Ricardo Spagni over de werking van Monero

Ricardo Spagni is de hoofdonderhouder van de Monero-software waarbij hij verschillende aspecten up-to-date houdt. Hij woont in Plettenberg Bay in Zuid-Afrika, is beter bekend als « Fluffy Pony » op Twitter en publiceert verschillende « fluffy ponies » per dag op Reddit. In de video op Youtube legt hij uit wat Monero is, hoe het werkt en waarom Monero de minst professionele valuta is, wat hij een goede zaak noemt. Hij beschrijft de groei van Monero en de toename van het aantal mensen dat er aan werkt. Ook praat hij over de structuur van het project. En waarom ze proberen Monero gedecentraliseerd te maken qua ontwerp.

Meer over de werking van Monero als digitale valuta met verhoogde privacy

Monero legt zich toe op privacy-verhogende aspecten met behulp van:

1. Stealth-adressen met dubbele sleutel
–> Om te verbergen waar transacties naartoe gaan

2. Ring handtekeningen
–> Om te verbergen waar transacties vandaan komen

3. Ring CT of bel vertrouwelijke transacties
–> Om te verbergen welk bedrag er wordt afgehandeld

4. Kovri-project
–> Om te verbergen van welk IP-adres de transacties is uitgegaan

De uitleg op de video overdrijft niet qua diepte en details, maar je kunt altijd de Monero Stack Exchange bezoeken om vragen te stellen.

Een Bitcoin-transactie bestaat uit in- en uitvoer. Op een later tijdstip kun je de uitkomsten van een transactie die je ontvangen hebt terug uitgeven. Dan draai je ze terug om als transactie-ingangen. Ruwweg ziet het er nu zo uit in de in of -uitgangen van Bitcoin-transacties.

Met Monero is het niet anders. Het belangrijkste verschil is dat in plaats van naar één Bitcoin-adres het naar een Monero-adres gaat dat daarboven ligt. Ten tweede betalen we aan iets wat we een « stealth-adres met dubbele sleutel » noemen. Dus dit kleine ding hier in Bitcoin zou het Bitcoin-adres zijn dat wordt betaald.

1. Stealth-adressen met dubbele sleutel

Om te verbergen waar transacties naartoe gaan

Monero gebruikt deze hex-reeks in plaats van één adres zoals bij Bitcoin het geval is. Niemand kan het ware adres achterhalen. In dit voorbeeld, dat natuurlijk hypothetisch is, kunnen we deze in het grijs naar een persoon laten gaan terwijl deze in het rood bij ons terugkomen als de transactie wordt uitgevoerd. Deze in het grijs gaan naar eenzelfde persoon en die in het rood gaan ook naar eenzelfde ander persoon. Maar als je ernaar kijkt, kun je niet zeggen dewelke. Of als je ze in een blokverkenner bekijkt zien ze er gewoon uit. M.a.w. je kunt niet naar een Monero-transactie kijken. Je dus ook niet zeggen of op een Monero-adres werd betaald. Het betekent ook dat als je vermoedt dat iemand door een Monero-transactie is betaald, je dat niet kunt bewijzen. Alleen de ontvanger kan dit decoderen en er vervolgens achter komen dat dit voor hem was bedoeld.

2. Ring-handtekeningen

(Verbergen waar transacties vandaan komen)

