Monero Economy

[AnonyMint]

Ok so now we basically agree and it is matter of correct design and implementation. So I will signout of this if there is no further major points that need to be addressed?

Thanks for the discussion.

[rpietila]

So if you are going to bring that Napster size market into your crypto-currency, you are going to need your wallet client integrated into social networking.

BTC already has the QuickCoin, which can send your bitcoins to anyone of your FB friends without them needing to do anything in advance.

[NewLiberty]

So if you are going to bring that Napster size market into your crypto-currency, you are going to need your wallet client integrated into social networking.

Which is, of course, the polar opposite of anonymity.

[cAPSLOCK]

So if you are going to bring that Napster size market into your crypto-currency, you are going to need your wallet client integrated into social networking.

Which is, of course, the polar opposite of anonymity.

If we use a file sharing analogy we should flesh it out a little more, though it cannot be a perfect analogy.

Bitcoin is most like Napster --> iTunes&Spotify
We are talking about technology which is eventually sanctioned, regulated, and used in the open.  Though it had shaky beginnings and was tied to illegal uses it evolves to become more mainstream.  It has many connections with the social network, and will always be preferred by masses who do not need the value of less convenient methods which offer better privacy (buy a CD with cash and convert to MP3 for use on a non connected device), and are glad to avoid the appearance of shady dealings.

Monero is more like Gnutella -> Bittorrent.
This is ethics neutral and legally agnostic technology.  It evolved to evade the costs to privacy incurred by the other technology and to further avoid centralization.  It may never be as widespread in use as the more open connected technology above,  but the astute user, or professional user might find value in this more private decentralized solution.  Of course crime uses also gravitate to this technology as they find clear benefits in privacy.  But it is CERTAINLY not only crime that will find an interest (linuxtracker.org for example).  There are few connections to the social network.

So a question is this (for AnonyMint really), why would Monero need a facebook app?  Not that it wont get one, but the use cases for Monero span a slightly different set than that of more "mainstream" crypto imo.

[cAPSLOCK]

I suppose the obvious answer is Monero will be used for private cash like transactions on social networks...  But my point is the other uses will pave the way for this.  We don't need that functionality first.

[AnonyMint]

My point is simple. To top out at significant share of global population for adoption, need to make it something that the majority of people need and want to use. And adoption should be extremely easy or decentralized. See how fast Viber took off.

I have a specific idea in this realm and in my personal opinion QuickCoin isn't it because afaik it doesn't drive a major need nor a major market.

If I am correct to interpret that Bitcoin adoption should have a similar S curve slope as the internet, radio, and cell phone, Bitcoin is looking to top out in the realm of 10 - 50 million users as currently structured given it was launched 5 years ago and current estimates of usership are in the couple of million range.

Whereas, crypto-currency may be more like the computer that took 50 years to develop adoption, because it was too expensive and lacking sufficient computational power, etc.. Bitcoin was the first rough attempt at doing crypto-currency and (in my opinion) has numerous flaws.

I want to see Facebook replaced with something faster growing and hopefully more protective our privacy and not a honeypot for the NSA (not just make something eaten by Facebook, e.g. WhatsApp), not embrace it (I own a domain appropriate for this, coolpage.com). Facebook was launched 10 years ago, thus according the technology adoption curves for decentralized virtual technologies, Facebook is well past 50% adoption already. Given it is as popular as the VCR, it may already be past 80% adoption and on the rapidly declining end of its S growth curve.

[rpietila]

Facebook is well past 50% adoption already. Given it is as popular as the VCR, it may already be past 80% adoption and on the rapidly declining end of its S growth curve.

Isn't FB's active usage actually in the decline already? Remember reading a post concering the matter..

[dreamspark]

Facebook is well past 50% adoption already. Given it is as popular as the VCR, it may already be past 80% adoption and on the rapidly declining end of its S growth curve.

Isn't FB's active usage actually in the decline already? Remember reading a post concering the matter..

I think this is true although with facebook I imagine their demographic shifts quite a bit as people gain access to and then begin to use the service.

[AnonyMint]

Hello guys. I have some thoughts on the Ethereum IPO (and applicable to Monero in terms of the economics of premine, supply curve, and valuation). I am interested to read your thoughts here or at that thread or a link to where you've commented elsewhere on it?

