rpietila Altcoin Observer

[Brilliantrocket]

I don't see any overt flaw with the fundamentals apart from the bloat. I'm even open to investing in Monero, if the bloat can be fixed. Anonymint has stated that it cannot, but perhaps he can be proven wrong, who knows?

 My main issue is with the Monero shills who try to misrepresent where Monero is in terms of completion. Just read your own thread to see the crippling issues that people deal with on a daily basis.

You're conflating - the conversation you were involved in was about the "best" anonymous coin, not the most usable or the most feature-complete. The person referred to ZeroCoin, so clearly they're talking about the "best" with regards to the degree of anonymity provided.

Bloat is something we know about, but not something we're concerned with solving right now, so stop bringing it up. Rehashing it is a strawman argument.

Nothing will be truly anonymous until there is an IP solution (not I2P, which is offers only illusory protection) and open source hardware. Bloat is an issue, no matter how much you try to divert attention away. It exposes your coin to centralization and makes it easier to attack the network.

[AnonyMint]

I give up trying to talk to you - you simply don't appear to actually read what other people write, and respond to some strawman argument of your own creation.

My post was very clear:  *A hard-fork is effective if enough of the exchanges, merchants, and actual users play along with it.*

And you came back and said "NO!  The users would have to buy in."

In the time-honored tradition of the Internet:  Plonk.

Work on your reading comprehension. Smooth's reply can help you comprehend.

[AnonyMint]

It's pretty obvious that Boolberrys biggest problem is, it has no team.

No its biggest (first-class) problem is it doesn't have a single feature that can't be adopted quickly by Monero and which makes it extremely compelling "must have" coin. A team won't change that.

So... not having a feature that can't be ripped off by XMR is a problem?

If it had features which were driving a market which is larger than XMR, which would not get adopted by XMR except on a lag, it could potentially accelerate past XMR in adoption. Yet apparently it is just trying to make marginal improvements to the same Cryptonote market XMR is.

Monero has a superior name, larger team, larger market cap, more investment, more funding.

It isn't beyond the realm of remote possibilities that the BBR developer could possibly surprise us and release some new feature that accomplished the above. But not likely.

It's pretty obvious that Boolberrys biggest problem is, it has no team.

No its biggest (first-class) problem is it doesn't have a single feature that can't be adopted quickly by Monero and which makes it extremely compelling "must have" coin. A team won't change that.

The second non-starter problem is the name isn't professional, i.e. it reflects on a lack of marketing.

Boolberry has had a working Official GUI Wallet for some time now. Boolberry has had the ability to prune the size of the blockchain since start. Monero has not quickly adopted either of these features.

If I look outside the Bitcointalk space, I see many products with different names that seemed bad at the time. The products did well. Google used a mispelled name. Yahoo is a derogatory term for a "rough" person.

Pruning the block chain doesn't drive a large user adoption at this stage, because no one knew it was important and it doesn't matter yet. And I doubt your pruning works.

The GUI could have been big positive for adoption if your target market were dummies. What did you do to market this advantage to the less technical? Whereas most of the serious miners here are apparently willing to slog through a command line near-term if they believe (a GUI is coming soon and) that coin has greater serious support.

Things that drive user adoption are quite different and a marketing guru understands this intuitively.

Apologies for my frankness.

[Its About Sharing]

I don't see any overt flaw with the fundamentals apart from the bloat. I'm even open to investing in Monero, if the bloat can be fixed. Anonymint has stated that it cannot, but perhaps he can be proven wrong, who knows?

 My main issue is with the Monero shills who try to misrepresent where Monero is in terms of completion. Just read your own thread to see the crippling issues that people deal with on a daily basis.

You're conflating - the conversation you were involved in was about the "best" anonymous coin, not the most usable or the most feature-complete. The person referred to ZeroCoin, so clearly they're talking about the "best" with regards to the degree of anonymity provided.

Bloat is something we know about, but not something we're concerned with solving right now, so stop bringing it up. Rehashing it is a strawman argument.

Nothing will be truly anonymous until there is an IP solution (not I2P, which is offers only illusory protection) and open source hardware. Bloat is an issue, no matter how much you try to divert attention away. It exposes your coin to centralization and makes it easier to attack the network.

I'm really interested here in Open Source Hardware. Guys - anyone have any more information here?
With the NSA revelations, I really don't trust any of the hardware manufacturers (but who does?)

