Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 140. (Read 387552 times)

I was quite relieved to see that someone well-known for vetting vulnerabilities had chosen to test those vulnerabilities in a sandbox, and that same person also felt comfortable saying something interesting about finding out what BitJohn wants to say about it. The interaction shows me that a possible double-take is going to take place with regard to the current impression from otherwise sensible people, and maybe some legitimate recognition might come out of it. Hell in the very least, if the worst comes out of it .. I can stop wondering 'what if' and move on . I like to see something when literally in one day one of the loudest voices here already did a double take (Spoetnik) on the project.


This brings up something interesting that might have something to do with this. We speak in terms of 4000 or 5000 tx's per second for visa/mastercard. Do you know of any links that will explain how many of those tx's reside in the under $10 range, or in the $10.01-$100.00 range, and in the +$100.00 range? It's dawning on me that these niches we're describing might be of both value, and function, rather than just function. Perhaps, as we both seem to agree that multiple cryptocurrencies should/will exist, these niches will include an average transaction value as well as the other variables in the niche.

I'm willing to bet this information might shed some light here .. I could see many people being fine with a high-scale crypto with no anonymity so long as the purchase is low and not really requiring the need for privacy (think groceries - not prescriptions, where maybe you only put $50 in your wallet at a time). I'm thinking this CN might fill a niche for a little bit more costly purchases because of what it offers. Honestly, I'd find it crazy to want to ever hide the fact that I bought some milk, eggs and bread from the grocery store from anyone - I just don't care about it (add: though I do respect the impression that some feel they should restrict this information - and agree that sometimes it might be the right choice), and why would I go overkill and permanently obscure that data when it's not needed. OTOH, if I'm buying some vicodin and have thousands of dollars in my bank account well I just might want that not known by everyone. What if, instead of the number of transactions scaling, we were to observe the capability of cryptocurrencies of handling typical transaction values of one higher magnitude every decade or so (yes I'm pulling from Moore's law here - but just in a different light).

Alternatively, lifestyle purchases like the specific shoes I wear .. or computer parts I own .. yeah I can see a niche for that where I wouldn't want everyone to know what I'm buying. These items are a little more expensive and could easily be used to spam me and track me. I don't buy these types of things all the time, and would argue that the need for a specific transaction needs much much less of a scaled usage. This is where I see the currency no longer really needing to support a consumer culture and moving toward the frontier of a business. That would be good information to have -- how often do businesses make purchases compared to consumers making purchases.



So as opposed to bitcoin, where only two transactions (I think) from my wallet are required to link my purchases, we've effectively moved the order of magnitude of possible transactions before linking/identifying by two full decimal places in this example, before needing a different wallet. That's a huge leap. Repeating here, I'm starting to lean toward CN not needing to scale as high as bitcoin due to possibly less transactions taking place of higher value than the number of micropurchases taking place. I can imagine some form of possible conjoined wallet where I could set parameters that I either pay from a bitcoin wallet or a CN/anon example in such a case (set by conditions that I can choose before the time of purchase IE: less work). Maybe I'm totally wrong and it will instead just be certain demographics that use one coin .. but what it's looking like is that any one person from any one demographic will be able to choose from a plethora of cryptocurrencies, the one of their choice at the time of purchase .. provided any of them get that far (though I agree very few would get this far).

I don't know for sure if we'd need another ten or twenty years before the possible value usage can be scaled or not to something that can handle for example $10,000 dollars safely .. but the reality right now to me, is that we're having trouble providing a scale to even $100 dollar transactions safely (but I do know with certainty that something capable of that is beginning to surface right now, and is something with which I'd consider purchases a full order of magnitude higher as 'within a realm of possibility'). Specifically the blockchain bloat you and many others have pointed out will be a major factor in trying to get this to scale. Of course it's totally possible that the next best thing could come out tomorrow that will handle everything.

I agree, it's the target market that stands to lose the greatest here. It's with that in mind that, to date, I've only mentioned this to people and not business owners. I think the target market is still something that's up for debate, because the scope of the newest project still has yet to be achieved.

