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

[cAPSLOCK]

Also, we're wondering if we should listen to such comments and actually stop doing campaigns like this one. Please make your opinion known: if most of you guys actually don't like this campaign, we are prepared to comply. Otherwise we shall probably continue with it.

Also, we wanted to remind you that our 'Monero2TheMoon' and Usability Improvement and Bug Reporting campaigns are still underway.

I am fine with the campaigns and as long as you keep the marketing side reasonable and non spammy I say let people vote with their XMR/BTC.  I personally trade on your exchange and poloniex.

[David Latapie]

Sure it does. It's 6 months experience for free Thanks.

Also, how can I help getting monero on track? I'm planning on donating to the dev team when I get some spare money, and the Portuguese mnemonic word list is already under way so I don't know what else I can do...

At the moment most of the urgent / important tasks require an in-depth knowledge of cryptography and C / C++, but as things progress there will be things that will come up that will require more soft skills. As and when we have a need for that we will definitely put the call out:)

If this is not something you can apply for, you can spread the word around about Monero as being a serious coin. Target newcomers in alt first - so much pump and dumps where newcomers get scammed.

[David Latapie]

https://github.com/jwinterm/SimpleVanity

Now on the OP. Thanks!

Vanity address generator (source only)

[statdude]

I had seen some comments saying XMR was having a hard time a few weeks ago with large tx because of all the inputs.

Here's a big one:

http://monerochain.info/tx/3bdad88fbb2fef74bd7491ea75cc4eff5ca5e6e04ffd2be7aa7b6dcf3bd0089f

201 inputs for a 5,000 output. So is it safe to say this is no longer an issue?

[fluffypony]

I had seen some comments saying XMR was having a hard time a few weeks ago with large tx because of all the inputs.

Here's a big one:

http://monerochain.info/tx/3bdad88fbb2fef74bd7491ea75cc4eff5ca5e6e04ffd2be7aa7b6dcf3bd0089f

201 inputs for a 5,000 output. So is it safe to say this is no longer an issue?

The number of inputs used in a tx depends on the unspent outputs available to you (ie. what's been received and is in your utxoset). A lot of this came from pools sending dust to miners, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't occur if you charged 25 XMR for something, and 200 people bought, and then you wanted to move the 5k XMR somewhere. It would require 200 inputs.

Bitcoin can have similarly large transactions, and that's just fine: https://blockchain.info/tx/574d77eb277974ca1000b154023940c3e366d5bf4dd06b7fe3b0d92eea54e0c7

[statdude]

I had seen some comments saying XMR was having a hard time a few weeks ago with large tx because of all the inputs.

Here's a big one:

http://monerochain.info/tx/3bdad88fbb2fef74bd7491ea75cc4eff5ca5e6e04ffd2be7aa7b6dcf3bd0089f

201 inputs for a 5,000 output. So is it safe to say this is no longer an issue?

The number of inputs used in a tx depends on the unspent outputs available to you (ie. what's been received and is in your utxoset). A lot of this came from pools sending dust to miners, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't occur if you charged 25 XMR for something, and 200 people bought, and then you wanted to move the 5k XMR somewhere. It would require 200 inputs.

Bitcoin can have similarly large transactions, and that's just fine: https://blockchain.info/tx/574d77eb277974ca1000b154023940c3e366d5bf4dd06b7fe3b0d92eea54e0c7

Yeah makes sense.
I was just curious if there was an issue sending tx with large amounts of XMR as that's what Poloniex mods had said a while back, and to send less than 1000 xmr at a time. If they were incorrect, I'm happy

[binaryFate]

I had seen some comments saying XMR was having a hard time a few weeks ago with large tx because of all the inputs.

Here's a big one:

http://monerochain.info/tx/3bdad88fbb2fef74bd7491ea75cc4eff5ca5e6e04ffd2be7aa7b6dcf3bd0089f

201 inputs for a 5,000 output. So is it safe to say this is no longer an issue?

The number of inputs used in a tx depends on the unspent outputs available to you (ie. what's been received and is in your utxoset). A lot of this came from pools sending dust to miners, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't occur if you charged 25 XMR for something, and 200 people bought, and then you wanted to move the 5k XMR somewhere. It would require 200 inputs.

Bitcoin can have similarly large transactions, and that's just fine: https://blockchain.info/tx/574d77eb277974ca1000b154023940c3e366d5bf4dd06b7fe3b0d92eea54e0c7

Yeah makes sense.
I was just curious if there was an issue sending tx with large amounts of XMR as that's what Poloniex mods had said a while back, and to send less than 1000 xmr at a time. If they were incorrect, I'm happy

Because people send xmr to polo by small amounts, so the polo wallet may need a large number of inputs to build the big amount withdrawal. I don't know if there's a limit with monero, for bitcoin I think it is 200 inputs.

