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

[nakaone]

"benevolent dictator"

I think this cannot be overquoted - anomymint wrote some very reasonable posts about the importance of this role in the beginning of projects.


I think the 1% solution for financing development is fair. that said I am not a miner but an investor and I think it is as crucial to design a system for investors not to freeride. maybe less utopian is a system which inventivecises non-free riding. I have a few ideas about that but little time.

[smooth]

- do we want a change in emission? (if so, what are the pros/cons?)

- can we afford a change in emssion? (as in: will the negative reactions be prohibitively expensive).

I'd say we have bigger fish to fry right now, like getting the development moving at a faster pace than it has for the past six months.

If we can make that happen then we can take up this question at a later time. I agree with your general framework for asking the question.

[skunk]

imho we should incentivate donations instead of begging for donations...
what about a weekly lottery where participating cost you eg. 1 xmr and the winner gets eg. 50% of the jackpot and the remaining 50% goes to developers?
we could use the block hash to choose the winner like fairpumps.net is doing for choosing the coin to pump (just an idea)...
it would be even better if it could be implemented directly into the gui (just to incentivate a little more the developers to finally release it ).
what do you think?

[Triffin]

You're making this harder than it needs to be ..
Take a page from Wall Street ..

You can't have a successful project without adequate funding ..

How much money do you need ?
When do you need it ?
Is this a 'one off' funding request or an ongoing funding requirement ?  

The easiest and quickest solution is a small secondary offering ..
If you want to call it an 'instamine' then so be it ..
Bottom line you've got devs that need to be paid and projects that need to get done ..

Take 100,000 Monero out of the back-end of the emmissions curve and sell them
now at a slight discount to current market prices ..

Most current XMR holders will buy a 'proportional share' of the offering to maintain or increase their
ownership position in the coin .. and you'll be offering new investors a chance to get in at a slight discount ..

Considering the development pace in Cryptoland you can't afford to wait ..

Triff ..

[myagui]

Rounding things up, it looks like we can/will fund development by:
 - mining at a pool with a % going to development fund
 - donate on personal initiative (thus joining the hall of fame)
 - by setting up a donation % on top of transaction fees, soon^(tm)

Initiatives like MEW might/will come up with their own funding strategies as well. As stated upthread, nothing precludes a crowd funding initiative that might take place.

I think this already gives participants from all quadrants, the opportunity to take their part in assuring that development doesn't stagnate and is properly rewarded. Not all these bits are fully in motion yet, so it looks like we don't have a realistic funding quantification at this time.

There's one participant in particular that benefits largely from the Monero community, and should be in a position to 'give a little back', and that is Poloniex, which has an apparent dramatic increase in popularity and trading activity, in no small part thanks to Monero. Just my 2 cents, but I think that it would be great if they would donate a small % of their Monero trading fees to the development fund.

@ fluffy: I don't know if this has been considered yet, but perhaps it is worthwhile having a couple of different development fund accounts, in order to separate donation sources? I'm thinking that it would be useful, if long term, one could perform some statistical analysis on donations per source (% of donations made from pool fees, % of donations from individuals, % of auto-donations from the client software, etc).

Cheers,
~ Myagui

[dEBRUYNE]

Got no problem with an optional payout (and even setting it to non-zero as default in the official client).

The proposal I reacted to made no mention of it being a setting, i.e. optional, however.

Ah ok, so just to make sure everyone's on the same page, this is the screenshot from the Missive:



The idea was to make it "ticked" by default, and it's a per-wallet setting, but if people want to disable it or increase/decrease the percentage they can at any time. Before the GUI is even released, though, we wanted to add this in to simplewallet / rpcwallet - again, prompted during wallet creation, and configurable at any time.

Now I know this seems like a small amount, and it won't do much difference, and you're right. This is not going to satisfy the immediate and large funding requirements. Which is why this is more of a longer-term thing to make sure we always have budget for ongoing efforts / maintenance. It does not preclude fundraising for specific features / tasks.

Isn't it possible to make such a thing for mining also? Something like: auto-donate 1% of block-reward to development fund. Miners that would like to contribute enable the option and miners that won't just put it off. Sorry if this was already proposed, not enough time to read through the thread.