Hoe verbergen we waar transacties vandaan komen? Voor dit doel gebruiken we een ring-handtekening. De handtekening van de ring is in feite, laten we beginnen met het uitkiezen van een hoop oude transacties en nieuwe transacties van de blockchain en we zullen doen alsof we een van hen uitgeven. Een passieve waarnemer kan niet zeggen welke van die transackties de echte is. In Bitcoin werkt het niet op die manier. In Bitcoin linkt een input terug naar een enkele uitvoer van een oud blok of een oude transactie. In Monero lijkt het om het even dewelke van een reeks oude transacties te gebruiken. Dus is het net alsof je alle mensen moet zoeken die oude transacties hebben gedaan en je tegen hen zegt:
– « Hey, ik zou graag willen dat je deelneemt aan het maken van een ring-handtekening ». Dit zou dan een interactieve ring-handtekening zijn vergelijkbaar met coin-join, maar met Monero zou gebeuren. Niet de interactiviteit is vereist maar alleen die openbare sleutel die al bestaat op de blockchain. Je hoeft dit niet af te handelen met iemand. Je kunt dit volledig offline doen en uiteraard kunnen de passieve waarnemers niet vertellen welke van deze inputs de echte is die nu wordt uitgegeven. Dit zorgt voor een probleem omdat het betekent dat Monero geen UT-exocet heeft. Monero heeft geen reeks niet-uitgegeven transactie-outputs. Bij Monero kan elke transactie-uitvoer al dan niet uitgegeven zijn. Sommige transactie-outputs lijken al 20 maal te zijn uitgegeven. Er is geen enkele manier om u te vertellen of het werkelijk is uitgegeven of niet.

Het probleem is natuurlijk dat dit kan leiden tot een dubbele besteding. Daarvoor hebben we een sleutelbeeld. Het belangrijkste beeld ervan heeft betrekking op een publieke sleutel of een representatie van de werkelijke transactie die wordt besteed. Het lastigste is dat je dit niet kunt decoderen. Je kunt niet proberen te achterhalen welke transactie daadwerkelijk wordt besteed, althans niet met een grote hoeveelheid rekenkracht die we cryptografisch verwaarloosbaar achten voor zover het risico verdwijnt. Zo voorkomen we dubbele spins in Monero of cryptografische dubbele spins. Nu moeten we de waarde verbergen, maar eerst moeten we begrijpen dat dit slechts gewone publieke sleutels zijn. Om de waarde te verbergen hebben we een verbintenis naar een publieke sleutel. Een verplichting in cryptografie is alsof ik je een representatie van een getal geef, maar niet ga onthullen wat dat getal is, maar we weten dat dat een weergave is.

3. Ring CT of ring van vertrouwelijke transacties

(Om het bedrag te verbergen dat wordt afgehandeld)

Vervolgens gebruiken we wat we ring CT noemen. Het is gebaseerd op de vertrouwelijke Tron van Greg Maxwell. In principe ondertekenen we dit verschil tussen de ingangen en de uitgangen. De som van alle uitgangen minus de som van alle ingangen is 0. U kunt dit doen vanwege rekenkundige bewerkingen. Vervolgens gebruiken we iets dat bereikproeven wordt genoemd om ervoor te zorgen dat al deze waarden waaraan u zich hebt gecommitteerd, positief zijn. Als een van hen negatief was, zou je Monero uit het niets kunnen creëren. Dit zou geweldig zijn voor jou, maar slecht voor de rest van de wereld. Dit is een soort ruwe schets van hoe mijn smalste transactie of hoe het dichtstbijzijnde transactieformaat eruit ziet. Het zwakste deel van Monero’s op ketenprivacy is echt dit beetje, ja, hoe selecteer je transactie-outputs op een manier die de echte afzender niet onthult? Als een voorbeeld van wat er kan gebeuren, ontvangen mensen doorgaans geld in een digitale valuta-betekenis en geven ze het vrij snel uit. We ontdekten dat mensen de neiging hebben om bijvoorbeeld binnen een dag een Bitcoin uit te geven. Er is veel oude Bitcoin die rondslingert, maar vooral mensen ontvangen het en het beweegt binnen een dag. Dit betekent dat als je alle transacties kiest om mee te mixen of om een ​​ringhandtekening mee te maken en je een heleboel van alle transacties kiest, maar je weet dat je transactie duidelijk vanaf vandaag is, het onthult een beetje welke het echte is een. Dit is dus een zwakte en dit is echt het moeilijkste omdat het de grootste kans heeft om metadata te lekken.

