Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.
by
TPTB_need_war
on 03/07/2015, 05:25:16 UTC
A year prior he was supposed to release his "coin" but instead worked with Monero and then suggested it isn't truly anon

I will respond to statements of factual inaccuracy. If you can find a quote from any of my usernames which refutes any of the following, then please share.

I said and still maintain the following about Monero:

  • I once joined the dev chat room for a few moments, and they were going on and on about Linux and networking esoterica, which is not my interest nor forte. Seemed far off from the things I would like to focus on and gets my juice pumping.
  • there is no great scaling for it in use as a currency that I can see
  • it can't scale decentralized
  • it uses I2P (which along with Tor I don't trust) to obscure the user's IP address (and if IP addresses are revealed the ring mixing anonymity can be unmasked)
  • it doesn't appear to group and force mandatory rings in a way that prevents unmasking the anonymity
  • the PoW hash function is not optimal for minimizing the differential between future ASICs and CPUs, i.e. I measurably know this because I have a better PoW hash function implemented
  • In Cryptonote, the mixes have to be equal value which forces balances to be preloaded into powers-of-10, which complicates wallets, leads to more chances for combinatorial unmasking, and explodes the transaction data sizes (which has impacts on scaling, orphan rate, etc).
  • afaik they have no coins to offer bounties because there was no ICO reserved for such (instead I heard the devs were mining the shit out of the egregiously front loaded debasement curve and rumor was the guy who optimized the PoW hash netted himself $150,000 before releasing the optimizations), nor would they like a rancorous dev coming in and rearranging the house
  • I've heard (not verified) they inherited a sloppy C code base and I hate C and C++, even I am very proficient in those programming languages
  • fluffypony (is he Australian?) was nasty to me from the get go (perhaps I was to him but I was just expressing my opinions similar to what I am saying now), which turned me off since he is apparently the most active dev. I've had respectful exchange with him since, and I retain no animosity towards even people who appear to have lost their mind.
  • over a year ago, rpietila was telling everyone to buy more BTC at $600 and XMR was the greatest thing since sliced bread and I was turned off by the lack of cooler heads and objectivity. Since then, I come to respect smooth and realized that rpietila isn't the key voice of XMR (and I don't dislike rpietila, he is my friend and even a potential token amount seed investor of my controlling group... no I am would not pull rpietila away from XMR, he just likes small diversifications and he is my friend after all).
  • XMR was a coin for those devs who already had money to invest, not for a dev like me who exhausted his former 18,000 oz stash and needs to strike it big one more time in life coming to old age without a retirement, blind in one eye, teenage dependents, and diagnosed with a chronic, progressive illness Multiple Sclerosis.
  • it feels like most in Monero are Europeans and I am an American. This seems to be related to their major boasting about how the coin was launched "fairly" as a collectivist mining (with front loading no less Wink) instead of as an ICO. Seems even though we can probably work together technically if we have some independence and orthogonality in modules, there do exist some cultural attitude differences. Americans (of yore and I am a throwback X gen) tend to be adamantly capitalist, anti-collectivist, very "can do", etc.. My best friend from high school was a Lt. Colonel in USAF and he lamented to me once that he hated meeting with the NATO counterparts because mostly all they did was talk. Obviously Germans are perfectionists and I have some German ancestry.
  • I was very ill most of 2013 and 2014
  • they basically took someone else's work and capitalized on, convincing the market that other Cryptonotes were inferior. For me this felt more like freeloading than capitalism. Even if Boolberry was sort of instigating them by trying to make comparisons, the entire Cryptonote outcome felt like a clusterfuck to me. What innovations did Monero do? I recalled Michael Jordan's criticism when Lebron joined with Dwade and LongNeck in Miami, "I didn't want to join Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, I wanted to beat them." Competition and innovation makes the world a better place. Lebron is athletically nearly as gifted as MJ was, but he doesn't appear to have the same mental gifts. On the flip side, whatever made MJ great as a player, makes him a horrible GM/owner[1].
  • probably lots of other reasons I am not thinking of off the top of my head

There were other things I had written and later retracted such as for example in debates with smooth. For example, I once had asserted that off chain mixing could have some advantage in that the mixes were not seen by the public, but smooth pointed out that if the NSA is truly recording every packet, then all the unmasking can be done if ever for example Tor's encryption is broken. There were other examples of issues that I retracted during discourse, such as formerly thinking Cryptonote rings could not be pruned, yet recently I revealed how to do that.

My main issue with Monero right now is that I can't see that they've solved all the issues and have momentum on its use as an anonymous currency. They are apparently making progress with a new web wallet coming, rpietila is making a game to potentially drive use as a currency. They probably have other initiatives in the works and I know also they feel that once the debt contagion accelerates, then they will be a beneficiary. We will see.

Also Monero doesn't precisely fit my goals which are to get rich, work on something interesting, and to solve the totalitarianism I believe we are facing. One aspect of "interesting" for me, is to rock the boat and make big waves. I love shocking people. Think of me as Michael Jordan or Dennis Rodman, in that I want to shoot the ball with my eyes closed or win doing it my way.

Yeah I am an American. That doesn't mean I can. Lots of loud mouthed loser Americans,  Tongue. America is at the top of the mountain and headed down the backside, but Europe is already more than halfway down from its former glory. The Asians will be taking over for us by 2032. I am in Asia now trying to adjust.

I have absolutely no desire to be involved in any pump and dump, nor do I want to own 1% of the economy (what a major responsibility and nearly impossible to allocate resources optimally at that scale).

You can be sure if ever I am involved in something it will be a fight to the finish (or unification), very high quality, and very serious. For me it is as much about making a mark on my life before I go, the challenge of competition, the wonderment of try to build something, as it is gaining some fortune to enjoy the time I have remaining.

[1]http://swarmandsting.com/2015/06/26/reports-hornets-turn-down-four-1st-rounders-from-celtics/
http://www.seasonsover.com/nba/the-path-to-prosperity-the-timely-death-of-the-bobcats

Edit: also there some personal redemption involved in my motivation. For example, there is a certain Bitcoin core dev who seems to have a difficult to categorize what appears to be from my perspective an attitude problem about me. Perhaps it has something to do with the conjecture that math conquers creativity or something along those lines. Again I don't hold grudges, for me life is more fun if moveon, but some guys incessantly remind me that they do (hold grudges or repeat the same traits that rub me the wrong way). That is the food I love to eat.