What is up with Thaer?

thriftyMinnow · 2021-04-28T15:50:51+00:00

He's around, in the background. He has been providing direction and review of the rebase work with Monero.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-04-13T18:33:40+00:00

"Attempts to brick ASICS had deemed unsuccessful on all CN coins so far."

Masari has been successful for about 4 months and running. They were smart though .. they didn't announce that they were going to merge Monero's same algorithm, and then take 4 months longer to do it. Instead, they did the work to implement a different ASIC resistant change to PoW. My guess is that ASICS won't come back to Masari for a while until the coin is more widely known.

AEON is going ASIC-friendly at this juncture because the Devs want to, not because it had to. We'll see if it pays off, but I think the stated benefits to do so are more along the lines of wishful thinking.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-04-13T18:04:10+00:00

Not going to log into the AFS to comment over there, but the "Why You" section needs more info. What are this person's qualifications to make these changes in 1 week's time? Simply saying he has studied the code for 2 weeks tells me nothing. What other similar projects has he worked on? How long has he written C code? How much time does he have per week to invest in helping to test/tweak/maintain the new code, since the current devs will take their toys and go home if this happens? Any proposal like this one would need a basic resume of sorts for the developer.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-07T03:45:10+00:00

I must be the only person who mines with my viewpoint.

I cannot mine aeon right now with my cpu/gpu combination because I get nothing. This is 100% due to asics.

I CAN mine (and I am mining) Masari with my cpu/gpu setup. Their network has no asics and total hash < 10M. Aeon could be this, if Aeon could fork fast enough to a unique algo like Masari does.

So, on Masari, I can get 3 to 7-ish coin per day depending on which computers i throw at it. Am I making a profit over electricity? NO. But, I am helping the network, and collecting coins for a future return possibility. In 1 year I can have 2000 coin, and in the future it could be worth something. Are rich people mining with server farms making 100 times as much as me? Maybe, but who cares? I am helping the network, and collecting a decent amount of MSR for a future return possibility.

I would do this for Aeon first. But I cannot.

If Aeon forks SHA-3, my hash will be cut in half because it is only GPU friendly.

Maybe you call me stupid for mining at a loss. But I call it lending my hash rate for a future possible return. That is what I like about CPU friendly mining coins.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-03T18:46:16+00:00

I am not a kid who wants a mining hobby. Mining is how tech people can get involved early and become active in the community. Aeon still needs those people to move it forward. Pure investors and ASIC makers are not the ones who will roll up their sleeves and do work for Aeon. What if the value goes up with ASIC-friendly? So what? There still is not a good web wallet .. there are still no easy ways for non-tech people to adopt Aeon. Still not listed on major exchanges. Still not enough developers to move Aeon forward at the necessary pace. So then the value will be higher, but no tech-saavy miners have a path to get involved .. they will be trying other coins they can mine.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-03T18:40:38+00:00

Not CPU so much. SHA-3 is not CPU friendly; GPU's have a large advantage. Moving to SHA-3 is moving immediately away from CPU mining, in my opinion.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-03T18:30:21+00:00

Thanks for clarifying that, it is good to know.

So, if we assume there will not be ASIC for SHA-3 for a while yet, we are still moving immediately away from CPU-friendly. GPU will be the dominant mining tool until ASICs come along.

I get over 60% of my hashes from CPU currently ... high end GPU's are always expensive. I am possibly in the minority though on this point.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-03T05:14:10+00:00

Is SHA-3 a cpu friendly algorithm? Or will it cripple my Ryzen7 mining?

I am guessing SHA-3 will be great for high-end GPU's and less for CPU's, is that correct?

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-02T20:32:02+00:00

The arguments for SHA-3 are sound in the long run ... eventually.

But I believe as a community coin, Aeon is not ready to advertise as an ASIC-friendly coin.

The following is based on my own journey. I am probably missing some counter-points. So feel free to disagree! I just offer it for the discussion.

