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

[Mumbles]

You couldn't be more wrong. Trust and non scam is a huge merit and the reason many of us are investing in XMR.

XMR being created to avoid "scams" is not a merit.

[Nekomata]

XMR is the future.

[surfer43]

How can it be "documented" cbuchner sold all his coins?

Like this.

[smooth]

Is there an active prioritized bounty list? That's a start.

Apparently the developer group at some point became very opposed to continuing to use bounties (which we did early on). I was not directly part of that decision and have no opinion on it so I can't comment.

EDIT: Although, I would add a small opinion. There has been an active bounty for an AMD GPU miner since the very beginning, one to which I pledged (the largest pledge if I'm not mistake). Not only has the bounty not produced such a miner, but no one has pledged anything more toward the bounty since that time either. So based on my limited experience I'd say it suffers from the same failure as other forms of voluntary contributions.

[nioc]

The other part of the decision not to use bounties is that the incentive is to do the minimum required to collect the bounty with no further development or support.  This isn't always the case with the windows GUI being one example.

[rpietila]

The beauty of MEW is that everyone may voice their own opinion and vote for it, and the majority wins. Even then, the core team may totally independently decide whether to act according to the guidance or not.

Majority of what?

One man one vote?
One coin one vote?
Ranking systems?

It's all arbitrary. I wish I could continue this discussion some more but I can't right now. I will try and come back later today or tomorrow.

Most everything is arbitrary. That should, however, not lead to nihilism, believing that a bad modus operandi is equal to a good one. While a perfect one may not be possible to find, the aspiration to a better one should still be our aim. The founding fathers of the united States (sic), at least some of them, believed in that revolutions every once in a while are necessary, because a political system cannot make provisions for its own overthrow - there are limits to what can be accomplished inside the system.

Yet they clearly saw that some system was necessary to wage a war of freedom from the greatest Empire on Earth until that time, plus for the building of a nation and guarding its independence from then on. We all know that it did not work out - at first the Constitution was amended, then it was enshrined, then it was mummified, and then it was essentially overthrown by the federal takeover of the liberties that were fought for, more than 200 years ago. The only real attempt of rebellion/revolution/reinstating the rights that the federal government was about to take away, was quenched with a military action in 1861-1865. From then on the freedoms have been on a descent.

The following piece by NewLiberty won the Bitcoin Supernode Essay Contest early this year:

Supernode Decision Making

Various proposals are considered but primarily differentiated between identity and investment.

Both types of systems are essentially voting systems, with the primary difference being the criteria for voting power.  There are many different systems for voting, but these can be set aside for now.

Political systems have historically centered around identity based voting, but are also heavily influenced by investment into presentation of the messages upon which voters may base their voting decisions.  These decisions are primarily government centered and usually determine high level office holders, taxation, spending, and etc.

Financial systems have historically centered around investment as the principal criteria for voting power.  Shareholders may vote their shares or assigning them to others by proxy, large shareholders may be given board membership to make more detailed decisions.

For the Bitcoin Supernode system, the rationale for selecting one of these over the other, whether voting is representational of investment or identity can be determined by the focus and agenda of the supernode system.

The Bitcoin Supernode system has been described as a fundamental advocacy for the expansion and protection of the uniqueness of Bitcoin, through education and a focus on significantly increasing the liberty in the world, especially economic liberty.

This agenda and focus bridge both the political and financial arenas, however the mechanism of action of a supernode is primarily financial in activity, rather than political.  This suggests that there may be some blending of both types of decision making, but where to draw the line between these?

For financial activity, investments, business development, and spending on education these are each financial decisions primarily.  More narrowly, education and liberty activities may be political in nature.  The natural blend here is facilitated by the identity based discussion and lobbying of ideas and proposals, with the financial based decision making of whether or not to fund such initiatives.

The element most fundamental to the supernode concept in making this determination is maximizing liberty, and any constraint on liberty for any end must be carefully considered.  In this structure, individual identities have maximal liberty in a) forwarding their proposals, b) providing discussion and c) decision-support activities, while preserving the financial liberty of those funding the efforts as to whether the initiative will be funded.

Maximizing liberty through this structure the supernode benefits from encouraging the wealth of mental activity toward its goals, and likewise encouraging the wealth of funding those goals by maximizing the liberty of each.  Individuals are free to advocate or not, and investors are free to fund or not.

