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

[rpietila]

Fortunately, miners are only 0.00001% of the population. The rest have to buy coins, and they don't have a concern if it's PoW or PoS as long as it does what they need it to.

Which, again, is a very wrong statement. Buyers, regardless of method, care very much if their coin is going to be around in 12 months, and for PoS, this is unproven.

smooth: +1

[windjc]

Fortunately, miners are only 0.00001% of the population. The rest have to buy coins, and they don't have a concern if it's PoW or PoS as long as it does what they need it to.

How can you be so sure about that?

While the number is exagerated the general view is true, think about anyone now wanting to get 1000XMR, are they going to buy it or are they going to spend x amount of time mining it and hoping the difficulty doesn't increase etc. Yes lots of people mine a few coins here and there but for the majoirty of people the larger parts of their holdings are bought.

The more questionable part of the statement was the assertion that buyers don't care about PoW or PoS. They might not care about the inner workings, but they damn well care in so far as it affects the security (incl perceived security) and value (incl perceived value) of their investment. To some extent this may be arbitrary or unfair (or perhaps a better word is undeserved). PoS might just has a bad reputation for whatever reasons not based in actual security (and being associated hundreds of PoS scam coins might well be part of the reason), which affects its perceived value and therefore is value. In that case it is still a bad investment (unless you want to make a bet on this changing in the future).

Doesn't matter. With the innovations happening with coins like Nxt, the network effect will win out eventually even if POW continues to exist somehow long into the future. POW innovations are hindered by Bitcoin and the clone universe. XMR is one of the few POW coins doing something exciting. 95% of the rest of the exciting innovations are happening in the POS universe. One day, Rpetilia and other old schoolers will buy POS coins. Just like the gold bugs buy bitcoin today.

[devphp]

Which, again, is a very wrong statement. Buyers, regardless of method, care very much if their coin is going to be around in 12 months, and for PoS, this is unproven.

smooth: +1

I agree that many investors want to see the PoS crypto to stay around longer without breaking to invest. My statement was assuming that. And because there is no rush in the mainstream to invest in crypto currencies, although there has been some progress in the past 12 months, there is still plenty of time to prove to new users that certain PoS implementations are at least as secure as PoW.

[rpietila]

After going from fiat to stocks to gold to silver to bitcoin to monero, in search for increased security, it would be funny to go back to fiat again, wouldn't it?

[devphp]

After going from fiat to stocks to gold to silver to bitcoin to monero, in search for increased security, it would be funny to go back to fiat again, wouldn't it?

Fiat is a currency proclaimed and enforced by a government as money, literal translation of fiat - 'by decree'. I am not sure what you refer to when you say "going back to fiat".

[windjc]

Which, again, is a very wrong statement. Buyers, regardless of method, care very much if their coin is going to be around in 12 months, and for PoS, this is unproven.

smooth: +1

I agree that many investors want to see the PoS crypto to stay around longer without breaking to invest. My statement was assuming that. And because there is no rush in the mainstream to invest in crypto currencies, although there has been some progress in the past 12 months, there is still plenty of time to prove to new users that certain PoS implementations are at least as secure as PoW.

Look, this isnt fucking rocket science. POS is a direct threat to miners. As MANY of the rpetilia's associates on this forum either were/are miners or where closely associated with miners, there is a nature threat and biased towards POS.

Just like Peter Schiff doesn't like Bitcoin and WU doesn't like Bitcoin and Paypal doesn't like bitcoin - miners and old school bitcoiners dont like POS.

All the other "reasons" are just noise. Obvious is obvious.

[devphp]

Obvious is obvious.

For the sake of the debate stating the obvious shouldn't be done so bluntly

[rpietila]

That PoS are called "coins" is a misnomer. What makes digital things "coins" is the real world energy that restricts their creation. Without mining, there is nothing that prevents duplicating PoS schemes endlessly, because doing that is free. With mining, the difference between Bitcoin and mineable altcoins stays clear because the meager demand of altcoins means meager price and less mining.

The inflation of Monero is 2.5% of that of Bitcoin, which is quite a lot. What is even more striking is the energy expended, which may be up to 10% of that of Bitcoin, due to the reason that Monero is mined with energy-inefficient methods instead of ASICs.

All the PoS coins combined, use about nothing to secure their integrity. Also due to zero inflation, there is no balance in the market to restrict pumps and dumps. I cannot understand why anyone would invest in these, except for the insiders of course. See the terms of the IPO for Ethereum for more details.

[rpietila]

Ever since I woke up today, I have not found a more ridiculous thing said, than that I am somehow associated with any kind of miners, or mining, or have ever been.

(The truthful arguments grow few and far between, but trying to find and use them, would make the PoS scamcrowd a little more believable.)

