rpietila Altcoin Observer

[Brilliantrocket]

Might as well rename Poloniex to Moneroex, as everything else has almost no volume.

160BTC is not 'no volume'

Closer to 77 BTC. Second biggest thing is XCP with 13.7, which is laughable.

[zadiume]

So has mintpal stated why they aren't adding XMR yet?

[Skinnkavaj]

Might as well rename Poloniex to Moneroex, as everything else has almost no volume.

Yep. It is ridiculous how the rest of exchanges haven't accepted Monero yet. What's the deal? They are lossing money by doing so.

It is because since Monero is so new and different, exchanges must customize code it in. It's not like adding another clone of BTC or LTC.

[3x2]

Might as well rename Poloniex to Moneroex, as everything else has almost no volume.

Yep. It is ridiculous how the rest of exchanges haven't accepted Monero yet. What's the deal? They are lossing money by doing so.

It is because since Monero is so new and different, exchanges must customize code it in. It's not like adding another clone of BTC or LTC.

BTC-E should add monero, they didnt added any new coin from long time.

So has mintpal stated why they aren't adding XMR yet?

Monero (XMR) is already on Mintpal.

https://www.mintpal.com/market/XMR/BTC

[uvt9]

BTC-E should add monero, they didnt added any new coin from long time.

Being added to BTC-E would be a dream for any alt, but i don't think this would happen anytime soon. XPM, TRC, FTC, PPC have been dying there in both volume and price, it seems BTCE showed no interest in removing them and adding new coin.

So has mintpal stated why they aren't adding XMR yet?

Mintpal are no longer a dream place for altcoin. They constantly add more shitcoins but pretend that they value innovation 

Volume is also dying especially since the moment they got hacked. Bittrex seems to have best volume out there (not sure if this exchange fake their volume or not).

[smooth]

The two organizations I can think of with the most CPU cycles available are Google and the NSA.

I don't have real numbers of course but I'm guessing that both are a tiny fraction of the CPU cycles available to end users. At one point a number of one million computers was circulated for google. The PC installed base is around a billion.

This is not true for ASICs. Big farms have routinely had double digit percentages of the total SHA hash rate.

[smooth]

A very quick answer is:  I've spent a lot of time looking at CryptoNight and believe it to be very solid.  There are some potential things to think about in the long term, but assuming you accept its technical tradeoffs (slow block verification leading to increased susceptibility to block-flooding DoS attacks, in favor of a balance between CPU, GPU, and ASICs), I don't believe it's an issue that should be concerning in the next few years. 

  * The tradeoff of verification time is a good one.  Again - that depends on a lot of other factors.  It's the part about CryptoNight that makes me most nervous, but there are likely other ways to mitigate block-flooding attacks, so it doesn't need particular panic.

It's far from clear that any such trade-off is necessary;
asymmetric PoWs can combine instant verification with architectural balance.

The way real progress happens is someone goes and demonstrates this.

[othe]

Smooth, tromp wrote cuckoo - which maybe is indeed a not so bad addition for xmr i have to say, could solve the verification issues.

[zadiume]

Oh fuck I didnt realize XMR hit mintpal already lol.

[smooth]

Smooth, tromp wrote cuckoo - which maybe is indeed a not so bad addition for xmr i have to say, could solve the verification issues.

Yes, I'm well aware.

My point is, launch it in a coin and have the coin not get attacked, suffer from extreme instamine-type issues with optimized miners, get built into ASICs, etc. If if you don't want to launch an actual coin, raise a substantial bounty for a successful attack on the algorithm directly (and then have the bounty go unclaimed for some significant period of time). There was a thread a while back where dga talked specifically about cuckoo and explained some of the issues in broad terms.

Those same issues applied equally to Cryptonight when it surfaced, although now at least we have some (limited) track record with it.

[Este Nuno]

The classical altcoins do not offer anything relative to Bitcoin, except maybe a different hashing algorithm. An important thing to remember is that there is no long-term market niche for two coins with the same algo. The hashing power of the larger coin is constantly threatening to destroy the smaller one. Even if that does not happen, there are network effects in play that favor the larger coin and suppress the smaller.

Look at Bitmark: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.0
It's a 1-gen altcoin using scrypt PoW, but the dev has a real interesting attitude to this coin's future. Bitmark project is very well organized. Much better than LTC in my opinion. I've been pointing my old scrypt asic to it

Bitmark looks pretty cool.
The super slow distribution curve, weak testing block rewards right now, weak marketing have kept me away from now.
Also the lack of real innovation as far as I can see.
But seems like an honest project. I have my eye on it.