I publicly (on this forum) warned bytemaster about that while he was designing it. I stopped following his work last year. He did present at least one good idea I adopted as optimum—select the block solution with the lowest value over some interval to mitigate the orphan issue.

No I really mean 2 megaBYTES. 4G LTE. Sometimes it is faster (and sometimes slower, or no 4G LTE coverage at all), but that it is pretty common.

Anybody can create a shitcoin, but useful cryptounits may or may not be intrinsically rare. It depends whether what rpietila is saying has merit. Perhaps it is not possible to fully solve issues of "bloat" with any coin and also provide other attributes that people want in these crypto-units (privacy and liquidity for a start).

If that is true, then the units might not be rare but blockchain space might indeed be very scarce (and then must be somewhat expensive). It is a useful perspective.

I am referring to if you wanted full nodes to be plentiful and have the ability pop in and out of the network spontaneously, in order to defeat for example blacklisting by the authorities.

Perhaps these nodes could download only what had changed since the last time they were online (or they keep another connection always on to stay up to date and only pop in and out for their node presence). But even so, the sizes computed below are intractable for those who don't have a server farm of hard drives.


I don't understand how you computed that metric? Even if your standard denominations are powers-of-2 from $1 to $1024, that is 10 denominations. And then you need to multiply the signature sizes by the number of inputs which determines the level of mixing. Anything less than say 16 inputs is not much statistical anonymity.


You mean 2 megaBITS/sec, thus 48 days.

Bitcoin is at 60,000 tx per day and I think Visa + Mastercard is 6,000 per sec. So multiply the 10GB for Bitcoin blockchain by 8000 (= 80 Terabytes) just to get to current commerce. And Visa + MC don't do micro transactions. With micro transactions we would be in the Petabyte range.

So even if your bloat is only a constant factor less than an order-of-magnitude, the real problem is one-time ring signatures defeat the mini blockchain design (because you can't know which address has which balance with ring signatures).

Edit: I think there is some effort underway looking into how to prune the Bitcoin blockchain, but afaics this won't be possible with ring signatures because you don't know which inputs were spent. There are some heuristics that could be applied, but it looked very messy when I thought about it a bit. One of the mixed inputs not spent can cascade and prevent the pruning of all those mixed with.

Why should I if I don't have to?

Crypto-units are not intrinsically rare (competition abounds even amongst Cryptonote coins), although what appears at the moment to be rare are designers who can solve all the fundamental issues.

I don't believe you need to download the entire blockchain to a mobile device, and we now have some real world usage data showing that Monero (ring sig plus denominations) vs Bitcoin for typical usage is not orders of magnitude (it might be around 5x).

But putting those aside (it is certainly true that widespread adoption means much higher transaction volumes), a terabyte is not necessarily a show stopper. I get about 2 megabytes/sec on my mobile devices. That is 6 days to download, not a year. Soon this will be considered slow. I've heard talk about gigabit mobile (50x faster than mine -- download 1 TB in hours).

P2Pool is not a solution, because it can be attacked with the Share Withholding Attack. I've pointed this out many times, but my point isn't known by most people so it gets forgotten.

Agreed the centralization of pools is a fundamental and yet unsolved problem.

Edit: this Ethereum blog post discusses some of the incentives to centralize pools (see the Pools section).

I would urge you to think of the idea of intentionally living with a rigid or punitively expensive cap of daily transactions.

The transaction cost for physical gold bullion transactions is always 1% or more of the value, typically 2% (not counting all the externalities such as your time).

I am in favor of drastically increasing the price of something that is rare and valuable, and would not even notice paying 1 XMR fees.

Discussion ongoing in another thread about Monero scaling.


I already said one-time ring signatures are an improvement, except they come at the cost of defeating the mini-block chain, which is the only way I can see to scale to micro transactions and remain decentralized (assuming you want new mining nodes to be able to pop up, download the block chain, and leave the network at-will to guard against IP blocking by the authorities, etc...).

