Monero XMR ... Why do people fall for the shills and bullshit?

[fluffypony]

See, now that's a well written criticism. Worlds apart from OP's faggotry that included no arguments whatsoever.

Anyone care to comment on it and write a rebuttal? Fluffypony, maybe?

(disclosure: Monero owner writing)

I commented on that post elsewhere (Anotheranonlol has been cut-and-pasting that everywhere, so I had to dig around to find my reply, and turns out it wasn't even a reply to that comment specifically).

Basically, the difference between the two in terms of usability is incremental. We did not build the 0.8.8 release statically as there were too many boost issues on various platforms, and we needed people to be able to dynamically switch one boost version out for another. The next tagged release will have boost linked in statically. With regards to the GUI, there are already a number of GUIs for Monero. They are all just as usable as the Boolberry one, which makes them all equally useless to anyone outside of the very small circle of technically proficient people on this forum. They're not intuitive or natural for a non-cryptocurrency native.

In other words, you have to split target audiences in two. Firstly, there's a relatively group of people (no more than a few tens of thousands) who know or use this forum (check box one), are interested in cryptographically sound software (check box two), don't buy into gimmicky "features" (check box three), and have a degree of technical proficiency (check box four). Secondly, there's the rest of the planet (check box one), who may have a peripheral interest now or in the future in using digital currency (check box two), and who may run malware-ridden systems or be unable to use a computer without the simplicity of an Apple product (check box three). In-between these two groups is a sliver - a very tiny third audience - who know or use this forum (check box one), are very opinionated and express their opinion loudly (check box two), and have a technical proficiency below what one would expect (check box three - and that's an observation and not meant to be an insult).

Monero in its current form (command-line, optional GUIs you may have to compile yourself) is perfectly useable by the first audience, as is Boolberry. In the future Monero hopes to be perfectly useable by the second audience, but right now both Monero and Boolberry are completely useless for that target audience. That tiny sliver - the third audience - are not catered for by Monero unless they are willing to ask and learn, whereas Boolberry appears to "work out the box" for them.

It is not worth our while expending effort and doing something half measure to incrementally improve usability for that third sliver. We will, as a natural order of ongoing development, make things easier for that group, but most likely not to the level Boolberry has. Instead we choose to focus on improving the stability and usefulness for our current audience (the first group), whilst also pursuing a long-term goal of making Monero useable by the second group. Between now and when we reach that long-term goal, those that are in the third sliver will either disregard Monero until it accomplishes that long-term goal and is useable by them, or they will apply their minds, ask questions, and move into the first group.

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[rpietila]

I am a large owner of Bitcoin since 2011 (and married since 2003 since that was of importance to the OP  )

I have bought 1%+ of the monero emitted so far, in my campaign that I told in advance.

The reason for buying Monero and not any other altcoin, before of after, is outlined in the Altcoin observer thread.

The two basic qualifiers for me to buy into a coin are:

- being the first to introduce a technical feature not implementable in Bitcoin;

- fair launch and reasonable emission schedule.

These are, in my understanding, the fundamentals that make it possible for a coin to stand the test of time, because out of these only grow the market niche, the community of reasonable people, and the adoption.

[MaxDZ8]

Monero is scam?
I never got that idea at all.
Ok, it is scam because the wallet is clunky... what? Everything is clunky in BTC world I never ever ran a wallet until Electrum came out! Hours downloading a .dat... or synchronizing? WTF?

I honestly completely fall in for those "shills and bullshit", I have no perception of a problem and I still don't have one.

BBR... okay, why not.

[drawingthesun]

A pile of junk coin, that has made its position by somehow replacing LTC as the second coin to trade on Poloniex.

It has features, though, but sadly the features are pointless, and can never go beyond appealing to teenagers and unmarried men in their thirties that have prostituted themselves to become Monero Shills. OMFG!

Horrible coin.

How is being truly anonymous pointless?

Your first point is completely ridiculous, are you a fan of transparent transactions that make litecoin less private than a PayPal account?

The world is changing, slow movers get left behind.

[Lauda]

A pile of junk coin, that has made its position by somehow replacing LTC as the second coin to trade on Poloniex.
It has features, though, but sadly the features are pointless, and can never go beyond appealing to teenagers and unmarried men in their thirties that have prostituted themselves to become Monero Shills. OMFG!
Horrible coin.

How is being truly anonymous pointless?

Your first point is completely ridiculous, are you a fan of transparent transactions that make litecoin less private than a PayPal account?

The world is changing, slow movers get left behind.

Yet one of the main thing that attracted people to Bitcoin is anonymity (semi-anonymous). They just can't state a good reason why Monero is bad. The same happens with DRK.
Just look at the volume of Bytecoin and you will know everything right away.

[drawingthemoon]

2. I have read the Monero whitepaper

Link to the whitepaper?

Original CryptoNote whitepaper: http://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf
Our mathematicians and cryptographers raw (and sometimes snarky;) annotations are here: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_annotated.pdf
The review of the CN whitepaper as presented by one of our mathematicians is here: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf

Awww that's so cute.