It's a very interesting and promising project in my opinion and I've been following it closely since its inception. It certainly different than the vast majority of projects I've seen here. The focus on long term value, stability and adoption as opposed to the typical fast run up pump and dump mentality that is the norm is a big positive I think. The latest Bitcoin Core customised for scrypt, focused development, no premine, no IPO, fair distribution including an innovative IPM(investor public mining: https://github.com/project-bitmark/bitmark/wiki/IPM-Pool ) idea, fully funded by voluntary donations with all Bitmarks donated locked until next year. I'll repost my original thoughts from the main Bitmark thread here:

As to where Bitmark stands in the cryptocurrency market, I see the current situation as a spectrum with the 'bleeding edge' coins like NXT, Qora, CryptoNote coins leading the way on the far left side with brand new code and ideas. And Bitcoin on the far right side of that spectrum acting as a solid reliable base with little to no innovation. Bitcoin development being more defensive since the stakes are much, much higher and there is no mandate on the developers end to do anything other than protect the integrity of the Bitcoin protocol and associated code.

So with the coins on the left side of the spectrum pushing forward with new untested technology there's obviously more risk than there is with Bitcoin which has been around for about 5 years now and been thoroughly tested by millions(probably?) of people.

Now since the nature of the cryptocurrency community is one of open source and shared ideas and innovation and that gives an advantage to 'second movers' so to speak who can also benefit from new technology as it's developed. Not only is the technology itself open and freely usable, but by the time it's proven to be useful it's also been tested in real world conditions enough to have a much lower probability of having some catastrophic issue that would derail it.

With Bitmark I see it sitting in the middle of that spectrum building off the foundation that Bitcoin provides while also observing and analysing the evolution of cryptocurrency technology. This way Bitmark can implement innovation with much lower risk while still being far beyond Bitcoin since Bitcoin is more or less constrained by its own size.

As far as what's being done to further adoption offer value so far, the first major subproject which is being crowdfunded by donations now is named 'getMarked'. Which aims to be a karma/tipping system used through out the web that is based on Marks(0.001 BTM). The long term goals being introducing new people to cryptocurrency in a frictionless and riskless manner(similar to a faucet) while hopefully evolving into a off-the-chain micropayment system that can be used for anything.  http://getmarked.org/

Most of the innovation will be done by attempting to 'create a useful daily currency' while still adding any technological innovations that have proven themselves a useful and stable addition to modern cryptocurrencies.

Personally I think there will be room in the market for balanced currency like this. I know this is pretty much the Monero core adopters vs other anonymous challengers thread but I thought I'd get my thoughts in here since someone brought it up. It's certainly not typical, pretty much the anti-pump and dump. I don't even think there has been a single BTM sold since release interestingly enough. It either earns its value over time from development and the community or it doesn't, and so far things have been going extremely well.

Main thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544

[rpietila]

Personally I think there will be room in the market for balanced currency like this.

The economics of money are ruthless. If there is no niche to be filled, the thing withers away from its use as currency. Worldwide, not many niches are available.

[Este Nuno]

Personally I think there will be room in the market for balanced currency like this.

The economics of money are ruthless. If there is no niche to be filled, the thing withers away from its use as currency. Worldwide, not many niches are available.

Perhaps. We'll see how the crypto market evolves. So far the target seems to be non crypto users in a sort of 'blue ocean strategy'. If the market can be expanded and capture people before Bitcoin can by making it easy to use and accessible then I think there is a chance. edit: Also, improving the Bitcoin API and such to better suit the needs of merchants who already accept Bitcoin. So not just non-crypto users. I think there's still lots of innovation that can be done in this space.

It's an entirely different approach than XMR et al. (at least at the moment). XMR will focus on use and adoption at some point soon, but I think the focus now is getting the new technology up to speed(block chain size reduction, more GUI options and such, adding the anonymity upgrade that's been talked about here recently, similar to the one that BBR is doing).

[pabloangello]

The classical altcoins do not offer anything relative to Bitcoin, except maybe a different hashing algorithm. An important thing to remember is that there is no long-term market niche for two coins with the same algo. The hashing power of the larger coin is constantly threatening to destroy the smaller one. Even if that does not happen, there are network effects in play that favor the larger coin and suppress the smaller.

