rpietila Altcoin Observer

[smooth]

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.

It depends. If you think this is going to replace Visa (or perhaps larger, by including micropayments that are currently handled "off-chain" with Visa) in its present form that then that is probably in the PB range. If you are thinking about Bitcoin today and in the foreseeable future then that is not PB.

Anonymint to his credit wants to "think big" and focus on the former. I think that's entirely reasonable, but I also think it is fairly useless for him to be doing so on this forum, because there is little indication that Bitcoin-derivied technologies are going to do that and certainly he is going to get very little useful collaboration here because few if any in the Bitcoin space are currently making any serious effort to implement it.

The rest of us are (or at least the Monero team is) focused on incremental improvements on what already exists and adding value in the near future. So adding some level of privacy to Bitcoin which currently has essentially none, improving scaling even if that doesn't mean scaling to PB, fixing bugs, improving usability and performance, etc. It is entirely possible that all this work will be made entirely obsolete someday by what Anonymint envisions, but it won't be soon.

[AnonyMint]

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?

I2P is a general network layer. It is not just Monero that is being run on it. Adding a protocol change to I2P impacts all the network services that run on it. I suppose it might be possible to allow services to opt-in higher latency, so that is implicit in the question I asked of them. But it might not be possible for various reasons, one being resource usage reciprocity on relay nodes (or who provides the bandwidth for free and why are they not the NSA's Sybil attack?).

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.

If something comes along that can scale faster because supports ZERO transaction fees, prevents pools from being large, mass mining, micro transactions and Ethereum style contracts, then Monero could be surpassed.

Also I don't believe Monero is anonymous to the NSA and authorities with high reliability given the weaknesses in I2P and Tor.

Also just like Bitcoin, Monero appears headed towards centralization thus it won't take long for NSA to have power to send national security gag order to the few pools that will dominate it, and thus defeat the anonymity either by correlating entry and exit node timing or simply changing the protocol to ban transactions they can't correlate.

Centralization is the near-term enemy. Bitcoin is already there. Monero has not innovated at all on decentralization of mining.

Note I did not argue that Monero is useless in all possible scenarios one can contemplate.

[smooth]

- 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

Mostly agree, but one comment. Ring signatures do not make up the entire block chain, so using a mix factor of three (approximately 3x signature size) does not mean 3x in terms of blockchain size factors. Perhaps you are already assuming a mix factor of 5 or something, and the 3x number includes this.

[AnonyMint]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

The other killer flaw of Monero is it inherits Bitcoin's centralization of mining.

I edited my prior post to make that point.

[Este Nuno]

Thank you AnonyMint, dga, and smooth for your answers. All very interesting perspectives.

[dga]

- 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

Mostly agree, but one comment. Ring signatures do not make up the entire block chain, so using a mix factor of three (approximately 3x signature size) does not mean 3x in terms of blockchain size factors. Perhaps you are already assuming a mix factor of 5 or something, and the 3x number includes this.

Right.  "with a sane minimum" -- something akin to BBR's minimum-mixin flag, to address the long-term mix de-anonymization problem.  A solution to that will boost the blockchain size, though by how much nobody knows yet.  The last time I heard from Zoidberg on this, he was thinking of something like minimum-mixin 5, but don't quote me on that, that's memory.

[Este Nuno]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

The other killer flaw of Monero is it inherits Bitcoin's centralization of mining.

I edited my prior post to make that point.

I'm surprised at how many people in the Bitcoin community are fine with the way transaction fees are headed to be honest. I was really surprised too when I downloaded NXT to see that the fee was 1 whole NXT per transaction for a currency just a few months old. I guess they depend on that fee to support the network or something?

[AnonyMint]

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.

I sort of agree with your post.

I do note nothing gets done to fix these killer flaws, e.g. centralization of mining.

We always push it out into the future when it is too late already, e.g. Bitcoin.

Okay so now we know what the parameters are. So I will go back to work on solving the fundamental problems and Monero can continue moving forward as a stop-gap measure.

Agreed?

(so I can go silent now I hope)

[tacotime]

Centralization is the near-term enemy. Bitcoin is already there. Monero has not innovated at all on decentralization of mining.

There hasn't really been any decent alternatives.

For any proof-of-resource chain, it will tend towards centralization. That centralization can be concentrations of stake or coinage, or signing delegates, or hard drive space, or bandwidth, or whatever.

A censorship free, decentralized, provably temporally stable messaging system for which we can transmit and then store transactions simply doesn't exist. I have a lot of doubts about whether or not there will be a solution to that. I think it will be proven impossible before it will be proven possible.

