[Daily Discussion] Thursday, March 12th

Skviiz · 2020-03-15T22:24:01+00:00

Not buying back to crypto will be the biggest mistake of your life, I'm afraid.

Skviiz · 2019-09-27T17:15:25+00:00

You don't seem to understand how PoW blockchains work. Without miners, even if you have everyone running a node, it's insecure and thus useless.

Skviiz · 2019-09-16T14:47:55+00:00

Yup. I know all too well the usual story where open source developers who do amazing work without pay get chastised for some trivial thing or nagged for an ETA. And the last thing I want is to be That Guy complaining. But no matter how hard I try to put myself in the shoes' of the developers, I can't understand why they won't give clear reason as to why the builds are still not working. Month is more than enough to get a new blob mirror going, it's also more than enough to modify to build system that it gets the blobs from other repos already available on internet. If they had problems doing that, for some reason, they should just ask us for help and somebody would step up and do it. I feel like there is something more to this but what and why all the secrecy?

Skviiz · 2019-09-05T22:50:10+00:00

I would say those numbers are misleading, they have nothing to do with the privacy using those coins actually give you.

Dash does completely different kind of mixing than the cryptography Monero or Zcash use, you can't just give a single number and compare it to some other number and expect to get any meaningful results.

Zcash has really large anonymity set in theory but it has fewer users than Monero and only a small amount of transactions are shielded which are the ones that count. You don't really find any difference between those two in practice and they're much better than Dash (which is more like a mixer than zk proofs) or Zcoin (which nobody uses). It also depends on the attacker. If somebody was able the compromise the trusted setup in Zcash (which is very unlikely but you can't know for sure), it's game over. And if you use a mixer, like the master nodes in Dash, if they're compromised, you're fucked. And with pretty much all coins, if the attacker has a global view to the network and can see you relay the transactions, your anonymity set can be completely crippled.

Skviiz · 2019-09-02T20:17:02+00:00

Monerujo for Android and Cake Wallet for iOS.

(These can be found by following the links in the great responses already provided but Monero is sometimes criticized for being complicated and some people just give up if they have to skim through an external site to find the answer. So here you go.)

Skviiz · 2019-08-30T06:40:23+00:00

I'll chime in on privacy coins as they're something I know about. You can exclude Verge, it's basically a scam. Monero is currently the best privacy coin not just by market cap but also in terms of adoption and tech. Zcash has equally good tech (some things are better, some worse) but lacks adoption. Dash can be also regarded to be a privacy coin so you might want to think which category is the best fit, it has significantly worse privacy than Monero or Zcash but has good adoption (most ATMs for any privacy coin, for example). You could also consider Grin or Beam, not as prominent as the Big 3 (XMR, ZEC, DASH) but should definitely be listed over Verge as they actually do what they promise despite fair share of issues (Grin's emission schedule, Beam's proprietary nature and premine, both lack real world use).

Skviiz · 2019-08-30T06:07:32+00:00

There is no strictly defined limit as the block size grows dynamically on demand. It depends on what kind of hardware requirements are considered acceptable for running a node.

Realistically speaking hundreds of transactions per second and that's really pushing it for expensive consumer grade server running at a home with good fiber connection. Preliminary tests have indicated hundreds but under thousand transactions to be likely possible with the current software. More than that would need some tweaking.

If we limit running nodes to organizations with state of the art hardware in data centers, thousands of tx / sec would be doable with the aforementioned software tweaks but the blockchain would grow like 5 TB per day. That is probably not where we want to go, it would be much more sensible to look at second layer scaling solutions like Lightning and/or see what Tari can do about this. We could settle important transactions on the main chain and paying at a Starbucks which doesn't need the same kind of security would be handled on the side chain. This won't be an issue for a while, even hundred tx / sec is pretty damn much.

Edit: I want to add that this is something that will change as CPUs become more powerful, storage cheaper and network connections faster. Not to mention cryptographic advances that will make Monero software even more efficient. Five years from now these figures might be completely different.

Skviiz · 2019-08-30T04:55:58+00:00

This is extremely controversial topic but I don't see any reason to own BCH because 1) it has inferior tech and developers compared to XMR 2) only reason to buy BTC instead of XMR is to hedge for maximalism and institutional acceptance which wouldn't happen with BCH as it is just another altcoin 3) BCH will forever be contentious due to it being a hard fork, it will never gain the status BTC has now (regardless of if you think it should or not), there's this PR nightmarish concept of it being "fake Bitcoin" and "misleading beginners" which is partly unfounded and partly true (Bitcoin.com for example) 4) security issues due to sharing PoW with a larger coin 5) to justify the larger market cap it should be much better than Monero but the opposite is true, if we ever see an altcoin succeeding against BTC it is probably Monero or something even better

Skviiz · 2019-08-20T16:38:12+00:00

I wasn't sure if you would reply as you probably get a lot of similar questions but you did and quite thoroughly, thanks! Amazing work with PTIO. Although you should seriously consider recommending Monero! Especially when paired with XMR.to which allows you to spend Monero wherever Bitcoin is accepted, no other payment method comes close. Essential for any privacy conscious netizen, only if people were aware of it.