I know it is the CryptoNote whitepaper. I was looking for Monero whitepaper that the poster indicated he had read. For example, if someone said Boolberry whitepaper/presentations, I found them on the Boolberry thread.

This might be the type of "shilling" that people are complaining. Now, CryptoNote = Monero, when it is far from it. It should not be called Monero whitepaper, that would be plagiarism.

[Anotheranonlol]

By cutting out dust from block rewards. Monero can have this as well. They chose to spend their time on building a proper database instead. I think I saw CZ get all giddy when he tried to make the point that a hard fork would likely be required to do exactly what he did. TBH, I've heard claims of 30-70% reduction with just a database being a possibility .. so why this is being repeated and hailed as a pinnacle achievement (trimming dust) I don't really care to know. Nobody knows the exact percentage:

"By cutting out dust from block rewards, Monero can have this as well" - No, It can't. I suggest you read again - http://boolberry.org/files/Boolberry_Reduces_Blockchain_Bloat.pdf That reduction is unrelated to cutting dust.

You can compress a file into an archive. You haven't made the file smaller, you've just compressed it. Putting blockchain into a database hasn't trimmed the actual dataset.  It's just put it into a database, BBR would actually reduce the size of the dataset. Spending time on database is a commendable piece of work and a needed contribution to cryptonote, yet If I'm not wrong it's something which can, and would be expected be adopted by others. So you can have a 'pruned' dataset IN an embedded DB.

..so I'm gonna ask you .. could it be that we're really just dealing with a guy that wanted to take a hacked shortcut by ruining your anonymity set and not deal with putting the work into creating a real database in the first place? What you should be asking is why he didn't put it in a real database!

Care to elaborate, exactly how he ruined your anonymity set? factoring in the mandatory mixin features added. I don't disagree with some of gmaxwells statements though. Why do you keep bringing up the database..  after XMR team commandeered Bitmonero, rebranded and began their (very good) concerted marketing efforts, was there a database? NO. so same question to you- why do you want to trust those guys who never put the time into putting in a real database in the first place? Why didn't they do a proper relaunch and fix the problems?  instead of just hijacking, changing the name initially and calling it a day. Because they weren't in a rush right?    

Anybody could of cloned bitmonero and rebranded it as moneronxt or some moronic shit without making any changes at that time, just promised ones at a future date... No shit they would be first to launch then.  No shit BBR launch was a little later because it actually implemented it's own novel ideas. Brand new PoW for instance. A whitepaper of which was recently released yet torn to shreds by die hard monero supporters nitpicking at minor (mis)interpretations of sentences, the dev doesn't even have english as a native language.

We come again to the predictable answer 'they are working on it' ... 'doing it properly' (stab at other coins implying they aren't) - XMR started by copy pasting BMR without making any changes  to launch earlier but now the team is working on it and that's what counts. It'll come soon...please.. So maybe BBR dev is also 'working on it gradually' like XMR works on their features gradually. As you know.. you cannot rush these things..

Ultimately, the argument you use to deride BBR is the same one you use to support XMR. If XMR is amazing because it's fixing problems not today but X date into the future, why can't BBR or any other coin be be that way?

Ten years, tony will have to pay an address licensing fee. His social security number will be replaced by his blockchain alias and it will be just wonderful. Not really .. these aliases are kinda pointless. Any benefit provided by protocol enforced aliases can just as easily be given by a third party that would use the alias in the first place. Also .. what if someone nabbed your view key or got access to your wallet? Imagine having to pay another aliasing fee? Could be lots of money. Why go through the hassle?

The whole point of this being a trustless, transparent feature baked in is so you don't need a (usually centralised) third party service.  It's a frictionless process to send money to an alias with BBR. No need to remember a long string of characters, no need to trust any other service. With XMR to send money to your friend alice, you have to ask her for her address, and then paste something like 226f0f1682c3f5afda441789f4c9eee0c124586c4fd729c3103f63f4675f225b to send her funds. You have to save that into a notepad file or address book to keep track of it.  With bbr, you could just type @alice and hit send. No arguing that that isn't a nicer experience.

what if someone nabbed your view key < what does that even mean?
or got access to your wallet? < Are you serious? Imagine if someone got hold of your monero or btc wallet. shock horror! you might have a risk of losing some funds.. Be serious.

"BBR has completely open source GPU miners, that don't hold you to ransom by stealing hashpower or forcing a donation to the dev like with XMR. "

..which were affordable because nobody fucking wants the coin.

what was affordable because nobody wants the coin -- The mandatory donation to the author of moneros closed source GPU miners?   I can't see how you'd even try to argue that closed source miners with pitfalls twisting your arm behind your back if you don't donate (you earn more donating than the loss of hashrate in not) are better than open source BBR miners for the ecosystem.

"BBR has more sensible block times."

Oh look! Another time traveler who knows for sure that blocks should yield exactly the amount of value that BBR produces! How convenient!

