Topic: Could Monero replace Bitcoin soon? - page 7. (Read 33662 times)

No, monero will never replace bitcoin or any other crypto unless it solves scaling. The closest project so far of doing that is ethereum. Ethereum foundation is the only team out there with both resources and an elite dedicated team of developers. Ofcourse, there are many projects out there with their own teams, but they're either small or aiming low, developing clones ain't rocket science.

You seem to be digging yourself a great big hole here. Please read this line back.

Even anecdotally it's dismissible.

 - You send a transaction to Poloniex using a blockchain address they supply
 - your local simplewallet app reports your balance reduced by the transaction amount
 - But the balance on your exchange account doesn't move for a whole day

That is only 1 tiny scenario of thousands that occur day in day out in every cryptocurrency where the actual blockchain itself (as opposed to exchange trading) is in heavy use.

It's resolved by a symmetric audit of the transaction (described earlier) which is supported by transparent blockchains such as bitcoin and serviced via a number of public block explorers.

You entirely missed the point.  Nor in bitcoin, nor in monero, there is such a thing as a balance in itself.  The balance is DERIVED from a set of valid transactions.  The + and the - of the two derived balances come BOTH from the SAME valid (or invalid !) transaction.  As such, your argument is totally false.  In as much as there is a + and a - in bitcoin, it is there also in monero (as a derived quantity in both), and the + AND the - are derived from one and the same thing, namely a valid transaction.

It is simply not true that in bitcoin there are two balances, and in monero there is one.  There is NONE, nor in bitcoin, nor in monero. There are only valid transactions.  If a transaction is valid, it contains BOTH a + and a - for a to be derived balance.  So verifying the - against the + is not a double check at all.

The differences reside in two aspects.  The first aspect is that the DERIVED balance in bitcoin can be done by anybody, for any address.  Again, the instruction to {ADD 10 to B and to SUBTRACT 10 to A} which is the transaction, OBVIOUSLY will give an agreement in augmenting B and decreasing A, but that is not a double check ; only, everybody can do that calculation if he wants to.  But he's checking nothing that is not already stated when we say that {ADD 10 to B and to SUBTRACT 10 to A} is a valid transaction.  The "double check" follows mathematically from the acceptance of this transaction as valid, so it doesn't check anything.  But, in bitcoin everybody can do that calculation if he wants to.  In monero, only the owner of the secret key of A can do the calculation for A, and the owner of the secret key of B can do the calculation of B.  But B KNOWS that, given the validity of the transaction, some A must see a minus, and A KNOWS that, given the validity of the transaction, there is a balance of some B that must go up with the same amount.
The second aspect is that in bitcoin, the checking of the double spending of an output is done by checking simply whether that output appears DIRECTLY already as an input (then it is spend and cannot be spend twice) while in monero, it is checked by cryptographically verifying that the same SIGNATURE CHECK doesn't appear already somewhere.  

But these are just two different methods to make sure that the output that makes the transaction valid, is indeed unspend.

So in the end, whether we have a transaction that says:
{ADD 10 to B and SUBTRACT 10 from A} like in bitcoin ; or whether we have:

{ADD 10 to B and SUBTRACT 10 from one of A X or Z, such that this is the only time this can be done},

in both cases we know that there is a + and a corresponding - IF WE MAKE THE BALANCES, which are not explicit, nor in bitcoin, nor in monero.

What counts, is whether the transaction is valid.  If we ERRONEOUSLY accept a transaction as valid, while it isn't, then JUST AS WELL IN BITCOIN AS IN MONERO, you will find the "correct" check of B increasing with 10 and A decreasing with 10, because in both cases, a transaction contains as well a + as a - instruction.  As such, this + vs - check, is not a check at all.  It ALWAYS works out, in bitcoin, as well as in monero, and doesn't check the validity of the transaction itself, at all.

You go to great lengths to justify hiding the output of a user's own transaction from them.

