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Topic: Zero Knowledge Transactions - page 5. (Read 18678 times)

sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 01:52:08 PM
your best is copy/edit of shadowcoin zero knowledge, if you even have that kind of coding knowledge.

Absolutely not. My inventions have not been copied from any one. Put your full legal name on your posts as mine is on my white paper. So you can be held legally culpable for slander.
full member
Activity: 212
Merit: 100
October 20, 2015, 01:50:21 PM
Somebody wrote this about me in private. Lol. I guess I sort of played that role for Dash. I remember that.

Quote
You have made plenty of positive contributions and you have helped many projects. Some may not have liked your approach, but plenty of people have benefited whereas you have provided challenges, made people think and changed their path - they may have benefited but not given you anything in return, not even an acknowledgement. Sadly, I have to put Darkcoin into this category. The masternode concept was largely Evan's invention, but it was born, in my opinion, from your contributions and challenges to Evan on various sybil attacks.

Btw I did receive some remuneration and small angel investment from a few in return. Mucho gracias.

Any way now is time to really get healthy and make something happen. Need to decide on a direction. And I don't have any ill feelings towards any coin nor group. My challenge is figuring out where I fit in.

Lead developer is the best role for me because I like a free reign to innovate. Some people had asked me to consider contributing my anonymity algorithm to Monero and so I made this thread because of Shen's Reddit announcement. I have since discovered that Shen's design can probably suffice for Monero at least for a first version. So I don't think it is really that compelling that they need my design. I think the Monero community is contented with their progress and team of contributors. Don't you think guys it is sort of a waste to take a very creative guy like me and try to get me to conform to the larger inertia already in Monero? That is not me. I am a free bird. I go off and tinker and sometimes (not every time) produce very creative products. Wouldn't it be better for our community if I am off taking a stab at the other problems such as block chain overhaul that are not going to be on Monero's radar for some time yet?

The smartest thing to do would have been to work with smooth on Aeon.

But each to their own.
legendary
Activity: 1764
Merit: 1000
October 20, 2015, 01:39:17 PM
Somebody wrote this about me in private. Lol. I guess I sort of played that role for Dash. I remember that.

Quote
You have made plenty of positive contributions and you have helped many projects. Some may not have liked your approach, but plenty of people have benefited whereas you have provided challenges, made people think and changed their path - they may have benefited but not given you anything in return, not even an acknowledgement. Sadly, I have to put Darkcoin into this category. The masternode concept was largely Evan's invention, but it was born, in my opinion, from your contributions and challenges to Evan on various sybil attacks.

Btw I did receive some remuneration and small angel investment from a few in return. Mucho gracias.

Any way now is time to really get healthy and make something happen. Need to decide on a direction. And I don't have any ill feelings towards any coin nor group. My challenge is figuring out where I fit in.

Lead developer is the best role for me because I like a free reign to innovate. Some people had asked me to consider contributing my anonymity algorithm to Monero and so I made this thread because of Shen's Reddit announcement. I have since discovered that Shen's design can probably suffice for Monero at least for a first version. So I don't think it is really that compelling that they need my design. I think the Monero community is contented with their progress and team of contributors. Don't you think guys it is sort of a waste to take a very creative guy like me and try to get me to conform to the larger inertia already in Monero? That is not me. I am a free bird. I go off and tinker and sometimes (not every time) produce very creative products. Wouldn't it be better for our community if I am off taking a stab at the other problems such as block chain overhaul that are not going to be on Monero's radar for some time yet?

you belong nowhere in this crypto scam world
your best is copy/edit of shadowcoin zero knowledge, if you even have that kind of coding knowledge.
legendary
Activity: 1008
Merit: 1007
October 20, 2015, 01:38:05 PM
So what if that was excellent tech that was generally considered to be the best out there. Then those market pumps might be like staircases lifting the valuation and ecosystem network effects. I don't think this model has been tested yet, except maybe Bitcoin is that model.

Tech alone doesn't drive success - you need to get marketing behind you;best if this comes in the form of having industry experts on your side / working for you. Bitcoin is only successful because of the first mover advantage.

Funding wise, I think etherium did it right, but its a huge project to arrange...seemingly outside the reach of the small developer.
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 01:33:31 PM
Somebody wrote this about me in private. Lol. I guess I sort of played that role for Dash. I remember that.

Quote
You have made plenty of positive contributions and you have helped many projects. Some may not have liked your approach, but plenty of people have benefited whereas you have provided challenges, made people think and changed their path - they may have benefited but not given you anything in return, not even an acknowledgement. Sadly, I have to put Darkcoin into this category. The masternode concept was largely Evan's invention, but it was born, in my opinion, from your contributions and challenges to Evan on various sybil attacks.

Btw I did receive some remuneration and small angel investment from a few in return. Mucho gracias.

Any way now is time to really get healthy and make something happen. Need to decide on a direction. And I don't have any ill feelings towards any coin nor group. My challenge is figuring out where I fit in.

Lead developer is the best role for me because I like a free reign to innovate. Some people had asked me to consider contributing my anonymity algorithm to Monero and so I made this thread because of Shen's Reddit announcement. I have since discovered that Shen's design can probably suffice for Monero at least for a first version. So I don't think it is really that compelling that they need my design. I think the Monero community is contented with their progress and team of contributors. Don't you think guys it is sort of a waste to take a very creative guy like me and try to get me to conform to the larger inertia already in Monero? That is not me. I am a free bird. I go off and tinker and sometimes (not every time) produce very creative products. Wouldn't it be better for our community if I am off taking a stab at the other problems such as block chain overhaul that are not going to be on Monero's radar for some time yet?
legendary
Activity: 1764
Merit: 1000
October 20, 2015, 01:28:29 PM
Here is an excerpt from my fully completed white paper for my revolutionary anonymity invention.


why don't you shuffle this whitepaper in your ass and get lost? i know that would help lot of dumb people and saving their headache later.
legendary
Activity: 1456
Merit: 1000
October 20, 2015, 01:23:44 PM
.....
Clients in the system retain messages for a couple or few days. But they are only stored opportunistically decentralized and not on any deterministic, globally coordinated ledger......

