rpietila Altcoin Observer

[GTO911]

Ethereum is starting to get my attention.

This is an extremely serious threat to be #1 or #2. I don't know if they can pull it all together.

I will studying and thinking more...

Anonymint shilling for Ethereum, now hell has frozen over.

And what coin shill are you?

[1714252452]

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[Quanttek]

Can anybody shed some light on syscoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587080.0

It seems like Syscoin is just another appcoin and we all know they are pretty much snake oil

Also it seems liek they only offer the range of commands they've already shown, which probably can also issued via an API, but they don't offer any form of turing-complete scripting language, so you actually could provide something on the blockchain like giving diskspace away for a certificate without you having to trust the other party that they will do it.

And the variety of functions seems pretty narrow (storage, aliases, certificates, marketplace), functions that are built into the protocol and can never be changed (forks, of course, are possible) instead of a turing-complete  scripting-language, where you can create new services.

[akujin]

What's stopping someone from offering to buy lunch for someone at the office? All it would take is one meal. Say the person gives a receiving address, and now they can see the other person's transactions. Then from their own personal paychecks, they can cross reference the transactions rather easily and discover their income if people aren't using multiple addresses .. and just look for two transactions that are the same. Civility goes a long way, and in this case it can be used to discover private financial information about someone that just wanted a big-mac and fries. Again, steps can be taken to avoid this - but not everyone does this. How many people use their facebook login info on tens/hundreds of websites? They're not gonna do the work to stay private - because it involves potentially lots of work, and it needs to be done on a protocol level else it opens them to abuse.

When the time comes where cryptos are being used to pay salaries, I'm sure there would be apps for the currently accepted crypto to help with the privacy issue. The question is, will the government accept these anon coins.

Incorrect, you're detracting from the argument. I will make the point that giving your ISP access to infinitely valuable, and potentially unencrypted, information that they don't have access to right now is a scenario for disaster. Right now, they don't stand to benefit nearly as much if they were to reveal this information, nor do they deal with the costs of keeping it private. If this information were to become incredibly valuable (which it would, because it would be financial transaction data) .. in that you're now not acting through a bank an instead directly with your transactor through an ISP .. multiple layers of obfuscation are now removed. I'm making the claim that if your ISP were to have access to your transaction records, rather than a bank, you (and them) will be in a terrible situation and as such the cost of having an ISP in the first place would scale infinitely in trying to secure that information, or worse possibly sell that information. An ISP is not a bank, and I could not imagine a scenario where I would treat them as such.

You said "They would have a very good clue of my logical location on a network" so I assumed you were worried about other people knowing your location.
Hmm, I don't get it. Let's say, from an ISP's POV, they'll see from the blockchain that someone did a transaction and they're using them as service provider. Isn't it that most ISP use dynamic IPs, which means it's possible for multiple user to have the same IP? How would they specifically identify that you?
And also, is it impossible for bitcoin to improve it's anonymity by removing the IP infos from the blockchain for future transactions?

LOL! That means you'll end up with a mountain of dildos.

You're missing the point. It isn't about dildos specifically, that was just your example.

It is about tools being developed with that mountain of data that allow much of to be tracked, linked, and identified. It won't be targeted at you specifically (usually not at least), but it will be done in the aggregate and a great deal of identification will drop out. Have you ever posted a bitcoin address online? If so, and if you weren't extremely careful, that address can now be linked to your online identify, perhaps linked to other addresses of yours, and certainly linked to addresses of people who have transacted with you (who may also have posted addresses online, though not necessarily the same one you used) and indirectly (computers are good at this) linked with (many, many) other known addresses.

Here is one small example (though the graphs and tables in the paper are interesting, scary, and worth a look), and this is just the very, very beginning (think "cookies" as a privacy issue in web browsers a decade or more ago):

In this paper we explore this unique characteristic further, using heuristic clustering to group Bitcoin wallets based on evidence of shared authority, and then us- ing re-identification attacks (i.e., empirical purchasing of goods and services) to classify the operators of those clusters.

