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

[kbm]

I'm afraid the people (well respected contributors no less) saying it makes no sense for botnet owners to mine Monero are mistaken. Sure, other coins might be more profitable in small volumes, but there's no way a botnet will be able to exchange out of a thinly traded premined shitnote and into BTC without bringing the price to zero. Same for VTC

Don't get me wrong, im in this coin for the long haul. I've exchanged all my alts for XMR. I expect botnets securing the network. As the network grow to include more efficient hardware, this will be less and less of an issue. It's a little disheartening to see this kind of misinformation here. Understand that there is no better coin for botnet operators to mine right now, and this is to be expected. Not sure if there are ulterior motives at play or if you're simply not taking volumes into consideration when claiming otherwise

Good point. Volume. Had not been taking that into consideration for botnets. I had only been taking it into consideration for miners. Stupidly I didn't link the two, and you have helped here. Thanks!

Though we're dealing with enough misinformation as it is .. I don't think anyone participating in that conversation was trying to spread misinformation. Lack of information, and then sharing that one does not have an answer for a question is not the same as misinformation, I'm just venting about a bigger issue that seems to be along the lines of "well if you posted 'x' on the internet, you clearly thought it was 100% true forever .. so because you're wrong about 'x' means you have an alternative agenda". People need to stop looking into things so hard. Sometimes folks (in this case myself) are just plain wrong. Fortunately, in this case I believe you've fixed that.

Moving on, yes .. a market capable of absorbing mined coins from a botnet of stolen computers would be something to wish for. Less headaches in trying to change parameters/coins. A 'sure thing', regardless of the daily price. I both like and hate your point

[smooth]

Basically, coming from a purely investors perspective.

Monero is the only cryptonote worth investing/buying.

Boolberry's instamine is pretty bad with the PGPU making over 2k boolberry(difficulty dropped) per day now, and was making 5k-7k bbr a few weeks ago....Plus Botnets.. = No thank you

Ducknote reminds me of Dogecoin, there dev is nonexistent, and doesn't really have any work being done

Quazarcoin doesnt really have much work being done either

So that leaves Monero, the only one that has a future..

Monero had more of an instamine than Boolberry, just see http://monerochain.info/charts/difficulty. Claymore likely mined with his GPU miner before he released it with a 5% fee. cbuchner1 also has mined Monero with a private gpu miner on EC2.

I'm at a loss as to what you think that chart shows. The difficulty started lower, then increased later as adoption (at least adoption of mining) increased, just like almost every other coin in existence.

dga is right, neither coin had an instamine at all, because the difficulty adjustment algorithm (both use the same one) works pretty well, preventing a large number of coins from being mined in a short period of time.

This is a more informative chart: http://monerochain.info/charts/blocktime

There was never a time when the block time fell much below the target because a huge amount of mining was brought online before the difficulty could adjust. In fact at the very beginning the block time was much higher than the target (so fewer coins were being mined, not more), although I'm not sure why would have happened (it could be an error in the chart calculation).

[smooth]

You are living in illusion with your flawed math.

Monero is a better investment for investors, as you already said the most coins will be emmited within 2 years (around 75%) then we have a very low inflation - whereas the Boolberry emission will have a high inflation at that time.
One day Moneros emission curve will CROSS the Boolberry emission curve and our inflation is _less_.
Monero clearly gives an advantage to early adopters - if thats good or bad is out of context, but for investors i guess it is.

So, you're assuming investors will be buying the first 2 years and hodling. Also assuming that there will be enough investors to keep buying from miners constantly dumping on the market to keep the price stable or even going higher. Ok, it's hard to argue with that logic. Like you said price discussions are pointless. Let's wait what happens. But 2 years is an eternity in crypto space.

Two years is an eternity for a quick pump and dump scheme. For a useful piece of open source technology with a real future with widespread adoption, two years is not a long time at all. The dev team for this coin is betting on the latter proposition. If you are looking for the former, you are in the wrong place.

I am of the opinion that the shape of the curve doesn't really matter, within reason (instamines and premines excluded). What matters more is the total supply. More issuance earlier causes greater immediate dilution, but it also means you are buying into a coin with lower future issuance. Slower issuance earlier means more issuance later. These effects offset each other to a large extent, if not entirely.

