[XMR] Monero Speculation

[phishead]

I think that XMR and BITCOIN are on the brink of poping up to higher price levels.

The longer we stay stable at 50 cents, the longer I think we'll stay at 50 cents.

 
 
Lucky for us, the longer you *believe* that, and the more of us that believe that, the greater the chance of us being wrong. 

On a related note, I would like to announce our new logo + formal celebrity partnership: 
 
http://imgur.com/a/J95r7

"Go, go, go, go, go shorters..."

From Vitamin water to an extremely obscure cryptocurrency... didn't see that one coming  I don't think he would mind everyone knowing where his wealth is at/being on the "rich list" though...

[primer-]

I've listened to a 10 min speech about privacy held by Andreas Antonopoulos, he talked about DASH and zerocash, not one mention of monero...

On another note, simplewallet sucks at creating transactions! It takes one minute to send 100xmr out of my wallet (mixin 2). Sending 500xmr in one transaction is impossible - it hangs for a couple of minutes then
gives an error that the daemon is down.

So much for development...

[RustyNoman]

Just read the zcash AMA and I came away a bit unconvinced. Some CN related comments in the second page

https://forum.bitcoin.com/post16238.html#p16238

It looks like they are very much set with the 10% "Founder's fee" and being pretty much a Bitcoin code base with zero knowledge for enhanced privacy and fungibility. Because of their non threatening stance and some associated names, they will surely be pushed and positioned over Monero with more whales supporting it financially as well as via marketing and networking.

XMR has so much going for it in every way, just not the cash flow it truly deserves.

In the short term, it does not matter if zcash is worst or not then monero. What meters is publicity. And zcash is getting much more attention than monero.

How can we get the publicity of Monero? I think the Monero is quite low profile. Its market cap is not much higher than Bytecoin.

[dEBRUYNE]

Just read the zcash AMA and I came away a bit unconvinced. Some CN related comments in the second page

https://forum.bitcoin.com/post16238.html#p16238

It looks like they are very much set with the 10% "Founder's fee" and being pretty much a Bitcoin code base with zero knowledge for enhanced privacy and fungibility. Because of their non threatening stance and some associated names, they will surely be pushed and positioned over Monero with more whales supporting it financially as well as via marketing and networking.

XMR has so much going for it in every way, just not the cash flow it truly deserves.

If you read the blogpost, you will notice that it's 10% of the whole supply, but actually 20% of the blockreward in the first 4 years.

During the first four years, every ten minutes 40 newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 10 ZEC to the founders.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

[wachtwoord]

Just read the zcash AMA and I came away a bit unconvinced. Some CN related comments in the second page

https://forum.bitcoin.com/post16238.html#p16238

It looks like they are very much set with the 10% "Founder's fee" and being pretty much a Bitcoin code base with zero knowledge for enhanced privacy and fungibility. Because of their non threatening stance and some associated names, they will surely be pushed and positioned over Monero with more whales supporting it financially as well as via marketing and networking.

XMR has so much going for it in every way, just not the cash flow it truly deserves.

If you read the blogpost, you will notice that it's 10% of the whole supply, but actually 20% of the blockreward in the first 4 years.

During the first four years, every ten minutes 40 newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 10 ZEC to the founders.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

How did zerocash solve the seeding problem anyway?

If it's open source insta-clone it immediately without a "founders fee" and we're all set.

[dEBRUYNE]

Just read the zcash AMA and I came away a bit unconvinced. Some CN related comments in the second page

https://forum.bitcoin.com/post16238.html#p16238

It looks like they are very much set with the 10% "Founder's fee" and being pretty much a Bitcoin code base with zero knowledge for enhanced privacy and fungibility. Because of their non threatening stance and some associated names, they will surely be pushed and positioned over Monero with more whales supporting it financially as well as via marketing and networking.

XMR has so much going for it in every way, just not the cash flow it truly deserves.

If you read the blogpost, you will notice that it's 10% of the whole supply, but actually 20% of the blockreward in the first 4 years.

During the first four years, every ten minutes 40 newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 10 ZEC to the founders.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

How did zerocash solve the seeding problem anyway?

