rpietila Altcoin Observer

[aminorex]

the differences in utility between the better and the worse will be massive.

I think the only area where this is true is privacy factors.  Other distinctions rooted in technology may be important for usability factors, but these are essentially linear terms.  Privacy is extremely non-linear; in the extreme case, it is nearly a kronecker delta.  Network effects follow power laws, so they generally dominate over usability factors, but are in turn, ceteris paribus, dominated by the privacy factor.

I'm looking at the XMR and BBR charts.  It's pretty obvious that the market is reacting in radically different ways to the two coins.  Essentially, for the past month, BBR is only sold, not bought.  I have behaved this way myself, yet I do not know exactly why it is so.  Perhaps it is the cbuchner miner which destroyed BBR.

[smooth]

network effects

Network effects are extremely large and critical for privacy technologies.

Take even zerocash as an extreme, which theoretically leaks no information about who is holding coins or spending coins. If you are the only one using it (ignoring that one person using a coin is impossible), you have zero privacy. Every transaction is obviously yours. There are more realistic examples though. If it can be determined through external sources that you are the only one transacting with some counterparty using zerocash (for example you are the only one to whom he sent his address), then the fact that he received zerocash proves that you sent it.

Regardless of the details of technology you still need a haystack to hide the needle, and the larger the better.

[AnonyMint]

WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME?

I'm pretty sure he has no actual authority over how you allocate your time.

smooth your political postering isn't going to help you. I am here to get real work done. Your underhanded psyops are revealing a conniving side of you that I would not want you in my group. Learn to be upstanding, so you can be with the winning group, or stay with the manipulative losers. I'm pretty sure I have no authority over your choice. (arsehole)

You know damn well he is Dunning-Kruger wasting my time. You are too smart not to realize that.

 

WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME? Hire a cryptographer to do some study.

can't you see this man is serious! stop wasting his goddam time and get bruce schneir on the case already

Seriously you have a $6 million marketcap and you all brag about the donation model of funding, so why can't you spend $5000 to get the damn cryptanalysis done going on 3 months after release.

Instead you play manipulative political games. Appearances are that you can't get real work done, and you only have BS politics to fall back on.  

You can't even build anonymity into mining.  

Ahh, you tricked me into reading!

When will you graduate kindergarten?

Sentences of the form:

"I haven't studied the Boolberry PoW algorithm but "

Either your mind is extremely unperceptive and depraved, or you are just being facetious.

You know damn well that I understand the overview of the algorithm employed to make a hash function memory hard, because I told you that I implemented L3crypt. And it is quite clear from my writings that I am highly knowledgeable in this area.

I didn't study exactly how he is twiddling each bit to utilize the block hash data to provide the randomization of the lookups in the scratchpad, but I do know he says he eliminated the computation of a hash that would normally take that role. Thus I don't need to look at the source code, to make the statements I have made.

Idiots like you are wasting valuable time on political grandstanding. If you had any idea of what I am capable of, you might feel guilty for the disservice you are doing to the community by delaying my work by causing me to have to come here and defend my person against your nonsense.

Don't those just read a lot better as:  "I haven't studied mechanical engineering." ? :-)

Just continue to believe that I am not capable. That is perfect. I am going to enjoy immensely putting you in your rightful place.

Any more of this nonsense? Come on don't get shy now. Continue your senseless BS please.

[AnonyMint]

this bbr xmr discussion is so needless and I see no reason why it is important - I own both in a 1/3 bbr/xmr ratio and yes bbr is massively undervalued BUT xmr has one thing and probably the only really important - the market until now has decided that xmr is the one that shows some serious network effects

Ah what network effects. You guys don't have a freakin' clue. Sigh.

You are just lucky that Zoidberg seems to be lacking in the communication area, or that he misses certain organizational opportunities. You won't be so lucky with me.

[crypto_zoidberg]

I didn't study exactly how he is twiddling each bit to utilize the block hash data to provide the randomization of the lookups in the scratchpad, but I do know he says he eliminated the computation of a hash that would normally take that role. Thus I don't need to look at the source code, to make the statements I have made.

Would you like to be more concrete ?