[kbm]

I am of the opinion that the shape of the curve doesn't really matter, within reason (instamines and premines excluded). What matters more is the total supply. More issuance earlier causes greater immediate dilution, but it also means you are buying into a coin with lower future issuance. Slower issuance earlier means more issuance later. These effects offset each other to a large extent, if not entirely.

What kind of opinions do you have of the 18.4 million targeted compared to any other power of ten number like 184 million/1.84 billion/18.4 billion etc .. ?

Do you think the 12 decimal place denomination would be taken into account when compared to the max coins, or would this just be a visual thing?

Exchanges limit the usage to 8 decimal places, when there's 12 in the wallet.

Clearly total coins in the millions seems to be favored in any coin (save for PoS currencies .. which tend to favor higher total supply, giving them an immediate top ten market cap) .. but I'm not sure if this is because bitcoin has similar parameters, or if that's just a good amount in general to have .. not too much but not too little.

The cross comparison between the two seems to indicate that the major reason total supply around 20-50 million seems to be favored is because bitcoin also has that same setup.

[smooth]

In contrast, what happened with both XMR and BBR is closer to what happened to Bitcoin:  The initial distribution of mining hashrate was uneven, and several individuals were able to mine at a cost advantage relative to others, when they used a technological advantage to do so.  This happens to most coins, and evens out over time.  Heck - for the first few weeks of XMR, almost nobody knew it existed, and all of those early adopters probably got in at a great price.

It doesn't really even out over time, unless you mean very long term. The first successful developers of Bitcoin ASICs had a huge advantage, years after the coin launch. Even today, a year or so later, those with access to large supplies of Bitcoin ASICs still have a large advantage.

Technological arms races are built into the premise of mining. All miners optimize, that is what they do. If you don't optimize your operation in some way, you aren't a serious miner. At various times and places, someone within a large population of miners trying to optimize will advance the technology in such a way that they can optimize better than everyone else and get a large advantage. There is no way for any one core developer team to prevent this (it would require that one team to always be better at optimizing than everyone else in the world, and that is simply going to fail).

Trying to assure some kind of "fair" enforced level playing field for mining beyond the fact that everyone has an equal opportunity to optimize is silly and futile. I do agree that deliberately releasing horribly unoptimized or deoptimized miners is a scammy practice though, so this is really a question of degree, not absolutes.

[Anon136]

I am of the opinion that the shape of the curve doesn't really matter, within reason (instamines and premines excluded). What matters more is the total supply.

The shape of the curve is what matters and the total supply is completely meaningless. If the devs moved the decimal place in everyones client one place to the left or one place to the right what would that change? of course it would cause some confusions but it wouldnt actually change anything. Total currency supply is purely aesthetic. It is completely meaningless. If the total currency supply was 0.9 coins for all of time than as long as there are enough decimal places it would work fine.

of course maybe i misunderstand your point.

[smooth]

I am of the opinion that the shape of the curve doesn't really matter, within reason (instamines and premines excluded). What matters more is the total supply. More issuance earlier causes greater immediate dilution, but it also means you are buying into a coin with lower future issuance. Slower issuance earlier means more issuance later. These effects offset each other to a large extent, if not entirely.

What kind of opinions do you have of the 18.4 million targeted compared to any other power of ten number like 184 million/1.84 billion/18.4 billion etc .. ?

Do you think the 12 decimal place denomination would be taken into account when compared to the max coins, or would this just be a visual thing?

I think there are some cognitive biases that make certain numbers of coins somewhat preferable. It would not surprise me if these differed across cultures though, and perhaps dominate usage (large or small value transactions)

From a practical point of view, there is something to be said for the argument made by some in the Bitcoin proponents to move the decimal to 100 satoshis, so existing software that supports 2 decimal places can process satoshis natively.

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[smooth]

I am of the opinion that the shape of the curve doesn't really matter, within reason (instamines and premines excluded). What matters more is the total supply.

The shape of the curve is what matters and the total supply is completely meaningless. If the devs moved the decimal place in everyones client one place to the left or one place to the right what would that change? of course it would cause some confusions but it wouldnt actually change anything. Total currency supply is purely aesthetic. It is completely meaningless. If the total currency supply was 0.9 coins for all of time than as long as there are enough decimal places it would work fine.

of course maybe i misunderstand your point.

Yes, I was not clear. What I mean is not the specific number (which as you say is arbitrarily scalable) but the fact that there is a fixed supply means that any curve with more issuance earlier means less issuance later and vice versa. These affect valuation in opposite directions, and I believe close to equally. While it may be harder to find investors to buy a coin with high immediate supply, at the same time, investors don't want to buy a coin that will be heavily diluted later. With any fixed supply the two must offset.

