Topic: [XMR] Monero Speculation - page 1728. (Read 3313576 times)

Please go on...

Regarding Monero research: go read the early pages of the Bytecoin (BCN) thread. That will give you the unbiased truth of why Monero came to exist.

In early 2014, anonymity (privacy) was the big issue, and there wasn't a whole lot of talk about fungibility. It was well known you could improve bitcoin's privacy with coinjoin or mixing, but I don't think the implications of Monero's opaque blockchain became realized until long after its release. The idea that addresses on a transparent ledger always have a history (regardless of mixing), but on an opaque ledger they don't, is still not quite grasped by many in the crypto space.

TL;DR Monero is still relatively young but its purpose has already shifted.

Well i'm not trying to say that people should learn to read code, but it would help to address his concern of getting an unbiased view of a coin.

Google is here so anyone can teach themselves to do just about anything. There are even youtube videos on simple coding.

I guess it depends on how much one wants to understand how something works.


For example my double blade riding lawn mower recently broke the main belt.

I didn't say to myself, "I dont work on lawn mowers". I did a bit of research and found out how to change the belt effectively and in a timely way.

The internet is powerful if whomever wants to embrace it takes it and runs with it.

Heck if I didn't know how to cook, I would google it as well and take tips from people who are good at cooking.

The best way is to just start...somewhere.

The last few days have been a great time to accumulate more coins at attractive prices. Development seems to be coming along well and coin emission keeps slowing. The new dice game, GitHub documentation and rumors of a new service for BTC > XMR trades with a minimum mixin are exciting

Most wont know what's hit them. This is going to be a kind of change that the world has never actually experienced before.  

Works better for people with a technical background. phishead has stated he doesn't have that. What is the alternative then?

A good start is doing what I'm doing...


Reviewing the latest source code file by file, line by line.

Reading back through all 400 pages of this topic, and just had a few words of wisdom from the future to share with some of you in the past:  


 
Don't worry my friend; you have plenty of time... in September of 2014, that is.  
  


I did not get that memo.  Oops.  


 
  
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.  
  

 
  
This was nearly a year ago.  It was right around the time that Monero "died" with this topic at about 50 pages.  Since then it has been another year and we have over 460 pages of conversation - much of it substantial.  Hopefully we have the distinction of dying many more deaths as we grow.  
  
  
 
  
I almost think that we will see the development of crypto move in a speculatory wave pattern which began with frequent rises and crashes (which were relatively large, but tiny in the big scheme of things) and will conclude with infrequent rises and crashes that are very severe in magnitude.  
  
In 2009/2010 when crypto first burst into existence there were massive quakes all the time that caused insane rises and falls in the value of the entire cryptocurrency universe.  Finally around early 2014 things stabilized - in a downtrend.  But that doesn't mean that we stay here.  The bottom of this wave has already been reached (or will be reached by Spring 2016 at the latest) and the next wave up will be both longer than any before it AND more severe (to the upside).  
  
Basically: as slow and dismal as things seem now, it's going to slowly do a 180 and rock the world of cryptocurrency with an anti-crash that the world will most *definitely* notice.

There's always money being spent to employ those guns and laws. Not specifically energy, but something of value being consumed.

And this.

https://shapeshift.io/site/blog/2015/09/24/new-tool-shapeshift-skeleton-allows-site-exchanges-video

I'm not pretending to know or have a solution because I don't ... But look at what happens to bitcoins price when we whisper about a fork to increase transactions.  Value falls by 30%.  

Or spam/stress test the network.  

No other asset class depends on intentionally burning energy (money, electricity, whatever) to secure it.  They depend on guns and laws.  No other asset class has security bound together by who is willing to burn the most energy.  

As much as I hate PoS I'm starting to think the cryptos that survive will be PoW that convert to PoS when the rewards get too low.  Not like these fly by their seat 3 month PoW coins.  But after years of PoW

Gold was just an example. There are very few asset classes of any kind that you can't secure for less than 3.6% per year. And, yet, you've suggested that 3.6% is too low. How high do you think it should be?

Man there are so many reasons.  Have you ever tried to cross borders with gold?  Is there any chance that gold can allow frictionless transactions by all market players from criminal to mom and pop businesses outside corrupt government control?  Wealth is simply things being more efficient than they were and humans reaping the benefit (often the wrong people reap the benefits but still the wealth was created)

Crypto has the potential of making things more efficient .  Gold is simply a limited supply that represents a store of value.  I view them completely differently.