IAS

[AnonyMint]

It's a healthy market, people believe in Monero because it was the first fair CryptoNote coin. There are only several other types of coins on the market:

1. Bitcoin
2. Other CryptoNote coins that are technically strong like Monero but have no leading market edge and are essentially "Litecoin/Litenotes"
3. Gen 2 coins like Ethereum and Nxt. However Nxt economy will never be strong because newly minted coins are essential for economic freedom and movement, and Ethereum is early days.
4. All the scam coins, (XC, Dark, Black, etc...)

Really, the only decent coins that are worth our time is Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum.

I think the Ethereum IPO will be so large it might be worth waiting until the coin is release before investing though.

The market for something totally new still seems to be ripe.

You forgot Zerocash which should splash down before the end of 2014. But seems to me it will likely not be prunable either?

Ethereum has $6 million marketcap (and counting...) yet won't have anonymity in its first generation and they didn't even select a PoW yet?

[fluffypony]

Nothing will be truly anonymous until there is an IP solution (not I2P, which is offers only illusory protection) and open source hardware. Bloat is an issue, no matter how much you try to divert attention away. It exposes your coin to centralization and makes it easier to attack the network.

There is no indication that I2P offers "illusory" protection. There are theoretical attacks that remain to be proven, and there are demonstrable attacks that are quickly patched. It is not perfect, but again, it is an added layer of obfuscation that will make it exceedingly hard for an advanced and resourceful attacker to even determine whether you are running Monero or not.

I also never said bloat was a non-issue, but that we were aware of it and we were not concerned with solving it right now, most certainly not in some half-baked way that has potentially far-reaching and devastating consequences. We aren't diverting attention from it, we are solving things around it whilst we consider existing solutions and invent brand new ones.

If it will make you feel like you won some sort of non-existent argument, you are welcome post once a day on the Monero topic and say "just a reminder that the Monero blockchain is going to be linearly larger than Bitcoin's when it reaches the same amount of use!"

[AnonyMint]

"just a reminder that the Monero blockchain is going to be linearly larger than Bitcoin's when it reaches the same amount of use!"

Incorrect on 'linearly'. Bitcoin can theoretically be pruned. Monero can't theoretically be (prove me wrong).

most certainly not in some half-baked way that has potentially far-reaching and devastating consequences.

And I agree that BoolBerry's pruning probably has a flaw that inevitably leads (or is vulnerable) to some divergent scenario such as gridlock or simply isn't what is claimed. I would need to look closer to be sure, and I don't have time. But I remember thinking about the possibilities in some detail months ago when I learned of Cryptonote and I always thought of divergent scenarios to every pruning strategy.

As I said upthread, any user you mix with can stop pruning for everyone else in the mix by not spending his coin, thus there are not enough spends on the ring to prune it. And rings can overlap each other thus the number of independent variables in the pruning equation can explode.

Even if force everyone to spend their coins periodically, that just shifts the problem forward in the blockchain and doesn't solve it.

[fluffypony]

I'm really interested here in Open Source Hardware. Guys - anyone have any more information here?
With the NSA revelations, I really don't trust any of the hardware manufacturers (but who does?)

IAS

Not really, you still have to trust someone to build that hardware.

There's a running joke when discussing "secure" systems, that if you want it to be "truly" secure you have to design and build the hardware yourself, and then write the OS yourself. And it has to have no exploitable bugs. In other words, good luck with that;)

When you take usability into account (presumably you don't want to jump through tons of hoops for every message you send and every penny you spend), the best you can do is exercise a moderate amount of caution, and use older, known cryptography on older, known hardware.

[canonsburg]

I don't get this obsession with bloat. No one in their right mind is going to download the full Bitcoin blockchain so they can spend $10 buying bread at their local shop. So why the hell are people complaining about Monero blockhain bloat? The vast majority of people are not going to be using the full client running a full node. That's just crazy to expect that. Even Bitcoin development is going in this general direction, by getting rid of the QT client and moving to a Core client because in the future, the Core program will be running the full node and third parties will develop the wallet program.

[thelibertycap]

Nothing will be truly anonymous until there is an IP solution (not I2P, which is offers only illusory protection) and open source hardware. Bloat is an issue, no matter how much you try to divert attention away. It exposes your coin to centralization and makes it easier to attack the network.

