Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 155. (Read 2032248 times)

"Will" is a future tense verb.

And the bulk of my post was about a general logic which doesn't hinge on what if anything I might do. And my post was not derogatory to Monero nor Cryptonote, rather just pointing out that if the best selling point you can muster is illogic, then you are doing yourself a disservice. Instead I suggest focus on the facts that are positive, such as the autonomy of one-time ring sigs and the massive amount of refinement effort that has been done. Or continue beating the "not a copycoin premine" drum and I will continue to refute it.

P.S. I didn't realize Monero had changed from 0% perpetual debasement to 0.9% (according to rpietila). Smooth (and I but not coordinated at all, no back dealings and no alignment, just I was aware of his stance) were for perpetual a couple of months after launch and he was apparently rebuffed by afair rpietila, aminorex, and others. Seems his (our) stance won over? At the time I was pushing for closer to 5% (my thinking may have changed hence) and I believe smooth was for any level 1% and above which could accepted by the consensus. And afair rpietila was slowing moving away from 0% to thoughts of a few tenths of a percent.

You are assuming a cryptographic break, I'm not, which is why I mentioned the cryptographic issue with key images. There is also the case of an implementation flaw that would (or at least could) be more readily apparent in a system that maintains visibility on sum(in) <= sum(out). In practice failures of mature cryptographic assumptions occur much less frequently implementation flaws. Bitcoin has had the latter (overflow bug) but not the former. Likewise Zerocash (if it existed) would have recently failed due to the latter (libsnark bug).

Anyway, a few different approaches comparable to CT in effect and performance are being looked at for Monero. One I believe does not require any protocol changes.

Also, TPTB, I disagree with your assertion that some benefit was obtained from a "front loaded" curve in Monero. In practice what happened is that the difficulty simply skyrocketed as the coin became popular. There was still no real opportunity for developers or other early adopters to vacuum up cheap coins, after the first few weeks (or more like one week, during which it wasn't even clear there was going to be an organized and effective project) at least. If the rewards had been lower the difficulty would have just been lower too.

Also, with the perpetual debasement it is debatable whether you can call the curve front-loaded, at least compared to say Bitcoin, which starts off with slower reductions but continues those reductions until the effect is to reduce later supply more quickly relative to early adopters. It is impossible to say you are even a 1% holder of "all" of Monero's supply since the supply is infinite.

Poo appears to be an excelsior.

How can anything be challenged when you haven't done anything other than talk about creating a coin?

By arguing that XMR's mcap is miniscule, you are argue against your point. Your logical point can only be that it is relatively near to free to acquire some significant % of XMR's mcap, and afaics whether the proceeds of the wealth effect are distributed to the person who obtained coins cheaply via selling a premine or by selling coins bought or mined near to free, then what is the operative difference?

The one argument you can make is that everbody has an equal opportunity to obtain coins at the same very low price; whereas, in a premine only the controlling group can obtain them for very low cost (not free because you must factor in their costs of development, promotion, etc) while everbody else has to pay a market rate which may be higher or lower than the controlling group's initial cost.

I think really your only logical complaint is embodied by the term "shitcoin", which I assume you mean to infer that controlling group had nearly 0 development costs and I could suggest then that the more accurate term is "copycoin". But wasn't Monero a "copycoin" at the launch when the core devs mined the heavily front loaded debasement curve (with thus less competition and relative hashrate difficulty per block reward).

I don't see much merit in that line of argument. Rather I think it is more useful to point out that Monero has a claimed 80+% code rewritten, and it apparently refined Cryptonote implementation. Refinement btw, is precisely what I asserted that leaderless organization excels at. Yet you won't find leaderless organization doing radical innovation (because by definition there is no leader who can take the bull by the horns), thus Monero will probably forever be not much more than a "copycoin". That is in a nutshell why I am not working on Monero, because copying bores me to tears. It is not an attempt to diminish Monero's importance (it is what it is), rather just the point that I like to create new technology. And I will challenge you to call anything I do a "shitcoin" or a "copycoin".

Peace.

First, gravity confounding levitation schemes on youtube, now, Lamb of God fueled anti-semitism? You know... at a certain point, you start working as an advocate against the positions you take, and the opinions you espouse.