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf

LOL! It's too long.. I feel drowsy when I'm reading too much text 
Ok let's just take my bitcoin address at my sig as an example. It's an address I used long time ago. How would other people know if I own the sender's address that sent btc to that address? How would they know what that transaction is for?  How would they know where is my btc now and how much I currently have now?
If someone could post that info, I'd be pro anon coins right away 

[akujin]

Could anyone explain to me why there's too much fuss about anon coins and how would ordinary users benefit from this feature?
Say, someone wants to buy 2nd hand ps4 from someone. Why would he be so eager to use cryptos with anon feature and hide his transactions?

If you don't feel that privacy is important, I invite you to publish ALL of your UNEDITED credit card and bank statements, ever, on the Internet.

No?  Now consider someone who actually has wealth.  Suppose you have a billion dollars in spare change (after the last multinational corp you bought) and a daughter in elementary school.  Do you want every Corsican and Byelorussian ex patriate within 500km to be able to determine just how large a ransom to ask for, when they leave her left hand in your mailbox?

Suppose instead that you are a middle-level cadre running a department in a satellite city of Chongqing.  Making arrangements for entrepreneurs to build the New China has provided you with a substantial quantity of yuan that you need to move to Cambridge, for Harvard tuition, a boxster and a nice flat.  BoC is off the table.  Bitcoin leaves a trail similar to the heat trail a satellite sees when watching a nuclear submarine transit the pacific:  A big red arrow pointing directly to your location.

These are not merely "first world problems".

No one is asking you to use monero if it doesn't serve your interests.  But I do claim that it is a crucial protection from totalitarian control of your political and religious activism, and can be used to deny ANYONE who may wish to seize your wealth the information necessary to do so.  The tech to make this easy enough to use so that those who are motivated, but not technically exceptional, can do so, is not present.  But Monero puts it in reach.

We live in a world of increasing risks.  Transactional privacy enables you to manage many important risks in useful ways.  The captive coopted mass of circus-goers will not fret about this, as they butter the bread for their grilled government cheese sandwiches.  Those who have something which they consider their own, something to protect, will understand this.

Governments control the cheese consumers.  But those who control the governments have something to protect.

Ok, good answer. But as of now, I still don't feel the need for anon coins. Maybe someday when cryptos are widely used all over the world. That's when I'd feel safe converting all my wealth to crypto and would need such features.

[akujin]

Following this discussion i get the idea that the 'killer app' for monero would be a wallet where people see and use bitcoin, but in the background it gets converted to monero on a (decentralized of course) exchange.
Bitcoin and the public blockchain can and should be used by governments and other open organizations, while this monero wallet would be for privacy. also, the wallet would automatically 'mix' bitcoin if taken in/out a monero wallet on payment if it makes a new address every time

Killer app would be something which allows you to trade in the exchanges without losing all your coins if they get hacked. That'll bring confidence back to crypto 

[ShroomsKit_Disgrace]

Killer app would be something which allows you to trade in the exchanges without losing all your coins if they get hacked. That'll bring confidence back to crypto 

Are you talking about MGW and uMGW of NXT?:
http://multigateway.com/

All the info:
https://nxtforum.org/nxtservices-releases/how-to-test-multigateway-with-nxtservices-a-test-user-guide/

[akujin]

Killer app would be something which allows you to trade in the exchanges without losing all your coins if they get hacked. That'll bring confidence back to crypto 

Are you talking about MGW and uMGW of NXT?:
http://multigateway.com/

All the info:
https://nxtforum.org/nxtservices-releases/how-to-test-multigateway-with-nxtservices-a-test-user-guide/

I didn't know about that. I'll check it out   

[coinsolidation]

Killer app would be something which allows you to trade in the exchanges without losing all your coins if they get hacked. That'll bring confidence back to crypto  

I cannot see how focussing on allowing a small community to swap funds with each other indefinitely can do much to progress the outwards appearance or long term goals of the effort to bring digital money to everyday people.

It is precisely because focus of the majority is on trying to profit from each other that things have deteriorated so badly, people get hacked and scammed because ultimately they are all trying to get a larger portion of the sum of money they together share.