There is no indication that I2P offers "illusory" protection. There are theoretical attacks that remain to be proven, and there are demonstrable attacks that are quickly patched. It is not perfect, but again, it is an added layer of obfuscation that will make it exceedingly hard for an advanced and resourceful attacker to even determine whether you are running Monero or not.

Well, there is this timing analysis attack for example and instead of labeling it theoretical, you could perhaps forward the previously asked question to the i2p team that is supposed to work on the i2p monero integration: is it possible to add some sort of random delay or something that would make this attack not possible?

[thelibertycap]

I don't get this obsession with bloat. No one in their right mind is going to download the full Bitcoin blockchain so they can spend $10 buying bread at their local shop. So why the hell are people complaining about Monero blockhain bloat? The vast majority of people are not going to be using the full client running a full node. That's just crazy to expect that. Even Bitcoin development is going in this general direction, by getting rid of the QT client and moving to a Core client because in the future, the Core program will be running the full node and third parties will develop the wallet program.

hmm, lets think about it for a while.. what could go wrong when there are only a couple of NSA computers running the full nodes...

[AnonyMint]

I don't get this obsession with bloat. No one in their right mind is going to download the full Bitcoin blockchain so they can spend $10 buying bread at their local shop. So why the hell are people complaining about Monero blockhain bloat? The vast majority of people are not going to be using the full client running a full node. That's just crazy to expect that. Even Bitcoin development is going in this general direction, by getting rid of the QT client and moving to a Core client because in the future, the Core program will be running the full node and third parties will develop the wallet program.

100 Petabytes scaling and thus can't scale without centralization of mining. See upthread details.

[Este Nuno]

I don't get this obsession with bloat. No one in their right mind is going to download the full Bitcoin blockchain so they can spend $10 buying bread at their local shop. So why the hell are people complaining about Monero blockhain bloat? The vast majority of people are not going to be using the full client running a full node. That's just crazy to expect that. Even Bitcoin development is going in this general direction, by getting rid of the QT client and moving to a Core client because in the future, the Core program will be running the full node and third parties will develop the wallet program.

100 Petabytes scaling and thus can't scale without centralization of mining. See upthread details.

So we have people on one hand saying 1TB or some more, and then on the other end you're saying 100PB(?!). Whose estimate is closer to reality?

If it actually is in the 1-2TB range I think that's pretty manageable to be honest. Most people want to use thin clients anyway.

[AnonyMint]

Nothing will be truly anonymous until there is an IP solution (not I2P, which is offers only illusory protection) and open source hardware. Bloat is an issue, no matter how much you try to divert attention away. It exposes your coin to centralization and makes it easier to attack the network.

There is no indication that I2P offers "illusory" protection. There are theoretical attacks that remain to be proven, and there are demonstrable attacks that are quickly patched. It is not perfect, but again, it is an added layer of obfuscation that will make it exceedingly hard for an advanced and resourceful attacker to even determine whether you are running Monero or not.

Well, there is this timing analysis attack for example and instead of labeling it theoretical, you could perhaps forward the previously asked question to the i2p team that is supposed to work on the i2p monero integration: is it possible to add some sort of random delay or something that would make this attack not possible?

Also ask how they can prevent Sybil attacks on the relay nodes? Answer: they can't

Also ask if adding the randomized delay would be compatible with use of I2P as a foundational network layer for general network functions? Answer: No

[Its About Sharing]

I'm really interested here in Open Source Hardware. Guys - anyone have any more information here?
With the NSA revelations, I really don't trust any of the hardware manufacturers (but who does?)

IAS

Not really, you still have to trust someone to build that hardware.

There's a running joke when discussing "secure" systems, that if you want it to be "truly" secure you have to design and build the hardware yourself, and then write the OS yourself. And it has to have no exploitable bugs. In other words, good luck with that;)

When you take usability into account (presumably you don't want to jump through tons of hoops for every message you send and every penny you spend), the best you can do is exercise a moderate amount of caution, and use older, known cryptography on older, known hardware.

Thanks for the information.

(Anyone) - Any suggestion on a small and cheap netbook or the like, to be used as an offline machine?
I will be using a USB stick with the wallet generator on that and just print off it.

Thx in advance,
EMS

[AnonyMint]

Question:

So we have people on one hand saying 1TB or some more, and then on the other end you're saying 100PB(?!). Whose estimate is closer to reality?

If it actually is in the 1-2TB range I think that's pretty manageable to be honest. Most people want to use thin clients anyway.