[NapoleonBonaparte]

Hello guys. I have some thoughts on the Ethereum IPO (and applicable to Monero in terms of the economics of premine, supply curve, and valuation). I am interested to read your thoughts here or at that thread or a link to where you've commented elsewhere on it?

Research and do some homework before buying. Ask question such as what competitive advantage this coin give vs the current batch of coins. How usable is the coin? Is the blockchain practical in term of confirmation time when it grows as large as bitcoin.

Remember this, investors who didn't do enough research and homework before investing deserve what they get.

[AnonyMint]

I have a question about CPU mining.  I've been browsing thru bitcointalk again due to the links you've been sending.  And I've seen two things I'm curious as to your take on when it comes to CPU mining.  

"Well, CPU minable coins, such as our XMR, have the problem that we have to worry about not just cryptocurrency mining power, but all CPU power in the world that could mine.  What if all idle CPU power in the world suddenly started mining Monero?  What if someone subverted AWS and pointed all Amazon's hardware at Monero?  Could they mount a 51% attack?  (Extermely unlikely, I know, that anyone will subvert AWS, but the point is we now need to worry not about someone having 51% of the SHA-256 ASICs, but simply somone having more CPU than the Monero miners). "

"I don't get why people worry about ASIC centralization when the two organizations in the world with the most computing power are Google & the NSA"

Indeed those are serious concerns. But Google and the NSA don't have spare capacity. They would stop rendering existing services to use that CPU power for attacking a coin. Much more of a concern is if the NSA is serving national security letters to specialized or closed source ASIC manufacturers (e.g. any ASIC for Monero is going to be a very specialized likely closed source design, because it is so complex) and requiring them to sell xx% of their production to them (much more realistic for the NSA to lock up some % of control that way than redeploy their huge infrastructure which is already dedicated to other tasks). Also assuming the $3 - 5 trillion black budget is correct, the NSA has unlimited funds and so we need to very concerned about ASICs that could be (covertly) locked up by them, unlike generalized CPU power that can't be.

Note I made the point that botnets pull from the supply of computers as legitimate mining, thus if mining demand is high enough, the price of botnets need to rise asymptotically to approach the cost of renting the same hardware, so botnets are not an extreme threat at the asymptote where most people in the world mine.

This is why I would want any ASIC to be very modular for generalized use (e.g. SHA2 or the AES round circuit) and easy to reproduce by a wide array of vendors. Ideally you want that any specialized ASIC can't best the modular ASIC by an order-of-magnitude, and it would be really sweet if not more than doubling of performance from the highly specialized ASIC. Amdahl's Law applies but is not sufficient by itself for complete characterization of the solution space.

And the most CPU power in the world resides with the users. They just aren't organized...

[georgehosterguy]

I'll point out the fact that high end CPU computing power (thru cloud based technology) is moving computing power AWAY from the end user.  It doesn't matter if I'm on a tablet or a high end $2,000 gaming desktop - more and more of my work is crunched by cloud computing.  Corporate servers are moving to AWS, Microsoft SQL Server is moving to Azure.  Email moving from exchange to gmail.  It's being centralized from both end users AND corporate levels to global centralized computing power.

The computing power may still be held by the masses but we are shifting to low computing power devices (iPhone's, iPad's, etc) while the computing power is shifting to more and more centralized places.  I see tons of white trash who've never owned a computer using tablets now.  

High end CPU's are more of a consumer niche than they are consumer mainstream.  More so now than 5 years ago.  Mainstream will belong to power sipping low powered processors for tablets, phones, cheap laptops, etc

[AnonyMint]

I'll point out the fact that high end CPU computing power (thru cloud based technology) is moving computing power AWAY from the end user.  It doesn't matter if I'm on a tablet or a high end $2,000 gaming desktop - more and more of my work is crunched by cloud computing.  Corporate servers are moving to AWS, Microsoft SQL Server is moving to Azure.  Email moving from exchange to gmail.  It's being centralized from both end users AND corporate levels to global centralized computing power.

The computing power may still be held by the masses but we are shifting to low computing power devices (iPhone's, iPad's, etc) while the computing power is shifting to more and more centralized places.  I see tons of white trash who've never owned a computer using tablets now.  

High end CPU's are more of a consumer niche than they are consumer mainstream.  More so now than 5 years ago.  Mainstream will belong to power sipping low powered processors for tablets, phones, cheap laptops, etc

Astute point. Thanks for making it.

We are discussing a related topic at rpietila's altcoin thread.