You haven't actually argued against the point there. the vision was supposed to be "close to BTC original curve" < Does it look close to BTC curve to you? half of all supply mined within a year.. seriously? I'm fine with it, because the more for me and less for others the better, as is everyone elses mentality lucky enough to be here early on, but it means potential pool for participants is much smaller. If BTC was 50% mined in 2009-2010, when it was more mature than XMR, (although the concept wasn't) I'm sure it wouldn't have taken off in the same way.

But saying that I can't pretend there hasn't been worse around, the fact NXT is near the top of the crypto market caps is testament to that. Also have to concede if the free market believes. they'll buy regardless of the distribution. Still can't lie and say it doesn't seem shortsighted, perhaps even lazy and greedy to not have tweaked it.

TFT was the one who added the 'feature' (bug) to change it from 120s to 60s which caused it's own set of problems. It since hasn't been corrected. It's one of the reasons you saw so many orphans-  verification is expensive, that wasn't optimized, neither was the daemon, etc all CN coins had problems but XMR had issues even more so with introduction of 60s block. When XMR was hijacked from TFT, the new devs made no effort to fix his questionable changes, Those params were left the way they were, despite there being arguments against them they were left to stay . Why even choose it? why keep it.

They couldn't be changed at this point, no way. It would harm XMR too much.. So it HAS to be swept under the rug and masqueraded as an intentional design choice to save face.

[btc-mike]

,. we needed people to be able to dynamically switch one boost version out for another.

Why?

In other words, you have to split target audiences in two.

When do you expect the second group to start using it?

The word you were looking for is sliver, not slither, Snakes slither.

[fluffypony]

,. we needed people to be able to dynamically switch one boost version out for another.

Why?

Because we were having endless issues with statically compiled boost not playing nicely on some systems. As a reminder, the release in question is 2 months old, so we've since moved past this and it will no longer be an issue in the next tagged release.

In other words, you have to split target audiences in two.

When do you expect the second group to start using it?

The word you were looking for is sliver, not slither, Snakes slither.

I'd expect them to start using it sometime between now and mid-2040.

Thanks for the catch:) I'll fix it now!

[smooth]

half of all supply mined within a year.. seriously?

You better check your math.

TFT was the one who added the 'feature' (bug) to change it from 120s to 60s which caused it's own set of problems. It since hasn't been corrected. It's one of the reasons you saw so many orphans-  verification is expensive, that wasn't optimized, neither was the daemon, etc all CN coins had problems but XMR had issues even more so with introduction of 60s block. When XMR was hijacked from TFT, the new devs made no effort to fix his questionable changes, Those params were left the way they were, despite there being arguments against them they were left to stay . Why even choose it? why keep it.

Because some changes are more risky and disruptive than others, and need to done with greater care and planning. Some of the changes you mentioned, such as not being optimized, were fixed relatively quickly. Others will be fixed in due time, and obviously the experience so far shows that the coin can do quite well, thank you, despite not having changes that you apparently don't fully understand pushed out too quickly.

(Good) software development is hard, okay? Are you actually a software developer in any way? Because frankly you sound pretty ignorant about this, even if you make some other good points from time to time.

[Anotheranonlol]

See, now that's a well written criticism. Worlds apart from OP's faggotry that included no arguments whatsoever.

Anyone care to comment on it and write a rebuttal? Fluffypony, maybe?

(disclosure: Monero owner writing)

I commented on that post elsewhere (Anotheranonlol has been cut-and-pasting that everywhere, so I had to dig around to find my reply, and turns out it wasn't even a reply to that comment specifically).

Basically, the difference between the two in terms of usability is incremental. We did not build the 0.8.8 release statically as there were too many boost issues on various platforms, and we needed people to be able to dynamically switch one boost version out for another. The next tagged release will have boost linked in statically. With regards to the GUI, there are already a number of GUIs for Monero. They are all just as usable as the Boolberry one, which makes them all equally useless to anyone outside of the very small circle of technically proficient people on this forum. They're not intuitive or natural for a non-cryptocurrency native.

In other words, you have to split target audiences in two. Firstly, there's a relatively group of people (no more than a few tens of thousands) who know or use this forum (check box one), are interested in cryptographically sound software (check box two), don't buy into gimmicky "features" (check box three), and have a degree of technical proficiency (check box four). Secondly, there's the rest of the planet (check box one), who may have a peripheral interest now or in the future in using digital currency (check box two), and who may run malware-ridden systems or be unable to use a computer without the simplicity of an Apple product (check box three). In-between these two groups is a slither - a very tiny third audience - who know or use this forum (check box one), are very opinionated and express their opinion loudly (check box two), and have a technical proficiency below what one would expect (check box three - and that's an observation and not meant to be an insult).

Monero in its current form (command-line, optional GUIs you may have to compile yourself) is perfectly useable by the first audience, as is Boolberry. In the future Monero hopes to be perfectly useable by the second audience, but right now both Monero and Boolberry are completely useless for that target audience. That tiny slither - the third audience - are not catered for by Monero unless they are willing to ask and learn, whereas Boolberry appears to "work out the box" for them.

