Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1325. (Read 4671575 times)

That's your response to the substance of my message?


It is possible this could happen! I suspect we would at least do it very slightly differently that addresses some of the issues I mentioned at negligible cost though.


What!? I'm certainly not wrong about #1 at the very least. You can't download the entire chain from the p2p and you must rely on a web site. Do you disagree? And #3 was actually supporting Boolberry's approach! Did you even read my message?

You have very tricky language smooth.
Even when you'll decide to do the same with ring sigs, you'll find the nice way to explain this

And once again - you wrong about 1, 2, 3. Blockchain is a confirmation of transaction history, and in BBR you can't change transaction history like i any other currency. Ring signatures has no sense after hundreds of confirmations, esspecially under checkpoins.


Zoidberg

In ~99.8% of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies you can verify the entire chain by: 1. Retrieving the entire chain from the p2p network, ensuring that you have the correct chain with the assumption that you are able to connect to at least one honest peer, 2. Verifying that no blocks have ever been changed by checking block and tx hashes, and 3. Verifying that chain of transactions from the genesis block is valid (with checkpoints disabled).

Boolberry:

1. Can't do #1 because the chain doesn't exist on the p2p. You would have to use (i.e trust) a web site.

2. Can't do #2 because the tx hashes don't include signatures.

3. Can do #3 predicated on the assumption that nothing has gone wrong with #1 and #2

Certainly you can see a degree of trust has been added here (#1) and the chain of steps that is normally used for trustless verification is broken in at least two places (#1 and #2).

As I have said before, I don't know that this is necessarily a bad trade off, but it is a different trade off. What is frustrating about it is not that Boolberry has decided to do something differently (experimentation and diversity and choices in the marketplace are great). It is that Boolberry aggressively portrays its changes unambiguously as "improvements" or "fixes" when they are actually trade-offs. This confuses people and causes them to then ask us why we are relying on an "unimproved" solution when in fact we have simply made different tradeoffs.

A very similar argument could be made about XCN, except that XCN is much more explicit that it is making a trade-off in order to achieve certain goals, and doesn't run around saying "XCN fixes Bitcoin flaws."

I remember a day back in October 2011 I read almost the same discussion on a Bitcoin forum. Bitcoin was going from 5 USD to almost 2 USD in a few days and I got quite a stack of BTC in my wallet.
I decided to do my usual day-to-day work and do not care so much. A youtube video I was watching on my phone while waiting for the breakdown service to get to my car reminded me that I got a bitcoin wallet on one of my old usb sticks sitting in a jar on a windowsill collecting dust. It was a few days before Christmas 2013. I sold them all, got a nice replacement for my old VW Golf 3 and some nice things for my kids&wife.

Moral of the story: Do not call a coin dead _before_ it is dead. Just keep what you got and come back later if you are unsure, or get all you can afford and wait for your happy moment.

Thats exactly what happening.  People have been pulling money out of alts into bitcoin for months.  Now they are moving out of bitcoin into fiat.  Many people have made significant profits.  You can't spend altcoins so you need to turn it into fiat via bitcoin to buy that single malt scotch, new car, kitchen remodel, etc...  Some people have made tremendous amounts of money.  They want to enjoy it not watch it shrivel away.

Well, it'd definitely be better for them in the longterm.

I'm saying that Alts can still be tied to BTC partially(during uptrends), since they are all cryptocurrencies, but they need to start cutting themselves off from Bitcoin(having their own payment processors, their own exchanges, and etc) in some ways so if bitcoin is in a bearish state, it wont affect the alts that much.

If that happen will be bad for alts at least on short term.
I am sure there are many investors, that invest in alts so much since they believe that if bitcoin will raise x10 in USD price all alts will also. If there would not be this believing, many would pull out part of majority of  their investments.

