Why exactly is downloading the last 10% of the blockchain far slower than downloading the first 90% of the blockchain?

Also, why are my logs getting spammed with constant stack traces?

DiffieHellman: Bigger blocks

Tx volume and tx weight. Originally txes were smaller and fewer in number. In recent times, and with updates to the protocol, txes are significantly larger, and the amount of people using it is much higher

Ok

isn't that also because rx blocks take longer to verify?

i guess if it's before the checkpoint it's irrelevant

monero_man: take a look at getmonero.org/community/merchants

I don't kno any service that does XMR -> Steam card

but you can use something like xmr.to and bitrefill

fwiw it's quite easy and fast to use bitrefill with xmr. Just use a mobile wallet which integrates xmr.to, scan the bitcoin bar code and the conversion happens automatically

You can still do it.

Instead of being automatic you have to go to xmr.to, paste the bitcoin address there and then follow their instructions

but yeah, would be cool if compamnies like bitrefill, purse, etc would start to accept Monero payments. The only thing we can do is to let them know :)

btw can be that somebody offers XMR -> gift card, i'm just not aware of any

*anybody doing that

yes. Some wallets integrate xmr.to. So you can pay with xmr to anyone accepting btc

Few minutes

I heard bitcoin is slow since a few days due to network congestion. I guess that also influences the conversion through services like xmr.to..

Sorry I mean "even slower than usual".

lol yeah xmr.to doesn't even batch transctions, not great for the poor overwhelmed btc network

oh I see what you mean though. as far as I can tell xmr.to hasn't raised their fees to match

hasn't raised their fees for users I mean. I've still had stuff confirming in one block even with btc having like $5 fees. xmr.to is an incredible deal for folks doing small btc transactions. literally cheaper than using the btc network directly

i wonder how the service makes money. exchange rate spread ?

<rbrunner7> Test for checking "voice" over in IRC

<rbrunner7> artefact: I think to remember they charge progressively larger fees for larger amounts and make up this way for what they often loose with smaller transfers

<rbrunner7> By the way, how do I get permission back to directly post on IRC in #monero and #monero-dev? I did not get a "blue dot" :(

rbrunner7 you have to ask an OP to give you voice

It's a bit a mess for relays. I cannot write in -community and -dev

<rbrunner7> By direct message on IRC?

<rbrunner7> And will it stick?

Until you disconnect AFAIK.

<rbrunner7> Oh no, I disconnect all the time ...

<rbrunner7> I will hack the damn thing to become OP :)

Thanks for the voice, btw

Anyone who wishes to post and can't, feel free to /query me to ask.

Except those spammers I guess ...

Can you see in some logs whether they continue to try?

I've not seen the telltale tor join/part with the usual nick template in a while. But then I did not look for them.

<artefact> isn't that also because rx blocks take longer to verify? >>> turns out randomx is faster to verify. look at h/s at: github.com/tevador/RandomX#cpu-performance

well, compared to cnv4. there used to be a table somewhere with original cnv0

don't the checkpoints on the first ~90% of the chain speed things up?

for that part

Most of the blocks have precomputed hash of hashes which allow skipping some checks (including PoW) on those known good blocks. There's a command line option to toggle this.

Checkpoints just add a guide to what cannot be the right chain.

What does everyone think about Litecoin adding MimbleWimble?

Won’t see adoption and has all the issues of opt-in privacy

Seems like a money grab to keep pulling people into a dead chain, but we’ll see.

MW is better as a scalability tool, its not amazing at privacy (though it has some native benefits).

So I take it you dont see Grin as a direct competitor to xmr as a privacy coin then?

Grin/MW untraceability is based on the assumption that everyone in the world buries their head in the sand

if anyone bothers to run an archival node to keep full blockchain history, they can trace at will

Interesting I have not looked into Grin/MW just was just curious

So it seems xmr is still the #1 privacy coin option right now despite other chains trying

GRIN is a good in-between of scalability and *reasonable* privacy, but has many privacy flaws Monero does not have. I.e. anyone running a large amount of nodes on the network breaks user privacy across all transactions.