In November 2014 we published a research paper and then in January 2015 we suggested some changes in fact the author of the research paper sitting over there and we suggested some changes that could improve this and could reduce the snowball effect where an attacker owns a large number of outputs and is able to then own a large number of outputs further down the chain and then is able to use things like a temporal guess a bit of temporal guesswork to figure out where the you know which is the real output but this is genuinely hard we’ve switched to try and get a distribution to try and wait more recent outputs we’ve then more recently than a recent output cut in where we wait we’re naughty just wait recent outputs but we select a large number of recent outputs to mix with or to create a knowing signature from but really ring CT is the big thing that made this a game-changer because prior to ring CT you could only create our own signature with outputs that had the same value as yours which was problematic but
more importantly it allowed much larger base ring sizes however this is really an ongoing research area and it’s important to be pragmatic about that because a lot of people especially newcomers to the cryptocurrency will they use absolutes all the time they go Monero is absolutely anonymous or private and no it isn’t verges absolutely autonomous and who we’re kidding but you know the reality is that the stuff is hard and and it’s a it’s a constant game of cat and mouse you figure out an improvement a researcher goes and publishes a paper and says « haha that’s not really an improvement » and so you’re constantly playing this game where you need to improve things in order to defeat not only defeat researchers but defeat attackers that might be trying to figure out the the flow of transactions in the chain so more work is required and is ongoing now when it comes to hiding IP addresses this is also an area of ongoing work.

The way Bitcoin and Monero work is full nodes exist in a network and they’re all connected or they appeared to – not necessarily to all of the the peers in the network but to some peers who are then peer to other peers and so you end up with this network that is all interconnected now an attacker might set up a bunch of logging nodes and those nodes just sit and log the time that they saw a transaction and the IP address that they first saw the transaction from because when a transaction is broadcast on Bitcoin or Manero or any of the these networks it’s

broadcast using a technique called flood fall so what happens is you broadcast it to the nodes that you’re connected to and they broadcast it on until every node has seen it the downside of course is that if an attack is running a lot of logging nodes they might be connected to you
and they go ah okay so this transaction was first seen from that IP address that’s obviously problematic now given that this is a very complicated attack to pull off it’s not simple but still the fact that the attack exists is is problematic.

4. Kovri project

(To hide the originating IP address of transactions)

We’re busy working on something called Kovri which basically build an entire second network on top of the main network.

The lines in green are Kovri connections between nodes. Nodes have connections on normal internet and on kovri. Kovri is just an ITP Rooter. Thus effectively these green lines are ITP connections between nodes. The advantage is that transactions then get broadcast over Kovri and over ITP and blocks still get broadcasted over normal internet so you don’t have the risk of isolation attacks and more like this.

But you’re still able to defeat attackers because if the logging node then sees where transactions coming from it will only have an IP address which is rather useless it’s point you know you can’t reverse that into any sort of real-world IP address. Kovri is a quite a behemoth a (huge or monstrous creature) we’ve been working on for quite some time and will continue to work on. We plan on not only adding ITP support through Kovri but also adding support for Tor and other mix nets with the hope of being able to not limit the number of mix knit options that we have all the users have for broadcasting transactions.

In Monero privacy is mandatory. Imagine you have a hundred thousand users of your blockchain project (or digital currency) and you have this magical cloud of privacy. And this magical cloud of privacy is only used by a thousand users so what happens? Those 1,000 users need to move in and out of the magical cloud of privacy. Maybe they pay some people in « it doesn’t matter » and maybe they pay some people normally. Effectively what’s happened is your total anonymity set your total privacy set is restricted to those 1000 users at best. If you’re observing it as an attack over a small period of time, that privacy set might be reduced to something like 10 users. This makes it ridiculously easy for attackers to go and target a limited set of users. It also reduces things like the ability to say « no that wasn’t me because I’m lost in a sea of users ». Mandatory privacy is very important. As Bitcoin works to do things like add privacy the Bitcoin developers are looking at ways to make it the default. To add privacy in such a way that it is the default. Because without this it’s useless, it’s pointless, it’s a bolt-on system used by a tiny percentage of the population of the user base.