SnapChat have raised investment valuing their shares at mulit-billion $$$ levels with something less desirable.

It would be interesting to reverse engineer crypto into mobile apps, by first making the messaging system desirable - messages that can disappear after x-period of time (unless saved) and never get stored on a central server where the authorities can demand access.
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 01:08:46 PM
Quote
In my design, the anonymity can be added without a hard fork, so everything is much more plugin oriented. Monero will have to hard fork.
We have a builtin hardfork design that hardforks the network every 6 months, people have to upgrade. Old protocols will stop working. Adopt or die; You also have to upgrade your OS regularly or you get fucked by malware, so i see no issue with this.

https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/303/a-formal-approach-towards-better-hard-fork-management

It´s a bit like the linux kernel, old ones get abandond.

I am curious what smooth thinks about this, because seems like up thread he was arguing that forced upgrades are destabilizing and I assume because they violate the trust that user has that the protocol is decentralized and thus doesn't die by any expiration date or reliance on any controlling entity.

Btw, this feature makes me wonder if you guys are setting yourselves up to be more culpable under investment securities law, as you are clearly forcing the product to rely on your ongoing control, unless I misunderstand the implication of the stated feature.

Not to spread FUD but seriously if a coin is undergoing hard forks then it really isn't decentralized in the purest/strictest sense.

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Bitmessage doesn't use a block chain. It uses only the idea of Proof-of-Work to make sure each sent message has some CPU power behind it. Because spam is very costly to the network performance of its "send every message to everyone in the same channel" design.

Yeah but a bc like system that stores the last couple of days, doesn´t it?

Clients in the system retain messages for a couple or few days. But they are only stored opportunistically decentralized and not on any deterministic, globally coordinated ledger.

P.S. happy that we entered a respectful dialogue.
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
October 20, 2015, 01:02:12 PM
Quote
In my design, the anonymity can be added without a hard fork, so everything is much more plugin oriented. Monero will have to hard fork.
We have a builtin hardfork design that hardforks the network every 6 months, people have to upgrade. Old protocols will stop working. Adopt or die; You also have to upgrade your OS regularly or you get fucked by malware, so i see no issue with this.

https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/303/a-formal-approach-towards-better-hard-fork-management

It´s a bit like the linux kernel, old ones get abandond.

Quote
Bitmessage doesn't use a block chain. It uses only the idea of Proof-of-Work to make sure each sent message has some CPU power behind it. Because spam is very costly to the network performance of its "send every message to everyone in the same channel" design.

Yeah but a bc like system that stores the last couple of days, doesn´t it?
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 01:00:34 PM
AnonyMint's Guide to Illegal Unregistered ICOs and Investment Services (Options, etc)

...

Clarification about what I think is legal and not legal.

Crowdfunding a product (where you give out coins in the product as the reward) appears to be not an investment security as long as you as the lead developer (or his controlling group) does not continue to exclusively manage the coin as a controlling entity. In other words, you are selling only your programming services and are not managing an investment. Thus you must complete your development work and debugging before you accept the funds from the crowdfunding. Any ongoing work would come from anyone who wants to submit patches, and the decentralized nodes in the system can decide whether to upgrade or not (thus no hard forks can work). For features requiring a hard fork, then create a new coin.

So I would still be able to submit patches as well as others could for as long as I don't try to control some master copy of the open source and commit access (thus not acting as a controlling entity for the product), i.e. as Linus explains about decentralized version control Git, everyone can have their own local copy of the changesets they have merged.
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 12:19:06 PM
I had heard that, but again there was an asset there with features that provided justification that along with the pump will bring in liquidity. I don't you think you can effectively pump some copycoin with nothing to get investors excited about other than the attempted pump? There has to be some illusion of legitimacy.


Yes there always is, thats what pnd groups use to justify a pump, be it some release eta of a new version etc. or just some good news.
For example there was last year ALWAYS a pump when a new coin got added to Mintpal (an exchange with the most volume back then), also for XMR.
Dogecoin block halving was another example, price just went down then, Bitshares 2.0 the same, price just crashed after it.
Thats why they say: "Buy on rumour, sell on news."

Maybe thats why we don´t give out ETAs.

Seems the ones that stayed in the Top 10 actually have some useful features (even if for example Dash's anonymity has the holes of swiss cheese and users don't comprehend nor care).


Is it evil to invest a lot of money in your own coin in order to drive up market interest?
Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.
Fair and homeostasis are the antithesis of the definition of openly traded exchange markets. That is one reason securities are regulated (because the government is always asked to fix nature, i.e. to fix what can't be fixed).

No it´s not; but Evan instamined it with Azure Cloud nodes, i know it, i tried to compile it and i watched all incoming connections after i finally fixed the crap, the code he uploaded to github didn´t even compile and it had this nice bug that produced 500 coins per block, then later when a lot of people mined the emission was changed and the amount per block has an algorithm that says -> the more hashrate the less coins per block. He took that from peercoin without thinking about the parameter, their algo was optimized for sha mining. Funny enough, the release of an open GPU miner meant a loss for all miners because the difficulty went so high that the reward per block went to the minimum amount. From 500 to 5 coins. I would call that evil or at least dishonest, i personally will not resort to those tactics to earn my money.

