rpietila Altcoin Observer

[achimsmile]

that's a pretty weak deflection

Indeed, it is a weak argument. My thought: What to tell people on here that do not want to read kushti's or vitalik's paper and still say that every PoS is vulnerable to n@s?
So let's fight Joe average's reasoning with the same.

but still, if n@s was possible and a hacker could easily gain a lot of money doing it, it makes you wonder why no one succeeded. It's been almost 2 years since Nxt is out.

Kushti's recent research seems to indicate that long range N@S attacks aren't an issue on NXT at least.

yes. But people on here don't care.

[rpietila]

In my understanding, n@s is a capability you don't lose. So it's better to wait until there is something to gain.

So you attack point 3. and say that currently, an attacker would not gain anything?

edit: Note that market cap for Nxt has been 100M in the past

I am not attacking anything. Just saying that like nuclear weapons, you need to first have them before you can use them. Perhaps nobody has the nuclear weapons to attack NXT, or the ones who have, don't gain by using them.

Just because something has a marketcap, does not mean that there is much to be gained by destroying it.

[dewdeded]

Let's talk Bitcoin has interviewed fluffypony (Monero core developer)
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/ltb-e202-understanding-monero.

Furthermore Monero was now added been to shapeshift.io:

https://twitter.com/ShapeShift_io/status/585570515139563521

And the pull request for the database version in the official master was made:

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/256


Best Monero day ever? :-)

[Its About Sharing]

Let's talk Bitcoin has interviewed fluffypony (Monero core developer)
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/ltb-e202-understanding-monero.

Furthermore Monero was now added been to shapeshift.io:

https://twitter.com/ShapeShift_io/status/585570515139563521

And the pull request for the database version in the official master was made:

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/256


Best Monero day ever? :-)

Honestly, looks like all the groundwork has been laid for the Grand Finale - The GUI. And it all fell into place so quickly, relatively speaking.
Once we have a true "Killer App" GUI out (with the merchant tools too I believe), I think then we will know where Monero is going. Though recent movements hint... up. 

[e-coinomist]

...
And the pull request for the database version in the official master was made:
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/256
Best Monero day ever? :-)

Honestly, looks like all the groundwork has been laid for the Grand Finale - The GUI. And it all fell into place so quickly, relatively speaking.
Once we have a true "Killer App" GUI out (with the merchant tools too I believe), I think then we will know where Monero is going. Though recent movements hint... up. 

Well, Bytecoin announcing a GUI release this week might have worked miracles. Maybe we can move them into announcing some OpenBazar clone, to speed it up over there at Dwarfpool 

[Oscilson]

...
And the pull request for the database version in the official master was made:
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/256
Best Monero day ever? :-)

Honestly, looks like all the groundwork has been laid for the Grand Finale - The GUI. And it all fell into place so quickly, relatively speaking.
Once we have a true "Killer App" GUI out (with the merchant tools too I believe), I think then we will know where Monero is going. Though recent movements hint... up. 

Well, Bytecoin announcing a GUI release this week might have worked miracles. Maybe we can move them into announcing some OpenBazar clone, to speed it up over there at Dwarfpool 

Bytecoin is still being developed actively. I wonder where do they get the funding, from the premine?

[rpietila]

...
And the pull request for the database version in the official master was made:
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/256
Best Monero day ever? :-)

Honestly, looks like all the groundwork has been laid for the Grand Finale - The GUI. And it all fell into place so quickly, relatively speaking.
Once we have a true "Killer App" GUI out (with the merchant tools too I believe), I think then we will know where Monero is going. Though recent movements hint... up. 

Well, Bytecoin announcing a GUI release this week might have worked miracles. Maybe we can move them into announcing some OpenBazar clone, to speed it up over there at Dwarfpool 

Bytecoin is still being developed actively. I wonder where do they get the funding, from the premine?

There is no need for much funding. Monero is very little funded, and more actively developed than Bytecoin. Also CK did not really receive any funding. Same with Bitcoin.

The marginal benefit of money when doing something truly great is almost zero. CK character "Town" is paradoxically awash with money ($10,000s), but we did not find any use for it, we would like to have marketing but did not find a way to spend money on that +EV. After the release, unless it is required for development, we'll just return it to the characters.

[rpietila]

More on the CK plans can be found in the latest post.

