delete

[TheFascistMind]

Perhaps I am closer to describing more specifically how a BCX-like an attack might be feasible. Note I still haven't done any precise quantification so interpret this as probing FUD.

A key algorithmic insight may be that the attacker's hidden fork is evaluated when it is published according to difficulty in place at that time, not the difficulty that existed while the attack was mining the hidden fork.

TW and other difficulty adjustment attacks are based on lowering the difficulty at which the attackers fork is measured, non-linearly relative to the proportion of the attacker's percentage of the network hashrate.

For example, the attacker could introduce a lot of orphans and cause the network to waste hashrate, thus lowering the difficulty at the next adjustment.

Or the attacker can leverage flaws in the difficulty adjustment that cause the majority to mine at a higher difficulty than the majority's hashrate, then the attacker publishes his hidden fork when the difficulty readjustments. For example, Kimoto Gravity Well has a flaw in that it thresholds the adjustment so the attacker can trigger a huge difficulty raise, then pull his hashrate away but not too fast so the difficulty adjustment stays under the threshold and doesn't adjust until the attacker is ready for it to.

I believe the discarding of the 20% tails of the timestamp distributions in Cryptonote's difficulty adjustment might present such a flaw, but I am not attempting to quantify it and prove it (not my job). Imagine that every distribution of timestamps follows some bell curve. So if the hacker puts his timestamps on one side of the mean, he can shift the mean.

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[iCEBREAKER]

Never said it was. But seemed you were excluding technological design as a component of marketing.

Certainly not.

I just cautioned technologists not to excessively focus on technology, because it is extremely apparent (from the controlled experiment of essentially identical technologies having enormously different outcomes) that other factors are also having a huge impact. Likely in my opinon huge enough to drive success of inferior technologies and doom better ones to failure. Even if in this case "inferior" and "better" refer to networking/viral effects. A cute dog picture and seeding in the right demographic can be tremendously important (with corresponding mistakes being equally important negatively), and these are just examples of a theme, not at all an exhaustive list.

Most people can barely understand the Byzantine Generals Paradox/Solution, much less Ripple's abstractions and Ethereum's average brain melting concepts like "Turing completeness."

The Cambrian explosion of altcoins competing has led to feature-fatigue.  New technology is moot as we endure innovation saturation.

EG: DOGE has a silly popular .gif, while XCN has mini-blockchains and safe zero-confirmation transactions.  Result?  DOGE goes to the moon as its legions of redditards sponsor NASCAR, post videos, and propagate meme clusters, while XCN languishes in the dark with a market cap incapable of buying a new Lexus.

[smooth]

Not arguing in favor of byteshitcoin, but if they built the protocol with the sole intention of a pump and dump...well then the code must be shit.

Nobody really knows their motivations. Perhaps it was a combination. Perhaps someone with different motivations designed it or developed and then the scammers acquired it. Maybe there was a change or heart as the altcoin market soured and they wanted to get their significant investment out somehow. Or a change in management. Really, we can only guess.

From looking at the code instead of speculating it is not all shit, but it does seem rushed with some rough edges (TODO comments left in, etc.). There are some aspects of it that are reasonably high in quality (better than many other coins), such as the existence of a reasonably large set of test cases, but other aspects are not as good. And on top of all that, the Monero project has done a ton of work with reviewing and vetting the code as well as paying others to do so, and improving it.

The rest of your message is largely speculation based on the false (IMO) premise that the coin and code is entirely shit.

Look, it doesn't really matter to me whether you like Monero or not. I am happy to discuss specific technical considerations, non-technical economic questions about Monero or other coins, positive or negative, or nothing at all. Just running around saying "the code is shit" based on no real information is not particularly credible or useful.

There are certainly very hypish proponents of Monero who run around talking about how great it is at every opportunity. I understand how they might put you off, and I find them tedious and stupid as well. I'm not one of them.

[TheFascistMind]

Never said it was. But seemed you were excluding technological design as a component of marketing.

Certainly not.

I just cautioned technologists not to excessively focus on technology, because it is extremely apparent (from the controlled experiment of essentially identical technologies having enormously different outcomes) that other factors are also having a huge impact. Likely in my opinon huge enough to drive success of inferior technologies and doom better ones to failure. Even if in this case "inferior" and "better" refer to networking/viral effects. A cute dog picture and seeding in the right demographic can be tremendously important (with corresponding mistakes being equally important negatively), and these are just examples of a theme, not at all an exhaustive list.

