Topic: What cryptocurrency is closest to my ideal? Monero? (Read 3391 times)

I as I explained near the bottom of my prior post, I don't think advertising is what wins but rather a superior fit of the product to the market.

Dash is doing a very good job of explaining the reason crypto-currency hasn't been adopted and thus their marketing to speculators is excellent.

But afaik where Dash is failing is in actually solving the problem they correctly identified and enumerated. At the 7min point in the Dash video, Dash is incorrectly applying a model of the credit card and Paypal advantages over prior payment systems.

But there is no way that crypto is going to be significantly more secure in the eyes of the masses than Paypal. And the switching incentives they propose are not powerful and sufficient motivators for the masses.

I have a plan that addresses precisely this chicken-and-egg dilemma. As I have said many times before, the way to bring the masses onto crypto is to provide something they want which requires or works significantly better than legacy systems in some important way with crypto.

So while we can say Dash is doing a good marketing job of pulling the wool over the speculators eyes, afaik they have absolutely failed in terms of achieving any adoption amongst those outside of our speculation ecosystems.

This applies to pretty much everything, and another important thing is that marketing has to begin way before launch to be competitive.

I think Coke had better distribution.

For me it is mostly in the logo and fact that I grew up seeing logo on gas stations in the Old South this so Coke is tied into my hot summer refreshing soda (i.e. it is tied into my tradition and familial memories):



The Pepsi logo is horrible:



Edit: confirmed my intuition:



And this is true also, that I drank 4 or more bottles of Coke per day in my youth, so I liked the taste was not too sweet and more acidic:

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/rivalries/2013/08/pepsi_paradox_why_people_prefer_coke_even_though_pepsi_wins_in_taste_tests.html

My gf says Coke tastes better. So instead of marketing, it may be that Coke has the superior product and can just keep a consistent marketing and product, which is why they are more trusted and favored.

So please don't attribute too much to marketing.

I know I said i was going but I have another question that i'm going to ask in a new thread.

Anyway, regarding the above point, during my research on crypto-currencies I saw lots of paid dash advertising, mostly on youtube at the start of videos, but I saw some banner ads, and I know they are sponsoring events etc.

I saw absolutely 0 paid advertising for Monero or even Bitcoin.

My personal belief is that you can have the best crypto-currency in the world, but if hardly anyone knows about it, then it will go nowhere.

There is a thing on youtube somwhere comparing pepsi to coke, in blind taste tests pepsi always wins, but coke sells by far the most volume, because of better marketing.

I know you are planning on creating your own, it might be something to keep in mind

More conjecture on Dash:


Relating the marketing of Monero as compared to your point about Dash marketing to mainstream:

I was trying to influence you to not be so overly enamored with Monero wherein you would put all your investment in one coin. Crypto is complex. I think it is very wise to diversify. I like the mix you chose. Reasonable given the info you have, and that you are only putting in $1000 so you can't expend too much time+effort on this.

Personally I appreciate you sharing your process with us. Helps me understand the perspective of newbies like yourself.

^* Also you helped me realize two potentially important conjectures, so major bonus points for me.

Well thankyou everyone for your replies.

I have learned a lot.

I have made the decision that I will go with:

$500 Monero (its the most private coin in the top 10 as far as my understanding goes and I think privacy is an important issue)
$400 Bitcoin and i'll just hope at some point in the future the issues that it has (privacy, transaction speed) are fixed
$100 Dash (Marketing is worth something, and its the only coin I regularly see advertisements for around the place, I know its marketing as a private coin and it isnt really one but I think its mainstream appeal could make it bigger than its fundamentals suggest it should be for a while at least)

So thats that, it will be done soon so no point trying to change my mind now, and I probably wont be back to these forums for a while.

Next time i'm back it will probably be me wanting to dip my toe into mining something, I still like the concept of the storage coins so maybe one of those.

Once again thankyou everyone who replied for your input.

Bye.

I made two conjectures (and I stress they are only conjecture at this point, not proven facts).

1. The ability to spam a lot of transactions enables the attacker to know the anonymity sets and thus aids in deanonymizing. This is why we have high txn fees with anonymity coins, in order to (hopefully) make it too costly for spamming the anonymity sets. I conjectured that a miner with x% of the hashrate could fill up his blocks with transactions paying the txn fee to himself (since he is the winner of the block as the miner). @Smooth retorted that the blocks will always be nearly full (because of Monero's unique block size adjustment algorithm which tries to fit the block size to the exact rolling average of block sizes), thus displacing paid txns with the attackers would cause the attacker to lose the same revenue as if the attacker was not paying the txn fees to himself. Get the logic? Programmers think this way, with twists of deep logic. Any way, I retorted that if the block size adjustment algorithm works that way, then it means Monero is broken in that it can't handle transaction load spikes. So either way, I found a serious flaw in Monero. It can't be both ways.

