rpietila Altcoin Observer

[smooth]

Rehashing this over and over again isn't going to make a solution present itself any faster (not directed at you, just speaking in general).

A significant number of they people doing it (and I'm not sure they even know who they are) are not trying to solve anything. They are rehashing the topic in order to spread FUD because they have already decided they don't like Monero for various reasons.

I'll reiterate that this does not mean I think Monero is perfect or that these problems are not serious or should be addressed. I'm speaking to motivation here, and why we see (and will see) the same points repeated and repeated and repeated with no new substance.

[smooth]

I'm willing to bet this information might shed some light here .. I could see many people being fine with a high-scale crypto with no anonymity so long as the purchase is low and not really requiring the need for privacy (think groceries - not prescriptions, where maybe you only put $50 in your wallet at a time). I'm thinking this CN might fill a niche for a little bit more costly purchases because of what it offers. Honestly, I'd find it crazy to want to ever hide the fact that I bought some milk, eggs and bread from the grocery store from anyone - I just don't care about it, and why would I go overkill and permanently obscure that data when it's not needed.

This is potentially addressed with an off-chain model, even something as simple as prepaid card/account which has been widely used already to address the fact that Visa transactions don't scale down to small purchases very well (so iTunes, Starbucks, etc.)

If you don't care that someone is tracking your milk, eggs, and bread purchases you don't need crypto to do it at all. Just use a crypto with good privacy to load up your grocery store card (so no one including the grocery store can find out about your other finances) and you are good to go.

[AnonyMint]

Thanks for the discussion.

Please don't assume I am "not trying to solve anything".

[kbm]

I'm willing to bet this information might shed some light here .. I could see many people being fine with a high-scale crypto with no anonymity so long as the purchase is low and not really requiring the need for privacy (think groceries - not prescriptions, where maybe you only put $50 in your wallet at a time). I'm thinking this CN might fill a niche for a little bit more costly purchases because of what it offers. Honestly, I'd find it crazy to want to ever hide the fact that I bought some milk, eggs and bread from the grocery store from anyone - I just don't care about it, and why would I go overkill and permanently obscure that data when it's not needed.

This is potentially addressed with an off-chain model, even something as simple as prepaid card/account which has been widely used already to address the fact that Visa transactions don't scale down to small purchases very well (so iTunes, Starbucks, etc.)

If you don't care that someone is tracking your milk, eggs, and bread purchases you don't need crypto to do it at all. Just use a crypto with good privacy to load up your grocery store card (so no one including the grocery store can find out about your other finances) and you are good to go.

Right! I totally neglected to encompass off-chain tx's into the scope of the statement. At the time I was thinking under the impression that multiple cryptocurrencies would be all that were in existence, and promise notes were out of the picture. This takes the scope of the thought a bit further .. adding this into the picture falls back onto having some form of trusted banking system manifesting though (possible full-reserve banking?). That's something else that is still an unknown too. I'd like to not think that I would personally have to worry about protecting and maintaining my financial data from here until the end of time, and might consider paying someone else to take charge of that responsibility at this moment in time, just as I currently do(add: unless I can be shown beyond doubt that my money is safest in my own hands). The amount of time and effort that will be required by a third party to serve as such an entity would not be something light .. though I already do see it coming to light with people leaving their money on exchanges. One more step from here and they can just do exactly what you mentioned (That seems to have been the basis of Anonymint's coinbase/bitstamp thread).

I haven't really put enough thought into that happening though, I see that a whole lot of people here exclude the thought banks from crypto so it's a weird topic to try and discuss here .. not much unbiased discussion has taken place (for both good and bad reasons I guess). Right now I'd say it's too early for any one of these exchanges to try this at all - they're far from secure with your money (Gox, just a few months ago).