Almost every coin on every exchange has no need to be on an exchange, they have no users and no real value. The time to worry about being on an exchange, and to address the security concerns involved, is when you have every day people shouting at your door to provide a way for them to acquire more. Every day people, acquiring more to use in every day transactions. Not miners, investors, speculators, bad actors, and traders, all trying to take profit from the same thing, something which is obviously impossible, which leads to negative sentiment, and encourages more bad actions.

Cryptographic currency is completely purposeless without every day people and businesses using it. Their needs should be paramount, while doing what is reasonable to balance the needs of those who enable it, the people around here.

[itod]

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.

Your reasoning is correct, but it has the consequence of keeping the cryptocoins away from general public. Until the specialized hardware (including high-end GPUs) is required to mine the coins, we will very rarely get average Joe to try the system. Imagine if every computer and every mobile phone would have an equal chance to mine something, we would have dozens of millions of new users in no time. So there's a catch - either you want stability with ASICs and great difficulty, or you want mass adoption, you can't have both. Claims that botnets would be a threat make no sense to me, why would we mind few botnets even with 100K machines under them if we have 100M machines successfully mining coins? Botnets can not have double digit percentage of machines polluted, they would be detected since it's obvious they are working in the background, so let them mine their few percentage of mining power.

Problem is that it's very difficult to find the hashing algorithm that would be really ASIC resistant, not to mention GPU. For instance, Primecoin which included large integer algorithms that should be difficult for GPUs was soon transferred to GPU mining. All scrypt algos are prone to GPU mining. I tried to find some hashing algorithms that would favor RISC processors, since they dominate modern smartphones, but I've failed to find any. If anybody has some info about such algos it would be very nice to share that info here.

[kwest]

Problem is that it's very difficult to find the hashing algorithm that would be really ASIC resistant, not to mention GPU. For instance, Primecoin which included large integer algorithms that should be difficult for GPUs was soon transferred to GPU mining. All scrypt algos are prone to GPU mining. I tried to find some hashing algorithms that would favor RISC processors, since they dominate modern smartphones, but I've failed to find any. If anybody has some info about such algos it would be very nice to share that info here.

What about Slimcoin? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=613213.0

"New Block Generation through Proof-of-Burn
Even a Raspberry Pi can competitively mine, fast hardware offers no advantage"

[Skinnkavaj]

If you don't feel that privacy is important, I invite you to publish ALL of your UNEDITED credit card and bank statements, ever, on the Internet.

No?  Now consider someone who actually has wealth.  Suppose you have a billion dollars in spare change (after the last multinational corp you bought) and a daughter in elementary school.  Do you want every Corsican and Byelorussian ex patriate within 500km to be able to determine just how large a ransom to ask for, when they leave her left hand in your mailbox?

Suppose instead that you are a middle-level cadre running a department in a satellite city of Chongqing.  Making arrangements for entrepreneurs to build the New China has provided you with a substantial quantity of yuan that you need to move to Cambridge, for Harvard tuition, a boxster and a nice flat.  BoC is off the table.  Bitcoin leaves a trail similar to the heat trail a satellite sees when watching a nuclear submarine transit the pacific:  A big red arrow pointing directly to your location.

These are not merely "first world problems".

No one is asking you to use monero if it doesn't serve your interests.  But I do claim that it is a crucial protection from totalitarian control of your political and religious activism, and can be used to deny ANYONE who may wish to seize your wealth the information necessary to do so.  The tech to make this easy enough to use so that those who are motivated, but not technically exceptional, can do so, is not present.  But Monero puts it in reach.

We live in a world of increasing risks.  Transactional privacy enables you to manage many important risks in useful ways.  The captive coopted mass of circus-goers will not fret about this, as they butter the bread for their grilled government cheese sandwiches.  Those who have something which they consider their own, something to protect, will understand this.

Governments control the cheese consumers.  But those who control the governments have something to protect.

Well spoken.

