rpietila Altcoin Observer

[aminorex]

Also the "privacy" coins are quite a new thing. They need totally new services built around them, and need a new infrastructure. It will be interesting to see where they go, and if they can gain traction.

Now there's something about which I am entirely and categorically convinced:  Privacy-enhanced crypto will be a dominant force for decades to come. 

[solnechnyy]

@Aminorex

Actually, it seems Hash-on-blockchain approach more forward thinking than vanilla cryptonight proof-of-work.
For now ASIC is problem for neither.  When it becomes economically viable, the research and development would begin.

example:

True, we goes with different approach, but to the same goal.
The goal is not to make hash which is perfect for CPU.
The goal is to make "egalitarian proof of work", in other words: to provide almost equal voting rights to all participants.
Now traditionally approach is to have heavy hash-function, which is hard to implement in custom hardware. Cryptonote (CryptoNight) PoW hash(so called "slow_hash") goes on this way. It use some modern instructions sets coupled with memory consuming algorithm. Nowdays 2MB for ASIC seems to be almost impossible, but the world changing so fast now. And this finally could come to the same situation as Litecoin have now.
Our approach is to keep using modern instructions sets, but instead of making big scratchpad and then process whole pad for each hash call, we gonna use blockchain as one big source of random data, and will use pseudo-random parts of it for each hash.Two-phase hashing will protect from pre-calculation of all possible hashes(second phase hash randomly accessed data with salt). Blockchain after year of network's life will be consisited of about 1.5GB random data. In mining process all this data should be randomly accessible - and back to talking about ASICs - even if ASIC calculator for this hash will apear it will be almost impossible to grant paralel  access of huge count of hardware calculators to to big scratchpad- due to DRAM specific.

The GPU is a small problem for BoolBerry. Scratchpad increase will reduce the gap.  Hardfork is possible.
mining with MIC-like architecture on Monero is also more profitable than CPU but not the case with BoolBerry

[aminorex]

True, we goes with different approach, but to the same goal.
even if ASIC calculator for this hash will apear it will be almost impossible to grant paralel  access of huge count of hardware calculators to to big scratchpad- due to DRAM specific.

The massive pseudo-random scratchpad concept is not going to prevent ASIC acceleration.  Being a small niche coin might.  As long as BBR is the only wild keccak, and doesn't rise too high on the exchanges, it will be safer that way.  And yes, I agree that hard-forking to preserve the interests of existing miners against incoming ASIC miners is very viable, if it is done decisively.  I don't see this as a meaningful differentiator.  That's not a criticism of BBR.  It just means I don't think it weighs significantly in favor of BBR on a competitive basis.

I am quite certain that there are efforts to implement cryptonight on ASIC, given the recent outperformance of CN coins.  Planning for a hardfork to deal with that should be ongoing for all the CN coins.  "Be Prepared"

BTC value could survive mining centralization.  CN coin value cannot.



  

[Anotheranonlol]

The massive pseudo-random scratchpad concept is not going to prevent ASIC acceleration.
 

Elaborate please.

[aminorex]

The massive pseudo-random scratchpad concept is not going to prevent ASIC acceleration.
 

Elaborate please.

SOC with flash blockchain on-chip.  You made it more expensive, it takes more silicon, but it still amortizes to the cost of sand, at scale.

[smoothie]

Can someone in the know summarize the BBR coin for me in 10 lines, please.

- Great team
- Sexy cross-platform GUI (Windows/Linux/MacOS)
- Fast synchronization blockchain
- Forced TX mixing
- Network Alerts
- Optional 1% donation to devs
- Reduced blockchain weight (dust tx removed)
- Wallet addresses aliasing
- Different emission curve
- Different algo (Wild Keccak)
- Special prefix tx off rig signature

How does it measure up to ring signatures that is used in Monero to give pretty good anonymity of the sending and receiving parties?

This is the #1 selling point of Monero.

[aminorex]

How does it measure up to ring signatures that is used in Monero to give pretty good anonymity of the sending and receiving parties?

This is the #1 selling point of Monero.

Unless there is a peculiar flaw in the implementation, which is not very likely, the privacy features of BBR are as good or a little bit better than XMR.  I would expect XMR to incorporate the enhancements of BBR where appropriate.

[smoothie]

How does it measure up to ring signatures that is used in Monero to give pretty good anonymity of the sending and receiving parties?

This is the #1 selling point of Monero.

Unless there is a peculiar flaw in the implementation, which is not very likely, the privacy features of BBR are as good or a little bit better than XMR.  I would expect XMR to incorporate the enhancements of BBR where appropriate.

What exactly is BBR using?

[aminorex]

What exactly is BBR using?

Same bytecoin original code base.  I am not now sufficiently informed to give accurate details on the specific improvements.  I merely provide digest information which I deem sufficiently reliable to usefully report.  The reputed changes affecting privacy are small tweaks to the cryptonote protocol, making it easier to use the privacy features correctly.