When it comes to evaluating privacy technology how do you do that? This doesn’t just apply to Monero but to evaluating privacy projects in general. so the thing that that I believe is that ideology is important because the way the developers and the community and the user base approach things is really representative of how things are handled within the project and within the the development community so manera contributors are very aware that they’re responsible at the very least for people’s money this is you know this is obvious but more importantly no matter how much I say to people don’t buy Manero unless you have a use for it people ignore me clearly and we know that we might also be responsible for somebody’s life savings and so we’re very critically aware of the fact that if we make a mistake we might end up costing somebody a lot of money because they you know didn’t know how to do something and they ended up losing access to their funds and so this is this weighs heavily on us but more importantly we know that we might be the difference between somebody going to prison or not going to prison they might be entirely innocent but big excuse me because of something we’ve done and because of an error of judgment and because of a poor implementation of technology we might end up making a trivial for them to be traced on the manera blockchain but most importantly we know that because Manero is a privacy enhancing technology and because it it can and will be used and is being used in in jurisdictions where people are not as free as the rest of the world we know that we at some point are going to be responsible for someone’s life and that the technology that we’re building might mean the difference between life or death and I truly believe that any project any privacy enhancing project or any project that claims to be a privacy enhancing project but does not treat things with that amount of care is honestly not only irresponsible but they’re indistinguishable from a scam and I think it’s very important that we start evaluating projects with seriousness because there’s a lot of snake oil out there and there’s a lot of nonsense and users are finding it difficult to distinguish between what is a good project and what is a bad project and they’re starting to trust their life to things that are really not particularly well engineered or well-designed so obviously with my narrow decentralization is a big aspect
<!–