If it's open source insta-clone it immediately without a "founders fee" and we're all set.

Which seeding problem do you mean? Or are you talking about the initial setup?

That would be possible since it's open source, but who would develop on that then?

[dEBRUYNE]

Shapeshift - Monero back online!

https://twitter.com/ShapeShift_io/status/694586607580614656

[Melbustus]

Just read the zcash AMA and I came away a bit unconvinced. Some CN related comments in the second page

https://forum.bitcoin.com/post16238.html#p16238

It looks like they are very much set with the 10% "Founder's fee" and being pretty much a Bitcoin code base with zero knowledge for enhanced privacy and fungibility. Because of their non threatening stance and some associated names, they will surely be pushed and positioned over Monero with more whales supporting it financially as well as via marketing and networking.

XMR has so much going for it in every way, just not the cash flow it truly deserves.

If you read the blogpost, you will notice that it's 10% of the whole supply, but actually 20% of the blockreward in the first 4 years.

During the first four years, every ten minutes 40 newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 10 ZEC to the founders.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

How did zerocash solve the seeding problem anyway?

If it's open source insta-clone it immediately without a "founders fee" and we're all set.

I gather from the AMA that the seeding problem is "solved" by a process which distributes the seed-generation to a set of individuals, where only one individual has to be honest (ie, delete their portion of the key) for the entire thing to be provably secure. Most people will find this sufficient. Some will not.

Regarding the insta-clone idea, I think we've seen how important community/development/publicity/etc is for a coin, so I don't think an insta-clone of ZC would do much actual damage to ZC. Remember when Counterparty implemented Ethereum? What are the relative mcaps of XCP and ETH again?

Also from the AMA it's clear that zcash is going to have some equivalent of Monero's "Viewkey" functionality.

I think what Monero has going for it versus zcash boils down to:
1) It's not built off of Bitcoin's codebase. In my mind, this makes it a much better candidate for a "backup" top-5 coin than junk like Litecoin, Doge, or Dash.
2) I *think* Zcash still has the problem of there being no way to prove that there's not some bug in the system which is creating new coins. There was no mention of this in the AMA (wish I'd seen it in time to ask).

[dEBRUYNE]

Just read the zcash AMA and I came away a bit unconvinced. Some CN related comments in the second page

https://forum.bitcoin.com/post16238.html#p16238

It looks like they are very much set with the 10% "Founder's fee" and being pretty much a Bitcoin code base with zero knowledge for enhanced privacy and fungibility. Because of their non threatening stance and some associated names, they will surely be pushed and positioned over Monero with more whales supporting it financially as well as via marketing and networking.

XMR has so much going for it in every way, just not the cash flow it truly deserves.

If you read the blogpost, you will notice that it's 10% of the whole supply, but actually 20% of the blockreward in the first 4 years.

During the first four years, every ten minutes 40 newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 10 ZEC to the founders.

https://z.cash/blog/funding.html

How did zerocash solve the seeding problem anyway?

If it's open source insta-clone it immediately without a "founders fee" and we're all set.

I gather from the AMA that the seeding problem is "solved" by a process which distributes the seed-generation to a set of individuals, where only one individual has to be honest (ie, delete their portion of the key) for the entire thing to be provably secure. Most people will find this sufficient. Some will not.

Regarding the insta-clone idea, I think we've seen how important community/development/publicity/etc is for a coin, so I don't think an insta-clone of ZC would do much actual damage to ZC. Remember when Counterparty implemented Ethereum? What are the relative mcaps of XCP and ETH again?

Also from the AMA it's clear that zcash is going to have some equivalent of Monero's "Viewkey" functionality.

I think what Monero has going for it versus zcash boils down to:
1) It's not built off of Bitcoin's codebase. In my mind, this makes it a much better candidate for a "backup" top-5 coin than junk like Litecoin, Doge, or Dash.
2) I *think* Zcash still has the problem of there being no way to prove that there's not some bug in the system which is creating new coins. There was no mention of this in the AMA (wish I'd seen it in time to ask).