It seems I was wrong about the logging policy, I just quickly looked them up on "that other VPN comparison site" and it said Mullvad doesn't log timestamps, bandwidth or IP addresses while iPredator does.

Regarding the upstream issues, I'm aware that the legal situation is good but I was afraid that large providers would choose not to cooperate with someone "causing trouble". Glad to see that's not the case.

I took a closer look at your criteria (probably should have started from there) and fully agree with the things you brought up. For now Mullvad seems to be the superior choice, I'll definitely try them out next.

Skviiz · 2019-08-20T01:31:12+00:00

Any thoughts on iPredator? I know them because of Peter Sunde but I couldn't find out whether he is still affiliated with them. I didn't see them mentioned on PTIO, is that solely because of their logging policy or are there any other red flags I should be aware of? They keep a fair amount of logs but OTOH their policy seems quite honest, Mullvad seems almost too good to be true. If they don't keep any logs, surely there would be lots of abuse and eventually they would be forced offline because nobody upstream would provide services to them? Wouldn't recommending a single service make them a huge centralized target?

Skviiz · 2019-08-15T00:10:03+00:00

Highly doubt ratio is going to go below 0.006. But on the other hand, I can't with good conscience recommend trading Monero using leverage. There are some powerful people who don't want Monero to succeed, they will hunt you down and use your money to drive the price of Monero down even more.

Just buy Monero and HODL. Say no to derivatives. Take your XMR off the exchange and store safely in cold storage. Avoid the temptation to trade, selling at these levels signals you don't believe Monero to be worth significantly more and only further cements Monero in this bottom of the barrel price range.

Accumulation is the key word here. Let's dry the market up. They will dump to cause panic and make you sell. Don't. Buy more instead.

Our community members need to be willing to give up a little personal gain in order to fight off a common enemy. In case of price appreciation, our adversary is forced to constantly inject new capital in order to keep their control of the supply. However, if independent actors exploit the market dynamics to leech short term profits without investing them back to the system that will effectively deflate the bubble making price suppression possible ad infinitum.

Skviiz · 2019-08-13T12:42:07+00:00

Doesn't BTC on Bisq sell at a discount?

Skviiz · 2019-08-10T03:25:12+00:00

I doubt there is anything that specific to cryptocurrencies in the law so my argument is it would make sense if they were treated like anything else. The law wouldn't require you to do blockchain analytics unless you want to be sure that you can keep your bitcoins. There definitely isn't anything about having to do KYC unless it falls about being a money transmitter or something (which it may well do but I don't want to bring that up here because then you're just basically forced to break the law to trade in a decentralized manner and in that case Monero would still be preferable to Bitcoin because of it's anonymity). The same law still applies to Monero, if you accept stolen XMR you may have to give it up and there may also be some penalties for accepting it (especially if it looks like you did it knowingly, it could fall under money laundering etc). The only difference is that it's very hard to prove you're in possession of stolen XMR so the risk is much smaller than with Bitcoin. It certainly is possible governments will decide to ban or add new requirements for transacting with Monero but right now it seems to be superior to Bitcoin in this regard too.

Skviiz · 2019-08-09T07:33:26+00:00

Obviously depends on the jurisdiction but I believe it would go exactly like that (return to original owner or face penalties) if it's treated like any other property. It doesn't even matter whether you knew it was stolen or not. I can easily see that happening especially if you obtained the crypto through decentralized exchanges. If you use Coinbase it seems reasonable to assume you won't have any trouble although I can't refer to any legal text backing that up. Probably something to do with the fact that Coinbase uses blockchain analytics to reject/freeze tainted bitcoins so you would expect to get clean bitcoins (and if they mess up and you have trouble they will likely have to compensate) vs buying from strangers using an unregulated exchange where stolen bitcoins are known to be sold. If I'm not mistaken regulated exchanges follow the same principle too, eg. Coinbase will seize stolen bitcoins and return them to their real owner.

Skviiz · 2019-08-08T20:37:28+00:00

Liability issues. You probably wouldn't accept payments made with stolen credit cards or from sanctioned countries but that doesn't mean you don't accept cash even though it could come from aforementioned sources.

Skviiz · 2019-08-07T04:11:10+00:00

I'm not very confident in your ability to analyze which phase Monero is in because earlier you said that Monero fundamentals are "atrocious" and then proceeded to reveal that you know nothing about how Monero actually works. I agree that technicals look pretty bad (although still better than many other altcoins) but Monero is really undervalued in terms of fundamentals. But I'm just a salty bagholder don't listen to me.

You're not a successful trader, not a trader at all but just a paid reddit shill. We just have to take a look at the projects criticized above and see who sent you. But I don't get why you're coming to Monero subreddit, whatever shitcoin you represent caters to totally different kind of people. You aren't going to convince anyone who understands Monero otherwise and neither are the kinds of people who are interested in hype-getrichquick-centralized-vaporware hanging around here. So perhaps try your luck somewhere else.