[AnonyMint]

I didn't study exactly how he is twiddling each bit to utilize the block hash data to provide the randomization of the lookups in the scratchpad, but I do know he says he eliminated the computation of a hash that would normally take that role. Thus I don't need to look at the source code, to make the statements I have made.

Would you like to be more concrete ?

All Scrypt-like memory hard functions have essentially some variant of the same fundamental algorithm (ignoring the initialization of the memory scratchpad):

Code:

0: i = C, n = N
1: while(--n) i = hash(memory[i]) % pow(2,(sizeof(i)*8))
2: return i

Note some variants write the output of the hash back into the scratchpad, which is important for diminishing the threat of "lookup gap" strategies for trading computation for memory space.

My assumption (based on your description) is that Boolberry's PoW hash is faster because you replace 'hash' with some faster operation that modulates 'memory[ i ]' by data from the block chain, e.g. perhaps an xor operation. That modulation may not be cyptographically secure because that blockchain data may be subject to cryptanalysis and game theory.

Cryptonote's PoW employes AES round in the 'hash' which may not be cyptographically secure.

[nioc]

Anonymint is releasing a coin?

Never. But that doesn't mean that I didn't secretly contribute to a coin that is released. I will never tell you.

I for one appreciate your contributions to crypto, especially when they are in the more level headed vein as they have been the last week or so.  I hope you don't mind me pointing it out, but your tone has been far more reasonable recently, and it makes your positions and arguments much easier to navigate and consider.

I would always be interested in what coins you contribute to, and which you feel have serious potential.

But secrecy is your prerogative obviously.

I was thinking the same thing and then I read the recent posts.  It got me thinking of a wonderful book I read a very long time ago, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten".

I just found a short video based on the book and although it obviously can't do justice to the book it ain't bad .  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgvAGOGGuaQ

[AnonyMint]

I was thinking the same thing and then I read the recent posts.  It got me thinking of a wonderful book I read a very long time ago, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten".

Cripes are you a female? Can we all hold hands, say a prayer, and the technology will magically get done correctly. That is the way females and emasculated western males think.

What you don't understand is that many people did not like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, etc.. BECAUSE THEY DEMANDED HIGH STANDARDS. Yet you use their creations every day.

There are always these political jealousy hissy fits from losers.

BS walks. Technology and real work talks.

And for damn sure I know how to be polite, lovable, caring, etc.. and I also know how to cast away loser arseholes who are playing asinine political games.

[AnonyMint]

It is really sad that most humans are too inept to discern substance.

They are ripe for manipulation.

Armstrong said it best about humans, "if one person  is staring at the sky in a public place, people will ignore thinking the person might be crazy. If 5 people are staring at the sky, a crowd will gather and everyone will look into the sky".

"if one zebra takes off sprinting, the other zebras will copy without even knowing the reason".

Humans have not evolved.

[AnonyMint]

Zoidberg, this is an example of an opportunity that you may have failed to grab in the past. At the moment, if you could do some analysis of the issue I raised and come back with some concrete explanation or improvement made to your PoW, it would show that unlike Monero crapholes, you are open source to valid feedback and do try to stay focused on improvements and not political manipulation.

Grabbing such opportunities is the way you win the community.

And nevermind drawingthesun trying to keep you in second place. There is no reason you have to stay in second place, if you can demonstrate better leadership than Monero has. Monero has to cater to the "least common denominator" (e.g. dga), because they are a political paradigm (open source). They don't have any Benevolent Dictator (e.g. Linus Torvalds) to reign in political distraction and keep everything focused on innovation and substance.

[AnonyMint]

We don't use the whole header's data since it obviously not all of it is pseudo-random. For adding to scratchpad i use only:
* prev block id
* coin-base transaction's onetime key
* coinbase transaction's outs keys (xored with prev_id)
* blocks merkle hash
So i took only that data that seems to be maximum close to random.
(take a look into get_block_scratchpad_addendum(const block& b, std::vector<crypto::hash>& res) in src\currency_core\currency_format_utils.cpp: line 868)

I hope you realize that a pool with 50% of the hashrate, could discard hash solutions 50% (25% of all hashes generated in system) of the time (to favor some nonrandom bits in the data) and still win 37.5% of the block rewards. If this attack enabled them to speedup the calculation of the PoW by 100% only, they would have 67% hashrate, thus winning 50.25% of the block rewards.

