[XMR] Monero Speculation

[ArticMine]

Isn't a instamine == premine when it's done before anyone else has time to ramp up?

If the implication is that releasing the mining software on GNU/Linux ahead of Microsoft Windows converts an instamine into a premine the answer is most emphatically NO.

[stopsigningbitch]

Instamine, yes, but many coins in their beginnings have them.

Name names please. I'm curious about this peer group.

Excluding the couple week POW->POS coins, and no-name coins, off the top of my head from ones that were top coins or have been around for a while:

Darkcoin
Feathercoin
Megacoin
Novacoin
Peercoin
Primecoin
Vertcoin
Bytecoin
Dogecoin (although with the amount of coins, it hardly matters)
Litecoin

Countless others that have came and went all depending on what flavor of the week coin was hot at the time making the others launched with low diff.

I fixed that for you.

[oblox]

Instamine, yes, but many coins in their beginnings have them.

Name names please. I'm curious about this peer group.

Excluding the couple week POW->POS coins, and no-name coins, off the top of my head from ones that were top coins or have been around for a while:

Darkcoin
Feathercoin
Megacoin
Novacoin
Peercoin
Primecoin
Vertcoin
Bytecoin
Dogecoin (although with the amount of coins, it hardly matters)
Litecoin

Countless others that have came and went all depending on what flavor of the week coin was hot at the time making the others launched with low diff.

I fixed that for you.

Orly? http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins

[stopsigningbitch]

Isn't a instamine == premine when it's done before anyone else has time to ramp up?

If the implication is that releasing the mining software on GNU/Linux ahead of Microsoft Windows converts an instamine into a premine the answer is most emphatically NO.

It would be YES if there were 500 coins per block during the first few hours while the mining software was restricted to the very small pool of Linux users.

oh wait...Did I just describe something?

[smooth]

Instamine, yes, but many coins in their beginnings have them.

Name names please. I'm curious about this peer group.

Excluding the couple week POW->POS coins, and no-name coins, off the top of my head from ones that were top coins or have been around for a while:

Darkcoin
Feathercoin
Megacoin
Novacoin
Peercoin
Primecoin
Vertcoin
Bytecoin
Dogecoin (although with the amount of coins, it hardly matters)
Litecoin

Countless others that have came and went all depending on what flavor of the week coin was hot at the time making the others launched with low diff.

I have to admit I'm surprised at the sheer number, although I'd quibble that Bytecoin was not an instamine, it was an outright fabricated blockchain.

Nevertheless, it is interesting and makes me wonder how many of these are accidents vs. intentional. At some point you have to wonder after the 5th or 10th time, if it isn't intentional?

[stopsigningbitch]

Instamine, yes, but many coins in their beginnings have them.

Name names please. I'm curious about this peer group.

Excluding the couple week POW->POS coins, and no-name coins, off the top of my head from ones that were top coins or have been around for a while:

Darkcoin
Feathercoin
Megacoin
Novacoin
Peercoin
Primecoin
Vertcoin
Bytecoin
Dogecoin (although with the amount of coins, it hardly matters)
Litecoin

Countless others that have came and went all depending on what flavor of the week coin was hot at the time making the others launched with low diff.

I fixed that for you.

Orly? http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins

Oh dayum, you're right. Thanks for that link.

[opennux]

Instamine, yes, but many coins in their beginnings have them.

Name names please. I'm curious about this peer group.

Excluding the couple week POW->POS coins, and no-name coins, off the top of my head from ones that were top coins or have been around for a while:

Darkcoin
Feathercoin
Megacoin
Novacoin
Peercoin
Primecoin
Vertcoin
Bytecoin
Dogecoin (although with the amount of coins, it hardly matters)
Litecoin

Countless others that have came and went all depending on what flavor of the week coin was hot at the time making the others launched with low diff.

I fixed that for you.

