Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Monero’s proof of work works

blog.alcazarsec.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 244 posts

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#151

Post by fluffypony »

tomjen3 wrote: post #109
dgacmu wrote: post #3

If folks are interested in the old Monero PoW function (and, uh, the reason they changed it), I wrote up a thing about it a long time ago: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone... The history of people trying to design GPU or ASIC-resistant proof-of-work functions is long and mostly unsuccessful. I haven't looked into RandomX; it's possible they've succeeded here (or possible that with the alt-…

They had to design a specialized verification function, which I imagine would be the easy way to break it. The brilliant part of Bitcoin is that it uses very widely known crypto primitives - verification is the same as getting the right seed (you just happen to be told what the right seed is, rather than having to pay for it to be discovered).

lolwut. There is no specialised verification function.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#152

Post by nunobrito »

tardedmeme wrote: post #112
nunobrito wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sending donations to causes the government doesn't endorse. A good example was the truck manifestation in Canada a few years ago, they went after all the donors for what was a legitimate protest. Anyone using bank transfers or any crypto that wasn't Monero was persecuted. Those who used Monero had their privacy assured and zero issues.

I'm not sure that I'd cite being able to donate to terrorists as a legitimate use case. I mean, at the protocol level, donating to a terrorist is the same as donating to anyone else, so a system that lets you donate to anyone will necessarily let you donate to terrorists, but it wouldn't be the example I'd bring up in polite conversation.

You can be sure that those truckers were not terrorists.

Courts deemed as unlawful this government persecution to whoever donated to the protest using transparent cryptocurrency: https://usethebitcoin.com/news/canadian-court-rules-against-...

The point is that only those who used monero were safe from unlawful government persecution.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#153

Post by [deleted] »

tardedmeme wrote: post #65
Orygin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the point of Proof of Stakes that you hold some amount of coin to exert that control. If someone or some group get majority stake, doing anything nefarious would result in crashing the coin value, and thus nuke their own coin value?

Yes, but they can make it up with some other gain in value. For example if you're a US state agency tasked to destroy the Chinese economy, you might overall benefit from buying a ridiculous amount of Chinese money and then setting it on fire, if it means everyone else's Chinese money catches fire too.

[deleted]

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#154

Post by dgacmu »

fluffypony wrote: post #150
dgacmu wrote: post #3

If folks are interested in the old Monero PoW function (and, uh, the reason they changed it), I wrote up a thing about it a long time ago: https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone... The history of people trying to design GPU or ASIC-resistant proof-of-work functions is long and mostly unsuccessful. I haven't looked into RandomX; it's possible they've succeeded here (or possible that with the alt-…

Hmmm. That's not the reason we changed it. We just got tired of tweaking things to prevent ASICs. I'll add that there was such a large influx of miners at the outset, that (statistically) it seems any crippling of the original algorithm was fairly futile - the edge was both short-lived and minimally impactful. We're over a decade later, and nobody mining in the first month (even with that unfair advantage) was able t…

Sorry, I was not quite saying my fun was the reason, but that the failure to create something GPU/ASIC resilient was the more general underlying cause.

But be careful about "proven" in that last sentence - the absence of a solution isn't exactly proof, it's more of a proof that _either_ it is possible to create an ASIC-resistant algo _or_ it has not been worthwhile to ASIC-ify it given the economics of mining XMR and the research & NRE required to do so. I haven't the foggiest which of those two it is, mind you, just that there are a few remaining valid explanations.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#157

Post by sowbug »

Eisenstein wrote: post #134
sowbug wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people think communication mechanisms shouldn't enforce policy. They don't want their phones automatically disconnecting if they talk to a friend about illegal or immoral things. They don't want their TVs shutting off if they watch stuff that's politically unacceptable. So it follows that they don't want their money throwing an exception if they try spending on an transaction too unsavory for Stripe or your bank…

Is that something we want though? Why would it be beneficial to let money be used for anything without restrictions? Society has always relied on interdependence, not complete individual freedom. You have to make the case for it.

Respectfully, I disagree that anyone has to make the case for it. That's exactly what freedom is: if society fails to "make the case" for prohibiting something, it defaults to legal. There's no general law requiring people to be good people, or to have common sense, which would be the same as defaulting to illegal. I presume you wouldn't like that, or the surveillance state that would be required to enforce it.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#159

Post by nunobrito »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #11
Aeroi wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Absolutely true, no one needs monero when you can have bitcoin (and lightning for private instant bitcoin payments).

That is obviously ignoring that transactions on that old tech are transparent (no privacy whatsover) and governments will persecute whomever donates to inconvenient causes: https://usethebitcoin.com/news/canadian-court-rules-against-...

The reason why cryptocurrencies exist is precisely to detach money from governments, reason why Monero is persecuted by every single western government whereas that coin you mention is endorsed by them. There is quite a world that needs and uses Monero every day.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#160

Post by nunobrito »

mothballed wrote: post #32
littlecranky67 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly are you missing that i.e. PhoenixWallet or Electrum is providing? The only thing missing is merchant adoption - but bitcoin is far ahead monero in this field.

Monero has utterly failed in merchant adoption. If you go to something like cryptwerk, which is what getmonero themselves recommends as a vendor list, It has about 1/2 the vendors of even the roughly same market cap coin Litecoin.

Where I live there is only Monero as serious cryptocurrency to use between people.

Wouldn't risk sending large transactions where everything is visible to others when compared to LTC or any other non-private virtual coins.

Post reply on HN