Ancillary benefits to this method is its resistance to exploitation through pseudo-identity constructions.  Members of a supernode would otherwise have an inappropriate incentive to create identities for the simple purpose of forcing investment through force of numbers.  This incentive does not exist in the advocacy role as many similar comments and suggestions do not expand the wealth of options and can be reduced to a single choice among the available choices.  Investment based voting does not bear the same risk as the expense of creating the investment is outweighed by the power influenced by that investment mathematically.

In the MEW, we explored several different grounds for basing the votepower. The aim was to gain the best possible legitimacy as the representation of the owners of the XMR. We went through different ideas, ranging from provable stake to semi-provable stake (via forum bragging) or reputation. The method selected was in the end very straightforward - 1 XMR "invested" in MEW gives 1 vote. We dropped all additional qualifications since we found that they were ineffective in protecting against Sybil attacks, and did not really add but rather subtract legitimacy that we aimed to have as the collective of the owners based on their stakes. Adding other requirements would have alienated the large not-connected owners and made this a club.

Ideally, the votepower would also require provable holdings. The ideal way to prove them does not exist, however.


The questions such as this, therefore become easier to handle:

I suggest the dev team to put an end once and for all to this discussion with an official note that they wont be changing anything related to that.

Unlike most coins (some afaik do have a direct stake-based voting), Monero has an economic community vote. Whenever 10% of the community feels that any matter is important enough to be discussed and voted upon, it will be done. According to our charter,

MEW disregards non-member attempts to influence its action, welcoming the interested parties to become members instead.

I exhort you (and tacotime whom you quoted) to become members if you want to be part of this discussion. Exhorting the devteam to take a collective stance on a matter that does have strong opinions by both sides, in a public forum with no ground of measuring legitimacy, is reckless at best and outright trolling at worst. We already suffered (well, gloriously defended against) a trolling attack, and do not want the pot to be stirred needlessly.

There is consensus among the developers and the MEW that nothing that relates to the emission will be decided hastily. This will not be the first issue that the MEW handles. We develop our decision making process first with other matters that are less prone to knee-jerk responses to "sell all our coins" (I know this from experience since the MEW already has members in both emission camps that have promised to sell all they have if the opposite side wins  )

[generalizethis]

The other part of the decision not to use bounties is that the incentive is to do the minimum required to collect the bounty with no further development or support.  This isn't always the case with the windows GUI being one example.

I have input on this, but it's quite late so I'll have to save it for later.

My opinion is still a ''kickstarter'' campaign like protonmail.ch did, another privacy oriented "service", it was very successful and funded it with hundreds of thousands, the only "requirement" for it is having a fancy website with all the goals and working functions of monero so a random person can decide and with their freewill give (or not) to monero project.

Anon136 said he would host it. How would we promote it? Here? Reddit? Other? What kind of marketing materials? A general announcement with a link? A promo piece in some crypto-e-zines would be nice--Other?

I think coders see coding solutions, engineers see engineering solutions,  investors see investing solutions, altruists see altruistic solutions, and these are all represented well. But do we have marketing solution? Do we have marketers?

[varun555]

Is there an active prioritized bounty list? That's a start.

Apparently the developer group at some point became very opposed to continuing to use bounties (which we did early on). I was not directly part of that decision and have no opinion on it so I can't comment.

EDIT: Although, I would add a small opinion. There has been an active bounty for an AMD GPU miner since the very beginning, one to which I pledged (the largest pledge if I'm not mistake). Not only has the bounty not produced such a miner, but no one has pledged anything more toward the bounty since that time either. So based on my limited experience I'd say it suffers from the same failure as other forms of voluntary contributions.

Yes. you are on the dot on this one. I have seen you repeatedly mentioning it here to no avail.  I can only exhort you push it once more now. Maybe in today's environment, something might move.

Maybe we can try to significantly increase the bounty.

[Nekomata]

XMR is the future.

[fluffypony]

Guys, nobody is making any decisions on anything right now. Thus far, there have been a few scattered suggestions, but there hasn't been even one formal, well-defined, thoroughly analysed, well documented proposal. Calls for us (the Core Team) to make a decision or a statement just leave us scratching our heads and saying "turn down for what?"

This frenzied back-and-forth in posts littered with veiled threats and promises are posts driven by emotion. Of course I personally have extremely strong feelings in this matter, but is this the time and place to be discussing it? It is not.

