[XMR] Monero Speculation

[bitebits]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

Great initiative to clean up the code and improve the documentation, I like the long term / person independent vision.

Is it possible using Shapeshift.io to donate, using BTC to XMR? Shapeshift does not seem to support the below feature:

Make sure that you enter the payment ID to be aabe8732aabad9a7ec7c885015c3aeed2fcca66b1dc54fb089f01cb9d13c1f72! Otherwise, we will not be able to assign your contribution to this specific project!

[luigi1111]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

Great initiative to clean up the code and improve the documentation, I like the long term / person independent vision.

Is it possible using Shapeshift.io to donate, using XMR to BTC? Shapeshift does not seem to support the below feature:

Make sure that you enter the payment ID to be aabe8732aabad9a7ec7c885015c3aeed2fcca66b1dc54fb089f01cb9d13c1f72! Otherwise, we will not be able to assign your contribution to this specific project!

Looks like it doesn't. Easiest thing to do would be to create a new MyMonero account and use it as an intermediary.

[owm123]

I highly doubt that is why the price is where it is at.

His project is vaporware.

Remains to be seen.

XMR is real and exists today. Hence there is support for it.

 
 
I really enjoy anonyMint's (tptb_need_war) commentary on economics but I have learned not to believe anything until I see it.  That includes zerocash, ultimate anonymous vaporware, quantum prime cracking, etc. 
 
Monero is the real deal and building up greater network effect every day.  If a better currency comes along, it still might not be enough to dethrone Monero.  For example, consider that we are obviously superior to bitcoin, and yet you don't see a mass exodus; instead you see bitcoin belieber's maintain that Monero isn't even necessary. 
 

Dethrone Monero from what? No one cares or even heard about Monero apart from people on this forum, polo exchange and monero subreddit. And most people, like you wrote, seem to agree that nothing except bitcion is needed. This is really a shame. Especially if you consider that Monero aims at providing real privacy and anonymity, and none of the privacy oriented services (like vpn or secure email providers) supports it. You would think that such providers would be first in promoting private and anonymous ways of paying for their services and products, but not.

There must be a reason for it. Maybe monero is still too young and has small market cap, which hinders it adaptation. Maybe people are scared of non-gui wallets. Or maybe they just dont care as bitcoin is "good enough". Or maybe they just think monero is yet another scam-coin. I dont know. 

[XMRpromotions]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

I tweeted about it. Hopefully the funding goal is reached soon

[GingerAle]

I speculate that sooner we get tewinget funded, and the sooner he gets all that code documented, the sooner newcomers will be able to develop on and in Monero, and the sooner the price will skyrocket!!!

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

C'mon whales and other types with huge bags o' money! THIS is how Monero moons - we develop it!!

[DaveyJones]

I highly doubt that is why the price is where it is at.

His project is vaporware.

Remains to be seen.

XMR is real and exists today. Hence there is support for it.

 
  
I really enjoy anonyMint's (tptb_need_war) commentary on economics but I have learned not to believe anything until I see it.  That includes zerocash, ultimate anonymous vaporware, quantum prime cracking, etc.  
  
Monero is the real deal and building up greater network effect every day.  If a better currency comes along, it still might not be enough to dethrone Monero.  For example, consider that we are obviously superior to bitcoin, and yet you don't see a mass exodus; instead you see bitcoin belieber's maintain that Monero isn't even necessary.  
  

Dethrone Monero from what? No one cares or even heard about Monero apart from people on this forum, polo exchange and monero subreddit. And most people, like you wrote, seem to agree that nothing except bitcion is needed. This is really a shame. Especially if you consider that Monero aims at providing real privacy and anonymity, and none of the privacy oriented services (like vpn or secure email providers) supports it. You would think that such providers would be first in promoting private and anonymous ways of paying for their services and products, but not.

There must be a reason for it. Maybe monero is still too young and has small market cap, which hinders it adaptation. Maybe people are scared of non-gui wallets. Or maybe they just dont care as bitcoin is "good enough". Or maybe they just think monero is yet another scam-coin. I dont know.  

And in the end they dont even care for BTC because they exchange right away for FIAT which is the only thing that counts for them and pays their servers.... if that thing changes we can talk about true acceptance of Cryptocurrencies.... in the meantime... no one should care if overstock or someone else accepts Bitcoin if they exchange right for fiat.... its the same as all those years... accept crypto and change for crypto... but crypto to fiat is not a thing that will make any cc more valueable.... i think the last year showed that and the decline of btc purchases

[owm123]

I highly doubt that is why the price is where it is at.

His project is vaporware.

