ArticMine: monero-project/research-lab #70#issuecomment-799027110

moneromooo here is the ping you wanted ^

If a PR gets drafted for this I would like to review it, so please grab my attention if/when that occurs.

ty

I will, thanks for the offer.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to pump it and dump it,’ because I was interested and taking the ideas and implementing them in bitcoin. The bitcoin code base was far more interesting to me than monero, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to work on this codebase, it’s terrible,'” he recalls - fluffypony in an interview about Monero

Thanks UkoeHB for reviewing this, offering to review the PR and for raising this very important issue

I am on the road right now, but will be answering the questions in the issue when I get back to North Vancouver in a couple of days

I think everyone here knows that most Monero exchange withdrawals and desposits are traceable (Breaking Monero - poisoned outputs). How does it feel to go out and lie to people that they are private and then earn less than holding BTC on your bag?

Hi everyone, I study mathematics with a minor in computer science and I'm currently looking for a topic for my master's thesis. I found some threads on reddit where people were interested in writing their thesis about Monero and they were guided to this chat, so I thought I'd ask here directly. Tbh I'm only having a quite basic understanding of

blockchain technology yet, but I'm curios to learn more and I'd say I'm quite good at familiarizing myself with new areas and working independently. I'd appreciate any suggestions for topics about Monero that are suitable for a master's thesis in mathematics. Thanks for reading!

hi

Were you the person who asked about this a few weeks ago by any chance ?

No, that's my first time asking.

Welcome :) The other person started looking at ring size selection, so you should probably avoid this then.

okay, good to know.

There's the good old difficulty adjustment algorithm which is a nice mix of computer and math.

There's been research around this for a while, no plans to change anything to it, but there's been suggestions before.

(eg, monero-project/monero #2887)

There's a change to the block size algorithm and associated fees going on, see monero-project/research-lab #70

So some stats, simulations etc about this new system might be up your alley.

Then there's the hard subject of trying to extract heuristics from the blockchain history.

As in, attempt to place probabilities on which output is the real spend in a ring.

Since the theory of every ring member is equiprobable does not quite hold in practice.

This would allow tweaking monero to make it more privacy preserving.

The people at #noncesense-research-lab are interested in that area, it'd be a good link with your work if you were going for that.

Another possibility would be to investigate some kind of threshold where the burden of block verification starts overwhelming the network.

Though that depends a lot on the mix of different hw people have, but it looks at first glance it'd have some kind of critical mass behaviour.

The "trying to extract heuristics from the blockchain history" would be the most interesting one I think :)

And most useful.

It is also the most work by far I reckon.

In fact, it's the kind of study that never ends.

You can always make incremental improvements in this.

This is basically what blockchain analysis companies try to do. They try and invade our privacy, and we need to defend ourselves against these intrusions as they improve in their spying.

So kind of an arms race.

thank you for all your suggestions, I'll take a closer look on the links you provided. and yes, the extraction of heuristics from the blockchain history sounds definitely the most interesting, but also quite hard.

jasminks: for conceptual background on monero see web.getmonero.org/library/Zero-to-Monero-2-0-0.pdf (shameless plug from me - also note it is derived from Kurt Alonso's master's thesis), and github.com/monero-project/research-lab/issues has various research topics

UkoeHB thank you very much!

Hi jasminks, I'm also currently writing my master thesis (in computer science) on a cryptography topic directly related to monero. So if you wanna exchange ideas or just chat with someone else working on a similar thesis topic hmu.

madhatter369 thanks for the offer!  think it was also your thread which I saw

on reddit, good to see what came out of it!

All you are 'fighting' for is e-penis of a guy you never met, that doesn't even have common decency to pay you for your time.

Do you think they care about Monero, or privacy or anything other than money?