Is it possible to destroy Monero (XMR)?

[dga]

Sorry guys, Monero killer-
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=681725.msg8754756#msg8754756

Right.  Someone digs up a two-post conversation from the altcoin observer thread and then the next day there's a post in the Stealthcoin thread saying they're going to implement it.  Words are cheap.

Also, they're full of you-know-what when it comes to scalability.  As smooth already pointed out in the AO thread, and I think correctly, the real benefit of a sqrt(N)-scaling ring signature scheme is stronger anonymity through larger mixins.

As it stands, the Cryptonote family doesn't scale to visa sizes even with mixin=2 (for which there's no benefit from the cited ideas), and neither does Bitcoin.

yawn yawn yawn scam yawn yawn yawn empty promises yawn yawn yawn premine.

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

[rpietila]

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

Duly noted and implemented.

[Skinnkavaj]

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

No. This is just stupid. XMR should be a currency, not some kind of company with profits to developers.

[dga]

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

No. This is just stupid. XMR have enough inflation as it is.

Hi.  There's this thing called politeness.  It works even on the Internet.

Second - your comment makes me believe you aren't familiar with the BBR model that I'm advocating.  In BBR, 1% of the mining output is sent to the developer as a revenue source for ongoing development.  This 1% "dev fee" has nothing to do with inflation.  It decreases over time as the block reward decreases.  (It's also subject to a vote by the miners.)

(Edit)
I see you changed your response to this:

No. This is just stupid. XMR should be a currency, not some kind of company with profits to developers.

Right.  Because high-quality software writes itself!  Woo!  Ponies for everyone!  Unicorns too!

Let me suggest an alternate view:  the 1% ongoing revenue stream is to incentivize the developers to keep writing good software that increases the value and utility of the coin, which benefits everyone in the ecosystem.  Cryptocurrency is not a closed system; its real competitors are things like cash, checks, and credit cards.  To the degree that improvements to the core software allow any cryptocurrency to be more competitive against those established methods of payment, the players in the cryptocurrency win.  Actually, everybody wins -- except perhaps visa.

[othe]

I like the crowdfunding approach and i think all investors should help with funding, they definately should have an interest in that.

The problem with miners deciding donations is, they don´t really care if the coin succeeds, they will just jump to the next if it fails.

[Skinnkavaj]

Hi.  There's this thing called politeness.  It works even on the Internet.

Second - your comment makes me believe you aren't familiar with the BBR model that I'm advocating.  In BBR, 1% of the mining output is sent to the developer as a revenue source for ongoing development.  This 1% "dev fee" has nothing to do with inflation.  It decreases over time as the block reward decreases.

Sorry, DGA. Yes I realized it does not add more to inflation. I edited my post before you posted this one.
A change like this would make XMR like a company, but XMR is designed to be a currency and should be so.

Developers should find other ways to make money, I have already proposed making a Blockchain.info clone and make money from it.
Blockchain.info today is already a company making money.

It would be really silly the more I think about it, if Bitcoin had built in 1% fee to go to developers I doubt anyone would take Bitcoin seriously if this was the case.

A change like this would centralize development.

[dga]

Hi.  There's this thing called politeness.  It works even on the Internet.

Second - your comment makes me believe you aren't familiar with the BBR model that I'm advocating.  In BBR, 1% of the mining output is sent to the developer as a revenue source for ongoing development.  This 1% "dev fee" has nothing to do with inflation.  It decreases over time as the block reward decreases.

Sorry, DGA. Yes I realized it does not add more to inflation. I edited my post before you posted this one.
A change like this would make XMR like a company, but XMR is designed to be a currency and should be so.

Developers should find other ways to make money, I have already proposed making a Blockchain.info clone and make money from it.
Blockchain.info today is already a company making money.

It would be really silly the more I think about it, if Bitcoin had built in 1% fee to go to developers I doubt anyone would take Bitcoin seriously if this was the case.

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Indeed - why settle for a 1% ongoing dev fee when you can instead own more than 5% of the total number of coins that will ever be created?

I'd suggest looking to Linux as a better example of an alternate:  Most of the core kernel development work is done by people who work for companies (Intel, IBM, Google, etc.) that have collectively decided that Linux is so useful they want to make sure it stays around by subsidizing its development.  This isn't a bad model for Bitcoin either -- if, e.g., the exchanges all paid for one full-time developer.  But it doesn't work for a "startup" coin that doesn't have a well established ecosystem.

Perhaps rpietila's MEW is good enough - or better.  But coding takes money, because most coders like to eat and feed their families.