Orly? http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins

To quote from your link:

What's The Problem With Soft Instamines ("fastmines")?
Hopefully one can see after reading this article that coins like Novacoin, Goldcoin, Blackcoin, Darkcoin, etc are obviously bad investments. (Hold your comments until reading the entire article, please). The amount of coins mined in the beginning is just too advantageous of those fortunate few who got the easy money. But what about the questionable mining…that aren't quite an instant mine but are not a slow mine, either?

.............

Darkcoin
derived from Quark
type of algorithm: blake, bmw, groestl, keccak, jh, stein
PoW and PoS
The following data and time stamps were collected from the Darkcoin blockchain 37).

Block 1: 2014-01-19 Time: 3:54:41
Block 1000 : 2014-01-19 Time: 4:33:39
Block 2000: 2014-01-19 Time: 06:25:47
Block 3000: 2014-01-19 Time: 09:10:16
Block 3250: 2014-01-19 Time: 11:22:11
Looking at this data, we see that Darkcoin was mined with 500 DRK generated per block from the get go. From block 1 to at least block 3250, according to their blockchain, they were still producing 500 coins each block. The transition from 500 to 277 coins per block occurs between 3250 and 3500 but this author did not see the necessity of getting the exact moment of halving. Simple math shows that 3250 blocks multiplied by 500 coins a block is 1,625,000 Darkcoins created between the times of 3:54 and 11:22 on January 19th, 2014. As of today there are around 4,300,000 DRK in existence, making this a pretty hefty instamine. The Darkcoin website expects around 22,000,000 DRK to be created. That means in less than 8 hours, almost 5% of the Darkcoins that ever will be created spawned in that 1/3 of a day. It's safe to say Darkcoin has left it's investors in the dark on this one.

[oblox]

To quote from your link:

Again, what is your point? Where did I say there wasn't one? It hasn't been hidden, it's a well known part of the history of the coin. I guess when you run out of shit to talk about, bring it back up. Why not, right? And why does it always have to turn into a pissing match between DRK and XMR? I only discuss it when others start posting shoddy info, otherwise, I respect the on-topic discussion.

Smooth: Yeah, and that's not even scratching the surface when you start factoring in all the dead/dying coins.

[ArticMine]

Isn't a instamine == premine when it's done before anyone else has time to ramp up?

If the implication is that releasing the mining software on GNU/Linux ahead of Microsoft Windows converts an instamine into a premine the answer is most emphatically NO.

It would be YES if there were 500 coins per block during the first few hours while the mining software was restricted to the very small pool of Linux users.

oh wait...Did I just describe something?

I have zero sympathy here. Those who choose propriety DRM and malware infected operating systems sold licensed by large multinational monopolies such as Microsoft and Apple need to learn that by their choice of operating systems they are cutting themselves off from many extremely profitable opportunities. This is especially the case when dealing with crypto - currencies that by their very nature rely on FLOSS and computing devices under their owner's sole control for their security. My own personal experience was purchasing XBT in the 2 -6 USD range in late 2011/2012. Many of those XBT were subsequently sold at an 10000% profit for XMR after Apple gave the iSheep permission to purchase XBT. I am a strong critic of DRK and believe the coin is fundamentally flawed at a structural level; however one thing the DRK developers got right is releasing the mining software on GNU/Linux ahead of Microsoft Windows. There are many valid security reasons why one would do that. Furthermore this also sends a clear message that if one wants privacy one should not be using DRM and malware infected propriety operating systems, where the vendors have, in addition to the DRM and malware risk, made data sharing arrangements with multiple national spy agencies.

[generalizethis]

Can we call darkcoin's mine a "Freudian slip mine."

"Oooops, sorry, didn't mean to do that!" 

[Hueristic]

Isn't a instamine == premine when it's done before anyone else has time to ramp up?

If the implication is that releasing the mining software on GNU/Linux ahead of Microsoft Windows converts an instamine into a premine the answer is most emphatically NO.

