Topic: [BCN] Bytecoin. Secure, private, untraceable since 2012 - page 340. (Read 1070344 times)

Sure, but when we're talking about change happening over a single month?  Basically I see the idea that fixing the initial burst improves equality between the early miners, the economic effects take place on a larger time scale.

Basically I think you want the distribution itself to be locally fair while larger economic forces make things globally fair. Trade can't equalize an advantage that happens on the timescale of days or weeks very much. No programmed mining distribution system can achieve fairness over the span of years. Hopefully the two combine well enough to remove enough unfairness that we can look the other way long enough to enjoy the non-zero-sum benefit of a useful system.

I'm not trying to be sanctimonious... but rather I have a _lot_ of respect for the really clever cryptosystem used in Bytecoin. It's one of the most interesting cryptographic techniques _actually deployed_ that I've since basically bitcoin itself (there are a lot of other neat ideas, few have made it to actual use).  If this were tech that worked in Bitcoin it would have won pretty much the entirety of the coinjoin bounty hands down by my opinion.   So I don't mean to dismiss the work that has been done in the forks, but it is really not on the same level as the actual invention here in my opinion (esp since bytecoin is not a fork of Bitcoin).  Maybe in a couple years my opinion will be different.   My view is also colored by my own position as a developer who took up the maintenance of Bitcoin after its author left, e.g. I'm inclined to discount the value of contributions similar to my own.

Funny, I think lockup is exactly the opposite of what you want.  Part of what makes me generally think the situation is complex is that coins that change hands spread the appreciation around.

I'm not sure that lockup/vesting can ever really be made to really work. You can always sell your interest even if the system won't let you actually transfer it. I can sell you the private key(s), under the protection of traditional contract law and the courts that to convince you that I didn't keep a copy.  Failing that, I can also put we can some Bitcoin in an escrow to secure the deal. etc... all undetectable to the outside world.

In the case of bytecoin it just seems weird. Some day we'll discover that the code was really being written by a single brilliant grad student under contract and one day he suffered a freak brain aneurism and died. Left with no one to continue the development and without the technical chops to even evaluate new developers and concerns about the ramifications of releasing a cryptographically anonymous cryptocurrency the people funding him open sourced the works so far and hoped for the best.

I mean really, am I missing something subtle here? it's pretty hard to pull anything over on anyone. I'm not sure what we're supposed to be tricked into thinking here. It doesn't strike me as fraudulent as much as it does just weird and poorly done.  Likewise, the software is very raw, some elements of the design seem pretty poorly considered, maybe not absolutely bad but relative to the quality of the rest.  Maybe I'm a little spoiled by Bitcoin.

I actually agree with this nearly if not 100% (as well as what you wrote later), but this:

1. Contradicts somewhat your comments about how important it is to reduce rewards when the hash rate is low. If the value is only a few bitcoins, then it is fine for the reward in newcoins to be high. In fact I would argue that the simplest launch is often the best, because for the reasons you outline above, the very beginning doesn't matter all that much.

2. Argues against being the creator as anything with enormous inherent value or importance, since as you say, it is often what comes later that creates the "real" value (more than a few bitcoins). Thus I would argue we should dispense with the sanctimonious comments about the "original" developers being the most legitimate and "deserving"  fork and if they screw up the release and the disappear and do zero work to try to build anything after the release.

My biggest objection, by the way, with premines (including this one) isn't their existance but:

1) the lack of a lockup or vesting, something that could actually be fixed fairly easily, which entirely agrees with your point that the value isn't necessarily in the inventing, it is in the building of something actually useful (and in the case of a digital currency that is far more than code). With no lockup it is too easy to pump-and-dump, and too hard for anyone outside the inner circle to discern true intentions.  

2) The shady and often outright fraudulent actions that often surround them and try to hide them. This is not at all limited to this one, but this one is included.


Post an address. There is a magic Monero fairy who likes to drop coins in random addresses that get posted.

Well, for example, say you have a 100% "premine" coin, but most of it gets sold for a grand total of a few bitcoins.. and then sold again and again, gradually gaining value.  Sure the person upfront at an "unfair" advantage but who cares if it was just to the tune of a couple of bitcoins? — and if they put in the work to really create something original and innovative it's well earned.