[Skinnkavaj]

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Indeed - why settle for a 1% ongoing dev fee when you can instead own more than 5% of the total number of coins that will ever be created?

I'd suggest looking to Linux as a better example of an alternate:  Most of the core kernel development work is done by people who work for companies (Intel, IBM, Google, etc.) that have collectively decided that Linux is so useful they want to make sure it stays around by subsidizing its development.  This isn't a bad model for Bitcoin either -- if, e.g., the exchanges all paid for one full-time developer.  But it doesn't work for a "startup" coin that doesn't have a well established ecosystem.

Perhaps rpietila's MEW is good enough - or better.  But coding takes money, because most coders like to eat and feed their families.

Satoshi mined the coins himself, everyone had equal chance to mine. So there is nothing wrong with his stash at all. He had to pay for mining to obtain the coins and so he did.

The Bitcoin Core developers have discussed bounties many times, and come to conclusion it leads to people stressing out bad quality code just to collect the paycheck.

[shojayxt]

Sorry guys, Monero killer-
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=681725.msg8754756#msg8754756

Yeah right.  All they have is  a whitepaper.  Talk is cheap but is good for a pump in cryptoworld.  Nothing more.

[dga]

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Indeed - why settle for a 1% ongoing dev fee when you can instead own more than 5% of the total number of coins that will ever be created?

I'd suggest looking to Linux as a better example of an alternate:  Most of the core kernel development work is done by people who work for companies (Intel, IBM, Google, etc.) that have collectively decided that Linux is so useful they want to make sure it stays around by subsidizing its development.  This isn't a bad model for Bitcoin either -- if, e.g., the exchanges all paid for one full-time developer.  But it doesn't work for a "startup" coin that doesn't have a well established ecosystem.

Perhaps rpietila's MEW is good enough - or better.  But coding takes money, because most coders like to eat and feed their families.

Satoshi mined the coins himself, everyone had equal chance to mine. So there is nothing wrong with his stash at all. He had to pay for mining to obtain the coins and so he did.

The Bitcoin Core developers have discussed bounties many times, and come to conclusion it leads to people stressing out bad quality code just to collect the paycheck.

(a)  The ecosystem difference between 2009 and now is huge.  An altcoin cannot necessarily do what Satoshi did.  For example, fluffypony and tacotime did not mine substantial fractions of the XMR output in its early days.  Some annoying miner unrelated to the project did.

(b)  Ongoing 1% dev fee is very different from a bounty.  It incents longer term goodness.  I *think*.

But - gotta get back to real work.  I think we're starting to go in circles and agree to disagree.

[TheFascistMind]

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

Duly noted and implemented.

You keep finding a way to write something so important that I feel compelled to reply.

I see some motivational advantages for this idea also versus a premine, but unfortunately it is insufficient. For any coin that does not have Monero's catastrophic design error of rapidly declining the block reward, the 1% will be insufficient when it matters most at the early stage where all the critical work is done before inertia and vested interests prevent further radical improvements (e.g. Bitcoin).

The rapidly declining block reward is a design error because the early hodlers lock up the coin and the rate of velocity of money and adoption decelerate (e.g. Bitcoin and Monero).

Emission curve variants

https://i.imgur.com/jSu2EQU.png

Another problem with the developer fee: it is a resource to fight over and it can fund the development of a bureaucracy, e.g. the MEW foundation (just see what happened to the Bitcoin foundation and you can be sure the same will happen to the MEW despite the best intentions and will of the current participants due to the Iron Law of Political Economics aka Mancur Olsen's treatise on the Logic of Collective Action).

Also it does give the appearance of being a corporation instead of an open source project.

The best funding model is still (as it was for Bitcoin) for the brilliant creator to take his stash and run after he has made the coin so popular that no one can refuse nor fork it.

Great thing about a premine is all those who obstinately won't buy the coin until AFTER everyone else does. I love that.

P.S. Did you know Satoshi perhaps limited the money supply to 21 million because that is what he could fit into standard double floating point arithmetic with each coin at 100 million of the smallest unit (satoshi). Nice excuse any way.


Edit: for the math deficient, note that a slower declining rate of debasement means the relative value (as a percentage of total mined coins) generated by the fee is less early on than for a more rapid declining rate of debasement. And there is no guarantee to the developer that his hard effort early on will be rewarded 10 years hence waiting for the fee to accumulate. Timing risk comes into play when borrowing long to lend short. This is what killed the banks in 2008. Hommel did teach me that future's contracts are evil.