It wouldn't be a cryptocurrency without some volatility

This is one of the most underrated strategies that alt coin proponents don't develop enough. It is not the job of the developers either and it should come at a stage before real life "adoption". The future of any altcoin will depend on having exclusive fiat/alt pairs, independent and probably exclusive of BTC/ALT to not portray it as an easy way to grab bitcoins from altcoin speculators.

Bitcoin overall is going down and down. I even read a post on the general disussion bitcoin thread about one of those early adopters turning away from btc and into alts....

maybe alts should start having USD/EURO/CNY pairings for altcoins, instead of being paired with btc, As bitcoins pretty much bringing down the price on all alts atm, and im tired of alts being tied to btc.

Monero never been so alive. Don't believe that the marketcap at a moment say anything about the future.
We need to focus on development. Developers need funds as an incentive to do their best.
We also need ideas and side projects.

I plan to sell some of my altcoins to buy Monero as it is cheap.
Unfortunately other altcoins are low too. Monero is not the only one.
Remember : Buy low, Sell high
When the price go down, buy more. When it goes up, sell some.

We are about to go below 0.002 as a long trend.

Is this coin dead? Feeling kind of crap as my investments in CryptoNote coins have been smashed against Bitcoin, which isn't even doing too well itself.

Greg Maxwell has looked in to it. I don't know if he's done that to the extent where he's gone on record making a comment about the crypto(edit: nm I see fluffypony posted above now). He also may have done some work for XMR under a pseudonym(pure speculation on my part, but I think that's what he would do). He has publicly shown interest in the CN tech though. I remember reading him talking about it on Hacker News a while ago.

Peter Todd has also publicly done work for XMR I think, but I don't know if that was related to analyising the crypto or just some code review type stuff.

That is by choice, they will reveal themselves later on if they choose to.

There are well know cryptographers, such as gmaxwell and andytoshi who have verified the cryptography independently. You are welcome to either ask them, or look through their post history.

This was said about the cryptonote coins.  I'm curious as to if who verified the provable anonymity of cryptonote is public information..  I've heard several statements that the Monero team paid people for independent verification who were qualified but never seen any names.

There is no need to have two BBR networks. This is very simple. Normal (standart client) use checkpoints, to speedup blockchain loading (every currency have it, including bitcoin). Under checkpoints some checks are skipped. This based on idea the users trust developers and their checkpoints.

But, if some "new user" don't want to use checkpoints(don't trust developers), and want to completely validate(mathematically) whole blockchain from genesis block, then he build hi own manual client(or provide some command line params, depends of implementation) and completely validate whole blockchain. In BBR can do simple the same just by taking this complete version of blockchain, and do this verification for every transaction.

that isn't true... I bought my first moneroj at 0.000212 BTC 
(not very much unfortunatly. had the chance to buy 5000, bought only 500)

How do you keep the full blockchain? Which software (switch) do you use?

Remember, I am a new participant, so I wasn't around when that transaction was being verified, and I have no way to know there was a valid signature there before. Maybe you personally ran most or all of the nodes and they never checked.

Let's say you have two transactions:

1. A -> B

2. B -> C

With pruning you can remove transaction #1 in its entirety because its output is no longer needed. Trimming doesn't do that, it removes a portion of each transaction. The difference becomes important when you have a large chain of transactions (for example in a long-running coin A->B, B->C ... Y->Z). In that case you can remove enormous numbers of earlier transactions with pruning (everything except Y->Z in the previous example), so the savings from pruning grows over time as the chain gets bigger. By contrast, the same portion of each transaction is removed with trimming.

Both pruning and trimming involve a tradeoff that the reduced version of the chain can't be fully validated by a new independent participant who downloads the chain. How significant that is becomes a value judgement. I don't really have a strong opinion about how important that actually is, but Bitcoin has generally considered that to be fairly important which is one reason why pruning (and some other optimizations) has never been implemented.

It is also not obvious how to do pruning in cryptonote coins since you can't in general identify which coins are spent.