Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1383. (Read 4671575 times)

This is propaganda that you created to protect your investment. It is non-sense and based on the absurd proposition that because you dont know who CZ is, you cant trust him. Yet you are a BTC "whale" created by SATOSHI. Hyprocisy much? Come on.

The is one of the lamest excluses for an instamine scam I've ever seen, which makes it more likely in my eyes that XDN is a CN coin-mill scam coin (I've never been 100% sure about that one, but I'd say 85% now), because: 1) they seem to have an affinity for premine/instamine scams, and 2) they seem uniquely tone deaf when it comes to the made up stories they believe the community will actually find credible.

I still like their marketing though. Clearly the best in the CN space, unless you consider XMR's non-marketing marketing.

After messing with the other two significant Cryptonotes recently, here is my opinion on the issues du jour: emission rate change and dev compensation.

The other two, Duck/Darknote and Boolberry, currently offer more features and/or faster syncing. Darknote now has encrypted, on blockchain messaging (which seems to be possibly a bad idea if it can be spammed) and the blockchain moved out of memory (full disclosure, I don't have the wallet). Boolberry syncs extremely rapidly in comparison to Monero and offers aliasing of addresses (also maybe not a great idea).

However, the advantage Monero currently has over the other two is that it seems to have a much fairer distribution of coins. This is more difficult to analyze than traditional bitcoin clones due to the anonymous nature of the transactions.

Darknote is already 73% mined out after several months of a much smaller network hashrate compared to Monero, and I think it was something like 50% of coins emitted after only the first month. This is purportedly to head off asics before they have a chance to be designed and manufactured for cryptonight algo (assuming this ever happens), however it reeks of instamine imo, which is why I don't even bother downloading the wallet.

Boolberry is the more interesting competitor to Monero imo, despite currently having a significantly lower market cap than Darknote (I would argue this is a function of instaminers holding a large portion of coins ever mined, waiting for more buy support before dumping some/all their coins from the coin's first month of existence). However, despite Boolberry having a slower emission rate than Monero, it still has a couple of issues that make its distribution a bit more suspect than Monero's. I think the cbuchner miner/mining is viewed with more suspicion than dga's private miner, because Monero was probably already more popular when dga was mining that Boolberry currently is, in terms of miners and in terms of trade volume on exchanges. The other thing is the 1% dev fee, that zoidberg does not do a good job of explaining on the ANN page or on Boolberry's; it's supposedly voluntary, but miners can only vote to turn it up or down, not on or off, and this can only be done by solo miners or pool operators (I think, tbh I do not have a good idea how it actually works, and haven't gotten anymore info after asking on IRC).

So, that leaves Monero as the most fair. Mostly due simply to its much greater popularity and trade volume, but also due to the factors mentioned above. I just feel like messing with coin emission, or chucking in a 1% "post-mine" block, or anything else like that will greatly risk the trust that has grown around the dev team and the community in general, and would possibly create an opportunity for someone to fork Monero (or Darknote or Boolberry), and try to position itself as THE Cryptonote with a legitimately fair distribution.

tl;dr I agree with xulescu

XMR was formed to avoid scams.  Everything else is a scam, or threatens a scam.  The realistic alternative is to fork XMR for fair emission.  But that is too hard (expensive) and likely to fail, due to XMRs huge lead.  Better to buy counterfeit Euros.

Look, I agree with you. But some people (there were discussions even with crypto colleagues of mine) invested in FCN and QCN. So I am not going to just dismiss the investments of people I personally know.

But, your right, there is only one viable alternative at this time, although I don't know much at Darknote, so I won't right out dismiss it either.

It will go away if we (you) stop raising it.


In the MEW I suggested that emission in excess of adoption was bad because it concentrates wealth, and creates a 'common knowledge' of unfairness.  
I also suggested that the best way to fix this is not to change emission but to grow adoption faster than emission can decline.  I prefer to discuss this topic there.
I don want the subject "decided" in the public mind by bytecoin trolls.

Now I know you are full of shit and just throwing FUD bombs over here.

No serious experienced players in the crypto scene are remotely interested in "other CN coins" with the possible exception of those who are interested in Bytecoin as the first technical implementation (but still would never buy it).

The only one remotely worth considering would be duckNote/darkNote and its is pretty clear that nobody takes it all that seriously. Some of us find their marketing mildly amusing, but expecting anyone to view that as a substitute for Monero is silly.

What "other" ones are there? FCN/QCN/MCN? That boat sailed a long time ago.

It is my belief that if it is technical, this should not even be discussed in the MEW. MEW is about adoption, ecosystem, B2B. To each their own and overlap should be minimal (although probably not non-existant).

+1

I have heard this mentality over and over again from BTC turned XMR supporters. And I admit that I was a part of this group for a while.  But, I assume that you got involved with XMR either because A) You believed in the tech and realized that Bitcoin would never go the way of Anon and you wanted to be a part of a tech that could fill that market or B) you had BTC friends that recommended the coin so there was "group think" involved or C) Both.

Now the part I don't understand is, if XMR lets you down, why you would never touch other alts? XMR let me and others down and but we still believed in CryptoNote tech and the need for a real Anon to fill that market. So BBR was the choice for me - for others it was other CN coins.

Unless the only reason you got involved was "B," why would you leave CryptoNote for good?

We do. A lot. Even by allocating as much of our time to it, we do not have enough manpower by ourselves, even including the volunteer developers. So, yes, we outsource. And outsourcing is rarely free. Remember, we don't have 5 years of Bitcoin shoulders to stand on, especially considering we are addressing issues Bitcoin did not (and may never do).
Note: this is not as much a reply to a possible troll than something that new readers would be interested in reading.

Firstly, please read my previous post again, I have written more.