A dash of poo always spoils a thoughtfully prepared meal.

You didn't get the memo? For 7 years? Duude, are you for real?  

According to rules, terms & conditions, laws, and justice;

if a bank is in trouble,

- first you call in the loans
- then you pay out the depositors
- the rest (if any) goes to the bondholders

Why are bondholders made whole from the funds of the depositors? The rules are there to be followed!

Fucking bankster jews, your father is Satan, for you are liars, and he is the father of lies, and when you propose the depositors money to be cut and extracted to fill your pockets, you are truly speaking of your father. - Jesus (paraphrased)

The banking crisis in Greece and the proposed 30% bail-in on balances of 8,000 euros got me thinking…There's actually a euro banknote printing facility run by the Bank of Greece in Athens.  Is there any chance, given the political mess, that the Bank of Greece directly prints banknotes to meet withdrawal demands, thereby ending the bank runs?  I realize this would be a no-no according to rules for eurozone membership but I wouldn't be surprised if such an idea gained popular support.  

They are all the same mostly, previous or current shitcoin owners that could get large % of a coin emission for almost nothing and then pump and dump forever extracting bitcoin from victims, they can't do that with Monero, never been easy really and it pisses them off even more when they see how much potential Monero has. Its like rpietila said, its a coin that only the very rich already can own near 100K and this is positive because few ppl can get burned and allow easy and fair accumulations. A slow and inevitable march to the moon is what I would call the XMR market.

When you think about this it's pretty funny a lot of people (desperate bears) calling Monero overvalued at this moment in the speculation thread.

Absolutely no disrespect to your castle Risto but to me it definately looks like Monero is heavily undervalued as your castle is nearing the XMR marketcap

Inevitable and inspiring:

Almost exactly one year ago, we launched our Bitcoin remittance startup in the Philippines. Against the odds, our growth has been the exact opposite of the downtrend in bitcoin price. Just wanted to share a bit of our story so far.

Warning: Lengthy post. There's a TL;DR down there if you scroll down long enough

**How we started:**

Twelve months ago, Bitcoin had just bounced back to $600~, everyone was pumped for another bull run, and we were a brand-spanking new bitcoin startup that had just launched a [Bitcoin payment processor in the Philippines.](http://bitmarket.ph)  We were fresh, hungry, and excited.  Remittance wasn't part of our original plan, but after a few brainstorming sessions, we decided that it was going to be a vital stepping stone to support a healthy bitcoin ecosystem in our country. We decided to launch what we called a “Rebittance” service, a word that is [now included in the Money Wiki](http://themoneywiki.com/wiki/alternative-currency-rebittance-bitcoin-remittance) and describes bitcoin remittance in general. We were going to call it *Rebit.ph*.

**Early days:**

So we announced our “launch”, if you can call it that, on social media and here on Reddit. Other than [making it to the top of r/bitcoin](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29g8zf/introducing_rebitph_sending_money_to_the/), it was somewhat uneventful. Our first month was OK, seeing 1 or 2 transactions per day, getting sign ups here and there. We absorbed the things that we saw work, and removed the things that didn't. We focused a lot on customer service and speed of transaction fulfillment with our first few regular users, and it paid off as a lot of them are still regular customers up to this day.

Several months after we figured out the ins and outs of the business, we were getting more comfortable with handling more transactions. Our growth was slow and steady at first, but then we made a decision to just [do away with the transfer fee.](https://www.techinasia.com/bitcoin-rebit-philippines-zero-fees-remittances-kyc/) This caused an uptick in our numbers, to the point where we sometimes had to scramble to make sure we could accommodate all rebittances. We were still bootstrapping at that point, and cash wasn't exactly overflowing; besides, we were also busy launching five other services at the same time.

This is the part that most people do not know about us: Our startup is actually called [Satoshi Citadel Industries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Citadel_Industries), and Rebit is just one major component in an ecosystem that we are working on establishing. Rebit is our  “Bitcoin-In” piece of the puzzle, and [our other major verticals complement this system](http://sci.ph). It has been the most active and rapidly developing service in our lineup, hence our heightened focus on making it as effective and efficient as possible.

