Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 1970. (Read 4670562 times)

XMR is the future.

Oh okay, I misunderstood the connection you were making. I agree that not having a meaningful reward is probably a fail. I'm not persuaded by any of the arguments I've ever seen about what is the "right" reward structure (not limiting this by any means to your arguments), though that isn't a reason to do nothing either. On the somewhat positive side, BCN, if it survives (though its looking questionable at the moment) will get there much, much faster than we will, so we can see how they handle it. Perfect testnet.

Sorry if I was unclear. I wasn't suggesting block time has any effect on transaction fees. I was saying block reward affects the fees. It's important that block reward eventually be a fixed percentage of existing coins, otherwise tx fees will become infinitely more expensive as tx volume increases and reward approaches zero. Explained here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6701490

Masternodes: allows a bad actor to DDoS the legitimate nodes whilst maintaining a private network of their own nodes, and being able to observe and control the mix of transactions. It would be extremely trivial for law enforcement to create the semblance of anonymity whilst being able to fully monitor and control it, all because of the convenience of masternodes.

Ring signatures: I hope Darkcoin implement ring signatures in less than 6 months and in a manner that is not overly kludgy. The more coins that use the technology, the more refinement it goes through, and the more we can address challenges together.

I2P: we have decided this is a non-starter - forcing clients to run Java just introduces an additional attack surface and a set of dependencies. Monero already works through TOR.

That remains to be seen.  It depends on what DRK delivers and what MRO delivers in the meantime.  

DRK promises you a pony some day.  MRO has a fluffypony today.

I'm always nervous when correctness is attributed to a troll, so please pardon my reaction formation:  Technical features are just one small slice of many important distinctives, some quite intangible and abstract.  For use as a currency liquidity is central, and MRO is a furlong and a fortnight ahead of the privacy-enhanced alternatives on this point (disqualifying DRK on grounds of technology -- I don't consider it realistically competitive in the long run, for the natural monopoly of global liquidity in the private currency market, certainly not as it exists today).

This is important because it reduces the fear of hard forks, and fearless hard forking means radical improvements can be made at any stage of a cryptocoin's adoption.

In the current design there is no obvious relationship between block time and transaction fees, because there is no fixed maximum block size, so no scarcity of block space ever. Even relay time doesn't necessarily matter, because there are (complex, but tractable) technical solutions like starting to relay a block while you are still receiving it, or relaying blocks incrementally (bittorrent style), etc.

There are secondary effects, such as limiting orphans that do matter, which is why 1 minute is patently absurd, and even Satoshi's 10 minutes might well be right.

It is also possible the current dynamic block size design might not work, but I think we need to see it start to fail (or at least compelling simulations) before reaching that conclusion. It seems pretty well designed.

Pretty much nothing...

I believe Darkcoin will be the #1, go-to, anonymous coin as it will have Masternodes, Ring Signatures, and I2P, while forks of Bytecoin such as Monero, HoneyPenny, Quazarcoin, etc  will be lesser anonymous coins.

I'm not sure about this one. It has been five years since bitcoin launched. That's roughly 3 doubles in Moore's law terms. I don't think typical MRO transactions are a lot more than 8 times larger than typical BTC transactions. Pruning will eventually become an issue, but again looking to the BTC example, in five years exactly zero has been done about pruning in BTC (though SPV clients have become common). Something will need done, but it is not urgent. I don't hold up BTC as a role model in terms of development, but it does show that these sorts of problems can exist and not cause crippling failure for several years.

There is certainly a cost to the way the anonymity features, but it isn't as if the cost doesn't come with an huge offsetting value proposition. It does.

In any case I definitely agree with your other points, about user-friendliness and "getting it out there." There is much work to do.

I think Monero looks like a very promising crypto right now.

However, what will be Monero's competitive advantage after Darkcoin implements ring signatures?

I agree 100%. This is also important for preventing tx fee escalation and keeping coins spendable. If you click the link in my previous post aminorex and I discussed the issue in depth.

Yes that has always been the plan.

Block time should be increased but block reward also need to be increased proportionally to keep the amount of to-be-mined coins unchanged. We need to stick with original emission graph, otherwise many late miners and fudsters would come up and scream "instamine" all over the board.

Smooth, I agree block time needs to go back to 2 minutes or higher. I think this and other changes discussed (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6701490) should be rolled into a single hard fork and bundled with a beautiful GUI wallet and mining tools.

The trolls are correct in that there is nothing special (yet) with MRO's features. However, we have the right people in place to make this coin truly great. We cannot be afraid of taking unconventional approaches to solving problems and we certainly cannot be afraid of hard forking.

MRO has a long way to go. CryptoNote's solution for anonymity is far from elegant, but it is effective, and that's a huge step in the right direction.  It will suffice until better alternatives emerge. With that out of the way,

- is MRO easy to get? No (though we're working on it). My grandma should be able to fire up the miner and start receiving MRO without calling me.
- is MRO easy to spend? No. This is due to both economic reasons and user experience.
- is MRO scalable? No. Ring signatures add enormous bloat to the block chain that will become a big problem very soon.
- is MRO pretty? No. It's ugly and gross and this is just as important an issue as its functionality.

The good news is there are a lot of people who care about this coin and are taking steps to improve it. As long as we continue to focus on the things that matter we will be ahead of the pack.

GPU mining capability would also attract a lot of people.

If QCN gets on polo or cryptonote.ex, the miner poll is underway. 

40H/s is probably a waste right now.  My main machine can do about 160H/s with the wallet/daemon and I managed to find a block Monday night, but nothing all day yesterday, so I've switched back to pool mining.

If people abandon this and the total H/s drops down to ~1Mhash, I'll probably go back solo.

I didn't mean it that way. You code it so that only after a sufficient number of miners are running the new code does it go into effect. As long as they upgrade, it flips over at some automatically-determined point, but if for some reason they don't, everything stays the way it is. There is no failed hard fork.

Of course we can discuss this in the community first and if there is strong opposition not do it, but I really don't see why anyone would be strongly opposed. I could be wrong though.


Kind of unavoidable. It's the golden rule. The miners are spending the money to run the network (even if in some cases they are stealing it), so in a sense they get to make the rules.  You can sort of run interference against the miners by blocking relaying in the nodes, but it doesn't really work that well except in the most extreme cases.