Topic: Is it possible to destroy Monero (XMR)? - page 2. (Read 10399 times)

QFT. 

No mechanism, perhaps, but there are people.  When the extreme wealth concentrators develop their relationships with other people, their hoards tend to dissipate.  This can be done well, in a generous, healthy and growth-positive dynamic, or pathologically, via thievery or guilt-trips, &c, creating unhealthy dependence relationships.


Jealousy is just another face of greed.

There is another reason to contend against the concentration of wealth:  The suffering created by poverty.  The injustice of extreme wealth divergence is plain, and for many of us, quite painful.  When I am in pain, I tend to lash out against the perceived cause.  When the pain reflex, the noble and just cause, and the venial jealousy are all aligned to a single focus, it is a powerful force, and difficult to effectively counter.  The solution is to factor the problem into its facets, and deal with them each individually on their own terms.

Out of curiosity, how can a coin be destroyed? Isnt that one of premise of crypto currency that noone can destroy or control your coins?

I normally appreciate your posts but this one is wrong on many levels.

Designing a model of distribution, and that is what basically a block reward is, is a social contract. it can by definition not have catastrophic design errors, because no one is forced to sign this social contract. it basically does not matter if the block reward halves, doubles or does whatever it likes as long as people see the social contract as valueable.

Designs like monero or bitcoin give cash a store of value function which is probably a first order condition for money. I cannot imagine a system in which you would see a velocity without value.

hodling bitcoins or monero is neccessary for giving it value. the argument that they are hodled forever is wrong, because every person will find a point where he is willing to sell. the only argument against this fixed supply design is volatility.

I have to admit that I like bitshares idea of using a token to create a derivative which maybe has a somewhat price stability and is more useful for spending and using, but to call the design of bitcoin and monero a catastrophic design error is wrong.

regarding the idea of voluntarily giving 1% of mining to development I would strongly suggest doing it. the argument that miners do not profit from development is also wrong. 

I created a thread to discuss coin distributions in general, and you and anyone else here might want to take a look and perhaps voice your opinions on why you believe XMR is the most fairly distrusted coin on the market.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/cryptocurrency-with-the-best-distribution-777213

You keep finding a way to write something so important that I feel compelled to reply.

I see some motivational advantages for this idea also versus a premine, but unfortunately it is insufficient. For any coin that does not have Monero's catastrophic design error of rapidly declining the block reward, the 1% will be insufficient when it matters most at the early stage where all the critical work is done before inertia and vested interests prevent further radical improvements (e.g. Bitcoin).

The rapidly declining block reward is a design error because the early hodlers lock up the coin and the rate of velocity of money and adoption decelerate (e.g. Bitcoin and Monero).


Another problem with the developer fee: it is a resource to fight over and it can fund the development of a bureaucracy, e.g. the MEW foundation (just see what happened to the Bitcoin foundation and you can be sure the same will happen to the MEW despite the best intentions and will of the current participants due to the Iron Law of Political Economics aka Mancur Olsen's treatise on the Logic of Collective Action).

Also it does give the appearance of being a corporation instead of an open source project.

The best funding model is still (as it was for Bitcoin) for the brilliant creator to take his stash and run after he has made the coin so popular that no one can refuse nor fork it.

Great thing about a premine is all those who obstinately won't buy the coin until AFTER everyone else does. I love that.

P.S. Did you know Satoshi perhaps limited the money supply to 21 million because that is what he could fit into standard double floating point arithmetic with each coin at 100 million of the smallest unit (satoshi). Nice excuse any way.


Edit: for the math deficient, note that a slower declining rate of debasement means the relative value (as a percentage of total mined coins) generated by the fee is less early on than for a more rapid declining rate of debasement. And there is no guarantee to the developer that his hard effort early on will be rewarded 10 years hence waiting for the fee to accumulate. Timing risk comes into play when borrowing long to lend short. This is what killed the banks in 2008. Hommel did teach me that future's contracts are evil.

Proverbs - Do not be surety for thy friend.


And when the majority do not adopt the social contract, it is a catastrophic failure. It the money doesn't circulate, it isn't a currency, and there is no adoption. See the Quantity Theory of Money.

Do you have any clue how fucking tired I am of writing that? I have only written that point about 50 times in my archives on this forum. Geez.

Good riddance to this forum! (I know it is not your personal fault, you did not read what I wrote in the past)


Absolutely false!

The magic show is coming soon to a theater near you.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. — Arthur C. Clarke


Risto is correct, many or most people aren't skilled or well-practiced in math and or macro economics.