Most people can barely understand the Byzantine Generals Paradox/Solution, much less Ripple's abstractions and Ethereum's average brain melting concepts like "Turing completeness."

The Cambrian explosion of altcoins competing has led to feature-fatigue.  New technology is moot as we endure innovation saturation.

EG: DOGE has a silly popular .gif, while XCN has mini-blockchains and safe zero-confirmation transactions.  Result?  DOGE goes to the moon as its legions of redditards sponsor NASCAR, post videos, and propagate meme clusters, while XCN languishes in the dark with a market cap incapable of buying a new Lexus.

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

Features that solve no need are useless. I put XCN in that category, even though I see some utility of its design if applied in a different way. Who needs it as it currently stands?

DOGE solved the problem of how to get small amounts of coin into 100,000 spenders hands at viral rates of spread (they targeted a community that likes to tip reddit comments).

Very easy for me to see why DOGE was orders-of-magnitude more adopted.

[TheFascistMind]

There are certainly very hypish proponents of Monero who run around talking about how great it is at every opportunity. I understand how they might put you off, and I find them tedious and stupid as well. I'm not one of them.

Smooth I've been aided by having discussions with you so I'm glad you haven't done what he suggested. But to make it clear, I think he is saying he wish you had shut up and been coding.

It is not just you, rather you get lumped together with the effect of all that went on in rpietila's thread, etc...

I think he is saying he would rather see only subdued enumeration of XMR features and no comparisons or putdowns of other CN clones or altcoins.

We all want to see that altcoin which virally spreads itself.

[smooth]

There are certainly very hypish proponents of Monero who run around talking about how great it is at every opportunity. I understand how they might put you off, and I find them tedious and stupid as well. I'm not one of them.

Smooth I've been aided by having discussions with you so I'm glad you haven't done what he suggested. But to make it clear, I think he is saying he wish you had shut up and been coding.

That's nice, but he doesn't get to dictate our priorities any more than I get to dictate his opinion of us.

In case it isn't clear the reason I'm not spending all my time coding is one of teamwork. Monero is not a lone developer project where one person has to choose between coding and communicating with the community. We have people who code full time, people who code part time, people who work on research and design issues (both full and part time), and people who code not at all but do other things like organization, web design, etc. (and probably a few other categories I'm forgetting). I'm in the second and third categories in case anyone cares, but I'm not sure why that even matters.

Like it or don't like it, I don't particularly care. But if you do either based on made up justifications without any real information or bad information (as Liquid71 did, and as some proponents have done) I'm going to call that out, as I have done with both.

[TheFascistMind]

There are certainly very hypish proponents of Monero who run around talking about how great it is at every opportunity. I understand how they might put you off, and I find them tedious and stupid as well. I'm not one of them.

Smooth I've been aided by having discussions with you so I'm glad you haven't done what he suggested. But to make it clear, I think he is saying he wish you had shut up and been coding.

That's nice, but he doesn't get to dictate our priorities any more than I get to dictate his opinion of us.

In case it isn't clear the reason I'm not spending all my time coding is one of teamwork. Monero is not a lone developer project where one person has to choose between coding and communicating with the community. We have people who code full time, people who code part time, people who work on research and design issues (both full and part time), and people who code not at all but do other things like organization, web design, etc. (and probably a few other categories I'm forgetting). I'm in the second and third categories in case anyone cares, but I'm not sure why that even matters.

Like it or don't like it, I don't particularly care. But if you either based on made up justifications without any real information or bad information (as Liquid71 did, and as some proponents have done) I'm going to call that out, as I have done with both.

I understand your feeling. I am vested too in the things I contribute to.

I also think talking here can't help XMR get adopted at all.

I've enjoyed very much the discussions with you. Has clarified many things.

As the pedal hits the metal, only adoption will matter. And talking to cryponerds is only useful for making design decisions, not for marketing results.

Edit: perhaps it is because I don't think the target market is here on BTT.

[smooth]

I also think talking here can't help XMR get adopted at all.

We likely disagree about that. This community has its plusses and minuses but is still important in some ways. For what Monero is trying to do, cute DOGE pics are not effective, and remaining engaged with this community is important. (Other things we might also do entirely independently of this community are also important, and it should not at all be assumed that we need to choose between the two -- again with a larger team and employing teamwork, we can cover a bit more ground.) The are some very well defined reasons for that, but I'm not going to spell them out. Other projects will have to set their own priorities.