[kbm]

There was an issue with VRC, apparently mintpal was hacked and now they are working with VRC developers to 'roll back the coin' through a hardfork.

This seems like a major precedent IMO, if it were to be completed. Gox went down and bitcoin wasn't rolled back.

Can this be done with Monero? What type of situation would this be considered necessary in?

Literally another example of a third party directing (in this case indirectly) actions of the core team.

I have to ask myself .. would I want a rollback if ever an exchange were to have all of its XMR stolen (some of mine included)? Or would I want a different means of being refunded?

I would have to think it would be based on the amount. Coins like VRC the amount can be known; however, with Monero this may not be the case.

Would this be a place where mining can be used to effectively 'vote' on a protocol change, despite developers?

[onemorebtc]

There was an issue with VRC, apparently mintpal was hacked and now they are working with VRC developers to 'roll back the coin' through a hardfork.

This seems like a major precedent IMO, if it were to be completed. Gox went down and bitcoin wasn't rolled back.

Can this be done with Monero? What type of situation would this be considered necessary in?

Literally another example of a third party directing (in this case indirectly) actions of the core team.

I have to ask myself .. would I want a rollback if ever an exchange were to have all of its XMR stolen (some of mine included)? Or would I want a different means of being refunded?

I would have to think it would be based on the amount. Coins like VRC the amount can be known; however, with Monero this may not be the case.

Would this be a place where mining can be used to effectively 'vote' on a protocol change, despite developers?

only miners can decide a rollback; nobody else. this is true for any coin...
devs can only release a new client, but cant force anyone to use it. miners can force a rollback

btw: i am strictly against any kind of rollback. this would open the doors for much more evil (eg police requests for rolling back fraud transactions - they dont care about volume lost)

[kbm]

I think there are some cognitive biases that make certain numbers of coins somewhat preferable. It would not surprise me if these differed across cultures though, and perhaps dominate usage (large or small value transactions)

Hm that makes a good point. Cultures using high denominations (peso/yen) when compared to something like the USD would probably favor higher denominations in the high millions/billions. While USD/EUR may tend to favor ultimately amounts in the low millions. That's surely a possible cross-comparison to fiat, I wonder if the idea can be looked into further. Guess I'll look at typical volumes on exchanges based in certain countries (excluding BTC).

From a practical point of view, there is something to be said for the argument made by some in the Bitcoin proponents to move the decimal to 100 satoshis, so existing software that supports 2 decimal places can process satoshis natively.

That would be very confusing, probably temporarily .. but as Anon136 pointed out it wouldn't change anything .. unless the cultural comparisons play harder than anyone has yet considered.

[fluffypony]

btw: i am strictly against any kind of rollback. this would open the doors for much more evil (eg police requests for rolling back fraud transactions - they dont care about volume lost)

Agreed.

I can't imagine a situation where we released, say, RC2 of a specific version of Monero and it caused a bunch of forks because it was poorly tested and we had to roll back. The consensus network is the consensus network, and we have to make changes that the consensus network agrees with or else they will reject it. We also have to be cautious and make changes in a way that will remain compatible with the majority of the network so that miners can choose whether to adopt the changes or not. 99.9% of the things we want to change can be done via a soft fork and not a hard fork, so that plays quite well into that approach. I'm a big fan of soft forking over hard forking, if that wasn't apparent.

[Anon136]

I am of the opinion that the shape of the curve doesn't really matter, within reason (instamines and premines excluded). What matters more is the total supply.

The shape of the curve is what matters and the total supply is completely meaningless. If the devs moved the decimal place in everyones client one place to the left or one place to the right what would that change? of course it would cause some confusions but it wouldnt actually change anything. Total currency supply is purely aesthetic. It is completely meaningless. If the total currency supply was 0.9 coins for all of time than as long as there are enough decimal places it would work fine.

of course maybe i misunderstand your point.

Yes, I was not clear. What I mean is not the specific number (which as you say is arbitrarily scalable) but the fact that there is a fixed supply means that any curve with more issuance earlier means less issuance later and vice versa. These affect valuation in opposite directions, and I believe close to equally. While it may be harder to find investors to buy a coin with high immediate supply, at the same time, investors don't want to buy a coin that will be heavily diluted later. With any fixed supply the two must offset.