Something doesn't gain real sticky value except with trade, you can't premine 100% and then expect it to be magically valuable.  So asking if something is fair or not is more complicated than asking just about how much was premined or how fast the early release was. For all we know huge chunks of that large early mining may show up as donations and bounties driving innovation in the ecosystem and between that and the speculative trading of zillions of worthless coins ultimately resulting in a more equitable distribution than even the best tuned mining lottery would give. (Sadly, the forking diminishes the marginal return of this kind of activity, since ecosystem developments will also benefit the forks, making perhaps more rational to sit back and hope the forks fund that work instead).

It isn't immediately obvious to me that some of the BCN forks are inherently more fair, they may well be, but a lot of that depends on how the overall economy plays out.  Right now, however, the differential profit to me mining bcn today vs four weeks ago is far far smaller than for say monero.  One complicating bit is that the privacy of the system doesn't even let reliably you know if coins being moved are recently created coins churning or if its old coins moving.  

Basically the mining lottery is only one element to fair distribution and its inherently limited because it is biased towards experienced altcoin early miners, computation thieves, etc. in an active economy trade tends to spread out the profits from asset appreciation, and other things like donations and bounties stemming from concentrations of wealth can further the process.  Right now the forks argument is that the mining is more fair, but even more fair is pretty substantially unfair. How it all plays out is anyones guess, I think.

Feel free to seek my input— I can't resist running my mouth even if I think the whole enterprise is ill-advised— you might be able to extract something useful.

I did call it sketchy for a reason.   But at the same time I think it's reasonable and proper that the creators of the system actually do profit from it some (at least if anyone is!) one problem with cryptocurrency launches seems to be that as soon as you launch it people with botnets and other stolen resources immediately begin mining the hell out of it— and if there is an explicit 'premine' people fork and yank it out.  I do not begrudge the creators of a system feeling they're owed _some_ payoff, the question is how to get it in a way that is actually _viable_ even before you ask for fairness.

One of the criteria that I think is a requirement for an acceptable POW function is that it be largely "optimization free"— that is that the public implementation(s) are as close to the best implementations possible. Without being confident this criteria is met an attacker can gain an advantage. From that perspective its important that the released one be good.  OTOH, you're simply not entitled to demand people give away the software they wrote for themselves especially when they're already giving you so much.  Keeping some better mining code for yourself for a little while is crappy but it might be one of the more ethical viable ways to ensure compensation.  I think, for example, that it's more ethical than encouraging unsophisticated investors to "buy in" to something that exists only as a white paper and maybe a couple tech demos— a technique used by some altcoin proposals as of late.

Being able to fund infrastructure development in this space is still an open question. I think the general model of using altcoin launches to do this is not sustainable (for one, more currencies just dillutes network effect, hurting everyone— and too much of the value goes out to lucky speculators instead of the people creating the technology... plus the supply of hopeful suckers will eventually dry up). So I'm willing to have an open mind about different approaches people used, even though I'm personally a bit uncomfortable with anything that could be seen as compromising the integrity of the software. My tolerance for approaches is weighed by how interesting the tech is. I give bytecoin more slack than I'd give most altcoins because it has actually done some very innovative things, and it's not just a white paper but a usable system released as MIT licensed code, not hype.  Relatively speaking no matter how unfair BCN's initial distribution might turn out to be once the economy takes effect, I think it's inherently more fair than the many coins that never deliver anything interesting while sucking a lot of coins out of people on the basis of a bunch of promises. Bytecoin added value to the world, maybe some of the forks will add value by improving on the flaws in bytecoin's relesase— I thank that remains to be seen. If everyone benefits then I think splitting too many hairs about some people benefiting a bit more than some others may be short sighted, but it does depend on how the economy plays out.

Well that wasn't directed at you. Ignore my whining if you like.  I'm just sad to see how short sighted people are sometimes, it isn't everyone. I'll probably show in the Monero thread once I've successfully mined a block there, hard to use it until I have some to play with.

I'm perplexed at you how think a premine of 80% at release is only "marginally" worse than say Monero, which won't be 80% mined for about 4 years and which has only been mined about 4% so far. I don't know when you draw the line between early participants though. I kind of think that everyone involved with bitcoin now is an "early participant."