I wouldn't really call that solved, it certainly mitigates the issue but doesn't really solve it. See my reply about it:

The is simply not true, you have to trust that one of the guys from the initial setup is honest. This doesn't mean you do not have to trust you guys at all, which you stated. This is certainly an improvement over the previous setup, but it still isn't trustless. If all the guys of the initial setup collaborate, they could, for instance, still create additional coins and no one would notice.

Since the initial setup will most likely be videostreamed, the names (or at least the faces) of the people at the initial setup will be known. Tell me, what stops a three letter agency from demanding the initial setup guys to collaborate?

One of your engineers (Sean Bowe) acknowledged this (that the setup isn't trustless) as well in an earlier discussion I had with him.

Bottom line is that the initial setup isn't trustless, whereas you are implying it is. This also might be fooling the people that are reading this thread and your answers, thinking the setup is trustless.

I stand corrected if you meant something else with your post.

https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-m-zooko-wilcox-ceo-of-the-zcash-company-ask-me-anything-t5413-30.html#p16245

In addition to this, they have to prove that the software/hardware used to generate the masterkey isn't compromised beforehand and/or afterhand.


Regarding the viewkey, that was a bit ambiguous to me. It sounded more like they have a key where Alice can prove that she paid Bob. See:

In Zcash, the creator of each individual transaction gets complete control over who can view the contents of the transaction. This is accomplished by each transaction being individually encrypted by an encryption key known only to the creator and the recipient.

There is no other mechanism by which any party can gain the ability to view the contents of transactions other than getting the decryption key from the creator or the recipient of the transaction, or from someone else who has previously received the decryption key. This is a simple, implementable, secure, and understandable mechanism for controlling who can see what. We call it "selective transparency".

Agree with [1].


[2] Yes they still have that problem, there is no way to verify if no additional coins were created.


I could also think of a few other caveats as well (where Monero improves). First of all, using Bitcoin's codebase and porting most of the improvements / upgrades Bitcoin is inherent to continuing on a lot of fundamental issues Bitcoin has.

[1] Zcash will not have a tail emission:

Well, just like in Bitcoin, the mining reward keeps coming for a long time. See the diagram on https://z.cash/blog/funding.html. There will still be Zcash mining reward for decades. Now, after that reward has diminished so much that it isn't valuable, I hope that transaction fees will have risen to remunerate miners

https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-m-zooko-wilcox-ceo-of-the-zcash-company-ask-me-anything-t5413-30.html#p16236

This will result in severe problems in the future. Stating that there will be Zcash mining rewards for decades is kind of a poor argument, because people take the view / expectation (of no tail emission), discount it to the present and take it into consideration when assessing Zcash.


[2] Zcash will not have a smooth block reward:

I'm rejecting this from Zcoin 1.0 because it doesn't appear to have benefits great enough to overcome the cost of differing from Bitcoin.

https://github.com/Electric-Coin-Company/zcash/issues/143

In my opinion, the halving schedule of Bitcoin just creates wild fluctations in price (e.g. bubbles) and (potentially dangerous) large fluctations in hashrate.


[3] Zcash will incur the same blocksize issue as Bitcoin, they plan on simply porting everything regarding blocksize from Bitcoin:

We're still thinking about our plan for Blocksize, scalability, transaction fees, and mining incentives. We'll post as soon as we have a concrete proposal. Our current not-at-all-concrete thinking is to follow Bitcoin and learn from the experience of Bitcoin, and to help if we can. By the time we're ready to launch Zcash 1.0, Bitcoin will probably have deployed:

* segwit, and
* larger block sizes, and
* Lightning Network

In addition Bitcoin might deploy other relevant scalability improvements as well. Or, maybe by the time we Zcashers get to that stage, we Bitcoiners will have decided not to deploy some of those mechanisms, or maybe we'll have tried to deploy some of them and learned that they didn't work as well as we hoped.

In any case, our general thinking for Zcash scalability is to re-use ideas and source code from Bitcoin as much as possible.