Nothing is on the table or off the table, because there is no table just yet. The constant attacks, both actual and threatened, have left us running around chasing our tails for a month. Now is not the time or create disarray and suck up time in circuitous debates. There will be a time and place for that in the not too distant future.

I would respectfully request that if you insist on discussing this, that any and all comments or posts discussing ideas around "dev blocks", miner tax, adjusting the emission curve, threats to sell your stash if X happens, calls for the core team to wade through walls of posts and make some comment, and anything of that nature be taken to the MEW thread or anywhere else.

Let's, please, solidify ourselves and retain some degree of unity as we restart our activities and reevaluate our priorities, and we can have these in-depth and controversial discussions once the smoke has cleared.

[varun555]

The other part of the decision not to use bounties is that the incentive is to do the minimum required to collect the bounty with no further development or support.  This isn't always the case with the windows GUI being one example.

What I understand is that there actually is a need for a continuous upkeep/up gradation of the mining software. If this is true, then we can take a leaf from the PIMP mining software. It's website displays the various features that can be added vis a vis the money that would be required for a particular feature, all through donations. Once the limit for any feature set is filled, they write the code for it within a predetermined time frame.

Bits B Trippin featured this on it's youtube series. It seems quite a kickass of a programme.

Maybe we could do something like  this.

[smooth]

I would respectfully request that if you insist on discussing this, that any and all comments or posts discussing ideas around "dev blocks", miner tax, adjusting the emission curve, threats to sell your stash if X happens, calls for the core team to wade through walls of posts and make some comment, and anything of that nature be taken to the MEW thread or anywhere else.

Let's, please, solidify ourselves and retain some degree of unity as we restart our activities and reevaluate our priorities, and we can have these in-depth and controversial discussions once the smoke has cleared.

I concur with my team mate fluffypony.

A proposal has been made within MEW on this matter and that is the best place to discuss it.

[fluffypony]

if you think the community will ever accept changes on emission or a dev block you are 100% wrong :p

Again, not the time, not the place, to even have this discussion.

Now for a joke: why did the hedgehog cross the road? To get to it's flat mate.

:-P

[smooth]

EDIT: Although, I would add a small opinion. There has been an active bounty for an AMD GPU miner since the very beginning, one to which I pledged (the largest pledge if I'm not mistake). Not only has the bounty not produced such a miner, but no one has pledged anything more toward the bounty since that time either. So based on my limited experience I'd say it suffers from the same failure as other forms of voluntary contributions.

This is the first I've heard about it and I try to keep at the front of things as much as possible. Nothing personal, but it must not have been well organized or promoted. If it were, More would have heard of it and it likely would have received at least a few donations other than yourself.

It did receive a few donations other than myself. Here is the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656841.0

It has been discussed here and on the Monero Mining thread and elsewhere many times, usually linked, often in response to a comment like yours about how this or that should have a bounty, or even in response to specific comments about having a bounty for or having the developer team write a GPU miner. In each and every case, that has generated zero new pledges.

I'm sorry but the only reasonable conclusion I can reach from this experience is that people would prefer to simply let "someone else" pay.

EDIT 2: You could find a donations liason/manager or whatever you call it, whom the dev team communicates to, then they go on to process the info and accomplish these ends. This removes the time and organizational burden of this process from the dev's so they can focus on proper dev work.

Are you volunteering?

[DLow]

Anybody else experiencing issues with moneropool.com?

Miner is hashing away, yet the pool dash shows no shares or hashrate.

Edit: Also I think pool hash fell considerably.. Not fudding, just raising awareness with what's been going on recently

[iCEBREAKER]

if you think the community will ever accept changes on emission or a dev block you are 100% wrong :p

The post-mine bootstrap idea enjoyed immediate popular support when Triffin and RentaMouse first proposed it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8881179#msg8881179

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8874391#msg8874391

If you don't like it, start your own fork (with blackjack and hookers...).

[smooth]

Anybody else experiencing issues with moneropool.com?

Miner is hashing away, yet the pool dash shows no shares or hashrate.

Edit: Also I think pool hash fell considerably.. Not fudding, just raising awareness with what's been going on recently

We're looking into it meanwhile everyone please move your miners off moneropool.com. The pool is clearly having trouble and its has rate is down to a tiny fraction of normal.