2. I conjecture another serious flaw in Monero. Going forward, the only way anonymity will be compatible with a civilized society is that we need a way to declare (and for the State to verify) our tax obligations without destroying our privacy (and we can't trust officials with our privacy as they can be bribed and for example the TSA were caught masturbating to nude xray images from airport scanners). Any form of taxation other than taxing assets owned (e.g. not income but excise taxes) will still require at least reporting received payments (perhaps we could tax VAT only on tangible sales but still the payments might be via crypto-currency). The only way I can think of to accomplish this is to prove in zero knowledge the sum of our outgoing and incoming payments. In other words, we prove (separately, i.e. two proofs) the total of what we paid out and the total we received, but such proofs reveal nothing about the individual transactions involved except which ones they were. Yet note with CoinJoin-like anonymity protocol, the sending transaction is entirely disconnected from the received output. So identifying your outgoing and incoming transactions (but not their amounts) with CoinJoin does not reduce the anonymity at all (except to reveal you did a transaction but nobody knows how much and to/from whom). So I conjecture I know an algorithm+protocol that can do this (and I think I have a solution to CoinJoin's jamming or synchronization weakness), but Monero can't because Shen-noether's (Monero's upcoming) RingCT (or even just the original ring signatures of Cryptonote on which Monero is currently based) do not allow identifying the sender of the transaction. The entire point of ring signatures is the sender is one of many in the anonymity set. Thus Monero's form of anonymity appears to be incompatible with civilized society. But I conjecture that I know a way to do the anonymity that will be compatible with civilized society! This is a major revelation! On top of my recent (unpublished) work to develop the perfect blockchain consensus algorithm which solves all the other problems. So I feel like I am on a roll now, finally hitting full stride with my project plans.



Afaics, those decentralized file storage tokens have no value other than the misunderstanding of speculators:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17956009

All technical mumbo jumbo to me (but i'm sure you didnt want my response lol!!)

Storj seems to be doing ok similar to maidsafe but seems to be more developed but has lower market cap for some unknown to me reason.

Proof of Storage seems interesting to me but considering how far down the coinmarketcap index Burst is, there must be something wrong with it I dont know about.

Monero was never cheap. So whoever have lots Monero he paid them expensive.  The ones who got Monero cheapest was the ones that bought them on Poloniex a year and a half ago at $0.5.    What you said is so far from reality in Monero case. Monero is one of rare coins where this is not to be worry about. Coins were not almost free when Monero come out. I bought mine like 50 days after start and paid like $2-3. One year latter cloud get them 5 times cheaper.


And what is happening now is exactly the case. Everyone expect BTC rally. So people buy BTC with any alt they have. Alts with huge bagholders dont do that and crash price. alts with many small holders lose price. This will turn around soon.

I also favor Monero, However, we don´t really know if the early developers still hold big amounts. Many people are saying they do, or at least someone does, and that a big dump is eminent.

IMO, miners are pushing down the price because they have to pay for the costs, and that's the cause of the decreasing value, but I also believe there's someone out there with a lot of coins stashed just waiting for the right time to dump them. And this could wreak havoc on the currency. But, if that is so, why didn´t they dumped the stash when the coin was at its all time high???

Another issue with Monero's anonymity occurred to me tonight when I was at the grocery store and I was thinking about how can we have anonymity yet also comply with the need to report our earnings and expenditures for government tax compliance. If everyone is reporting, then the anonymity sets collapse and so does the anonymity for everyone (even those who didn't report).

So I got to thinking (yeah all inside the grocery store) that from my work in designing Zero Knowledge Transactions (my unvetted design which competes with and predates Monero's RingCT and which is based on Compact Confident Transactions which in theory are more efficient than Blockstream's CT which RingCT is based on), that I am pretty sure we can do a NIZKP (zero knowledge proof) of a total of all payments sent and received using CCT (not sure if can also do it with CT). Thus we could prove to the government how much we expended and earned without giving the government the detailed amounts for each transaction, thus not breaking the anonmity sets.

But then I realized this won't work with ring signatures, because ring signatures require that the sender isn't known publicly. Thus there is no way to prove the sum without revealing which ring signatures are yours, thus unmasking your anonymity.