Remains to be seen.

XMR is real and exists today. Hence there is support for it.

 
  
I really enjoy anonyMint's (tptb_need_war) commentary on economics but I have learned not to believe anything until I see it.  That includes zerocash, ultimate anonymous vaporware, quantum prime cracking, etc.  
  
Monero is the real deal and building up greater network effect every day.  If a better currency comes along, it still might not be enough to dethrone Monero.  For example, consider that we are obviously superior to bitcoin, and yet you don't see a mass exodus; instead you see bitcoin belieber's maintain that Monero isn't even necessary.  
  

Dethrone Monero from what? No one cares or even heard about Monero apart from people on this forum, polo exchange and monero subreddit. And most people, like you wrote, seem to agree that nothing except bitcion is needed. This is really a shame. Especially if you consider that Monero aims at providing real privacy and anonymity, and none of the privacy oriented services (like vpn or secure email providers) supports it. You would think that such providers would be first in promoting private and anonymous ways of paying for their services and products, but not.

There must be a reason for it. Maybe monero is still too young and has small market cap, which hinders it adaptation. Maybe people are scared of non-gui wallets. Or maybe they just dont care as bitcoin is "good enough". Or maybe they just think monero is yet another scam-coin. I dont know.  

And in the end they dont even care for BTC because they exchange right away for FIAT which is the only thing that counts for them and pays their servers.... if that thing changes we can talk about true acceptance of Cryptocurrencies.... in the meantime... no one should care if overstock or someone else accepts Bitcoin if they exchange right for fiat.... its the same as all those years... accept crypto and change for crypto... but crypto to fiat is not a thing that will make any cc more valueable.... i think the last year showed that and the decline of btc purchases

But they do care about btc, because they accept it. It does not matter for customers what they do with btc, if people pay with btc for vpn or email. The same it does not matter what they do with fiat if you pay by paypal.

But I think you might be right in one thing, i.e. exchanging crypto to fiat. This maybe a problem. Most secure vpn and emails providers are from europe, because well, you cant trust any service from usa due to spying and backdoors everywhere. Thus, most privacy focused providers, such as tutanota, zenmate, protonmail, ghostmail, lavamail, etc. are from europe. And exchanging monero to fiat might be not supported by exchanges they use to change btc to their local currency. Maybe they would have to go Monero->BTC->Fiat (on condition they their exchange even support monero), which only introduces additional and unnecessary transaction fee, as compared to BTC->Fiat.  

[jehst]

How's the Monero OpenBazaar Project going?

[ArticMine]

...
But they do care about btc, because they accept it. It does not matter for customers what they do with btc, if people pay with btc for vpn or email. The same it does not matter what they do with fiat if you pay by paypal.

But I think you might be right in one thing, i.e. exchanging crypto to fiat. This maybe a problem. Most secure vpn and emails providers are from europe, because well, you cant trust any service from usa due to spying and backdoors everywhere. Thus, most privacy focused providers, such as tutanota, zenmate, protonmail, ghostmail, lavamail, etc. are from europe. And exchanging monero to fiat might be not supported by exchanges they use to change btc to their local currency. Maybe they would have to go Monero->BTC->Fiat (on condition they their exchange even support monero), which only introduces additional and unnecessary transaction fee, as compared to BTC->Fiat.  

Quite apart from the privacy / fungibility arguments in favor of Monero, if Bitcoin transactions do not confirm or become very expensive to confirm because of the 1 MB blocksize limit, merchants, payment processors and exchanges will be looking for alternatives to Bitcoin that do not have this problem.

As for transactions where the merchant or payment processor converts back to fiat, there is always a minimum holding time between the customer purchasing the crypto currency and the final conversion back to fiat that will increase the market value of the crypto currency.

Edit: I do agree that direct Monero - fiat exchanges will be a very significant plus for Monero

[DaveyJones]

...
But they do care about btc, because they accept it. It does not matter for customers what they do with btc, if people pay with btc for vpn or email. The same it does not matter what they do with fiat if you pay by paypal.

But I think you might be right in one thing, i.e. exchanging crypto to fiat. This maybe a problem. Most secure vpn and emails providers are from europe, because well, you cant trust any service from usa due to spying and backdoors everywhere. Thus, most privacy focused providers, such as tutanota, zenmate, protonmail, ghostmail, lavamail, etc. are from europe. And exchanging monero to fiat might be not supported by exchanges they use to change btc to their local currency. Maybe they would have to go Monero->BTC->Fiat (on condition they their exchange even support monero), which only introduces additional and unnecessary transaction fee, as compared to BTC->Fiat.  

