Quote from: AnonyMint on July 26, 2014, 08:00:43 AM

Discussion ongoing in another thread about Monero scaling.

I was quite relieved to see that someone well-known for vetting vulnerabilities had chosen to test those vulnerabilities in a sandbox, and that same person also felt comfortable saying something interesting about finding out what BitJohn wants to say about it. The interaction shows me that a possible double-take is going to take place with regard to the current impression from otherwise sensible people, and maybe some legitimate recognition might come out of it. Hell in the very least, if the worst comes out of it .. I can stop wondering 'what if' and move on

. I like to see something when literally in one day one of the loudest voices here already did a double take (Spoetnik) on the project.

Quote from: AnonyMint on July 26, 2014, 08:00:43 AM

I already said one-time ring signatures are an improvement, except they come at the cost of defeating the mini-block chain, which is the only way I can see to scale to micro transactions and remain decentralized (assuming you want new mining nodes to be able to pop up, download the block chain, and leave the network at-will to guard against IP blocking by the authorities, etc...).

This brings up something interesting that might have something to do with this. We speak in terms of 4000 or 5000 tx's per second for visa/mastercard. Do you know of any links that will explain how many of those tx's reside in the under $10 range, or in the $10.01-$100.00 range, and in the +$100.00 range? It's dawning on me that these niches we're describing might be of both value, and function, rather than just function. Perhaps, as we both seem to agree that multiple cryptocurrencies should/will exist, these niches will include an average transaction value as well as the other variables in the niche.

I'm willing to bet this information might shed some light here .. I could see many people being fine with a high-scale crypto with no anonymity so long as the purchase is low and not really requiring the need for privacy (think groceries - not prescriptions, where maybe you only put $50 in your wallet at a time). I'm thinking this CN might fill a niche for a little bit more costly purchases because of what it offers. Honestly, I'd find it crazy to want to ever hide the fact that I bought some milk, eggs and bread from the grocery store from anyone - I just don't care about it (add: though I do respect the impression that some feel they should restrict this information - and agree that sometimes it might be the right choice), and why would I go overkill and permanently obscure that data when it's not needed. OTOH, if I'm buying some vicodin and have thousands of dollars in my bank account well I just might want that not known by everyone. What if, instead of the number of transactions scaling, we were to observe the capability of cryptocurrencies of handling typical transaction values of one higher magnitude every decade or so (yes I'm pulling from Moore's law here - but just in a different light).

Alternatively, lifestyle purchases like the specific shoes I wear .. or computer parts I own .. yeah I can see a niche for that where I wouldn't want everyone to know what I'm buying. These items are a little more expensive and could easily be used to spam me and track me. I don't buy these types of things all the time, and would argue that the need for a specific transaction needs much much less of a scaled usage. This is where I see the currency no longer really needing to support a consumer culture and moving toward the frontier of a business. That would be good information to have -- how often do businesses make purchases compared to consumers making purchases.

Quote from: AnonyMint on July 26, 2014, 08:00:43 AM

As for "chances", note that if you have 1 in 1000 chance of losing your anonymity for any single transaction or mining share submitted, then after 100 of them your probability of being anonymous has dropped to 1 in 10. Now I realize this doesn't take into account that access to your ISP or upstream router is not a random trial, so the point is in some respects specious. My point is that if you are talking about hiding my wealth from the G20's plan to hunt down and confiscate all wealth, then I'd rather something the NSA can't see easily and hackers can't see with some effort. Suppose you are in a nasty divorce, and your ex (or her attorney) wants to get revenge on you so they hire some hackers. That is not so rare. And there are many scenarios that overlap.

So as opposed to bitcoin, where only two transactions (I think) from my wallet are required to link my purchases, we've effectively moved the order of magnitude of possible transactions before linking/identifying by two full decimal places in this example, before needing a different wallet. That's a huge leap. Repeating here, I'm starting to lean toward CN not needing to scale as high as bitcoin due to possibly less transactions taking place of higher value than the number of micropurchases taking place. I can imagine some form of possible conjoined wallet where I could set parameters that I either pay from a bitcoin wallet or a CN/anon example in such a case (set by conditions that I can choose before the time of purchase IE: less work). Maybe I'm totally wrong and it will instead just be certain demographics that use one coin .. but what it's looking like is that any one person from any one demographic will be able to choose from a plethora of cryptocurrencies, the one of their choice at the time of purchase .. provided any of them get that far (though I agree very few would get this far).

I don't know for sure if we'd need another ten or twenty years before the possible value usage can be scaled or not to something that can handle for example $10,000 dollars safely .. but the reality right now to me, is that we're having trouble providing a scale to even $100 dollar transactions safely (but I do know with certainty that something capable of that is beginning to surface right now, and is something with which I'd consider purchases a full order of magnitude higher as 'within a realm of possibility'). Specifically the blockchain bloat you and many others have pointed out will be a major factor in trying to get this to scale. Of course it's totally possible that the next best thing could come out tomorrow that will handle everything.

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And if you are targeting business usage, then the extortion and espionage value of hacking it increases.

I agree, it's the target market that stands to lose the greatest here. It's with that in mind that, to date, I've only mentioned this to people and not business owners. I think the target market is still something that's up for debate, because the scope of the newest project still has yet to be achieved.