[nakaone]

well all discussion here is somewhat advertisement for coins but I would seriously like to get opinions on the following situation:

was clams ever discussed here?

clams were distributed to all non-dust bitcoin, dogecoin and litecoin adresses somewhen a year ago - so every non-dust adress of the three coins got 4.6 clams (around 3,1 million coins initital distribution). they use a pows, which is in im my opion a proof of stake which randomly (?) gives 1 clam every minute to every supporter of the decentralised network.

well all of this is quite boring but clams have a purpose. they are the in-house-currency of one of the most trusted dice sites: just-dice. I think dooglus is a well known person within the cryptosphere - he managed days back a very large amount of btc on just-dice and never ran. now his casino has an inhouse investment of around 540k clams (around 650k$)

what is interesting is that clams have an interest rate of around 0,2% per day on just-dice (according to dooglus) - this is all fine but you had this massive exchange risk given that clams are one of the hundreds of altcoins flying around. what basically changed today is that clams are now on margin trade on poloniex. theoretically you could insure the exchange rate of your casino investment, but you have to find someone who is giving a loan on clams.

since you have the interest rate of 0,2% per day on just-dice for clams, you have to find a good reason to give loans at a much lower rate on poloniex. the counterparty is risk is at least as low on just-dice as it is on poloniex etc. pp.

compare a 0.2% per day with the other interest rates: it think btc has around 0.07%, xmr around 0.004%, dash around 0.02% - this should have some implications.

given this special situation I assume we will see an interesting price discovery regarding clams

opinions regarding the situation?

[smooth]

Ignoring that proof of stake is pointless (it doesn't work unless ultimately centralized, in which case there are better solutions), the distribution method for CLAMs is untenable in terms of susceptibility to fraud, and the impossibility of demonstrating that there wasn't and isn't an enormous hidden premine.

Specifically, there is no way to know that insiders didn't create or control enormous numbers of, for example, non-dust DOGE outputs. Of course other coins could be used but it seems likely that DOGE would be the easiest place to hide such a premine.

The only distribute-to-outputs method that isn't susceptible to this form of manipulation is to distribute according to the balances.

[binaryFate]

The only distribute-to-outputs method that isn't susceptible to this form of manipulation is to distribute according to the balances.

This is not immune to insiders taking advantage if the point in time when the blockchain is "snapshotted" is only known publicly a posteriori. You can take a fiat loan to own coins just one particular day.
Even if the point in time is announced in advance you still can't have everybody to actually read and be aware of it and it might still be seen as a soft ninjamine.

[smooth]

The only distribute-to-outputs method that isn't susceptible to this form of manipulation is to distribute according to the balances.

This is not immune to insiders taking advantage if the point in time when the blockchain is "snapshotted" is only known publicly a posteriori. You can take a fiat loan to own coins just one particular day.
Even if the point in time is announced in advance you still can't have everybody to actually read and be aware of it and it might still be seen as a soft ninjamine.

Yeah I agree, but it is still much better than being able to take 100 coins, split into 100 outputs of 1 coin each, and get 100x as much of the spin off for the cost of a small transaction fee (if that). That's just absurd.

[Daedelus]

Ignoring that proof of stake is pointless (it doesn't work unless ultimately centralized, in which case there are better solutions),

I'm interested, how did you come to this conclusion?

[arnuschky]

Apropos speaking about PoS:

darknote aka ducknote just rebranded again to diginote: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082745.0
Trying to understand what they did here - at least they seem to be an innovative branch of the cryptonote clones.

They seem to have implemented some sort of PoS: coins can now be locked (at which point they become "semi-anonymous") to gain a 1%pa interest rate. The interest rate is covered by newly minted coins (?) but I am not sure whether they actually implemented this "proof-of-activity" as they call it already.

Did anyone had the opportunity to read the "whitepaper" or look at the source already? It's quite unclear what they did and what they didn't implement, but the dev is notorious for misleading English...

[aminorex]

Just more of the same it seems.  Crypto moves so slow, then so fast.

[cAPSLOCK]

Just more of the same it seems.  Crypto moves so slow, then so fast.

Very mysterious.

[newb4now]

Apropos speaking about PoS:

darknote aka ducknote just rebranded again to diginote: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082745.0
Trying to understand what they did here - at least they seem to be an innovative branch of the cryptonote clones.

