[XMR] Moderated Monero General Discussion Thread

[papa_lazzarou]

The existence of an XMR/fiat exchange with coverage of EUR and USD in a developed jurisdiction seems very positive to me.  It means that XMR will be less coupled to BTC, and accessible to anyone willing to send funds by bank wire or SEPA.  It may constitute a liquidity event, if interest is high enough.  However, it will not make XMR more usable.  Only DB and GUI work can do that.

Taking a cue from aminorex, lets resume this discussion and add value to Monero. We shouldn't take the risk of the rapid adoption kicking in while the tech is so raw as it is now.

X posting here:

I'm thumb-sucking numbers, don't take these guesstimates as anything actual or realistic.

- Embedded DB solution/implementation - 6 man weeks is a pretty solid guess, so I'll leave the $14 500
- Convertion of C-code - it's not as simple as this. Apart from this specific item, there needs to be an incremental audit and refactor. Just because the bug was lurking in a piece of C code with this doesn't mean there can't be a bug elsewhere, it's just easier to obfuscate it in C. Holistically this is an active, ongoing task, that will likely end up costing in the $80k - $140k range over many, many months.
- Finished (official) GUI - assuming all the other pieces are in place, then dEBRUYNE is correct - anything from $15k - $20k.
- C++ version of the I2P router (IP obfuscation) - this is already making rapid progress: https://github.com/PrivacySolutions/i2pd. To get it to a point where it's usable and implementable as submodule / library I'd imagine is easily a $50k job, but I'm guessing at what orignal's hourly is.
- ... (blockchain bloat issue?) - not really an issue, and I'm unsure as to what we'd consider "solving" it. A linear reduction? A lightweight access methodology that heavily reduces the need for local storage / bandwidth? The amount of experimentation and research needed here to find a cryptographically sound "solution" makes it hard to pin a value down.

Just quoting fluffypony's post so that we may have some context. Maybe the dev's could make a revision if it is in order.

The first two items in the list are the most pressing, IMO. So we have (1) a short term goal of $14 500 for the embedded DB and lets say (2) about $10 000 per month for the code conversion.
How can we achieve number (1) now and how can we plan a steady income for number 2?

Does our community have 1000 people willing to donate 15$ now? Personally I think we will only find out by trying and am with Nekomata regarding the crowdfunding initiative.

Any thoughts?

[rpietila]

Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.

Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.

I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".

[rdnkjdi]

Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.

I agree with this.  

That perception of "community premine" is my biggest fear.  Especially without the GUI.  I would vote FOR turning my 1,000 Monero's into 500 if we could reduce the coin release schedule to avoid this AND being accused of driving our investments up.  

However that said I've never paid too much attention to dark or other coins that rocketed up but Monero has the longest period of being able to accumulate close to a fair price / average price of any coin I've seen.  I'm not sure if that makes sense ... but in my head I envision that 75 - 85% of the Monero's owned were accumulated between .025 & .045.  And this has been possible for months and months.  So there is some defense against the community premine in that price stability has been so consistent.

Also releasing more coins creates more supply even after the coins are released.  Not sure how to explain this either but there is much more danger of going down when there's 5,000,000 coins on the market vs 2,500,000.  

My thinking is starting to shift on all of this a little.  Monero has clearly stated their direction from the beginning (GUI, database, etc).  As more features are added the risk of them not meeting those expectations shrink THIS is what drives the price up on a GUI release IMO.  Also as time goes on more coins are dumped on the market.  There are only two factors. 

A.  How many coins will be available when.
B.  What will the demand of coins be available when.

More coins early is actually more dangerous for early investors as early adopters face the risk of buying in when demand outstrips supply & then supply catches up later (Vertcoin, Cryptonite).

The demand of coins (even bitcoin to a large degree) is fully limited to speculation not actual use.  So I think (could be wrong) that what speculators buy it when may have less to do with the actual adoption & use than it does with one group of speculators crying foul at another group of speculators.  Ironic part is the group of speculators crying foul will likely be the ones driving up the value of the group of speculators holding.

It's such a lose lose situation.  Do nothing, get accused of community premine.  Do something to slow down emission, get accused of only wanting to drive up the price of your investment.  

[oda.krell]

Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.

Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.

I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".

Good high level summary.

I would add one more corner to the rock/hard place picture:

To break out of the status quo, we'd need to actively encourage user adoption / make XMR go "live". Devs have (understandably so, given their already taxing time constraints) said they think the project isn't ready for that yet (hence: the GUI delay).

[freebud]

Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.

Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.

I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".

Difficult situation indeed.. I think that XMR is not yet ready for increased adoption, as there are still issues with the anonymity, which is the most fundamental offering.
Releasing a GUI without solving those issues will just lure unsuspecting users into using it carelessly, which might actually put people in danger.
Maybe we can change the emission such that it will continue it's fast pace for a longer period?