**2015:**

2015 has been a breakout year for us. Despite all the challenges of a depressing market trend, we were able to secure [fresh capital from angel investors to push us forward.](https://www.techinasia.com/satoshi-citadel-industries-funding-joe-maristela/) We have since figured out our strategy and direction, had opened up Rebittance partnerships in different countries like [Hong Kong](http://www.thepaypers.com/cryptocurrencies-bitcoin-virtual-currencies/bitspark-partners-rebit-to-launch-bitcoin-as-a-middleman-remittance-service/757562-39) and [Canada](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/newnote-financial-partners-with-rebit-to-offer-international-remittance-service-2015-04-15), and are now working on opening up at least ten more corridors within the next year. We have been breaking our daily, weekly, and monthly records almost every month, and we expect that trend to sustain regardless of the price of bitcoin.

From the time we started a year ago doing 1 or 2 transactions a day, we're now doing at least fifty times more on a daily basis. The number of registered users, coming from about 19 different countries, has already zoomed past the 6,000 mark, and we're looking forward to reaching 10,000 in the very near future with new partnerships from other remittance corridors putting us on track to service about a dozen new markets by 2016. Rebittance, a funny word we like to think we invented, [is now a real thing](http://themoneywiki.com/wiki/alternative-currency-rebittance-bitcoin-remittance). Believe it or not, the business is now healthy enough to be able to sustain itself in the short term without burning through cash. It is not only surviving, it is thriving.

**Looking forward:**

Our vision looking forward has always been the same: *World Domination*. Well, not really. We just want to make an impact in an industry that is ripe for disruption, starting in our own backyard, the Philippines. We know that Remittance is a hotly contested market right now,[ with several billion dollars moving into the Fintech space](http://wealthmanagement.com/blog/fintech-investment-expected-double-2015), a growing new sector where technology meets finance, and the Philippines is one of the main battle grounds with $27 Billion in annual incoming remittances. We're gearing up to become a major player in this disruptive industry, starting here in our own home court.

Our long term strategy is to be able to replicate our service anywhere in the world, and create partnerships that connect us to other Bitcoin companies that will allow anyone, anywhere to easily access Rebittance services. Our first step is [Rebittance.org](http://rebittance.org), which recently [won 3rd place in Coinbase's BitHack v2.](https://blog.coinbase.com/2015/07/02/coinbase-announces-winners-of-bithack-v2/) It's a Rebittance portal that will act as an aggregator and connector for the rest of the world. We have more up our sleeve too. In the meantime, we keep working.

Like everything worth doing, it is going to take some more time to reach even just our short-term goals. Just getting the proper licenses from government agencies here takes weeks if not months, same with establishing one partnership with another company in a different country. All of the things we have accomplished up to this point took a lot of time and effort, and it will only become tougher as we grow bigger.

Looking back from this milestone definitely feels like an accomplishment, but by no means do we think we're anywhere near where we want to be.

Watching the growth of the Bitcoin technology as a whole in the past twelve months has been nothing short of amazing, bitcoin exchange rate aside. We are proud to be playing a role in it, no matter how small.  Big thanks to all the other bitcoin startups, entrepreneurs, developers, and engineers out there, working thanklessly and tirelessly day in and day out, teaching and inspiring us to keep going and looking forward to a bright future for the industry.

**TL DR; Despite the crappy declining bitcoin market, our Bitcoin startup not only survived, but has thrived, growing over fifty-fold in volume, getting funding, expanding to several countries, and has turned one year old.**

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3bzncr/almost_exactly_one_year_ago_we_launched_our/

So gmaxwell means that if discrete logarithm assumption is broken such that it can solved within minutes for a newly seen public key, then your transaction broadcasted on the P2P network could in theory be replaced by the winning block miner spending it to himself. Funny since I had argued this point to him in the past when he was defending the power of the hashes to protect in a worst case outcome. Funny he now uses my argument against you.  


Cryptonote's Appendix A says double-spending ("Linkability") depends on the random oracle model (i.e. the cryptographic hash function) which the same assumption that CCT has. CN also a discrete logarithm assumption in the random oracle model on theft, same as for Bitcoin.

And don't expect the double-spending to be recognizable in Monero. For as long as the attacker only double-spends from rings that are not yet saturated, then he can double-spend indefinitely without detection.