[TheFascistMind]

I see your point. You and I just have different perspectives due to different strategies and circumstances at the moment.

I take note that your strategy apparently causes some friction. All vibrant (alive) strategies incur some friction some where (there are no perpetual motion machines), but where friction occurs in a dynamic model can greatly affect the differential equations of the model.

[smooth]

I see your point. You and I just have different perspectives due to different strategies and circumstances at the moment.

I take note that your strategy apparently causes some friction.

Take a look around the cryptocoin space. The only coins with no friction are the ignored/dead ones. You can literally walk down the top 20-30 and I could write a paragraph or two about the friction surrounding each and every one. The only one I might have trouble with today is NMC (perhaps because the coin exists but the project is comatose), and even that has had its share of drama. It goes with the territory.

[TheFascistMind]

All vibrant (alive) strategies incur some friction some where (there are no perpetual motion machines), but where friction occurs in a dynamic model can greatly affect the differential equations of the model.

For example, if friction is placed at the starting gate, the modeled object may never move, or the maximum velocity may be more limited. Whereas friction placed on an underdamped system can be the difference between noise and resonance.

[Liquid71]

Not arguing in favor of byteshitcoin, but if they built the protocol with the sole intention of a pump and dump...well then the code must be shit.

Nobody really knows their motivations. Perhaps it was a combination. Perhaps someone with different motivations designed it or developed and then the scammers acquired it. Maybe there was a change or heart as the altcoin market soured and they wanted to get their significant investment out somehow. Or a change in management. Really, we can only guess.

From looking at the code instead of speculating it is not all shit, but it does seem rushed with some rough edges (TODO comments left in, etc.). There are some aspects of it that are reasonably high in quality (better than many other coins), such as the existence of a reasonably large set of test cases, but other aspects are not as good. And on top of all that, the Monero project has done a ton of work with reviewing and vetting the code as well as paying others to do so, and improving it.

The rest of your message is largely speculation based on the false (IMO) premise that the coin and code is entirely shit.

Look, it doesn't really matter to me whether you like Monero or not. I am happy to discuss specific technical considerations, non-technical economic questions about Monero or other coins, positive or negative, or nothing at all. Just running around saying "the code is shit" based on no real information is not particularly credible or useful.

There are certainly very hypish proponents of Monero who run around talking about how great it is at every opportunity. I understand how they might put you off, and I find them tedious and stupid as well. I'm not one of them.

I don't think the code is shit, I was just trying to point out that expending so mcuh energy pointing out the obvious bytecoin scam doesn't actually help XMR which is based on the same protocol.  I don't claim the code is shit, I claim the politics surrounding all CN coins is toxic.

[TheFascistMind]

Perhaps I am closer to describing more specifically how a BCX-like an attack might be feasible. Note I still haven't done any precise quantification so interpret this as probing FUD.

A key algorithmic insight may be that the attacker's hidden fork is evaluated when it is published according to difficulty in place at that time, not the difficulty that existed while the attack was mining the hidden fork.

TW and other difficulty adjustment attacks are based on lowering the difficulty at which the attackers fork is measured, non-linearly relative to the proportion of the attacker's percentage of the network hashrate.

For example, the attacker could introduce a lot of orphans and cause the network to waste hashrate, thus lowering the difficulty at the next adjustment.

Or the attacker can leverage flaws in the difficulty adjustment that cause the majority to mine at a higher difficulty than the majority's hashrate, then the attacker publishes his hidden fork when the difficulty readjustments. For example, Kimoto Gravity Well has a flaw in that it thresholds the adjustment so the attacker can trigger a huge difficulty raise, then pull his hashrate away but not too fast so the difficulty adjustment stays under the threshold and doesn't adjust until the attacker is ready for it to.

I believe the discarding of the 20% tails of the timestamp distributions in Cryptonote's difficulty adjustment might present such a flaw, but I am not attempting to quantify it and prove it (not my job). Imagine that every distribution of timestamps follows some bell curve. So if the hacker puts his timestamps on one side of the mean, he can shift the mean.

