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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

#61

Post by sowbug »

dgellow wrote: post #27
Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll get nothing but up votes here on HN, a lot are still angry they missed the boat. But solving the problem of how to transfer value trustlessly and anonymously, instantly anywhere in the world is one of the biggest breakthroughs since the Internet. Amazing how in a few short years kids started growing up with Bitcoin and don't understand how it work or why it exists :(

It’s an interesting technical problem to solve. But after 15y still has no meaningful benefits for our societies. Other than gambling/speculation/illegal stuff. The transformative cryptocurrency shift didn’t happen

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.

Free speech is for all the stuff you personally detest and personally choose to avoid. In a free country you hold your nose and allow others to engage in it.

If money is speech, then having a kind of money that doesn't pass through policy gates is an essential component of a free society.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#62

Post by tardedmeme »

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-…

RandomX is designed so that if you design a RandomX ASIC then you've designed a CPU. It writes and then executes random programs. To minimize the possible efficiency gains from matching the instruction set architecture, the same program is executed several thousand times, reducing the relative overhead of translating it to a different ISA.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#64

Post by iammrpayments »

Aeroi wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Hackernews is completely oblivious to cryptocurrencies. There we major hacks in April involving values 100x bigger than whatever gets upvoted here, and still I saw 0 posts commenting about it.

Just as an example, aave lost 295 million last month due to a hack in another protocol, and nothing was posted here.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#65

Post by tardedmeme »

Orygin wrote: post #36
littlecranky67 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which automatically makes in possibly centralized (you can never ever guarantee that not a single entity - or group of colluding entities - hold the majority stake and thus excert control).

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.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#66

Post by tardedmeme »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #59
j4cobgarby wrote: post #5

I never quite understand this stuff, maybe someone can help. Are cryptocurrencies supposed to be a potential replacement for real life cash? This was my understanding of the motivation behind Bitcoin, at least. If so, why does it make sense that people can "generate" cash by proving some amount of work done? This of course cannot be done with normal cash. Is the main functionality of these cryptocurrencies supposed t…

There are two parts of an answer to this, because your questions are somewhat divergent: > why does it make sense that people can "generate" cash by proving some amount of work done? This of course cannot be done with normal cash. People do generate money when they work, in a sense, because money doesn't have value. Money represents value. To really understand that you need to think about what money is and why it was…

I would say Bitcoin was a good attempt to create digital fiat money but it ultimately failed, both because it's deflationary and because of throughput limits. Monero succeeded a little bit more but will eventually collapse because of storage limits and the impossibility of pruning, and it's banned in most countries because their intelligence agencies can't track it.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#67

Post by dragonwriter »

Orygin wrote: post #36
littlecranky67 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which automatically makes in possibly centralized (you can never ever guarantee that not a single entity - or group of colluding entities - hold the majority stake and thus excert control).

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 thinking this is a safeguard presumes the exchange value of the coin must outweigh any other concerns the actor has.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#68

Post by tardedmeme »

dgellow wrote: post #27
Hilliard_Ohiooo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll get nothing but up votes here on HN, a lot are still angry they missed the boat. But solving the problem of how to transfer value trustlessly and anonymously, instantly anywhere in the world is one of the biggest breakthroughs since the Internet. Amazing how in a few short years kids started growing up with Bitcoin and don't understand how it work or why it exists :(

It’s an interesting technical problem to solve. But after 15y still has no meaningful benefits for our societies. Other than gambling/speculation/illegal stuff. The transformative cryptocurrency shift didn’t happen

When the USA collapses it could become the new global reserve currency (it won't but it could)

Point is, it's a currency you can use right now independently from the increasingly unstable-looking US dollar.

You could also use euros, yuan, rupees, or Australian dollars but it's really hard to get an account in those currencies if you don't live in those countries. Crypto is much easier to get access to.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#70

Post by tardedmeme »

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.

Well that's because it's illegal in most countries, and the reason it's illegal are the same reasons it's a good currency. States can't tolerate competition.

Still a global blockchain though with the associated throughput limits. You can't buy cereal with monero because you do that too often.

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