No that wasn't the inference I was making, I thought Before anyone even had the wallets compiled the magic blocks were mined. I really don't remember anymore. all I remember is it was real shady. Too much of this stuff going on I can't keep all the slight of hands and outright thefts straight anymore.

Edited:

W0w what a great Wiki! I didn't even know it existed!

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins

thanks for that link.

Monero

    type of algorithm: CryptoNight

    PoW only

Monero is a coin with a rather curious basis, CryptoNote, of which you can read about here 161). The minor details we won't get into, however the mining details we will. Monero proposes a system where the block generation does not have a halving scheme whatsoever. Rather, the coins generated begin to diminish over time according to a formula.

Looking at their blockchain shows good things. The first few blocks reveal around 17.59 MRO being created.

    block 1: 17.59 MRO 2014-04-18 10:49:53

    block 1000: 17.57 MRO 2014-04-18 10:49:53
    block 2000: 17.55 MRO 2014-04-19 01:42:08
    block 3000: 17.54 MRO 2014-04-19 21:21:11
    block 4000: 17.52 MRO 2014-04-20 10:16:26
    block 5000: 17.50 MRO 2014-04-21 01:44:45
    block 6000: 17.49 MRO 2014-04-21 18:23:27
    block 7000: 17.47 MRO 2014-04-22 07:04:14
    block 8000: 17.45 MRO 2014-04-23 00:07:23
    block 9000: 17.44 MRO 2014-04-23 15:45:54
    block 10000: 17.42 MRO 2014-04-24 08:17:44

    block 15000: 17.34 MRO 2014-04-28 08:41:15
    block 20000: 17.26 MRO 2014-05-01 18:48:17
    block 25000: 17.18 MRO 2014-05-05 00:51:23
    block 30000: 17.09 MRO 2014-05-08 06:04:09
    block 35000: 17.01 MRO 2014-05-11 13:29:44
    block 40000: 16.93 MRO 2014-05-14 22:51:54
    block 45000: 16.85 MRO 2014-05-18 05:25:23

On paper this seems like a great plan, but when this plays out to its logical conclusion, Monero will effectively mine out a lot of their currency relatively fast. As you can see from the mining data posted here, within one month the number of Monero generated decreased from 17.59 MRO to 16.85 MRO, a decrease of .76 MRO in a month. Obviously, there is a formula that determines the amount of MRO created and we shouldn't assume a purely linear relationship from here.

Indeed, the bitcointalk thread provides a graph that spells out the dirty details. The currency, using the formula Block reward = (M - A) * 2-20 * 10-12, will produce 15.48 million out of the total possible 18 million Monero in only 4 years 162).

On one hand, a 4 year plan to produce 85% of the currency is waaaay better than 90% of the coins on this investigation. In comparison to bitcoin, we see that from its inception from January of 2009 to today, May of 2014 (roughly 5.5 years), bitcoin has produced around 60% of its expected coin totals 163). In that sense, Monero isn't too much of a divergence.

There are no instantmines or premines in Monero. The smooth block subsidy scheme could be a little bit more tapered towards a slower distribution than it is, but ultimately this coin passes the smell test.

[opennux]

To quote from your link:

Again, what is your point? Where did I say there wasn't one? It hasn't been hidden, it's a well known part of the history of the coin. I guess when you run out of shit to talk about, bring it back up. Why not, right? And why does it always have to turn into a pissing match between DRK and XMR? I only discuss it when others start posting shoddy info, otherwise, I respect the on-topic discussion.

Smooth: Yeah, and that's not even scratching the surface when you start factoring in all the dead/dying coins.

It's a speculation forum. I believe there's much more speculation to be done on DRK, sure.  
ArcticMine speculated that DRK had great short-term > mid-term speculation value, but because of the perceived flaws such as insta-mine, apparently flawed cryptography and suggested vulnerability with master-nodes, it will eventually (speculation) lose out significantly compared to other (better? less flawed?) coins.

