[XMR] Monero Speculation

[elrippos friend]

I heard a rumor a few weeks back (Jan 19th) regarding ASICs on the network - supposedly there was a batch of 5000 miners manufactured for a private Chinese farm that went online just recently. It seems to be pretty feasible after comparing against some analytics done on the nonce ranges of historic blocks:

https://github.com/noncesense-research-lab/nonce_distribution/blob/master/nonce_distribution.ipynb

Conveniently enough, this analysis concludes the miners came online around Jan 9th. Some chit-chat from IRC matches up as well:

<@solar> i got some confirmation about asics too
<@solar> there's at least 1 group with cnv2 asics, 65nm
<@solar> supposedly a batch of 5000

<sech1> So after a thorough analysis of the winning nonces for blocks 1760000-1765000 I can say this about ASICs that are on the network now:
<sech1> 320 cores (10 chips x 32 cores?)
<sech1> each core processes nonces with 2^22 step - from 0 to ~1.34e9
<sech1> Single core speed is 400 h/s - calculated from the area of spikes (which come with 2^22 step) on winning nonce graph
<sech1> Overall ASIC device speed = 128 kh/s (400*320)
<sech1> Around 4000-4500 ASICs online now

<sech1> M5M400 they do mine on public pools: f2pool, viabtc, poolin - they all submit blocks with winning nonces strictly in ASIC nonce ranges
<sech1> all 3 are Chinese pools ironically
<sech1> so we can just count them in "unknown hashrate" part
<sech1> which leaves only 230 MH/s known
<sech1> and 641 MH/s = almost exactly 5000 * 128 kh/s solar

At the time of this post, network hashrate is 850 MH/s (640 MH/s being 75% unknown), putting us squarely in the danger zone for network-level attacks. This is also a major drain on public pools - with only 230MH/s of "legitimate" miners popular pools are operating at a significant loss, having only 60-70 MH/s on average (e.g. SupportXMR at 0.6% is just below $1300/mo, while their server expenses are approximately $5000/mo). With the next hard fork still a few months out this is a completely unsustainable scenario and will eventually lead to the closure and consolidation of the public pools, not to mention a mass exodus of "legitimate" miners.

Another Hard Fork Coming for Monero [XMR]? Analysis says ASIC Dominates Monero Hashrate
https://coingape.com/asic-dominates-monero-hashrate/

the current network hashrate likely consists of 85.2% ASICs (5400 ASIC machines) and some die-hard GPU miners and botnets.

This is why hard forks purely for banning ASIC miners are dangerous in my opinion, they lower your network strength (making it vulnerable to 51% attacks) while ASIC manufacturers
will find ways to circumvent it. Best is to just allow ASIC miners and have them spread their hashrate evenly across pools (difficult to arrange, but not impossible).

Yes and no 

[1714786087]

1714786087

[1714786087]

1714786087

[1714786087]

1714786087

[Sipizter]

I heard a rumor a few weeks back (Jan 19th) regarding ASICs on the network - supposedly there was a batch of 5000 miners manufactured for a private Chinese farm that went online just recently. It seems to be pretty feasible after comparing against some analytics done on the nonce ranges of historic blocks:

https://github.com/noncesense-research-lab/nonce_distribution/blob/master/nonce_distribution.ipynb

Conveniently enough, this analysis concludes the miners came online around Jan 9th. Some chit-chat from IRC matches up as well:

<@solar> i got some confirmation about asics too
<@solar> there's at least 1 group with cnv2 asics, 65nm
<@solar> supposedly a batch of 5000

<sech1> So after a thorough analysis of the winning nonces for blocks 1760000-1765000 I can say this about ASICs that are on the network now:
<sech1> 320 cores (10 chips x 32 cores?)
<sech1> each core processes nonces with 2^22 step - from 0 to ~1.34e9
<sech1> Single core speed is 400 h/s - calculated from the area of spikes (which come with 2^22 step) on winning nonce graph
<sech1> Overall ASIC device speed = 128 kh/s (400*320)
<sech1> Around 4000-4500 ASICs online now

<sech1> M5M400 they do mine on public pools: f2pool, viabtc, poolin - they all submit blocks with winning nonces strictly in ASIC nonce ranges
<sech1> all 3 are Chinese pools ironically
<sech1> so we can just count them in "unknown hashrate" part
<sech1> which leaves only 230 MH/s known
<sech1> and 641 MH/s = almost exactly 5000 * 128 kh/s solar

At the time of this post, network hashrate is 850 MH/s (640 MH/s being 75% unknown), putting us squarely in the danger zone for network-level attacks. This is also a major drain on public pools - with only 230MH/s of "legitimate" miners popular pools are operating at a significant loss, having only 60-70 MH/s on average (e.g. SupportXMR at 0.6% is just below $1300/mo, while their server expenses are approximately $5000/mo). With the next hard fork still a few months out this is a completely unsustainable scenario and will eventually lead to the closure and consolidation of the public pools, not to mention a mass exodus of "legitimate" miners.