So really there is no pragmatic difference in the threat of hidden inflation in CN or CCT, except perhaps you can argue that the break only needs to occur once in CCT and multitude of instances in CN or Bitcoin.

rpietila, thanks for your clarifications and explanations. Apologies for the overly aggressive wording "mining the shit out of it". What I am trying to get at there is that if some people will shill very aggressively that the only equitable way to do initial distribution to investors is via PoW, then another group can retort that front loading the emission curve is essentially the same outcome as an ICO (he who has capital and insight gets some shares) except for the differences:

• it gives the capital away to utility and hardware companies instead of the coin ecosystem (that is if network security is a non-issue), except the wealth effect which is not centralized with a leader
• it rewards technically astute over those investors with more money than time to mess around collecting coins in small morsels from exchanges, especially when clients require command line level skills and mining on Amazon EC requires a much greater level of skill
• it arguably can provide more anonymity, although an ICO via decentralized exchange between two anonymous coins could probably match that
• it front loads the requirement that the PoW hash has to exquisitely optimized right at launch, which is almost never the case.

One of the key reasons a typical PoW coin needs to do initial distribution via PoW is the threat of 51% attack and the need to rapidly scale up network security.

On the issue of volunteerism vs. collectivization of ICO funds with a leader, there are tradeoffs. The former is very difficult to incentivize radical innovation and also nearly impossible to seed fund deeply into the ecosystem, but is actually superior at the refinement stage as it doesn't overcommit to egregious error, i.e. it is more anti-fragile. The latter loads trust into a system that is aiming to be trustless, thus although expedient it is anti-fragile and can't scale well, but it can be very effective at making key investments of scale that couldn't be accomplished with the same efficiency (communication overload trying to organize and convince the politics, etc). In other words, the former has a trajectory that can't be altered (e.g. Monero and Bitcoin) and the latter is agile (e.g. NXT) but can diverge (e.g. Ethereum).

My thought it is possible to combine the best of both. One is better at the refinement stage and the other is better at the seed stage if the leader can demonstrate the ability.

Edit: I am surprised rpietila replied so quickly. I didn't know he was lurking. There was no coordination nor premeditation.

Edit#2:

The community is offering bounties, of course it is a different game as we don't have "free coins" but everyone must surrender actual value to get something done. On the other hand, this is called "voluntarism", which is the antithesis of "communism" practised by the premined coins.

I haven't heard that the devs could be "mining shit out of it". Mining Monero is somewhat tedious, because there is no ASIC, and GPU is not specifically good return. The only advantages you could get are using Amazon instances (mostly difficult, or else possible for all), botnets (not accessible by people except their owners, so a mandatory nuisance), or optimized miners (this era ended a year ago).

The emission schedule is a bit front-loaded, in part worse even than Bitcoin. At least Monero has perpetual emission (0.9%), which takes care of the network security and makes the game fairer. Less than half of the coins are mined, cf. 70% with BTC.

As for the ability to capture egrecious value by joining in now - yes, it is very much there. 1 XMR = 0.50 USD, and less exist than there exist BTC. So we are talking about BTC in 2010, and that's the year when many could have placed a sidebet worth a few $grand, yet did not do it, causing some gnashing of teeth for themselves.

Especially there is no need to care about mining, the coins can just be bought in surprisingly liquid markets.


That guy is like a broken record (or at least turns v e r y slowly): he was instructing to buy silver 5 years in a row and now he's been bullish on BTC constantly since it was $3, and still is. Despite his incessant shilling of XMR, he does not even have such a high % of his wealth invested (way less than the castle he owns in Estonia anyway - at the current valuation, the castle is nearing XMR marketcap).

I think it is correct to invest small amounts in many promising, +EV projects, Bitcoin and Monero (and Newcoin) included.


XMR is the "rich get richer" coin in the sense that the rich who grok it, can buy 100k XMR without sacrifice. The poor can only buy a few k.

Nevertheless, if it makes big, both will never need to work again.

Complaining about "devs" buying the coin at an early mover price is ludicrous as the price here and now is about -75% compared to last summer average ($0.50 vs. $2). In reality those who buy now, are the ones to be envied if it takes off. Are you in?


