Topic: [XMR] Moderated Monero General Discussion Thread - page 3. (Read 11177 times)

A few comments to clarify my earlier remarks about the funding question.

I've made the point that the current and past situation with a very small amount of voluntary donations is unsustainable, and it is, but some have interpreted that to mean there is immediate funding crisis, which is not the case. The core team is still covering the costs of the project out of our own resources and we are still volunteering a large amount of our time to work on the project.

All of the work we are capable of doing right now is being done. More immediate funding wouldn't get new people up to speed faster or even bring in more people (we are already in the process of adding two programmers right now).

"Unsustainable" means we do need to evolve the model otherwise we hit a dead end at some point, but that is likely months away, not days or weeks. Organizational improvements such as the creation of the MEW, some crowdfunding initiatives, etc. to be finalized over the next few weeks will probably push that back even more. My goal in even bringing up the topic was and is to ensure that the project is on sound financial footing before that crisis occurs, not to spark panic.

Also this should not be taken as lack of appreciation for those who have donated, nor to discourage MEW memberships or direct donations, because every little bit is definitely appreciated and does help.

I hope this helps clear up any misunderstandings.

Can you direct me to the thread so I can read without joining? I read only version is fine as well.

Personally I was just hoping that this thread would be used for updates on development and general news about Monero, instead of tedious and often off-topic back and forth about politics and economics...  But I guess the official site may be a better source for that.

It's good not to have to wade through chest height troll droppings anyway.

Yes you are correct about the curve for Bitcoin but it is not quite the same deal when comparing it with an altcoin.  If they are worried about being labeled as a 'community premine', they should really fix it.  I think i might of used the term emission curve in several places but I think I should of used a different term.  I've been sick and my head isnt on right lol but I think you'll get the point.  I may make an update in the morning.  Im going to bed.  Wanted to see MP v2 but now I'm tired of waiting on them to get their shit together.

I know you as one who doesn't drink koolaid.  You make some interesting points.

As to the bolded, I believe the a big reason most coins use this type of emissions curve is because btc does.  As far as benefiting early adopters, that was the point with btc as it was the first of it's kind and an incentive was needed to jump start the process.  I guess it is not needed to the same degree for that purpose now for new "real" coins. 

But how to change from where we are...............................................................

It will take more than a GUI wallet to increase adoption.  You need tools that allow companies to use your coin in real business scenarios.  You need a way for those companies to get out of monero and into fiat so they can pay employees, taxes, cost of goods sold, etc...  There's an entire host of things that are needed to make this possible and they MUST be easy to use.  The only thing a monero GUI will be good for right now is a reason to pump the price.  That's it.

Besides tools (any coin can do this), I think the key to long term adoption will be a stable market value.  Wild price swings and uncertain markets will only keep real companies from investing long term in a coin and reduce the number of them willing to accept it as payment.  I think this is the problem with litecoin.  At it's high, ltc was like $45+/- and now its 4.50+/-.  Its 1/10th the price of the all time high.  Bitcoin on the other hand has seen 1/3-1/2 of its all time high in this same time period.  Had the GOX fiasco not happened, we probably would not of seen this much of a decline. 

Where the heck is this "community premine" coming from.  I've never seen this term used.  I understand what you're saying when you say it but why?  Who has claimed that monero is "community premine"?  I think you are putting a label on something that does not exist to help push your agenda.




I doubt Monero will ever see "10s of millions of users at least" but in an attempt to not crush your dreams, if monero were to see 10s of millions of users, inflation would be good.  With a max supply of around 18 million coins, that leaves very few coins to be had for a lot of people.  Especially considering that you own such a large %.  I guess with 10s of millions of users you can be considered a "community premine".

For long term support and growth of the coin, a reversal of the emission curve would be a better option.  If monero's user base was to expand, it would benefit the community and late adopters to have more coins available later in the game than earlier.  I do find it a bit funny how many of you consider DRK to be a 'shitcoin' or a 'instamined scam' yet you also like to use it for comparisons.  You should do your own thing.  Do something different.