The blog post below makes it clear that it boils down to whether mining ASICs will be shipped by default on users' motherboards:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/19/mining/

Assuming that the funding strategies of selling pre-orders and selling mining contracts are economically equivalent (which they are), the equation for determining whether in-house mining or selling makes more sense is as follows:



...

This is actually surprisingly likely to be achievable. To see why, note that mining output per dollar spent is, for most people, sublinear. The first N units of mining power are very cheap to produce, since users can simply use the existing unused computational time on their desktops and only pay for electricity (E). Going beyond N units, however, one needs to pay for both hardware and electricity (H + E). If ASICs are feasible, as long as their speedup over commodity hardware is less than (H + E) / E, then even in an ASIC-containing ecosystem it will be profitable for people to spend their electricity mining on their desktops. This is the goal that we wish to strive for

Users can't farm out encryption to the cloud. It has to happen before the data leaves the user's system.

[smooth]

mining ASICs will be shipped by default on users' motherboards:

This is extremely unlikely unless some very, big player (Intel, NSA, perhaps entertainment industry, etc.) has an ulterior motive.

It took years before even audio got widely added to motherboards.

Margins on motherboards are tiny. Nothing gets added unless it is very widely demanded (or, as above, pushed by an external agenda).

If your coin becomes enormously popular, then after several years an ASIC for it might get added to new motherboards, and then several years after that a large portion of the installed base will have them installed. This is at least a decade of lag.

[AnonyMint]

smooth it is a very valid point. But of all the options we have in front of us, the one that is most likely to be shipped on every motherboard is encryption, because power consumption is very important on smart phone and if users demand their communications be encrypted, then you need low power hardware to do it. And power efficiency is all you need to compete with ASICs. I was told by my former boss who works at Apple that specialized ASICs on smart phones is the future.

And we already have AES-NI on every desktop and server CPU but I don't know how well it performs on a power efficiency basis relative to an ASIC for AES.

[smooth]

smooth it is a very valid point. But of all the options we have in front of us, the one that is most likely to be shipped on every motherboard is encryption, because power consumption is very important on smart phone and if users demand their communications be encrypted, then you need low power hardware to do it. And power efficiency is all you need to compete with ASICs. I was told by my former boss who works at Apple that specialized ASICs on smart phones is the future.

Phones already have numerous ASICs. I guess one might expect that to go in the direction of phones becoming an ASIC (at least the IC components). But again the hard part is getting your favorite features into the ASIC(s) if you aren't a big player like Apple, Verizon, or NSA.

And we already have AES-NI on every desktop and server CPU but I don't know how well it performs on a power efficiency basis relative to an ASIC for AES.

I think I saw an Intel white paper that claimed their implementation was competitive with other hardware implementations of AES. But the bigger issue is how AES is being used (for proof-of-work). If you are using it in some idiosyncratic way, an ASIC may outperform a lot.

[AnonyMint]

I think I saw an Intel white paper that claimed their implementation was competitive with other hardware implementations of AES.

I am also thinking about the power consumption of the CPU and the system over all since not everything but the AES-NI can be powered down.

As the number of cores increases, this perhaps will be reduced as a negative factor.

Also Intel is aggressively working on power consumption for its next generation.

But the bigger issue is how AES is being used (for proof-of-work). If you are using it in some idiosyncratic way, an ASIC may outperform a lot.

[nioc]

smooth it is a very valid point. But of all the options we have in front of us, the one that is most likely to be shipped on every motherboard is encryption, because power consumption is very important on smart phone and if users demand their communications be encrypted, then you need low power hardware to do it. And power efficiency is all you need to compete with ASICs. I was told by my former boss who works at Apple that specialized ASICs on smart phones is the future.

And we already have AES-NI on every desktop and server CPU but I don't know how well it performs on a power efficiency basis relative to an ASIC for AES.

I bought a cheap computer 3 months ago and it is not AES-NI.  It was good for everything I needed.  This was before I discovered Monero.  It can and does run Monero.

[Brad_BCK]

I bought a cheap computer 3 months ago and it is not AES-NI.  It was good for everything I needed.  This was before I discovered Monero.  It can and does run Monero.

Which CPU it uses? Maybe I'm mistaken, but I do not know any CPU's without AES-NI.

[Wikstr80]

Hi

I am going to invest some money in altcoins. I have 2.5btc for that purpose. How much would you suggest investing in monero? What about the risks that it could go to zero this year?

Thank you