[4] Due to their "Founder Reward" it is highly likely that Zcash will be subject to FinCEN and therefore miners will be qualified as MSBs, see this discussion:

https://forum.bitcoin.com/ama-ask-me-anything/i-m-zooko-wilcox-ceo-of-the-zcash-company-ask-me-anything-t5413.html

Hello Zooko,

I'm interested in reading your goals and motivations for taking on anonymity in general or anonymous digital cash specifically as your priority project?

Haven't you seen the new laws coming (eventually in all Five Eyes countries I've heard from reliable sources) that will ban end-to-end encryption?

To that end do you expect to support a viewkey or other way that users individually or a global backdoor, so that Zcash can be compliant with the lurch towards a 666 NWO which seems to be rapidly taking form now (and I assert will accelerate with the full global contagion sovereign debt collapse 2017 -2020)?

I am all for the ideology, but I am also pragmatic. We as society may have to fight with social networking and the political-economic revolution of a DIY economy, e.g. self-publishing, 3D printing, etc.. I have been looking at the concept of a decentralized social network. Any comments?

Sincerely,
TPTB_need_war
AnonyMint
Shelby Moore III

Bold my emphasis. The proposed legislation in the United Kingdom does not ban end to end encryption. What it does however is to require those companies that provide proprietary encryption products to retain a back door key and make this back door key available to law enforcement. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11970391/Internet-firms-to-be-banned-from-offering-out-of-reach-communications-under-new-laws.html?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1446482200 There is a critical difference here in that FLOSS end to end encryption tools remain perfectly legal and secure while proprietary end to end encryption tools would have a back door. This is not unlike the FinCEN guidance in the United States https://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html where proprietary development funding models for crypto currency (using the emission to fund development) will likely lead to a legal requirement for MSB registration while FLOSS development funding models can retain their decentralized virtual currency designation and avoid the MSB registration requirement. In Canada there was a proposed law that did not pass that required providers of email servers to retain records for law enforcement with an exception for those who ran their own mail server from their own homes.. A more relevant question to ask would have been: Given that you plan to use a portion of the emission over the next 4 years to fund your company, have you registered as an MSB with FinCEN or have you obtained guidance from FinCEN that MSB registration is not required in your case?

The pattern here is starting to become apparent. Click I agree on some company's terms for the use of proprietary software and become a slave, click I do not agree and use FLOSS tools instead and remain free.

Thanks ArticMine.

Yes I am aware that the proposed legislation in the UK (also afaik similar legislation proposed in the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia) only applies to service providers who offer encrypted services, not to open source code which users independently obtain, compile, and run on their own initiative. I was vaguely aware of this pending legislation and then I became more focused on it during my private discussions last month with the GadgetCoin team who have a P2P streaming technology named Streemo. The governments are not stupid to try to ban activity they can't possibly enforce (thus making the government look impotent), i.e. the government can't monitor/enforce against what each private citizen does in their home.

But I argue effectively the direction is to ban end-to-end encryption in general that does not provide a back door to national security agencies. The government can regulate the ISPs (internet service providers) and ban end-to-end encryption protocols that do not include a decryption key for national security agencies. I have also explained that using home computers as servers over asymmetric upload bandwidth home ISPs is a Communist economic plan (as I warned Bittorrent back in 2008 and offered them an economic solution for their tit-for-tat algorithm but they ignored me). And that protocols which allow illegal activities from unregulated home servers will be banned by ISPs and hosting providers. If you know of any technology to hide a protocol's patterns such that ISPs can't identify it, please enlighten me. There is some discussion of "Censorship resistance" in section 2.4 of Synereo's white paper, but that still seems to be inadequate.

Simply put, it is impossible to fight the government when there are choke points in the system which the government can effectively regulate. This is just common sense.