Reply:

Bitcoin is at 60,000 tx per day and I think Visa + Mastercard is 6,000 per sec. So multiply the 10GB for Bitcoin blockchain by 8000 (= 80 Terabytes) just to get to current commerce. And Visa + MC don't do micro transactions. With micro transactions we would be in the Petabyte range.

So even if your bloat is only a constant factor less than an order-of-magnitude, the real problem is one-time ring signatures defeat the mini blockchain design (because you can't know which address has which balance with ring signatures).

Edit: I think there is some effort underway looking into how to prune the Bitcoin blockchain, but afaics this won't be possible with ring signatures because you don't know which inputs were spent. There are some heuristics that could be applied, but it looked very messy when I thought about it a bit. One of the mixed inputs not spent can cascade and prevent the pruning of all those mixed with.

If that is true, then the units might not be rare but blockchain space might indeed be very scarce (and then must be somewhat expensive). It is a useful perspective.

At 8 billion people and 1024 account balances each, and say 128 bytes per account storage, that is 1 Petabyte. That is the best the mini blockchain could do. One-time ring signatures would make it entirely intractable (100s or more of Petabytes) unless you increase the cost until the 8 billion are restricted.

Let's assume a 10 year goal of 1 billion x 8 account balances each, so 1 Terabyte which is one hard drive. And hard drive space doubles every 18 months, so in 17 years we can store 1 Petabyte on one hard drive. So the mini blockchain can scale.

So there is no scarcity, except for badchosen design (priorities).

P.S. we do have to discourage dust balances though.

To get to Visa scale with Bitcoin brings us to 80 Terabytes without pruning.

Monero claims 5 - 6x bloat (and I disputed that, it could be higher see below...). So heading towards a Petabyte just to reach Visa+MC scale.

And we are expecting micro transactions and crypto-economies (Ethereum, CounterParty, Bitshares, etc) so the volume of transactions could increase orders-of-magnitude over Visa+MC scale.

Wait a minute, 6MB/day with 3% of Bitcoin transactions, and Bitcoins blockchain grows at 34 MB/day, that's not 5x the growth of blockchain compared to bitcoin, it's 5.82x, closer to 6x for the same number of transactions. You want to tell me that 6x bigger blockchain is not a design flaw...

As I wrote upthread, I don't think that 5 or 6x calculation is accurate. Because someone told me that Monero currently has a limitation wherein you can't mix too many inputs (incorrect?), so you need to mix multiple times to achieve the same level of mixing you would with one transaction without the limit. Thus many of the transactions are multiple mixes for the same transaction, thus the real bloat is orders-of-magnitude higher than Bitcoin.

But remember from upthread discussion between smooth and myself, that the level of that multiplier is less relevant. I explained (argued) that the real problem is one-time ring signatures make the blockchain unprunable.

[fluffypony]

Incorrect on 'linearly'. Bitcoin can theoretically be pruned.

Yeah, I was just being snarky:-P

Monero can't theoretically be (prove me wrong).

And I agree that BoolBerry's pruning probably has a flaw that leads to some divergent scenario such as gridlock. I would need to look closer to be sure, and I don't have time. But I remember thinking about the possibilities in some detail months ago when I learned of Cryptonote and I always thought of divergent scenarios to every pruning strategy.

I don't think pruning is possible, at least not in the way you could with Bitcoin. There are other things we're looking at, but in my opinion pruning is a non-starter for solving this.

[AnonyMint]

I don't think pruning is possible, at least not in the way you could with Bitcoin. There are other things we're looking at, but in my opinion pruning is a non-starter for solving this.

Is there any place I can go to learn about the ideas presented thus far?

This is open source correct?

[thelibertycap]

Also ask if adding the randomized delay would be compatible with use of I2P as a foundational network layer for general network functions? Answer: No

Not sure I understand, this delay is useful when sending coins because couple of additional seconds is worth the wait. We don't need other general network functions - or do we?

To get to Visa scale with Bitcoin brings us to 80 Terabytes.

Monero claims 5 - 6x bloat (and I disputed that, it might be higher). So heading towards a Petabyte just to reach Visa scale.

But..

Do we expect and require Visa scale and micro transactions? Bitcoin is fine for that. Remember you yorself claimed we are running out of time because of coming global sovereign debt collapse and currently there is nothing better on the horizon that would stand up to your criticism for now let's just stick with what we have and concentrate on the main goal - it doesn't include micro transactions on Visa scale.

