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Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1606. (Read 4670972 times)

legendary
Activity: 1904
Merit: 1003

The blockchain bloat was a hot topic on IRC at the end of last week so I decided to start keeping exact blockchain size figures as the charts on monerochain.info can be misleading. I have been recording these at aroun 10:00 GMT and are as follows.

1,516,605 KB    13/7/14
1,544,024 KB    14/7/14
1,606,429 KB    15/7/14
1,628,828 KB    16/7/14
1,646,808 KB    17/7/14


As you can see the blockchain is growing at ~30 mb average a day which is fantastic news if you look back to how much bloat the dust transactions were causing on the chain so kudos to the core devs and pool devs for implementing those solutions. This current rate of growth is much more acceptable for the privacy afforded than the 10x the size of BTC's chain we were heading towards a month or two ago.


As it was mentioned again in another thread and I therefore said I would update the list I was keeping here is the blockchain growth on disk rather than the one displayed on monerochain.info which is significantly smaller than the on disk size.

1,663,092 KB  18/7/14

1,711,573 KB  21/7/14
1,727,554 KB 22/7/14
1,742,269 KB 23/7/14

This gives an average growth rate of ~16MB over the period 18/7 to 23/7 and an average of ~22.5MB for the ten day period 13/7 to 23/7.

Im sure you will all agree again that this rate of growth is perfectly acceptable for the privacy and anonymity provided by the protocol and is again a significantly slower rate of growth than the rate when the pools were sending out dust. 


Much better than in early days when pools didn't implement minimal payout threshold.
hero member
Activity: 798
Merit: 1000

The blockchain bloat was a hot topic on IRC at the end of last week so I decided to start keeping exact blockchain size figures as the charts on monerochain.info can be misleading. I have been recording these at aroun 10:00 GMT and are as follows.

1,516,605 KB    13/7/14
1,544,024 KB    14/7/14
1,606,429 KB    15/7/14
1,628,828 KB    16/7/14
1,646,808 KB    17/7/14


As you can see the blockchain is growing at ~30 mb average a day which is fantastic news if you look back to how much bloat the dust transactions were causing on the chain so kudos to the core devs and pool devs for implementing those solutions. This current rate of growth is much more acceptable for the privacy afforded than the 10x the size of BTC's chain we were heading towards a month or two ago.


As it was mentioned again in another thread and I therefore said I would update the list I was keeping here is the blockchain growth on disk rather than the one displayed on monerochain.info which is significantly smaller than the on disk size.

1,663,092 KB  18/7/14

1,711,573 KB  21/7/14
1,727,554 KB 22/7/14
1,742,269 KB 23/7/14

This gives an average growth rate of ~16MB over the period 18/7 to 23/7 and an average of ~22.5MB for the ten day period 13/7 to 23/7.

Im sure you will all agree again that this rate of growth is perfectly acceptable for the privacy and anonymity provided by the protocol and is again a significantly slower rate of growth than the rate when the pools were sending out dust. 
donator
Activity: 1274
Merit: 1060
GetMonero.org / MyMonero.com
...

I got the whole way through, tearing my hair out, before I realised what was happening:)
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1012
Still wild and free
newbie
Activity: 22
Merit: 4
Okay I will abide by your desire to censor this thread. I will not reply unless someone makes a very serious critique of what I wrote that requires a response.

You are welcome to participate in this thread at any time as long as it is focused on topics directly relevant to Monero. (You are also welcome to not participate, if that is your choice, of course.)


Even considering all the blatant censorship here, I have decided to reveal the one single hope Monero, and in fact all cryptocurrency has against the NSA as well as The HK SAR, and Chinese MSS and a few other agencies I don't have the time to mention.  You do not have the mental capacity to know this many acronyms anyway.

At least Monero has not taken the route of using PoS which is really just a honeypot.  In fact it is a reverse Tupelo honeypot, designed to draw in the clueless masses to be caught in the great clawback of 2013, which is actually happening in 2016 since the NSA has not realized that honey without the comb can spoil at a rate which follows the accelerated curve represented by the non-comb reverse Tupelo honey equation:

Q′(x)=[(cosx)(tanx)(ex)+(sinx)(sec2x)(ex)+(sinx)(tanx)(ex)+52x32+72x−32][(cscx)2−19]−[(−cscxcotx)(cscx)+(cscx)(−cscxcotx)][(sinx)(tanx)(ex)+(x3+2x12−7)(1x√)][(cscx)2−19]2

But I digress.