So attacker has 25% of hashrate, so he pulls it after the difficulty adjustment (mines another coin), then mines a secret fork at 33% hashrate starting with a few blocks before the next difficulty adjustment. If he has 25% he can amplify that further. Instead of mining another coin, he can selfish mine which further pulls down the hashrate due to all the orphans created.

While doing that selfish mine on CN he can possibly set his timestamps such that he causes the 20% fastest blocks from honest miners to be discarded. Thus the difficulty will reduced even more, thus he is mining on his secret chain just before the next difficulty adjustment at up to 0.25 / (0.8 x 0.75) = 42% effective hashrate, thus he can mine 9 blocks on his secret chain with a 50% probability of success.

That doesn't sound that dangerous, but every time he pumps the hashrate back up for one difficulty adjustment period he reduces miner income and the amplified selfish mining is reducing miner income.

Thus the honest mining hashrate declines over time. Isn't this what was happening to Auroracoin where it had declined from 16 ghps to 2.4 ghps, before the block 5400 eta of TW exploit to take over the chain?

Remember that post during his Auroracoin attack where BCX wrote, "doesn't seem miners are too interested to defend this coin, LOL".

So if you want to look for his exploit, check to see if there is evidence of increasing orphans around difficulty adjustments. And/or look for increasing swings in the difficulty and hashrate.

Edit: thus the shorter the interval of the block adjustment, the faster he gains on the majority. This is why he said "haven't developers learned to not make their difficulty adjustment fast". Sounds to me, he knows his book.

[smooth]

I don't think the code is shit, I was just trying to point out that expending so mcuh energy pointing out the obvious bytecoin scam doesn't actually help XMR which is based on the same protocol.  I don't claim the code is shit, I claim the politics surrounding all CN coins is toxic.

I'm a little confused what you are asking. Hardly any energy is expended pointing out the bytecoin scam. You (at least I think it was you) ask why Monero would be better if it was based on a clone of bytecoin, so I answered you: 1. No fraudulent 82% premine or other scamminess; 2. Ongoing work since the fork by independent developers.

I happen to think the distinction and choice between the two is pretty clear, but if you really have a hard time telling the difference and to you it looks like it is all toxic (and you believe I'm trying to sell you on a pump-and-dump, as you suggested a message or so ago), you should simply stay away from all of them. That is just good advice, here an elsewhere.

[Spoetnik]

All vibrant (alive) strategies incur some friction some where (there are no perpetual motion machines), but where friction occurs in a dynamic model can greatly affect the differential equations of the model.

For example, if friction is placed at the starting gate, the modeled object may never move, or the maximum velocity may be more limited. Whereas friction placed on an underdamped system can be the difference between noise and resonance.

Jesus christ man LOL ..holy fuck !

Ya gettin' all science up on us here... STILL
i will have all this science stuck deep up inside my craw for months

i have eluded to your commenting style on here a number of times already but i am not sure if you picked up on it because of the subtly.
is there an equation for dropping too much science for the simple folk ?

seriously man WTF is the deal ?
you stuck in a lab doing math all day everyday or something ?
and don't bother answering me if your gonna go full on "Mensa" on me

oh yeah....
MONERO

Buy some i want your Bitcoin !

edit:
oh and tell the reptile / nazi rules guy his "Signal to Noise Ratio" bullshit is STILL spamming to cover up the big bad Troll FUD
yeah.... i see what your doing as i have stated many times LOL

[TheFascistMind]

so I answered you: 1. No fraudulent 82% premine or other scamminess; 2. Ongoing work since the fork by independent developers.

Perhaps not even claiming "no fraud" (because claiming it is a form of fraud) would be better because you've also implied that the lead developer of BBR was the developer of the original scam (do we even know if he was just the developer and not the one scheming). You XMR devs also made a somewhat dubious attack on BBR's compression feature and rpietila did a good job of saying BBR didn't have the qualifications people-wise.

I happen to think the distinction and choice between the two is pretty clear

Instead tell us about features of XMR and what we can use it for to make ourselves "crap and ejaculate in our pants".


Oh my dog, Sputnuts noise is back. 

[Spoetnik]

Never said it was. But seemed you were excluding technological design as a component of marketing.

Certainly not.