[nakaone]

There's one participant in particular that benefits largely from the Monero community, and should be in a position to 'give a little back', and that is Poloniex, which has an apparent dramatic increase in popularity and trading activity, in no small part thanks to Monero. Just my 2 cents, but I think that it would be great if they would donate a small % of their Monero trading fees to the development fund.

I also thought about poloniex role in this process but did not come to a proper solution.

there are basically two scenarios:

1.) busoni keeps his place as basically the monopoly of xmr trading - in this situation he should support xmr in the best possible way. I think if he does this position would be self enforcing.

2.) a bigger exchange overtakes his position (btc-e?), in this case he would be worse off.

that said - it could be a marketing idea of an exchange to say it funds the development of xmr

[David Latapie]

Also to anyone mining, there is a pool that donates 100% of it's 1% fee to the devs.

http://cryptonotepool.org.uk. Sure, it is a little acorn, but great oaks from little acorns grow.

[illodin]

BCX

he destoroyed aura.  or was that before ur time?

No he didn't. He said there is a timewarp exploit (in KGW), which the devs fixed.

[smooth]

Rounding things up, it looks like we can/will fund development by:
 - mining at a pool with a % going to development fund
 - donate on personal initiative (thus joining the hall of fame)
 - by setting up a donation % on top of transaction fees, soon^(tm)

Initiatives like MEW might/will come up with their own funding strategies as well. As stated upthread, nothing precludes a crowd funding initiative that might take place.

The above list won't be enough to provide significant funding unless a huge number share of the hash rate switches to pools with a significant donation percentage. That is somewhat similar to expecting a major shift in voluntary donation behavior relative to the tiny level we have seen over the past six months so I don't expect it nor consider it a reasonable plan.

Thus the crowd funding or another source is absolutely needed. I'm in agreement with trying the crowd funding first, to see whether that gets a high level of participation.

Your idea of corporate donations is a good one. We will explore that further.

[slavo]

maybe can you reach the swarmcorp team for that purpose ?

[RentaMouse]

The above list won't be enough to provide significant funding unless a huge number share of the hash rate switches to pools with a significant donation percentage. That is somewhat similar to expecting a major shift in voluntary donation behavior relative to the tiny level we have seen over the past six months so I don't expect it nor consider it a reasonable plan.

I have to agree with Smooth's last comment regarding voluntary donations; even though various miners are saying they wouldnt have a problem with a 1% donation, in practice I'm pretty certain that you would see 99.5% of them turn it off.

Interesting to turn that round and impose the fee at the pool level though - I run the pool which donates all its 1% fee to the dev fund and it has maybe 0.25% of the net hash. Reliability and payouts aren't an issue at my pool(although a surprising % of miners think that a bigger pool = bigger payouts), so maybe the donation level just isnt an important factor for most miners. If the admins of the top 5 pools could be convinced to jointly increase their donation fee to 1% (in addition to whatever fee they need to fund the pool) I don't think they would lose many miners to smaller pools who opted not to impose the fee.

It was a few pages back now but I appreciate Anon136's argument against imposing a "post-mine" which would affect the emissions curve, as he says miners have the choice to stop mining if they dont like the change but investors have already bought in so changing the conditions is unfair. I still like the idea of a post-mine on the principle that the devteam have proved themselves worthy of a pre-mine which never happened, but I don't have a decent idea of how to create it

[StatusSeeking]

What the heck is going on with the price?

[Triffin]

What the heck is going on with the price?

1) Dithering
2) Gravity
3) BitCoinEXpress' exploit

Triff ..

[mmortal03]

Look, one can argue that having good developers is just as important to a cryptocurrency's future as the security provided by the miners, and so, too, deserve compensation. The problem with open source projects is how to implement this compensation in such a way that it doesn't centralize the development funds to one particular individual or set of individuals. If there was some way to trustlessly and fairly direct funds to each individual developer based on their perceived contributions to the development work, using some sort of algorithm, that would be the ideal. This may be an intractable problem.