I wouldn't want to be Evan. I doubt he registered with the SEC, he is a USA citizen, and he apparently sold securities to non-accredited investors where he retained interest in the venture promoting himself as the lead dev of the controlling group hence. And there seems to be considerable evidence he was not truthful in the prospectus. Looks like the man could be in heaps of legal trouble in the future. I believe the powers-that-be are simply waiting for as much fraud as possible to pile up in crypto currency and then when they are ready, they will sweep down and wallop the industry in order to take control. They seem to be purposefully allowing a wild west to proliferate so that as many people as possible can incriminate themselves.

I would advise not resorting to illegal activity to earn money.

I think as long as you disclose what you are doing, then you are not culpable even if some people didn't grasp the ramifications. That is if you are not selling securities; otherwise the law requires more extensive disclosure. My interpretation of the USA securities law is if you remain as a controlling group of a product that has shares and thus you are essentially operating as an unregistered company entrusted to grow the value of investment securities.

Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.

I would like to pick that quote out, i don´t think they have written more lines of code than we did, especially not darkcoin. Nor did any of them produce any reasonable research like the stuff we discuss in this very same topic.

I haven't looked but Bitshares has produced a fair amount I bet.

Just because someone hasn't yet combined the best of honest investment pumping with the best of open source coding, doesn't mean Monero's performance is the optimum we can achieve.

Seems Daniel Latimer got closest to merging both strategies, but so far he has pursued some designs that could not work such as BitUSD and now the incomplete anonymity upgrade. And the DPOS also appears to be flawed (at least the last time I looked at it, but let's delay that technical discussion until I am ready to get into it).

Charles H. who was originally partnered with Daniel went on to help form Ethereum. Charles was talking to me, but I wanted to have a product already and not rush in with all my ideas still up in the air unsettled. It wasn't surprising to me that they went the bloated research direction. I could feel intuitively that was the leaning. So apparently there was some incompatibility between Daniel's direction and Charles. According to Charles, they created reasons to oust him. Maybe he stood in the way of the pump with the Chinese or was dispensable. Never a dull moment in crypto land.

So what is unsettled from my view is whether a methodical model such as Monero is superior to a model that raises a lot of capital and market awareness via enabling the speculation pathway of concentrating ownership and pumps to raise liquidity for the whales to cash out. Appears that Bitshares settled back down to its non-pumped value as the core users were still using it after the China pump. And Bitshares afaik just isn't really that great of tech but not the worst either. So what if that was excellent tech that was generally considered to be the best out there. Then those market pumps might be like staircases lifting the valuation and ecosystem network effects. I don't think this model has been tested yet, except maybe Bitcoin is that model.

Normally one would say open source methodical approach wins in the end, but we are talking about here is which code base gains the most momentum in the most effective areas. In my design, the anonymity can be added without a hard fork, so everything is much more plugin oriented. Monero will have to hard fork.

Writing a lot of code can be good or bad. Bad if you end up having to throw a lot of it away and start over. I am not saying that is the case for Monero. I haven't actually looked at the code that much or thought deeply about Monero's code structure and the future implications. I doubt I have time to go on that tangent unless I want to be a Monero developer.

Dogecoin for example doesn´t seem to have developers with much funding either, but they crowdfunded some crazy shit like a whole NASCAR racing car in Dogecoin optic, all paid by people in their community. I think Dogecoin is a good example of working crowdfunding without a premine or ico.

Yeah Dogecoin was able to get network efforts with pumping. So take the best of tech from Monero, best of merging production with pumping from Bitshares, and the best of marketing network effects with pumping from Dogecoin. And package it with a block chain scaling that threatens Bitcoin. Then maybe we see a unique result.

In the case of Cryptonote, knowing the IP address of sender is in theory enough to do holistic correlation chain analysis and break down the anonymity combinatorially.

It´s way harder then for stuff like DRK or BTC. But yes, we have to find a way to secure the networking, i2p will be the first attempt, it´s good enough for now, and good enough simply means there´s nothing better and theres also no way we would have the resources to create something better ourselves at the moment. TOR and I2P are both projects which many many man years of engineering and in case of TOR also with a lot of funding, hard to compete with.

Yup. That is why is I said it is difficult to hang the hat on anonymity as a coin's main purpose at this time. And how to gain size so that there is enough demand for securing the networking. I think anonymity is a longer range goal, although I wish we could accelerate it.

Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.

No, DRK and co where just one some of them, Vertcoin, Blackcoin etc all had high marketcaps, more than Monero and they are all pretty much dead. There was a so called pump of the month every month starting in january 2014 or so.

I meant of those coins still in the Top 10, most where pumped and did not fall out. The difference between those that fell away entirely appears to be they have no unique feature at all. Vertcoin has Scrypt and stealth addresses, but then along comes Dash and Cryptonote with far more anonymity features than stealth addresses.

Armstrong has a few words for people who say markets lie. I reduced it to one word: delusion.

I don´t say they lie, i say the current prices are irrelevant in 10 years.

I might be dead in 10 years.

Users need solutions in the next couple of years as we head into the sovereign debt crisis global collapse.

I care about the near-term as well willing to sustain for the long-term for as long as it is still the best opportunity.

We might look and them and scratch our heads or we will ask ourselves why someone even paid a few cents for certain coins or even bitcoin.
They all have too small marketcaps to matter at all, even bitcoin.

There are scenarios though where they fall away entirely but their example influenced the one that replaced Bitcoin. I am dreaming you know.

Something that works is to be criticized  Huh

Robbing old people with a gun also works, i am still not a fan of that.

Old people are not typically investing in highly speculative altcoins.

I've tried to educate readers about economics and investing, but you know people will not listen. They have to learn for themselves the hard way. There is probably a reason that nature does what it does. I am not here to fight nature, but rather to find the most efficient opportunities and look for large markets that have an unmet need. Then find the most efficient way to meet that need.