[dga]

I don't get this obsession with bloat. No one in their right mind is going to download the full Bitcoin blockchain so they can spend $10 buying bread at their local shop. So why the hell are people complaining about Monero blockhain bloat? The vast majority of people are not going to be using the full client running a full node. That's just crazy to expect that. Even Bitcoin development is going in this general direction, by getting rid of the QT client and moving to a Core client because in the future, the Core program will be running the full node and third parties will develop the wallet program.

100 Petabytes scaling and thus can't scale without centralization of mining. See upthread details.

So we have people on one hand saying 1TB or some more, and then on the other end you're saying 100PB(?!). Whose estimate is closer to reality?

If it actually is in the 1-2TB range I think that's pretty manageable to be honest. Most people want to use thin clients anyway.

To the previous poster:

(a)  Some people are looking for any hammer they can to bash on the CryptoNote coins in general, and XMR specifically.  This is the most obvious, because it does represent the most apparent tradeoff made thus far:  The cryptonote blockchain is larger than the bitcoin blockchain.

(b)  It's actually interesting, for the above reasons, if your goal is for BTC or XMR or BBR or whatever to "take over the world" (i.e., replace cash) and scale to handle thousands of transactions per second.
  (b.1)  The block time is 60 seconds, so there is 10x more overhead from "blocks" (as opposed to transactions).  An "empty" XMR blockchain is O(10x) larger than an "empty" BTC blockchain.  An empty BBR blockchain is 5x larger than an empty BTC blockchain.  I use the "order of" notation O(x) to note that this is not a precise answer, but it's the right order of magnitude.

  (b.2)  To facilitate anonymity, transactions in CryptoNote are split into fixed-size chunks, so that the precise size of the inputs and outputs is not a clear distinguisher of the transaction.  Thus, one "payment" (as the user sees it) involves more inputs and outputs than might be typically used in Bitcoin.  Kind of.  None of the analyses that people have posted are very careful on this front, because the increase in transaction size depends on how well your client software can match up your existing set of coin inputs (which were also sent as fixed-size chunks!) to the outs it needs to generate.  This may be anywhere from 1x to 10x.

  (b.3)  When using mixins, the ring signature scheme adds an extra signature for every mixin used.  Thus, again speaking vaguely, a CryptoNote transaction is a few times larger than a BitCoin transaction, other factors being equal.

(c)  People are guessing and seem to be biasing their answers in favor of the direction they like.  I don't think people have a good answer to how much (b.2) above actually adds to things -- my personal hunch is that it's maybe a factor of two or three, but that's a guess.  Some people are pointing out stridently that the "empty blockchain" is actually only X much bigger than bitcoin, and that's true, but it's also a bogus measure, because we shouldn't care about the size of a blockchain that's being used primarily for mining coins and sending them to an exchange.  

The people picking huge constants and multiplying them all together are being similarly deceptive, because they're ignoring that some overheads (such as the block header, etc.) are fixed and shouldn't be included in the multiplication.

If you pick and choose this, you can construct almost any answer you like.

Here's my guess:

- Splitting into fixed size chunks:  2-3x
- Ring signatures with a sane minimum for guaranteeing anonymity:  3x
- Block time:  Negligible in the limit as the number of transactions increases
- Bigger individual signatures and addresses:  2x

Overall:  Roughly 10x the size of bitcoin.  Perhaps 10x, perhaps 30x.  With bitcoin at nearly 20GB, the XMR equivalent would be somewhere in the 200-600 GB range.

This is a concern.  Once the blockchain is too big to fit on a single commodity hard SSD, for example, the *time and knowledge* needed to participate as a full node in the system increases substantially -- RAID arrays, building your own hardware, etc.  The time to download the blockchain may also be a concern for the time to bring a new node into the ecosystem.

This is also an overblown concern for the moment, given the newness of all of these coins, the experiments underway at ring signature pruning (BBR), the increasing understanding of pool management to mitigate dust transactions (XMR), and the fact that we have *no idea* what kind of fees people would be willing to pay in order to have their transactions remain anonymous, or whether and what technical solutions will work well to help keep the size down.  There's also a complex long-term interplay with Moore's law and the volume of transactions.

tl;dr:  People are blowing a lot of smoke to try to achieve their own aims and pretending to be a lot more certain about it than they really are.  It's an important question.  But you probably don't need to panic about it in the short term.