[rdnkjdi]

Double the total coin supply.  Then change emission curve to something closer to BBR's emission curve?

I'd be on board with that.  Be ready for a price tank.

[papa_lazzarou]

Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.

Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.

I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".

As we approach the end of the emission, and if the adoption rate is stagnant, that perception risk will grow. We are currently at around 20% of the emission and a year from now we'll be at 50%. If we want to avoid that risk we have to specify deadlines at which some fundamentals should be in place in order to drive adoption. These deadlines must be from a funding perspective.

We already have an idea of the milestones. (Embedded db and QoS, then GUI, blockchain size management). These achievements can be facilitated to the Dev Dream Team by means of well defined (time and money) fund goals as was already discussed.

Along side these developments is the ongoing work of patching/refactoring/commenting of the code. This could be addressed by a similarly ongoing funding, which is being hard to pinpoint.

[freebud]

Double the total coin supply.  Then change emission curve to something closer to BBR's emission curve?

I'd be on board with that.  Be ready for a price tank.

Could you please explain why this would tank the price?

[rdnkjdi]

Could you please explain why this would tank the price?

Ok - it is my opinion it would in the short term.  Much like Darkcoins price shot up after they limited their total coin supply, we are talking about increasing ours. 

The rational being "I hold 5000XMR.  This is 1/5 of a % of all XMR's that will be produced.  After doubling the eventual output my holdings will only be 1/10th.  They made me own less & increased the ceiling for future scarcity."

I do feel this move increases the likelyhood significantly of actual XMR adoption which is what we all want.  And if that happens the long term effects on price will be amazingly positive regardless of if there are 18 million or 36 million coins. 

[Its About Sharing]

Without GUI, adoption will remain sluggish. With sluggish adoption, not only will price be pressured, but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts.

Since changing the emission also can be considered to be a premine of sorts, we are between a rock and a hard place with (yet) no solutions that would have the unanimous support of everybody.

I can also be wrong concerning the future perception of "community premine".

I've thought of picking up more on dips, but honestly, without a nice wallet I won't and for different reasons. 1 of which is I couldn't get the simple wallet installed from scratch. I could run it and I had the blockchain on my Mac but I didn't want to chance a non binary install. No longer a computer expert and didn't want to waste the time figuring things out (after 3 hours).

I thought the emission rate was ok, and the majority slowdown is in 3 or 4 years? Excuse my ignorance here.

Anyway, with their update of the wallet (screenshots and such) a month ago, I thought we were close. If they can get it out in the next month or two we have a chance but if they wait much longer anything can happen. We are not in the position of cutting off our nose to spite our face, via non action.

Any word on the wallet GUI?

[rpietila]

1st year is 39%, after 4 years it is 86%.

I would much rather see us at <50% for 3-4 years, because a fully mined coin when there is no meaningful adoption (10s of millions of users at least) is likely to be superseded by a fork of the same, which is perceived as "more legitimate" since it is "not premined".

I don't think inflation is "good" but I find it hard to retain legitimacy in the view of the future generations without it. Crypto is not gold. Gold cannot be forked, crypto can. And has. And will.

[Anon136]

but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts

This may be wrong but I think there is a pretty reasonable chance that it isn’t, so this is an important insight I think. Also something I had not thought of myself, so thanks for bringing that up.

[xulescu]

From the quiescence of this thread, in contrast to the rapid growth of the free-for-all thread, I feel forced to conclude that people are idiots.

Criticism noted.

[Anon136]

I vote for a flat emission curve. X monero per block for ever. Though I know no one else would ever support that.

[rdnkjdi]

I vote for a flat emission curve. X monero per block for ever. Though I know no one else would ever support that.

I 1000% agree with this.  Ethereum is doing this & it actually makes a lot of sense (to me).

The % of the coin in existence produced per month/year falls even though the coin output never changes.  Those who invest early only make money if adoption increases - the way it is now as long as adoption remains consistence you just need to get in early enough & soak up early coin production.

I think bitcoin will die for this reason (eventually).  No one is going to want to pay the transaction fees needed to support the network.

[Nxtblg]

Many people are motivated by fear--and I believe the motivating fear acting here is: if you let trolls rule the unmoderated thread, that new users will be influenced by FUD and the adoption rate won't increase. At least that's why some days, and depending on my anxiety level,  I go to the wasteland instead of relaxing on a nice soft comfy chair.

Fear is the natural opposite side of greed when it comes to investing/gambling (crypto does not deserve to be classified as "investing")

Believe it or not, the presence of fear explains one of the paradoxes of blowoff bubble. It isn't just greed that fuels them, it's also the fear of missing out. Seriously.

