root, then I do neither, adding the machine to my botnet and moving on. I can also do the usual shit they do, spread fake torrents that morons download and run, etc. All of these things grow my botnet, which brings in revenue, and they don't cost me a dime.

If I have money to spend, that opens up further options: want to be lazy, I can hire someone to do it for me, or if I want to rapidly grow, I could drop a good amount of money on a zero-day. The former is rather pointless if I have the skill, unless I am very time constrained, but the latter is a one-time investment that is a lot smarter than buying bots. I can also deploy more techniques, free or otherwise, to expand my botnet whenever I have the time and/or money.

So, you're saying that botnet owners aren't making money - pray tell, where is the mined XMR going? Because if I can set up a small botnet and grow it with pretty much zero expenses, then ANY XMR I mine is profit - monetarily, anyway - I suppose I'd still be looking for an ROI on my time.

Now, while I don't know the details of the operations run by the two people I know, I know that this is possible. Therefore, anyone with a brain is going to be looking at options with the least expenses.

Note that I say "almost no expenses." Unless you make everything from scratch, which isn't usually feasible, you will need to pay for SOME things. Not exploits, you can use public ones - plenty of people are too slow or lazy to update - if you're fast, you should get plenty. No, what you'll probably have to buy is the use of a crypter for your software, otherwise it will soon get flagged and you'll end up losing bots.

Even if majority of hashing power is not coming from botnets, maybe XMR marketing could be something like "Your computer is mining Monero either way, do set up mining to the wallet you own "

[Sebastien256]

so when the next XMR pump, the price is low enough now? any guess? it been a while that i did not check monero.

Is there any new working gui wallet?