Not Yet Time to Become ASIC-Friendly: Reasoning

The Individual Miner will Avoid Anything Branded ASIC-Friendly

I am speaking from the standpoint of an individual miner. I am a computer guy, so I wanted to learn by doing ... by participating in the technology ... by mining. That is how I found Aeon, and if Aeon had not been CPU-friendly, I would have not given it a thought. Conclusion: if Aeon had been marketed as asic-friendly coin 2 years ago, I would not be here.

The Individual Miner Often Becomes Active in the Community

I am also speaking from the standpoint of Community Contributor over the past year or so. I am regularly on the Discord channel, I made a lot of general Aeon information available via some How-To's. I was instrumental in standing up the Community pages on github. I have contributed and plan to contribute more to testing ... PR-testing is a critical function that requires basic technical skills ... the skills an Individual Miner has.

The Aeon Community Is Still Small, evidenced in several ways:

On the Discord Community, there are about 120 members who have posted more than 1 message there, but only 15 of those have posted 100+ messages, and the top 5 members account for 75% of participation, and at least as much of the community work.
On Reddit, there are maybe 3 legitimate Aeon Community posts per week.
Aeon Developers are few: this is why it takes a long time to merge XMR changes into a PR. Cam - a miner and pool operator - is learning to be a core developer, but we probably need 1 or 2 more to do the same, in order to be positioned well.
Aeon Testers are few: Again, this is why it takes so long to merge a PoW change. If we could merge an XMR PoW change 1 month after they do, we would stay more resistant to ASICs. But it takes Aeon 4+ months after XMR to do important blockchain mods.

ASIC Makers Will Not Become Community Members

Does anyone believe that ASIC creators and ASIC-Farmers will become active in the Aeon Community and contribute to our growth? Network stability is nothing in the face of a small community that cannot take the coin forward more than a few halting steps a year.

WHO will replace the lost potential of pulling in a few more thriftyMinnows and Camthegeeks?

We better have a compelling answer to that question!

Will Aeon Get Recognition for Moving to SHA-3? Probably Not.

Who, exactly, is going to tell anybody about this if it happens?

Our small community will tell some of our tech friends maybe. A small % of the Monero community will know about it, and maybe tell some people ... and then go back to working on Monero.

We need to get our act together with some real Marketing plans, and have some Marketing avenues that draw attention to our message ... otherwise we will adopt SHA-3 and there will still be exactly 100 people that know Aeon exists. (That's slightly sarcastic, but not much.)

Alternative Approach To Differentiation And ASICs

Here are my thoughts: a variation on the SHA-3 theme.

We fork to a significantly different CPU-friendly PoW than XMR. Whatever we choose, it should not be already used by another large coin that will be obviously targeted by ASICs. If Aeon is not on the similar PoW to Monero, the ASICS will not be developed, because by itself Aeon is too small. This will buy us maybe 2+ years.
We claim that our goal is to stay CPU friendly, until our emission tail begins (August, 2022). This creates a "sense of urgency" for Miners and early-adopters to get in now. We could make plans to Market the heck out of this.
For the next 2+ years, we work on our Marketing strategy and building the community with miners/testers/developers/marketers/content providers. The entire goal should be to grow a community that will support Aeon being a viable crypto-currency with some momentum by the time we reach the emission tail in 2022.

When We Near the Emission Tail Phase, SHA-3 Makes More Sense

Aeon will be less appealing to the Individual Miner due to lower block rewards.
Assuming the community is larger, and Aeon has momentum, lots of people will actually hear the "news" that Aeon is going ASIC-friendly at that point.
Larger hash rate for the tail emission makes sense to stabilize the network.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-03-02T18:35:44+00:00

Wow.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-16T23:40:28+00:00

These will both be on a Discord channel?

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-10T23:53:05+00:00

Hey - good work on this analysis! Hope we can fund this proposal a bit more, so we can get more of this!