Look at Bitmark: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=660544.0
It's a 1-gen altcoin using scrypt PoW, but the dev has a real interesting attitude to this coin's future. Bitmark project is very well organized. Much better than LTC in my opinion. I've been pointing my old scrypt asic to it

Bitmark looks pretty cool.
The super slow distribution curve, weak testing block rewards right now, weak marketing have kept me away from now.
Also the lack of real innovation as far as I can see.
But seems like an honest project. I have my eye on it.

Apart from dev's great atitute and devotion, here is one of the Bitmark innovation under development: http://getmarked.org/
Join #Bitmark IRC channel on https://freenode.net/ There are interesting cryptocurrency discussion daily.

[Roy Badami]

OK.  I've been thinking about this for a while.  And this is still a "thought in progress".  But...

On ASICs, and ASIC-resistant PoW.

Ok, I'm an XMR holder and bullish XMR.  But the one thing I don't like about Cryptonote is the ASIC-unfriendly PoW.  I'm, admittedly somewhat tentatively, coming to the opintion that ASICs (or at least custom hardware miners of some sort) are essential to the long term stability of a cryptocoin network.

Look at it this way.  Which coins have a reasonable assurance of a stable hashrate?

• Bitcoin.  There is a huge amount of ASIC hashing power pointed as Bitcoin, and no matter whether the owners get RoI on it or not, most of this hashing power is not going to get switched off until the value of the coins is less than the cost of the electricity.  It's unlikely that a significant portion of this hash power will defect to another coin (there aren't really any major SHA-256 altcoins anyway) but perhaps more importantly there is almost certainly no serious (i.e. comparable with the Bitcoin network) pool of SHA-256 hardware doing something non-Bitcoin (whether altcoin or something entirely unrelated to cryptocurrency) that could be pointed at the Bitcoin network at a moment's notice if someone felt it worth their while
• Litecoin.  At least once scrypt ASICs start to dominate the hashrate, Litecoin will be in a similar (but far less strong) situation to Bitcoin. Less strong, because Litecoin is smaller and because there are far more scrypt altcoins below it

What of the other SHA-256 coins?  Well they will always be at risk of huge hashrate fluctations even if only a tiny proportion SHA-256 ASICs out there gains interest in them or loses interest in them.

And what of coins using neither SHA-256 nor scrypt?  The CPU and GPU coins?

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).

GPU minable non-scrypt coins are in a similar situation - and might have an added shock from a massive switch of GPUs away from scrypt as ASICs start to dominate scrypt coins.  And, of course, we're a GPU minable coin, too.

Bottom line: no coin can start with ASICs, but ASIC mining ultimately creates stability and makes it harder, not easier, for someone to rapidly attain 51% of the network, at least if you can create an ecosystem where you by far outnumber other users of the ASIC.

I think it's clearly ideal for any serious long-term new coin to create a new hash function (living in BTC's or LTC's shadow is too dangerous).  But the goal should be to move to migrate to an ASIC-based ecosystem over a number of years once the coin gains enough success.  I therefore believe that while the Cryptonote designers were right to choose a novel PoW, they were wrong to pick a strongly ASIC-resistant PoW.

Put another way, I think we've moved beyond Satoshi's "one CPU, one vote".   I'm much happier with "one SHA-256 ASIC, one vote".  That's because there are far more CPUs in the world in hands that i don't trust than there are SHA-256 ASICs in the world in hands that I don't trust.  And we have a fair amount of transparency as to the total SHA-256 hashpower in the world (because to a first approximation, it's all hashing Bitcoin.  We have no transparency as to the total CPU power in the world.)

Thoughts, anyone?

roy

EDIT TO ADD: This certainly isn't fatal for XMR.  I'm not sure it's even particularly seriously damaging.  It is non-optimal though, IMO.

[coinsolidation]

no coin can start with ASICs, but ASIC mining ultimately creates stability and makes it harder, not easier, for someone to rapidly attain 51% of the network, at least if you can create an ecosystem where you by far outnumber other users of the ASIC.

We have started with scrypt, and almost all miners are smaller ASICs, the network is stable. I wrote this to a GPU miner yesterday, I feel it is applicable to what you say:

GPU miners can't mine it fairly, it's impossible, arguments there in wiki ain't make GPU owners to mine it. Lots of Titans will land on this coin and in a week expect incredible difficulty. You have to make it at least scrypt-n, so home miners can win several months. This is it. Good luck.

GPU miners can mine Bitmark fairly, you will receive an amount of BTM according to how much hashrate you commit to securing the networking for it's users.

Mining is a service offered, not a money printing machine. If you offer a less efficient service that is not as beneficial to the users then your service will not generate as much revenue.