Proverbs - Do not be surety for thy friend.

is a social contract. it can by definition not have catastrophic design errors, because no one is forced to sign this social contract.

And when the majority do not adopt the social contract, it is a catastrophic failure. It the money doesn't circulate, it isn't a currency, and there is no adoption. See the Quantity Theory of Money.

Do you have any clue how fucking tired I am of writing that? I have only written that point about 50 times in my archives on this forum. Geez.

Good riddance to this forum! (I know it is not your personal fault, you did not read what I wrote in the past)

hodling bitcoins or monero is neccessary for giving it value.

Absolutely false!

The magic show is coming soon to a theater near you.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke

regarding the idea of voluntarily giving 1% of mining to development I would strongly suggest doing it.

Risto is correct, many or most people aren't skilled or well-practiced in math and or macro economics.

they don't have time for the economy, and they are not competent in it

[Marlo Stanfield]

Why are people pushing the coin this hard when it has this many problems?

My previous long post answers this:

Fair launch. It is just so precious. And never before happened as well. So that the largest holders are not there by accident (or more likely planning by the dev), but because they wanted to buy a crappy coin at a high price. Monero's history is special.

Just tell me one example of a coin where the dev is not the largest owner.

I believe it is very good that the coins are not dev pet projects.

"Why is this coin not taking off when so many big names are supporting it"

I can only say that if something should happen, but has not yet happened, there is a good chance that it will happen.

I created a thread to discuss coin distributions in general, and you and anyone else here might want to take a look and perhaps voice your opinions on why you believe XMR is the most fairly distrusted coin on the market.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=777213

[nakaone]

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

Duly noted and implemented.

You keep finding a way to write something so important that I feel compelled to reply.

I see some motivational advantages for this idea also versus a premine, but unfortunately it is insufficient. For any coin that does not have Monero's catastrophic design error of rapidly declining the block reward, the 1% will be insufficient when it matters most at the early stage where all the critical work is done before inertia and vested interests prevent further radical improvements (e.g. Bitcoin).

The rapidly declining block reward is a design error because the early hodlers lock up the coin and the rate of velocity of money and adoption decelerate (e.g. Bitcoin and Monero).

Another problem with the developer fee: it is a resource to fight over and it can fund the development of a bureaucracy, e.g. the MEW foundation (just see what happened to the Bitcoin foundation and you can be sure the same will happen to the MEW despite the best intentions and will of the current participants due to the Iron Law of Political Economics aka Mancur Olsen's treatise on the Logic of Collective Action).

Also it does give the appearance of being a corporation instead of an open source project.

The best funding model is still (as it was for Bitcoin) for the brilliant creator to take his stash and run after he has made the coin so popular that no one can refuse nor fork it.

Great thing about a premine is all those who obstinately won't buy the coin until AFTER everyone else does. I love that.

I normally appreciate your posts but this one is wrong on many levels.

Designing a model of distribution, and that is what basically a block reward is, is a social contract. it can by definition not have catastrophic design errors, because no one is forced to sign this social contract. it basically does not matter if the block reward halves, doubles or does whatever it likes as long as people see the social contract as valueable.

Designs like monero or bitcoin give cash a store of value function which is probably a first order condition for money. I cannot imagine a system in which you would see a velocity without value.

hodling bitcoins or monero is neccessary for giving it value. the argument that they are hodled forever is wrong, because every person will find a point where he is willing to sell. the only argument against this fixed supply design is volatility.

I have to admit that I like bitshares idea of using a token to create a derivative which maybe has a somewhat price stability and is more useful for spending and using, but to call the design of bitcoin and monero a catastrophic design error is wrong.

regarding the idea of voluntarily giving 1% of mining to development I would strongly suggest doing it. the argument that miners do not profit from development is also wrong. 

[atoni]

Out of curiosity, how can a coin be destroyed? Isnt that one of premise of crypto currency that noone can destroy or control your coins?

[aminorex]

The greedy 1% that owns most of the world's wealth are the whales you speak of, but most people hate them with a passion.

There is no mechanism that would preserve people's liberty and produce a different wealth distribution.

QFT. 

No mechanism, perhaps, but there are people.  When the extreme wealth concentrators develop their relationships with other people, their hoards tend to dissipate.  This can be done well, in a generous, healthy and growth-positive dynamic, or pathologically, via thievery or guilt-trips, &c, creating unhealthy dependence relationships.

What is the source of this hate?