Anyone who is prepared to fire up AWS instances or GPU rigs or anything else to help support the network while moneropool.com is impaired, please do so.

[smooth]

How about abiding by fluffypony's and my requests to take this up within the context of the MEW or at least give it a rest here for now?

You too Nekomata.

[oda.krell]

Guys, nobody is making any decisions on anything right now. Thus far, there have been a few scattered suggestions, but there hasn't been even one formal, well-defined, thoroughly analysed, well documented proposal. Calls for us (the Core Team) to make a decision or a statement just leave us scratching our heads and saying "turn down for what?"

This frenzied back-and-forth in posts littered with veiled threats and promises are posts driven by emotion. Of course I personally have extremely strong feelings in this matter, but is this the time and place to be discussing it? It is not.

Nothing is on the table or off the table, because there is no table just yet. The constant attacks, both actual and threatened, have left us running around chasing our tails for a month. Now is not the time or create disarray and suck up time in circuitous debates. There will be a time and place for that in the not too distant future.

I would respectfully request that if you insist on discussing this, that any and all comments or posts discussing ideas around "dev blocks", miner tax, adjusting the emission curve, threats to sell your stash if X happens, calls for the core team to wade through walls of posts and make some comment, and anything of that nature be taken to the MEW thread or anywhere else.

Let's, please, solidify ourselves and retain some degree of unity as we restart our activities and reevaluate our priorities, and we can have these in-depth and controversial discussions once the smoke has cleared.

Thanks, and 100% agreement from me.

There wasn't even a proposal to vote, and still some in here reacted as if Monero was about to be hijacked by special interest groups. In fact, the careful reader will have noticed that a number of posters (including me) said that a more structured discussion on those topic should take place another time, not in the current turmoil.

I do want to point out one asymmetry in this discussion: as I said above, the (rather cautious) proponents of e.g. emission change, said "discussion on this topic another time". To which the opponents answered in absolute terms ("out of the question"), and emotional threats to sell their stash right now, unless the devs sign a declaration of code immutability.

If I were cynical I'd respond "I don't see price crashing? Guess your stash wasn't that big after all."

I also want, for the record, state very clearly what *was* and what was *not* actually discussed so far:

1) the 'emission' discussion  and the 'dev funding' discussion have been, but should not to be conflated. There was at least one proposal that entered into both areas, but the majority of funding proposals had nothing to do with emission. Keep the two topics separate, please.

2) the "pro" arguments for emission change have been grossly misrepresented. Nobody ever argued to change emission so that the exchange rate would go higher. The *actual* argument in favor of slowing emission, in a nutshell: a big share of Monero will be mined rather soon (compared to, say, how Bitcoin does it), and some of us are worried that this could hamper the long-term potential of Monero. The argument "You want to change emission to pump & dump, or fill your pockets" is a complete strawman.

I'm going to let this topic rest now (unless there is a response that misrepresents my position). I will however say, as I said before, that this is in a sense a community project, and statements by some in here "that topic X isn't even up for discussion" are naive in the context of such a project (not addressed at you, fluffypony) ....

There will be several difficult decisions the dev team (and the community) will have to make in the future, completely unrelated to emission or dev funding, and we will have to come up with methods to gauge what the consensus (or at least: majority opinion) is on those topics. Shouting "If you do X, I will leave!" is perhaps the least helpful response in developing such methods.

[iCEBREAKER]

if you think the community will ever accept changes on emission or a dev block you are 100% wrong :p

The post-mine bootstrap idea enjoyed immediate popular support when Triffin and RentaMouse first proposed it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8881179#msg8881179

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg8874391#msg8874391

If you don't like it, start your own fork (with blackjack and hookers...).

oh because it was your idea? no, it was a shitty idea, the general consensus is the people that want change the status quo go fork the coin to satisfy their needs.

My idea?  You don't read very well do you?

Here, have a second chance to catch the clue-clue train:

The post-mine bootstrap idea enjoyed immediate popular support when Triffin and RentaMouse first proposed it

I like XMR's emission just fine.  Especially the part where the tail-end is To Be Determined:

A minimum subsidy may be implemented in the future with <1% inflation to preserve mining incentives.

Sorry smooth & fluffy, but the MEW is master-debating about what their own logo and name should be right now.  IE, it's not ready for prime time.