Didn't poloniex enabled the transaction auto-split fix by now?

[nioc]

Because people send xmr to polo by small amounts, so the polo wallet may need a large number of inputs to build the big amount withdrawal. I don't know if there's a limit with monero, for bitcoin I think it is 200 inputs.

Didn't poloniex enabled the transaction auto-split fix by now?

Am I correct to assume that if you are sent 500 XMR that is comprised of many inputs, that once you receive it it is now one input and you will have no problem sending it anywhere?


Obviously there is no need as there is with btc to have multiple wallets in order to not reveal your stash, but are there reasons to have multiple wallets for Monero?  I would feel funny having a large amount in any one place but don't know if that feeling is based on reality.

[binaryFate]

Because people send xmr to polo by small amounts, so the polo wallet may need a large number of inputs to build the big amount withdrawal. I don't know if there's a limit with monero, for bitcoin I think it is 200 inputs.

Didn't poloniex enabled the transaction auto-split fix by now?

Am I correct to assume that if you are sent 500 XMR that is comprised of many inputs, that once you receive it it is now one input and you will have no problem sending it anywhere?

Correct. The numerous unspent ouptuts are "destroyed" and you end up with only one bigger.

Obviously there is no need as there is with btc to have multiple wallets in order to not reveal your stash, but are there reasons to have multiple wallets for Monero?  I would feel funny having a large amount in any one place but don't know if that feeling is based on reality.

No reason for privacy I think, but the obvious usage of several wallets is to have several layers of security. Smartphone, laptop, cold strorage... with increasing amounts on them.

[smooth]

Obviously there is no need as there is with btc to have multiple wallets in order to not reveal your stash, but are there reasons to have multiple wallets for Monero?  I would feel funny having a large amount in any one place but don't know if that feeling is based on reality.

No reason for privacy I think, but the obvious usage of several wallets is to have several layers of security. Smartphone, laptop, cold strorage... with increasing amounts on them.

There can still be some type of privacy issues. For example, let's say you have that 5000 output yourself, and you send 100 XMR to someone. That person will be able to see that you broke up a 5000 output into 100 and 4000+900 (change), so the recipient will know that you have/had 5000.  

In the future I would expect that wallets will optionally do some kind of auto-splitting to avoid this (breaking up the 5000 into smaller pieces -- which will be unlinkable by anyone including the recipient -- before sending the 100). The technology will continue to improve.

For now, if you are interested in extreme privacy you may want multiple wallets (say one for long term storage in larger amounts, one for routine transactions, etc.)

[villabacho]

And yes AES-NI is already widely deployed.

My understanding is Intel has been on 22nm while ASICs have been 28 or 40nm (?), so Intel has inherent advantage if they decide to make a ubiquitously used instruction more efficient. As encryption becomes more used on everyone's computer, Intel is going to have an economic incentive to make AES-NI (and perhaps SHA-2?) more efficient.

You're right in that the AES-NI unit on Intel CPUs will be faster than on any ASIC, but you'll never have thousands of such units on a CPU as you could have on dedicated ASICs.

[smooth]

And yes AES-NI is already widely deployed.

My understanding is Intel has been on 22nm while ASICs have been 28 or 40nm (?), so Intel has inherent advantage if they decide to make a ubiquitously used instruction more efficient. As encryption becomes more used on everyone's computer, Intel is going to have an economic incentive to make AES-NI (and perhaps SHA-2?) more efficient.

You're right in that the AES-NI unit on Intel CPUs will be faster than on any ASIC, but you'll never have thousands of such units on a CPU as you could have on dedicated ASICs.

Thousands of AES units won't do anything for you. This is not a Bitcoin-style PoW using AES (as a hash function) instead of SHA. Most of the Intel chip is being used for mining. In fact one might surmise (in part of course) that the algorithm was designed by looking at the layout of an Intel CPU and working backwards from there.

[saddambitcoin]

Obviously there is no need as there is with btc to have multiple wallets in order to not reveal your stash, but are there reasons to have multiple wallets for Monero?  I would feel funny having a large amount in any one place but don't know if that feeling is based on reality.

No reason for privacy I think, but the obvious usage of several wallets is to have several layers of security. Smartphone, laptop, cold strorage... with increasing amounts on them.

There can still be some type of privacy issues. For example, let's say you have that 5000 output yourself, and you send 100 XMR to someone. That person will be able to see that you broke up a 5000 output into 100 and 4000+900 (change), so the recipient will know that you have/had 5000.  