What is your argument exactly? I don't care about Bitcoin, that's why I'm here. Bitcoin left the sanity world a long time ago.

Okay fair enough. Do you feel my argument is valid for Bitcoin?

I think I might argue that it isn't, because a finite supply is just as impossible for Bitcoin as it is for Monero, but they just haven't realized it yet.

I have argued above that the bolded phrase is meaningless. Please read my post again.

EDIT (to prevent double post): I proved maybe ~50 pages earlier that Monero's block reward is actually a simple exponential decay once you solve the recurrence relation. This means that the emission curve is really only defined by three parameters: constant term (premine, 0), reward of first block (17.something but can be normalized to 1 for this discussion) and base of exponential (reward "decay factor", which is 1 - 2^-something * 10^-something, a value very close to 1). I claim there are good reasons for the exponential form and should not be changed. Now let's consider our options:

1. A post-mine changes the constant factor and a posteriori (i.e. for later adopters) it is the same as a premine, which is frowned upon. A 1% premine seems to be acceptable, but one of Monero's main selling points was ZERO premine. Even 0.1% is much larger than 0. As I noted before, I would accept a 1% post-mine but only if other methods of fundraising have failed.

2. Changing the normalization factor is equivalent to a redenomination. This would have been acceptable in April (second option in my previous post) but I do not believe it is the case now. I think doing this will kill the coin with p > 0.5. Increasing the normalization factor is the second option in the previous post, decreasing the normalization factor is a posteriori equivalent to a fastmine.

3. increasing the decay factor is a posteriori equivalent to a fastmine. See (2) above. Increasing the decay factor is the same situation as decreasing the normalization factor.

So to sum up, any of [increase|decrease] the [normalization|decay] factor, as well as increasing the constant factor, clearly and directly affects one of [early|late] adopters to the advantage of the other group. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't. And in this situation, the only winning move is to not play.

I agree. But we are still left with the question of what favors the early adopters (presumably this means over later adopters?) and what does not.

Example:

I mined in block 10 hold on to my coins, never buy or sell, and never mine again.

How does shifting around the rewards in various ways (unspecified) between blocks 11 and 1 million but without changing the total number of such coins mined affect me one way or the other?

I suppose there are extreme cases where it likely does. For example, moving all the rewards to block 11 and then having no rewards. In that case, it is likely no mining occurs and the coin dies, so it does affect me.

Leaving out those obviously harmful permutations, how does this affect me as an early adopter?

During the April vote (around 200k MRO were mined) I and others strongly argued to make the emission twice longer and halve everyone's holdings. Alternatively, one could have doubled the emission forward (denomination) for the same net effect but without the "taking away half ma coins" factor. The second option was psychologically better.

I don't think either is an option anymore. We know the story of Monero's inception and how the curve is twice faster than it should be because thankful_for_today doubled the block frequency in the last moment without adjusting the block reward. In this sense, yes, the emission curve is wrong. However, how many of Monero's CURRENT users know that? Back then there were very few users so taking the first option would have been much less traumatic than now.

I insist that changing the emission curve is at this point to only be considered in force majeure (only if the alternative is certain death of the currency) because itself bears a tremendous risk to kill the currency. No matter what I or you or the early adopters think, for the crypto community at large changing the emission curve to favour the early adopters directly is taboo. It should not even be on the table.

Another issue that gets to me from time to time is any discussion about the "total" or "final" emission. We know and have always known that the "final" emission is infinite. Defining "final" as "when the tail starts" is inane as long as we don't know when the tail starts. The only metric we have is the emission curve (or its derivative, the block reward curve).

All three of (1) post-mine (2) moving emission around and (3) miner fee, even if they violate the emission curve, are strictly (much) more palatable alternatives to outright slowing the emission curve. And all three are strictly (much) worse than fundraising through any other methods. Even issuing MEW voting rights as a PoS asset is better, because it does not affect Monero the coin.

Sorry for the brash words but I feel this point is not getting across. Changing Slowing the emission curve is taboo. In this respect, the status quo is inherently better simply because it is the status quo. It's not my opinion, it's my opinion of the market/community opinion. You may disagree with this, but read the last pages again.

I am one of the first 50 if not fewer people involved in Monero and it is my only non-BTC holding. I will dump all and probably never touch alts again if the emission is slowed. In my mind, the risk far outweighs the benefits if things work OK. I am sure I am far from the only one in this situation.

I will soon



Good to know because it felt for a moment that we were panicking indeed

Yeah. Currently with XMR we won't see single digit inflation until well into year 4, so between now and then users will be able to buy in cheaply.

Certainly yes. I remind that there is no immediate funding crisis. The work is getting done and the team remains, for the time being, comfortable with subsidizing the project with our own time and money.

So fix it yes, but don't panic.

That discussion is close to the hearts of the Monero Economic Group.  Have you joined?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=776479.0;topicseen

I don't necessarily agree. In such matters of practice, you must always ask the question, compared to what. A decision not to act is still a decision. The community trusts us to be good custodians and do the right thing with respect to ongoing development of the project. Failing to act when a strong case has been made in favor of acting, even if some controversy remains, could equally damage trust.

What is "the right thing" is certainly contentious and on that I agree entirely with your comments above.

I do not give the status quo any inherent advantage when considering a proposed change in its merits. There may be considerations that weigh in favor of the status quo, but they must still be weighed, not assumed.

Regarding the later question of subsidizing whales. All can rest assured that our decisions are most certainly not influenced by that consideration, at least not positively. If you want to be cynical about it, consider that we are not whales so we would be acting against our direct interests to do that. In any case, it is not going to happen.

Reasonable opinions may differ about the effect of various changes of course. I don't happen to think that inflation affects the price of the coin much at all within a reasonable range and assuming no change in the long term supply.