Quite apart from the privacy / fungibility arguments in favor of Monero, if Bitcoin transactions do not confirm or become very expensive to confirm because of the 1 MB blocksize limit, merchants, payment processors and exchanges will be looking for alternatives to Bitcoin that do not have this problem.

As for transactions where the merchant or payment processor converts back to fiat, there is always a minimum holding time between the customer purchasing the crypto currency and the final conversion back to fiat that will increase the market value of the crypto currency.

Edit: I do agree that direct Monero - fiat exchanges will be a very significant plus for Monero

btw you did not answer your 1.) and 2.) question from 1 to 2 pages earlier... or did i miss it

[smooth]

...
But they do care about btc, because they accept it. It does not matter for customers what they do with btc, if people pay with btc for vpn or email. The same it does not matter what they do with fiat if you pay by paypal.

But I think you might be right in one thing, i.e. exchanging crypto to fiat. This maybe a problem. Most secure vpn and emails providers are from europe, because well, you cant trust any service from usa due to spying and backdoors everywhere. Thus, most privacy focused providers, such as tutanota, zenmate, protonmail, ghostmail, lavamail, etc. are from europe. And exchanging monero to fiat might be not supported by exchanges they use to change btc to their local currency. Maybe they would have to go Monero->BTC->Fiat (on condition they their exchange even support monero), which only introduces additional and unnecessary transaction fee, as compared to BTC->Fiat.  

Quite apart from the privacy / fungibility arguments in favor of Monero, if Bitcoin transactions do not confirm or become very expensive to confirm because of the 1 MB blocksize limit, merchants, payment processors and exchanges will be looking for alternatives to Bitcoin that do not have this problem.

There are many alternatives though. Look at the top 20 list of cryptocurrencies and all will have some reasonable capacity to take transaction offload from BTC. That is indeed one of the arguments against small blocks in BTC -- that it will drive tx volume to alts.

On the surface (if people don't bother to look at the technology in depth, and most won't), Monero has no special place in that group, although Monero could certainly be one of the several top alts that benefits from traffic offload in this scenario.

[Anon136]

When all trading happens on a central computer on Wall Street, the way to get an advantage is to build extremely fast connections to this computer and pay for the highest tier of access.  
  
When all trading happens on a decentralized network where any given node might become the most important for a brief time, the only way to get an advantage is to build up faster and faster throughput across the entire network, which just happens to be global.  
  
Its possible that crypto-profits might also drive us to new heights of global bandwidth as well.

You are just assuming away the whole problem. When addressing the question of will bitcoin remain decentralized you cant start with the premise that it will.

Two big mining operations who worked in buildings adjacent to each-other with their own dedicated fiber connecting each other together would each have an advantage over all other miners in the world who did not have a similar arrangement. And the bigger the block size the greater that advantage would be. The question is under varying amounts pressure to what extent would the decentralization be compromised.

[smooth]

How's the Monero OpenBazaar Project going?

I have not been following the updates but just given the time period and the lack of announced progress or success I would have to say that project has been a failure. Some would say scam and maybe they are right, but from my perspective it is hard to tell whether it was that or a developer who just got in over his head and couldn't finish it.

[Anon136]

This funding system we have built into the forum is great. We really ought to be leveraging this more. We need more developers to realize that we have employment opportunities.

Also is there a way to set it up so that we can get our money back if the funding goal isn't reached? That would make me a lot more comfortable donating.

[GingerAle]

This funding system we have built into the forum is great. We really ought to be leveraging this more. We need more developers to realize that we have employment opportunities.

Also is there a way to set it up so that we can get our money back if the funding goal isn't reached? That would make me a lot more comfortable donating.

Indeed, it hasn't been laid out what happens when a funding goal isn't met. many things *could* happen. The developer could decide to develop anyway. The funders could decide to move their money elsewhere. As its currently designed, because a project = payment ID, there's no additional parsing of payments, unless I guess you personally communicate your end of the transaction.


It also hasn't been laid out what happens when milestones aren't met, or the community flat out disapproves payout due to the quality of delivered goods.

One idea I proposed was to work it into a sidechain, similar to moo's tippero bot. So that way when the funders donate, their funds can be tracked and managed off chain, with better linkability / traceability etc. We could even get fancy and incorporate some voting thing such that funders could vote on the final product, and this triggers tippero to make the transaction to the developers tippero-like account, and then the developer can withdraw to his actual XMR account. But I posted that idea in our forum and then the spam monster ate it.

I think anything is possible regarding the policies of the system.

sorry for the OT smooth. Don't redtext me. :=( it was Anon136's fault!!!!