So I realized that instead we need offline anonymity mixing like CoinJoin. Then I remember that last year in my discussions with @jl777, I had revealed my invention for how to remove the jamming problem from CoinJoin and make them scale and work properly. I specifically figured out how to let the signers sign independently of each other!

So I am thinking I might have the best anonymity solution after all! But I will need to think out the details more later. How ironic would that be if I win in the end against @Shen-noether. Oh how sweet it would be after how he was so condescending to me when I did peer review with him on Reddit. I had pretty much put anonymity on the low priority queue because it seemed like Monero and Zcash had it all wrapped up (and it seemed to me that anonymity wasn't the huge market to drive millions into crypto, yet here in this thread I can see it is important to some investors). But hmmm, maybe they don't! My only interest in anonymity lately (in 2016) was to contemplate how to make it lightweight and compatible with microtransactions. Hence the invention I had sort of explained to @jl777 (but he decided to clone Zcash instead).

Any way, I'd like to get some feedback on the issue I've raised?

P.S. I am going to try to ask someone to vet my ZKT soon, so I will know if my method of removing the onerous "proof of the square" was valid or not. Removing that proof which was added when Andrew Polestra found a flaw in CCT (not my work), was what caused CCT to be less efficient and less viable because it then required huge elliptic curves 768-bit or larger.

So you are claiming Monero will refuse to process transient spikes in the transaction load? It is sort of like Communism instead of a free market, in that participants have to get in a rationing line and wait. No dynamic headroom. Like Communism, everyone must be equal, and no one can rise up higher.

(Maybe irrelevant or relevant, isn't @ArticMine (apparently one of the designers of Monero's blocksize adjustment algorithm) a Communist at least evident by his stated preference for CopyLeft licenses?)


If I had, wouldn't I have logically sold my methods to the NSA and GCHQ already instead of informing you since ostensibly they can pay a lot more than Monero's community would?

(Obviously smart people can realize I am not necessarily asserting what I would do, but what a logical, self-interested Ayn Rand follower would do. The implication is that the fact it hasn't been shown to us publicly, doesn't necessarily have any meaning/bearing/relevance. It is a game theoretic retort.)

The assumption with the dynamic block size is that most blocks will be close to full with customer transactions (or at least, not mostly empty). If the spammer/miner wants to spam transactions, paying to himself doesn't help because that still displaces transactions from paying customers, so lost revenue.


Neither you nor anyone else has shown this hypothetical actually happens. It's worth asking though, just not any sort of demonstrated vulnerability or attack.

Btw, our discussion about txn fees caused me to realize that there may be another attack that can be done on Monero's anonymity.

Off the top of my head (and I am in a rush out the door to go to the grocery store), if the attacker controls x% of the mining hashrate, then he wins x% of the blocks. When he wins a block, he can pay the txn fees to himself, thus he can spam as many transactions as he wants, up the block limit. Thus he can spam the anonymity sets x% of all transactions and aid in demasking the anonymity of other users.

Combine this with afaik Monero never fixed the problem I told them about in 2014 wherein overlapping anonymity sets hypothetically creates a potential combinatorial solution to unmasking the blockchain.

Monero may not be as anonymous as we think it is.

I warned many times not to assume that these anonymity coins are sound. The peer review is highly lacking. Mostly you've got the same few guys who are looking at this stuff who are also the ones vested in it. And I don't have enough time to spend on doing very detailed peer review and research on every single coin and its protocols+algorithms.

Marketing or market manipulation because a few guys own all the tokens and buy from themselves at higher prices? I'm not sure.

Looks like that already happened.....

Dash definitely has better marketing than Monero thats for sure.

With my design for a "blockchain", there is no such thing as spam. The more the merrier. The entire data doesn't need to be downloaded in order to prove a transaction. Miners aren't subjected to the entire volume of transactions.

Thus afaics the only reason to make tx fees higher than costs+competitive level of profit (or to make them public) is for some groupwise (collectivized) reason, such as needing to squelch the spamming of anonymity sets.

Do you know who controls the price? and how?

Is it a vote of miners? dev team? Fluffy Pony has unilateral control?

thanks.

I hadn't clicked on that link, but I have now.

I do understand that a major government force of a major power can most likely figure out who users are, or, do something to shut the coin down if they feel they need to (USA gov, Russian gov, China gov, something like that), however I still think privacy is valuable to prevent joe up the road, or small company B that you just purchased something off from finding out about all of your transaction history.

My understanding currently is that Bitcoin does not have that level of anonymity.