[Anotheranonlol]

The massive pseudo-random scratchpad concept is not going to prevent ASIC acceleration.
 

Elaborate please.

SOC with flash blockchain on-chip.  You made it more expensive, it takes more silicon, but it still amortizes to the cost of sand, at scale.

so the boolberry scratchpad is now in RAM, small at this time yet increasing rapidly in size. Your proposal for a (presumably high performance) wild keccak ASIC would be some sort of SOC with external flash.. ?

[smooth]

What exactly is BBR using?

Same bytecoin original code base.  I am not now sufficiently informed to give accurate details on the specific improvements.  I merely provide digest information which I deem sufficiently reliable to usefully report.  The reputed changes affecting privacy are small tweaks to the cryptonote protocol, making it easier to use the privacy features correctly.

Correct.

[smooth]

The GPU is a small problem for BoolBerry. Scratchpad increase will reduce the gap.  Hardfork is possible.
mining with MIC-like architecture on Monero is also more profitable than CPU but not the case with BoolBerry

That makes it an even bigger problem, because its an insanely large advantage for a few very early adopters that won't be possible later (i.e. instamine).

I'm not sure about this whole, "it's all sand" argument about ASICs. NRE matters. You have to get a big enough advantage from the design over its useful lifetime for the chip to ever get designed and manufactured. A small edge over more general purpose hardware that are manufactured in greater quantity with much larger R&D budgets won't cut it.

[Anotheranonlol]

The GPU is a small problem for BoolBerry. Scratchpad increase will reduce the gap.  Hardfork is possible.
mining with MIC-like architecture on Monero is also more profitable than CPU but not the case with BoolBerry

That makes it an even bigger problem, because its an insanely large advantage for a few very early adopters that won't be possible later (i.e. instamine).

I'm not really too sure it could be construed as 'insanely large' advantage without it sounding like an exagerration.
especially considering such an early stage of distribution. That would be reserved for Bytecoin.

Of course, GPU miner was not ready on day 1. Brand new algo would take some R&D time. So far, we have an account of a single entity at a ~2x advantage (not exact figure: could be less, could be more). So essentially he has 2 CPU solo for every 1 CPU of joe public solo . And now the pools are gaining interest levelling the playing field.

It's known there are botnet mining XMR. I'd presume the same is true for BBR, if not now in future.
these cases are more than a ~2x advantage.
 
It's not known how many BBR, (if any) said user has sold on market to recoup costs and make instant profit.

an 'instamine' that's dumped before it actually realised any significant value is not really something I'd be concerned with. Coins were more 'instamined' heavily with Amazon instances. I put the term in quoutes because have seen real instamines and cannot compare whatsoever.

I'm not arguing about which coin is better. I hold both and see both as great investments. Aware that most reading this thread hold XMR primarily, so stand to profit if it becomes the one and only. I just think the market cap of BBR relative to XMR is surprising.

Based on current supply & last prices at poloniex:
BBR  market cap            BTC678
XMR (via coinmarketcap) BTC7,759

Is there a tangible reason for such a disparity?

It seems at the peak price today, BBR will need BTC20-30 to buy all mined coins daily, whereas XMR  will require around BTC110-125

[smooth]

Of course, GPU miner was not ready on day 1

Not knowable. The algorithm was discussed for a little while, and there was a testnet, development could have started before launch, and perhaps only a few tweaks were required at launch, if that. This is all speculation of course, but you can't say for sure how quickly a GPU miner was ready. Even to this day there are only private GPU miners. 

Even the CPU miner was poorly written and poorly scrutinized (the whole design was rushed) so the public code was very unoptimized and still is not well optimized to this day. You could say the same about CryptoNight except that within a few weeks of launch, the Monero team was releasing optimized mining code (which got copied to the other CN coins) and now even the very best coders are struggling to make big gains.

So far, we have an account of a single entity at a ~2x advantage

You are way off. If you understood how GPUs work you would realize this.

[Anotheranonlol]

Of course, GPU miner was not ready on day 1

Not knowable. The algorithm was discussed for a little while, and there was a testnet, development could have started before launch, and perhaps only a few tweaks were required at launch, if that. This is all speculation of course, but you can't say for sure how quickly a GPU miner was ready. Even to this day there are only private GPU miners.  

Even the CPU miner was poorly written and poorly scrutinized (the whole design was rushed) so the public code was very unoptimized and still is not well optimized to this day. You could say the same about CryptoNight except that within a few weeks of launch, the Monero team was releasing optimized mining code (which got copied to the other CN coins) and now even the very best coders are struggling to make big gains.

So far, we have an account of a single entity at a ~2x advantage

You are way off. If you understood how GPUs work you would realize this.