[g4q34g4qg47ww]

Dethrone Monero from what? No one cares or even heard about Monero apart from people on this forum, polo exchange and monero subreddit. And most people, like you wrote, seem to agree that nothing except bitcion is needed. This is really a shame. Especially if you consider that Monero aims at providing real privacy and anonymity, and none of the privacy oriented services (like vpn or secure email providers) supports it. You would think that such providers would be first in promoting private and anonymous ways of paying for their services and products, but not.

There must be a reason for it. Maybe monero is still too young and has small market cap, which hinders it adaptation. Maybe people are scared of non-gui wallets. Or maybe they just dont care as bitcoin is "good enough". Or maybe they just think monero is yet another scam-coin. I dont know.  

Prepare for incoming contradictory statements.

Using my strongest efforts to overclock my comprehension abilities, I believe I at least have a semi-clear understanding of a decent bit of what is being added / modded to a decent bit of the code. As far as I can determine, these additions are utilizing slightly obscure but absolutely top notch and in some cases mold-breaking technology (esp. 0mq and lmdb). IMO these projects seem to be in the obscure stage literally because they are SO cutting edge that they are solving problems (elegantly) that many devs / administrators don't properly realize are current / near future performance affecting issues.. bottlenecks ... failures to deal with massive amounts of accurate info transfer at top speed etc.. in a lot of fields, not just crypto. I think part of my addiction to monero is following the dev work and being introduced to tech that I really would have no chance of being exposed to otherwise. I think it is correct and admirable to nail these additions in securely before the release of official GUI.

BUT, and this is a big but, the lack of a the GUI is an enormous hindrance towards adoption. Of course VPN providers, anon mail services and DNM aren't racing to accept it, because really, its a small (but steadily growing) crowd that is able to understand the gear being packed into this baby well enough to be interested in giving the CLI a try, which means not many customers for the merchants. I'd probably stick to cli myself even after gui release, but without the GUI I don't believe there will be any sudden influx of non-speculative customers willing to try figure out how to use xmr (sorry if brutal). Once we make it easy for the user, the ridiculous tech that is designed to handle massive use without flinching as well as all the other under the hood work might not be individually identifiable by average-Joe, but they will definitely notice how quick, clean, and resilient the performance is, making the experience nice and pleasant for them as they take advantage of the refined and hardened cryptonote as well as dynamic block size and other goodies.

So for now I expect a slow increase in user base due to technically-minded people becoming aware enough of what this coin is quickly becoming that they want to take a speculative position, but I think we are still very much in the speculation stage. Emission has dropped a lot at this point which helps, but polo's withdraw limits make it REALLY annoying to load up a bunch of BTC to properly challenge market-makers intent on pushing down the price.

TLDR; These under the hood gear ups are truly making xmr pull far into the lead regarding technical prowess, should definitely be implemented before gui... and are well worth the wait. But it would be silly to expect an enormous influx of average-joe users without the gui, which means less usage and thus less incentive for merchants to spend the time to implement it as payment option.

Sidenote: The price suppression is pretty heavy handed and obvious, but is effective currently. I think its partly because of individuals and or companies wanting to make large entries while maximizing their purchasing power with no real intent of selling at low prices.  It is REALLY annoying to withdraw large sums from polo without submitting blood sample, and many have been around long enough to not feel comfortable loading up 60 btc on an exchange that's going to take forever to withdraw in tiny little chunks.

[bitebits]

Snip of great post!

TLDR; These under the hood gear ups are truly making xmr pull far into the lead regarding technical prowess, should definitely be implemented before gui... and are well worth the wait. But it would be silly to expect an enormous influx of average-joe users without the gui, which means less usage and thus less incentive for merchants to spend the time to implement it as payment option.

About the bolded part. I know there is a Monero roadmap. But is there any insight in how many monthly hours are actually jointly spend on Monero development, beside the paid developer hours?

The obvious concern is that the vision and skills are there, but people are lacking time to achieve the set goals within a certain reasonable time frame.

[dEBRUYNE]

Snip of great post!

TLDR; These under the hood gear ups are truly making xmr pull far into the lead regarding technical prowess, should definitely be implemented before gui... and are well worth the wait. But it would be silly to expect an enormous influx of average-joe users without the gui, which means less usage and thus less incentive for merchants to spend the time to implement it as payment option.

About the bolded part. I know there is a Monero roadmap. But is there any insight in how many monthly hours are actually jointly spend on Monero development, beside the paid developer hours?