Jealousy is just another face of greed.

There is another reason to contend against the concentration of wealth:  The suffering created by poverty.  The injustice of extreme wealth divergence is plain, and for many of us, quite painful.  When I am in pain, I tend to lash out against the perceived cause.  When the pain reflex, the noble and just cause, and the venial jealousy are all aligned to a single focus, it is a powerful force, and difficult to effectively counter.  The solution is to factor the problem into its facets, and deal with them each individually on their own terms.

[aminorex]

Out of curiosity, how can a coin be destroyed? Isnt that one of premise of crypto currency that noone can destroy or control your coins?

It is trivial to burn individual coins by sending them to addresses for which no private key is known.

It is possible to destroy a blockchain by corrupting it irremediably, if you can find an exploit in the code base.

It is possible to destroy a currency economy in myriad ways.  Many have been proposed in this forum.  Others are possible as well, but I am certainly disinclined to publicize any of them.

[Anotheranonlol]

What is the source of this hate?

Jealousy is just another face of greed.

There is another reason to contend against the concentration of wealth:  The suffering created by poverty.  The injustice of extreme wealth divergence is plain, and for many of us, quite painful.  When I am in pain, I tend to lash out against the perceived cause.  When the pain reflex, the noble and just cause, and the venial jealousy are all aligned to a single focus, it is a powerful force, and difficult to effectively counter.  The solution is to factor the problem into its facets, and deal with them each individually on their own terms.

So we can close the thread? there couldn't possible be any other reason any entity would be against [Coin you invested in], aside from simple jealousy. Investigation over, I guess.  

Also good to see you have not just succinctly outlined the problem, but, provided a solution, which is to simply "factor the problem into its facets, and deal with them each individually on their own terms."  It's a little vague,  but seems easy enough on paper. Now we understand both the problem and the solution. Kudos!  the community should get started on making us all monero lovers asap.

 

[drawingthesun]

I'm now at peace with the fact that people will be trying to destroy Monero forever, I can't see the hate ever going away.

There will always be someone who has picked up some cheap fat stack of some coin and they will always do whatever they must to make their coin and voice heard. These people will always attack Monero because Monero sucks legitimate money from the alt coin space, the trolls will always want that legitimate money for themselves.

All I see, is every Monero hater being some cheap coin fat stacker, and now I understand why Monero is under constant attack. Monero is fair, and many people here do not want fair, because fair doesn't allow them to pump their fat stack.

Long live Monero.

[nakaone]

is a social contract. it can by definition not have catastrophic design errors, because no one is forced to sign this social contract.

And when the majority do not adopt the social contract, it is a catastrophic failure. It the money doesn't circulate, it isn't a currency, and there is no adoption. See the Quantity Theory of Money.

in my language there is a very gentle distinction between cash or money and currency.

by no modern definition in economics bitcoin or monero is a currency, because certain characteristics of a currency cannot be given by definition in a decentralized system.

what bitcoin or monero basically is, is a payment network with a store of value function - this is probably much closer to the definition of cash or money. gavin andreesen uses the term electronic cash nowadays when he describes bitcoin. also the analogy to gold is much closer than the analogy to currencies.

since we are all vain I shortly come to your defamation regarding my economic skills: you are quite a smart guy who has massive skills and coding and great analytical skills. but this does not hinder you from using a theory in an area of application where it does not fit at all. but you are forgiven: even proper economists often fail to do that correctly. Keynes put it this way: Economics is the science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.

[slapper]

I'm now at peace with the fact that people will be trying to destroy Monero forever, I can't see the hate ever going away.

There will always be someone who has picked up some cheap fat stack of some coin and they will always do whatever they must to make their coin and voice heard. These people will always attack Monero because Monero sucks legitimate money from the alt coin space, the trolls will always want that legitimate money for themselves.

All I see, is every Monero hater being some cheap coin fat stacker, and now I understand why Monero is under constant attack. Monero is fair, and many people here do not want fair, because fair doesn't allow them to pump their fat stack.

Long live Monero.

Can you drop the "I am a victim, they are jealous of me" koolaid? Next you will say they hate you for your freedoms 

To trace back the decline in the interest of XMR and the now ever rising hatefest, one just needs to see how bad the shilling has been. You were yourself arguing with Evan Duffeld the day of the attack about how superior Monero is to Darkcoin in their own thread. My guess is you will no longer be going to that thread. There are other bad examples like this all over the place.

I am actually afraid people are not taking CN as seriously as they should be (and not Monero) because of this excessiveness.