[AnonyMint]

TacoTime, there are cases when it is better to keep my mouth shut. This is one of them.

[fluffypony]

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?

Just discussions on IRC in #monero-dev (we will move to a more archivable format soon) - once something is ready to be formalised it will be proposed and put up for commentary.

[Skinnkavaj]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

So when mining is finished who is going to pay the miners?
Nothing in this world come for free you should know that. This was the stupidest statement I have ever read from you.

[Brilliantrocket]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

So when mining is finished who is going to pay the miners?
Nothing in this world come for free you should know that. This was the stupidest statement I have ever read from you.

Perpetual debasement. If you had bothered to read some of his discussions, you'd know that. You'd make a good posterchild for Dunning-Kruger.

[smooth]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

So when mining is finished who is going to pay the miners?
Nothing in this world come for free you should know that. This was the stupidest statement I have ever read from you.

Perpetual debasement. If you had bothered to read some of his discussions, you'd know that. You'd make a good posterchild for Dunning-Kruger.

Monero is going that direction as well, though there is healthy debate about the exact amount and structure. We don't however believe (as bitcoin does) that transaction fees alone supporting miners is a good approach.

I don't agree with zero transaction fees for the most part, but I'm not sure.

[Brilliantrocket]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

So when mining is finished who is going to pay the miners?
Nothing in this world come for free you should know that. This was the stupidest statement I have ever read from you.

Perpetual debasement. If you had bothered to read some of his discussions, you'd know that. You'd make a good posterchild for Dunning-Kruger.

Monero is going that direction as well, though there is healthy debate about the exact amount and structure. We don't however believe (as bitcoin does) that transaction fees alone supporting miners is a good approach.

I don't agree with zero transaction fees for the most part, but I'm not sure.

Obviously you'll get significant resistance from shortsighted individuals, but long term, I don't think there's any other solution (perhaps heavy transaction fees). At least not yet.

[fluffypony]

Obviously you'll get significant resistance from shortsighted individuals, but long term, I don't think there's any other solution (perhaps heavy transaction fees). At least not yet.

Agreed - in my opinion it's the most elegant solution, as it prevents miner collusion and selfish miners artificially forcing a fee increase by rejecting / slowing down min-fee transactions. Fees may still serve a dual purpose, though - both as a way of preventing spam, and as a way of indicating transaction priority.

[AnonyMint]

So if Monero goes light or zero on transaction fees paid with perpetual coin rewards, then the blockchain can be spammed to more bloated.

Only the mini blockchain can scale well with the increased transactions and usership from zero transaction fees, and that is if you can stop spam. And even then you need to get rid of dust.

Interplay of design of a coin is holistic.

[dga]

The other killer flaw of Monero is non-zero transaction fees. A coin with zero-transaction fees can surpass it quickly.

So when mining is finished who is going to pay the miners?
Nothing in this world come for free you should know that. This was the stupidest statement I have ever read from you.

Perpetual debasement. If you had bothered to read some of his discussions, you'd know that. You'd make a good posterchild for Dunning-Kruger.

Monero is going that direction as well, though there is healthy debate about the exact amount and structure. We don't however believe (as bitcoin does) that transaction fees alone supporting miners is a good approach.

I don't agree with zero transaction fees for the most part, but I'm not sure.

Zero transaction fees combined with a flexible blockchain structure that can support, e.g., arbitrary user data or extensibility are a recipe for letting people externalize their costs.

When you're consuming storage in a medium replicated 1000s of times around the world, paying a little rent is a good idea.  Otherwise, some clever schmuck will figure out how to store a copy of windows ME in the blockchain, and we'll never be rid of it.

[itod]

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 isn't just a concern of disk space, which can be remedied with adding more disks in RAID, people keep forgetting individual nodes have to verify all those scripts in that data in order to individually verify the blocks. It essentially boils down to more centralized mining, and being very prohibitive for smaller development projects to be self sustained and not depend on the third party to trust. I would be very glad to see the projection from the Monero developers how many processor cores would be required for full Monero node to run with amount of transactions getting close to Bitcoins.

[smooth]

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 isn't just a concern of disk space, which can be remedied with adding more disks in RAID, people keep forgetting individual nodes have to verify all those scripts in that data in order to individually verify the blocks. It essentially boils down to more centralized mining, and being very prohibitive for smaller development projects to be self sustained and not depend on the third party to trust. I would be very glad to see the projection from the Monero developers how many processor cores would be required for full Monero node to run with amount of transactions getting close to Bitcoins.

Bitcoin runs about 60K transactions per day which is less than one transaction per second. Even allowing for the fact that transaction flow is not constant throughout the day this is not even close to being a serious issue.