They seem to have implemented some sort of PoS: coins can now be locked (at which point they become "semi-anonymous") to gain a 1%pa interest rate. The interest rate is covered by newly minted coins (?) but I am not sure whether they actually implemented this "proof-of-activity" as they call it already.

Did anyone had the opportunity to read the "whitepaper" or look at the source already? It's quite unclear what they did and what they didn't implement, but the dev is notorious for misleading English...

I don't understand the definition of proof of activity in this case

I will never be a fan of XDN because of the very fast mine when the coin had the silly duck name and no features. However what they are doing now is interesting.

[arnuschky]

Apropos speaking about PoS:

darknote aka ducknote just rebranded again to diginote: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1082745.0
Trying to understand what they did here - at least they seem to be an innovative branch of the cryptonote clones.

They seem to have implemented some sort of PoS: coins can now be locked (at which point they become "semi-anonymous") to gain a 1%pa interest rate. The interest rate is covered by newly minted coins (?) but I am not sure whether they actually implemented this "proof-of-activity" as they call it already.

Did anyone had the opportunity to read the "whitepaper" or look at the source already? It's quite unclear what they did and what they didn't implement, but the dev is notorious for misleading English...

I don't understand the definition of proof of activity in this case

I will never be a fan of XDN because of the very fast mine when the coin had the silly duck name and no features. However what they are doing now is interesting.

Yes, their emission was certainly weird. They are, however, by far the fasted developing cryptonote coin in terms of features: QT wallet, chat, combining PoW with PoS etc.
Which is why I asked: they show very good progress, but I never had the time to check their stuff for bullshit - and as their community seems to be mostly noobs, I don't see much checking happening there.

Regarding their "PoA": here's the original idea https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/452.pdf

[newb4now]

Ignoring that proof of stake is pointless (it doesn't work unless ultimately centralized, in which case there are better solutions), the distribution method for CLAMs is untenable in terms of susceptibility to fraud, and the impossibility of demonstrating that there wasn't and isn't an enormous hidden premine.

Specifically, there is no way to know that insiders didn't create or control enormous numbers of, for example, non-dust DOGE outputs. Of course other coins could be used but it seems likely that DOGE would be the easiest place to hide such a premine.

The only distribute-to-outputs method that isn't susceptible to this form of manipulation is to distribute according to the balances.

I agree with you on all points.

However some may feel that a distribute according to balances method would just enrich the early adopters of the coins the distribution was based on (similar fairness arguments that apply to side chains)

If another coin besides BTC was used to base the distribution on the dev could still buy up large portions of that coin (since it is much cheaper than BTC) prior to the distribution balance based snapshot.

The one positive for the CLAM based model is that no trust is involved. In fact someone could wait several years (since PoS interest rate is low they risk very little by waiting) and only bother to claim CLAM or some similarly distributed coin if/when it has proven itself to be a successful project

edit: I don't own any CLAM. I am just interested in different forms of distribution. I still see PoW as the best

[smooth]

Ignoring that proof of stake is pointless (it doesn't work unless ultimately centralized, in which case there are better solutions), the distribution method for CLAMs is untenable in terms of susceptibility to fraud, and the impossibility of demonstrating that there wasn't and isn't an enormous hidden premine.

Specifically, there is no way to know that insiders didn't create or control enormous numbers of, for example, non-dust DOGE outputs. Of course other coins could be used but it seems likely that DOGE would be the easiest place to hide such a premine.

The only distribute-to-outputs method that isn't susceptible to this form of manipulation is to distribute according to the balances.

I agree with you on all points.

However some may feel that a distribute according to balances method would just enrich the early adopters of the coins the distribution was based on (similar fairness arguments that apply to side chains)

If another coin besides BTC was used to base the distribution on the dev could still buy up large portions of that coin (since it is much cheaper than BTC) prior to the distribution balance based snapshot.

The one positive for the CLAM based model is that no trust is involved. In fact someone could wait several years (since PoS interest rate is low they risk very little by waiting) and only bother to claim CLAM or some similarly distributed coin if/when it has proven itself to be a successful project

edit: I don't own any CLAM. I am just interested in different forms of distribution. I still see PoW as the best

I agree with you that Bitcoin's distribution is problematic in some ways, but at least it isn't a complete structural fail in terms of enabling fraud-at-will the way CLAM does. The positive of being able to wait indefinitely applies to any spin-off method that bootstraps from another coin, as long as it doesn't have an expiration date for claims.