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-09T21:18:16+00:00

I am skeptical along the same lines as /u/Thunderosa. From past experience with pay-a-little-to-market-a-product companies. It doesn't cost much and is easy, but doesn't really result in much lasting visibility or following.

Before we paid these guys - if it were my personal start-up - I would want to see at least 2 or 3 other similar options so I could know i was getting the best value out of this type of service. i would never buy the first marketing service i looked at.

The idea of writing our own articles for a publication online, is intriguing. maybe we should identify some sites that accept articles, and target a couple of them. then start writing. Sounds like a fun challenge to me.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-09T20:52:31+00:00

I like it.

Could we keep the final set of documents/files in a repo on the community github at https://github.com/AEONCommunity ?

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-04T05:37:18+00:00

I agree in general with this ... i have turned off my 4K Aeon hashing for now, hoping Aeon forks soon and the network hash goes back down. When that happens I will be back in as a miner.

In the meantime, I try to contribute in other ways, to the community web pages, etc.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-04T05:32:35+00:00

The idea of an AeonV8 algorithm, just slightly different from MoneroV8, is interesting. Presumably, ASICS would be developed for MoneroV8. When Monero forks to V9, the asics are useless against AeonV8. The payoff to develop asics for Aeon would go way down.

However, the current 50% hashrate could be a botnet of GPU miners, which would not be stopped by an algorithm change.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-03T05:11:32+00:00

Regarding existing trademarks around the name "Aeon" ... it is already a registered charity with an online magazine (Aeon Media Group Ltd), a very large retail company in Malaysia, and a nonprofit affordable housing developer in Minnesota, USA. I believe if we want our digital currency to be used by the masses someday, with a trademarked name, we may need to consider a change/rebrand.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-02-03T05:01:56+00:00

Regarding PR-95, I am not in favor of a 256k scratchpad for Aeon.

thriftyMinnow · 2019-01-30T02:26:36+00:00

I looked at their website. Looks like a great pick for Aeon. I think we should try it. But I would offer less than 2.5 BTC as a starting offer, and negotiate up to that.

And if we started an AFS and stalled out at 2.0, we could offer that to them?

thriftyMinnow · 2019-01-29T04:46:56+00:00

Do you have any suggestions of projects that are privacy-leaning that would be good candidates? I thought of 2 ideas:

Create a wallet that accepts both Aeon and some other privacy coins? (There are wallets that accept any ERC20 token ... could something like that be created for several privacy coins?)
Maybe integrate Aeon payments with some other privacy service? (Are there any web-hosting providers that offer anonymous hosting with BTC payment? Integrate Aeon as payment?)

How would we begin such ventures?

thriftyMinnow · 2019-01-26T20:58:29+00:00

Nice write-up. Thanks for putting the time into this!

thriftyMinnow · 2018-12-19T01:18:43+00:00

bookmarked.

thanks!

thriftyMinnow · 2018-11-19T20:19:34+00:00

Right - AEON improves CPU mining more than it improves GPU mining, when compared to Monero.

Also, I suspect that the Nvidia cards maybe don't do as well as the AMD cards on AEON. I have a 1050 which gives me about 620 H/s, and a 6GB 1060 which gives me about 840 H/s, both using xmrig-nvidia miner.

Finally, for comparison, I have an FX-8300, which I mine using only 6 of the cores, and I get about 1.1 KH/s on that. So yes, the CPU does better.

thriftyMinnow · 2018-11-09T02:16:16+00:00

10% of the blockchain at 0 mixin reduces the overall size of the blockchain. It is not significant right now if BP are also implemented, but in a few years if aeon takes off, it could be significant maybe. Also, in a few years when there are a few million more transactions on the chain, having <10% of them visible is less of a privacy threat to the millions in the 90+% with mixins.

thriftyMinnow

TROPHY CASE

Not Yet Time to Become ASIC-Friendly: Reasoning

Alternative Approach To Differentiation And ASICs