[superresistant]

Killer app would be something which allows you to trade in the exchanges without losing all your coins if they get hacked. That'll bring confidence back to crypto 

Are you talking about MGW and uMGW of NXT?:
http://multigateway.com/
All the info:
https://nxtforum.org/nxtservices-releases/how-to-test-multigateway-with-nxtservices-a-test-user-guide/

I didn't know about that. I'll check it out   

We talked a bit about it few pages ago :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg7985996#msg7985996
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624223.msg7986586#msg7986586

[Este Nuno]

Problem is that it's very difficult to find the hashing algorithm that would be really ASIC resistant, not to mention GPU. For instance, Primecoin which included large integer algorithms that should be difficult for GPUs was soon transferred to GPU mining. All scrypt algos are prone to GPU mining. I tried to find some hashing algorithms that would favor RISC processors, since they dominate modern smartphones, but I've failed to find any. If anybody has some info about such algos it would be very nice to share that info here.

What about Slimcoin? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=613213.0

"New Block Generation through Proof-of-Burn
Even a Raspberry Pi can competitively mine, fast hardware offers no advantage"

Pretty interesting. Hadn't heard of it before. Just peaking at the last few pages of that thread it looks like a technical disaster though.

[David Latapie]

David Latapie has a low-risk strategy, something like selling 20% every time price doubles, which is pretty infallible in an exponentially rising trend, and which is described in depth in another thread.  Risto has a thread about bitcoin which is similar.

As a reminder: Extended 10/200 strategy. Except that I'm considering stop selling now that Risto showed me that someone with 10,000 BTC some years ago applying the basic 10/200 strategy (a.k.a. Risto's "SSS method") would only have 185 BTC now

I just tell people to hold, and continue to buy, at a fixed regular interval, spending a fixed amount of their local currency each time, regardless of the price.  This is almost impossible to mess up.  The result is that when price is low, you get more than when price is high, so that unless price collapses, when you need to sell, the price is very likely to be higher than your average price.  In XMR, I might add that buying more sooner, and waiting as long as possible to sell, is likely to serve you well.  Trading is at least 2:3 a losing bet.  Relatively few people make gains on daytrading.  In XMR it is in many ways more difficult than in other instruments.

And I follow your advice. Every month, I have 100 EUR sent to Kraken converted to BTC and then sent to Poloniex for buying at market price (well, not exactly market price, since Polo has no such thing as market price order). The key as you mention it to not use money that you may need in the immediate future, so that you won't have to sell at the worst moment because of externalities.

Don't invest more than you can afford to leave idle long enough to reap a significant gain.  Don't sell at a lower price.  If you feel compelled by the price to buy or to sell, it probably means you're about to get torn to pieces.  Don't even look at it if price alone is going to lead you to buy high or to sell low.

Sound advice.

[tromp]

I tried to find some hashing algorithms that would favor RISC processors, since they dominate modern smartphones, but I've failed to find any. If anybody has some info about such algos it would be very nice to share that info here.

Sounds like you may want to have a crack at the Cuckoo Cycle GPU Speed Parity challenge at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=707879.msg7996954#msg7996954

Among all PoWs, Cuckoo Cycle may be best suited to smartphones since it minimizes computation, and spends 2/3 of its running time on memory latency.

[itod]

Problem is that it's very difficult to find the hashing algorithm that would be really ASIC resistant, not to mention GPU. For instance, Primecoin which included large integer algorithms that should be difficult for GPUs was soon transferred to GPU mining. All scrypt algos are prone to GPU mining. I tried to find some hashing algorithms that would favor RISC processors, since they dominate modern smartphones, but I've failed to find any. If anybody has some info about such algos it would be very nice to share that info here.

What about Slimcoin? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=613213.0

"New Block Generation through Proof-of-Burn
Even a Raspberry Pi can competitively mine, fast hardware offers no advantage"

Tx for the link. No wonder that PoW+PoS+PoB implementation lead to problems. Dcrypt sounds interesting but doesn't seem like full solution against ASIC/GPU domination.

[itod]

I tried to find some hashing algorithms that would favor RISC processors, since they dominate modern smartphones, but I've failed to find any. If anybody has some info about such algos it would be very nice to share that info here.