Yet, the bitcoin network is 7 years old, fully transparent and benefits hugely from that transparency.

Maybe you need to rethink why.

Here's a clue: (And here's another one)

Do you know the most common error in scientific controls ?  The false sense of security, when the scientific control you think is "independent" is in fact totally correlated with your original.

And this is an example of it.

After all, what are we looking at ?

We are looking at the VALIDITY OF A SINGLE TRANSACTION.

Now, that transaction will essentially be something like:

{input: transaction X with address A ; output address B (10 bitcoin)}

Now you THINK that you have TWO INDEPENDENT ways of verifying that transaction:
namely that address A has now 10 bitcoin less, and address B has now 10 bitcoin more.

You think that the verification of the diminishing of 10 coins in A is a kind of INDEPENDENT verification of the increase of 10 coins in address B, which would bring "credibility to the validity of the above transaction".  You THINK that you do a scientific control.

There's nothing about it.

What happens when a wallet calculates the CONTENT OF address A ?

It looks at all transactions that have an UNSPEND OUTPUT at address A.  How does the wallet do that ?  It looks at all the transactions that have address A as output, and LEAVES OUT THOSE THAT HAVE THEM SOMEWHERE AS AN INPUT.  (to keep only the unspend)

So what happens when your wallet calculates the content of B, before and after the transaction ?

Well, before the transaction it makes the sum of all unspend outputs containing address B.  After the transaction, it finds ONE MORE such output, namely 10 bitcoin.  Why ?  Because of the above transaction !

What happens now when your wallet calculates the content of A, before and after the transaction ?

Well, before the transaction it makes the sum of all unspend outputs containing address A.  After the transaction, it has to leave out one output, of 10 bitcoin (plus fee).  Why ? *** because of the above transaction ***

So your "scientific control" involves TWICE the same transaction of which you want to verify the veracity.  You thought that by verifying that the balance of A diminishes while the one of B increases, you have a kind of double check on the validity of the transaction.  But this is not true: the increase of B and the diminishing of A are BOTH calculated using one and the same transaction: the one you wanted to verify !  So checking that A diminished, didn't ADD any "independent control" at all !  You checked twice the same thing !

This is a common mistake in "scientific control": depending on the same element, and thinking one has done an independent verification.

And now we come to the essence that kills all your arguments: the BALANCE of addresses FOLLOWS from the VALIDITY of transactions, and not the other way around.  The whole idea of crypto currencies is NOT to have "bank accounts", but is to have VALID TRANSACTIONS.  The atomic component of a crypto currency is not a balance, but is a transaction.  And the essence of a monetary asset is the "right/power to spend", that is, the CAPABILITY OF PROVIDING A VALID TRANSACTION, not of 'changing balances'.  That is a consequence of it, it is not the cause.

Your "double check" in bitcoin balances was nothing else but using twice the same valid transaction.  If the transaction is invalid and you didn't see it, your "double check" would work just as well, and you would be wrong.  Your whole check stands or falls with the validity or not of that transaction, and nothing else.   And as I pointed out, checking the validity of a transaction in bitcoin (which is the essential function of the whole bitcoin thing !) is complex, uses a lot of cryptography, and can only be done with software.

IF the transaction is deemed valid, your balances will check, but the balance of A will not check anything more than the balance of B, because it uses exactly the same information you validated.

The validity of a transaction in bitcoin is checked by verifying that:
1) the block chain is all right
2) that the inputs of the transaction exist as former outputs of other transactions and are unspend
3) that the transaction is correctly cryptographically signed

the inclusion of the transaction in the block chain will make the former outputs now "spend".

In Monero, it is not much different.  The only thing that changes is the WAY 2) is verified.  In bitcoin, there is an explicit indication of which transaction had which output.  In monero too, but there are OTHER transaction outputs in the list which have nothing to do with this transaction.  However, the cryptographic signature used CAN ONLY BE USED ONCE for a given output.  When that signature is used, we know that this output is "spent", because nobody will be able to produce a SECOND signature on the block chain using the same output, without it being seen.  So directly checking, or using this signature, comes down to the same effect: the impossibility of spending an output twice.