Crypto may very likely wither and die (aweful store of wealth).  Gold won't.

Crypto may usher in a new economic era uncontrollable by powers that be.  Gold can't.

Gold is the currency that always has been.  Crypto is the currency that might be. 

I agree with the differences at that level, but from the perspective of a holder, I don't see a difference. Why would I pay 3.6%+ when I could secure my wealth for less?

I don't think you can really compare gold and crypto.  For instance "securing" crypto is paid via dilution vs gold being an outright expense.  Also an attacker for gold is just trying to get your stash - not crash the entire gold market.

I just see incentives running the opposite direction of where you'd want them to if securing the network was your primary goal.  I think it's really a competition between driving adoption (get rich quick by getting in early) and security once a coin grows big enough.  Maybe I'm wrong ... guess we'll know in 5 years

I don't really see where you can say that, for example, 3.6% is "not enough" security. How much would you want to pay? I'm pretty sure you can secure gold or other valuable assets quite safely for less than that. If 3.6% isn't enough, then crypto will fail simply because it is uncompetitive.

I will agree that the emission rate of Monero seems a bit quick, and also seems designed to intersect so that a majority of coins (and initial inflation) is done and over with by 2020. 
 
I would also argue though that if you extend out an intial issue curve for too long, you run the risk of your currency (and network) going undefended and unvalued. 
 
Pretend that Monero emission began at 20 XMR per block and after a year and a half had declined to just 19.8 XMR per block.  Where's the incentive to hurry up and mine it?  You can get around to it in the next year or two and it will still be just as (if not much more) profitable.  As well consider the massive new supply of coins hitting the market every year - it's almost impossible for a coin to stabilize because yearly inflation is absurd until decades have passed. 
 
As I have said before, the goal of a cryptocurrency is to provide equal and fair access to money for everyone on Earth.  Unfortunately, we're going to have to make a few people extremely rich in order to do that.  All we can do is hope that we make the right people rich.

This is something that will eventually crush the current economic model of crypto (IMO).

Say you have a blockchain with .05% emissions daily with a market cap of $5,000,000.  You are paying a "tax" of 18% a year to blockchain security.

Fast forward 3 years and say you have a market cap of 100,000,000 with an emission rate of .01.  You are paying a tax of 3.6% a year.

The financial incentive to attack a network to short a coin marches towards something that makes sense the older a coin grows.  Where you should be paying more for security - you are paying multiple times LESS for security as your network grows.  The incentive to attack (large network that is competition with someone else or that you want to short) grows while the % of rewards fall.

I wouldn't say it was really designed, except that satoshi designed this general sort of scheme (declining rate of mining) for Bitcoin, with only somewhat vague justification and most other coins copied it (with variations such as using a smooth curve instead of big drops). In the case of Monero, there was a bunch of discussion, some disagreement and some confusion, with the current curve being the one that was launched.

Ultimately the curve in Monero ended up being a bit more than twice as fast as Bitcoin (not counting the tail reward, which offsets somewhat in the other direction). Some people suggested that might be good because the crypto market is far more mature now, and moves faster (the first year or two Bitcoin was very obscure and the code immature). However, regardless of that difference, there is no way to know for sure that the Bitcoin, or Monero, or any other schedule is in any way optimal or even good.

My philosophy is you have to get the coins out there, and it is better to give some years for the market to absorb them in an orderly manner rather than have 1-14 (or even zero) day fastmines/instamines/etc. that are easily manipulated, but other than that there isn't really an objective basis to say that 4 years or 8 years or 20 years is best.

I also agree that part of the goal of mining is to keep the price low, in the sense that it makes cornering the supply and thereby deliberately driving up the price difficult and expensive. If you want to control a large portion of the supply instead of merely holding coins you need to continually spend money to mine them or buy them, otherwise your holdings are constantly diluted. When a mined coin goes up in price and manages to hold on to those gains, it is a pretty good indication that there is actual demand in the market, not just some small group of insiders holding most of it and refusing to sell.

For more technical explanation you need to wait maybe for someone more knowledge to answer this. But, maybe here you can find some of the answers:
https://en.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/2u4m2u/the_thee_pillars_of_monero/

"The same consideration are given to the emission curve. We believe (and we are not the only ones), that relying only on transaction fees won't be enough of an incentive for miners (remember: the core of the blockchain is to rely on an economic incentive, because it is not possible to solve the Byzantine Generals' problem with math alone). This is why Monero implements a "tail emission" that will kick off once the main emission is over, in less than eight years."