(a)  The ecosystem difference between 2009 and now is huge.  An altcoin cannot necessarily do what Satoshi did.  For example, fluffypony and tacotime did not mine substantial fractions of the XMR output in its early days.  Some annoying miner unrelated to the project did.

(b)  Ongoing 1% dev fee is very different from a bounty.  It incents longer term goodness.  I *think*.

But - gotta get back to real work.  I think we're starting to go in circles and agree to disagree.

Yeah right.  All they have is  a whitepaper.  Talk is cheap but is good for a pump in cryptoworld.  Nothing more.

Satoshi mined the coins himself, everyone had equal chance to mine. So there is nothing wrong with his stash at all. He had to pay for mining to obtain the coins and so he did.

The Bitcoin Core developers have discussed bounties many times, and come to conclusion it leads to people stressing out bad quality code just to collect the paycheck.

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Indeed - why settle for a 1% ongoing dev fee when you can instead own more than 5% of the total number of coins that will ever be created?

I'd suggest looking to Linux as a better example of an alternate:  Most of the core kernel development work is done by people who work for companies (Intel, IBM, Google, etc.) that have collectively decided that Linux is so useful they want to make sure it stays around by subsidizing its development.  This isn't a bad model for Bitcoin either -- if, e.g., the exchanges all paid for one full-time developer.  But it doesn't work for a "startup" coin that doesn't have a well established ecosystem.

Perhaps rpietila's MEW is good enough - or better.  But coding takes money, because most coders like to eat and feed their families.

Sorry, DGA. Yes I realized it does not add more to inflation. I edited my post before you posted this one.
A change like this would make XMR like a company, but XMR is designed to be a currency and should be so.

Developers should find other ways to make money, I have already proposed making a Blockchain.info clone and make money from it.
Blockchain.info today is already a company making money.

It would be really silly the more I think about it, if Bitcoin had built in 1% fee to go to developers I doubt anyone would take Bitcoin seriously if this was the case.

A change like this would centralize development.

I like the crowdfunding approach and i think all investors should help with funding, they definately should have an interest in that.

The problem with miners deciding donations is, they don´t really care if the coin succeeds, they will just jump to the next if it fails.

Hi.  There's this thing called politeness.  It works even on the Internet.

Second - your comment makes me believe you aren't familiar with the BBR model that I'm advocating.  In BBR, 1% of the mining output is sent to the developer as a revenue source for ongoing development.  This 1% "dev fee" has nothing to do with inflation.  It decreases over time as the block reward decreases.  (It's also subject to a vote by the miners.)

(Edit)
I see you changed your response to this:

Right.  Because high-quality software writes itself!  Woo!  Ponies for everyone!  Unicorns too!

Let me suggest an alternate view:  the 1% ongoing revenue stream is to incentivize the developers to keep writing good software that increases the value and utility of the coin, which benefits everyone in the ecosystem.  Cryptocurrency is not a closed system; its real competitors are things like cash, checks, and credit cards.  To the degree that improvements to the core software allow any cryptocurrency to be more competitive against those established methods of payment, the players in the cryptocurrency win.  Actually, everybody wins -- except perhaps visa.

No. This is just stupid. XMR should be a currency, not some kind of company with profits to developers.

Duly noted and implemented.

Right.  Someone digs up a two-post conversation from the altcoin observer thread and then the next day there's a post in the Stealthcoin thread saying they're going to implement it.  Words are cheap.

Also, they're full of you-know-what when it comes to scalability.  As smooth already pointed out in the AO thread, and I think correctly, the real benefit of a sqrt(N)-scaling ring signature scheme is stronger anonymity through larger mixins.

As it stands, the Cryptonote family doesn't scale to visa sizes even with mixin=2 (for which there's no benefit from the cited ideas), and neither does Bitcoin.

yawn yawn yawn scam yawn yawn yawn empty promises yawn yawn yawn premine.

(edit:  In addition to wishing more coins would copy Gatra's soft-start approach to block rewards used in Riecoin, more coins should copy Zoidberg's 1% ongoing dev fee from BBR.  The incentive difference between a 1% premine and 1% ongoing revenue is HUGE.  The premine invites a fast pump and dump;  the 1% ongoing revenue motivates continued long-term development.

Heck - XMR should add this so the team has food on their plates. :-)

Yes, the whole thing sounds like typical pump and dump rumors. The whole thing sounds way too good to be true: ring signature level anonymity on a Satoshi based client with transactions one fourth of the size of standard CN transactions? Definitely sounds like bullshit. But I'd also love to see someone like AnonyMint(neutral unbiased evaluation - nothing personal to XMR people) have a look.

They have no idea what they talk about and didn´t even understand the implications of that Whitepaper.

