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How Monero’s proof of work works

blog.alcazarsec.com

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Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#221

Post by neilwilson »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #184
dhosek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the weird things about our world is that money is central to everything, but it’s hard to understand how it works. There’s a great deal of handwaving around how, for example, dollars are created, much of which is, in fact, not correct at all (most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand). The big…

> most dollars are created not by the government, or even the Federal Reserve, but by private banks, via a mechanism which I will not pretend to fully understand Fractional reserve banking. Basically, bankers start getting very anxious when they see the masses of people depositing mountains of cash into them. They look at the cash hoard they have suddenly amassed and think, we can't just leave this pile of cash here…

It's amazing this myth continues when the Bank of England debunked it in 2014. [0]

[0]: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#222

Post by neilwilson »

jimmydorry wrote: post #170
newsy-combi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought private banks create money the moment they take out a credit from the central bank. The central bank's job is to set the interest rate for those loans, et viola.

That's one method, but consider what happens when someone deposits a million dollars at a bank. This million dollars can be lent out to another person as a mortgage, and guess where that person accepts that money? That's right, a bank. That same 1 million dollars could be lent out to 10 different people, expanding the supply of money many times over. The only limit to this are the capitalisation ratios legislated and…

"This million dollars can be lent out to another person as a mortgage"

It can't. It isn't. And it never has been.

What banks do is provide liquidity against your collateral. You sell them a charge over your house (for example), and they give you a credit for it. That credit can then be passed on to other people.

Banks are in the business of discounting. They don't take anything in and give it out to other people. [0]

[0]: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/m...

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#224

Post by lern_too_spel »

Tr3nton wrote: post #43
lern_too_spel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wall Street got ahold of it and now Bitcoin is primarily acting as a Store of Value for the purpose of speculative investments Insomuch as beanie babies are a store of value. Speculative assets only have value as long as there are more greater fools to buy in. When you've exhausted the supply of greater fools, there is no more reason to buy the speculative asset because its price won't go up, so it will fall to its…

You can't send a Beanie Baby to someone on the other side of the planet instantly.

Which is why they're more difficult for Russia and North Korea to steal and less useful speculative assets for them to fund their regimes.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#225

Post by lern_too_spel »

3form wrote: post #149
grey-area wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold has a use value.

So do beanie babies. Might be less than gold, but that's why I'm calling this argument flawed. The second part is that despite these disclaimers, I don't think gold has, in modern history, or will in our lifetimes, reach a price reflecting just the use/intrinsic value. The reasons being twofold: the storage of value IS a use itself; and importantly, which applies to Bitcoin and others, there are always people that wi…

> the storage of value IS a use itself

And for this, having a private ledger is cheaper and more efficient for moving stored value in a way that is recoverable by law and doesn't support sanctioned regimes.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#226

Post by ProllyInfamous »

hyc_symas wrote: post #208
ProllyInfamous wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Totally false. This is a well-documented failstate. Usually results in "unable to connect to 127.0.0.1:18081" errorlog, which is most-commonly due to a corrupt database/blockchain (from hardstop/kill). In order of crashout likelihood: Windows >> MacOS > Linux >If you don't sync, you're not abusing the SSD. If you don't sync then you're not (cannot be) a fullnode / network verifyer / ringsigner. ---- >LMDB is perfect…

> If you don't sync then you're not (cannot be) a fullnode / network verifyer / ringsigner. I was talking about database sync, not blockchain sync. You don't need to use safe sync mode if you don't have to worry about machine crashes. And just killing the process will never corrupt the blockchain DB. > This may be old behavior... I go way back On this particular point, I go way back further than you.

>On this particular point, I go way back further than you.

Definitely know who you are (LMDB programmer &c), and your contributions to world & crypto tech – thanks (few people can claim, like yourself, that their code exists on BILLIONS of machine). I've ALSO been in cryptospace longer than Monero's existance... you are hands down a better programmer than myself (I'm a bluecollar electrician), with much more name recognition.

----

BUT: You aren't listening to my "layperson user behavior report" about a common and known behavior of the default getmonero.org node. I would love to help you&team better stabilize/configure the default client behavior/options...

Please don't let hubris stand in our way of spreading the gospel of crypto. If you want me to sign some custome statement with a BTC hash (dating back to the earlytimes) just send me a postcard (I no longer use email). But you shouldn't need that to listen.

>just killing the process will never corrupt the blockchain DB

I would love to show you how easy this is to reproduce, even on fresh installs of Ubuntu and/or MacOS on otherwise-stable hardware (never tried Windows... easier?).

----

Loved your 2019 talk on "is XMR still ASIC-proof" – is it still, in 2026, in your opinion? Your line about ~"our goal is to make a hash algorythm so dynamic that if you designed an ASIC processor for it... it'd essentially just be a CPU"~ – classic quoteable.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#227

Post by hyc_symas »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #226
hyc_symas wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't sync then you're not (cannot be) a fullnode / network verifyer / ringsigner. I was talking about database sync, not blockchain sync. You don't need to use safe sync mode if you don't have to worry about machine crashes. And just killing the process will never corrupt the blockchain DB. > This may be old behavior... I go way back On this particular point, I go way back further than you.

>On this particular point, I go way back further than you. Definitely know who you are (LMDB programmer &c), and your contributions to world & crypto tech – thanks (few people can claim, like yourself, that their code exists on BILLIONS of machine). I've ALSO been in cryptospace longer than Monero's existance ... you are hands down a better programmer than myself (I'm a bluecollar electrician), with much more name re…

>> just killing the process will never corrupt the blockchain DB

> I would love to show you how easy this is to reproduce, even on fresh installs of Ubuntu and/or MacOS on otherwise-stable hardware (never tried Windows... easier?).

If it's so easy to reproduce, you should be able to screen record a session with two terminal windows:

1 with monerod running and syncing the blockchain

2 send a `kill -9` to the monerod

1b restart monerod

And then we should see the error message you're referring to.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#228

Post by hyc_symas »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #226
hyc_symas wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't sync then you're not (cannot be) a fullnode / network verifyer / ringsigner. I was talking about database sync, not blockchain sync. You don't need to use safe sync mode if you don't have to worry about machine crashes. And just killing the process will never corrupt the blockchain DB. > This may be old behavior... I go way back On this particular point, I go way back further than you.

>On this particular point, I go way back further than you. Definitely know who you are (LMDB programmer &c), and your contributions to world & crypto tech – thanks (few people can claim, like yourself, that their code exists on BILLIONS of machine). I've ALSO been in cryptospace longer than Monero's existance ... you are hands down a better programmer than myself (I'm a bluecollar electrician), with much more name re…

> Loved your 2019 talk on "is XMR still ASIC-proof" – is it still, in 2026, in your opinion?

Yep. Nothing about computing architecture has changed.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#229

Post by hyc_symas »

vessenes wrote: post #217
fluffypony wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Monerites - what’s the state of play for fpga mining? I did not see anything in the light documentation of RandomX that looked like it was tuned to be “awkward” for a good sized fpga.

FPGAs have no particular advantage. You could dedicate a chunk of their resources to implement a softcore CPU but it'd be several times slower than a real CPU.

The random programs change too quickly to just implement them directly on an FPGA. Reprogramming the entire chip like that takes too much time.

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