[DogTheHunter]

Did anyone tell about the MultiGateWay of Nxt ?



http://bitcoinist.net/multigateway-new-decentralized-exchange/
http://multigateway.com/
http://multigateway.com/user-guide/installing-the-software/
https://nxtforum.org/multigateway-jl777/
https://nxtforum.org/umgwc/
https://nxtforum.org/umgwc/umgw-ui-release-v1-3e/

It's working, I am using it.
Basically you can trade Nxt for Bitcoin or Litecoin, soon Darkcoin (I know fuck that coin) and more crypto soon.

It is a decentralized exchange that you use from the Nxt client.
All transactions are based on the Nxt blockchain. No cheat, no theft, no scam, ...

Isn't it what cryptocurrencies always needed ?

how can xmr be traded with this?

[clovex]

When are you guys going to sell XMR (to rebuy later..)

[kbm]

When are you guys going to sell XMR (to rebuy later..)

Anyone shorting it right already bought back

...is what I would say if I had bothered shorting in the first place

[equipoise]

When are you guys going to sell XMR (to rebuy later..)

Anyone shorting it right already bought back

...is what I would say if I had bothered shorting in the first place

Shorting now could leave you without your precious XMR.

[illodin]

Do you think it is at all possible to design and implement a "perfect" privacy coin?

If so, can you design it? I've understood that even if you could, you wouldn't have the time / resources to implement it.

Ideally, what should happen in order for you to pull off such a project successfully? How much funding? How big of a team would you need? Who would you select in your team as developers?

[Brilliantrocket]

Do you think it is at all possible to design and implement a "perfect" privacy coin?

If so, can you design it? I've understood that even if you could, you wouldn't have the time / resources to implement it.

Ideally, what should happen in order for you to pull off such a project successfully? How much funding? How big of a team would you need? Who would you select in your team as developers?

I believe that he has stated the he wouldn't want to be seen as a lead developer for such a project.

[drawingthesun]

Rehashing this over and over again isn't going to make a solution present itself any faster (not directed at you, just speaking in general).

A significant number of they people doing it (and I'm not sure they even know who they are) are not trying to solve anything. They are rehashing the topic in order to spread FUD because they have already decided they don't like Monero for various reasons.

I'll reiterate that this does not mean I think Monero is perfect or that these problems are not serious or should be addressed. I'm speaking to motivation here, and why we see (and will see) the same points repeated and repeated and repeated with no new substance.

This is one of the reasons I haven't been posting as much recently.

Monero is the best anonymous system that we have at the moment, the people following Monero are mostly interested in a digital cryptocurrency that is untraceable. Our community has anonymity as our fundamental ideal.

Even if Zerocash worked and solved their infinite currency problem, I would stick with Monero for one reason; because I believe in this community, and if this community was presented with a superior technology to ring signatures, I am certain that a hard fork would be made and we would continue to be the dominant community built up around the idea of an anonymous CryptoCurrency. I believe we will change with the times, and it's that reason I support Monero.

The trouble is now we either have the silly dumb trolls posting lies about Monero or we have some intelligent members of the community posting the same argument over and over again hoping for the perfect currency to emerge and not supporting anything until this "ultimate" currency gets created.

Even if this ultimate coin that solves all the problems gets created, the Monero community is so strong I believe we would emulate that coin's strengths and become stronger ourselves.

I agree smooth, sometimes it feels pointless arguing here because the same invalid points are made again and again without any consideration for Monero itself advancing and the community reacting to new concepts.

I believe in Monero and this fantastic community.

[Este Nuno]

 if this community was presented with a superior technology to ring signatures, I am certain that a hard fork would be made and we would continue to be the dominant community built up around the idea of an anonymous CryptoCurrency.

Is this the general consensus?

Just how deeply ingrained to the CryptoNote technology are ring signatures? What would a hard fork be like? Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?

[itod]

Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?

Exactly. The confidence in Monero after the hard fork will be shuttered. It's much better to admit it and try again with new coin than to let the whole concept limp in the future because of the initial design problems.

[fluffypony]

Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?

Exactly. The confidence in Monero after the hard fork will be shuttered. It's much better to admit it and try again with new coin than to let the whole concept limp in the future because of the initial design problems.