Monero’s growth

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but so is maneras growth now what we’ve
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lost what we’ve seen over the past few
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years is that monaro has really had a
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massive uptick in growth not talking
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about the price what I really care about
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are things like the manera contributor
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base so how’s that grown so what we’ve
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seen is over the past few years the
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number of commits per month has grown
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and also more recently instead of seeing
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a massive spike in the number of commits
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per month we’ve seen an increase in
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quality so we’ve seen we’ve gotten to a
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point now where we have seasoned
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contributors who are helping newcomers
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contribute to the Monaro codebase and
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improve the quality of their code which
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is fantastic we’ve also seen a massive
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increase over the years and the number
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of new contributors per month so this is
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this is great to see as well that on an
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ongoing basis we have new contributors
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coming pitching up and saying hey I want
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to
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work on Manero you know I have
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rudimentary C++ skills but I want to
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help we’ve also seen a massive increase
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in transactions and while some of this
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you’re going to see when when there’s an
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increase in price this has not been a
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perfect proxy for maneras change in
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price which is really comforting and and
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helpful to see because it means people
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actually using mineiro transactionally
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and not just for speculation certainly
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we’ve seen an increase in community
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stats or things like the subreddit
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subscribers and subreddit traffic where
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in 2015 we were we were doing like
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sixteen thousand page views a month and
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in 2016 we’re hitting sort of half a
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million when in December we did over
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three million pageviews on the subreddit
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which is massive and the number of
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subreddit subscribers as well we’re
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almost on one hundred thousand subreddit
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subscribers so this shows a very vibrant
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active community
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these aren’t BOTS that have been
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purchased to try to inflate our stats
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these are actual people who are
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participating and commenting and talking
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and engaging in helping newcomers we’ve
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also seen a big increase in the number
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of high availability nodes so these are
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nodes with open inbound ports and at the
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beginning of 2017 I took a screenshot
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and we had 700 nodes or high variability
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nodes and that was pretty cool and now
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January 2018 we’ve got nearly 3000 in
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jurisdictions all over the world which
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is also extremely encouraging especially
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seeing that I mean obviously in South
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Africa maneras completely massive
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because I’m there right but but to see
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to see the increase in like other parts
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of Africa and and other parts of the
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world especially in places like China
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the number of nodes has continued to
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increase and that that’s something that
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we’re really happy for as well because
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it means that the Monaro project has
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been built out to a point where it’s
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stable enough to use all over so who
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really is behind mineiro a lot of
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blockchain projects and a lot of digital
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currency projects nowadays have got
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companies behind them there’s also this
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cult of personality where
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there’s a person who is easily
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identifiable maybe their troll a lot on
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Twitter and their view is the creator so
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so really Mineiro is a lot bigger than
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that monaro is a lot bigger than than me
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or than any individual contributor to
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give you some indication let’s talk a
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little bit about how manure got started
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because it wasn’t launched by me
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contrary to popular belief was launched
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by a guy called thankful for today on
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Bitcoin talk back in 2014
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he ended up being a gigantic douche
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nozzle and myself and six others decided
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to fork the project away from him
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because he didn’t want to listen to the
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community and so we’re the stewards of
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the Minerva project which basically
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means we control like the github repo
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and the domain that’s really all we
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control but the the nice thing is that
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because it we the project away
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from him any control that anyone ever
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has from that point on is relative
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because you know that the community can
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fork it away from you so nobody’s in
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control of anything really and the core
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teams role I can say the stewardship
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only we don’t we don’t control
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everything we don’t a very few of us
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actually even write code ourselves
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because there’s so many different
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aspects of Manero that that we tend to
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and that other people tend to that it’s
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not entirely necessary so who are the
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people that that develop code so the
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Monaro contributors or developers
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there’s a massive group of manera
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contributors over the lifetime of
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Veniero’s or of a maneras history
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they’ve been over 330 people who have
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worked in Manero just over 2017 we had
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nearly a hundred and fifty people who
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contributed code to Manero so that is a
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massive number of developers all working
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i wouldn’t say how more harmoniously but
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working together for the betterment of
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Manero we also have work groups work
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groups are self assembling groups of
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people in the community that want to do
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certain things so for example we have a
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vulnerability response group where if
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somebody finds a bug in Manero or a
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vulnerability they can report it via
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hacker 1 and
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we have a small work group that deals
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with those reports as they come in on
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hacker 1 and most they’re mostly rubbish
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but there are a couple who are that are
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genuine legit and we deal with trying to
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figure out you know it is a song it
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needs to be fixed how do we if this is a
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real vulnerability how do we go about
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disclosing it to the community and to to
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the user base and all of that there’s
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things like the malware response
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workgroup that helps people who have
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been infected with mineral mining
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malware to clean their computer to make