I'll use generic numbers here to make my point easier.
So let's say we have 500 users now and 10 coins per block.  1 year from now we have 1000 users and 5 coins per block.  Earlier adopters "community premined" monero and those that come to the community later are getting the "short end of the stick".  A fairer emissions curve would be to have 5 coins per block now and 10 coins per block later.  The only benefit of a decrease in coins over time is it rewards early adopters.  With a decrease in emissions over time you are not supporting an increase in users.  You are not encouraging the community to grow.  You are actually supporting a decrease in users.  Why do you think most altcoins do this?  After the initial influx of users and the traditional pump and dump, many users leave and very few new users join.  A decrease in emissions relates to this trend.  If you truly believe monero's user base will increase, you should consider increasing emissions with the increase of the user base.

Reversing the emissions curve could help to even out the market over time if adoption increase.  If adoption does not increase, the price could fall with the increase in emissions.  I guess the question here is, how much do you believe in the coin and the increase in adoption?

Would this have the effect then, if it were an stock, of a reverse-split?

Whereas each whole coin would become some fraction of a coin, along with an emission change to a longer tail?
Whereas the same proportionate value of the whole market cap owned by the same wallets.

It would be difficult to see how this would harm any holders.

My other issue remains however, do it once, do it right.
And, I don't know what right is in this instance.  I also don't think that anyone else does at this time, or at least I have seen nothing yet.
So far it is just picking straws from a cup with other experiments using an arbitrary selection, there are no reasons behind any of them other than XYZ did it so it must be good.
Maybe I'm just not authoritarian enough to see the merit of that reason.

Our block chain has some senses, I am hopeful they can learn from the environment around it.
At the same time there may be merits in keeping it blind and deaf to what it carries if that is what it takes to maintain all of its other merits.

So I don't know the answer, not yet.

So far, I only know flat emission curve, this is TEKcoin. I draw no conclusion in one way or another neither do I imply anything.

10 XMR is the minimum fee. This nominally corresponds to 1000 XMR holdings, although you can be much smaller or bigger if you like.

It has 6,200 votes, so nominally 620,000 coins (about 20%).

Personally I believe people have on average "underbought" votes to save money and disguise their total holding. The MEW membership's share of the current emission is likely 30-40%.

the relation between changing emission and funding development is not totally clear to me - xmr needs ONE thing and that is funded development. - mew can work out a proper inflation after the coin is almost full mined.

- this coin fills the only existing niche
- it has a great development team
- it has a great and overall smart community, which is quite big
- it does NOT have a great codebase as well as userfriendliness
- it does have at least funding issues

from a scientific perspective I am very interested if we get a proper funding managed

How much monero do mew members have to have?

Any idea what % of coin owners MEW is?  I'd like to be involved - if at least to observe so I suppose I'll join.  Not much of a good ole boys club participant but I'd like to know sooner rather than later the direction the coin decides to take.

MEW is the place where it will be discussed. So that we can make sure if the coin owners actually prefer this or that.

The ones who do not believe in the viability of one of the choices, are likely selling their coins anyway. So it's better that a good project continues with the majority (instead of the minority), which also makes us hopeful that a great number (instead of a small number) of new ones will join, leading to increased (instead of decreased) adoption, compared to current situation.

Which side is the majority, I don't yet know. I - as well as many hopefully - has not locked in his own opinion yet.

How in the world could we ever get enough people on the same page to promote any change to coin release schedule or total emission? 

Just willing to restate my points:
- No, I am not advocating changing the total number of coins;
- No, I am not advocating higher inflation;
- Yes, I am advocating that inflation is more evenly spread over time;
- Reason I do this is that fully mined coins have a hard time finding buyers if there are growing coins also available (don't be confused with pumps - that's something that cannot happen with XMR anyway anymore).

Reading my posts in this short thread might be enjoyable and insightful.