Speculative investing is not holding a gun to anyone's head. Everyone is free to make their own decisions.

Fixing I2P and Tor is interrelating with making Bitmessage scale.

I said nothing about i2p or tor, even if we had a perfect anonymity network the bitmessage protocol would be the last thing i would use to produce an instant messaging application.

My meaning that once you have an anonymous networking then messaging on top of it is anonymous.

I also don´t see why Monero should spend resources on stuff like this.

They shouldn't perhaps and my point is the long wait ahead for anonymous messaging to be perfected by others or the demand to grow sufficiently.

I wasn't talking about the block chain. Anonymity of the on chain rings is unmasked in theory by an omnscient observer such as the NSA if the connection to the internet is not anonymous.

That wasn´t my context, i was pointing out that projects like BitMessage who use a blockchain are most of the time nonsense,

Bitmessage doesn't use a block chain. It uses only the idea of Proof-of-Work to make sure each sent message has some CPU power behind it. Because spam is very costly to the network performance of its "send every message to everyone in the same channel" design.
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
October 20, 2015, 10:55:01 AM
Quote
Do you disagree?

No.

Quote
I had heard that, but again there was an asset there with features that provided justification that along with the pump will bring in liquidity. I don't you think you can effectively pump some copycoin with nothing to get investors excited about other than the attempted pump? There has to be some illusion of legitimacy.


Yes there always is, thats what pnd groups use to justify a pump, be it some release eta of a new version etc. or just some good news.
For example there was last year ALWAYS a pump when a new coin got added to Mintpal (an exchange with the most volume back then), also for XMR.
Dogecoin block halving was another example, price just went down then, Bitshares 2.0 the same, price just crashed after it.
Thats why they say: "Buy on rumour, sell on news."

Maybe thats why we don´t give out ETAs.

Quote
What do you mean by 300k? Do you mean the pump group invested 300k BTC (certainly not satoshis which are 100 millionth of a BTC) moving the price up before they started selling?

I thought that 300k Satoshi was the max price of Dogecoin in the big pump. According to https://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/cryptsy/dogebtc the pump reached 296 Satoshi. I mixed that up, thought it was 300k sats, but it was "only" 300. I guess thats sth like a 5-10x gain for the pumpers involved.

 
Quote
Is it evil to invest a lot of money in your own coin in order to drive up market interest?
Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.
Fair and homeostasis are the antithesis of the definition of openly traded exchange markets. That is one reason securities are regulated (because the government is always asked to fix nature, i.e. to fix what can't be fixed).

No it´s not; but Evan instamined it with Azure Cloud nodes, i know it, i tried to compile it and i watched all incoming connections after i finally fixed the crap, the code he uploaded to github didn´t even compile and it had this nice bug that produced 500 coins per block, then later when a lot of people mined the emission was changed and the amount per block has an algorithm that says -> the more hashrate the less coins per block. He took that from peercoin without thinking about the parameter, their algo was optimized for sha mining. Funny enough, the release of an open GPU miner meant a loss for all miners because the difficulty went so high that the reward per block went to the minimum amount. From 500 to 5 coins. I would call that evil or at least dishonest, i personally will not resort to those tactics to earn my money.

Quote
Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.

I would like to pick that quote out, i don´t think they have written more lines of code than we did, especially not darkcoin. Nor did any of them produce any reasonable research like the stuff we discuss in this very same topic.
Dogecoin for example doesn´t seem to have developers with much funding either, but they crowdfunded some crazy shit like a whole NASCAR racing car in Dogecoin optic, all paid by people in their community. I think Dogecoin is a good example of working crowdfunding without a premine or ico.

Quote
In the case of Cryptonote, knowing the IP address of sender is in theory enough to do holistic correlation chain analysis and break down the anonymity combinatorially.

It´s way harder then for stuff like DRK or BTC. But yes, we have to find a way to secure the networking, i2p will be the first attempt, it´s good enough for now, and good enough simply means there´s nothing better and theres also no way we would have the resources to create something better ourselves at the moment. TOR and I2P are both projects which many many man years of engineering and in case of TOR also with a lot of funding, hard to compete with.


The X11 code in their wallet is still unoptimized and slow as he had just copied it from a known crypto library.

Quote
Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.

No, DRK and co where just one some of them, Vertcoin, Blackcoin etc all had high marketcaps, more than Monero and they are all pretty much dead. There was a so called pump of the month every month starting in january 2014 or so.

Quote
Armstrong has a few words for people who say markets lie. I reduced it to one word: delusion.

I don´t say they lie, i say the current prices are irrelevant in 10 years. We might look and them and scratch our heads or we will ask ourselves why someone even paid a few cents for certain coins or even bitcoin.
They all have too small marketcaps to matter at all, even bitcoin.

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Something that works is to be criticized  Huh

Robbing old people with a gun also works, i am still not a fan of that.

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Fixing I2P and Tor is interrelating with making Bitmessage scale.

I said nothing about i2p or tor, even if we had a perfect anonymity network the bitmessage protocol would be the last thing i would use to produce an instant messaging application. On a sidenode, all of those niche messaging apps are totally irrelevant because the world is only using WhatsApp (which btw uses the WhisperSystems protocol i linked earlier, created by Moxie Marlinspike).
I also don´t see why Monero should spend resources on stuff like this.

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I wasn't talking about the block chain. Anonymity of the on chain rings is unmasked in theory by an omnscient observer such as the NSA if the connection to the internet is not anonymous.

That wasn´t my context, i was pointing out that projects like BitMessage who use a blockchain are most of the time nonsense,
Look at all those bitcoin startups that bring product XYZ to the blockchain even if it could be done way better with a sharded database or whatever. It´s all just Blockchain buzzword marketing at it´s worst.
It was you who mentioned BitMessage, which uses a BlockChain to store the messages, which is...let´s say suboptimal. I simply see no need for it, it´s more of a proof of concept of stuff that can be done but shouldn´t be done.

