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

[AnonyMint]

I haven't had time to read the intervening posts, but here are a couple of followups to posts before I decided to leave this thread yesterday.

Ok so im reading the mini blockchain whitepaper. It appears to be a marginal improvement in some ways but it doesnt address the fundemental difficulty in scaling blockchains. The scalability problem doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the blockchain. It comes from the fact that each actor's transactions must be verified by all other network participants. Its the same math as network effects, except its a negative network effect.

Suppose actors make 1 transaction per minute.

1 actors = 0 verifications because he doesnt need to verify his own transactions.
2 actors = 2 transactions per minute. 2 * 2 actors = 4 transactions verifications. They dont need to verify their own so 4 - 2 = 2.  
3 actors = 3 transactions per minute. 3 * 3 = 9 verifications. they dont need to verify their own so 9 - 3 = 6.
4 actors = (4*4)-4=12
5 actors = (5*5)-5=20
ect...

0,2,6,12,20,30,42,56,72

This very quickly gets out of hand when you consider that there is a cost associated with verifying a transaction. even if that cost is infinitesimal.

Actors (users) are not verifying nodes, so you math is slightly incorrect in that respect.

However, your point remains valid that transactions scale O(NxN) by Metcalf or Reed's law. And verifying nodes probably don't scale by N actors.

However, Metcalf's law doesn't tell you the frequencies at which actors do transactions. Visa is currently at about 6000 transactions per second, so this can be verified with a single Intel CPU, so no problem for verifying nodes.

Scaling up to 6 billion people and micro transactions (more frequent transactions) might present a scaling problem. I've looked at Lamport signatures schemes that can verify 100,000+ transactions per second on a single i7 cpu. Since verifying nodes tend to be pools with considerably more resources (amortized over a large amount of hashrate), then a 10 - 100 cpu farm (or a Tilera 64 core cpu) is not unfathomable without destroying decentralization of pools.

Long-term the solution is simple. An ASIC for verification will scale sufficiently to 6 billion and micro transactions.

In short, no problem! Mini-block chain addresses the problem of block chain size and its impact on decentralization of mining. Cryptonite does not include anonymity however.

The real scaling issue.

He was arguing against a constant % rate of perpetual mining rewards (a.k.a. debasement). He conflated this with the exponential growth of the value and adoption of the coin.

This is not at all what I read.  I understood him to mean he favored a fixed constant block reward (ie 1 coin) as opposed to the exponential growth from a percent inflation (ie 1% total coins per x time).

The "1 coin per" scenario keeps rewards flowing while effectively reducing the value of the reward via the greater total coins while the percent ends up ramping up the coin supply on an exponential curve.

Was it not clear?

I see now that he was referring to an exponential growth of the money supply, and not an exponential growth of the rewards relative to the money supply.

I see no divergence problem with an exponential growth of the money supply if you are distributing it to yourselves (i.e. the broad usership). The money supply has been growing exponentially since the beginning of human history.

For one thing exponentially growing money supply is necessary to be consistent with the issuance of debt, because otherwise there is no means of paying the aggregately accumulated exponential growth in money needed due to interest compounding.

If we want to consider divergent outcomes and resilient strategies, note that any strategy might have a divergent outcome, e.g. even a feedback loop might carry with it some game theory for manipulation.

Note the alternative of a fixed nominal rate of emission means asymptotically the money supply stops growing (an exponential decline) which also has pathological divergence, e.g. you have to use transaction fees to fund mining which I had pointed out has pathological failure modes.

[RentaMouse]

I haven't had time to read the intervening posts, but here are a couple of followups to posts before I decided to leave this thread yesterday.


Note the alternative of a fixed nominal rate of emission means eventually the money supply stops growing which also has pathological divergence, e.g. you have to use transaction fees to fund mining which I had pointed out has pathological failure modes.

I'll sum up my rambling paragraph about tx fees funding decentralized mining which I posted yesterday then: I think Monero has even less chance than Bitcoin of funding decentralised mining from tx fees only, but there are other potential means of funding it which don't require a significant emission of coins if that is not desirable (I dont have an opinion on that). This is not necessarily a lesser of two evils problem, other solutions may be possible.

[drawingthesun]

-_-
blah blah blah, monero should not be overly inflationary, it must go like bitcoin, after mining 'stops', only transactions fees are rewarded to the miners, anything more will kill a currency, bitcoin model is well approved.

Nothing is approved. We have no idea what will happen to Bitcoin in a near future.

Nekomata, Tx fees are the kiss of death. Please do them.   (so much for your blah, blah)

I am starting to realize that it is probably wise not to rock the boat in this respect. It's probably not that big of a deal anyway and we could scare off untold numbers of people with talk of perpetual inflation of any sort.

