[XMR] Monero Speculation

[RAJSALLIN]

** 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!

Sent a small contribution. About time there is an official GUI

[iCEBREAKER]

the same as Freebazaar

When Openbazaar is done, the Official Monero GUI will be released along with Freebazaar!

Much timing!  Very synergy!   

[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.

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).

Thanks. That means it's not solved at all (which is ashame of course, but good for Monero).

I do like they dont have a tail emission (I hate that in Monero, smells like Keynsianism, just secure the chain with fees).

[ArticMine]

...

Thanks. That means it's not solved at all (which is ashame of course, but good for Monero).

I do like they dont have a tail emission (I hate that in Monero, smells like Keynsianism, just secure the chain with fees).

The tail emission of Monero places the inflation rate of Monero below the historical inflation rate of gold which after all is the "gold standard" of hard money of Austrian school economists. If anyone has a solution to both secure the chain only with fees and at the same time allow for an adaptive blocksize limit there are many in the Bitcoin community that would love to see this solution. This is after all the real issue behind the blocksize debate in Bitcoin.

 

[luigi1111]

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).

Thanks. That means it's not solved at all (which is ashame of course, but good for Monero).

I do like they dont have a tail emission (I hate that in Monero, smells like Keynsianism, just secure the chain with fees).

We don't even have evidence that works!

Anyway, I don't see a much of a comparison between a perpetual reward and Keynesianism.

From BusinessDictionary (bold mine):

...
The main plank of his revolutionary theory is the assertion that the aggregate demand created by households, businesses and the government and not the dynamics of free markets is the most important driving force in an economy.
This theory further asserts that free markets have no self-balancing mechanisms that lead to full employment. Keynesian economists urge and justify a government's intervention in the economy through public policies that aim to achieve full employment and price stability.
...

Keynesianism (to me) is about altering/controlling parameters to (attempt to) smooth or eliminate economic cycles. This seems far removed from a monetary system where the supply at any arbitrary point in the future is known from the beginning. Bitcoin will have inflation for 100 years yet. Gold has annual inflation (2011 numbers I found somewhere) of ~1.5%.

[Melbustus]

...

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

^ This is the biggest problem in my opinion. They need a satisfactory answer to this question or else it's going to be pretty problematic down the road. Any significant swing in price (to the downside, of course), will generate all sorts of "OMG, where are all these coins coming from!?" uncertainty...

[1] Zcash will not have a tail emission:
...
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.

I disagree with you on this one (and I think I owe you a response on Reddit, now that I think of it). In short, I think this is at best an open question, but if it turns out there is any orphan risk or marginal-cost-per-tx, and/or if miners don't actually compete, longrun, on mostly the commodity block-production anyway, then this just amounts to unnecessary economic meddling, and I hate it that people are so quick to justify this sort of thing.

That said, it's money supply transparency that matters most, so if a coins comes with a tail-emission out of the gate, that's fine (except for the above caveat about it suggesting the devs/community may be prone to over-engineering in the economic realm).

But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.

[2] Zcash will not have a smooth block reward:
...
In my opinion, the halving schedule of Bitcoin just creates wild fluctations in price (e.g. bubbles) and (potentially dangerous) large fluctations in hashrate.

I think that's a small potential issue. Transparency is the key; a free-market with good information symmetry should naturally solve for this. What's important is not screwing with key economic variables (you know, like supply) and leaving it to the market to the work out the details.

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

Yeah, I think Zooko's missing an opportunity to take the obvious approach of implementing something reasonable like Stephen Pair's simple adaptive size, or something like Monero's alg. By *not* doing something like that, I fear the ZC team agrees too much with bitcoin core-dev's broken ideas about using blocksize as to do econo-engineering.

[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:

The founder reward strikes me as too high, and yeah, who knows what the regulatory implications may be.

[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.

Seems minor to me, but hard for me to truly judge without being a cryptographer.

[smooth]

But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.