[NewLiberty]

but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts

This may be wrong but I think there is a pretty reasonable chance that it isn’t, so this is an important insight I think. Also something I had not thought of myself, so thanks for bringing that up.

My apriori ideas on emissions:

Bitcoin emission curve is quite long, it is not a bad model.  
Flat emission curve may also work, who knows?

However I critique:
These are both arbitrary decisions that are entirely uninfluenced by external factors.  They are inflexible.  They do not respond to economic realities, demographics, usage, mining security, or anything else that might reasonably be expected to have some influence on money supply.

Further:
The emission is something that does not have very good precedent for alterations.  A debate on what would be the optimal emission, and to get that right forevermore, it is not likely to be something merely arbitrarily decided, picked out of a hat and made permanent.  That is just guessing and is no better than Bitcoin or Ether.

I do agree with rpietila about one thing for certain.  At some time in the future there will be an exit from Bitcoin for something better.  XMR is the best there is at the moment for such an option, and it improves daily.  I am not under the illusion that it is perfect, but to change something there should be very excellent reasons not just to change it, but to what it ought be changed.

With respect to emissions, I am sure that I don't know the answer to what the optimal emission rate is at this time, but I do think that it is worthy of serious examination.  I do not think that this discussion should be in the context of "What to do with XMR emission".  I would rather it be in the context of a potential merge-mined coin, using the same XMR codebase and advancements.  This accomplishes four important things

1) It enables the discussion
2) There should not be uncertainty about whether what you have is going to be diluted more than what you thought when you bought it.
3) Prevent "extra work" for our development team.
4) Provide additional revenue for our miners through the merge-mining, Miners thereby mine both coins simultaneously for the same work, thus increasing incentives for mining XMR (and the potential discussion coin would have good mining before it even was delivered).

Milton Friedman also argued that money supply ought be mechanistically determined, not by human decision but by formula, it was one of his criticisms of The Fed Reserve and central banking generally.

The block chain has some information that can used to sense the economic environment of the world around it.  Difficulty, transaction volume, and etc.  There may be other things that it can detect.  This would be my starting points, there may be other metrics it can offer that it currently does not (when smart contracts are more popular for example, there could be a basket of commodities or something to pull real-world value data into the analysis).

[Anon136]

but more importantly - and this is a coin killer - the emission will run its course to the point that XMR will considered to be a "community premine" despite all our good heroic efforts

This may be wrong but I think there is a pretty reasonable chance that it isn’t, so this is an important insight I think. Also something I had not thought of myself, so thanks for bringing that up.

words

Yea there is a good point here. What is the ideal emission curve vs should the emission curve be changed at all are two entirely separate questions. My reply was more along the lines of what would be the most ideal emission curve and not any claim about whether it should be changed.

As for the arbitrary nature of these decisions yes i agree, it is very arbitrary and non adaptable. I think this is a very strong legitimate criticism about all crypto in general. Ideally we would have market feedback that would allow us to adapt these values to the optimal level, that is the level at which all attacks that are prevented by said emission would be avoided but only just. But there is no way to measure and determine what this value use. Not in any verifiable way. If we were to make it variable, it would end up coming down to the decisions of individuals which opens up room for corruption. It would be a bit like having a crypto federal reserve. Not ideal.

Right now the mechanism we have, and the only one that we may ever have, is market competition between different cryptos. Where the ones that select the best static values gain capitalization and the ones that chose bad static values lose it. Its slow, cumbersome, and non addaptive but it is perhaps the best answer we will ever have to this problem. (other than proof of stake which has its own shortcomings).

also the block chain may be able to sense if it is not secure enough, but another big problem that people often over look, and something that it never could sense, is whether it is paying too much for security. Miners can see if there are long orphan chains than perhaps the reward should be raised. But even then it opens up new attack vectors for fraud with people purposefully crafting long orphan chains inorder to change the reward.

[rpietila]

Just willing to restate my points:
- No, I am not advocating changing the total number of coins;
- No, I am not advocating higher inflation;
- Yes, I am advocating that inflation is more evenly spread over time;
- Reason I do this is that fully mined coins have a hard time finding buyers if there are growing coins also available (don't be confused with pumps - that's something that cannot happen with XMR anyway anymore).

Reading my posts in this short thread might be enjoyable and insightful.

[rdnkjdi]

Just willing to restate my points:
- No, I am not advocating changing the total number of coins;
- No, I am not advocating higher inflation;
- Yes, I am advocating that inflation is more evenly spread over time;
- Reason I do this is that fully mined coins have a hard time finding buyers if there are growing coins also available (don't be confused with pumps - that's something that cannot happen with XMR anyway anymore).

Reading my posts in this short thread might be enjoyable and insightful.

How in the world could we ever get enough people on the same page to promote any change to coin release schedule or total emission?