FTFY

Also I was interested in this project a long time ago before I was censored repeatedly in the main thread just for asking questions. The same sorts of questions which would simply garner forthright responses in moneros thread.

Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.  The market will use the cash which is liquid, and not the cash which is illiquid.  When XMR liquidity approaches that of BTC, then we can talk about replacement.  Until then, no.   But it does seem inevitable that a fungible currency will displace a non-fungible currency in a majority of use-cases.

No, simple NO.

why would XMR replace BTC even BBR do more then XMR and SDC do much more then BBR The reason i dumped MNR so long ago and never looked back was because development was slow and unimpressive and it hasn't changed obviously someone payed the DM off or the people running those DM hold XMR there is no other reason, it's really not that good.

Shadowcash It is now the top POS anon coin and for good reason.



https://shadowproject.io/en

https://umbra.shadowproject.io

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/illuminating-shadow-cash/

https://decentralize.today/privacy-within-the-umbra-83ecdba2f51#.92caow32w

http://insidebitcoins.com/news/shadowcash-a-peer-inside-an-anonymous-cryptocurrency/32825

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2015/01/28/shadowcash-zero-knowledge-anonymity/

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-race-for-the-first-decentralised-silk-road-is-on

there are a lot of lies going around  about SDC please do your own research.
Yes we had a bug and it was fixed promptly but transactions were still protected by shadowcash’s stealth addresses
I have been with project for 2 years and personally donated to them i would not do so if i did not trust them.

the lead developer Rhyno even revealed his identity in full

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/shadowcoin-lead-developer-rynomster-shadows/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUuk3W4tSzo interview with rhino.

The team are very real, very loyal to their community and have a great vision that they pursue with a fierce passion.
If there is anything i have learnt from spending over 2 years with this community.
Its that the team take users security and privacy very seriously and are generally pissed off about the Orwellian society that we are quickly becoming as am I.
I know when the Bug was found in shadowcash it was a real kick in the guts to them and they felt like they had let us all down, that shows they actually care about the community.
this isn’t about money for them thats why for 2 years they have developed with almost no funding, SDC had no IPO/ICOs Premine Instamine the dev hold little coins and thats a fact.
they do this because they believe in it and thats why i stick with them for so long.

Our new GUI 2.0 with end to end encrypted chat/group chat soon decentralised market much more.

It it expansive but unfortunately it's nonsense.

You are making an apples to oranges comparison. Monero isn't attempting to be anything other than digital e-cash. It has one application and that is to mimic the process of privately handing someone a wad of cash. At that it succeeds marvelously. Almost every other application besides that is going to be better on a different blockchain probably. Maybe bitcoin but maybe something else with a better balance of
fungibility, blockchain utility and scalability. I don't know. But what ever it is, it probably wont do pure private e-cash as well as monero.

I dont think its fair to dismiss the value of the apps that will be built ontop of other blockchains but could never be built ontop of moneros any more than it is fair to dismiss the obvious utility of such a pure and elegant e-cash.

And if you are going to say this completely missed the point of what you were trying to say I did make a few assumptions because your post wouldn't have made any sense if you were actually arguing apples to apples. If we are comparing bitcoins utility as a pure digital ecash to monero's there is no comparison to be made. The only thing monero needs to be trustworthy in this specific narrow application is well reviewed cryptography and the other basic ingredients of money (durability, portability, divisibility, fungability and scarcity).

*edit* i should clarify. this is sort of an argument against the premise of this thread. when i said i think monero has a shot (at replacing bitcoin) i meant as the goto standard for digital ecash. not blockchain applications. monero will probably never be the king of this.

Perhaps you are not yet ready for cryptocurrency.