I added the following to that question for Zooko:

Edit: please be aware of a rebuttal by ArticMine (afaik is a Monero/Cryptonote developer) to my question about a possible ban on end-to-end encryption, also note the desire for an answer concerning registration with FinCEN for your plans to fund your corporation or foundation with an 11% royalty on currency emission (creation). Note I also mentioned that FinCEN issue in the "Fundamental challenges?" thread at the zcash forum. I have suggested you consider doing an ICO instead, and I think it would be wildly successful. IANAL so please do consult your own counsel, yet I will will make you aware of a thread of discussion I launched about whether crypto currencies are illegal unregistered investment securities under the Supreme Court "Howey test" in the USA. It seems likely that ICOs are illegal if openly offered to unsophisticated USA investors unless the ICO is registered with the SEC. The "Howey test" seems to be misconstrued by most interpretations and the Supreme Court explicitly stated that no obfuscation of the economic facts would diminish the efficacy of the intent of the securities law protection. Also there is some discussion about the interpretation of the FinCEN guidance which is an orthogonal issue to SEC regulations. The EU may have other regulations as well.

[5] Zcash cryptography is in its infancy stage and has not been vetted yet, therefore it's more prone to "errorrs". By contrast, the cryptography behind Monero is quite mature and has been vetted over time.


There are probably some more caveats, but this is what I could think of currently (next to the Zcash vs Monero comparison we already had).

[SmoothCurves]

Not impressed by Zcrap. Buying more XMR.

[thelibertycap]

Well, no mater what, Zerocash with its mainstream media support will only bring attention to privacy and fungibility issues with Bitcoin. People will start to realize why anon coins make sense and are not just a gimmick.

[dEBRUYNE]

Well, no mater what, Zerocash with its mainstream media support will only bring attention to privacy and fungibility issues with Bitcoin. People will start to realize why anon coins make sense and are not just a gimmick.

Agree, this also got me thinking of a possible fungibility issue with Zcash itself, which leads to [6]. Zcash uses two kind of coins, namely basecoins and zerocoins, see:

Zerocash extends the protocol and software underlying Bitcoin by adding new, privacy-preserving payments. In doing so it forms a new protocol that, while using some of the same technology and software as Bitcoin, is distinct from it. This new protocol has both anonymous coins, dubbed zerocoins, and non-anonymous ones, which, for purposes of disambiguation, we call basecoins. In contrast to Bitcoin's transactions, payment transactions using the Zerocash protocol do not contain any public information about the payment's origin, destination, or amount; instead, the correctness of the transaction is demonstrated via the use of a zero-knowledge proof. Users can convert from basecoins to zerocoins, send zerocoins to other users, and split or merge zerocoins they own in any way that preserves the total value. Users may also convert zerocoins back into basecoins, though in principle this is not necessary: all transactions can be made in terms of zerocoins.

Having two kind of coins detoriates the fungibility. If, for instance, basecoins will be the most used coins, those zerocoins will merely be coins to mix with on top of the transparent ledger. In other words, it will be Bitcoin with a Zcash mixer instead of the Bitcoin with Coinjoin there is currently. Furthermore, miners could blacklist zerocoins and merchants/exchanges could reject zerocoins.

[dEBRUYNE]

** Funding required to complete the official GUI **

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2476/the-official-qt-gui-project

PS: Even if you don't have an account you are able to contribute, just press the contribute button and it will explain how to donate.

EDIT: General remark, make sure to include a payment ID!

[jwinterm]

...

Having two kind of coins detoriates the fungibility. If, for instance, basecoins will be the most used coins, those zerocoins will merely be coins to mix with on top of the transparent ledger. In other words, it will be Bitcoin with a Zcash mixer instead of the Bitcoin with Coinjoin there is currently. Furthermore, miners could blacklist zerocoins and merchants/exchanges could reject zerocoins.

I think the idea is that the base coin is only really supposed to be used as the coinbase, and then once you go zero there's really no need to ever go back to base. But, I guess that will be played out at least to some extent in the coming months...

[primer-]

** Funding required to complete the official GUI **

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2476/the-official-qt-gui-project

PS: Even if you don't have an account you are able to contribute, just press the contribute button and it will explain how to donate.

"The proposal is to raise 14,000 XMR for 280 hours of work, which is approximately 25.00$ per hour. Ilya will work 10 hours per week"

6+ months, wow! Reminds me of freebazar / dwarfpool / atrides scam.
Why 'outsource' such an important task ?
Why don't 'core' devs get their hands dirty ?!

'Core' devs are fucking noobs, their only achievement was forking the bytecoin code...

