You can compress a file into an archive. You haven't made the file smaller, you've just compressed it. Putting blockchain into a database hasn't trimmed the actual dataset. It's just put it into a database, BBR would actually reduce the size of the dataset. Spending time on database is a commendable piece of work and a needed contribution to cryptonote, yet If I'm not wrong it's something which can, and would be expected be adopted by others. So you can have a 'pruned' dataset IN an embedded DB.
But it's not pruned, it's 'pruned'. It will continue growing forever - just because he bought an extra year or two for something that's not even really a problem for easily over five years doesn't really sell me on it right now. Specifically because it's an partial solution to something that's not important right now when the chain is small. If he doesn't spend time on things that are important right now - building community, a real GUI, protocol bug fixes, multisig, firing btc-mike .. and instead spends all day working on things that have zero effect right now .. but can be done in the future .. then why would I ever think that he's gonna be working on the right thing? If one were to take this illegitimate 'pruning' as a selling point .. I would feel that there's a distinct lack of prioritization. I'm just not sold on that one, because of the trade offs involved (below). He has time to create a database - so why not work on that? Yes, I agree that 'pruned' in an embedded DB would be fantastic, but the reality is that taking a potshot on my mixins isn't the way to 'prune' cryptonote. I don't know what is .. but it's not that.
Care to elaborate, exactly how he ruined your anonymity set? factoring in the mandatory mixin features added. I don't disagree with some of gmaxwells statements though.
That's just it - now there's mandatory mixin features, you're left with no freedom to choose to mix at all .. and you pay higher tx fees because of that. What does this spur? Someone on the CN site said it best: A tragedy of the commons! It will get to a point where the biggest damn transactions will be chosen over the small ones, to an extreme and much faster when on a comparison with bitcoin or even Monero. The transactions are already larger with CN - there's only so many that can fit into a block, and even then there's only so much to the adaptive limit. The space will run out, and miners will cash the transactions worth the most value. It will cause transaction witholding attacks etc etc .. not something I'd want to encourage. Apart from that .. CZ decided to make space by trimming RS's. That means this data is not there to mix with when it originally would have been! Now we absolutely need miners to cash the highest mixin transactions in order to make more of an anonymity set, so that you can remain cryptographically anonymous in the first place!
Why do you keep bringing up the database.. after XMR team commandeered Bitmonero, rebranded and began their (very good) concerted marketing efforts, was there a database? NO. so same question to you- why do you want to trust those guys who never put the time into putting in a real database in the first place? Why didn't they do a proper relaunch and fix the problems? instead of just hijacking, changing the name initially and calling it a day. Because they weren't in a rush right?
Monero was launched by TFT, not the team that is in control today (I know you know this). I was here since the launch was delayed about an hour and a half because TFT couldn't compile binaries. Shit yea I made some Moneros, then I bought much more than I mined on top of that! Why would you need a 'proper' relaunch when there was no violation of the social contract in the original? It was fair in every regard. Just because theres no DB doesn't mean it's not fair. That just means it needs improvement .. because it would be retarded to relaunch a fair coin that was taking up a little more disk space than bitcoin, but was still totally accessible to anyone that was asking for it. How do you have a problem with people taking control of an open source project? I'm just not seeing a problem with this .. people decided to support Monero, the currency, and then the original team or two (probably more factoring in the coin-mill argument) made a decision that exactly zero people agreed with .. and an alternative was offered by the very same group that's in control today. The community voted them in, and the old idiots out. What we were left with was a group of people that haven't fucked us over to date. I consider that a good decision.
Anybody could of cloned bitmonero and rebranded it as moneronxt or some moronic shit without making any changes at that time, just promised ones at a future date... No shit they would be first to launch then. No shit BBR launch was a little later because it actually implemented it's own novel ideas. Brand new PoW for instance. A whitepaper of which was recently released yet torn to shreds by die hard monero supporters nitpicking at minor (mis)interpretations of sentences, the dev doesn't even have english as a native language.
btc-mike mentioned somewhere that he made comments in that paper as well .. not sure what you're doing defending the language part. Also - peer review. Btc-mike seems to know English. Hell, CZ probably could have paid someone twenty dollars and got someone to read it for grammar .. not my problem. Fact is - he didn't do it, and chose to release a shoddily-written white paper .. which are generally things that suffer through incredible amounts of abuse regardless of grammar errors or the fact that CZ wrote it. No amount of tears after the fact is going to change that. Guess it's time to make another go at that one.
We come again to the predictable answer 'they are working on it' ... 'doing it properly' (stab at other coins implying they aren't) - XMR started by copy pasting BMR without making any changes to launch earlier but now the team is working on it and that's what counts. It'll come soon...please.. So maybe BBR dev is also 'working on it gradually' like XMR works on their features gradually. As you know.. you cannot rush these things..
Ultimately, the argument you use to deride BBR is the same one you use to support XMR. If XMR is amazing because it's fixing problems not today but X date into the future, why can't BBR or any other coin be be that way?