Therefore, when people doing due diligence to such a degree as ArcticMine is doing (as would investors with large portfolios, or developers investing time and resources into a coin) and chooses XMR and rejects DRK, then that's a tell-tale of that at some point your portfolio should be restructured to accommodate opportunity costs.  

I suggested that you might have a bias towards your investment (of course, we all do), but that with the presented evidence it should be re-evaluated.  I know I have bias towards the things I have in a portfolio, and I am trying not to be.

[hodlmybtc]

Great 2 posts above me!

Before buying my first XMR I knew nothing about anonymous coins etc. However I found out that DRK was and still is very shady IMO.

It´s also easy to spot that DRK has/had a lot more "shilling" going on than XMR, a lot of dumb money just buys the coin with the most "community support" and marketing.

Dumb money doesn't take time to do due diligence, they just buy in the hopes of getting rich.

From an objective point of view I wouldn't dare to put $1 in DRK above 0.01, but I definately would put money that I can afford to lose in XMR at 0.0015, it seems the bottom is in and we're going up, regardless of rumors that people with hundreds of thousands of dollars are buying in in the near future.

[Brilliantrocket]

I find the bitching about DRK's fastmine/instamine to be petty. Yes it happened. Don't like it, don't invest. I think DRK will see success regardless, because most people couldn't care less about a fastmine. And if it does see success, going around and bitching about the fastmine makes you an envious loser. In the end, I will support whoever has the best solution. Monero has an awesome team behind it, so who knows.

[opennux]

I find the bitching about DRK's fastmine/instamine to be petty. Yes it happened. Don't like it, don't invest. I think DRK will see success regardless, because most people couldn't care less about a fastmine. And if it does see success, going around and bitching about the fastmine makes you an envious loser. In the end, I will support whoever has the best solution. Monero has an awesome team behind it, so who knows.

It's not bitching (from my side at least). It's just saying because of abc it is speculated that xyz.

[oblox]

You dont see drk devs addressing any of the gaping drk issues in any thread, there is no effort going there unless its some slick marketing term to be used as baiting. I got first into anon with drk and I soon noticed how I was being tricked into a futile crypto game already past its time (aka scam), the emission was changed and the price was(still) ridiculously pumped, I'm yet to find something better than xmr, that is technologically sound and does not try to scam me with its instamine/emission tricks.

edit: before anyone says anything about the mining issue, I dont care if monero is botnet mined, mining software evolves with time and the coins are heavily dumped into the market anyway, what I care is why I got into crypto: rules, the emission is the most important aspect and what solidifies bitcoin and others as a better economic model, I will never trust a coin like drk that change its rules as it pleases to unethically enrich the developers and associates, by "mistake" or not.

Gaping issues, eh? According to the github, most of the past vulnerabilities have been patched or addressed (I'd say that's the drk devs addressing things as the commits speak for themselves). Masternode blinding in the works further makes the rogue masternode argument fall flat. Cryptographically inferior, depends on what level you're getting at. I'm comfortable in a 1 in 43M chance at 16 rounds... hell, I'm comfortable at 1 in 6561 at 8 rounds. Obfuscating IPs for senders/receivers also in the pipeline. What others am I missing? I'd love to address them because it appears your bias has the best of you and you're just calling scam for the sake of your own interests in XMR. I think it's foolish to not have positions in both, especially this early in the game. Bitcoin is proving (especially due to Coinbase's activities) that privacy is something solely needed. InstantX is something XMR doesn't offer so even from the prospective outside of privacy, there is utility there. From an income standpoint, hard to beat income streams from running masternodes vs the hassle of mining.

Both DRK and XMR have fantastic development teams, both in their own right working on two completely different codebases.

[Johnny Mnemonic]

My belief in XMR's long term success over darkcoin has more to do with the coin's fundamentals than any perceived scamminess in DRK.

- Monero has zero dependencies. Regardless of a masternode's "vulnerability", DRK still depends on them to ensure privacy. XMR works out of the box. Just use the coin.