As for "chances", note that if you have 1 in 1000 chance of losing your anonymity for any single transaction or mining share submitted, then after 100 of them your probability of being anonymous has dropped to 1 in 10. Now I realize this doesn't take into account that access to your ISP or upstream router is not a random trial, so the point is in some respects specious. My point is that if you are talking about hiding my wealth from the G20's plan to hunt down and confiscate all wealth, then I'd rather something the NSA can't see easily and hackers can't see with some effort. Suppose you are in a nasty divorce, and your ex (or her attorney) wants to get revenge on you so they hire some hackers. That is not so rare. And there are many scenarios that overlap.

And if you are targeting business usage, then the extortion and espionage value of hacking it increases.

Funny news for TOR client coins

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/russia-research-break-tor/

Flatscreens kicked out CRT's, but both are still televisions (add: and the infrastructure that went into the TV networks is massive!). I agree that there's a lot into bitcoin right now, but we just got our foot in the door here. The general feeling I get from this board is that we're collectively on the verge of settling on a new monetary base of exchange for the world .. which has been largely based on gold, silver or other precious metals for over 4000 years. I'm not seeing how a 5 year head start is gonna take home all the bread. In short, the ending to every mild disagreement ever here (even though I shudder every time I see it): We'll see


You're right! I didn't get it, sorry! I was a little confused

Heh, I've stopped worrying about FUD for a while now. Now I just take the statements as they come to the extent I can understand them, because for all I know I'm probably not gonna understand what they mean in the first place. I'm fine with being wrong though .. part of figuring out what we're all doing here.

#1 Too much VC money, infrastructure and first mover advantage for xmr to compete head on with btc. Besides if BTC is facing the upcoming regulations and various government pressures while not being anonymous the same would apply to xmr in a exponential way.

#2/3 I dont think you understood, or i wasnt clear enough, the tradeoffs in the blockchain size (or clunkyness as you refer to) at the moment are a joke of a price to pay for the advantages monero offers.

The technology as you stated is very new and will get better I have no doubts, but i reference what it is at the time of my posts.

I am quite a large holder of XMR, to the tune of 25-30% of my btc holdings and it is the only other coin i hold so don't take this as FUD etc...so yes i do have faith in it.

Bitshares did it in an extremely poorly designed way by having an IPO where it's possible for the dev to to create thousands of mule accounts, send BTC in with all of them, get infinite premine + all his money back, then have plutocratic voting to determine delegates based on who owns the most coins afterwards.  The entire thing is a train wreck.  You can't get rid of mining for distribution, amongst numerous other changes they would have to do for how their system works to make it not a blatant scam.

What makes you think bitcoin will achieve mainstream adoption? Because someone told you it's gonna be worth a lot some day? Because someone said it's gonna be on some real markets soon? Really, the logic here is that because bitcoin has shown progress, it will be adopted by the entire world. Well cryptonote now has a coin with its own exchangemarket, GUI wallets, and is showing favorable responses. Your logic doesn't make sense that there's zero chance it can be adopted ever than by a couple thousand people .. as by your definition there are people telling you it's gonna be worth a lot some day, and there's actual progress.

So you're worried about bloat? Have you forgotten about lightweight wallets? What about other ways to mitigate the size of the blockchain, that you don't know about? These are all impossible to fix in the future, just because at one point in the past the data took up a lot of space? You really think the intended target audience is only people that want a personal swiss bank account? I hope you realize it could be much more as well.

Or are you trying to make the point that because the technology seems clunky right this moment in time only three months after discovery you'd use it as a swiss bank account? That's a large thing to say about something that's only three months old .. you must have a lot of faith in this to want to use CN as something like a swiss bank account.

How novel, somebody should do that.

I think introducing reputation is required to fix proof of stake.  Yea, I'm well aware reputation increases centralization, but I would argue it's extremely difficult to make something more centralized than Bitcoin already is using that method:

The BTC price is too high for it's current security model

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/the-btc-price-is-too-high-for-its-current-security-model-710107

I consider current PoW a complete dead end unless you can do something outrageous like enforce p2pool at the protocol level.