It’s an interesting tool but MW is far more useful as a layer-two approach instead of a base-layer for a money.

Tari is fine because you don

* Tari is fine because you don ‘t need perfect privacy for NFT/tickets, so its sufficient and much more scalable than Bitcoin/Monero at-present.

the more interesting tech to look at these days, IMO, is Avalanche, if their scaling claims are true

Could sb explain to me why masternodes would be no good substitute for pow? As far as I understood the logic: Masternode operators are locking up coins, which keeps them honest. I know about nothing at stake. Couldnt this be solved like with Lokis current Pulse (punishing double signed blocks)? I dont see the difference between miners using physical resources and stakers locking up their monetary resources?

It's inherently not distributed: the ones with money control what others can do. You're new, you're not equal, qualitatively, not only quantitatively.

moneromoo: Isnt it the same with btc pow for example. If you dont spend money for miners and electricity you have nothing to say.

?

To a point only. With monero pow, it's quantitative only. Bitcoin, it's a mix, since you need an ASIC and apparently that needs KYC to have any worthwhile one (hearsay only).

But everyone plays by the same rules. You start your daemon, you verify txes/blocks, you send yours, and as long as you abide by the consensus rules, you're good.

Masternodes mean there's a privileged class which decides whether to allow you.

That's qualitative.

At least from what I know of how they're done currently, which is superficial tbh.

It doesn't mean it could not ever get done right I suppose.

Arent masternodes just deciding which block comes next?

Well, depends what you have them to.But with darkcoin, they do more: they mix your coins for you (allegedly), the decide what txes get in prior to a block, that kind of thing.

Hence " It doesn't mean it could not ever get done right I suppose."

Masternodes mean there's a privileged class which decides whether to allow you. -> Ok, but you could spend resources in order to become part of that "privileged class". In order to be a monero miner you have to do that too.

A number of chains have privileged nodes like this, which are the only ones allowed to create/rubberstamp blocks.

Sure, to get money, you have to expend money.

Well, depends what you have them to.But with darkcoin, they do more: they mix your coins for you (allegedly), the decide what txes get in prior to a block, that kind of thing. -> I agree that it would be bad for privacy if masternodes would take care of that. But if they are just there for keeping the chain honest. Why not?

One thing that should be clear, because I assume it in the above: you can particupate in the monero network (or bitcoin) without mining, and you still do your own things: verify txes, and send yours doing your own verifiable privacy things. etc.

who keeps the master nodes honest?

"Ok, but you could spend resources in order to become part of that "privileged class". In order to be a monero miner you have to do that too." yeah you have to do it, but its a different level. its buy a computer and run it

with anything involving staking, you need to jump through permissions. hence, its not permissionless. hence, its not good.

if your system is permissioned then all the decentralization is useless

Anyone knows about "you need an ASIC and apparently that needs KYC" ? I'm not sure where I read that, and not sure whether true.

someone recently tried buying a bitcoin asic

thought it was sethsimmons maybe

i mean, you can try it for yourself. figure out what the latest hotness is for in bitcoin and try and buy one

Not sure that'd tell me much. So much of the web is unusable if you want to be private.

One thing that should be clear, because I assume it in the above: you can particupate in the monero network (or bitcoin) without mining, and you still do your own things: verify txes, and send yours doing your own verifiable privacy things. etc.-> Ok, couldnt you verifiy transactions as well with masternodes. You could verify if the masternodes operator locked up the coins instead of verifying if the miners nonce is true. What is

ference there?

"Ok, but you could spend resources in order to become part of that "privileged class". In order to be a monero miner you have to do that too." yeah you have to do it, but its a different level. its buy a computer and run it. -> I think that is just true for monero and we dont know yet what happens if things are going to scale.

Anyway, I don't care too much really, I think I'll keep it as a "plausible, not sure if true".

Anyway, I don't care too much really, I think I'll keep it as a "plausible, not sure if true". -> I was just thinking about it, because the envirmental impact would be significantly smaller.

oh that

wheres my link

show me :)

Thank you!

you should change your nick to xmrpos

i mean yeah, at the face of it, poS and its derivatives make sense regarding "oh it doesn't use energy" ... the problem is that you don't achieve what you need for a decentralized permissionless system with PoS and its derivatives. you end up with paypal

or the existing fiat system. so, fail.

decentralization is diametrically opposed to efficiency

if your aim is a permissionless system you have to just accept that there will be unavoidable overheads.