Let's not forget the debacle surrounding monero's early days, which you call 'optimized' mining code

https://github.com/NoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoo/bitmonero/commit/3cc45e9324a402aee91e2f46861b2ca393d711aa

Which came out in may.wow, that was a shocker, how did that escape peer review by collective monero dev team?  that was a huge red flag in my eyes & hardly a small thing to let slip through the net.  Now that was much more worthy of the label 'instamine'

All coins are taking bits from each other. example

https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/commit/feac5a7b2ddce8f4612ecc459b176518061495b3

credit to boolberry.

The 2x figure refers to efficiency & comes from here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.msg7362060#msg7362060

Unless either of us actually has wild-keccak GPU miner, I don't think we can say what the exact number is. The situation was the same with cryptonight.

[smooth]

https://github.com/NoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoodleDoodleNoo/bitmonero/commit/3cc45e9324a402aee91e2f46861b2ca393d711aa

Which came out in may... That was a shocker, how did that escape peer review by collective monero dev team?

Simple. The code came that way from bytecoin, from which MRO was forked (or alternately relaunched), and was supposedly going for two years. So somehow that little gem was "missed" by them for two years.  When the Monero team discovered the issue, we released it, and then most of the other cryptonote coins copied it, as I said.

Were it not for the Monero team fixing it, would it have been allowed to continue for another two years?

EDIT: And no, we did not carefully review 100K lines of code before the fork/relaunch. If we did you would still be waiting for the coin.  That work is still under way. For that matter the other CryptoNote coins are doing the same thing. We all push out fixes and improvements as we find them, often adopted by all.

[Anotheranonlol]

Simple. The code came that way from bytecoin, from which MRO was forked (or alternately relaunched), and was supposedly going for two years. So somehow that little gem was "missed" by them for two years.  When the Monero team discovered the issue, we released it, and then most of the other cryptonote coins copied it, as I said.

Were it not for the Monero team fixing it, would it have been allowed to continue for another two years?

I firmly believe that noodle should not be part of development team.

Like I stated in IRC, I am not part of the "dev team", I never was. Just so happens I took a look at the code and changed some extremely easy to spot "errors". I then decided to release the binary because I thought MRO would benefit from it. I made this decision individually and nobody else should be culpable, especially the community of individuals who have come together to maintain and foster the software.

By the way, I'm not even a real coder, so whatever changes I made should be easy to spot; especially for experienced developers.

Cheers.

Doesn't seem like the monero dev team actually discovered it all.  Boolberry certainly didn't copy this un-cripple 'fix' or optimization as you like to call it.

It seems logical that another actor (perhaps relating to XMR team if you're a fan of conspiracy theories, or conceivably someone previously involved in bytecoin, -- who naturally would be aware, OR an entirely independent user who has basic coding knowledge and few minutes to spare glancing over the code) had realised this and was operating at a significant advantage for some time.

The whole thing was a bit of a facepalm moment.   Although it seems to be in the past now.  

[smooth]

Like I stated in IRC, I am not part of the "dev team", I never was.

Pardon my error. NoodleDoodle was only unofficial part of the dev team at the time, but is now official, as verified here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg7098497#msg7098497

Boolberry certainly didn't copy this un-cripple 'fix' or optimization as you like to call it.

This issue did not apply to BBR at all.

It seems logical that another actor (perhaps relating to XMR team if you're a fan of conspiracy theories, or conceivably someone previously involved in bytecoin, -- who naturally would be aware, OR an entirely independent user who has basic coding knowledge and few minutes to spare glancing over the code) had realised this and was operating at a significant advantage for some time.

As I explained, the code was unchanged from the original bytecoin public release, whenever that was (some time before MRO that's for sure), until then-friend-of-monero-and-now-monero-developer NoodleDoodle fixed it.

[rpietila]

Based on current supply & last prices at poloniex:
BBR  market cap            BTC678
XMR (via coinmarketcap) BTC7,759

Is there a tangible reason for such a disparity?

If every piece of paper was as valuable, you could print numbers on paper and pay your dinner with it.

If every coin was as valuable, copying Bitcoin 1:1 and mining it to yourself would make you immensely wealthy.

It is called "legitimacy" and it's hard to get. The U.S. barely manages to retain theirs by having a 51% attack on the world's military. With garagecoins, it is harder.

ADD: comparing market caps with current number of coins is misleading. The total number (or perhaps the number at the point when yearly inflation goes <2%) is more important.

[tacotime]

Of course, GPU miner was not ready on day 1. Brand new algo would take some R&D time. So far, we have an account of a single entity at a ~2x advantage (not exact figure: could be less, could be more). So essentially he has 2 CPU solo for every 1 CPU of joe public solo . And now the pools are gaining interest levelling the playing field.

I would not be surprised if a GPU miner was actually available on day one. Unfortunately (or possibly intentionally), the GPU implementation of Boolberry runs almost an order of magnitude faster on GPUs than CPUs on unoptimized code. Optimization was reportedly extremely easy for those who undertook it,

...Of course, the original CryptoNight implementation was crippled too without us realizing it, and we pushed the optimized code when it became available. But none of our core team had anything to do with that.