- Monero is not a Proof of Stake currency. Even Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin admits that a secure PoS system is somewhat of a unicorn, though eventually achievable. Even if it is achieved, I don't believe PoS assets can ever be valued on a massive scale and remain decentralized (see the first law of thermodynamics).

- Monero's blockchain is opaque. You cannot see the contents or transaction history of my (or anyone's) address, even if I make it public. This is not the case for Bitcoin derived alts.

[oblox]

My belief in XMR's long term success over darkcoin has more to do with the coin's fundamentals than any perceived scamminess in DRK.

- Monero has zero dependencies. Regardless of a masternode's "vulnerability", DRK still depends on them to ensure privacy. XMR works out of the box. Just use the coin.

- Monero is not a Proof of Stake currency. Even Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin admits that a secure PoS system is somewhat of a unicorn, though eventually achievable. Even if it is achieved, I don't believe PoS assets can ever be valued on a massive scale and remain decentralized (see the first law of thermodynamics).

- Monero's blockchain is opaque. You cannot see the contents or transaction history of my (or anyone's) address, even if I make it public. This is not the case for Bitcoin derived alts.

Point 1 is true that DRK's privacy functions on the backbone of the masternode network, but even if the network were compromised tomorrow, all previous transactions would remain anonymous. Correct me if I am wrong, but if by some act of god (and excluding the ramifications of hash security not only on a mining level but on all systems secured by cryptography (yes you SHA256) being compromised), cryptonote was broken, all tx's (past, present, future) would be linked. It's a choice between on chain or off chain privacy.

Point two isn't right... DRK is, and always will be, a POW currency. Masternodes are dubbed as proof of service from posting collateral to partake in rewards, but beyond that, it all comes back to miners that process transactions and divide out the masternode percentage payment from the block reward.

As for point three, true, but what good is a ledger of tx's if the whole thing is obscured as to origin? I'm sorry, but having a 1 in 6561 chance at 8 rounds of viable pathways in the blockchain is fine. While it may not be true anonymity in the sense that it's cryptographically unlinkable, it's privacy through obscurity. Even so, the end user has the choice of how much obscurity he or she wants and further could re-DS if so desired.

[smooth]

Point 1 is true that DRK's privacy functions on the backbone of the masternode network, but even if the network were compromised tomorrow, all previous transactions would remain anonymous. Correct me if I am wrong, but if by some act of god (and excluding the ramifications of hash security not only on a mining level but on all systems secured by SHA256 being compromised), cryptonote was broken, all tx's (past, present, future) would be linked. It's a choice between on chain or off chain privacy.

Nothing prevents people from adding off-chain privacy to Monero. You can do this now by moving coins through exchanges, gambling sites, or other existing intermediaries,  and people can create dedicated centralized or decentralized mixing services if the want (all of these may keep records or be compromised, but so may masternodes) You can easily add off-chain privacy to a coin with on-chain but not vice versa.

[oblox]

Point 1 is true that DRK's privacy functions on the backbone of the masternode network, but even if the network were compromised tomorrow, all previous transactions would remain anonymous. Correct me if I am wrong, but if by some act of god (and excluding the ramifications of hash security not only on a mining level but on all systems secured by SHA256 being compromised), cryptonote was broken, all tx's (past, present, future) would be linked. It's a choice between on chain or off chain privacy.

Nothing prevents people from adding off-chain privacy to Monero. You can do this now by moving coins through exchanges, gambling sites, or other existing intermediaries,  and people can create dedicated centralized or decentralized mixing services if the want (all of these may keep records or be compromised, but so may masternodes) You can easily add off-chain privacy to a coin with on-chain but not vice versa.

Very true. I was simply making the point as it is out-of-box. You can always take more measures if you need more added privacy. The far more probable scenario in either coin's usage is the trails outside of the currency anyway leading to compromised anonymity.