It is not worth our while expending effort and doing something half measure to incrementally improve usability for that third slither. We will, as a natural order of ongoing development, make things easier for that group, but most likely not to the level Boolberry has. Instead we choose to focus on improving the stability and usefulness for our current audience (the first group), whilst also pursuing a long-term goal of making Monero useable by the second group. Between now and when we reach that long-term goal, those that are in the third slither will either disregard Monero until it accomplishes that long-term goal and is useable by them, or they will apply their minds, ask questions, and move into the first group.

The difference between the two right now in terms of usability is not incremental, but visible and apparent. That's what's real. The monero GUI mockup is sexy. Looks like a lot of thought went into it. Good job there. But For now that's what it is, a mockup. BBR gui is proven here today. The user experience is hardly the opposite, it just works.  There's this constant narrative in any monero supporters posts that they are doing things properly, other coins have done a botch job.

I wager any idiot here on this forum could work there way through downloading and sending a transaction with the BBR wallet. It's a relatively one click download and install. I find it much easier than bitcoin-qt or even electrum. I encourage anyone to try the two side by side and document the process. Using BBR was like a sigh of relief in comparison to XMR. - Sure a dumb mac user can setup a VM to try out XMR. or type in a sequence of commands and 'apply their mind' - Why would they want or need to do that though.

Maybe BBR can add a little privacy slider and cleanup a few things but it's a really simple process even today. BBR dev can forget about it for a while now and focus on underlying things.

The same cannot be said for Monero in it's current state We are not arguing about future things here, as monero could come out with an earth shatteringly user friendly GUI that enables grandma to send tokens to uncle bob encoded in ring signatures just as easily as ducknote or quazarcoin or boolberry could. The point is they haven't.

You say " They're not intuitive or natural for a non-cryptocurrency native." I'm sorry but who is your target demographic? We are talking about an alpha level altcoin, launched by anonymous group of individuals with questionable motives, promoted on subforum of a forum and on obscure exchange trollboxes. It's not permeating into the mainstream anytime soon, regardless of how shiny the buttons on the GUI are.

You split it into 2 broad groups, people that have a level of technical proficiency, and people that don't. I don't think it would be a stretch to imagine there are people on this forum who have no clue how to manually install boost on OSX, then setup and sync the monero daemon, then type in the command to create their wallet, and so forth, but who manage just fine to run precompiled xxxcoin-QT wallets who will ask 'how do I copy/paste from cmd prompt? when it comes to monero.

why this is continually used as a subtle attack against competing coins. The notion that you aren't in a rush to make things easy for the 3rd group and instead focusing on doing business in the back, so BBR has screwed up because it's already managed to make things perfectly easy for the 3rd group is something that keeps being repeated.  Used as a con when it's not one.  . We are getting the supporters parroting that same thing ad infinitum, implying they are the only group which puts any though into anything.

It's great monero is doing things methodologically, (no sarcasm), the whole GUI thing isn't that important really. It's a small pool of participants right now, and it is true you could take a little time to learn.  It's more the reaction to it. If XMR had GUI and BBR didn't, my god, you would not hear the end of it. When the opposite is true, complete nonchalence. No one seems to cares what other coins are adding because XMR can do it in the future so it wins by default is what seems to be happening now

[sisx2007]

well,time will told us who is right

[smooth]

For now that's what it is, a mockup.

Actually no, it isn't a mockup. It is the actual GUI code that will eventually be released into an integrated application (with bug fixes of course). A mock up is a simulation or model. This is the actual early development code being released for testing and feedback.

No one seems to cares what other coins are adding

As I explained on the BBR thread, this is because you don't understand what is actually important. Feature wars and being first to release one feature or another is (obviously, as demonstrated in the real world) not that important. You can rant all you want about XMR not having this or that feature and the reason no one cares is not because of some conspiracy, shill campaign, or whatever sort of paranoid delusion you are always spouting off about. It is simply because no one cares.

[btc-mike]

The two basic qualifiers for me to buy into a coin are:

- being the first to introduce a technical feature not implementable in Bitcoin;

- fair launch and reasonable emission schedule.

These are, in my understanding, the fundamentals that make it possible for a coin to stand the test of time, because out of these only grow the market niche, the community of reasonable people, and the adoption.

You described quite a few coins there, including BBR. Thank you for the vote of confidence!

[fluffypony]

The difference between the two right now in terms of usability is not incremental, but visible and apparent. That's what's real. The monero GUI mockup is sexy. Looks like a lot of thought went into it. Good job there. But For now that's what it is, a mockup. BBR gui is proven here today. The user experience is hardly the opposite, it just works.  There's this constant narrative in any monero supporters posts that they are doing things properly, other coins have done a botch job.