As I said, at least the Cryptonight devs and subsequently the Monero (leaderless, consensus based, socialist, betamale) "devs" used second most stupid method to secure the blockchain: PoW.

After many hours of study I have found the only computational cipher worthy of my study and mastery is: PoH.

Obviously you are too dimwitted to have even considered using PoH to secure the Monero blockchain.  But allow me to elucidate you slightly.

Nothing can be safe.
The Master posts here today.
Heed my words and live.

Yes, the Proof of Haiku algorithm is even capable of withstanding the coming rigors of quantum computing, and cannot be broken by the NSA until, by my calculations, sometime in the fall of 2065.  I would like to pinpoint the date more accurately, but as the original cryptopoet Bashō wrote:

the first cold shower
even the monkey seems to want
a little coat of straw

I have yet to work out exactly how to implement PoH, and how to make it ASIC proof, and of course you all expect AnnoyMint to do all the work for you.  I have so many other problems to solve, my time is simply too valuable to spend all day and night elucidating you.  Finally this:

i leave this thread now
never shall i return here
nakamoto, feh!
full member
Activity: 198
Merit: 100
1337ETH? Seriously?

I don't get it. Is 1337ETH a secret code?

1337 is leet speak for "leet" which is a colloquialism for "elite".

In other words, only 13 year old Counter-Strike players refer to things at 1337.

Thanks for clarifying Smiley That fits perfectly!
r05
full member
Activity: 193
Merit: 100
test cryptocoin please ignore
1337ETH? Seriously?

I don't get it. Is 1337ETH a secret code?

1337 is leet speak for "leet" which is a colloquialism for "elite".

In other words, only 13 year old Counter-Strike players refer to things at 1337.
full member
Activity: 198
Merit: 100
1337ETH? Seriously?

I don't get it. Is 1337ETH a secret code?
r05
full member
Activity: 193
Merit: 100
test cryptocoin please ignore
One thing I will say is that the ethereum team really knows how to engage, market, and create awareness, along with being very strong technically. Very impressed with their technical achievements, but also equally impressed with their website and ability to market and make the currency easy for the average non techie to purchase. One of the most professional websites I've seen for any alt coin project as well.

For that reason alone, they are likely to get a lot of attention, and attention equals dollars, and dollars equals hiring more devs. Pretty virtous cycle that XMR should have but doesn't seem able to make happen. They have already sold over 1 million USD worth.

Maybe that's about the right time to look into another direction: Etherium (ETH)

The Ether guys just started the pre-sale, and I'm wondering how you all think about this new coin and its presale. Some quick questions/points from me side:

- Will ETH be a threat to Monero?
- Is the presale (2000ETH per BTC right now) a reasonable investment chance? (I couldn't find an upper bound on the coin supply for the presale.)
- Is there a chance that ETH will make it against Mastercoin and Counterparty?
- Would Bitshares-X (similarly Bitshares-PTS) be a better investment? (ETH and Bitshares seem to share some goals, e.g., decentralized organisations/companies, etc.)

Regards.

OMG: Read this blog post by Vitalik Buterin (one of the main dudes behind Etherium): https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/

Some of his points made:

- The price of ether is initially set to a discounted price of 2000 ETH per BTC, and will stay this way for 14 days before linearly declining to a final rate of 1337 ETH per BTC. The sale will last 42 days, concluding at 23:59 Zug time September 2.

- The annual issuance rate is 0.26x the initial quantity of ether sold, reduced from the 0.50x that had been proposed in January. [...] We make absolutely no promises of this, except that the issuance rate will not exceed 26.00% per annum of the quantity of ether sold in the Genesis Sale.

- We reserve the right to use up to 5000 BTC from the pre-sale while the pre-sale is running in order to speed up development.

This reads like a birthday party for the devs. Bring all your BTC and we start OUR party. You get some totally weird coins/promises in return. WTF! Also, the shortcut, ETH, is funny, because it relates to the well-known university in Zurich/Switzerland which has nothing to do with the whole thing. To me, the Etherium project seems more than odd. (In addition, check out this Etherium related website www.ursium.com, yet another site without any real content or information.)

ADD1: Honestly, I hoped Etherium becomes something good (I would have liked to invest), but now I feel like Alice in Weirdo Land.