Yes please don't differentiate yourself from Bitcoin. And who are you targeting anyway with your mining client, the nimcompoops here or the masses?

Whilst I am unsure about many of AnonyMint's ideas the inflation one is spot on and inline with many of our thoughts.

Using fees to support the network without a mint will not work. Monero needs an immortal inflation and this is in fact one of our selling points. It seems something between 0.5% and 1% will end up being optimum.

[drawingthesun]

I haven't had time to read the intervening posts, but here are a couple of followups to posts before I decided to leave this thread yesterday.


Note the alternative of a fixed nominal rate of emission means eventually the money supply stops growing which also has pathological divergence, e.g. you have to use transaction fees to fund mining which I had pointed out has pathological failure modes.

I'll sum up my rambling paragraph about tx fees funding decentralized mining which I posted yesterday then: I think Monero has even less chance than Bitcoin of funding decentralised mining from tx fees only, but there are other potential means of funding it which don't require a significant emission of coins if that is not desirable (I dont have an opinion on that). This is not necessarily a lesser of two evils problem, other solutions may be possible.

0.7% inflation means a doubling every 100 years of the supply. Is this "significant"?  I don't think so. This will secure the network and also not erode our wealth significantly.

I think the 0.7% figure is the right one. It's around that area though.

[rpietila]

0.7% inflation means a doubling every 100 years of the supply. Is this "significant"?  I don't think so. This will secure the network and also not erode our wealth significantly.

I think the 0.7% figure is the right one. It's around that area though.

Since Jesus: 1,048,576x inflation. "not significant". yeah

The greatest loss of mankind is its inability to understand the exponential function.

j/k I also think that is close to the right figure from gold standard perspective. But there may be more to it, so let the debate continue

[AnonyMint]

I will continue in the Monero economics thread.

Please provide a link to the thread, so I could move my future economics related discussions there.

Mining could be the most efficient way to introduce new users to the coin, as it doesn't require AML, KYC, fraudulent exchanges, etc..

Do you want a Mt.Gox and Coinbase driving your coin's adoption, or do you want to get the coins directly to them?

Directly, of course. [snip] I could set up a miner and earn $20 per month, expending only $30 in electricity

The masses don't calculate their electricity cost. And you are not discounting the value of bypassing all the hassles, regulations, KYC bullshit hoops to jump through, etc with the exchanges.

The masses just want to get some of this new cool coin in the easiest way possible.

, except I couldn't (I can't even delete a file).

And Monero doesn't even have a GUI much less even get close to targeting the masses in other ways. Again I reiterate that my career was based around making things popular for the masses, e.g. CoolPage with ~1 million verified downloads at download.com (and 335,000 websites confirmed via altavista) when the internet was 10 - 30 times smaller.

Using CoolPage was a not a wise economics decision (much better would have been to use the templates at Yahoo Geocities or hire a web designer for $200), yet 100,000s (millions at today's internet scale) of people decided it was more fun and interesting to create the website with their own creativity. People are curious and love to learn. Word-of-mouth is viral marketing.

The economies of the coins need people like me so the way to purchase them with existing stored value must always to be available

You are not the masses. Your efficiencies are different.

The whales such as yourself will invest in the coin with the most adoption and clear quality of development. Period.

I argue that the bolded part falls apart in the equation I = N * A, (inflation = number * average), though. Which is a pity:

To have a coin with manageable inflation, the product of the number of individual miners and their average reward must be contained. Therefore there is no incentive for anyone capable to become a miner, and the ones not capable.. well, they cannot.

Technically and economically astute people have a high minimum transaction cost in their life. $20 per month is not enough. The ones who drool over the idea of receiving $20, are not in the position to get even that If they were, the formula above would take it to $2.

You forget the basic economics principle that demand vs. supply resolves with price.

The more that mine, the higher the price.

Go for 3 - 10% instead!

Get behind me, Satan!

Going for 10% means 1.1^100 = 13,781 times higher coincount after a century. Even USD has mismanaged its issuance by only 6.5% per year on average for the last century. What differentiates hard currency from soft is that inflation is kept at check.

Even the idea of having double the amount of coins in 100 years is worrisome/preposterous to many. And that is only 0.7% inflation.

This is a really important matter. A 1%-point fail can easily destroy the coin.

Human population + productivity grows more in the realm of 5% per annum. Iron used to be a precious metal, but productivity changed that.

Satan is behind all the Malthusian bullshit resource scarcity propaganda, e.g. global warming hoax, Rockefeller's funding of environmental movements, etc. The Bible says go forth and MULTIPLY (exponentially).

[RentaMouse]

I haven't had time to read the intervening posts, but here are a couple of followups to posts before I decided to leave this thread yesterday.


