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

[fluffypony]

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.

We didn't create it, we inherited it from the CryptoNote reference code. All optimisations we've made to it are public and in master on github.

Claymore has a Win64 AMD *only* miner, locking out all the serious miners who typically use Linux. He has the option to disable the fee:

-nofee: set "1" to cancel my developer fee at all. In this mode some recent optimizations are disabled so mining speed will be slower by about 10%.
   By enabling this mode, I will lose 100% of my earnings, you will lose only 5% of your earnings.
   So you have a choice: "fastest miner" or "completely free miner but a bit slower".
   If you want both "fastest" and "completely free" you should find some other miner that meets your requirements, just don't use this miner instead of claiming that I need
   to cancel/reduce developer fee, saying that 5% developer fee is too much for this miner and so on.

Over and above that, the most optimised cpuminer-multi is available on Github, and for those mining on Nvidia cards, ccminer-cryptonight is also available on Github. The last one is particularly relevant, as a large portion of GPU miners began moving away from AMD when the GTX 750 ti was released (massive power savings over AMD cards).

[AnonyMint]

The L3 cache by itself is almost half of the chip.

I looked at an image of the Haswell die and appears to be less than 20%. The APU (GPU) is taking up more space on the consumer models. On the server models there is no GPU and the cache is probably a higher percentage of the die.

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.

I believe that is wrong. I suspect an ASIC can be designed that vastly outperform (at least on a power efficiency basis) and one of the reasons is the algorithm is so complex, thus it probably has many ways to be optimized with specific circuitry instead of generalized circuitry. My point is isolating a simpler ("enveloped") instruction such as aesinc would be a superior strategy (and embrace USB pluggable ASICs and get them spread out to the consumer).

Also I had noted (find my post in my thread a couple of months ago) that the way the AES is incorrectly employed as a random oracle (as the index to lookup in the memory table), the algorithm is very likely subject to some reduced solution space. This is perhaps Claymore's advantage (I could probably figure it out if I was inclined to spend sufficient time on it).

There is no cryptographic analysis of the hash. It might have impossible images, collisions, etc..

[AnonyMint]

Claymore has a Win64 AMD *only* miner, locking out all the serious miners who typically use Linux.

Over and above that, the most optimised cpuminer-multi is available on Github

Much better. Thanks for the clarification.

[smooth]

The L3 cache by itself is almost half of the chip.

I looked at an image of the Haswell die and appears to be less than 20%. The APU (GPU) is taking up more space on the consumer models. On the server models there is no GPU and the cache is probably a higher percentage of the die.

Yes you are right, I had looked a a server layout.

But the point being that even if it is 10%, then you can't include more than 10 copies on the same size die using the same process. Using a cheaper/inferior process, you will be including far fewer than 10 copies.

I make no claim about more qualitative design improvements, cryptographic flaws (though in some cases these might translate to CPU/GPU mining improvements as well as ASIC), etc.. I was simply addressing the "thousands of copies" comment. That approach is not feasible.

[AnonyMint]

I make no claim about more qualitative design improvements, cryptographic flaws (though in some cases these might translate to CPU/GPU mining improvements as well as ASIC), etc.. I was simply addressing the "thousands of copies" comment. That approach is not feasible.

We can't make the latter assertion with certitude without knowing the former, because it is possible some insights reduce the size of the memory space required. Such insight could possibly require very fast circuit for some particular computation that could only be done on an ASIC.

And such insights could possibly be proprietary (for a while at least) could potentially be a major problem in the future. I assume you will have cryptographers doing cryptanalysis on the proof-of-work soon to head off such a threat.

[Brad_BCK]

Finally, I spent enough time trying to understand how to use XMR. My level is too low.
BTW I think it is enough to start trading.

I decided to make an arbitrage. To buy XMR on the Poloniex exchange and to sell it on the Hitbtc exchange.
There is a nice difference between XMR prices on this exchanges. So if you did not try it before - do it. You can earn additional money. Check rates by yourself and make your own conclusions.
After I'll test it with XMR - I'll write here some additional information. If you id it before - write what you think.