The guys who buy 1% of the coin supply and still have it, are rather few and far between. I don't know anyone in the world, except Satoshi, who still has his maximum amount of BTC.

If XMR would even to become as big as BTC, it would need to go up 2^10 times. Every time it doubles, statistics say, people tend to sell 17% of their holdings, distributing the coins to the newcomers whose interest is the cause for the price to double.

(1-17%)^10 = 0.15

After 1000-times upsurge, on average only 15% of coins still belong to the original guys. If we are talking about hindering the global economy with your wealth, we need a 1,000,000 times appreciation, at which point your holding is not 1% anymore but 0.01%, still a massive stash but not a disruptive one.

Good.  Even Gavin confirms that won't cause the sky to fall; BTC was designed to thrive under load (and duress).

Let a thousand fee markets bloom!   

I will respond to statements of factual inaccuracy. If you can find a quote from any of my usernames which refutes any of the following, then please share.

I said and still maintain the following about Monero:

• I once joined the dev chat room for a few moments, and they were going on and on about Linux and networking esoterica, which is not my interest nor forte. Seemed far off from the things I would like to focus on and gets my juice pumping.
• there is no great scaling for it in use as a currency that I can see
• it can't scale decentralized
• it uses I2P (which along with Tor I don't trust) to obscure the user's IP address (and if IP addresses are revealed the ring mixing anonymity can be unmasked)
• it doesn't appear to group and force mandatory rings in a way that prevents unmasking the anonymity
• the PoW hash function is not optimal for minimizing the differential between future ASICs and CPUs, i.e. I measurably know this because I have a better PoW hash function implemented
• In Cryptonote, the mixes have to be equal value which forces balances to be preloaded into powers-of-10, which complicates wallets, leads to more chances for combinatorial unmasking, and explodes the transaction data sizes (which has impacts on scaling, orphan rate, etc).
• afaik they have no coins to offer bounties because there was no ICO reserved for such (instead I heard the devs were mining the shit out of the egregiously front loaded debasement curve and rumor was the guy who optimized the PoW hash netted himself $150,000 before releasing the optimizations), nor would they like a rancorous dev coming in and rearranging the house
• I've heard (not verified) they inherited a sloppy C code base and I hate C and C++, even I am very proficient in those programming languages
• fluffypony (is he Australian?) was nasty to me from the get go (perhaps I was to him but I was just expressing my opinions similar to what I am saying now), which turned me off since he is apparently the most active dev. I've had respectful exchange with him since, and I retain no animosity towards even people who appear to have lost their mind.
• over a year ago, rpietila was telling everyone to buy more BTC at $600 and XMR was the greatest thing since sliced bread and I was turned off by the lack of cooler heads and objectivity. Since then, I come to respect smooth and realized that rpietila isn't the key voice of XMR (and I don't dislike rpietila, he is my friend and even a potential token amount seed investor of my controlling group... no I am would not pull rpietila away from XMR, he just likes small diversifications and he is my friend after all).
• XMR was a coin for those devs who already had money to invest, not for a dev like me who exhausted his former 18,000 oz stash and needs to strike it big one more time in life coming to old age without a retirement, blind in one eye, teenage dependents, and diagnosed with a chronic, progressive illness Multiple Sclerosis.
• it feels like most in Monero are Europeans and I am an American. This seems to be related to their major boasting about how the coin was launched "fairly" as a collectivist mining (with front loading no less ) instead of as an ICO. Seems even though we can probably work together technically if we have some independence and orthogonality in modules, there do exist some cultural attitude differences. Americans (of yore and I am a throwback X gen) tend to be adamantly capitalist, anti-collectivist, very "can do", etc.. My best friend from high school was a Lt. Colonel in USAF and he lamented to me once that he hated meeting with the NATO counterparts because mostly all they did was talk. Obviously Germans are perfectionists and I have some German ancestry.
• I was very ill most of 2013 and 2014
• they basically took someone else's work and capitalized on, convincing the market that other Cryptonotes were inferior. For me this felt more like freeloading than capitalism. Even if Boolberry was sort of instigating them by trying to make comparisons, the entire Cryptonote outcome felt like a clusterfuck to me. What innovations did Monero do? I recalled Michael Jordan's criticism when Lebron joined with Dwade and LongNeck in Miami, "I didn't want to join Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, I wanted to beat them." Competition and innovation makes the world a better place. Lebron is athletically nearly as gifted as MJ was, but he doesn't appear to have the same mental gifts. On the flip side, whatever made MJ great as a player, makes him a horrible GM/owner[1].
• probably lots of other reasons I am not thinking of off the top of my head