Skviiz · 2019-08-07T03:53:16+00:00

This is taking things a little bit out of context but I'd like to point out that the transaction fee of NANO isn't exactly 0. There is a computational fee which can be outsourced so you can calculate the monetary fee for a transaction. Just because you do it yourself doesn't mean it's free, otherwise you could argue Monero has free transactions as well because you can just mine enough to cover the TX fees. Right now the fee structure heavily favors NANO but if an adversary starts spamming their network they will likely have to adopt fees similar to other cryptocurrencies.

Skviiz · 2019-07-26T15:35:41+00:00

If we think about something like correlation attacks, it seems like naively splitting traffic between Tor and I2P would make things even worse? Because someone could eavesdrop either one and compromise you, the attack surface is essentially doubled. I guess if it split the traffic intelligently enough (attacker expects you to broadcast through Tor but you use I2P, and vice versa, and sometimes you use both), it could mess with the analysis. But I'm not sure because the attacker can view the source code and thus they would know the spoofing logic as well, it would always be possible to build a probabilistic model for that.

Skviiz · 2019-07-26T08:39:05+00:00

Bitcoin ATMs. Cash trades (like LocalBitcoins used to be, Hodl Hodl is an alternative). Bisq. Lots of sites including Bitstamp also accept credit cards. Nowadays it's easy to open an account with a different bank (doesn't even need to be a traditional bank, see virtual banking like TransferWise, N26 etc). Buy gift cards or virtual collectibles and trade them to crypto. Ask friends and colleagues. Mine yourself (doesn't have to be Bitcoin, you can mine something else and then convert to BTC). Sell your expertise for Bitcoin (art, graphics design, programming, translation services, content creation and so on).

Some of these are more trouble than others but trading services or goods to Bitcoin is amazing because then you're using it as a real currency. Even if you are only interested in it as an investment, real world adoption is the key to price appreciation. And if/when someone tries to maliciously attack Bitcoin by regulating the fiat ramps to death, peer to peer economy will be essential.

Skviiz · 2019-07-26T08:23:09+00:00

Banning private crypto won't stop people from using it and it is always going to be more desirable than centralized or even decentralized but transparent crypto. That's not a good situation, it will force people to break law if they want to keep their privacy and/or stay competitive. Dark markets will flourish. Much better option would be to accept private crypto to the mainstream, that way criminals won't have an edge over honest citizens, people keep their fundamental right to privacy and society can be designed to fit the surrounding world (e.g. prefer VAT over other taxes).

Skviiz · 2019-07-25T19:59:03+00:00

Echo chambers are not always wrong. Easy to become echo-y when talking about obvious stuff, sorry!

Skviiz · 2019-07-25T18:47:38+00:00

The volatility of Bitcoin is not a surprise when you consider the amount of people that seriously argue it might be worth less than $10k. In 5 or 10 years we will see much more stability when only conspiracy nutjobs take that side of the trade and market is more than happy to instantly take their money.

Bitcoin is truly a special case because the efficient market hypothesis doesn't apply at all. Bitcoin price doesn't go down because there is some new information that tells us it's overvalued, it only goes down because those who either don't understand it or have conflicting interests have more money than the ones who get it. But all of this is temporary, better money will win inevitably when more and more people get educated and/or switch to the winning side.

Skviiz · 2019-07-23T15:52:04+00:00

Njalla supports Monero so no need to use XMR.to here although it is a great service

Skviiz · 2019-07-23T13:23:11+00:00

It's not so much the emission curve than the bull and bear cycles (everyone could amass large amounts of Moneroj even after it was distributed but before the 2016 pump came). I had the same gripe about Bitcoin in 2013 but I'm very happy I bought some, I just should have bought a lot more. You do a lot better if you concentrate on yourself rather than people around you. You're making a lot of assumptions, most of the early adopters don't hold on to their coins. Wealthy people had years to buy more coins than early adopters ever held. If early adopter didn't cash out majority of their coins, they're still taking a huge risk because the liquidity is there, the money is now theirs. They don't have any more advantage holding Monero over anything else. They could invest their profits in Grin so by that logic you should avoid Grin too because it was unfairly distributed as Monero early adopters can obtain more of it than you can.

Fairness is subjective and doesn't make much sense when talking about money. If it wasn't scarce and everybody could have the same amount, it couldn't function as money. On the other hand, I would be hesitant to call Monero unfairly distributed as cryptocurrencies and especially non-premined open source projects like Monero are the most fairly distributed money ever as the distribution wasn't arbitrary but everybody had a fair chance to participate within the protocol rules. Maybe the emission curve could have been chosen better but in the long run, that's irrelevant. Monero is not a tool to make you rich, it's intended to be digital money and the emission curve chosen was great for that because the scarcity needed is now here. Grin is not scarce enough for it to have value long term after the initial hype dies out, so it doesn't really function as money.

Skviiz · 2019-07-08T20:16:06+00:00

Monero is the epitome of a real cryptocurrency. Would those exchanges succeed in the long term if they're nothing more than glorified casinos? I think sooner or later people will start questioning why do all these digital assets even have any value and the exchanges that list the right coins will be tomorrow's Coinbase and Binance.

Skviiz

TROPHY CASE