[smooth]

See the terms of the IPO for Ethereum for more details.

Ethereum is going to be PoW, at least initially. They have said they might switch to mixed PoS/PoW.

[windjc]

That PoS are called "coins" is a misnomer. What makes digital things "coins" is the real world energy that restricts their creation. Without mining, there is nothing that prevents duplicating PoS schemes endlessly, because doing that is free. With mining, the difference between Bitcoin and mineable altcoins stays clear because the meager demand of altcoins means meager price and less mining.

The inflation of Monero is 2.5% of that of Bitcoin, which is quite a lot. What is even more striking is the energy expended, which may be up to 10% of that of Bitcoin, due to the reason that Monero is mined with energy-inefficient methods instead of ASICs.

All the PoS coins combined, use about nothing to secure their integrity. Also due to zero inflation, there is no balance in the market to restrict pumps and dumps. I cannot understand why anyone would invest in these, except for the insiders of course. See the terms of the IPO for Ethereum for more details.

Digital currency is digital. It doesn't need ENERGY to survive to justify itself.  POS can be duplicated. Just like Bitcoin can be duplicated and XMR can be duplicated. Its called NETWORK EFFECT. The same shit you pedal to tell everyone why XMR is more valuable than Boolberry. But its TRUE. Network effect wins - especially with currency.

The POS coins that have the best innovation combined with marketing will win. The same is true with POW. Only difference is POW has a lot of energy waste that could potentially weigh it down.

[devphp]

The value of a coin is not found in how much hardware it takes to 'extract' it, but in useful features it offers to users.

You may not call PoS a coin, but a share or a token, does it really matter if it's used to transfer value and pay for goods and services just like PoW coins are used? The end users could care less about those definitions, to them it's all vehicles that have properties of money and can act as money, which is all that matters.

You can duplicate source code of a PoS coin, but you can't duplicate infrastructure and developers. And by the time you can, the network effect has already set in and competitors can't catch up, provided that development of the first PoS coin hasn't stopped, both software and infrastructure development.

It is also important to consider user base and ongoing distribution which can't happen overnight for any PoS clone.

[windjc]

Ever since I woke up today, I have not found a more ridiculous thing said, than that I am somehow associated with any kind of miners, or mining, or have ever been.

(The truthful arguments grow few and far between, but trying to find and use them, would make the PoS scamcrowd a little more believable.)

So none of the people you talk about that got you interested in XMR were miners or had mined in the past?

[kbm]

That PoS are called "coins" is a misnomer. What makes digital things "coins" is the real world energy that restricts their creation. Without mining, there is nothing that prevents duplicating PoS schemes endlessly, because doing that is free. With mining, the difference between Bitcoin and mineable altcoins stays clear because the meager demand of altcoins means meager price and less mining.

So the innovation of a quantifiable 'difficulty' lends heavily to the idea that you're creating 'something', where my current understanding of stake is that it's always a % of your staked money .. set in stone by the developers. That's an interesting comparison. On one end with PoW wealth would tend to be power law distributed .. or at least can be calculated to favor such a tendency, where on the other (PoS) that claim may fail(? - anyone have studies on this). A PoS tends to favor those that got their earliest, and grabbed the coin first. I believe this was one of the reason they are now tending to favor a PoW distribution, but the window of the distribution period is generally short with these newer ones (even ones with IPO are often short windows that don't give many a chance to get in at the only right time) .. so that any representative demographic has less of a chance to form, and generally has a very strange distribution. PoW - the right time to get in is generally 'now', where with PoS the right time to get in is usually only ever day one and before.

[smooth]

Digital currency is digital. It doesn't need ENERGY to survive to justify itself. POS can be duplicated. Just like Bitcoin can be duplicated and XMR can be duplicated.

Not exactly. He's right in a way. Energy is scarce. You can't duplicate Bitcoin or Monero a million times with their high hash rates because the energy usage would be prohibitive. You can create a little million shitcoins with virtualy no hash rate, or which are constantly stealing hash rate from each other as miner jump to the latest scam, and these might indeed be clones of the BTC or XMR code, but those are not duplicates of the BTC or XMR network

POS coins can be duplicated quite literally without physical limit. That is a major difference.

I don't totally agree this means they can never have value though.

[kbm]

The value of a coin is not found in how much hardware it takes to 'extract' it, but in useful features it offers to users.

The same can be said about software, which is generally all I consider PoS good for. Good software alone does not make a good cryptocurrency, because software does not make a good currency. I'd need to see my currency based on something that links it to physical reality, because that's how it's been for thousands of years. To eliminate that link leaves me with a nice software system, that I don't want to use as money.