The obvious concern is that the vision and skills are there, but people are lacking time to achieve the set goals within a certain reasonable time frame.

See:

Where can I find status of Monero development? Things like:

1) How many "core" devs are working on it, and who they are (handles, plus real-names/social-media where public)?
2) Roughly how much time per week/month these devs are spending on it.
3) What the dev roadmap is.
4) What the dev roadmap *was*, and were the milestones hit on-target.

^ You know, basic project management stuff. Looking at git commits only gives hints as to most of this.

pa's answer was pretty helpful on 1, 3, and 4. 4 may be a bit unsatisfying (I find it so) but given that we have to work with very unpredictable resources it is difficult to ever have timed milestones. So we never have and can't measure against them. That's just how it is.

As far as 2, it isn't formally tracked, but it's a reasonably significant amount of time for a mostly-unfunded open source project when you combine across the core team, the major development contributors, and the research group. I would estimate very roughly 2-3 full time equivalents  (varies somewhat unpredictably over time though), and by that I mean just software development and testing, and work on research reports, not the work we put into communications, third party support, etc.

Smooth - would you estimate that the bolded part is still roughly accurate?

Yes I would say that is roughly accurate. There may be slightly less now, but I'm not positive of that because the effort is a bit more diffuse and some major in-progress work may not be so visible. For example, I really had no idea the amazing scope of Noodle Doodle's benchmarking, debugging, and optimizing effort until his recent commit (though I did know he was working on it).

There has been a bunch of work from the MRL on various crypto things including: strengthening anonymization both against combinatorial attacks and better hiding of amounts along the lines of Blockstream's CT, continued analysis of the problem of difficulty retargeting, and upgraded python implementations of more of the crypto.

On the C++ coding side we have NoodleDoodle's massive effort of course. MoneroMooo has been contributing more as well, mostly on a various wallet things (and his work will be now be funded for several months via the forum crowdfunding system), and let's not forget luigi1111's great work to define and implement integrated addresses. I know oranjuice is continuing to work on the API upgrade. I don't see commits (possibly I'm looking the wrong place) for it but he is regularly on #monero-dev discussing it.

So it is interesting that some people who previously put in a lot more work have been busy with other things and putting in less time recently, but others are now contributing to the development effort, and the overall effort fairly stable (that is also visible in the commit rate over the past 6-9 months, although that is an imperfect measure and doesn't include some things at all, such as most of the MRL work).

To add some speculation: I noticed asks are down to <300k again.

[smooth]

To follow up on my quoted post above from five months ago I estimate that there is somewhat less in the way of consistent resources on the project right now. Maybe 1-2 full time equivalents. There is less active work in the research group, largely because the research people are busier with their other academic demands, but I imagine that will swing the other way at some point and we'll see some new reports that have been in the process of being refined over the past several months, along with some new stuff that is in earlier stages.

I'm not sure if it was reported here that we got a code commit from one of the academics to replace the somewhat customized crypto library in Monero with automatic incorporation of a well-known one, reducing the possibility of hidden back doors (none were ever found, but this provides greater confidence and transparency).

While MoneroMooo is delivering excellently on his part time crowdfunded work, some of the other contributors are less active now, and after all MoneroMooo is still only part time. In open source projects, people come and go. I'd guess that the generally depressing mood in the crypto universe and the fact that Monero hasn't mooned yet is a part of it. Sad, I suppose, that that matters, but that's reality.

It is possible there are efforts going on that I don't know about or don't know the extent of (for example, I knew about NoodleDoodle's optimization work a few months ago, but I didn't know until later the massive effort he had put into it nor the impressiveness of the results achieved).

I didn't check the status of funding of twinget's new crowdfunding proposal to work on documenting the code (with doxygen which can also be used to create pretty pictures), but I heard that was going fairly well so assuming that gets fully funded, it will be another nice boost to project resources, and it will be specifically doing work that makes the project more accessible to new contributors later.

EDIT: Looks 90% funded or something. If you are interested in seeing that work happen, take a look over at the funding section of the official forum and consider contributing to it.

[dEBRUYNE]

Great news guys! Another developer/contributer pitched a proposal for a part-time contract, see details below:

https://forum.getmonero.org/8/funding-required/2373/documentation-and-cleanup-of-source-code

PS: It's open for funding already!

Great work guys, we're at 3,429.43/3,600.00 (95.21%). I am a bit intrigued this was nearly raised within one day!

Bit of speculation: Asks are down significantly, volume is low though and we seem to be grinding down a bit lower. Bids are still a bid on the lower side.

As long as we don't break that uptrend line at 190k-191k, I am not worried.