ADD2: Just found this statement on the official Etherium website: "EthSuisse will not place a cap on the number of ETH that can be purchased by the community." WTF!

ADD3: "EthSuisse will restrict any single entity, person, corporation, or group from controlling more than 12.5% of the total ETH sold by the end of the Genesis Sale." WTF!!

EDIT: OK, I stop here. I can't take it anymore. Etherium could be (become) one of the biggest ripoffs in the crypto history... without me.

1337ETH? Seriously?
full member
Activity: 198
Merit: 100
One thing I will say is that the ethereum team really knows how to engage, market, and create awareness, along with being very strong technically. Very impressed with their technical achievements, but also equally impressed with their website and ability to market and make the currency easy for the average non techie to purchase. One of the most professional websites I've seen for any alt coin project as well.

For that reason alone, they are likely to get a lot of attention, and attention equals dollars, and dollars equals hiring more devs. Pretty virtous cycle that XMR should have but doesn't seem able to make happen. They have already sold over 1 million USD worth.

Maybe that's about the right time to look into another direction: Etherium (ETH)

The Ether guys just started the pre-sale, and I'm wondering how you all think about this new coin and its presale. Some quick questions/points from me side:

- Will ETH be a threat to Monero?
- Is the presale (2000ETH per BTC right now) a reasonable investment chance? (I couldn't find an upper bound on the coin supply for the presale.)
- Is there a chance that ETH will make it against Mastercoin and Counterparty?
- Would Bitshares-X (similarly Bitshares-PTS) be a better investment? (ETH and Bitshares seem to share some goals, e.g., decentralized organisations/companies, etc.)

Regards.

OMG: Read this blog post by Vitalik Buterin (one of the main dudes behind Etherium): https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/

Some of his points made:

- The price of ether is initially set to a discounted price of 2000 ETH per BTC, and will stay this way for 14 days before linearly declining to a final rate of 1337 ETH per BTC. The sale will last 42 days, concluding at 23:59 Zug time September 2.

- The annual issuance rate is 0.26x the initial quantity of ether sold, reduced from the 0.50x that had been proposed in January. [...] We make absolutely no promises of this, except that the issuance rate will not exceed 26.00% per annum of the quantity of ether sold in the Genesis Sale.

- We reserve the right to use up to 5000 BTC from the pre-sale while the pre-sale is running in order to speed up development.

This reads like a birthday party for the devs. Bring all your BTC and we start OUR party. You get some totally weird coins/promises in return. WTF! Also, the shortcut, ETH, is funny, because it relates to the well-known university in Zurich/Switzerland which has nothing to do with the whole thing. To me, the Etherium project seems more than odd. (In addition, check out this Etherium related website www.ursium.com, yet another site without any real content or information.)

ADD1: Honestly, I hoped Etherium becomes something good (I would have liked to invest), but now I feel like Alice in Weirdo Land.

ADD2: Just found this statement on the official Etherium website: "EthSuisse will not place a cap on the number of ETH that can be purchased by the community." WTF!

ADD3: "EthSuisse will restrict any single entity, person, corporation, or group from controlling more than 12.5% of the total ETH sold by the end of the Genesis Sale." WTF!!

EDIT: OK, I stop here. I can't take it anymore. Etherium could be (become) one of the biggest ripoffs in the crypto history... without me.
newbie
Activity: 50
Merit: 0
One thing I will say is that the ethereum team really knows how to engage, market, and create awareness, along with being very strong technically. Very impressed with their technical achievements, but also equally impressed with their website and ability to market and make the currency easy for the average non techie to purchase. One of the most professional websites I've seen for any alt coin project as well.

For that reason alone, they are likely to get a lot of attention, and attention equals dollars, and dollars equals hiring more devs. Pretty virtous cycle that XMR should have but doesn't seem able to make happen. They have already sold over 1 million USD worth.

Maybe that's about the right time to look into another direction: Etherium (ETH)

The Ether guys just started the pre-sale, and I'm wondering how you all think about this new coin and its presale. Some quick questions/points from me side:

- Will ETH be a threat to Monero?
- Is the presale (2000ETH per BTC right now) a reasonable investment chance? (I couldn't find an upper bound on the coin supply for the presale.)
- Is there a chance that ETH will make it against Mastercoin and Counterparty?
- Would Bitshares-X (similarly Bitshares-PTS) be a better investment? (ETH and Bitshares seem to share some goals, e.g., decentralized organisations/companies, etc.)