I just cautioned technologists not to excessively focus on technology, because it is extremely apparent (from the controlled experiment of essentially identical technologies having enormously different outcomes) that other factors are also having a huge impact. Likely in my opinon huge enough to drive success of inferior technologies and doom better ones to failure. Even if in this case "inferior" and "better" refer to networking/viral effects. A cute dog picture and seeding in the right demographic can be tremendously important (with corresponding mistakes being equally important negatively), and these are just examples of a theme, not at all an exhaustive list.

Most people can barely understand the Byzantine Generals Paradox/Solution, much less Ripple's abstractions and Ethereum's average brain melting concepts like "Turing completeness."

The Cambrian explosion of altcoins competing has led to feature-fatigue.  New technology is moot as we endure innovation saturation.

EG: DOGE has a silly popular .gif, while XCN has mini-blockchains and safe zero-confirmation transactions.  Result?  DOGE goes to the moon as its legions of redditards sponsor NASCAR, post videos, and propagate meme clusters, while XCN languishes in the dark with a market cap incapable of buying a new Lexus.

These two fuckers have been at for 100+ pages so i doubt anyone even had a chance to see your comment
so i figured id bump it before those two Monero shills hammer on more spam..
only question is are they getting paid to do it or not ?

[smooth]

Isn't this what was happening to Auroracoin where it had declined from 16 ghps to 2.4 ghps

Not necessarily. What happens on many coins, especially lesser Scrypt coins, and what KGW was designed to partially address, is that hash rate comes and goes very quickly as large multipools move their hash rate around. This causes very rapid changes in hash rate and block times until the difficulty adjusts. Adjusting too slowly can be as bad or worse than adjusting too quickly, because you can be stuck with extremely dysfunctional block times for a long period.

I don't really know whether it is true or not, but I've heard from some people who are not complete idiots that there was never a time warp exploit in KGW, and what as changed in AUR was window dressing serving as FUD repellant. And I'd add that ultimately didn't matter because all the "country coins" died anyway

As far as I know the only time wrap exploit that has ever been clearly identified and described is the original off-by-one bug identified by ArtForz in BTC and its clones.

I'm not ruling out that KGW might have an exploit or cryptonote difficulty adjustment might have an exploit, but big changes in hash rate or block times on AUR certainly don't demonstrate it at all.

[Spoetnik]

so I answered you: 1. No fraudulent 82% premine or other scamminess; 2. Ongoing work since the fork by independent developers.

Perhaps not even claiming "no fraud" (because claiming it is a form of fraud) would be better because you've also implied that the lead developer of BBR was the developer of the original scam (do we even know if he was just the developer and not the one scheming). You XMR devs also made a somewhat dubious attack on BBR's compression feature and rpietila did a good job of saying BBR didn't have the qualifications people-wise.

I happen to think the distinction and choice between the two is pretty clear

Instead tell us about features of XMR and what we can use it for to make ourselves "crap and ejaculate in our pants".

This topic is not MSN chat dog

[Spoetnik]

Not arguing in favor of byteshitcoin, but if they built the protocol with the sole intention of a pump and dump...well then the code must be shit.

Nobody really knows their motivations. Perhaps it was a combination. Perhaps someone with different motivations designed it or developed and then the scammers acquired it. Maybe there was a change or heart as the altcoin market soured and they wanted to get their significant investment out somehow. Or a change in management. Really, we can only guess.

From looking at the code instead of speculating it is not all shit, but it does seem rushed with some rough edges (TODO comments left in, etc.). There are some aspects of it that are reasonably high in quality (better than many other coins), such as the existence of a reasonably large set of test cases, but other aspects are not as good. And on top of all that, the Monero project has done a ton of work with reviewing and vetting the code as well as paying others to do so, and improving it.

The rest of your message is largely speculation based on the false (IMO) premise that the coin and code is entirely shit.

Look, it doesn't really matter to me whether you like Monero or not. I am happy to discuss specific technical considerations, non-technical economic questions about Monero or other coins, positive or negative, or nothing at all. Just running around saying "the code is shit" based on no real information is not particularly credible or useful.

There are certainly very hypish proponents of Monero who run around talking about how great it is at every opportunity. I understand how they might put you off, and I find them tedious and stupid as well. I'm not one of them.

I don't think the code is shit, I was just trying to point out that expending so mcuh energy pointing out the obvious bytecoin scam doesn't actually help XMR which is based on the same protocol.  I don't claim the code is shit, I claim the politics surrounding all CN coins is toxic.

Your topic does not interest them for some odd reason ? LOL