There were other things I had written and later retracted such as for example in debates with smooth. For example, I once had asserted that off chain mixing could have some advantage in that the mixes were not seen by the public, but smooth pointed out that if the NSA is truly recording every packet, then all the unmasking can be done if ever for example Tor's encryption is broken. There were other examples of issues that I retracted during discourse, such as formerly thinking Cryptonote rings could not be pruned, yet recently I revealed how to do that.

My main issue with Monero right now is that I can't see that they've solved all the issues and have momentum on its use as an anonymous currency. They are apparently making progress with a new web wallet coming, rpietila is making a game to potentially drive use as a currency. They probably have other initiatives in the works and I know also they feel that once the debt contagion accelerates, then they will be a beneficiary. We will see.

Also Monero doesn't precisely fit my goals which are to get rich, work on something interesting, and to solve the totalitarianism I believe we are facing. One aspect of "interesting" for me, is to rock the boat and make big waves. I love shocking people. Think of me as Michael Jordan or Dennis Rodman, in that I want to shoot the ball with my eyes closed or win doing it my way.

Yeah I am an American. That doesn't mean I can. Lots of loud mouthed loser Americans,  . America is at the top of the mountain and headed down the backside, but Europe is already more than halfway down from its former glory. The Asians will be taking over for us by 2032. I am in Asia now trying to adjust.

I have absolutely no desire to be involved in any pump and dump, nor do I want to own 1% of the economy (what a major responsibility and nearly impossible to allocate resources optimally at that scale).

You can be sure if ever I am involved in something it will be a fight to the finish (or unification), very high quality, and very serious. For me it is as much about making a mark on my life before I go, the challenge of competition, the wonderment of try to build something, as it is gaining some fortune to enjoy the time I have remaining.

[1]	http://swarmandsting.com/2015/06/26/reports-hornets-turn-down-four-1st-rounders-from-celtics/ http://www.seasonsover.com/nba/the-path-to-prosperity-the-timely-death-of-the-bobcats

Edit: also there some personal redemption involved in my motivation. For example, there is a certain Bitcoin core dev who seems to have a difficult to categorize what appears to be from my perspective an attitude problem about me. Perhaps it has something to do with the conjecture that math conquers creativity or something along those lines. Again I don't hold grudges, for me life is more fun if moveon, but some guys incessantly remind me that they do (hold grudges or repeat the same traits that rub me the wrong way). That is the food I love to eat.

But we're not ready for it.

Blocks are getting full now much more frequently.

Let's take it out a step further. At the moment we have the technocrats of Europe sacrificing the people of Greece for the sake of the union. While I think the main effect this has on bitcoin is awareness (also some speculation and new people getting in), lets say an economic event occurred that wasn't years in the making or was tantamount to a declaration of war: say China attempted to boot a country out of the SWIFT system (as the US did to Iran). Say this country was a US ally. All of a sudden the financial system itself is under threat. Citizens of the 'sanctioned' country are worst hit. Those in neighboring / allied / opposed countries would probably start to fear retaliation. The question becomes where do those who are able to move their money put it? With bitcoin representing a parallel system and now increasingly in the public mind's eye, I think the conditions would be ripe for a mass influx.

I'm pretty sure it was the HB Gary Federal e-mail hack which expose the multi-persona shill software and the U.S. Govt's purchase of some of it.  There have been second-sources for this.  It at least comes pretty close to a known fact I believe.  Of course it's possible that they bought it but it sits unused on a dusty shelf.  I find that very unlikely to say the least.


I swear I believe I've learned more tech by following (and sometimes engaging in) cat-fights on the net than from any other mode.  Back before the world wide web in the precambrian days of the usenet we had little to do but argue with and antagonize one another.  Better people than I focused on coding but I found it more relaxing to be a troll and a dick-head and it took considerable time away from doing useful work.