Regards.
legendary
Activity: 1722
Merit: 1217
Maybe that's about the right time to look into another direction: Etherium (ETH)

The Ether guys just started the pre-sale, and I'm wondering how you all think about this new coin and its presale. Some quick questions/points from me side:

- Will ETH be a threat to Monero?
- Is the presale (2000ETH per BTC right now) a reasonable investment chance? (I couldn't find an upper bound on the coin supply for the presale.)
- Is there a chance that ETH will make it against Mastercoin and Counterparty?
- Would Bitshares-X (similarly Bitshares-PTS) be a better investment? (ETH and Bitshares seem to share some goals, e.g., decentralized organisations/companies, etc.)

Regards.

Whats a better investment, a bowling ball or a ham sandwich?

They are all fundamentally different things. I don't think etherium is attempting to build a tax haven in the cloud and I don't think monero is trying to build a consensus based turing complete distributed virtual machine.

Be careful with etheirum though. Huge amounts of hype and many wild promises, little evidence that they will be able to deliver on those promises, and with the sorts of valuation they are obtaining i think its questionable whether it would be a good value even if they do deliver on those promises. The thing about open source code is that it can be copied. Of course there are network effects to make the largest network more valuable. But with something like a virtual machine thats being run in parallel on a huge number of computers, its very questionable to what extent that can be scaled. If it cant be scaled well than their first mover advantage may offer little benefit beyond a certain threshold.
full member
Activity: 198
Merit: 100
Maybe that's about the right time to look into another direction: Etherium (ETH)

The Ether guys just started the pre-sale, and I'm wondering how you all think about this new coin and its presale. Some quick questions/points from me side:

- Will ETH be a threat to Monero?
- Is the presale (2000ETH per BTC right now) a reasonable investment chance? (I couldn't find an upper bound on the coin supply for the presale.)
- Is there a chance that ETH will make it against Mastercoin and Counterparty?
- Would Bitshares-X (similarly Bitshares-PTS) be a better investment? (ETH and Bitshares seem to share some goals, e.g., decentralized organisations/companies, etc.)

Regards.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
Okay I will abide by your desire to censor this thread. I will not reply unless someone makes a very serious critique of what I wrote that requires a response.

You are welcome to participate in this thread at any time as long as it is focused on topics directly relevant to Monero. (You are also welcome to not participate, if that is your choice, of course.)

That includes the proof-of-work. If you can identify a specific vulnerability, post a proof of concept (even pseudo code). Voluminous abstract philosophical discussions of proof-of-work design are not directly relevant to Monero.

If you want to call that censorship, so be it. I'd rather be accused of censorship than have the thread filled with pages and pages of discussion not of interest to most of the Monero user community.

And for one last time, I never said that ASICs aren't a threat. I said that the approach of "1000 copies" of a straightforward implementation of the algorithm on a chip will not work. The Cryptonote people claim that the algorithm is ASIC-resistant generally. They may be right or they may be wrong, but I certainly will never mislead anyone that this is just a claim from some anonymous source. I don't know what background work they have done (if any) to support the ASIC-resistant claim, so I can't meaningfully evaluate it.

Some degree of GPU-resistance has been demonstrated however, so one of their claims has now been weakly validated.

legendary
Activity: 1624
Merit: 1008
At this point I would ask that you take this discussion elsewhere. There may well be (theoretical, unidentified and undemonstrated) cryptographic or other issues with Cryptonight, but that is a tiny subset of topics of general interest to the user base and potential user base of Monero.

The proof-of-work algorithm is absolutely essentially to crypto-currency. It is the fundamental building block upon which nearly everything else of the coin hinges.

Thanks for not appreciating me trying to help you while you still have the chance to fix what is broken.

But that is fine, go ahead and leave it broken. You will learn the hard way. And with your attitude, now you know why I wouldn't participate in developing for your design by consensus. It is abject failure.

And remember this discussion started because I corrected you when you gave a user the factually incorrect answer, leading him to believe that ASICs are not a realistic threat.

Okay I will abide by your desire to censor this thread. I will not reply unless someone makes a very serious critique of what I wrote that requires a response.

Pot meet kettle.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
At this point I would ask that you take this discussion elsewhere. There may well be (theoretical, unidentified and undemonstrated) cryptographic or other issues with Cryptonight, but that is a tiny subset of topics of general interest to the user base and potential user base of Monero.