I like your slow-start launch ideas though. If I'm ever involved with another coin launch those ideas will likely be used.


Sketchy deoptimization games were never needed. The original code could have been released in at least a some baseline efficient form (e.g. not doing massive  recalculations inside a loop for no reason). It is hard to know you've released something that still can't be optimized in some clever way, but the obvious stuff?  No excuse other than pure sketch here.


I'm not quite sure how to respond to this except to say that you may well be on the wrong thread. First of all, the designers of BCN don't even seem to be here at all unless it is in the form of some sock puppet (I even doubt that). Second, while the Monero thread has its share of speculators, pumpers and FUDsters (apparently on a mission from the DRK side), we actually have quite interesting technical discussions over there. The Boolberry thread does as well. I can't speak for the others.

Hm? No I'm not. I've mined exactly one bytecoin block, last weekend— as part of fooling around with it, and I've used that to make some transactions and try it out. I'm also not especially equipped for cpu mining any more, and as you may note I basically don't do anything with altcoins (except sometimes point out their technical mistakes).  I wasn't aware of bytecoin until Adam Back mentioned it (well I _heard_ about it but thought people were talking about the crappy bitcoin clone).  If I'd been involved earlier perhaps there would be fewer really awful design flaws (including the way it appears to have been launched, which I agree is screwed up). Where my opinion differs is that I think its foolish in the abstract to create separate currencies for things which are just more transaction features (which doesn't mean I may not use them, but I do not consider them virtuous). I also think some of the forks (and perhaps all of them so far) have been launched in ways which are only minimally better and also created a huge advantage for their early participants.  While I think what BCN has done is a bit crazy, relative to the forks I do think it at least has the moral high-ground of having at least been the original authors— to the extent that anyone ought to get a windfall it ought to be them.  The lack of good initial calibration is even less excusable for the forks since they knew going in what the demand would be.

(were I ever to launch some altcoin— among many other things— I'd figure out a reasonable target for what the difficulty will be once it has basic adoption, and when the difficulty is below that level I'd have it scale the subsidy that each block takes by the difficulty so that the very earliest miners wouldn't get a windfall— effectively the income per hash would be ~constant until the hashrate got above some threshold. I'd also never create something with such a costly to validate POW, or set things up so that sketchy deoptimizations games were needed.)

The cause for my interest in this technology is pretty well established, https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/coinjoin-bitcoin-privacy-for-the-real-world-279249  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/coinswap-transaction-graph-disjoint-trustless-trading-321228  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/really-really-ultimate-blockchain-compression-coinwitness-277389 https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cryptographically-private-loan-risk-management-398041 etc.  I've been developing cryptocurrency tech for personal and philosophical reasons for eons (in cryptocurrency time) and perhaps you're too busy with sleezy speculative activities to notice that there are some other people who are involved for reasons which are unrelated to making a quick buck.  There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreampt of in your philosophy.

(As an aside— you probably should be pretty happy that I went and pointed out this tech in discussions about ZeroCash, regardless of which forks you support I'm sure you benefited from it whereas I did not (in fact, I've not even managed to get any real thoughtful tech discussions out of it— few to none of the people posting here seem to actually understand the tech, and instead everyone is just flinging poo about their favorite forks).  Perhaps in the future I should not forget to add the caveat that while the tech is neat and deserves more attention, like most altcoins the community is full of speculators who actively repel technical folks with wild accusations stemming from an apparent inability to understand that not everyone is so desperately greedy...  It's doubly hilarious, in that it's so thoroughly counter productive— I don't approve of the pump behavior and won't try to encourage it, but I certantly could bring a huge amount of attention to this space by pointing how how powerful the technology is to people— but I'm certantly less inclined to do so when simply speaking my mined gets me accused of being one of y'all coin pumpers even by the selfsame folks who would benefit from it.. I mean, wtf are you thinking? Were you raised by wolves?)