[smooth]

I make no claim about more qualitative design improvements, cryptographic flaws (though in some cases these might translate to CPU/GPU mining improvements as well as ASIC), etc.. I was simply addressing the "thousands of copies" comment. That approach is not feasible.

We can't make the latter assertion with certitude without knowing the former, because it is possible some insights reduce the size of the memory space required. Such insight could possibly require very fast circuit for some particular computation that could only be done on an ASIC.

Those are thousands of copies of something, but not thousands of copies of the original algorithm. The latter is straightforward and reasonable to assume as essentially inevitable for any algorithm that is implementable in a small amount of hardware (as the original post to which I replied suggested was the case here, incorrectly). The former is not.

[AnonyMint]

I make no claim about more qualitative design improvements, cryptographic flaws (though in some cases these might translate to CPU/GPU mining improvements as well as ASIC), etc.. I was simply addressing the "thousands of copies" comment. That approach is not feasible.

We can't make the latter assertion with certitude without knowing the former, because it is possible some insights reduce the size of the memory space required. Such insight could possibly require very fast circuit for some particular computation that could only be done on an ASIC.

Those are thousands of copies of something, but not thousands of copies of the original algorithm. The latter is straightforward and reasonable to assume as essentially inevitable for any algorithm that is implementable in a small amount of hardware (as the original post to which I replied suggested was the case here, incorrectly). The former is not.

I edited my prior post. I think the complexity is working against you, not for you as you assume. Defer to your cryptographers. You've got to characterize it before you can make any such qualitative assumptions with certitude.

And such insights could possibly be proprietary (for a while at least) could potentially be a major problem in the future. I assume you will have cryptographers doing cryptanalysis on the proof-of-work soon to head off such a threat.

The worst thing that can happen is a few have a significant advantage. If that degenerate case is the true risk (we can't say since we don't know), much better to have ubiquitous cheap ASICs.

[papa_lazzarou]

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.

I know what you mean.

Will do that. Instead of them getting scared off they could be supporting Monero.
 
Must find out if there is a crypto community here in Portugal.

hasta!
Monero to 2100!

[smooth]

I edited my prior post. I think the complexity is working against you, not for you as you assume. Defer to your cryptographers. You've got to characterize it before you can make any such qualitative assumptions with certitude.

I assume nothing. ASICs may rip this to shreds. I merely state that it isn't inevitable.

We don't know how much cryptographic analysis there was, since it was all done in secret by whoever designed it (also secret). Maybe there was a lot, maybe none at all, or maybe something in between.

Re: cryptographers, yes, we are paying cryptographers to review it, as has been stated on this thread before. We are conducting a top-to-bottom review of everything. Cryptography is important, of course, but there are plenty of opportunities for other problems throughout the code as well. And this was indeed the case with the deoptimized mining code we discovered when we first started looking at the code we inherited, but certainly the scope of this effort is not now limited to (or even focused on) mining.

[HardwarePal]

I edited my prior post. I think the complexity is working against you, not for you as you assume. Defer to your cryptographers. You've got to characterize it before you can make any such qualitative assumptions with certitude.

I assume nothing. ASICs may rip this to shreds. I merely state that it isn't inevitable.

We don't know how much cryptographic analysis there was, since it was all done in secret by whoever designed it (also secret). Maybe there was a lot, maybe none at all, or maybe something in between.

Re: cryptographers, yes, we are paying cryptographers to review it, as has been stated on this thread before. We are conducting a top-to-bottom review of everything. Cryptography is important, of course, but there are plenty of opportunities for other problems throughout the code as well. And this was indeed the case with the deoptimized mining code we discovered when we first started looking at the code we inherited, but certainly the scope of this effort is not now limited to (or even focused on) mining.

The number of coins produced a day will still be the same 23K+- 10% .

As mentioned by Aminorex "Block reward was 17.6 initially (97 days ago) and is now 15.4.  It takes 512 days to halve the emission. "

As long as Demand-Supply is there , even Asics wont hurt the coin.