Yea there is a good point here. What is the ideal emission curve vs should the emission curve be changed at all are two entirely separate questions. My reply was more along the lines of what would be the most ideal emission curve and not any claim about whether it should be changed.

As for the arbitrary nature of these decisions yes i agree, it is very arbitrary and non adaptable. I think this is a very strong legitimate criticism about all crypto in general. Ideally we would have market feedback that would allow us to adapt these values to the optimal level, that is the level at which all attacks that are prevented by said emission would be avoided but only just. But there is no way to measure and determine what this value use. Not in any verifiable way. If we were to make it variable, it would end up coming down to the decisions of individuals which opens up room for corruption. It would be a bit like having a crypto federal reserve. Not ideal.

Right now the mechanism we have, and the only one that we may ever have, is market competition between different cryptos. Where the ones that select the best static values gain capitalization and the ones that chose bad static values lose it. Its slow, cumbersome, and non addaptive but it is perhaps the best answer we will ever have to this problem. (other than proof of stake which has its own shortcomings).

also the block chain may be able to sense if it is not secure enough, but another big problem that people often over look, and something that it never could sense, is whether it is paying too much for security. Miners can see if there are long orphan chains than perhaps the reward should be raised. But even then it opens up new attack vectors for fraud with people purposefully crafting long orphan chains inorder to change the reward.

My apriori ideas on emissions:

Bitcoin emission curve is quite long, it is not a bad model.  
Flat emission curve may also work, who knows?

However I critique:
These are both arbitrary decisions that are entirely uninfluenced by external factors.  They are inflexible.  They do not respond to economic realities, demographics, usage, mining security, or anything else that might reasonably be expected to have some influence on money supply.

Further:
The emission is something that does not have very good precedent for alterations.  A debate on what would be the optimal emission, and to get that right forevermore, it is not likely to be something merely arbitrarily decided, picked out of a hat and made permanent.  That is just guessing and is no better than Bitcoin or Ether.

I do agree with rpietila about one thing for certain.  At some time in the future there will be an exit from Bitcoin for something better.  XMR is the best there is at the moment for such an option, and it improves daily.  I am not under the illusion that it is perfect, but to change something there should be very excellent reasons not just to change it, but to what it ought be changed.

With respect to emissions, I am sure that I don't know the answer to what the optimal emission rate is at this time, but I do think that it is worthy of serious examination.  I do not think that this discussion should be in the context of "What to do with XMR emission".  I would rather it be in the context of a potential merge-mined coin, using the same XMR codebase and advancements.  This accomplishes four important things

1) It enables the discussion
2) There should not be uncertainty about whether what you have is going to be diluted more than what you thought when you bought it.
3) Prevent "extra work" for our development team.
4) Provide additional revenue for our miners through the merge-mining, Miners thereby mine both coins simultaneously for the same work, thus increasing incentives for mining XMR (and the potential discussion coin would have good mining before it even was delivered).

Milton Friedman also argued that money supply ought be mechanistically determined, not by human decision but by formula, it was one of his criticisms of The Fed Reserve and central banking generally.

The block chain has some information that can used to sense the economic environment of the world around it.  Difficulty, transaction volume, and etc.  There may be other things that it can detect.  This would be my starting points, there may be other metrics it can offer that it currently does not (when smart contracts are more popular for example, there could be a basket of commodities or something to pull real-world value data into the analysis).

Believe it or not, the presence of fear explains one of the paradoxes of blowoff bubble. It isn't just greed that fuels them, it's also the fear of missing out. Seriously.

I 1000% agree with this.  Ethereum is doing this & it actually makes a lot of sense (to me).

The % of the coin in existence produced per month/year falls even though the coin output never changes.  Those who invest early only make money if adoption increases - the way it is now as long as adoption remains consistence you just need to get in early enough & soak up early coin production.

I think bitcoin will die for this reason (eventually).  No one is going to want to pay the transaction fees needed to support the network.