You bought in when exactly? Because the tail reward language was included in the original Monero OP from the initial instant of its creation on 2014-04-25. You might have a case if you were the bolded trade from the OTC thread below:

2000 MRO @ 0.000250 2014-04-24 02:03:21
2000 MRO @ 0.000400 2014-04-23 00:23:41
1000 MRO @ 0.000500 2014-04-22 03:57:27

Those, along with two auctions I ran that week (won by eizh and SlyWax) are the only known trades that occurred before the Monero OP (during the 5-day Bitmonero era).

You can't be one of the last two because those were both NoodleDoodle selling to eizh. I also suspect the first one was NWO buying from
pandher so you probably aren't that one either, but that isn't clear from the OTC thread.

If that trade is not you, then you may have misunderstood the economic model, but it was not changed out from under you.

[opennux]

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).

I thought the idea was that everyone could contribute to the entropy of the seed creation, that is including the you's and me's. So as long as you trust yourself you can trust the system. Otherwise it is just brain dead. (sorry for quoting the whole post)

[iCEBREAKER]

But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.

You bought in when exactly? Because the tail reward language was included in the original Monero OP from the initial instant of its creation on 2014-04-25. You might have a case if you were the bolded trade from the OTC thread below:

2000 MRO @ 0.000250 2014-04-24 02:03:21
2000 MRO @ 0.000400 2014-04-23 00:23:41
1000 MRO @ 0.000500 2014-04-22 03:57:27

Those, along with two auctions I ran that week (won by eizh and SlyWax) are the only known trades that occurred before the Monero OP (during the 5-day Bitmonero era).

You can't be one of the last two because those were both NoodleDoodle selling to eizh. I also suspect the first one was NWO buying from
pandher so you probably aren't that one either, but that isn't clear from the OTC thread.

If that trade is not you, then you may have misunderstood the economic model, but it was not changed out from under you.

ZOMG Monero was insta-traded and ninja-auctioned!!!1111!

[opennux]

Thanks. That means it's not solved at all (which is ashame of course, but good for Monero).

I do like they dont have a tail emission (I hate that in Monero, smells like Keynsianism, just secure the chain with fees).

It IS an experimental project to a large degree, but it certainly is not Keynesianism (continuous intervention and stabilisation policies). It's everything but. XMR has a predetermined tail-emission. It is still the same in 5 years, 10 years, 25 years (forking etc. notwithstanding). There is no lowering of emission if liquidity is low. You are free to choose which chain you want to use.

[TrueCryptonaire]

Thanks. That means it's not solved at all (which is ashame of course, but good for Monero).

I do like they dont have a tail emission (I hate that in Monero, smells like Keynsianism, just secure the chain with fees).

It IS an experimental project to a large degree, but it certainly is not Keynesianism (continuous intervention and stabilisation policies). It's everything but. XMR has a predetermined tail-emission. It is still the same in 5 years, 10 years, 25 years (forking etc. notwithstanding). There is no lowering of emission if liquidity is low. You are free to choose which chain you want to use.

Actually gold has very similar emission schedule:
Annually a certain percent of new gold has been discovered to the existing gold supply.

[illodin]

But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.

You bought in when exactly? Because the tail reward language was included in the original Monero OP from the initial instant of its creation on 2014-04-25. You might have a case if you were the bolded trade from the OTC thread below:

2000 MRO @ 0.000250 2014-04-24 02:03:21
2000 MRO @ 0.000400 2014-04-23 00:23:41
1000 MRO @ 0.000500 2014-04-22 03:57:27

Those, along with two auctions I ran that week (won by eizh and SlyWax) are the only known trades that occurred before the Monero OP (during the 5-day Bitmonero era).

You can't be one of the last two because those were both NoodleDoodle selling to eizh. I also suspect the first one was NWO buying from
pandher so you probably aren't that one either, but that isn't clear from the OTC thread.

If that trade is not you, then you may have misunderstood the economic model, but it was not changed out from under you.

Maybe he bought in by spending time and money mining.

[smooth]

But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.

You bought in when exactly? Because the tail reward language was included in the original Monero OP from the initial instant of its creation on 2014-04-25. You might have a case if you were the bolded trade from the OTC thread below:

2000 MRO @ 0.000250 2014-04-24 02:03:21
2000 MRO @ 0.000400 2014-04-23 00:23:41
1000 MRO @ 0.000500 2014-04-22 03:57:27

Those, along with two auctions I ran that week (won by eizh and SlyWax) are the only known trades that occurred before the Monero OP (during the 5-day Bitmonero era).