Note the alternative of a fixed nominal rate of emission means eventually the money supply stops growing which also has pathological divergence, e.g. you have to use transaction fees to fund mining which I had pointed out has pathological failure modes.

I'll sum up my rambling paragraph about tx fees funding decentralized mining which I posted yesterday then: I think Monero has even less chance than Bitcoin of funding decentralised mining from tx fees only, but there are other potential means of funding it which don't require a significant emission of coins if that is not desirable (I dont have an opinion on that). This is not necessarily a lesser of two evils problem, other solutions may be possible.

0.7% inflation means a doubling every 100 years of the supply. Is this "significant"?  I don't think so. This will secure the network and also not erode our wealth significantly.

I think the 0.7% figure is the right one. It's around that area though.

My point was more intended to say that there are possible alternatives to relying on tx fees and/or eternal emission to sustain network security, but if the accepted expert opinion is that some level  of eternal emission is in fact a good thing then that's even better!

[smooth]

My point was more intended to say that there are possible alternatives to relying on tx fees and/or eternal emission to sustain network security, but if the accepted expert opinion is that some level  of eternal emission is in fact a good thing then that's even better!

I don't think there is any "accepted expert opinion" on the matter. We are still waiting for the first cryptocoin to demonstrate sustained success for a long period of time (more than a few years), and that includes bitcoin.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I will continue in the Monero economics thread.

Please provide a link to the thread, so I could move my future economics related discussions there.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=597878.new#new

[AnonyMint]

I will continue in the Monero economics thread.

Please provide a link to the thread, so I could move my future economics related discussions there.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=597878.new#new

I request if anyone replies to my points on economics, consider posting your reply to above linked economics thread instead of here. I will reply there.

[darkota]

Poloniex is considering to add a XMR market.

Just some Trollbox news.

coinup: busoni@poloniex, XMR and poloniex... it's a love story now. Why don't you drop LTC parity for XMR one?

busoni@poloniex: coinup, it's definitely an idea I'm considering.

coinup was me. Busoni said the LTC market is currently pretty useless to them. From a very practical perspective, they would make more money by switching to XMR.
This is kind of "boom" event if it happens I think, as many newcomers would realize XMR is indeed something big.

Yea, an XMR market would benefit Poloniex much more than a LTC one, considering over 70% of trading on there comes from monero.

[drawingthesun]

My point was more intended to say that there are possible alternatives to relying on tx fees and/or eternal emission to sustain network security, but if the accepted expert opinion is that some level  of eternal emission is in fact a good thing then that's even better!

It would be great to secure the network via another means, I'm sure that a solution may present itself within the next decade because there are a lot of people trying to solve this issue.

Another point, let's assume that the network could be secured via something else and no immortal inflation was required, would it still be wise to have some type of immortal coin release? I feel we would still need new coins being minted to keep the economy from going stale. For example look at NXT, looking at it from an outsiders perspective the only way in is to buy from someone, no new money can be created. Something feels wrong with that.  (To me anyway)

[shojayxt]

My feeling is that Monero will hit 100$+ next year, Bitcoin will be at least around 2000$ so 100$ for Monero is defintly realistic

Not likely.  It should be in the top ten coins but lets keep the expectations of value within the bounds of reality.

[shfc]

The development team, what is the new development plan ?

[smooth]

The development team, what is the new development plan ?

Please review here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg7847156#msg7847156

[twistelaar]

My feeling is that Monero will hit 100$+ next year, Bitcoin will be at least around 2000$ so 100$ for Monero is defintly realistic

Not likely.  It should be in the top ten coins but lets keep the expectations of value within the bounds of reality.

Well there are a lot of people who believe MONERO will reach at least 100$ and more, at the time this happens BTC is a lot of more valuable, so I think it;s possible, there is a good community, good activity and progress, see you on the m00n 

[Mumbles]

Oops.

It's a good thing I dumped this coin... Saved myself from another 12% loss 

[digicoin]

Oops.

It's a good thing I dumped this coin... Saved myself from another 12% loss 

You feel more loss now. The price shoots to moon already  2 days ago: 0.0029 Now 0.0043

[george888055]

Oops.

It's a good thing I dumped this coin... Saved myself from another 12% loss 

You feel more loss now. The price shoots to moon already  2 days ago: 0.0029 Now 0.0043

I'm crying, I sold all my xmr at 0.0037

[Nathonas]

Oops.

It's a good thing I dumped this coin... Saved myself from another 12% loss 

You feel more loss now. The price shoots to moon already  2 days ago: 0.0029 Now 0.0043

I'm crying, I sold all my xmr at 0.0037

That's really not that bad dude. Just buy in right now. that's not a major loss.