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Encryption is not anonymization. That secure messaging doesn't obscure the IP address of the sender and receiver. It is known they are communicating to each other. It is not known what they communicated.

I am well aware of that, but you mentioned BitMessage which is also just encrypting your messages and has to be used in combination with TOR or whatever. People can as well just use the linked protocol with TOR (Textsecure, Whatsapp, Signal); Or stuff like TorChat, Jabber+OTR, IRC+BLOWFISH.

What i really want to say is, there are reasonable good ways of messaging securely already but no one cares about them, and thats the main issue. Let´s call it the PGP problem.
I am chatting encrypted on IRC since the 90s, so dunno if encrypted messaging is "the" big deal...
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 10:28:00 AM
But why are you skeptical when some have raised a lot of money. And some coins have had huge gains from their launch price.

Because they have mostly failed as developments, and especially as you say for ongoing development. Huge gains don't constitute success from my perspective if it just means getting a big pump and then engaging in a long march toward zero while interest fades and the original promoters and developers move on to their next big score. Of course the final chapter has not been written on most of these coins, but the outline of the story seems to be the same for all (or at least most) of them.

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For refinements, probably a donation model is all that will work.

Perhaps now you understand my support for Monero's model as an inclusive open source project, where there are donations in cash, but most donations are in kind (collaborative development by ecosystem stakeholders). It struggles at first by comparison with ICOs, instamines, etc. but if you care about staying power, it is hard to beat.

It is a proven model that successfully develops core software infrastructure and has many examples of projects that has succeeded for decades (including, for a shorter time so far, Bitcoin, which BTW, entirely dwarfs all the "successful" coin projects you cite). I don't know that there is another applicable model with a similar track record.

Agreed eventually open source produces over 10 years or so the likes of Linux and Gimp which compete effectively with commercial OSes and top-of-line Photoshop.

But if you were going to pick a coin to work on as a starting point, why not pick the one that already has most of the major issues resolved in its design. When Linus started, he didn't port FreeBSD or other Unix OSes, I guess because he saw fundamental inertia there that would prevent him from reaching his goals for great design. (Linus is really good at smart delegation and managing design)

I assert no such starting point exists today. All the Top 10 have inertias and incorrect designs that can't serve as the platform for the next 10 years. I have some very big specifics in mind but I won't enumerate them yet, because other may try to copy me.

And what is wrong with pumping up the product, getting the market cap up there and then proceeding with donations? If that is what it takes to produce the best starting point, then so be it. As long as we as a community get what we need in the end. What ever is most efficient in the market. Markets don't lie.

Ideology killed the cat.

Again I think the only correct way to do ongoing development for both legal and economic reasons is the person who sells the coin product (awarding coins to people who purchased the product) must not continue as nor transfer control to a controlling group. Or the "fair distribution" approach but that appears to diminish speculation cycles which are necessary to create investor excitement and media play. The coin must run on auto-pilot after fixing the bugs and completing the contract for delivering the product and being paid. Independent developers can solicit donations to make changes in the source code, and nodes can adopt which ever version they wish (meaning that hard forks are very unlikely). This means a decentralized model of non-vested development. Any developers that try to act like controlling group, will thus face the possible ramifications under securities legislation. Thus I think developers should instead focus on paid tasks by decentralized donations. Foundations may form websites to teach about the coin, etc.. and again not by a controlling group. They can pay for their efforts by linking to products & services, and other monetization methods that don't involve being a controlling group.

If there is some major features that need to be added in a hard fork, then someone can go create a new coin. Simple as that.

There is no way to really force an upgrade on an established decentralized community. As we discussed the options up thread, it became clear to me (after I slept) that the concept of an organized upgrade doesn't exist in a decentralized consensus protocol because the protocol didn't have an expiration date in it. If we build in a burn capability for upgrades, then we create instability of an unknown expiration in that trust and consensus model (that no one is in control and no party has a favorable position in the protocol which is what I meant to write when I was so sleepy). Also burning for upgrades provides no funding for the developers who want to attempt some radical new features that justify a hard fork. Thus creating a new coin (even with the same name and calling it version 2 or what ever since no one owns the name in a decentralized system and only the community will decide how to refer to something) and funding it with crowdfund again in order to ascertain the level of interest probably is the most sensible.

Are we closer to agreement now?
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 09:41:55 AM
This post is very very helpful to me! Thank you.

But I never thought about that being a main driver for LTC. You taught me a datum I didn't know about the largest LTC exchange allowing anonymity.

The reason for LTC´s pumps were several MLM shemes originating in china and hong kong.

Makes sense. And I guess the first ASICs were produced in China too so someone perhaps mined a lot of coins cheaply.

But I think the underlying base of support of looking at LTC as a safe diversification from BTC (and the use case for laundering money and GPU mining) is what provided liquidity for suckering greater fools into the pump. It seems you need both the good illusion of a reason and the also the control of some of the money supply by those who will pump it up to increase liquidity so they can cash out.

Do you disagree?

Bitshares pump was caused by chinese investors too.

I had heard that, but again there was an asset there with features that provided justification that along with the pump will bring in liquidity. I don't you think you can effectively pump some copycoin with nothing to get investors excited about other than the attempted pump? There has to be some illusion of legitimacy.

Dogecoin was pumped to 300k satoshi (value is out of my head) by a guy called wolong (from singapore imho) and his pump group.

What do you mean by 300k? Do you mean the pump group invested 300k BTC (certainly not satoshis which are 100 millionth of a BTC) moving the price up before they started selling?

Darkcoin was pumped by a group called prometheus to its all time high.

