Perhaps odd question but wonder if anyone has any thoughts. It is the middle of a heat wave here and I would like to keep my 390X going but it is getting uncomfortably warm in the room it is in. Is there any way for me to reduce the GPU utilization a bit? E.g. set it at 50% of full use for a few days? I get around 850 h/s at 100% utilization. I have changed to low intensity mode and fiddled around with -h, -a, and -li and through all permutations the GPU still has 100% utilization and never goes below around 760 h/s.

That did the trick! You are gentleman and a scholar!

I just downloaded the qt client from the site to take a look and am having trouble with network syncing. I constantly get stuck 7 days behind in the "downloading headers" stage of syncing with the network. Block 25698 is the point where things seem to get stuck. Has this happened to anyone else? Something I'm missing?

I dunno I have some training in this area as well and see things somewhat oppositely to you. If someone wanted to trust their real money to something I made in grad school I would raise my eyebrow pretty highly. I have no doubt that the work that Matt Green et al. are doing is academically intriguing but the fact that it is cutting edge and unvalidated by the academic cryptography community is not really a strength. Ring signatures  are a well-validated cryptographic approach with a strong literature base supporting them as an elegant and reasonably secure approach to privacy.

No I think it probably is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. Total wallets is around 1.7 million and I'm assuming that most people, like myself, have more than one. I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, but just trying to point out that Bitcoin, even though it is by far the most likely cryptocurrency to succeed long-term, is still tiny in terms of its userbase.


I guess this depends on how you define the market. If you limit it to current cryptocurrency users, which overwhelmingly is made up of people who hold at least some Bitcoin, then you are right that probably anything linked to Bitcoin would likely have an automatic built in userbase. What I am trying to say is: what about people who don't even know about Bitcoin now? Why would they have any incentive to join a system that favours a relatively tiny group of what in their view are "early adopters"? (This issue is even more sensitive given the current complaints regarding wealth concentration, the 1% etc. in fiat currency.)

So you are saying that Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency whose users likely number in the hundreds of thousands at most, is the be-all and end-all determinant of how any future cyptocurrencies should be distributed? What would be the incentive for any new users who did not happen to hold Bitcoin?

Just to clarify, will your updated miner be portable to Windows or not? It's a bit hard to follow the OP as the edits aren't dated. Good work either way and thanks for contributing to MRO.

Yeah some of the posts in here reek a little too much of drinking the kool-aid. The roll-out of the masternodes was a major flop regardless of how much you spin the quick recovery--darkcoin's key feature is not working currently. I hope this is treated as a learning opportunity for future releases. Changing the masternode incentives at the expense of everyone else will help the price in the short term, but that's an economic tool you can only use one or two times at most to buoy up the price--miners have to receive something for their contribution as well.

The only way that Darkcoin is able to avoid the same problem is by being closed source and hence entirely unvalidated in its claims. If Darksend goes open source as Evan has claimed, what is going to stop someone from launching a "fair launch" Darkcoin with identical technology but none of the problems involving the "insta-mine" etc.? I'd be really careful relying on this argument as the exact same criticism will apply to DRK three months from now when clones start coming out. The MRO developers are clearly the drivers of CryptoNote innovation right now in terms of volume of improvements to the code base, making CryptoNote technology more accessible, etc. That is how you establish a currency amongst a sea of duplicates.

Monero is a CryptoNote coin built from the Bytecoin source (see github) and so offers an identical feature set. Thus far the developers have in fact fixed several errors in the Bytecoin coin, notably the apparently crippled mining code. Monero's net hash is approximately 14 times that of Bytecoin's and so is likely the more popular of the two. Monero's development team is also much more active in terms of popularizing CryptoNote, e.g. today's successful implementation of stratum pool mining.

My primary concern with Bytecoin is that it is subject to the same economic problems that are currently destroying Ripple: when you have the vast majority of the wealth held by a small number of holders the economy becomes unstable. If even one large holder decides to liquidate their holdings, they flood the market and destroy the value of the entire currency. Monero's clean start and extreme liquidity (its daily exchange volume approaches 10% of the coin supply) mean that it is more likely to be well-distributed and hence immune from this issue.

Thanks for clarifying things. Can you share anything about the future plans and directions for CryptoNote? As I said above, I think you guys (and girls?) really are doing very interesting work.

Sounds exciting! I look forward to seeing what you've got in store.

Cryptonote's underlying cryptography does appear to be remarkably elegant in its implementation which is why I find all the related projects so exciting. Cryptography is not an area of mathematics in which I am particularly well-read, but the project was sufficiently intriguing to get me delving into some of the literature underlying their work and left me impressed. They do seem to have made one of the first real steps forward I would say in terms of bringing something genuinely new to an altcoin.

What do you make of the apparent schism between Cryptonote, which now appear to be the prime movers behind the technology, and the Bytecoin team? They make numerous allusions on their forum posts that there was disagreement in how Bytecoin was to be developed which led to the two teams splitting.

Btw there have been some good technical chats over on the Monero thread, so come take a look some time! (Ignore the rinse-repeat MRO/DRK trolling though.)

Ok cool, thanks for the quick reply.

Just to be clear, resyncing the blockchain now (i.e. after deleting the old one) will be sufficient? Have the fake blocks been removed and the old balances restored?

Is there a reason you're so personally invested in this? Monero is less than a month old and has been maintained by a loosely-affiliated group of developers, not some kind of internet cabal. That's the source of the disorganization that seems to bother you (e.g. the change in name, domain, etc.).

Right now there is obviously either an optimized miner or some kind of botnet on the network. If someone has inspected the Cryptonote source and used their abilities (programming, financial, or otherwise) to gain an advantage it sucks for the rest of us but is not an insta-mine. That's just the way the world works. Someone else is better at something and they get ahead. I think it's pretty naive to think that people won't try to gain an inside advantage if they can. Although it's nice for people to share crypto mining resources (e.g. cgminer, sgminer, guiminer, Noodledoodle's code fork) there is no moral obligation that they do so. Ultimately if something is unfair we're free to choose not to participate. Whoever has dramatically increased the hash runs the risk of alienating their potential future buyers if they shut everyone else out of the game, but we'll have to wait and see if that happens.

Yeah I got only minor gains on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge cpus in windows. Seems the upgrade most benefits AMD unfortunately 

So are we able to continue mining while a fix is finalized? I'm in no rush to go through the process of updating to a beta wallet if a final one is going to be released soon anyway. I still seem to be synced to the network in the daemon, it's just that obviously the wallet cannot currently receive any new transactions.

Because you are merging Monero, a coin somewhat distinct for a clean launch, with a coin shrouded in mystery with a lot of suspicious manipulation around it (80% mined when released to the public, vague allusions to use in the darknet despite no real evidence as such, an incredibly polished pool miner (Minergate) within days of launch that just happens to charge 10%, team separated from the Cryptonote team for unclear reasons, etc.). That hurts the marketability of Monero. I highly doubt that Bytecoin will ever take off as it will never be able to shake the 80% mined problem. Look at how much trouble Darkcoin has and that was an order of magnitude smaller ninja-mine. 

Monero also doesn't need the Bytecoin network to secure its hash as it is already on track to surpass the Bytecoin net hashrate. It would essentially be linking Monero to a coin that will likely become increasingly smaller relative to Monero for no real advantage.