If this hypothetical "perfect" cryptocurrency is ever designed, we can cross that bridge then. Hypothetically telling everyone how the hypothetical users of a cryptocurrency would react to a hypothetical hard fork brought on by the introduction of a hypothetical perfect cryptocurrency is...well...nothing more than your hypothesis.

[Este Nuno]

Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?

Exactly. The confidence in Monero after the hard fork will be shuttered. It's much better to admit it and try again with new coin than to let the whole concept limp in the future because of the initial design problems.

If this hypothetical "perfect" cryptocurrency is ever designed, we can cross that bridge then. Hypothetically telling everyone how the hypothetical users of a cryptocurrency would react to a hypothetical hard fork brought on by the introduction of a hypothetical perfect cryptocurrency is...well...nothing more than your hypothesis.

In this instance we were just talking about a superior anon technology. Not a perfect currency. Just that one aspect.

Anyone speculating in anything fundamentally has to consider hypothetical situations and their associated probabilities.

My original question of whether or not being ready to hard fork XMR was the general consensus among the community still stands. I've found it incredibly rare for any community or dev team to ever be willing to change. Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin being the three largest examples. If Monero development is taking a more agile approach I would find that interesting.

Right now XMR is a bleeding edge crypto. Is the plan for it to constantly retain that position? There are big rewards for staying on top off all the latest trends and technologies, but that also comes with larger risk of course.

[ArticMine]

I already said one-time ring signatures are an improvement, except they come at the cost of defeating the mini-block chain, which is the only way I can see to scale to micro transactions and remain decentralized (assuming you want new mining nodes to be able to pop up, download the block chain, and leave the network at-will to guard against IP blocking by the authorities, etc...).

I would urge you to think of the idea of intentionally living with a rigid or punitively expensive cap of daily transactions.

The transaction cost for physical gold bullion transactions is always 1% or more of the value, typically 2% (not counting all the externalities such as your time).

I am in favor of drastically increasing the price of something that is rare and valuable, and would not even notice paying 1 XMR fees.

High transaction fees for trading and in particular for taking delivery of gold are in fact the major weakness of gold as a form of money and led to the development fractional reserve banking and fiat currencies. The net result of these costs is that gold is worth less not more since it becomes easier to short gold and more importantly maintain the shorts. This is critical to understanding the source of the Rothschilds' wealth. The premise is that owners of gold would deposit their gold with Rothschild and use their promissory notes for gold instead of gold as money in order to avoid the the above mentioned fees and costs. Rothschild would then issue promissory notes for gold in excess of the gold on deposit and profit from the interest rate spread on the notes that were created "out of thin air". This worked because only 10% of the depositors withdrew their gold because of the fees, troubles and costs of taking delivery. Now what happens if these fees and costs were suddenly removed, people would redeem their notes and withdraw their gold from the bank, since there is now no advantage to holding the promissory note for gold rather than the gold itself. This causes the bank to collapse in a massive short squeeze, since there are more notes than gold, and the price of gold to rise sharply.

How does this apply to BTC and XMR? Well with BTC we saw pirateat40 build a massive short position in BTC in late 2011 and early 2012. This had the effect of depressing the price of BTC in 2012 allowing those of us who were buying BTC at the time to benefit from depressed prices. When the short position blew up in August 2012 it set the stage for the sharp rise in 2013. The key advantage of BTC over gold is that with BTC it is trivial in cost and time to take delivery and thereby squeeze the shorts to the wall. Mark Karpelès of MTGox was also likely taught this same lesson. In fact I would not be surprised if there is another sharp rise in the BTC price in the aftermath of this latest short squeeze. So trying to "pull a Rothschild" with BTC is doomed to failure, at least for the time being. This brings me to my next point. The 1MB blocksize limit in BTC. If this is not addressed. this will cause transaction fees to rise sharply, fractional reserve banking to become viable as with gold, and prices to fall. It is for this reason and not privacy that I have purchased a substantial position in XMR as a hedge on my BTC position. XMR does not have this problem, in fact some would argue it has gone somewhat too far in the opposite direction.