If I can make a coin using PoS + reputation that most people would estimate would last years, if not decades or more before the security model really had even a chance to break down, how is that worse than Bitcoin when Bitcoin can collapse at any second?

There's a trade off for everything, but with PoW, we are currently being fed the illusion of decentralization and security, and it's basically a lie.

I don't think anyone in this thread actually believes monero could overtake bitcoins mainstream adoption, EVER.

Now that said, blockchain bloat can be an issue but lets take this into perspective with the quote above.

If bitcoin is the actual threat to the current banking industry we could view monero as the offshore banking currency to bitcoin.

I wonder how many people here have actually used offshore/swiss banking? Fees are much greater than traditional US/EU banking and people accept them on a daily basis because the offshore banking provides them whatever service they require.

Offshore banking in general is much riskier than traditional banking aswell. Anyone with the slightest experience in any type of offshore banking will confirm this in a split second.

Now my point being, whether it is Monero (likely at this point in time due to its tech) or another crypto down the line, blockchain bloat will be the least of the intended target audiences worries. These are the same people you are targeting who pay much higher fees in the real world for these services and a bigger blockchain is in reality a joke in comparaison.

Sometimes we step too far away from the real world problems that can be solved and dwell too much on smaller technical issues that are definatly acceptable in some situations in regards to the solutions they offer.

I'm not worried about my nieces hand ending up in my mailbox, if that's the level to which you're trying to observe my trust in online financial anonymity from people I've never met toward other people I'll likely never meet .. but I'm not gonna pack it up and go home just because some anonymous stranger on the internet tells me my goals are too big to be tackled (however good their intentions are). I'm not here to track the exact level of anonymity and throw it all down on horses, I'm here to say which guy is running faster or slower than the others .. and right now no matter the level toward which my finances are secure .. bitcoin is in dead last (you've helped me understand that by a lot). There's other problems with specific details, that you've also pointed out and I'll admit that list I made in your thread was created largely from your information, and some others.



That's why you're the best I got, Lisowski ! All of anything ever is for sale to the highest bidder! The higher they have to pay, the more value I feel comfortable placing into what they're paying for. Of course there is a limit to which I'd trust anything .. but I can say right now that I'd be fine buying goods under $10 dollars right now with CN .. provided the service was offered .. of course I could also say the same about bitcoin here .. but at least with CN I might feel comfortable making $100 purchases in the future. With bitcoin I do not. Is this wrong?

If the only information the adversary has is the blockchain and you have employed the one-time ring signatures with sufficient mixing (i.e. the adversary hasn't Sybil attacked your inputs), then (assuming the cryptography hasn't been cracked) the adversary can not reasonably trace the transaction such as to identify the originating and destination address.

However if the adversary has hacked or has an inside contact at your ISP (or upstream router), or is the NSA, they can potentially use information about your traffic patterns to break the anonymity on the blockchain (not only for you, but for potentially for everyone mixing with you on the blockchain if they can do this for many of you).

In other words, the anonymity can potentially fall apart in the real world.

This is why Monero is adding I2P support to try to obscure this additional vector of information leakage. However, these low latency networks admit in their FAQs that they are not able to obscure from an adversary who can see both the entry and exit traffic because timing analysis can be employed. If you only have a few pools, then the exit nodes for mining shares and transactions should be known and hackers can target their ISP or upstream router (correct me if I am wrong).

So yes time and resources are needed, but I bet surprisingly less time and resources than you might be assuming.

Hacking is something that can't be just wished away. It is a real and growing phenomenon. And your private information is for sale to the highest bidder.

Privacy is the notion that your identity is associated with some activity, but certain details of the activity are not disclosed. Anonymity is the notion that your identity is not associated with some activity.

For example, Zerocash obscures all the transaction information—it is all private. But there is no mechanism to obscure that you are connecting to the Zerocash network, thus your participation in the network is not anonymous.

So do note I said one-time ring signatures are an improvement, but they come with a high cost in terms of blockchain scaling (as far as I can see).