It's not just a mockup - we pushed out binaries of the interface a week ago. It is not wired up, and there is still a lot of work to be done, but the interface is way past mockup stage.

why this is continually used as a subtle attack against competing coins. The notion that you aren't in a rush to make things easy for the 3rd group and instead focusing on doing business in the back, so BBR has screwed up because it's already managed to make things perfectly easy for the 3rd group is something that keeps being repeated.  Used as a con when it's not one.  . We are getting the supporters parroting that same thing ad infinitum, implying they are the only group which puts any though into anything.

I never said it was a screw-up, I was just stating why we do not have a similar GUI as part of the Monero core. Incidentally, Jojatekok's Windows Monero client is one-click to run, it auto-updates itself, and is available in a bunch of languages (16 if memory serves). Literally its only downside is that it is Windows only, but that appears to be the majority of the target audience served by the BBR GUI, no? So I'd throw it straight back at you - why are you using this as a not-subtle-at-all attack against Monero, when an equivalent already exists for Monero? Come, now, this is a silly argument to be having.

It's great monero is doing things methodologically, (no sarcasm), the whole GUI thing isn't that important really. It's a small pool of participants right now, and it is true you could take a little time to learn.  It's more the reaction to it. If XMR had GUI and BBR didn't, my god, you would not hear the end of it. When the opposite is true, complete nonchalence. No one seems to cares what other coins are adding because XMR can do it in the future so it wins by default is what seems to be happening now

Now let me ask: what is up with all this "BBR vs. XMR" stuff?

I'm going to reiterate what I've said on more than one occasion: we like crypto_zoidberg very much. We have shared code across the fence on more than one occasion. There are changes he's implemented that we do not agree are a good idea, and it's ok for us not to agree with everything another person does. It would be a particularly boring world if we all just agreed with each other all the time:)

If someone asks my honest opinion about an aspect of BBR of course I will answer honestly, in a positive or a negative sense, just as I have been openly honest about Monero's shortcomings. Recently, however, there's been a great deal of baiting that has gone on, and I've been suckered into responding to fallacies and nonsense in a way that could be viewed as me having a negative opinion of crypto_zoidberg, when that is not the case. I wish him all and his cryptocurrency all the best, and I don't see any reason why both can't coexist without the need for constant comparison by supporters on both sides.

[Anotheranonlol]

half of all supply mined within a year.. seriously?

You better check your math.

TFT was the one who added the 'feature' (bug) to change it from 120s to 60s which caused it's own set of problems. It since hasn't been corrected. It's one of the reasons you saw so many orphans-  verification is expensive, that wasn't optimized, neither was the daemon, etc all CN coins had problems but XMR had issues even more so with introduction of 60s block. When XMR was hijacked from TFT, the new devs made no effort to fix his questionable changes, Those params were left the way they were, despite there being arguments against them they were left to stay . Why even choose it? why keep it.

Because some changes are more risky and disruptive than others, and need to done with greater care and planning. Some of the changes you mentioned, such as not being optimized, were fixed relatively quickly. Others will be fixed in due time, and obviously the experience so far shows that the coin can do quite well, thank you, despite not having changes that you apparently don't fully understand pushed out too quickly.

(Good) software development is hard, okay? Are you actually a software developer in any way? Because frankly you sound pretty ignorant about this, even if you make some other good points from time to time.

Hi,

"You better check your math." < numbers may be rough, I'll correct it and apologize. could you post the exact figure?

It's easy to understand (good) development is hard. I'm addressing this constant argument about any other coin with the exception of Monero being rushed.  Monero was the one launched without changes initially. Changes which were 'To be fixed in future" - Of course there have been changes, it's plain to see. and of course there will be changes in future, some of which take longer. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

What is wrong is this notion perpuated by monero zealots that XMR is perfectly allowed to have hiccups or flaws, because they can fix some of those in the future, yet any other coin can't have hiccups because that's not okay and that means they've rushed.  I mean BBR was the one which took longer to release (BBR made some fairly large changes to a greater magnitude than XMR) Somehow in that case, BBR is the one that rushed! How does that even make sense.  

Whenever I come here and get jumped by these various beleibers wearing I heart monero t-shirts who are plainly in love with this supposed soon-to-be silver to btc's gold. (I know there was one before, but this one is shinier) I feel like i'm getting a pillow over my mouth and telling me to shh, you can't fight it..

You can even consider some of the changes implemented by other coins as stopgap solutions. While XMR supporters go wild and rejoice that they haven't taken half-measures, and plan to do everything in one go. The other coin can potentially fix it in one go too, and still enjoy the benefits the stopgaps might have afforded them.
during the meantime.

I also know XMR will do perfectly well, in it's current incarnation, it's apparent. Doesn't even matter the specific reasons why it Will- it will do so regardless of criticism levied against it

You know yourself some of the params associated with XMR cannot and will not be changed. It was a decision that was made once and now we're stuck with it.