In the future I would expect that wallets will optionally do some kind of auto-splitting to avoid this (breaking up the 5000 into smaller pieces -- which will be unlinkable by anyone including the recipient -- before sending the 100). The technology will continue to improve.

For now, if you are interested in extreme privacy you may want multiple wallets (say one for long term storage in larger amounts, one for routine transactions, etc.)

Could one also prevent this by making smaller transfers to your wallet - 100, 200 XMR each time in order to build up a large supply of outputs?

[smooth]

Obviously there is no need as there is with btc to have multiple wallets in order to not reveal your stash, but are there reasons to have multiple wallets for Monero?  I would feel funny having a large amount in any one place but don't know if that feeling is based on reality.

No reason for privacy I think, but the obvious usage of several wallets is to have several layers of security. Smartphone, laptop, cold strorage... with increasing amounts on them.

There can still be some type of privacy issues. For example, let's say you have that 5000 output yourself, and you send 100 XMR to someone. That person will be able to see that you broke up a 5000 output into 100 and 4000+900 (change), so the recipient will know that you have/had 5000.  

In the future I would expect that wallets will optionally do some kind of auto-splitting to avoid this (breaking up the 5000 into smaller pieces -- which will be unlinkable by anyone including the recipient -- before sending the 100). The technology will continue to improve.

For now, if you are interested in extreme privacy you may want multiple wallets (say one for long term storage in larger amounts, one for routine transactions, etc.)

Could one also prevent this by making smaller transfers to your wallet - 100, 200 XMR each time in order to build up a large supply of outputs?

It isn't documented (other than the source) how the wallet chooses which outputs to use. If you can be sure that it the smaller ones, that would work. But you would still have to be careful not to run out of small outputs, at which point the wallet would happily just go ahead and grab your big 5000 output with no warning at all. A separate wallet would make this safer. But again I expect more streamlined solutions in the future.

[villabacho]

And yes AES-NI is already widely deployed.

My understanding is Intel has been on 22nm while ASICs have been 28 or 40nm (?), so Intel has inherent advantage if they decide to make a ubiquitously used instruction more efficient. As encryption becomes more used on everyone's computer, Intel is going to have an economic incentive to make AES-NI (and perhaps SHA-2?) more efficient.

You're right in that the AES-NI unit on Intel CPUs will be faster than on any ASIC, but you'll never have thousands of such units on a CPU as you could have on dedicated ASICs.

Thousands of AES units won't do anything for you. This is not a Bitcoin-style PoW using AES (as a hash function) instead of SHA. Most of the Intel chip is being used for mining. In fact one might surmise (in part of course) that the algorithm was designed by looking at the layout of an Intel CPU and working backwards from there.

Ah, that's interesting, I wasn't aware. Thanks for explaining!

[AnonyMint]

And yes AES-NI is already widely deployed.

My understanding is Intel has been on 22nm while ASICs have been 28 or 40nm (?), so Intel has inherent advantage if they decide to make a ubiquitously used instruction more efficient. As encryption becomes more used on everyone's computer, Intel is going to have an economic incentive to make AES-NI (and perhaps SHA-2?) more efficient.

You're right in that the AES-NI unit on Intel CPUs will be faster than on any ASIC, but you'll never have thousands of such units on a CPU as you could have on dedicated ASICs.

Thousands of AES units won't do anything for you. This is not a Bitcoin-style PoW using AES (as a hash function) instead of SHA. Most of the Intel chip is being used for mining. In fact one might surmise (in part of course) that the algorithm was designed by looking at the layout of an Intel CPU and working backwards from there.

Ah, that's interesting, I wasn't aware. Thanks for explaining!

smooth, his point is still valid in the sense that if L3 cache is implementable on an ASIC then there might be many transistors in the CPU which are not being utilized and in which case the ASIC might in theory be able to pack more hashrate on the same die or decreased cost of hardware for the equivalent hashrate. And it is possible that specific memory use pattern of Monero's proof-of-work hash could be optimized on an ASIC as compared to the use of the generalized L3 cache on the CPU. This would need much more investigation, but realize that caching is a very wide topic, e.g. consider the variable of set-associativity. Be very careful making blanket statements, because the devil is in the details.

Yet my point was that if Intel lithography[1] is at 22nm when the ASICs are at 28 or 40nm (due I assume to Intel's higher economies-of-scale and consequent long-term investment schedule), then in terms of more hashes per watt, Intel might have a potential advantage should they attempt to maximize some instruction, e.g. the aesenc instruction. Such a well enveloped instruction may have much fewer modes of optimization as compared to usage patterns of L3 cache.