This is an example of analysis that needs to be done within the scope of cryptanalysis and game theory.

Altcoins by non-cryptographers are dangerous, analogous to ignorant children playing with fire.

Edit: for novices (and those facetious whose goal is to obfuscate, not procreate), the above isn't limited to those with 50% of the hashrate.

"I hope you realize that a pool with X% of the hashrate, could discard hash solutions 50% ((X/2)% of all hashes generated in system) of the time (to favor some nonrandom bits in the data) and still win (X * 0.75)% of the block rewards. If this attack enabled them to speedup the calculation of the PoW by 100% only, they would have (2 * X / (1 + X/100))% hashrate, thus winning ((2 * X / (1 + X/100)) * 0.75)% of the block rewards."

Nor is it limited to 100% speedup vulnerabilities.

"I hope you realize that a pool with X% of the hashrate, could discard hash solutions 50% ((X/2)% of all hashes generated in system) of the time (to favor some nonrandom bits in the data) and still win (X * 0.75)% of the block rewards. If this attack enabled them to speedup the calculation of the PoW by A%, they would have ((X + A/100 * X) / (1 + (A * X)/10000))% hashrate, thus winning (((X + A/100 * X) / (1 + (A * X)/10000)) * 0.75)% of the block rewards."

For example, lets set X = 33%, A = 10x speedup, and discarding 67% of hash solutions. The adversary gets 37% of the block rewards.

This field of analysis is game theory.

[AnonyMint]

well basically it is network effects which gives the one on the superior technology a higher utility when he uses the inferior technology, in the case that all others use them as well. even if drk has more users/investors/speculators at this moment of time the inferior technology will in this case not win against the superior, for the reason that the the elasticity between somewhat half-baked private and full private regarding utility is very high. this is not watching a movie on a vhs which is inferior to betamax, but offers almost the same utility - this is a very sensitive issue: the differences in utility between the better and the worse will be massive.

But Monero's advantage is too muddled to trounce DarkCoin, because while DRK's masternodes could potentially be compromised, XMR's I2P connections could potentially be compromised.

Good luck trying to explain the distinction to a wide audience. You'll never scale that dissemination of marketing.

You see this is where I kick your butt, because I've done million user products before and I understand what matters.

You guys in armchairs. Have. No. Fscking. Clue.

You will get off my lawn kiddies.

I think the only area where this is true is privacy factors.  Other distinctions rooted in technology may be important for usability factors, but these are essentially linear terms.  Privacy is extremely non-linear; in the extreme case, it is nearly a kronecker delta.  Network effects follow power laws, so they generally dominate over usability factors, but are in turn, ceteris paribus, dominated by the privacy factor.

In a fantasy world where 'privacy' isn't a lie that you can't market against. Most people think they have privacy already.

Privacy was never a sufficient feature alone to win this market on. I knew that!

Btw, the anonymity trend was to some significant extent pushed along by me since early 2013 and my voluminous posts on the matter. And you think you can be pissingly disrespectful to me and gain community!

I never did anything to any of you to justify you treating me with such disdain. An apology from you would go a long way towards some hope of mutual respect. But I don't expect it will be forthcoming.

I'm looking at the XMR and BBR charts.  It's pretty obvious that the market is reacting in radically different ways to the two coins.  Essentially, for the past month, BBR is only sold, not bought.  I have behaved this way myself, yet I do not know exactly why it is so.  Perhaps it is the cbuchner miner which destroyed BBR.

Because there is a perception (and perhaps a reality) that confidence is moving towards Monero. Humans are herding creatures. This is the network effects point as well. The main features these investors (speculators) think is important are the ring signatures and the I2P integration. They don't see what BBR has that is important.  BBR is trying to sell a faster hash and some fractional reduction in blockchain bloat, but neither of those features addresses any real perceived dire need (although the faster hash is important long-term for decentralization, but nobody cares right now).