It's no wonder that projects where there is no opposition to investment in a centralization of effort (say, closed source startups) at least don't have this problem. They do have other problems, of course.

It'd definitely be awesome if someone could figure out a way to fairly compensate FOSS devs for the all those LASER beams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYJwen53cII

[Odalv]

Ok I'm not sure about "image key". I red somewhere it is derived from private key (so only me can verify because only I know private ) ... But in this paper "image key" is derived from pubic key. Does it mean I can use  VER/LINK to find out who is really spending ?

This is a TA thread - if you're struggling to grasp the cryptography then you are welcome to continue this discussion in the Monero ANN thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

Alternatively, if you believe you've found an exploit, I do encourage you (again) to document it and write a PoC like every other security researcher. The process of writing a PoC normally forces me to come to grips with the intricacies of the subject, and I document thereafter.

Rem tene verba sequentur, as they used to say.

Is that "image key" public observable ? Every node knows what input is really spent and who ring-sing this message ?

Edit:
If I know YOUR public key, from an unspet input . You are broadcasting new transaction (is not yet minted). I can compute "image key" and create ring-sing of YOUR input with my privateKey ...

[neverminer77]

I never thought I would ever think a tax could be the best solution to a problem, but that 1% seems fair and logical considering the needs. (Note: I'm a pretty big XMR miner myself.)

I think Anon136 has a point, it isn't really a tax, it is a price for a product (sort of). If you don't like the product, you can always use another one. It isn't as if there is a lack of choice of cryptocoins (1000+ and cointing) or even cryptocoins based on CN technology (10 or so and counting, including one that has been abandoned and you can adopt yourself for nothing if you want it).

Fair enough, even if that's probably still a tax in the sense it's automatically deducted from your potential gain. Let's say it's a mix of both. Anyway I'd pay it. It's a no-brainer for me. You guys need money, you spent a lot of time trying the voluntary approach, it didn't work well, now you're completely open about it. I should have donated more (just paid via the pool) but I didn't know you guys were that desperate. To me that's another proof of your honesty, the fundamental health of this project, and another incentive to make it prosper.

1% is not that much of a loss. no one should complain about it considering what the coins are going to be spent for.  

[majeis]

I also thought about poloniex role in this process but did not come to a proper solution.

there are basically two scenarios:

1.) busoni keeps his place as basically the monopoly of xmr trading - in this situation he should support xmr in the best possible way. I think if he does this position would be self enforcing.

2.) a bigger exchange overtakes his position (btc-e?), in this case he would be worse off.

that said - it could be a marketing idea of an exchange to say it funds the development of xmr

No other exchange will try to push that kind of volume in the same questionable manner unless they're trying a coordinated manipulation on it... but why bother?

So +1 on scenario 1, though not sure how good of a scenario that is.

[Triffin]

You're making this harder than it needs to be ..
Take a page from Wall Street ..

You can't have a successful project without adequate funding ..

How much money do you need ?
When do you need it ?
Is this a 'one off' funding request or an ongoing funding requirement ?  

The easiest and quickest solution is a small secondary offering ..
If you want to call it an 'instamine' then so be it ..
Bottom line you've got devs that need to be paid and projects that need to get done ..

Take 100,000 Monero out of the back-end of the emmissions curve and sell them
now at a slight discount to current market prices ..

Most current XMR holders will buy a 'proportional share' of the offering to maintain or increase their
ownership position in the coin .. and you'll be offering new investors a chance to get in at a slight discount ..

Considering the development pace in Cryptoland you can't afford to wait ..

Triff ..

No good ?? Don't want to do a secondary offering ??

Then ask the top 100 wallets on the 'rich list' ( they know who they are )
to kick in 1% of what they currently own/hold to the 'Dev Fund' ..

Triff ..

[sleepdog]

imho we should incentivate donations instead of begging for donations...
what about a weekly lottery where participating cost you eg. 1 xmr and the winner gets eg. 50% of the jackpot and the remaining 50% goes to developers?

This is a great idea. One that could probably be run by pretty much anyone too.

Perhaps someone should try it and see what kind of level of participation we get?