[Hueristic]

** Funding required to complete the official GUI **

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2476/the-official-qt-gui-project

PS: Even if you don't have an account you are able to contribute, just press the contribute button and it will explain how to donate.

"The proposal is to raise 14,000 XMR for 280 hours of work, which is approximately 25.00$ per hour. Ilya will work 10 hours per week"

6+ months, wow! Reminds me of freebazar / dwarfpool / atrides scam.
Why 'outsource' such an important task ?
Why don't 'core' devs get their hands dirty ?!

'Core' devs are fucking noobs, their only achievement was forking the bytecoin code...

Try reading once in awhile.

Fluffypony and me will help him and work together on the implementation and will oversee everything - as always unpaid .

[dEBRUYNE]

** Funding required to complete the official GUI **

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2476/the-official-qt-gui-project

PS: Even if you don't have an account you are able to contribute, just press the contribute button and it will explain how to donate.

"The proposal is to raise 14,000 XMR for 280 hours of work, which is approximately 25.00$ per hour. Ilya will work 10 hours per week"

6+ months, wow! Reminds me of freebazar / dwarfpool / atrides scam.
Why 'outsource' such an important task ?
Why don't 'core' devs get their hands dirty ?!

'Core' devs are fucking noobs, their only achievement was forking the bytecoin code...

You conveniently left out a part of "Ilya will work 10 hours per week at the beginning, expanding into more hours per week later when some other project is finished". If that other project is finished the amount of hours will be 20 per week and perhaps even more (asked othe about this after you commented).

You also missed:

The hours that remain after having completed the GUI will be used to work on other features. There should be a better estimate of hours needed to complete the GUI once the work really has started.

[primer-]

** Funding required to complete the official GUI **

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2476/the-official-qt-gui-project

PS: Even if you don't have an account you are able to contribute, just press the contribute button and it will explain how to donate.

"The proposal is to raise 14,000 XMR for 280 hours of work, which is approximately 25.00$ per hour. Ilya will work 10 hours per week"

6+ months, wow! Reminds me of freebazar / dwarfpool / atrides scam.
Why 'outsource' such an important task ?
Why don't 'core' devs get their hands dirty ?!

'Core' devs are fucking noobs, their only achievement was forking the bytecoin code...

You conveniently left out a part of "Ilya will work 10 hours per week at the beginning, expanding into more hours per week later when some other project is finished". If that other project is finished the amount of hours will be 20 per week and perhaps even more (asked othe about this after you commented).

You also missed:

The hours that remain after having completed the GUI will be used to work on other features. There should be a better estimate of hours needed to complete the GUI once the work really has started.

It will end the same as Freebazaar and I am willing to bet money on it... I contributed, 1 XMR.

[luigi1111]

** Funding required to complete the official GUI **

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2476/the-official-qt-gui-project

PS: Even if you don't have an account you are able to contribute, just press the contribute button and it will explain how to donate.

"The proposal is to raise 14,000 XMR for 280 hours of work, which is approximately 25.00$ per hour. Ilya will work 10 hours per week"

6+ months, wow! Reminds me of freebazar / dwarfpool / atrides scam.
Why 'outsource' such an important task ?
Why don't 'core' devs get their hands dirty ?!

'Core' devs are fucking noobs, their only achievement was forking the bytecoin code...

You conveniently left out a part of "Ilya will work 10 hours per week at the beginning, expanding into more hours per week later when some other project is finished". If that other project is finished the amount of hours will be 20 per week and perhaps even more (asked othe about this after you commented).

You also missed:

The hours that remain after having completed the GUI will be used to work on other features. There should be a better estimate of hours needed to complete the GUI once the work really has started.

It will end the same as Freebazaar and I am willing to bet money on it... I contributed, 1 XMR.

Thanks for your contribution.

Would you also be willing to bet on it?

[Hueristic]

..

Would you also be willing to bet on it?

Dammit you ninja'd me! teach to get distracted in the middle of a post.

BTW make sure the definition is more solid. I.E. Abandoned

And let us all know how much XMR your willing to put behind your mouth primer. I'll bet that will get funded faster than the proposal itself!