You can't be one of the last two because those were both NoodleDoodle selling to eizh. I also suspect the first one was NWO buying from
pandher so you probably aren't that one either, but that isn't clear from the OTC thread.

If that trade is not you, then you may have misunderstood the economic model, but it was not changed out from under you.

Maybe he bought in by spending time and money mining.

Of course it is impossible to know for sure but I'd find it surprising if he were involved, had such strong feelings about changing economics, and didn't even make his opinion heard when, for example, changes to the emissions and block time was discussed pre-launch and during the first week (though no changes were made).

Other than people following Bytecoin (which all of us were) most others found out about Monero when rpietila started talking about it, a month or so later, or possibly a bit earlier when it started getting listed on exchanges.

Just frankly more likely he misunderstood what he was buying.

[dnaleor]

But in Monero's case, you tail-emission supporters broke *the* single biggest implicit contract: don't change the supply dynamics!! I loathe the fact that I bought-in to one economic model in 2014 and then a bunch of economic-meddlers decided to change the model out from under me. Yes, it's small relative to my holdings, but quite the slippery slope. That might as well be fiat, and the move *drastically* reduced my respect for the coin, the developers, and the community.

You bought in when exactly? Because the tail reward language was included in the original Monero OP from the initial instant of its creation on 2014-04-25. You might have a case if you were the bolded trade from the OTC thread below:

2000 MRO @ 0.000250 2014-04-24 02:03:21
2000 MRO @ 0.000400 2014-04-23 00:23:41
1000 MRO @ 0.000500 2014-04-22 03:57:27

Those, along with two auctions I ran that week (won by eizh and SlyWax) are the only known trades that occurred before the Monero OP (during the 5-day Bitmonero era).

You can't be one of the last two because those were both NoodleDoodle selling to eizh. I also suspect the first one was NWO buying from
pandher so you probably aren't that one either, but that isn't clear from the OTC thread.

If that trade is not you, then you may have misunderstood the economic model, but it was not changed out from under you.

ZOMG Monero was insta-traded and ninja-auctioned!!!1111!

Brings back the memory of the OTC charts I made


The volume below 0.001 BTC was very small.

[medusa13]

I have to agree with smooth here, the social contract was never changed in this regard. also the tail emission has been communicated transparently from the start. but i can understand, i also had one of those moments where everything was clear for everyone, but the info somehow never reached me. than the day i found out, i felt pissed(it was on what the viewkey exactly shows in my case)

regarding the additional coins out of nothing due to a bug: i dont think Zcash is the only technology that has this issue, but i can not find the place where TPTB_need_war and Shen discussed it. At least i remember TPTB_need_war claiming ringCT have this issue too, or does my mind play me a trick here?

i dont want to spread FUD here or so, but i think its good we answer this question once and for all. mabye it allready got finnaly answered and i never noticed?

[futureofbitcoin]

I've been thinking, is monero a bit too ahead of its time?

Now I know this is a lot of assumptions, some of which might not be true, but I think they're reasonable and good assumptions:

1. Some sort of anonymous coin WILL succeed, if cryptocurrencies are here to stay. With people like Mike Hearn declaring Bitcoin has failed, and really traction slowing down, it's not an absolute guarantee that cryptocurrencies won't become a passing fad yet.

2. Most "normal" people don't need full anonymity. They don't mind/don't realize that their data might be taken advantage of by governments/big businesses. This will remain that way at least for the next while. Maybe the next generation will care about privacy more.

So the biggest use-cases for an anonymous coin currently is 1. illegal dealings, like drugs, weapons, tax evasion, etc and 2. hiding assets. For example, a lottery winner might want to remain anonymous. Or people who do illegal dealings/tax evasion etc might also want to hide their assets. Basically for Rich people. This would help an anonymous coin get a potentially huge market cap.