To answer your question; re: am i a software developer -  It's not my occupation. stopped needing to work about 3 years ago, hopefully will continue that for next 60-70 years, if i live that long   . I certainly wouldn't do it for fun.
But I've developed some software, so I guess that makes me a software developer in some way? also I wrote a HTML page once but i messed up on the img tags. I'll come clean and say i'm not that good with computer to be truthful. but welcome to be educated.

Questions for you: 1) Do you consider the emission curve of XMR to be preferable to the one chosen by BBR 2) do you consider the 60s block time to be optimal, or would you preferred it to have been changed?

[rpietila]

No one seems to cares what other coins are adding because XMR can do it in the future so it wins by default is what seems to be happening now

+1. Exactly.

[kbm]

You can compress a file into an archive. You haven't made the file smaller, you've just compressed it. Putting blockchain into a database hasn't trimmed the actual dataset.  It's just put it into a database, BBR would actually reduce the size of the dataset. Spending time on database is a commendable piece of work and a needed contribution to cryptonote, yet If I'm not wrong it's something which can, and would be expected be adopted by others. So you can have a 'pruned' dataset IN an embedded DB.

But it's not pruned, it's 'pruned'. It will continue growing forever - just because he bought an extra year or two for something that's not even really a problem for easily over five years doesn't really sell me on it right now. Specifically because it's an partial solution to something that's not important right now when the chain is small. If he doesn't spend time on things that are important right now - building community, a real GUI, protocol bug fixes, multisig, firing btc-mike .. and instead spends all day working on things that have zero effect right now .. but can be done in the future .. then why would I ever think that he's gonna be working on the right thing? If one were to take this illegitimate 'pruning' as a selling point .. I would feel that there's a distinct lack of prioritization. I'm just not sold on that one, because of the trade offs involved (below). He has time to create a database - so why not work on that? Yes, I agree that 'pruned' in an embedded DB would be fantastic, but the reality is that taking a potshot on my mixins isn't the way to 'prune' cryptonote. I don't know what is .. but it's not that.

Care to elaborate, exactly how he ruined your anonymity set? factoring in the mandatory mixin features added. I don't disagree with some of gmaxwells statements though.

That's just it - now there's mandatory mixin features, you're left with no freedom to choose to mix at all .. and you pay higher tx fees because of that. What does this spur? Someone on the CN site said it best: A tragedy of the commons! It will get to a point where the biggest damn transactions will be chosen over the small ones, to an extreme and much faster when on a comparison with bitcoin or even Monero. The transactions are already larger with CN - there's only so many that can fit into a block, and even then there's only so much to the adaptive limit. The space will run out, and miners will cash the transactions worth the most value. It will cause transaction witholding attacks etc etc .. not something I'd want to encourage. Apart from that .. CZ decided to make space by trimming RS's. That means this data is not there to mix with when it originally would have been! Now we absolutely need miners to cash the highest mixin transactions in order to make more of an anonymity set, so that you can remain cryptographically anonymous in the first place!

Why do you keep bringing up the database..  after XMR team commandeered Bitmonero, rebranded and began their (very good) concerted marketing efforts, was there a database? NO. so same question to you- why do you want to trust those guys who never put the time into putting in a real database in the first place? Why didn't they do a proper relaunch and fix the problems?  instead of just hijacking, changing the name initially and calling it a day. Because they weren't in a rush right?    

Monero was launched by TFT, not the team that is in control today (I know you know this). I was here since the launch was delayed about an hour and a half because TFT couldn't compile binaries. Shit yea I made some Moneros, then I bought much more than I mined on top of that! Why would you need a 'proper' relaunch when there was no violation of the social contract in the original? It was fair in every regard. Just because theres no DB doesn't mean it's not fair. That just means it needs improvement .. because it would be retarded to relaunch a fair coin that was taking up a little more disk space than bitcoin, but was still totally accessible to anyone that was asking for it. How do you have a problem with people taking control of an open source project? I'm just not seeing a problem with this .. people decided to support Monero, the currency, and then the original team or two (probably more factoring in the coin-mill argument) made a decision that exactly zero people agreed with .. and an alternative was offered by the very same group that's in control today. The community voted them in, and the old idiots out. What we were left with was a group of people that haven't fucked us over to date. I consider that a good decision.

Anybody could of cloned bitmonero and rebranded it as moneronxt or some moronic shit without making any changes at that time, just promised ones at a future date... No shit they would be first to launch then.  No shit BBR launch was a little later because it actually implemented it's own novel ideas. Brand new PoW for instance. A whitepaper of which was recently released yet torn to shreds by die hard monero supporters nitpicking at minor (mis)interpretations of sentences, the dev doesn't even have english as a native language.

btc-mike mentioned somewhere that he made comments in that paper as well .. not sure what you're doing defending the language part. Also - peer review. Btc-mike seems to know English. Hell, CZ probably could have paid someone twenty dollars and got someone to read it for grammar .. not my problem. Fact is - he didn't do it, and chose to release a shoddily-written white paper .. which are generally things that suffer through incredible amounts of abuse regardless of grammar errors or the fact that CZ wrote it. No amount of tears after the fact is going to change that. Guess it's time to make another go at that one.