Another Hard Fork Coming for Monero [XMR]? Analysis says ASIC Dominates Monero Hashrate
https://coingape.com/asic-dominates-monero-hashrate/

the current network hashrate likely consists of 85.2% ASICs (5400 ASIC machines) and some die-hard GPU miners and botnets.

This is why hard forks purely for banning ASIC miners are dangerous in my opinion, they lower your network strength (making it vulnerable to 51% attacks) while ASIC manufacturers
will find ways to circumvent it. Best is to just allow ASIC miners and have them spread their hashrate evenly across pools (difficult to arrange, but not impossible).

Monero tries to be fair for all so ASICS (which are not easily obtainable for normal miners) are unfair advantage. So it is not like ASICS are bad but more like they are bad because so few can get them.

This situation is not new. It was the same year ago. As soon as it is known that algo will be changed, those ASICS will be sold. I just hope people are not getting fooled into buying them.

[Globb0]

What if graphics card companies are testing their new cards? isn't that also unfair?

Someone will always have more money for the better hardware

[ukloon]

If ASICS prices were to fall then there will be fewer complaints, but it is inevitable for any coin that some hardware will be built specifically to mine it if there is money to be made from it. One might trigger a whole new argument and bring up POS

[Febo]

This is why hard forks purely for banning ASIC miners are dangerous in my opinion,

Monero never had fork solely to prevent ASIC miners.  ASICS cant mine /3 of time solely because at this point Monero can afford to upgrade its protocol twice a year. I dont see that will go on for very long. But at this point it works.

Another Hard Fork Coming for Monero [XMR]?

This is like 9th I believe. Monero was never afraid of hardforks as most of other copycat coins. If anyone thinks any previous version of Monero suit them perfect they should give their best to revive that version.

[joroz]

Monero never had fork solely to prevent ASIC miners.

No, but Monero does hard fork earlier than scheduled because of ASICs. Case in point:

https://twitter.com/JEhrenhofer/status/1094660036398366720?s=20

The next Monero upgrade has been scheduled for block 1788000 in about 4 weeks. This is earlier than expected. Source: moneromooo on #monero

[mitkos1]

Hi guys, I got a private msg on monero.org stating I'm a lotery winner of 5xmr. There is link in the msg. Probably a fishing mail. I got it in mail too. Anyone else got it?

[Febo]

Monero never had fork solely to prevent ASIC miners.

No, but Monero does hard fork earlier than scheduled because of ASICs. Case in point:

https://twitter.com/JEhrenhofer/status/1094660036398366720?s=20

The next Monero upgrade has been scheduled for block 1788000 in about 4 weeks. This is earlier than expected. Source: moneromooo on #monero

Yes it is earlier, but not sure if is earlier then it should be by schedule.  So far in past they were always delayed. This was a pleasant surprise. We will get blockchain size almost halved.  And probably lots of other goodies.  Usually developers meetings right before protocol upgrades change from every two week to once a week.  Binaries have to be out at least a week ahead. So we will have exciting weeks and soon days to come.

Hi guys, I got a private msg on monero.org stating I'm a lotery winner of 5xmr. There is link in the msg. Probably a fishing mail. I got it in mail too. Anyone else got it?

Owner of that site is unknown. But they quite fast added those ASIC fork coins half a year ago. So could be linked with them.

[mitkos1]

Sorry, it is getmonero.org, so it is "official" monero site. The sender is someone named Admin. Just be careful..

[Febo]

Sorry, it is getmonero.org, so it is "official" monero site. The sender is someone named Admin. Just be careful..

There is nothing as official monero site. But yes people that runs that site are well known. You should definitely report that to admin of that site.  It is a forum. Yes I got same.    I will ask on IRC.  I see people already talk there about it.  Think is that forum is in state of getting replaced, so is not that well maintained.

[mitkos1]

That is why I put it in quotes. It is not official but it is a trusted site so one might get fooled into clicking on the link. I am registred there but have no contacts. If someone knows the admin let him know. I've posted here because people read this site more often I guess.

P.s. ohh, great, so it is been noted

[yurimir]

Useful information - best way to learn how Monero works. Monero has two books: “Mastering Monero” and “Zero to Monero”.