[dreamspark]

Fortunately, miners are only 0.00001% of the population. The rest have to buy coins, and they don't have a concern if it's PoW or PoS as long as it does what they need it to.

How can you be so sure about that?

While the number is exagerated the general view is true, think about anyone now wanting to get 1000XMR, are they going to buy it or are they going to spend x amount of time mining it and hoping the difficulty doesn't increase etc. Yes lots of people mine a few coins here and there but for the majoirty of people the larger parts of their holdings are bought.

The more questionable part of the statement was the assertion that buyers don't care about PoW or PoS. They might not care about the inner workings, but they damn well care in so far as it affects the security (incl perceived security) and value (incl perceived value) of their investment. To some extent this may be arbitrary or unfair (or perhaps a better word is undeserved). PoS might just has a bad reputation for whatever reasons not based in actual security (and being associated hundreds of PoS scam coins might well be part of the reason), which affects its perceived value and therefore is value. In that case it is still a bad investment (unless you want to make a bet on this changing in the future).

Yep fully agree with that, to say that buyers don't care whether they are buying PoW or PoS is nonsensical. I care, most others care . Many will immediately dismiss a coin for being PoS. With so many options in regards to alts around people make quick snap decisions about what they like the look of, with all the PoS scams that have been ran its hardly suprising that people quickly chose not to invest. Its simply harder to make gains on PoS coins when half the crypto community instantly dismisses them.

[rpietila]

Luckily your opinion has no much bearing on the real world. You can invest your government salary for anything you like, I also do the same with my business earnings. My horse has done +20,000% in the past 3 years, not only because of luck but because I understand things even when I cannot explain them to hardheaded people. Despite this, I enjoy much more following than you.

I am not buying PoS coins, because my economics understanding puts them in the same category as fiat, creating value out of nothing, and even though that may sound smart at first, it impoverishes the masses and ends sadly. Cf. USD.

I also support honest initiatives for that merit alone, and reject scams and pumps (imagine how many times I have been approached because some new coin wanted me to join a pump, I could have easily lived on those gains alone  )

[devphp]

Digital currency is digital. It doesn't need ENERGY to survive to justify itself. POS can be duplicated. Just like Bitcoin can be duplicated and XMR can be duplicated.

Not exactly. He's right in a way. Energy is scarce. You can't duplicate Bitcoin or Monero a million times with their high hash rates because the energy usage would be prohibitive. You can create a little million shitcoins with virtualy no hash rate, or which are constantly stealing hash rate from each other as miner jump to the latest scam, but those are not duplicates of the BTC or XMR network.

POS coins can be duplicated quite literally without physical limit. That is a major difference.

I don't totally agree this means they can never have value though.

If that logic is applied, would you say that Fantomcoin should be more valuable than Monero, because it can be merge-mined with it and a few others, meaning it can easily have more energy spent on mining it (larger total hashrate) than any other single CN coin? So why does it not happen? Is it because of energy spent or because there are not enough users/marketing/development efforts of Fantomcoin after all? What comes first - users see value in a coin or miners come to mine it? I would say miners follow the price, not vice versa, which proves my point that it's useful properties of a coin that matter, not how much energy is spent on it.

@kbm, see my post on why energy spent doesn't back a coin, because there is no guarantee that you can exchange a PoW coin for kWhs of spent energy. Backing a currency with some tangible things in the past centuries meant you can redeem bank notes for gold or silver. You can't do that with a crypto, so it's pointless to talk about some sort of backing with energy.

[windjc]

Digital currency is digital. It doesn't need ENERGY to survive to justify itself. POS can be duplicated. Just like Bitcoin can be duplicated and XMR can be duplicated.

Not exactly. He's right in a way. Energy is scarce. You can't duplicate Bitcoin or Monero a million times with their high hash rates because the energy usage would be prohibitive. You can create a little million shitcoins with virtualy no hash rate, or which are constantly stealing hash rate from each other as miner jump to the latest scam, and these might indeed be clones of the BTC or XMR code, but those are not duplicates of the BTC or XMR network

POS coins can be duplicated quite literally without physical limit. That is a major difference.

I don't totally agree this means they can never have value though.

Network effect. That cannot be duplicated. So, we could have a trillion POS coins. It doesnt matter. Go start a social network. Let us know how that works out for you.

Once entities outside of the tight knit crypto community (ie banks that are reaching out to partner with Nxt services) start interacting with POS independently from Bitcoin and POW alts, value will be added. This cannot be taken away.

It boggles my mind that high level thinkers and innovators struggle with the concept of POS. But that statement in itself is a misnomer, because many of these individuals don't struggle with the concept. In fact they embrace it. They just are less vocal on this forum.