3. Crypto currencies have benefits over current methods for hiding assets, because it's a lot easier to do than setting up off-shore accounts, and its a lot more accessible and secure. But these rich people will want to tie huge amounts of assets in something that might end up dying in a few years.

4. Because of the above, it seems VERY likely that the anonymous coin that succeeds (or the first one, if multiple ends up succeeding) will be after bitcoin has already established itself well in mainstream media etc, and most people think that it's here to stay (like the internet).

So if an anon coin will succeed AFTER bitcoin, then is monero too early? I mean there are benefits of being early because you already have some support/development/network effects. But at the same time, it's not that much. If people with a lot of assets in the future decide to use anonymous cryptocurrencies to store a large part of their wealth, will they choose a coin that has been around for years but still has a low market cap? Or will they choose a newer coin (that will inevitably pop up) that promises newer technology, etc?

Would it have been better if monero (or for any anon coin that wishes to succeed, for that matter), to somehow try to time when to announce the project and enter the market?

[smooth]

regarding the additional coins out of nothing due to a bug: i dont think Zcash is the only technology that has this issue, but i can not find the place where TPTB_need_war and Shen discussed it. At least i remember TPTB_need_war claiming ringCT have this issue too, or does my mind play me a trick here?

Any coin that does not have full visibility and tracing is going to have this to some extent, but in practice it will vary a bit.

In zerocash since you literally can't see anything about the state of the ledger (by design, and that is a feature), there is zero possibility of detecting such a bug/exploit should it occur (other than finding the method yourself). Zerocash also has the possibility of the setup being exploited or botched, however unlikely that may seem, allowing invisible coin creation, an issue that doesn't exist with the others.

With something like ringct, where the origin is ambiguous and the amount is hidden and even regular ring sigs just the origin is ambiguous, in some cases, if a bug like that did exist, it would be visible (which would make it not really a usable exploit). But in other cases it might not be visible.

The math and code in these latter cases (ringct and regular rings) is much, much simpler then zerocash as well, so the risk of such a bug even existing is probably lower (though it is hard to assess such a thing precisely -- it mostly comes down to judgement).

[bitebits]

If people with a lot of assets in the future decide to use anonymous cryptocurrencies to store a large part of their wealth, will they choose a coin that has been around for years but still has a low market cap? Or will they choose a newer coin (that will inevitably pop up) that promises newer technology, etc?

Are you currently putting most of your cryptocurrency allocation in bitcoin or some random altcoin with some enhanced bitcoin protocol features? By answering that question you answer your own question.

If I had to secure my wealth, I would definitely store it in something that has been around and proven itself for a long time: gold, classic cars, paintings, you name it. Sure not the new Picasso, how fancy it may look at this brief moment in time.

I really like Monero because of the anonymity part at the heart of the protocol. Why do I need reveal who I am and where I live when, for example, donating to the Monero GUI development? I think that is absurd, and that is why I try to support the Monero development. Whatever happens, all the Monero research and development currently done contributes to a better and more private financial future.

[futureofbitcoin]

If people with a lot of assets in the future decide to use anonymous cryptocurrencies to store a large part of their wealth, will they choose a coin that has been around for years but still has a low market cap? Or will they choose a newer coin (that will inevitably pop up) that promises newer technology, etc?

Are you currently putting most of your cryptocurrency allocation in bitcoin or some random altcoin with some enhanced bitcoin protocol features? By answering that question you answer your own question.

If I had to secure my wealth, I would definitely store it in something that has been around and proven itself for a long time: gold, classic cars, paintings, you name it. Sure not the new Picasso, how fancy it may look at this brief moment in time.

but that's exactly the point. Monero has not succeeded after so many years (remember, we're assuming that people's attentions will turn to anon coins AFTER bitcoin (or some fork of it) goes mainstream), can you really call it trustworthy?

This is a phenomenon observed in VC-funded start-ups. It's OK when you're still making $0 revenue. Because you can claim that your company is still building up, and it'll start to have hockey-stick growth any day now.

But once you have some revenue, that is very low, suddenly your company's valuation will become much lower, and it's much harder to get higher stage funding.

[DaveyJones]

The GUI project is fully funded now in less then a day !!

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