Technology progresses over time, GPU miners made CPU miners redundant, ASICs make GPUs redundant. You keep up or you fall behind.

I am the developer, I do not have an asic, I cannot mine the coin I created. When I can I will buy an asic to do so, and if I want to sooner I will hire one, or later buy some BTM, but that is speculation on my part.

My service is not mining, my service is developing. If your service is mining then treat it as a business and upgrade your hardware, or target your service at people who require gpu hashing to secure their network.

Bitmark's focus is on it's users, the decision to use scrypt is in their best interests, to keep their network reliable and secure.

Perhaps that helps give another viewpoint to the (scrypt) ASIC question

[Roy Badami]

no coin can start with ASICs, but ASIC mining ultimately creates stability and makes it harder, not easier, for someone to rapidly attain 51% of the network, at least if you can create an ecosystem where you by far outnumber other users of the ASIC.

We have started with scrypt, and almost all miners are smaller ASICs, the network is stable.

Sorry, what I should have said was, no coin can create a new PoW funciton and start with a network that ASIC mines it.

I read what you say, and as I said, I don't think this is a big deal.  I'm not going to stop investing in XMR because of it.

But the fact of the matter is that BTC is in the enviable situation that there is no one bigger that it using the same mining hardware.  You are not in that situation, and nor are we. [EDIT: And unless we change our PoW, we will never be in that enviable situation unless/until there are custom Cryptonight miners.  And unless you change your PoW you will never be in that enviable situation unless LTC fails - or you grow bigger than it.]

roy

[coinsolidation]

But the fact of the matter is that BTC is in the enviable situation that there is no one bigger that it using the same mining hardware.  You are not in that situation, and nor are we. [EDIT: And unless we change our PoW, we will never be in that enviable situation unless/until there are custom Cryptonight miners.  And unless you change your PoW you will never be in that enviable situation unless LTC fails - or you grow bigger than it.]

Perhaps both will happen

[smooth]

Thoughts, anyone?

I don't think you can trust the ASICs in the way you suggest. The ones already delivered and paid for in the hands of customers, perhaps. But chip production costs are usually quite low, especially for mature processes with high yield. Manufacturers constrain their production volume in order to achieve a high selling price (or if they are mining themselves, to maximize profitability by not driving up difficulty) and recoup NRE.

But consider the same economics from the point of view of a rogue ASIC-developer. He can run off 10x or 100x as many ASICs at only modestly increased cost, and then use them to attack the network instead of for mining.

The only real protection from this risk seems to be that it is usually more profitable to mine than attack.

That applies equally to ASICs, CPUs, and GPUs. We have seen enormous numbers of CPUs from AWS, etc. come online in a very short period of time on this coin and others. GPUs likewise move around constantly between different coins in order to mine them. This is easy to do when the mining profitability is there. But we rarely see actual attacks, and never on coins with a real level of success. It seems the incentives to attack are much smaller than the incentive to take that same resource and just mine with it. Otherwise, with how easy it already is to move CPUs and GPUs around, we would see attacks constantly.

Satoshi said something along these lines in his paper. It likely assumes some level of actual success by the coin (so the mined coins are worth enough, otherwise you will get nuisence attacks, even if they aren't economically motivated), and it assumes a rational mining emissions. If there are no (or nearly no) mining rewards, you might as well attack.

[Roy Badami]

But the fact of the matter is that BTC is in the enviable situation that there is no one bigger that it using the same mining hardware.  You are not in that situation, and nor are we. [EDIT: And unless we change our PoW, we will never be in that enviable situation unless/until there are custom Cryptonight miners.  And unless you change your PoW you will never be in that enviable situation unless LTC fails - or you grow bigger than it.]

Perhaps both will happen

I don't know anything about Bitmark, so I don't have an opinion on how likely it is to eclipse LTC.

As for whether Monero will ever have custom miners?  I think probably, but I haven't thought about this deeply.  I doubt we will have Cryptonight ASICs any time soon in an analagous sense to SHA-256 ASICs.  But then, custom designed machines that miner more efficently than a PC or graphics card?  Very likely.  And in the long term, will such devices use ASICs to assist the process?  Probably.

But my belief is that the factor by which the custom hardware improves the hash per dollar over PCs and GPUs will be way lower with Cryptonight than with BTC.  And therefore I think out network will be less secure that it could have been. My guess is Scrypt has the same problem in being worse than SHA-256 in this regard, but that Scrypt is better than Cryptonight. (Except, as I said, I wouldn't use scrypt, because there is already a big established scrypt coin which will be difficult to displace)