The bottom line is that for XMR we need to keep fees at a minimum to cover actual costs, in order to maximize the value of the currency not the other way around.

[rpietila]

...good analysis...

The bottom line is that for XMR we need to keep fees at a minimum to cover actual costs, in order to maximize the value of the currency not the other way around.

Good analysis.

I did not say that high fees increase the value of money. I mean that it is possible to live with them, because everything considered, the fees are typically a minor percentage of the transaction costs.

- In corporate context, the policies and red tape are so high that every transaction costs up to $60 (accounting etc dept costs divided by # of transactions per year).
- In retail, we are still talking about several dollars.
- Even in grocery stores, each customer costs about $1 at least to check out.
- Only in automated internet transactions (not even really possible until crypto*), it matters whether the price is $0.01 or $0.1 per transaction.

ADD:
*or even then without subsidized transaction fees, given current implementations

[fluffypony]

In this instance we were just talking about a superior anon technology. Not a perfect currency. Just that one aspect.

Anyone speculating in anything fundamentally has to consider hypothetical situations and their associated probabilities.

My original question of whether or not being ready to hard fork XMR was the general consensus among the community still stands. I've found it incredibly rare for any community or dev team to ever be willing to change. Litecoin, Dogecoin, Bitcoin being the three largest examples. If Monero development is taking a more agile approach I would find that interesting.

Right now XMR is a bleeding edge crypto. Is the plan for it to constantly retain that position? There are big rewards for staying on top off all the latest trends and technologies, but that also comes with larger risk of course.

There are two problems. The first is that new technology (and I'm not talking about altcoin gimmicks, I mean ZeroCoin specifically) may introduce brand new, untested cryptography. What happens when you have millions of users and huge merchant adoption uptick? You can't play with people's money by opening them up to risk, so you stick with what is tried and tested.

The other problem is that it's not us who makes that decision. We may have some degree of swing now, but even right now - if we suddenly decided to introduce something stupid like doubling the block time without doubling the block reward, what would happen? Miners would ignore our changes, someone would fork the repo, and they'd continue development without us.

None of this means that Monero will eventually reach a point where change is impossible, it's just that some changes will be ill-advised until another cryptocurrency has demonstrated its value and cryptographic soundness over many years, and other changes may never live to see the light of day because miners will refuse to accept it. The upshot of this is that even if something like ZeroCoin is the holy grail and they've solved the obvious trust issue and they are absolutely certain no other exploits in the software exist (which will take years) it will still be a struggle for them to have any sort of adoption based on technology alone. There are WAY too many other variables at play.

[Its About Sharing]

Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?

Exactly. The confidence in Monero after the hard fork will be shuttered. It's much better to admit it and try again with new coin than to let the whole concept limp in the future because of the initial design problems.

Are you guys serious? You really think if a better technology comes along, that it is easier to build that network out with a new coin (not to mention testing, getting a developer network behind it, promoting it, etc.) instead of just adding that to Monero, BTC, etc? And then rinse and repeat with each new technological advancement. That makes absolutely no sense.

[itod]

Wouldn't be easier for people to just start over with a new currency than deal with a hard fork?

Exactly. The confidence in Monero after the hard fork will be shuttered. It's much better to admit it and try again with new coin than to let the whole concept limp in the future because of the initial design problems.

If this hypothetical "perfect" cryptocurrency is ever designed, we can cross that bridge then. Hypothetically telling everyone how the hypothetical users of a cryptocurrency would react to a hypothetical hard fork brought on by the introduction of a hypothetical perfect cryptocurrency is...well...nothing more than your hypothesis.

I'm not talking some far-in-the-future hypothesis. I'm talking about the fact that Monero's blockchain is exploding in size with negligible amount of transactions it now process. There's no PHD needed to see that with anything close to BTC amount of transactions it would making running the full Monero node unsustainable for most users. There's many things I like in Monero, but if something looks unrepairable without dreaded hard fork, why not take the best from Monero and move it to a new currency which doesn't have the super-fat blockchain problem?