Yea, well the darkcoin thing was pretty offensive to me in general, I feel that it commercially exploited my work promoting coinjoin— itself not so bad, but it was frustrating that it was also stupid: the attraction of coinjoin— for all its limitations— is that you don't need a new coin, it's already just part of Bitcoin.  I've been continually disappointed by the level of hype around Zero*, especially when it comes at the expense of attention to other techniques which are very interesting themselves.

We do? Do tell.

The difficulty in the cryptnote implementation adjusts every block and pretty fast in practice. The block times stay close to the target. In fact you look at the overall block rate on all of these coins since launch they are pretty close to the target in terms of blocks mined per day.

There are definitely shitcoins that are launched with diff 1 and lousy adjustment algorithms that mine off absurd number of blocks on the first day or week until an adjustment hits but that is not the case here at all.

Sure, if people find these coins attractive and begin using them the difficulty (and likely the value) goes up but that is not guaranteed nor is it a one-way street at all. Monero and Bytecoin have had significant drops in difficulty and value as popularity and value ebbs and flows over the past month (I can't really speak for the others since I don't follow them, but I would guess the same).

We already know you are among that group of early BCN miners, but nothing that you can say will justify this coin's dodgy launch. Quark is an example of the future of this coin for the same reasons. Btw, I wasn't able to use this software until the MRO team came and optimized it. The bloat from Bytecoin was horrid. Mining was horrible.
DRK was instamined heavily as well. I made a lot of cash with it but I wouldn't hold long term for obvious reasons. How Evan backpeddled after promising "ring signatures in V2" is plain laughable. I don't see any other anonymous coins being worth investing long term beside MRO. The other forks don't seem to be formed by a team of veterans. Then we have Zerocoin/Zerocash and their ridiculous idea of needing to trust a 3rd party will delete something that can give access to 100% of the coins. No thanks.

Now now, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.  What is the marginal return of one CPU hour mining on your favorite fork just a few weeks after it started?   Bitcoin's difficulty hasn't ever grown faster than doubling in a month or so, it's never been a gigantic bonza where someone a few weeks before you was getting 100x more.   It wasn't launched with a difficulty thousands of times below what the surrounding network could support (quite the opposite: the bitcoin network wasn't fast enough to justify the minimum difficulty in the first year).

It's pretty easy to create an fork that while announced is still a huge windfall for the initial people on it. Perhaps less of a windfall is better, but at least— as far as we known with Bytecoin the receivers of the windfall are the people who wrote the software, enabling everyone else (including the fork to use it).

This is part of the reasons for decisions are somewhat unstable. Anyone can create a fork, why is one more righteous than another? Especially when all you a generally similar launch approach which rewards the people in the first _days_ much more than those who came later...  It's not clear how one can fairly launch a scarce asset cryptocoin today now that people know and expect them to be valuable (even moreso than they actually are, often).

This is what happens when vast majority of your currency is owned by a select few.

https://xrptalk.org/topic/2629-selling-my-xrp/

A single person can crash your net worth and guess what? They still make millions because they own so much.

The keyword of the day is: "trustless"

Once you understand what that means, and how it applies to currency distribution, you might realize why monero exists.

What I think happens is if the reward penalty applies, then the reward is deferred and then allocated to future blocks so the total supply is unaffected, but I'm not sure. Someone can look at the code.

But then what exactly determines the size and the reward definition does not imply such a thing; it should be a previously known number for every future block.
The definition at OP does have exceptions then?

There is a short term adjustment to the reward based on the size of the block. It goes back to normal in time. This is described in the cryptonote paper I think.

Can someone pleae explain me what happens with the recent block?

The reward was  all around 150k BCN but the recent ones reward like 15k?! And is the size much much bigger on these block, what does "size" actually represent?

Sorry for the basic questions :-)

MinerGate v1.14-win 64  - increase hashreate cca. about 15% compare to previous version. - maybe it is somehow connected. I do not know how they do it but good job.

Anyone mining guide on bytecoin?

To sum up, these two coins are different: BCN was the first CN coin ann MRO was the second. Has some technical different features and devs team. and fans.

Noob question but how many orphaned blocks does minergate pool has?

IMO devs won't give another ver if there is no changes. I mean no point at all to give people bin files without making any improvements

I received the letter from BCN devs. It said new binaries have faster hash function than yesterday's ones.