You have to have either PoW or PoS or something similar. If you don't, then there's no cost to rewrite.

Whether masternodes or not.

hyc: Name is not always the agenda ;)

hyc: Just kidding. Why not thinking about how alternatives could work.

many people already have, and moved on

hyc: Might be true for those people, but it never hurts to understand things by oneself :) Maybe for you its a little bit boring ;)

Hearing things over and over again ;)

gingeropolous: "All things in our lives are closely linked to the price of energy" If prices are already linked to energy. Couldnt we protect the blockchain by market mechanisms?

hyc - when you mentioned avalanche is an interesting technology. I tried searching avalanche, but wasn't sure what other keywords to put in. 1 result was an "next generation" NVRAM company. Or is something else?

Maybe, hyc was true it is more about pos there. I thought that masternodes and pos do both have the concept of locking up stake.

john_r365: it's another project from Emin Gun Sirer

moneromoo: You have to have either PoW or PoS or something similar. If you don't, then there's no cost to rewrite.-> True. I think that by saying masternode I just meant to lock up stake.

locking coins with masternodes/pos is great if you don't want people to dump your scamcoin on the market and tank the price :P

sounds fiscally responsible!

asympt: It is true that you are forcing people to lock up capital resources. Arent we doing that as well when we are buying miners? If I would buy a dozen asic miners. Then that would be equivalent to locking up capital in my opinion.

nobody buys ASIC miners for XMR ;)

Maybe the point is not that strong for monero with randomx, but I think it would still be difficult to sell a farm of used ryzen rigs...

The intention has always been to disicentivize that sort of thing. and promote the every-day computer users.

in that case, the investment in mining is transient, not locked up.

e.g., you use your PCs for your day to day tasks, and they only mine when you're done and they're idle.

Do you think there dont exist monero mining farms?

of course they exist

but they're not a first priority

I think entities with more resources will always somehow able to drive out the small guy, just because of more monetary resources. Maybe farms dont have an advantage on the hardware side, but they can just allocate more resources for mining and so taking a bigger cut of the profit pie. Im not sure if in large scale industries the resources are that transient.

sure, a dedicated mining farm would presumably mine 24/7

as for driving out the small guy - maybe. this seems to be a law of the universe, success breeds success, the rich get richer.

hyc: Do you dislike the idea of locking up monetary resources?

it very obviously favors the richer

although if you allow pooled investment into masternodes, I guess that's more fair

Any idea what is going on here? reddit.com/r/monerosupport/comments…yg/tor_node_stuck_on_height_2210016

there's still a qualitative difference, to me - most people already own PCs. they don't need to make any additional investment solely to participate in Monero

It's not the locking up that's bad, it's the fact that there's this small clique that has more rights, in effect.

Seems like curl from localhost displays the proper height, curl from outside does not

in every other case, people must go out of their way to dedicate resources to the task

Looks like it's not querying hte same daemon.

hyc: Ok, lets expect a coin where you could do these shared masternodes. Wouldnt that be better than using additional electricity? You could say as well that everybody has a few bucks left over.

You seem to be asking about mater nodes but making argments about PoS.

moneromoo: Dont these concepts do have sth in common?

They bot allocated monetary resources for keeping the chain honest.

*both

moneromooo: How did you infer that?

Differnet heights.

and not by just a couple, which could be he case if you wait a minute beteeen two calls.

According to the user it is the same node, but I guess I will ask if he runs multiple instances

def looks like different nodes

I guess it *might* be that somehow a lmdb txn did not abort nor get committed, so it's continuing to read old data.

That doesn't sound super likely since the dtor takes care of that.

moneromoo: It's not the locking up that's bad, it's the fact that there's this small clique that has more rights, in effect.- > I think not everybody is mining as well. Would be nice but not everybody can do that just because of the nature of different electricity prices worldwide. So in the end we do have a "small clique " called miners.

hyc, moneromooo: All right, ty

I will ask the user to clarify

You're still not getting it. I am not tlaking about miners. I was not. Still am not.