[Wexlike]

Anonymint, maybe start your own thread about all this technical talk?

I and every other regular reader does not understand a word of your conversation and consistant spam of posts. They might be important, but please start a new thread, so we can go back to have an altcoin discussion.

It really ruins my reading experience.

[fluffypony]

Zoidberg, this is an example of an opportunity that you may have failed to grab in the past. At the moment, if you could do some analysis of the issue I raised and come back with some concrete explanation or improvement made to your PoW, it would show that unlike Monero crapholes, you are open source to valid feedback and do try to stay focused on improvements and not political manipulation.

Grabbing such opportunities is the way you win the community.

And nevermind drawingthesun trying to keep you in second place. There is no reason you have to stay in second place, if you can demonstrate better leadership than Monero has. Monero has to cater to the "least common denominator" (e.g. dga), because they are a political paradigm (open source). They don't have any Benevolent Dictator (e.g. Linus Torvalds) to reign in political distraction and keep everything focused on innovation and substance.

Calm yourself, son. You keep using terms like "your" and "them" when you're replying to people that are not even involved with Monero. You get angry and frustrated at conversations with dga and Wolf0 and others that clearly do not know the internal state of Monero development.

This, in turn, leads to you saying things that are obviously nonsensical when you know better because you've been told as much. For instance, this choice quote of yours (in response to dga that is not part of the Monero core team, and appears to be more involved with BBR than XMR from my casual observation) -

Seriously you have a $6 million marketcap and you all brag about the donation model of funding, so why can't you spend $5000 to get the damn cryptanalysis done going on 3 months after release.

Instead you play manipulative political games. Appearances are that you can't get real work done, and you only have BS politics to fall back on.  

You can't even build anonymity into mining.  

This is in direct contrast to a conversation we had just yesterday where I quoted the Monero Missives, indicating that the mathematicians and cryptographers that peer reviewed the whitepaper are now involved in a code analysis and review, focusing initially on validating the cryptographic primitives used. Subsequent to that they will obviously expand their reach to review and analyse the PoW, ring signatures, and so on. You know this. You know that they are not doing this for free (as indicated in the opening of the whitepaper review which you have read). So making a broad-reaching, clearly baseless, obviously factually incorrect statement as you have made vastly reduces your credibility.

Your comment about anonymous mining has already been responded to by smooth who indicated that mining on i2p will work just fine, but the increased latency would likely lead to a higher orphan rate than mining over TCP. So saying that we "can't" build anonymity into mining when we already have is quite bizarre.

Let me be as clear as I can to you, and I'm going to put this in bold so you digest it and understand it and no longer make broad, nonsensical claims:

Monero has a "benevolent dictator". This is the core team, made up (in no specific order) of the following people: tacotime, eizh, smooth, fluffypony, othe, davidlatapie, NoodleDoodle. That's it. If you are responding to anyone of those people, they are speaking with knowledge of Monero's current state and priorities. We are not perfect, and we will say things online that are regrettable or even incorrect, but unless it comes from our mouths it is not "us". Stop treating people that do not necessarily even represent Monero's best interests as if they were somehow part of a hivemind of Monero souls. Stop imagining that we're playing a political game with you. We're happy to engage in a discussion of technical merits, although we are not obligated to share your unique point of view, but we have no interest in having any discussion beyond that with you. We do not have any ulterior motives, and for the most part we ignore the goings on here to focus on getting things done.

I reiterate: DO NOT in future respond to someone who is not part of the Monero core team and act like they represent anything other than their own opinion.

[AnonyMint]

Calm yourself, son.

I am likely your elder. Perhaps you've forgotten what culture was like back in the day. You didn't speak to your elders disrespectfully.

I told you to reign in dga. He reflects badly on your coin. And smooth made a reply upthread in support of Wolf0 at my expense.

You are playing politics right now. You never stop.

I would like to have a technical and factual discussion, but instead you want to fucking play this shit. That means fight.

You only responded, because I just blew away your entire marketing foundation.

Piss off. <middle finger>

[fluffypony]

Calm yourself, son.

I am likely your elder. Perhaps you've forgotten what culture was like back in the day. You didn't speak to your elders disrespectfully.