That is the main and only driver for all coins including bitcoin, pump and dump groups.

Is it evil to invest a lot of money in your own coin in order to drive up market interest?

Those coins have all stayed in the Top 10 of market caps and thus have been able to fund ongoing development.

Fair and homeostasis are the antithesis of the definition of openly traded exchange markets. That is one reason securities are regulated (because the government is always asked to fix nature, i.e. to fix what can't be fixed).

It was never easy to buy huge stakes of xmr for very small prices, thats why u never saw a big pump there, of course there were smaller ones.

Bingo! As I have always said, the "fair distribution" was the initial death blow to Monero. I have said that so many times. There is no incentive to create any momentum, neither in capital structure nor in development (my point being paradigm shifts in development strategy don't come from group action but rather highly motivated individual creativity).

The current prices say nothing, they are all irrelevant. Time will tell who will be an important player and who won´t.

Armstrong has a few words for people who say markets lie. I reduced it to one word: delusion.

Markets tell you the reality. Holier than thou intellectuals wish reality was more amenable to "well-structured top-down sparkling academic cathedral of vastly superior theoretical minds".

I see. And being first in anonymity gave them the illusion of being hot in innovation while the masternode actually tied up the money supply so that that market cap appears much larger than the actual liguid float, which thus caused more stampede in on the way up the ramp to $53 million. May explain also why PoS coins have had ramps?

See above, also note that they used other "innovations" like a screwed up initial distribution where the first blocks gave 500 DRK per block, a cutting of the total supply from 84 mio to 21 mio without a word before etc.

This illusion how you call it, it´s what pnd groups use to justify a pump and it works every time.

Something that works is to be criticized  Huh

Surmounting the anonymity space is not going to be easy. For example, Bitmessage sucks and Monero hasn't done anything about that.

It´s not our job to invent secure instant messaging, the blockchain itself is not the correct tool for that.

Fixing I2P and Tor is interrelated with making Bitmessage scale. Who else has the financial incentive? I am not saying necessarily XMR should do that work, but rather my point is that anonymity is difficult to complete holistically.

I personally hate it that everyone wants to solve everything using the so called blockchain, it doesn´t make any sense, especially for a messaging protocol.

I wasn't thinking about using the block chain to do anonymous messaging. Anonymity of the on chain rings is unmasked in theory by an omniscient observer such as the NSA if the connection to the internet is not anonymous.

There are already scalable protocols who got peer reviewed and just work fine for the mass amount of people (https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/904.pdf).

Encryption is not anonymization. That secure messaging doesn't obscure the IP address of the sender and receiver. It is known they are communicating to each other. It is not known what they communicated.

In the case of Cryptonote, knowing the IP address of sender is in theory enough to do holistic correlation chain analysis and break down the anonymity combinatorially.
legendary
Activity: 1256
Merit: 1009
October 20, 2015, 09:12:52 AM
Quote
The reason for LTC´s pumps were several MLM shemes originating in china and hong kong.

I'm not sure what you define as "pumps" - but litecoin has had a long standing #2 spot for three years now?  The ride from $10 to $40 I have no doubt was an artificial pump but the daily transaction volume has always dwarfed everything outside of Bitcoin.  My analysis was directed at this - not the ride to $30 and crash back down to only 4 - 5X whatever the current leading alt is.

Quote
Imo, the bet you should be making is on block chain scaling.

Bitshares seems complex and like a be all / end all for everything from stock trading, market place, multi level marketing scheme, etc.  NXT and SuperNET seem to have at least some of these attributes that make me think they will never see widespread adoption.   Even Ethereum seems focused compared to those projects.  

I also hate their names and hate PoS (although for scaling purposes with transaction times maybe it's a necessity?)  I guess I should spend some time outside of the PoW fold ...
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 09:00:56 AM
I actually just had an idea outside of being paid outright or starting your own coin if you wanted to bootstrap off of Monero or another coin with rich bagholders.  And it's something I would be willing to participate in.

Get Risto to act as an ESCROW and Smooth and others to review your white paper to see if they think it will add significant value / demand to Monero.

I don't think my white paper can turn the fate of Monero. The only advantages I see for mine over Shen's are potentially a performance boost (but need to actually dig in to quantify) and this obscure notion that in the holistic sense of combinatorial chain analysis by entity that can see many output values, then the unlinkability of the hidden values is I allege "not strictly enforced" ("broken") at the holistic chain analysis perspective (not broken at a per transaction perspective). In Cryptonote the values are always equal so values never lead to combinatorial unmasking cascade. One example of seeing many values is when users send many transactions through large entities such as Coinbase or Bitpay. The NSA might have tapped that data for example.

So while mine may have those advantages (no one can verify until they see mine) and if so is worth a minor increment in payment perhaps, it is not enough to turn the fate of Monero to justify that level of intrusion into Monero's coin distribution. The potential benefit is out-of-proportion to the tumult suggested.

Also neither smooth nor rpietila are fully qualified to judge the value of cryptography white papers (smooth could perhaps digest it but with much effort that he is probably too busy to do). They would be relying on the opinions of others experts. I have lost too much time due to talking and such. I'd prefer the paths of least resistance and clear paths to production asap.

Although I'd like to get something for my anonymity white paper, unless I am going to join Monero as an ongoing developer, then it doesn't seem like there is enough value that can be extracted by me relative to the tumult of the different personalities, past history, etc.. I mean I could release my paper then after seeing it they could argue it is not significant enough difference, then later they basically sneak in my advances in some other equational transformation that makes it look like they didn't take it from mine. I think they already have Shen's which is close enough so it is difficult now to do any deal.

