Quote from: crypto_zoidberg on July 28, 2014, 09:49:39 PM

I heard you were talking about pruning ring signatures from CryptoNote coins, so let me introduce Boolberry's solution

Zoidberg

Hello Zoidberg. I apologize I thought you were attempting to prune the blockchain of transaction records which are spent which both I and at least fluffypony think is impossible.

Now I see the details of your solution, which is discarding the ring signature proofs bloat, but retaining all transaction history. This indeed will work fine.

However, this is not pruning the blockchain, rather is just a constant size reduction in the bloat, thus it still won't scale to Visa scale because even Bitcoin wouldn't scale to Visa scale without pruning transaction history (or implementing the mini blockchain which also discards transaction history more efficiently). To reach Visa scale without mining centralization, appears to require transaction history pruning (at current hard disk size, and for the UXTO also memory size or SSD is a factor).

There is confusion over what the term 'pruning' means in this context of the blockchain. You are discarding some of the data from each transaction record (specifically the ring signatures proof), but you are not pruning the transaction history (because it is impossible or impractical).

I will update my upthread summary of top anonymity coins to note your advantage. But note your advantage doesn't really solve the scaling problem of one-time ring signatures. Thus I can't insure the mention of Boolberry will be sticky (for long) as the summary is edited by the community.

When I said my enthusiam waned, I didn't mean to imply that you are not a capable programmer, because obviously you are. I meant that you are picking features to implement which don't really achieve the necessary level of functionality to unequivocally pull out in front of the rest of the coins. But I don't fault you for this, because most everyone else can't figure it out either. It is just that you are up against apparently a significant team of devs with Monero. I am not saying you couldn't pull a radical innovation out of your hat anything is possible. Seriously consider renaming your coin. Perhaps rpietila still owns StealthCoin, which I gifted to him in early 2013 and can offer it to you to show his goodwill?

About your PoW hash, I am concerned there isn't enough entropy on the blockchain headers to prevent some trivial preimaging. I haven't had time to think deeply about it though, so no one should quote my concern as any thing more than an intuitive guess.

P.S. I never wrote that the ideal team size is 1 or 2 for all scenarios. Rather I said that for raw innovation, the ideal is 1 or 2 and for refinement via open source, the core team size should be larger (with hopefully a Benevolent Dictator to keep innovation from being stifled by consensus gridlock or chaos) and the community of eyeballs should be unbounded.

Shelby