What you meant to say was infact insightful

[kbm]

btw: i am strictly against any kind of rollback. this would open the doors for much more evil (eg police requests for rolling back fraud transactions - they dont care about volume lost)

Agreed.

I can't imagine a situation where we released, say, RC2 of a specific version of Monero and it caused a bunch of forks because it was poorly tested and we had to roll back. The consensus network is the consensus network, and we have to make changes that the consensus network agrees with or else they will reject it. We also have to be cautious and make changes in a way that will remain compatible with the majority of the network so that miners can choose whether to adopt the changes or not. 99.9% of the things we want to change can be done via a soft fork and not a hard fork, so that plays quite well into that approach. I'm a big fan of soft forking over hard forking, if that wasn't apparent.

I would have to agree also. Despite the major loss to those using the exchange, there would have potentially been any number of completed transactions outside of the exchange. If people were using it to purchase goods/pay paychecks etc .. it would be brutal to just 'roll that back'. You can't expect people to unmail something, or just give back whatever now hasn't been paid for .. just not how things work. The rollback can't address that, so it's clearly a tough issue.

Bringing the issue to a larger picture, what if people were buying houses, cars, or other things of large value? The hardfork would put them in a precarious position that they didn't ask for. Do they give the money back, or keep both the money and the goods? It would make people face a very tough reality that they most likely wouldn't be ready to face.

I know there's more than one person here who lost money from gox, so I'm sorry if this topic strikes a nerve.

[TheKoziTwo]

So many people (including bitcointalk hero members and btc whales) saying they are buyers at this price but not bid support on the exchanges. I find this curious.

also my own comment from June 27, 2014:

I lost about ~20 BTC here  why XMR is down!!!!!!

There are not enough buyers to sustain a price of say 0.008 at the moment. 24k XMR is being mined every day, at 0.008 that's 192 btc. Surely it's not all dumped on the market but it's certainly contributing to downward pressure along with people who bought higher that are now selling in panic and also people who bought much lower who secures profit in btc. Nothing surprising about this, every large price increase tends to overshoot and come back down. Hopefully you still got a decent amount of BTC, buying range 0.002-0.004 is decent (buy more the lower it goes). In fact previous increase when XMR was added to poloniex took us to 0.008 and down to about 0.0017 before it turned up again. I think we're staying above 0.002 this time though.

I've been buying all the way down, at 0.004, 0.003 and also placed order @ 0.002.

[onemorebtc]

btw: i am strictly against any kind of rollback. this would open the doors for much more evil (eg police requests for rolling back fraud transactions - they dont care about volume lost)

Agreed.

I can't imagine a situation where we released, say, RC2 of a specific version of Monero and it caused a bunch of forks because it was poorly tested and we had to roll back. The consensus network is the consensus network, and we have to make changes that the consensus network agrees with or else they will reject it. We also have to be cautious and make changes in a way that will remain compatible with the majority of the network so that miners can choose whether to adopt the changes or not. 99.9% of the things we want to change can be done via a soft fork and not a hard fork, so that plays quite well into that approach. I'm a big fan of soft forking over hard forking, if that wasn't apparent.

I would have to agree also. Despite the major loss to those using the exchange, there would have potentially been any number of completed transactions outside of the exchange. If people were using it to purchase goods/pay paychecks etc .. it would be brutal to just 'roll that back'. You can't expect people to unmail something, or just give back whatever now hasn't been paid for .. just not how things work. The rollback can't address that, so it's clearly a tough issue.

Bringing the issue to a larger picture, what if people were buying houses, cars, or other things of large value? The hardfork would put them in a precarious position that they didn't ask for. Do they give the money back, or keep both the money and the goods? It would make people face a very tough reality that they most likely wouldn't be ready to face.

I know there's more than one person here who lost money from gox, so I'm sorry if this topic strikes a nerve.

it is possible to keep other transactions (to be precise: record them and just let them mine again automatically)

only coins which got sent from the transaction which got rolledbacked cant be sent of couse.

[Dogeshop_eu]

On which exchange was that guy with 100BTC >?

[TheKoziTwo]

On which exchange was that guy with 100BTC >?

https://www.poloniex.com/exchange/btc_xmr

[sirsmokesalot]

On which exchange was that guy with 100BTC >?

it was poloniex.com, but it is now gone. er nvm, just moved up to 205, 102.5 btc buy lol