I could see my whitepaper being more valuable to a coin that has no strong anonymity yet and which has the funds or market size to pay me. Bitshares and Nxt are probably the strongest candidates for getting my white paper if they are interested because they have weak anonymity thus far and at least the SuperNet (although they are working it, mine is I think superior than what they came up with and I do know what they were working on) has the funds available (haven't spoken to them yet on this issue) and if not just keep it for my own coin. Boolberry may still be affiliated with SuperNet so perhaps SuperNet would fund the addition of my algorithm to both BBR and any other coin on the SuperNet.

I'm not much into crypto

Imo, the bet you should be making is on block chain scaling.
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
October 20, 2015, 08:47:59 AM
Quote
But I never thought about that being a main driver for LTC. You taught me a datum I didn't know about the largest LTC exchange allowing anonymity.

The reason for LTC´s pumps were several MLM shemes originating in china and hong kong.
Bitshares pump was caused by chinese investors too.
Dogecoin was pumped to 300k satoshi (value is out of my head) by a guy called wolong (from singapore imho) and his pump group.
Darkcoin was pumped by a group called prometheus to its all time high.

That is the main and only driver for all coins including bitcoin, pump and dump groups.
It was never easy to buy huge stakes of xmr for very small prices, thats why u never saw a big pump there, of course there were smaller ones.

The current prices say nothing, they are all irrelevant. Time will tell who will be an important player and who won´t.

Quote
I see. And being first in anonymity gave them the illusion of being hot in innovation while the masternode actually tied up the money supply so that that market cap appears much larger than the actual liguid float, which thus caused more stampede in on the way up the ramp to $53 million. May explain also why PoS coins have had ramps?

See above, also note that they used other "innovations" like a screwed up initial distribution where the first blocks gave 500 DRK per block, a cutting of the total supply from 84 mio to 21 mio without a word before etc.

This illusion how you call it, it´s what pnd groups use to justify a pump and it works every time.

Quote
Surmounting the anonymity space is not going to be easy. For example, Bitmessage sucks and Monero hasn't done anything about that.

It´s not our job to invent secure instant messaging, the blockchain itself is not the correct tool for that.
I personally hate it that everyone wants to solve everything using the so called blockchain, it doesn´t make any sense, especially for a messaging protocol.
There are already scalable protocols who got peer reviewed and just work fine for the mass amount of people (https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/904.pdf).
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 08:23:03 AM
Here is where we disagree on what made early adopters rich (which I believe at its core was about supply and demand ... Not innovation that kicked bitcoins ass)

Litecoin was successful because there was a "demand" for a bitcoin backup in case something went horribly wrong with the network and early adopters who had money wanted to diversify.

Ah yes. I remember that now that you mention it. I remember specifically people citing that reason.

In combination with this there was a demand to anonymize by obscurity (there is a reason why the biggest litecoin exchange is anonymous and requires no identity verification).  I think this is a better method and more widely used than coin mixing services.

I do remember people mentioning exchanges as their form of anonymity when I was pushing off and on chain solutions integrated into a coin (which became Dash and Cryptonote). But I never thought about that being a main driver for LTC. You taught me a datum I didn't know about the largest LTC exchange allowing anonymity.

And this goes right to the point of my prior post, where I said that educating users about anonymity is difficult. Don't these naive users understand that if the exchange is anonymous, then it might be the NSA! No they don't understand, don't believe it is likely, or don't care!

Marketing is not about what is correct and most intellectual, rather about what people think and the path of least resistance. This is what I mean when I say coins that have horrible marketing in that they don't pay attention to the things that really matter in marketing.

For it to work it needed liquidity which early bitcoiners wanting to cash out brought to the table.

Excellent point. The synergy between the two modes you raised.

Do any readers concur or disagree?

I disagree with the scrypt / decentralization as being much of an innovation.  It failed when GPUs replaced CPUs and then again when ASICs replaced GPUs - litecoin failed to follow its decentralizion innovation very intentionally.

No I didn't mean Scrypt was an innovation in the sense of intellectual correctness. I meant in terms of marketing timing. The GPUs had to leave Bitcoin and so Scrypt meant Bitcoin mining ASICs could not mine Litecoin. So combined with the other modes you mentioned, this mining hash feature ended up being another factor driving the synergy of the timing.

And the wealth in litecoin did not move into what tried to carry on it's original intention (Scrypt-N / Vertcoin & X11 / Darkcoin)

Well because X11 is nonsense. And because GPUs were doing fine thank you in other coins with unique mining algorithms once the LTC mining had become saturated. And also probably most GPUs had been amortized and no one was buying more GPUs since ASICs were the hot new thing to buy. So LTC was the transition for paying off the GPU amortization.

The reason Darkcoin succeeded was due to the masternode method of tying up 50% of the coins and cutting down emissions to a fraction of what was originally planned to limit supply.

I see. And being first in anonymity gave them the illusion of being hot in innovation while the masternode actually tied up the money supply so that that market cap appears much larger than the actual liquid float, which thus caused more stampede in on the way up the ramp to $53 million. May explain also why PoS coins have had ramps?

Dogecoin I agree had the most innovation with marketing.

But (correct me if I'm wrong) the marketplace is full of innovation that takes crypto well beyond Bitcoin.  Monero / cryptonote wipes it's ass with anonomization and supporting a dynamic block size out of the gate (what Bitcoin has been fighting over for years).

I will correct you because now you are in my area of expertise which is evaluating technology. Your expertise above of having more time than I do to observe all the goings on in different markets of crypto, explains that it is difficult for a core dev to be omniscient in marketing if he doesn't have input from astute others he trusts.