You're confusing miners/pow with masternodes.

You can have PoS wihtout masternodes. You can have masternodes will pow.

moneromoo: So if we are talking about masternodes. Other nodes are not verifying anything?

I suspect masternodes with pow might used for semi pubiv govt coins.

Gives an air of legitimacy from pow :)

Depends aout your consensus rules. They typically verify some stuff, or it'd have less of a pint..

point.

PoS is a total scam

The one thing in particular that drives the point home is that in darkcoin you can't do your own privacy crypto, you ask a master node to do it for you.

just use visa if you want low power costs

but with blockchains, you *can't* have a 0-waste system

Anyway. Things to do.

it's completely pointless and impossible

yanmaani: Im not talking about 0 waste. More about efficiency.

the efficiency must be exactly as high/low

because "irreversibly wasted resources between block X and Y == resources needed to overtake chain at height block X starting at block Y"

this is constant for all blockchains

so PoS just wastes money instead.

(this is disregarding the fact that PoS is impossible. But even if you could do it, it'd be equally wasteful)

Ok, but the issuance of money is not directly connected with a global footprint.

????????????????

I don't know what that sentence means.

in PoS, you're lighting $X of money on fire to earn $X of Monero

in PoW, you're wasting $X of energy to earn $X of Monero

Hello everyone, I have a technical question. How can we assert or know exactly what are the technical rules or requirements on which Monero is built upon (should we exactly know what's happening in the code, right?)? Example, TXO's 10 decoys is a requirement. These decoys is a transaction rule, without those 10 decoys the transaction is not able to be added to the blockchain.

What other rules or requirements are there? Is there a source where those rules are listed? Stealth addresses, another example, without the public address being cryptographically modified inside the blockchain the transactions aren't verified.

lh1008[m]: monero, like Bitcoin, doesn't have a spec IIRC

so it's reference implementation

in PoS, you're lighting $X of money on fire to earn $X of Monero -> Trading x$ for monero does not need much electricity.

no, but you're still wasting resources

you're just wasting money instead of power

you forego the cost of capital

hyc - thanks! will take a look at his project - avalabs.org

Money is a representation of a certain amount of goods. So with x$ you can buy x goods. If you buy monero you just decide to buy a virtual currency instead of goods. So the opportunity costs for the crypto must be paid by the users of the network. What is the problem of the capital cost?

yanmaani: Maybe I got your point. If you are seeing at a basic level, people would exchange pos crypto for goods (represented by fiat currencies). In ordert to keep the ledger honest transactions are associated with costs which are paid in the pos currency, which is then exchanged back by the staker, because of goods consumption .

thank you yanmaani

locustlord: trolling maxis?

Inge- where?

yeah maxis are pretty dumb

sech1: #bitcoin

I got banned from there briefly because I suggested it would be easier and cheaper to buy monero than to run your bitcoin through a dozen layers of coinswap and tumblers

heh

I was gonna say something similar yanmaani

the truth hurts

artefact: larger spread for larger orders

Lyza: yes but tumbling large quantities is not reliable

sorry that was a bit of a non sequitur I was calling back to a convo from this morning

interesting and timely conversation about master nodes though. I was just learning about zcoin and they have a hybrid pow + staked master node system. their transaction tech looks cool but I'm not sold on what appear to be a number of centralizing features of the protocol

master node / staking / whatever is just a total scam

nobody has explained how it would work, or came up with a working system

there are really solid reasons to believe proof of stake is impossible

The only consensus that resolve byzantine generals is PoW

"resolves"

but basically, yes. Although I don't think there's a mathematical proof of impossibility of PoS.

although I remain skeptical, tezos appears not to have exploded

Lyza: isn't tezos centralized?

more centralized than Proof of Stake usually is? idk

I'm considering a PoW/PoS hybrid for my game. Half because interesting to do, and half because of the tari people's exploration of merge mining security.

It's actually fun to work with something that doesn't have to be as secure as monero.

For Townforge would be nice to try it