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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

#81

Post by ArchieScrivener »

yfontana wrote: post #55
ArchieScrivener wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Bitcoin is a replacement for central banking currencies. Its the first few lines of the white paper. This is how money works. If you use a medium of exchange and unit of account for goods and services then that medium must increase at the same rate as the increase in goods and services otherwise you get second and third order effects such as inflation, contraction, rising unemployment, etc., directly impacting i…

> In Bitcoin you don't generate cash, you earn block rewards for acting as a consensus broker which otherwise would require a central banking settlement layer. This activity, tied directly to the transaction layer, acts to maintain the equilibrium between increases in goods and services and expansion of the money supply. Block rewards have no connection to transaction volume or economic activity, the protocol is desi…

Yes, they absolutely do. That's what dictates difficulty. It is not deflationary, deflation is not the same as supply constraint. Deflation is a reduction in price level, constraining supply is precisely how it moderates the equilibrium of value which is why it is a threat to existing monetary control.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#82

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

tardedmeme wrote: post #63
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #52

Can someone explain to me why RandomX miners don't just generate programs without branching? I'm a bit confused on why that's not possible

Because it's designed to be hard to execute on anything that is not a CPU.

Right, but the program is generated by the miner. So the miner could just generate a program that has no branching, and run it on a GPU.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#83

Post by kedihacker »

grey-area wrote: post #76
3form wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly the same argument could be applied to gold, and yet it has been used as a value store for ages. Can't say I like crypto, but I think better arguments can be made against it.

Gold has a use value.

90% percent of gold is used in jewelry or bars so use value isn't that much unless price is prohibiting use cases.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#84

Post by captn3m0 »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #52

Can someone explain to me why RandomX miners don't just generate programs without branching? I'm a bit confused on why that's not possible

The program is randomly generated and I am guessing that the seed for this is deterministically determined from the current block head (or something similar) making it hard to attack.

It might lead to scenarios where a miner may optimise block generation itself, I guess?

I was more curious about the possibility of generating optimised branchless variants and then running them in parallel on multiple ASICs to ensure you cover every branch and submit all the results and hope you’re fast? Would that be more inefficient than relying on branch prediction and CPUs?

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#85

Post by dale_glass »

latchkey wrote: post #35
dale_glass wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A transaction fee of what? To take a fee from a transaction there has to be a transaction to take a fee from, which needs some sort of "coin" that came from somewhere. Somebody has to create a money supply and distribute it somehow. When the network first comes into existence, nobody has any money, so where does it come into being from? Mining is what generates the coins. And you need mining because otherwise you nee…

It is subtle, but PoW mining itself doesn't generate coins. It isn't like someone is digging a hole in the ground and extracting gold. PoW miners are rewarded for correctly validating transactions, with newly minted coins. The whole proof of work thing is that you proved that you validated a transaction by expending energy, and the network pays you for that security service. Miners then need to sell those coins on th…

I believe transactions are quite optional though? A miner could choose to mine empty blocks if they truly wanted, which transactions to include if any is up to them.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#87

Post by kedihacker »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #52

Can someone explain to me why RandomX miners don't just generate programs without branching? I'm a bit confused on why that's not possible

It can skip but it has 7 more programs to go and it can only know the program after completing the first one so after first one there is no advantage

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#88

Post by captn3m0 »

captn3m0 wrote: post #84
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #52

Can someone explain to me why RandomX miners don't just generate programs without branching? I'm a bit confused on why that's not possible

The program is randomly generated and I am guessing that the seed for this is deterministically determined from the current block head (or something similar) making it hard to attack. It might lead to scenarios where a miner may optimise block generation itself, I guess? I was more curious about the possibility of generating optimised branchless variants and then running them in parallel on multiple ASICs to ensure y…

Read a little and turns out Monero requires a chain of programs, each with a Blake hash construction to generate the next one. That makes it very hard to optimise since it adds a layer of “hard to avoid” branching.

And this also makes it hard to generate favorable programs.

Re: How Monero’s proof of work works

#89

Post by tardedmeme »

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…

Bitcoin was designed to be a replacement for real life cash, but it ultimately failed in this role. Nonetheless it was a great experiment that essentially invented the industry.

Most cryptocurrencies, if we go only by their number, are designed to make their creators rich and moderately succeed at that. This is your ERC20s, pump dot fun, et cetera.

If we only consider ones that have any serious chance of being usable as actual currencies, these days they're usually designed to run arbitrary money-like programs known as "smart contracts", of which traditional money is just one.

Money can't be sent until it's generated, that's the same whether you're talking bitcoin or dollars. There's always a rule for who gets the new money when it's created, and somehow the rule always ends up being "rich people get the new money". Dollars go to politicians and big bankers, bitcoins go to big compute farms, ethers go to big bankers, monero goes to big compute farms. The aforementioned get-rich-quick currencies go to their creators, if course.

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