We come again to the predictable answer 'they are working on it' ... 'doing it properly' (stab at other coins implying they aren't) - XMR started by copy pasting BMR without making any changes  to launch earlier but now the team is working on it and that's what counts. It'll come soon...please.. So maybe BBR dev is also 'working on it gradually' like XMR works on their features gradually. As you know.. you cannot rush these things..

Ultimately, the argument you use to deride BBR is the same one you use to support XMR. If XMR is amazing because it's fixing problems not today but X date into the future, why can't BBR or any other coin be be that way?

My concern with BBR is not that the development is slow or in process, where did I say that? My concern with the development of BBR is that he is working on:

novel ideas

It's insane to think that with the CN protocol being shoved down everyone's throats .. but now within a month .. even that wasn't good enough! No! We're gonna shove more crap down your throat! Just too much information coming at once. People were still trying to understand wtf CN was, and here comes some guy who not only says it has flaws .. but adds novelty features to it! If it had flaws .. why the fuck wasn't he fixing them?! Again, I consider his method of compressing/trimming the blockchain a hack .. because of the tradeoffs. A database has zero trade offs, and yields the same shrinkage his solution does! Good luck trying to sell people on "Well, instead of compressing stuff like those other guys are taking so long to do we just cut parts out to have the exact same result for you, so long as you're willing to pay a little more! Also, enjoy waiting a day for your transaction to be picked up in ten years! At least at the end of the wait you can save a billionth of a microsecond and just have someone send you money to your alias!"

The whole point of this being a trustless, transparent feature baked in is so you don't need a (usually centralised) third party service.  It's a frictionless process to send money to an alias with BBR. No need to remember a long string of characters, no need to trust any other service. With XMR to send money to your friend alice, you have to ask her for her address, and then paste something like 226f0f1682c3f5afda441789f4c9eee0c124586c4fd729c3103f63f4675f225b to send her funds. You have to save that into a notepad file or address book to keep track of it.  With bbr, you could just type @alice and hit send. No arguing that that isn't a nicer experience.

You don't need trust for a wallet address either. Just because I have to right-click copy and paste one string doesn't really make me mad I have to do the same with the other. Then there's the name squatting -- again introducing a tragedy of the commons. You're setting people up against each other on shit that doesn't need to be implemented into the protocol. Oh the horror of copying and pasting!

With bbr, you could just type @alice and hit send. No arguing that that isn't a nicer experience.

Which works if I know about less than ten people. Anything more than than an I'm gonna save the alias in a notepad anyways - because again tragedy of the commons will force people to compete for alice1, alice2, and alice3. How do I hold all these alices? In a notepad - with their last name and other contact info the same as I would with XMR. It's a non-benefit novelty feature that will wear itself out as soon as people have to compete for aliases.

what was affordable because nobody wants the coin -- The mandatory donation to the author of moneros closed source GPU miners?   I can't see how you'd even try to argue that closed source miners with pitfalls twisting your arm behind your back if you don't donate (you earn more donating than the loss of hashrate in not) are better than open source BBR miners for the ecosystem.

Yeah - funny thing demand is. If people want the coin, and you have what produces the coin .. are you gonna feel compelled to give them that for cheap? The bounty for the BBR miners to be open sourced was considered a fair price for it at the time (otherwise there would be no source). Because the value offered was less than what is currently offered for an open source XMR ATI miner, I'm making the correlation that demand was less. The market cap has already reached a significant value to afford open sourcing the XMR Nvidia miner, and only time will pass before the bounty will be considered significant enough to open source the ATI miner. Whether this will correlate with an increased market cap, increased difficulty, or decreased demand are not up to me. As the value currently stands at roughly 500 XMR and some BTC, I don't think it will be soon. Fortunately, a small developer fee is being easily bought every day .. while still giving people fair access to minting the coin. If it weren't then nobody would use the program.

You haven't actually argued against the point there. the vision was supposed to be "close to BTC original curve" < Does it look close to BTC curve to you? half of all supply mined within a year.. seriously? I'm fine with it, because the more for me and less for others the better, as is everyone elses mentality lucky enough to be here early on, but it means potential pool for participants is much smaller. If BTC was 50% mined in 2009-2010, when it was more mature than XMR, (although the concept wasn't) I'm sure it wouldn't have taken off in the same way.

But saying that I can't pretend there hasn't been worse around, the fact NXT is near the top of the crypto market caps is testament to that. Also have to concede if the free market believes. they'll buy regardless of the distribution. Still can't lie and say it doesn't seem shortsighted, perhaps even lazy and greedy to not have tweaked it.

TFT was the one who added the 'feature' (bug) to change it from 120s to 60s which caused it's own set of problems. It since hasn't been corrected. It's one of the reasons you saw so many orphans-  verification is expensive, that wasn't optimized, neither was the daemon, etc all CN coins had problems but XMR had issues even more so with introduction of 60s block. When XMR was hijacked from TFT, the new devs made no effort to fix his questionable changes, Those params were left the way they were, despite there being arguments against them they were left to stay . Why even choose it? why keep it.