My concern with BBR is not that the development is slow or in process, where did I say that? My concern with the development of BBR is that he is working on:
The whole point of this being a trustless, transparent feature baked in is so you don't need a (usually centralised) third party service. It's a frictionless process to send money to an alias with BBR. No need to remember a long string of characters, no need to trust any other service. With XMR to send money to your friend alice, you have to ask her for her address, and then paste something like 226f0f1682c3f5afda441789f4c9eee0c124586c4fd729c3103f63f4675f225b to send her funds. You have to save that into a notepad file or address book to keep track of it. With bbr, you could just type @alice and hit send. No arguing that that isn't a nicer experience.
You don't need trust for a wallet address either. Just because I have to right-click copy and paste one string doesn't really make me mad I have to do the same with the other. Then there's the name squatting -- again introducing a tragedy of the commons. You're setting people up against each other on shit that doesn't need to be implemented into the protocol. Oh the horror of copying and pasting!
With bbr, you could just type @alice and hit send. No arguing that that isn't a nicer experience.
Which works if I know about less than ten people. Anything more than than an I'm gonna save the alias in a notepad anyways - because again tragedy of the commons will force people to compete for alice1, alice2, and alice3. How do I hold all these alices? In a notepad - with their last name and other contact info the same as I would with XMR. It's a non-benefit novelty feature that will wear itself out as soon as people have to compete for aliases.
what was affordable because nobody wants the coin -- The mandatory donation to the author of moneros closed source GPU miners? I can't see how you'd even try to argue that closed source miners with pitfalls twisting your arm behind your back if you don't donate (you earn more donating than the loss of hashrate in not) are better than open source BBR miners for the ecosystem.
Yeah - funny thing demand is. If people want the coin, and you have what produces the coin .. are you gonna feel compelled to give them that for cheap? The bounty for the BBR miners to be open sourced was considered a fair price for it at the time (otherwise there would be no source). Because the value offered was less than what is currently offered for an open source XMR ATI miner, I'm making the correlation that demand was less. The market cap has already reached a significant value to afford open sourcing the XMR Nvidia miner, and only time will pass before the bounty will be considered significant enough to open source the ATI miner. Whether this will correlate with an increased market cap, increased difficulty, or decreased demand are not up to me. As the value currently stands at roughly 500 XMR and some BTC, I don't think it will be soon. Fortunately, a small developer fee is being easily bought every day .. while still giving people fair access to minting the coin. If it weren't then nobody would use the program.
You haven't actually argued against the point there. the vision was supposed to be "close to BTC original curve" < Does it look close to BTC curve to you? half of all supply mined within a year.. seriously? I'm fine with it, because the more for me and less for others the better, as is everyone elses mentality lucky enough to be here early on, but it means potential pool for participants is much smaller. If BTC was 50% mined in 2009-2010, when it was more mature than XMR, (although the concept wasn't) I'm sure it wouldn't have taken off in the same way.
But saying that I can't pretend there hasn't been worse around, the fact NXT is near the top of the crypto market caps is testament to that. Also have to concede if the free market believes. they'll buy regardless of the distribution. Still can't lie and say it doesn't seem shortsighted, perhaps even lazy and greedy to not have tweaked it.
TFT was the one who added the 'feature' (bug) to change it from 120s to 60s which caused it's own set of problems. It since hasn't been corrected. It's one of the reasons you saw so many orphans- verification is expensive, that wasn't optimized, neither was the daemon, etc all CN coins had problems but XMR had issues even more so with introduction of 60s block. When XMR was hijacked from TFT, the new devs made no effort to fix his questionable changes, Those params were left the way they were, despite there being arguments against them they were left to stay . Why even choose it? why keep it.
They couldn't be changed at this point, no way. It would harm XMR too much.. So it HAS to be swept under the rug and masqueraded as an intentional design choice to save face.
I guess I should explain - my personal stance is that absolutely none of us knows exactly what emission curve is correct for a cryptocurrency in 2014. Not how long it should go on for, not how much should be in the reward .. we're getting a good idea on block times but that's about it. I think many agree that a couple weeks is too short .. but look at some of the PoW/PoS coins that are still around. Clearly I'm not 100% right, and don't claim to be because it would be insane to tell these people they're wrong unless I was from the future and knew the correct emission for a cryptocurrency. In short - I don't argue the point because I have no legitimate opinion about the emission curve, and I'm okay with not knowing exactly how it's going to turn out.
I think most people dismiss it as a bug .. because if we all understood CN, we would have had a valid understanding of the block rewards and known before TFT launched the coin. Shit was open source from the launch. The social contract is in github, not on the OP .. that's why this shits open source. TFT lied to us, but the social contract is and has always been the current emission. The only fix I think anyone can agree on would be to change the block times, and keep the emission. That's probably gonna be a 'run this version of the source or that one, up to you' kind of thing though .. I hope it happens and there's no serious divide like the last time something like that was used in XMR.
. I certainly wouldn't do it for fun.