I admire you sir... the patience with which you try to explain this to someone who doesn't want to understand is very very admirable...

For what it's worth, I enjoy your writings very much!

best regards

Have you ever heard of scientific controls ?



In this case, the independent variable is the balance in the destination address and the dependent variables are just about every aspect of the blockchain mechanics that you cite in last previous post.

Controls are everywhere. If you go to the dentist, you don’t need a degree in dentistry to know if you have toothache afterwards or not. The toothache is the “control” that allows you to test the integrity of the treatment without spending 4 years at dentist school. In bookkeeping, a trial balance acts as an aggregate “control” on the recording of individual transactions.

You say that the blockchain’s too complicated for ordinary users to understand and but that the technology is based on sound theory, programming and should therefore be trusted. This is unacceptable and would be unacceptable in any other field of industrial or administrative activity because though people may be too unskilled to understand the mechanics of the system, they are not too unskilled to understand a control.

Cryptonote and similar technologies impose an asymmetric audit on end users as its means of supporting "fungibility". This deprives them of just such a control since 2 addresses are required, not 1.

The problem with asymmetric audits is that they are cancerous to the integrity of any system - doesn’t matter if it’s financial, mechanical or chemical. They are therefore never used because they lack any kind of control that rings the alarm bell on some detailed aspect of the system which failed.



Bitcoin supports a symmetric audit at the granular (transaction) level. That’s to say, the balance movement in the sending AND destination addresses act as controls for the user on the blockchain mechanics which facilitate it. Although it’s at granular level, the aggregate effect of millions of blockchain users carrying out controlled actions on the blockchain in this way gives it immense resistance to confidence challenges. This is the MINIMUM level of transparency needed in an unbacked monetary system. As an encrypted bookkeeping technology, cryptonote is quite nice. But as a universal unbacked electronic asset, it's holed below the waterline due to this fundamental weakness - the asymmetric control for end users.

There's an interesting interview with the Monero rep(s) on Lets Talk Bitcoin from last year where halfway through they are asked the elephant in the room question as to "if it's so great, why didn't Satoshi use the Cryptonote approach". They responded that they didn't know the answer which, when you think about it is a bit alarming. If I were embarking on a challenging technology that ditched fundamental properties of the market leader such as transparency, I'd want to do a bit of due diligence and find out.

In fact the answer is staring us in the face every day we use bitcoin and every time we get back from the dentist and don't hit the roof at the first cup of coffee...  

Monero is one of the best cryptocurrencies existing today, but it is hard to predict if some coin will surpass BTC, because it involves a dynamic community acceptance and a huge media attention.

Bitcoin has a long history and ups and downtimes... Even lotta people said it will be dead or that it was already dead (even some very known persons said it).

So, honestly, I don't think it will happening.

Ok, so let us assume you have a broken wallet application.  We will assume this on the bitcoin, and on the monero/zcash/other anon side.

What happens ?  Your broken bitcoin wallet doesn't do the right verifications, and shows you a wrong balance.  Your broken monero wallet does the same.  So why is your broken bitcoin wallet now more to be trusted than your broken monero wallet ?

After all, and this is what I wanted to indicate to you earlier on, the bitcoin block chain is ALSO WAY TOO COMPLEX to "see visually that the transaction is right".

In order for the "transaction to be right", you have:

1) to verify the entire chaining of all block chain headers since the genesis block of Satoshi to verify that you have *A* right block chain.
2) to "hop backwards" from the transaction to be verified, to the whole TREE OF BACKWARD INPUTS, all up to their individual coinbases, and find ALL those transactions.
3) to verify the Merkle tree hash of each of the blocks where at least one such transaction occurs.

==> at this point you know that the transaction is transmitting you legit coins that have been created in a coinbase.

4) to verify all OTHER Merkle tree hashes of ALL other blocks.  (now we know that you have the full list of reliable transactions on this chain)
5) to see if NO OTHER transaction ever had one of the outputs used in your backward chain as an input

==> now we know that along the path, there has not been any double spending.