Cryptonote does wipe ass on one aspect of anonymity, but anonymity is more of an all or nothing proposition in that if you can't anonymize the path over the internet, then the on chain anonymity is broken against the NSA. I argue I2P and Tor are broken against the NSA. And CN did not anonymize values (until Shen and my inventions) thus it required equal denominations in transactions with bloated and complicated with power-of-10 denominations splitting of transactions. And all of this too obtuse for your average investor and user. And anonymity isn't the feature most investors are looking at in terms of expanding the ecosystem to the other entire world. Anonymity is an idealism/ideological feature and even some investors would prefer not to have it because they think it hinders mainstream issues.

Surmounting the anonymity space is not going to be easy. For example, Bitmessage sucks and Monero hasn't done anything about that. There is so much work that needs to be done. I2P and Tor must be replaced. And many other work to do. Complexity. Slog. Slow. Lose momentum.

Cryptonite fixes the blockchain size / bandwidth issues.

Nope. The block chain scaling issues have more to do about the latency of propagating transactions to all nodes, resultant orphan rates (or centralization of mining to deal with it) and implications on double-spending probabilities and number of confirmations needed, security of 0-confirmation transactions, vulnerability of 51% attack, etc..

Also balances design doesn't stop the block chain from growing. So it doesn't really address scaling, rather it only addresses the point in time where scaling becomes a crisis (as is the case now for Bitcoin). Rather to address the scaling of the block chain data size, then not having to run a full node and download the entire block chain is more important. Yet not having mining become centralized by encouraging that.

All of these above are the sort of issues that my block chain scaling designs solves.

Note I wrote up thread that a balances design is incompatible with rings, but now I remember that may not be true. I think I remember I had thought of a way to do rings with balances.

Ethereum provides a programmable blockchain and has much better transaction time and ongoing development than Bitcoin.  I would argue the talent they've brought in from outside of altcoin world greatly exceeds bitcoins (and the same might be said for Monero).  I do agree that scope creep and mismanagement is 90% likely to kill the project.

I will have millisecond transaction time  Tongue

And I am only 1 person. Vitalik and the others are extremely intelligent. Too smart Smiley (joke, but it can be true. Any way, appears to be bloated and not focused because they are having fun with research)

I guess my point is that the pattern of getting rich for early adopters has much less to do with innovation and market penetration (compare Monero and Darkcoin) than making sure supply is much lower than demand.  The most successful projects judged by making early adopters money are the least innovative (Darkcoin vs Monero, Litecoin vs Vertcoin or Cryptonite, Dogecoin ... Maybe it doesn't have an equivalent etc.). Innovation is divorced from payoff in this space.

Your definition of innovation is different than mine. For me even using masternodes to limit supply is a clever innovation. You are thinking idealistically that the goal is to produce technology. But technology is useless if it doesn't produce market results. So thus I have more open minded perception of what innovation really is.

What I bring to the table is a geek combined with a realist. And a proven ancient history of doing 1 man projects that reached million user adoption (because I combined those two aspects of my attitude and ability). There are times where I have let myself get too far off into never-never land of idealism and research. But when I realize I need to get back to what I did best, I need to be a realist about producing market value (while also being able to inject high tech where is makes an impact on the former not just for idealistic delusions).
legendary
Activity: 1256
Merit: 1009
October 20, 2015, 08:00:55 AM
I actually just had an idea outside of being paid outright or starting your own coin if you wanted to bootstrap off of Monero or another coin with rich bagholders.  And it's something I would be willing to participate in.

Get Risto to act as an ESCROW and Smooth and others to review your white paper to see if they think it will add significant value / demand to Monero.  Those interested in investing tie up their Moneroes in a predefined ESCROW with Risto for a set amount of time (six months?).

On the hard fork that releases your changes and the price of Monero doubles (hopefully in conjunction with GUI release etc) you get the difference between the value of Monero between the time the money went into ESCROW and the time it's sold.  If I put 10,000 Moneroes in at .40 per Monero and your changes increase the value to .80 then I only get half of my Moneros back - you keep the rest.  If your changes don't add value and value doesn't go up I keep all of my Moneros.

I'm not much into crypto but if devs thought it was a significant step beyond anything we have now I might be willing to take a small 50/50 bet.  50% in escrow for your paid for by innovation long position and 50% privately held by me.
sr. member
Activity: 420
Merit: 262
October 20, 2015, 07:40:58 AM
the importance of a strong whitepaper

That would correlate to my point in my prior post that Monero had a difficult time selling that their tech was superior enough to Dash that Monero could overtake Dash's "first mover" momentum on the feature of anonymity. But I am not sure a layman's white paper would have overcome that Dash was "first mover".

How many investors actually understand the math in the Cryptonote paper? I'd guess almost none of them. This is another problem with making anonymity the main focus of a coin right now. Very difficult to educate the users as to what is important. But this new hiding of values along with rings to hide sender, is perhaps a new frontier for anonymity. But who will explain to newbies so they understand well. I know I can, but I am also not sure if anonymity should be my first priority. I think block chain scaling is #1 for me. For Monero and Dash, they need to protect their market share on the anonymity feature, so they have more incentive to make it a #1 priority.

Question: Is the work of TPTB and/or Shen/gmaxwell intended to improve the Cryptonote protocol or can this tech be used on a BTC side-chain or blockchain too? Is it designed to be built on top of the CN protocol or does it stand alone?

It can be implemented on any coin that wants to implement it and has UXTO. Will probably be a hard fork and the entire ecosystem has to be upgraded, so it is surely a non-starter for Bitcoin. Only those few coins that have a balances-only design would be technically ineligible.

Note Cryptonote is a technology that can be added to nearly any coin that manages UXTO. But CN required extra wallet complexity because the values are not hidden so the powers-of-10 balances need to be employed. Whereas this new improvement hides values, so that complexity of power-of-10 balances is removed.

Satoshi might well be reading this so "Hi, Satoshi!".

Surprisingly I didn't think of that. I must be too focused on trying to find my direction.
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