Electricity consumption may be the more significant factor, especially if you consider the points I made that if home miners mine at a loss, then ASIC farms would mine at a loss too if the home mining setup is equivalent in power efficiency.

And you've still got all the latent power issues on a CPU with so many things that aren't being utilized but which are still powered on. Intel has been working very much on improving the finer grained power down of unused modules as they realize power consumption is extremely important.

The CPU has an inherent disadvantage in that it is designed to be a general purpose computing device so it can't be as specialized at any one computation as an ASIC can be.

There is much more that has to be investigated and I can find nearly nothing on Monero's proof-of-work hash. No benchmarking. No detailed whitepaper. Nothing but the source code.

[1] Lithography on silicon isn't consistently that small. That progress halted somewhere in the realm of 30nm or so. Other tricks (even 3D transistors) have been employed to give the apparency of what 22nm geometry would provide. Intel has had delays moving to "14nm".

[fluffypony]

There is much more that has to be investigated and I can find nearly nothing on Monero's proof-of-work hash. No benchmarking. No detailed whitepaper. Nothing but the source code.

We have the same issue with the CryptoNight PoW algorithm. To quote the initial CryptoNote whitepaper review we've released:

It's absolutely unconscionable to to come up with a new "Proof of Work Algorithm" and then refrain from including any sort of pseudocode to describe that algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh.

[smooth]

smooth, his point is still valid in the sense that if L3 cache is implementable on an ASIC then there might be many transistors in the CPU which are not being utilized and in which case the ASIC might in theory be able to pack more hashrate on the same die

The L3 cache by itself is almost half of the chip. There is also a 64 bit multiply, which is I'm told is non-trivial. Once you combine that with your observation about Intel having a (likely persistent) process advantage (and also the inherent average unit cost advantage of a widely-used general purpose device), there just isn't much if anything left for an ASIC-maker to to work with.

So no I don't think the point is really valid. You won't be able to get thousands of times anything with a straightforward ASIC design here. There may be back doors though, we don't know. The point about lack of a clear writeup and peer review is valid.

The CPU has an inherent disadvantage in that it is designed to be a general purpose computing device so it can't be as specialized at any one computation as an ASIC can be.

This is obviously going to be true, but the scope of the task here is very different. Thousands of copies will not work.

[AnonyMint]

There is much more that has to be investigated and I can find nearly nothing on Monero's proof-of-work hash. No benchmarking. No detailed whitepaper. Nothing but the source code.

We have the same issue with the CryptoNight PoW algorithm. To quote the initial CryptoNote whitepaper review we've released:

It's absolutely unconscionable to to come up with a new "Proof of Work Algorithm" and then refrain from including any sort of pseudocode to describe that algorithm. Upon which. Your entire. Coin. Is. Based. Ugh.

Yeah (I read that before) and Claymore is earning (up to) 5% of all the coins apparently with some proprietary insight. Hmmm. As a programmer, makes you wonder doesn't it.

So Rpietila said he would never invest in a coin with a premine (not even 1% for the core developers?), yet Claymore is taking 5% of the universe?

This should be a how-to-guide take 5% of the universe by releasing some public CryptoNite specification anonymously and pretending to be doing it for noble reasons. Of course this doesn't necessarily implicate the Monero developers, since (if) they didn't create CryptoNite. And this is of course speculation.

(I didn't attempt to learn if Claymore is anonymous?)

About 740 h/s on stock 290X (Hynix memory).
About 650 h/s on stock 290X (Elpida memory).
About 450 h/s on stock 280X (Hynix memory).
About 300 h/s on stock 270X or 6950 2GB.

About 270 h/s on i7-4770 ("-t 4")
About 170 h/s on i5-4430 ("-t 3")
32bit version is slower than 64bit version in 1.5-2.0 times, about 190 h/s on i7-4770.

Since the 290X is about 2.5x the power TPD as the i7, appears they are roughly at power efficiency parity with perhaps a slight advantage to the CPU, which is roughly equivalent to the observed result for MemoryCoin 2.0's proof-of-work.

However that is a significant disadvantage to all those who run a 32-bit operating system, which is apparently still greater than 50% of all computers:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/426628-windows-32-bit-vs-64-bit-market-share

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Desktop_and_laptop_computers

[dreamspark]

[snip]

Claymores miner has a no fee option and there is also a fee free verison for Nvidia cards as far as I know. It is also limited to windows.

Claymore is not getting "5% of the universe".

Plus if you beleive the botnet line then they arent going to be using Claymores miner.
Plus all the people who are mining on their own hardware (CPU's) are again not paying that 5% fee. Really dont see how you would come to the conclusion that Claymores miner is the equivalent of a 5% premine.