I told you to reign in dga. He reflects badly on your coin. And smooth made a reply upthread in support of Wolf0 at my expense.

You are playing politics right now. You never stop.

I would like to have a technical and factual discussion, but instead you want to fucking play this shit. That means fight.

You only responded, because I just blew away your entire marketing foundation.

Piss off. <middle finger>

I'm in my mid-30s, so you'd do well to flip that statement around.

We have no control over dga, he is not even involved in Monero on a peripheral level. Even if he was involved, there is little we could do to stop him expressing his (certainly valid) technical viewpoints.

There is no fight with you, Mint. There absolutely no desire to fight with you. There is no game. There is no attack. We have nothing but respect for your knowledge, and we have definitely taken heed of some of the valid points you have made. We all have ridiculous amounts of work to do, and arguing is among the least productive things we can do.

You have blown nothing away, although I'm certain you feel it important to think yourself capable of doing so, and I have no problem with you continuing to believe that.

I have said what needed to be said. Neither myself, nor any of the core team members, will continue this conversation thread with you as there is no value in doing so. Feel free to respond and continue to postulate as you will undoubtedly do.

[Este Nuno]

Anonymint, maybe start your own thread about all this technical talk?

I and every other regular reader does not understand a word of your conversation and consistant spam of posts. They might be important, but please start a new thread, so we can go back to have an altcoin discussion.

It really ruins my reading experience.

Other than the fact that the thread has recently gone in a bad direction I'm a regular reader and I just want to say that I was enjoying it quite a bit before the recent turn.

[rpietila]

Calm yourself, son.

I am likely your elder.

According to information known to me, AnonyMint is 10-20 years older than fluffypony. I think that (as well as his credentials, and pure motives) should increase our respect towards him. Only ignorant people ignore AnonyMint.

I told you to reign in dga. He reflects badly on your coin.

Freedom of speech is not so easily reigned, and public white- and blacklists of politically correct people sounds like a bad idea.

Fluffypony's response of whitelisting the core team and "let the others speak for themselves only" seems good.

I would like to have a technical and factual discussion, but instead you want to fucking play this shit. That means fight.

There are technical Monero threads, dev threads and other places for those issues. This thread is for fucking playing this shit, as well as serious tech. And also it does not necessarily mean fight.

[crypto_zoidberg]

I didn't study exactly how he is twiddling each bit to utilize the block hash data to provide the randomization of the lookups in the scratchpad, but I do know he says he eliminated the computation of a hash that would normally take that role. Thus I don't need to look at the source code, to make the statements I have made.

Would you like to be more concrete ?

All Scrypt-like memory hard functions have essentially some variant of the same fundamental algorithm (ignoring the initialization of the memory scratchpad):

Code:

0: i = C, n = N
1: while(--n) i = hash(memory[i]) % pow(2,(sizeof(i)*8))
2: return i

Note some variants write the output of the hash back into the scratchpad, which is important for diminishing the threat of "lookup gap" strategies for trading computation for memory space.

My assumption (based on your description) is that Boolberry's PoW hash is faster because you replace 'hash' with some faster operation that modulates 'memory[ i ]' by data from the block chain, e.g. perhaps an xor operation. That modulation may not be cyptographically secure because that blockchain data may be subject to cryptanalysis and game theory.

Cryptonote's PoW employes AES round in the 'hash' which may not be cyptographically secure.

Dear AnonyMint.
You make wrong assumptions. We added massive memory readings inside the keccak rounds. Not replaced.



UPD: I'll do some analysis. Just need to finish some current critical tasks

[Its About Sharing]

What do you guys think of just using volume as a way of gauging public interest in alts?
I realize it is not perfect, clearly. But it has been nice seeing XMR climb, but we are not alone.

Here is the site I use to see alt volumes: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/v2/coins/info
(If you know of any others, please let me know.)

Currently we are the #6 coin. Dark has been falling. But Cloak seems to be extremely strong in volume lately.  It is almost on par with LTC.
I have read not much good about Cloak here, but it is almost the #2 coin and it is an "anonymous" coin as well. Volume is around 1000 BTC.

IAS