[darkota]

the emission halves every 512 days?

[binaryFate]

the emission halves every 512 days?

This is a continuous process, not suddenly halved (like bitcoin). The continuous decrease is such that after 512 days the reward is half of original one.

[r05]

Quite interested in having a purely OpenCL miner. I know Claymore is OpenCL, but it only works with AMD GPUs. The Intel HD series of GPUs are very poor I know, but they too utilize OpenCL - for those of us that are hoping to squeeze every little last bit from our systems using the onboard GPU would be very advantageous.

[Brad_BCK]

Quite interested in having a purely OpenCL miner. I know Claymore is OpenCL, but it only works with AMD GPUs. The Intel HD series of GPUs are very poor I know, but they too utilize OpenCL - for those of us that are hoping to squeeze every little last bit from our systems using the onboard GPU would be very advantageous.

So you mean that I can use both AMD GPU and Intel HD graphics for mining on one computer?

[r05]

Quite interested in having a purely OpenCL miner. I know Claymore is OpenCL, but it only works with AMD GPUs. The Intel HD series of GPUs are very poor I know, but they too utilize OpenCL - for those of us that are hoping to squeeze every little last bit from our systems using the onboard GPU would be very advantageous.

So you mean that I can use both AMD GPU and Intel HD graphics for mining on one computer?

And your CPU, yes. They are separate devices with separate resource pools, despite the Intel HD GPU being on the same unit as the CPU. I have read up on it and other coin algos have miners for the Intel HD series and the use of it doesn't impact the CPU mining speed.

[hitbtc]

Hello once again, people!

As we’ve announced yesterday, the 100 XMR rewards for taking part in our most recent contest were sent out to their respective winners.

Here are the winning deals:
1. July 18th: at the price of 0.004976 at 10:33:41.045 by an anonymous person
2. July 19th: at the price of 0.004888 at 21:44:09.451 by equipoise here on Bitcointalk.org. He also shared a link to his personal page.
Thanks once again for your partaking and for your intense interest in the coin’s performance on our exchange, and congrats!
Please let us know if this was exciting and if you want to see us continue running such contests, and we shall keep doing that.
Read the full text of this announcement

[pallas]

Quite interested in having a purely OpenCL miner. I know Claymore is OpenCL, but it only works with AMD GPUs. The Intel HD series of GPUs are very poor I know, but they too utilize OpenCL - for those of us that are hoping to squeeze every little last bit from our systems using the onboard GPU would be very advantageous.

So you mean that I can use both AMD GPU and Intel HD graphics for mining on one computer?

And your CPU, yes. They are separate devices with separate resource pools, despite the Intel HD GPU being on the same unit as the CPU. I have read up on it and other coin algos have miners for the Intel HD series and the use of it doesn't impact the CPU mining speed.

Miner for Intel HD? Rough estimate on h/s on 4000/5000?

on scrypt, gpu mined slower than cpu.
but probably using less power.

[r05]

Quite interested in having a purely OpenCL miner. I know Claymore is OpenCL, but it only works with AMD GPUs. The Intel HD series of GPUs are very poor I know, but they too utilize OpenCL - for those of us that are hoping to squeeze every little last bit from our systems using the onboard GPU would be very advantageous.

So you mean that I can use both AMD GPU and Intel HD graphics for mining on one computer?

And your CPU, yes. They are separate devices with separate resource pools, despite the Intel HD GPU being on the same unit as the CPU. I have read up on it and other coin algos have miners for the Intel HD series and the use of it doesn't impact the CPU mining speed.

Miner for Intel HD? Rough estimate on h/s on 4000/5000?

on scrypt, gpu mined slower than cpu.
but probably using less power.

Can confirm pretty much the same metrics. It's slower than CPU but can be used at the same time.

Seems a bit silly to be having idle processing power 

[monero]

New exchange: lazycoins.com

Disclaimer: please take note that referencing it do not imply we endorse it. Trade at your own risk.

Updated by David Latapie