Topic: [XMR] Monero - A secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - page 250. (Read 4671660 times)

They are way ahead of you the curve.  Go to getmonero.org and read some blogs.  Or just hold your nose, and go to reddit, where the news breaks these days.

Well here is an interesting article.

"In 10 Years We Won't Have Blockchains"

The idea is, that in future the blockchains evolve the way that they are no more a linear timely arranged chain of blocks, but a some kind of a mesh of transactions. So blockchains are then no more called blockchains, because it is misleading name for them.

And the advance of this kind of a new structure is efficiency. Faster transactions and so on.

The writer of the article does not tell details how such system would work, but the idea sounds interesting. Just like before 2009 we did not know exactly how blockchain works, but the idea truly was interesting.

I think Monero team must think about this. This could be future. And if Monero was first to take it in use. That would be nice.

In 10 Years We Won't Have Blockchains

I predict that in 10 years blockchain technology will improve to a level that calling it "blockchain" will no longer be a useful term.

Let's think about this a moment. Why do we call it a blockchain? The three most interesting parts of the blockchain are:

Consensus mechanisms
Management mechanisms (meta-consensus of how to manage future improvements to the overall chain)
The structure of the blockchain itself
The last one will affect how large the network can get, how fast transaction times will happen, and so on. And the structure of the blockchain is why we call it a "blockchain."

So, what do we mean by "blockchain?" Let's break out the two component terms:

Block: A bunch of transactions bundled together.

Chain: The blocks cryptographically connected in a linear fashion.


Bye-bye blocks

I think in the future the block will not be needed. In its place will be a system where transactions are linked together and can confirm previous transactions.

In order to submit your next transaction, you need to validate others in the queue. In order to get what you want (your transaction submitted), you have to do some work for others.

Why do it this way? Transaction times in this model would be faster than, for example, bitcoin's transaction times today. The miner is technically removed and each transaction validates past transactions. Transaction times can actually go down as more people use the system.


Ciao to chains

I also think that in the future, the chain won't be a single directional string of blocks. I think it will look more like a mesh (or graph). Maybe we could have a non-linear set of of branches that go in several different directions, where many parallel transactions are happening.

So, maybe we'll call it a transaction graph. I've also seen the term Tangle (in the IOTA protocol) for early similar concepts.

Maybe we'll call it "the graph" much the same way we speak of "the cloud" today. We will all save information and transactions into this global graph (whether we know it or not).


Enter the DAG

The closest thing I've seen so far that matches my imagined path is a directed acyclic graph.

From Wikipedia:

"In mathematics and computer science, a directed acyclic graph is a finite directed graph with no directed cycles."

A DAG model works differently than a blockchain. A common blockchain requires miners to maintain blocks, but a DAG wouldn't need either proof-of-work or blocks.

New models of management would be needed. So, there is a lot of work to do.

But this model theoretically gets better as new nodes are added. So it may be an improved model for both fees (or, in ethereum parlance, "gas") and scalability over current blockchain models.

In the future, we may have something that does what a blockchain does, only better. There are still challenges to this model, so I don't know how this will play out. But, I think this design is intriguing, and I'm curious to see how it develops.

https://www.coindesk.com/10-years-wont-blockchains/

It is not usable, and doesn't look to become usable in the foreseeable future.  IIRC transactions would take like 20 minutes or something to compute.  I don't remember the details, just that it isn't currently viable.

https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/10/11/monero-considers-implementing-zk-starks/

I don't think our community is wedded to any particular technology. We have a vision of providing private fungible value storage and transfer at the best scale that technology currently allows for while using only safe and well vetted techniques. We also have very healthy governance and a well balanced and rational community who all have a similar vision, so forks tend to be a breeze. If it turns out that sk-starks is the bees knees it will almost certainly be implemented here.

I'm a little behind the times, are we going to see zk-STARKS in Monero?

While Monero’s lead developer, Riccardo Spagni, has criticized Zcash in the past, calling it a “complete security farce,” this new system of implementing zero knowledge proofs may avoid some of the serious issues that Zcash’s current zk-SNARKs system has. Spagni told CoinDesk that Monero will integrate zk-STARKs “if and when it’s usable.

Should be interesting to watch the hashrate after the fork.

I'm running 0.11.1.0 Helium Hydra 64 bit linux on a notebook and Armv7 on a phone.
My daemon says


The update is not available yet at getmonero.org
It still says
Current Version: 0.11.1.0 Helium Hydra

I must have missed it but do we know which block will activate the fork

Some info on the Monero hard fork:

https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.html

we strongly believe that it's beneficial to preserve our ASIC resistance. Therefore, we will perform an emergency hard fork to curb any potential threat from ASICs if needed. Furthermore, in order to maintain its goal of decentralization and to provide a deterrent for ASIC development and to protect against unknown or undetectable ASIC development, the Monero team proposes modifying the Cryptonight PoW hash every scheduled fork, twice a year. The modifications will be light, and should not change performance profiles much. The first change is now being tested, and will happen in the coming March fork. Finally, we will continue to research alternative Proof of Work functions that may provide better ASIC resistance than Cryptonight.

Patches will be available for the following software: zone117x's pool, Snipa's pool, Lucas Jones' CPU miner, wolf0's CPU miner, ccminer-cryptonight, sgminer-gm, xmr-stak, xmrig-nvidia, wolf-xmr-miner.

It's a bear market until 0.06!  I followed your advice and lost my life's savings 

bear market? Are you sure it was only coffee you got