1. “Mastering Monero” is a very good introduction that starts out assuming zero knowledge and covers the very basics, but also continues to explain all the critical parts fairly thoroughly:

https://www.getmonero.org/library/Mastering-Monero-Preview.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1731079966/

2. “Zero to Monero” is also an excellent resource. It goes into more technical details and I think assumes that the reader has a background in math and some understanding of modern cryptography as well:

https://www.getmonero.org/library/Zero-to-Monero-1-0-0.pdf

[DaveyJones]

What if graphics card companies are testing their new cards? isn't that also unfair?

Someone will always have more money for the better hardware

Difference is ... GPU's are commodity , ASICs are not ... i can buy a GPU in my local store or on amazon without any probs ... meanwhile ASICs are limited.

[iCEBREAKER]

Regarding the i2p drama, what if we turn it around by using the opportunity to restart from scratch, this time utilizing best practices to avoid another disappointment and instead create something amazing+useful for everyone who uses the internet?

Rolling our own single-use project-specific (functionally proprietary) crypto is bad not just because of the isolated point of developer failure, but because it eschews known good schema like Black Team vs. Red Team Protocol Design.

Given:

-Monero needs an i2p client not written in Oracle's unsafe/bloated Java and has demonstrated resource commitment to that with Kovri
-Kovri is written in C++, a safer/faster improvement over Java's lowest bar but not ideal for modern security-critical FOSS networking applications
-Monero is part of a small family of altcoins striving to uphold Bitcoin's cyberpunk ideal of a private, fungible store of value/medium of exchange
-this small family consists of Litecoin (implementing mimblewimble Soon), Cardano (implementing Sonic ZK-SNARKS Soon), Grin (using mimblewimble now), and Decred (implementing some kind of fungibility feature Soon)
-all these projects are self funding, using a FFS, Treasury, and/or Foundation
and
-all these projects may benefit from availability of the option to preserve privacy at the network layer

I propose the i2p router project be rebooted and distributed among the various and splendid Magical Crypto communities:

-Cardano plays Black Team, leveraging their Foundation+Treasury resources and  IOHK's expertise in formal analysis to create a fully verified canonical i2p client in a concurrent/functional/strongly typed language (Haskell or Erlang) and use the resulting specification to create a 2nd client (in Rust or Elixir)
-Monero plays Red Team and tries to break whatever Black Team builds
-Purple Team may be played by Decred (Politeia permittting), Litecoin (if coblee isn't too busy and Foundation can afford), or Grin (who are they again?)

Even scamcoins with an interest in network privacy (Zcash, Dash, Beam, PivX) could be of use by contributing funds/code/review.
Major projects with high-value transparent blockchains should also provide user privacy at the network level for reasons of physical security/safety and mitigating DDOS/hacking vectors, so a bolt-on i2p layer is something Bitcoin/Ethereum/Stellar devs may be motivated to help fund/build/deploy/maintain.


By request, here is the code for my sig.  It's free for anyone to use as long as you keep the "Is Dash a Scam?" link.  Otherwise it's 0.1 tacoshi to license.

Code:

[table][tr]
[td][table][tr][td]
[center][size=1px]
[color=#ff6600]██████████
[/color][color=#ff6600]█[/color][color=#ff6600]█████████████████
██████████████████████
[/color][color=#ff6600]█[/color][color=#ff6600]█████████████████████████
████████████████████████████
████[/color][color=transparent]█[/color][color=#ff6600]█████████████████████[/color][color=transparent]█[/color][color=#ff6600]███
█████[/color][color=transparent]███[/color][color=#ff6600]█████████████████[/color][color=transparent]███[/color][color=#ff6600]████
█████[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#ff6600]███████████████[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#ff6600]████
██████[/color][color=transparent]██████[/color][color=#ff6600]███████████[/color][color=transparent]██████[/color][color=#ff6600]█████
██████[/color][color=transparent]████████[/color][color=#ff6600]███████[/color][color=transparent]████████[/color][color=#ff6600]█████
██████[/color][color=transparent]█████████[/color][color=#ff6600]█████[/color][color=transparent]█████████[/color][color=#ff6600]█████
██████[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#4c4c4c]██[/color][color=transparent]█████[/color][color=#ff6600]█[/color][color=transparent]█████[/color][color=#4c4c4c]██[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#ff6600]█████
██████[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#4c4c4c]███[/color][color=#444444]█[/color][color=transparent]███████[/color][color=#404040]█[/color][color=#4c4c4c]███[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#ff6600]█████
█████[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#4c4c4c]█████[/color][color=transparent]█████[/color][color=#4c4c4c]█████[/color][color=transparent]████[/color][color=#ff6600]████
[/color][color=#4c4c4c]███████[/color][color=transparent]█[/color][color=#4c4c4c]██████
██████████████
████████████████████████████
[/color][color=#4b4b4b]█[/color][color=#4c4c4c]█████████████████████████
██████████████████████
[/color][color=#4b4b4b]█[/color][color=#4c4c4c]█████████████████
██████████[/color]
[url=https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.msg6382239#msg6382239][size=10pt][color=#ff6600][b]Monero[/b][/color][/url]
[/center][/td][/tr][/table]
[/td][td][table][tr][td][center][size=7pt][b][i]"The difference between bad and well-developed digital cash will determine 
whether we have a dictatorship or a real democracy."  [/i][/b][url=http://www.hit.bme.hu/~buttyan/courses/BMEVIHIM219/2009/Chaum.BlindSigForPayment.1982.PDF]David Chaum 1996[/url]
[size=7pt][b][i]"Fungibility provides privacy as a side effect."  [/i][/b][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dAdI3Gzodo&feature=youtu.be&t=28m31s]Adam Back 2014[/url]
[/td][/tr][/table][/td][td][table][tr][td]
[color=#191919][center][size=7pt]▪Private▪Auditable▪[url=http://bitscan.com/articles/why-you-should-care-about-fungibility]100% Fungible[/url]
▪[url=https://www.gofundme.com/Mustang-Needs]Wild & Free[sup][/url]▪[url=https://youtu.be/mM2ra-LzMQk?t=]Flexible Blocksize[/url]
▪[url=http://www.slideshare.net/arnuschky/monero-geneva]Intro[/url]▪[url=https://getmonero.org/downloads/]Core GUI[/url]▪[url=https://github.com/monero-project]Github[/url]▪[url=https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.m2049r.xmrwallet]Android[/url][/td][/tr][/table][/td]
[td][table][tr][td][size=6pt][url=https://localmonero.co/][color=#e65c00][b]Buy and sell XMR near you[/b][/color][/url]
[url=https://bisq.network/][color=#ff6700][b]P2P Exchange Network[/b][/url]
[url=https://monero.stackexchange.com/a/1203][color=#ff761a][b]Buy XMR with fiat[/b][/color][/url]
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBxbiH_Mg44][color=#ff761a][b]Is Dash a scam?[/b][/color][/url]
[/td][/tr][/table]
[/td][/tr][/table]

[coco23]

Useful information - best way to learn how Monero works. Monero has two books: “Mastering Monero” and “Zero to Monero”.

1. “Mastering Monero” is a very good introduction that starts out assuming zero knowledge and covers the very basics, but also continues to explain all the critical parts fairly thoroughly:

https://www.getmonero.org/library/Mastering-Monero-Preview.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1731079966/

2. “Zero to Monero” is also an excellent resource. It goes into more technical details and I think assumes that the reader has a background in math and some understanding of modern cryptography as well:

https://www.getmonero.org/library/Zero-to-Monero-1-0-0.pdf

Thanks for the links! Will check it out, Monero is still one of the most interesting Alts out there. It can go far if it stays Privacy coin #1. Enjoy some merits

[phishead]

I propose the i2p router project be rebooted and distributed among the various and spleneded Magical Crypto communities

It’s actually not a bad idea to get people to compete for the remaining Kovri development funds, but am confused why it would be a “Cardano vs. Monero” development team effort? Open source is gonna open source and only individual people who are interested in completing the project might collaborate with others in order to achieve that goal.

Also, thanks again for the sig logo... will be displaying it loud and proud here shortly

[Globb0]

Rather just see it done for Monero,

"doing" some other coin first sounds risky in a first to market wins kind of world.

[Hueristic]

I still don't know what to believe on the I2p shit so how are we supposed to know what imitative to support when we are in the dark on what the truth is?

We need all the Core Devs to weigh in and give us their unbiased opinions.

Hell if the guy who wrote that article is right and he already wrote that loki code then we could hire him to code a C++ version.

We need to know the truth of the matter. I personally wanted to give anonimal the benefit of the doubt but I'm not impressed with his handling of the situation. Anyway, he said he was going to finish korvi so I guess we should decide after that is done...or not done.

[smooth]

Hell if the guy who wrote that article is right and he already wrote that loki code then we could hire him to code a C++ version.

Which article?

[jwinterm]

Hell if the guy who wrote that article is right and he already wrote that loki code then we could hire him to code a C++ version.

Which article?

Think he's referring to these:

https://i2p.rocks/blog/kovri-and-the-curious-case-of-code-rot-part-1.html

https://i2p.rocks/blog/kovri-and-the-curious-case-of-code-rot-part-2.html

https://i2p.rocks/blog/kovri-and-the-curious-case-of-code-rot-part-3.html