Sounds like you may want to have a crack at the Cuckoo Cycle GPU Speed Parity challenge at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=707879.msg7996954#msg7996954

Among all PoWs, Cuckoo Cycle may be best suited to smartphones since it minimizes computation, and spends 2/3 of its running time on memory latency.

Amazing that we both posted about the same thing in different places on the same day. We must team-up to make this coin

Going to read everything on cuckoo Github.

[georgehosterguy]

I've been reading some of the negative posts regarding ethereum and I'm having a hard time grasping - in a world of a million clonecoins why it's a bad investment?  Anonymint's idea of virus in the blockchain is the biggest detracter I can see.

I see people saying
  A - the distribution model gives too much ethereum distribution to original investors.
  B - the distribution model doesn't limit the number of ethers distributed - so it screws the initial investors.

This seems to balance out for me.  I mean - if initial investors are getting screwed but too much ether distribution at the same time...

Second complaint I've seen is inflation. 

Inflation = @ .26 inflation against the ORIGINAL investment amount (not a recurring .26) is less than bitcoin in year 1 (100%) & year 2 (50%) etc.  At some point (been too lazy to figure it out) it will inflate faster than bitcoin - but by year 5 (if my math is right) it'll be 7% inflation and continue to decline.

Third complain is that it's a scam.  I have a difficult time buying this after looking thru the forums, looking at the github activity (https://github.com/ethereum/cpp-ethereum).  Here's a guy who's creating his government with it - https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1009/the-people-s-republic-of-doug-ethereum-based-decentralized-organization

It feels like pointing out the obvious to say that even if ethereum raises $10,000,000 - they have already done MORE work & innovation than 100X the everyday $250,000 - $500,000 scamcoin / pump & dump.

P.S.  I'm not an investor - have too much tied up in crypto already.  Just wondering if I'm crazy.

[AnonyMint]

Ethereum is starting to get my attention.

This is an extremely serious threat to be #1 or #2. I don't know if they can pull it all together.

I will studying and thinking more...

Anonymint shilling for Ethereum, now hell has frozen over.

"We're aiming for either a turing complete PoW algo, or a randomized hash function every thousand nonces. The algo has not been decided on yet. We are also considering PoW/PoS hybrid." - July 23, 2014

For all intents and purposes, it is currently a completely vaporware money grab.

Hey guys I agree about the IPO metrics being silly (in terms of buy small, grow big, but maybe they work as a centralized distribution mechanism?) and I wrote similar criticism at the thread I linked to.

But then I took another look at it from the standpoint of technology and potential market size.

1. A programmable blockchain has 100s more applications than Bitcoin alone. This could be what is required to increase adoption by 10 or 100 fold.

2. Vitalik Buterin seems quite capable at least from reading a few of his blog posts. Yet I will say that when Charles H. asked me to look at Vitalik's Dagger Pow CPU-only algorithm several months ago, I told him it could be trivially defeated with parallelism in the same memory footprint and now Vitalik admits it ("shared memory"). So it appears to me he might be very intelligent yet unable to actually choose correct designs and "get 'er done".

The concept of what Ethereum wants to achieve is extremely powerful and could really change the world immensely. Any one agree or disagree?

A ("the") fundamental problem is that Turing-complete insures viruses will appear and mess up the state (i.e. on the block chain).

I don't see any solution from them yet on this fundamental issue.

Yet I am thinking about a potential decentralized solution and so if I can think of it, they may be able to too.

I agree of course they are selling vaporware in many respects.

Probably will end up being a failure, but there is huge latent potential also (difficult to totally dismiss).

Comments? Thoughts?

P.S. I am very sleepy, so please excuse if this post is lame.

Add: I haven't looked in detail at the other smart contract coins, e.g. CounterParty, BitShares. Do they offer Turing-complete scripting?

[othe]

A ("the") fundamental problem is that Turing-complete insures viruses will appear and mess up the state (i.e. on the block chain).

Or someone exploits their VM code and breaks out.