They couldn't be changed at this point, no way. It would harm XMR too much.. So it HAS to be swept under the rug and masqueraded as an intentional design choice to save face.

I guess I should explain - my personal stance is that absolutely none of us knows exactly what emission curve is correct for a cryptocurrency in 2014. Not how long it should go on for, not how much should be in the reward .. we're getting a good idea on block times but that's about it. I think many agree that a couple weeks is too short .. but look at some of the PoW/PoS coins that are still around. Clearly I'm not 100% right, and don't claim to be because it would be insane to tell these people they're wrong unless I was from the future and knew the correct emission for a cryptocurrency. In short - I don't argue the point because I have no legitimate opinion about the emission curve, and I'm okay with not knowing exactly how it's going to turn out.

I think most people dismiss it as a bug .. because if we all understood CN, we would have had a valid understanding of the block rewards and known before TFT launched the coin. Shit was open source from the launch. The social contract is in github, not on the OP .. that's why this shits open source. TFT lied to us, but the social contract is and has always been the current emission. The only fix I think anyone can agree on would be to change the block times, and keep the emission. That's probably gonna be a 'run this version of the source or that one, up to you' kind of thing though .. I hope it happens and there's no serious divide like the last time something like that was used in XMR.

[Anotheranonlol]

For now that's what it is, a mockup.

Actually no, it isn't a mockup. It is the actual GUI code that will eventually be released into an integrated application (with bug fixes of course). A mock up is a simulation or model. This is the actual early development code being released for testing and feedback.

No one seems to cares what other coins are adding

As I explained on the BBR thread, this is because you don't understand what is actually important. Feature wars and being first to release one feature or another is (obviously, as demonstrated in the real world) not that important. You can rant all you want about XMR not having this or that feature and the reason no one cares is not because of some conspiracy, shill campaign, or whatever sort of paranoid delusion you are always spouting off about. It is simply because no one cares.

I've seen the QT creator screenshots. Can't touch it though.  Where could I find the link to try it out in the flesh.

What's actually important is nothing more than convincing others what's important. Perception. It's clear XMR has already solidified their position there. It's autopilot mode and keeping on appearances somewhat now. Just do everything as you're already doing now. More missives, more donations, more background work. More price targets, more market analysis, more acceptance, more adding snow to the snowball. The unstoppable rolling snowball. Much as I'd love it to BBR can't recover from sub 100k market cap to 1million anytime soon, even though rightly it's apparent it doesn't deserve to be valued below a ton of shitcoins and what..15-20x less than XMR.

XMR could stagnate a little but stay relatively stable and as long as you inject the mentality everyone here is part of the new wealthy elite- and you can join today and be amongst the 1% you are onto a winner. Investing in XMR is a bet on a solid foundation (Cryptonote), with solid, personable group of devs, a great PR effort, some of it in manifisted in pretty clever ways. You might not even know anything about crypto and sole reason for investing in it might be purely because you're amongst a crowd which doesn't tend go down with sinking ships often or end up with egg on their face that much. In itself that's not a bad decision

Supporting another coin now is pissing in the wind.  They will have to break their backs to even get close to getting the recognition XMR would get for doing the same thing. We'd need a few events like a colossal fuck up from XMR and the opposite from another coins dev. Brand new revelations or something similar to start seeing a slight sentiment shift

[smooth]

half of all supply mined within a year.. seriously?

You better check your math.

TFT was the one who added the 'feature' (bug) to change it from 120s to 60s which caused it's own set of problems. It since hasn't been corrected. It's one of the reasons you saw so many orphans-  verification is expensive, that wasn't optimized, neither was the daemon, etc all CN coins had problems but XMR had issues even more so with introduction of 60s block. When XMR was hijacked from TFT, the new devs made no effort to fix his questionable changes, Those params were left the way they were, despite there being arguments against them they were left to stay . Why even choose it? why keep it.

Because some changes are more risky and disruptive than others, and need to done with greater care and planning. Some of the changes you mentioned, such as not being optimized, were fixed relatively quickly. Others will be fixed in due time, and obviously the experience so far shows that the coin can do quite well, thank you, despite not having changes that you apparently don't fully understand pushed out too quickly.

(Good) software development is hard, okay? Are you actually a software developer in any way? Because frankly you sound pretty ignorant about this, even if you make some other good points from time to time.

Hi,

"You better check your math." < numbers may be rough, I'll correct it and apologize. could you post the exact figure?

I think rpietila has posted the most exact emissions charts. I tried to link them but couldn't find it. Perhaps he can help.

Questions for you: 1) Do you consider the emission curve of XMR to be preferable to the one chosen by BBR 2) do you consider the 60s block time to be optimal, or would you preferred it to have been changed?

I have said several times that neither would have been my first choice. I'm more confident of my opinion about the block time. I don't think anyone really understand what makes a "best" emission curve, and I have said that as well.