The proof-of-work algorithm is absolutely essentially to crypto-currency. It is the fundamental building block upon which nearly everything else of the coin hinges.

Thanks for not appreciating me trying to help you while you still have the chance to fix what is broken.

But that is fine, go ahead and leave it broken. You will learn the hard way. And with your attitude, now you know why I wouldn't participate in developing for your design by consensus. It is abject failure.

And remember this discussion started because I corrected you when you gave a user the factually incorrect answer, leading him to believe that ASICs are not a realistic threat.

Okay I will abide by your desire to censor this thread. I will not reply unless someone makes a very serious critique of what I wrote that requires a response.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
In fact he said "longer to validate" not "longer to propagate."

He implied "validate" includes the time to wait on propagation before validation can be started (part of the process of validation).

That is good because the former is not a Monero-specific issue at all so it doesn't belong on this thread.

His valid implied point is it is Monero-specific when combined with Monero's short block period and the higher potential for DDoS due to the slow proof-of-proof validation.

BTW, if you "don't know if ... Monero  has implemented" something, please don't bring it up here

I was allowing for the possibility that you were not misinterpreting and instead if Monero doesn't transmit the transactions when the block is solved, then your response would have been correct. I didn't have time to go learn what is the current status on Monero on that design point.
legendary
Activity: 2968
Merit: 1198
One minor technical correction though:

Quote
In the future those key factors protecting Monero may well change, with more pools online and more decentralisation, plus a much higher tx generation rate resulting in significantly larger blocks requiring longer to validate.

As things stand today larger blocks don't take much longer to validate. The PoW hash is performed not directly on the entire block but on a much faster hash of the block, so it is essentially independent of the block size. The transactions within a block also need to be validated, but currently that is much faster than the PoW. That could change if database lookups are required. Note that if the dominant portion of block validation time is database lookups, then the speed of the PoW becomes unimportant to validation speed.

I don't know if CryptoNote or Monero has implemented a strategy of eliminating the need to transmit (not validate) the entire block when a block is solved, but if not then you missed his point. He is talking about how block size impacts propagation time which impacts orphan rate. See my cited footnotes.

In fact he said "longer to validate" not "longer to propagate." That is good because the former is not a Monero-specific issue at all so it doesn't belong on this thread.

BTW, if you "don't know if ... Monero  has implemented" something, please don't bring it up here (except, perhaps, once to ask if Monero has implemented it, if you are unable to determine that yourself by consulting the source code). This is not a thread for general discussion of coin design topics that apply to virtually every coin.



hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
One minor technical correction though:

Quote
In the future those key factors protecting Monero may well change, with more pools online and more decentralisation, plus a much higher tx generation rate resulting in significantly larger blocks requiring longer to validate.

As things stand today larger blocks don't take much longer to validate. The PoW hash is performed not directly on the entire block but on a much faster hash of the block, so it is essentially independent of the block size. The transactions within a block also need to be validated, but currently that is much faster than the PoW. That could change if database lookups are required. Note that if the dominant portion of block validation time is database lookups, then the speed of the PoW becomes unimportant to validation speed.

I don't know if CryptoNote or Monero has implemented a strategy of eliminating the need to transmit (not validate) the entire block when a block is solved, but if not then you missed his point. He is talking about how block size impacts propagation time which impacts orphan rate. See my cited footnotes.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 521
I would actually describe the Monero mining network as semi-centralised, because most of the pools configure each other as priority nodes so they are all connected by 1-3 network hops, meaning new blocks only in fact require 4 hops to propagate on average.

...

In the future those key factors protecting Monero may well change, with more pools online and more decentralisation, plus a much higher tx generation rate resulting in significantly larger blocks requiring longer to validate. This could make it possible for Mr X to launch a more disruptive attack so it is worth considering methods of mitigating that risk, one of the more obvious being to increase the block time, which has been discussed before and I dont believe it has been ruled out by the dev team yet. Monero is still at the stage where major changes to the protocol could be made if deemed necessary, it is not set in stone yet.

Lucid explanation. Yes it impacts the tradeoff between decentralization vs. block period (transaction delay). And it also impacts something much more critically important about anonymity which is currently not published. In short, you won't get real NSA-proof anonymity without a fast proof-of-work hash. You will know why when it is published.
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