6) listen on the bitcoin network, to find out if there are no chains propagated with more PoW then the one you just analysed.

This is NOT something you can "visually inspect".  And if you leave one step out, you might:
A) not have the consensus block chain, where double spends have been left out
B) not have a valid block chain at all, where simply transactions have been left out (Merkle trees wouldn't fit, but this, you only know if you verify).
C) have double spend coins
D) have non-legit coins that don't go back to a coinbase transaction (bitcoin creation).

So ALL THIS HAS TO BE DONE before you can know that a transaction in bitcoin is legit.  This is NOT something that is simple and "visual".  Leave one step out, and you have a visual "check" that is wrong.

If you don't trust crypto, then you cannot trust this whole procedure ; if you can't trust your wallet having done this correctly, then you don't know anything about the legitimity of any transaction.

And no, you cannot do it with pen and paper.  You have to trust software doing this, or write it yourself.

In other words, you have no clue about the right balance or the legitimity of any bitcoin transaction without trusting software and crypto in any case.  So your argument that it would be simple to verify is not true.  Once you have to trust software and crypto, you can trust software and crypto in a slightly more sophisticated edition too.

You cannot simply "verify the balance of the other guy" without going through the same steps as I have indicated here.  If you have a block chain where a former spending of that balance was left out, or missed by your crappy wallet software (your hypothesis), you are as vulnerable as in any other case, believing a transaction.  And to verify that this is not the case, you have to check the whole validity of the entire chain, AND make sure you have the right chain (highest PoW).  That's a lot of crypto you have to believe.

Agreed. Monero has had no big problems in the past, and ever since Poloniex started accepting it, the price has shot up. My holdings are now hodlings!

i think monero has a great future, and monero show a great development in crypto currency, however to become equal with bitcoin is still far away, bitcoin already famous and has become the pioneer for a long time, and had been through so many ups and downs, Monero still need a lot of phases before catching up with bitcoin

Trusting in theory is not the same thing as trusting in practice.

About the most flakey link in the whole chain of crypto are wallets - everybody knows that. The chance of your wallet showing you the right balance at any given moment is about as good as the chance of me scoring 100 out of 100 basketball set shots with one hand tied behind my back. (That isn't very high b.t.w.    ). Wallets stick, may be unsync'd, have backloged transactions - you name it. And thats just the un-hacked ones. None of this has anything to do with "trust in cryptography" or the number of PHD's you happen to have on your dev team.

Contrary to what a lot of posters in here would like people to believe, the biggest challenge for crypto isn't privacy, it's confidence.

In that regard, this is a very strong model:



...and this is a very weak one:



It isn't just weak with regard to confidence, it also drives a truck through blockchain usability & maintenance because the entire technology stack has to be over engineered to support something that is not a priority for unbacked, anonymous media at the expense of something that is. The end user therefore has to satisfy themselves with only an implicit level of auditability rather than the explicit one they get with transparent blockchains. In the long run, thats just going to lead to a growing number of confidence scams, hacks and rackets that has the potential to fatally corrode monetary integrity in the eyes of its users.

As I said earlier, it doesn't mean that fungibility can't and shouldn't be improved in blockchains. But do it the proper way - by creating blockchains that natively mitigate the distinction between one address and another. Not by burying it under a thick layer of cryptographic syrup and torpedoing the very properties that give it value in the first place.

Why do they trust addition, then ?
Maybe addition isn't trustworthy either.
Maybe the Abelian group of addition over the integers isn't correct either, and can be cracked by a sufficiently smart hacker.

You cannot "see" the addition of two numbers that are larger than, say, about 10.

You've been wrong with your "people need to see cryptography to believe in it" argument from the start--now you're just 10x more wrong about it. When AEON passes your marketcap, please feel free to say hi.