Quote from: illodin on July 26, 2014, 01:46:09 PM

Do you think it is at all possible to design and implement a "perfect" privacy coin?

If so, can you design it? I've understood that even if you could, you wouldn't have the time / resources to implement it.

Ideally, what should happen in order for you to pull off such a project successfully? How much funding? How big of a team would you need? Who would you select in your team as developers?

1. yes but "devil is in the (so many and always multiplying complexity of...) details" so this is conjecture at this point. Often (as any programmer will attest to) estimates of design are proved grossly incorrect during actual implementation and refinement of a design that existed only in overview in someone's head.

Quote from: Linus Torvald

Show me the code, talk is cheap.

2. unknown

3. 1 or 2 developers maximum (unpaid yet vested in project success), because the Mythical Man-Month shows that communication overload (politics and decision making) by groups actually retards the interative design and implementation process of software development. Open source is optimum as a refinement mechanism, not as optimal as an innovation model. Open source is more reactive than proactive. The metric is that if someone has some private innovation, they have to calculate whether they can gain more (or better chance of success) by trying to slog through the politics and decision making of consensus or go it alone. There are tradeoffs on either choice.

Quote from: Brilliantrocket on July 26, 2014, 02:33:14 PM

I believe that he has stated the he wouldn't want to be seen as a lead developer for such a project.

I did write or imply that.

Quote from: drawingthesun on July 26, 2014, 03:37:35 PM

Monero is the best anonymous system that we have at the moment,

I wanted to agree, but to really be anonymous you need to obscure your IP address connection too, so in that case you could just use Bitcoin.

You can start to make that argument once the I2P or Tor support is running by default, but still one has to decide if they trust low-latency Chaum mix-nets or if they'd prefer to obtain an unregistered connection to the internet.

Note however that Cyptonote's untraceability and unlinkability adds a form of anonymity that can't be obtained with obscured IP address alone, and that is the correlation of people who have spent to you and you have spend to, so if any one of them leaks your identity then cascade to potentially all your transactions can be identified.

So I would say your point is reasonable, but not absolute.

Quote from: drawingthesun on July 26, 2014, 03:37:35 PM

Even if Zerocash worked and solved their infinite currency problem,

Won't Zerocash have the same problem with a unprunable blockchain?

Quote from: Este Nuno on July 26, 2014, 03:58:17 PM

Just how deeply ingrained to the CryptoNote technology are ring signatures?

Cryptonote could of course copy any new innovation if the community agrees, but they can't copy the developer of those innovations. And that is why the momentum will always stay with the innovator (assuming it continues to innovate and refine) and not the copycat. That developer has more insight into his innovations than the copycats do. And he doesn't have time to explain every damn detail to everyone. He would never get any real work done (the Mythical Man-Month communication overload point again).

Quote from: fluffypony on July 26, 2014, 05:19:31 PM

If this hypothetical "perfect" cryptocurrency is ever designed, we can cross that bridge then. Hypothetically telling everyone how the hypothetical users of a cryptocurrency would react to a hypothetical hard fork brought on by the introduction of a hypothetical perfect cryptocurrency is...well...nothing more than your hypothesis.

I agree. Hypothetical is silly if taken too far, because no one can predict all of that, not even the person who might be working on the dreamcoin.

One point of my posts was to ascertain where Monero is exactly (to test my assumptions) and also to explain the weaknesses clearly so both that community and any competitors can see clearly where the issues lie.

I am not trying to play some political game wherein I want to spend all my time trying to prevent people from adopting Monero. I think the discussion has reached its fulfillment already.

Quote from: Este Nuno on July 26, 2014, 05:35:26 PM

Anyone speculating in anything fundamentally has to consider hypothetical situations and their associated probabilities.

Agreed, but we can't project very well in detail speculative unknowns. What we can say is that Monero is likely to proceed on its current trajectory.

Quote from: ArticMine on July 26, 2014, 05:47:31 PM

High transaction fees for trading ... are in fact the major weakness...

There is no level of transaction fees that is stable. I don't enough time right now to collate all my posts about tx fees to summarize the reasons.

Quote from: Its About Sharing on July 26, 2014, 08:17:32 PM

You really think if a better technology comes along, that it is easier to build that network out with a new coin (not to mention testing, getting a developer network behind it, promoting it, etc.) instead of just adding that to Monero, BTC, etc?

Agreed the value of the existing network inertia is one of the factors the person with the private innovation has to consider carefully for making the choice whether to contribute it to the existing community or launch a new coin.

Launching a new coin successfully is much more difficult than it seems. Go find one example in an altcoin? Dogecoin got the ramp up from making debasement decline extremely fast and now they are paying the price for it (which I think is the other theoretical egregious flaw that may destroy XMR).

Quote from: itod on July 26, 2014, 08:57:41 PM

Wait a minute, 6MB/day with 3% of Bitcoin transactions, and Bitcoins blockchain grows at 34 MB/day, that's not 5x the growth of blockchain compared to bitcoin, it's 5.82x, closer to 6x for the same number of transactions. You want to tell me that 6x bigger blockchain is not a design flaw...

As I wrote upthread, I don't think that 5 or 6x calculation is accurate. Because someone told me that Monero currently has a limitation wherein you can't mix too many inputs (incorrect?), so you need to mix multiple times to achieve the same level of mixing you would with one transaction without the limit. Thus many of the transactions are multiple mixes for the same transaction, thus the real bloat is orders-of-magnitude higher than Bitcoin.

But remember from upthread discussion between smooth and myself, that the level of that multiplier is less relevant. I explained (argued) that the real problem is one-time ring signatures make the blockchain unprunable.

Quote from: Nekomata on July 26, 2014, 09:46:47 PM

Attacking XMR blockchain grow is merely a troll strategy to dismiss it, largely used by darkcoin bagholders

For the record: I don't (nor do anyone I want appease) own any DRK.