I guess they need some new ammo for their pump: https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-XST

AnonyMint:

They are claiming ring signature anonymity with Visa level scalability. A.k.a your holy grail. Is what they say true?

I think for the most part it is not rational, or it is out of fear (of something). I don't own any XMR and I don't think it is a scam I have chatted with you (on poloniex as "addi") and fluffypony here, and have found you guys helpful.
I think one just has to rise above it and with attackers the best, and accept that this is a wild and chaotic place at times. All coins get attacked and it's probably good because to survive, and be taken on by the masses the coin will probably have to a good community and honest unflappable people involved.

If we wish people the best we don't even have to understand why.

One last attempt to explain how I see that the rich buys club is incongruent with the future.

I could summarize all my posts in this thread with the following outcome in the movie Braveheart:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdlL65LD6I4

You really should watch that and see the unexpected SWAN impale the rich boys British at the end.


Sorry that is just a constant size reduction and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ring-signatures can't be pruned, except by some other restrictions such as an expiry on coins.


There IS an obliterating black swan (i.e. Taleb's unexpected long-tail statistic event) they don't see, whilst they be doing busy-bee grunt work of fixing databases for a broken design, making a gui, etc..


And this produced how many million user products?

I have produced (one as a co-developer) three separate "million user" level products since 1980s. With a lot of goofing off vacation time in between (mea culpa).


I suppose this was directed to me as well as any others who aspire.

This is analogous to the inefficiency of saying that anyone who wants to buy french fries needs to travel to Belgium.

Those who are truly capable don't need any money. There will be too much money trying to be rammed down their throat.

Money is the weak thing to hold. Knowledge is strength.

My suggestion to you was to be more friendly and spread an insignificant (for you) investments around on all promising endeavors in order to be respected for your 1% instead of resented by the community. Also to give yourself more chance on not missing the swan boat when it comes. Your "Rpietila's Altcoin" thread instead of being a jovial and spirited discussion of exciting developments, should be renamed "Rpietila's Monero Membership Club". I am not upset about it, I am just relaying to you how it appears to others who are not brainwashed by "Monero is the answer".

You've already been friendly to me and you even gifted me 2 BTC. There is no problem between you and I. I am writing to gift you feedback, because in my analysis you are in the process of committing a fail and possibly a mega-fail.

Expecting busy hackers to go through personal interviews with you is I am sorry to tell from the perspective of a hacker insulting. I am not insulted, but I am telling you what sort of actions and attitude breed animosity. We build our reputations by our code, not our talking.

"Talk is cheap, show me the code"— Linus Torvalds

"Those who can't build, talk"— Eric Raymond

Your stance is fundamentally incongruent with the open source movement. Open source projects will spawn more and more granularly (smaller teams) and stored capital and top-down organization will become more and more irrelevant.

This is a virtual new economy; we only need to click a button to make an investment. We don't need to travel across the world. And we don't need to invest everything in one thing or two things, thus we don't need to know all the answers before the questions can even be asked. Creativity spawns serendipitously not as planned (even my own work lately proves this is true, because I didn't plan all the ideas I discovered along the way).

Open source is the odds of large numbers.

"Given enough eye balls, all bugs are shallow"— Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds

"Given enough experiments, all possibilities are achievable"— Shelby Moore III paraphrasing Eric Raymond paraphrasing Linus Torvalds

Eric Raymond noted that is the only known positive-scaling law in software engineering, i.e. that efficiency improves the more autonomous N actors involved. Design by top-down grouping or committee is not the same scaling law.

We don't have time to waste on top-down bureaucracy.

Warren Buffett doesn't do angel investing, because he wants to evaluate companies based on well established metrics. Angel investing is a game of more risky probabilities. Thus efficiency of scattershot is more important. Angel investing will become less and less like an exhaustive evaluation and more and more spontaneous and small, e.g. KickStarter. Everyone gives a little bit, not one big whale slowing everything down.

The Knowledge Age is the end of the road for large stored capital. The power-law distribution of wealth will shift to stored knowledge. Actionable knowledge will be power-law distributed. It already is. Which is why when you are searching for a needle in a haystack, don't tell the needle to jump to your castle.

P.S. I do want to have friendships and vacation in nice resorts such as castles. But that is vacation time. I can't mix business with vacation, it doesn't work. When I am coding, I need to be where ever I already am where I can code now, not tomorrow, not after a conversation, not after a glass of wine, not after ... Procrastination is the bane of software development. My best work has come when I didn't have material comforts.

I have not taken a shower in 2 months. I haven't washed my clothes, they are stink like a pig pen. I have not been outside of my room nor seen the sunshine except to restock on food.

Time is of the essence.

---

And the competing and equally devastating Apple Plan.