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sure that they’re up their stuffs up to
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date that they’ve installed an
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anti-virus scanner that they understand
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the need to patch their system regularly
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it goes and it helps pool operators
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identify mining malware and unblock them
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because pools mining pools tend to
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suffer from a performance perspective if
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they’re getting thousands of client
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connections from malware miners
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similarly we got the manure Research Lab
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also very self-assembling the mineral
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research lab consists of a number of
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academics and research researchers and
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anyone can become part of that and I’ll
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talk a little bit about that later
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and then the manure community which
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handles things like everything from
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social media to helping newcomers to
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Stack Exchange moderators to related
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projects so this is a really big
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grassroots movement that consists of
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many many thousands of people all
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contributing and working working on
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Manero and the reality is working on
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ferment on Meniere’s permissionless so I
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sometimes get emails well the core team
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gets emails from people saying things
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like I’d like to do this from on Manero
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and we’re like ok why are you telling us
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the things like the Monaro logo are
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licensed as CC BY 4.0 so it’s an open
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permissive license the community Commons
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license you can do whatever you want
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with the mineral logo you can you know
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turn it into artwork or whatever so so
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this is really great because it means
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that nobody needs permission to start
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doing something with Manero or working
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on material or building a project on
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Manero
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but it also means that you sometimes
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have abrasive personalities and and that
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things sometimes move slowly because
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decisions can’t be made very quickly
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because you’ve got so many people that
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need to reach some level of general
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consensus and yet it’s the best way to
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do it and I’ll explain why in a moment
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the reality is that open source needs
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many participants and if anyone wants to
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get involved with Manero there are a
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number of ways to do so so if you are a
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developer the bulk of Manero is written
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in C++ there is some C the GUI is mostly
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QT quick so anyone who’s familiar with
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the Qt framework you’re more than
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welcome to come along and help and
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there’s a lot of a lot of low level
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stuff that we hardly touch and there’s a
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lot of stuff that needs refactoring but
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everything sort of progresses slowly
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over time and we merge anything and when
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I say we merge anything it doesn’t mean
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anything well it almost does but for the
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most part if you’re a newcomer if you’re
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a new you a new developer if you’re a
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young developer and you’re inexperienced
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pitch-up goes through the github issues
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there are a number of github issues that
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are marked as easy make a note that
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you’d like to work on it and then start
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working on it and people will help you
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if you if you get stuck there’s the
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Monaro dev IRC channel and say well I’m
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trying to do this and I don’t know what
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I did there and I broke this thing and
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people will try and help you and if you
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you end up submitting a pull request
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that works on Windows but doesn’t work
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on Linux and BSD no problem we’ll merge
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it somebody else will fix it and then
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you’ll see how they fixed it and you’ll
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learn from that the same goes for the
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Monaro research lab it’s an open group
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there’s no restriction anyone can join
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if you’ve ever wanted your name on a
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research paper go find a research paper
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that has a spelling error and correct it
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and then put your name at the top it’s
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great you can call yourself a researcher
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too but but seriously I mean like you
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know if you’re figuring something out
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figure out a break with Manero you
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figure out an improvement write it up as
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a research paper it’s the best way to
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get peer review on it and and ultimately
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those papers do get published in in
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journals and they do get presented that
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after
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we conferences so it’s a great
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collaborative way to do research on a
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privacy enhancing project similarly
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there’s lots of non technical projects
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maneras user experience right now is not
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so great there are a lot of things that
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can and are being improved so you know
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the websites are probably a great
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example of this the website design
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itself is fine but there’s a lot of
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content that can be improved there’s
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better ways of saying certain things and
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there’s more concise ways of explaining
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things especially to newcomers
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there’s diagrams that can be drawn
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there’s animations that can be made
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there’s all sorts of things that anyone
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who’s even non-technical can do to
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enhance them in Eric’s user experience
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on the GUI there’s also translations so
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you know and those need to be updated as
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functionality is added and and then
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there’s external projects in the
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ecosystems in the ecosystem rather so
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bindings in other languages manera has
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an RPC interface but we don’t really
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have nice libraries for other languages
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so even if you’re not familiar with C++
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if you’re familiar with rust or PHP or
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whatever JavaScript heaven forbid
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then you can come along and write a
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library and and that helps the ecosystem
27:55
because it means that somebody else can
27:57
come along and use that instead of them
27:59
having to rework it themselves the same
28:02
goes for merchant systems how are we
28:05
helping people to earn Manero it’s easy
28:07
to spend mineiro but how are we helping
28:08
people earn it what are the systems
28:11
being built out to enhance that there’s
28:14
also over-the-counter exchanges like
28:16
local Minero they need liquidity they
28:17
need people buying and selling in so
28:20
that people who really desperately need
28:22
to onboard get on board with manera or
28:24
you know transact in and out are able to
28:27
get on without needing to use a
28:28
centralized exchange and then of course
28:31
there’s mobile wallet projects like X
28:32
wallets mana Rizzo and my mineiro all of
28:35
which are open source and and are
28:38
written in various languages and can be
28:39
contributed to now the advantage of
28:42
having this massive group of people like
28:45
thrashing away at things sometimes very
28:48
slowly sometimes very quickly is that
28:51
it’s decentralized by design so it’s
28:54
very easy from a technical perspective
28:56
to have a decentralized network you can
28:58
have thousands of people you know 30,000
29:01
people all running loads or you can have
29:02
30,000 nodes being run by one person
29:04
whatever that part is easy but the the
29:09
thing is how do you decentralize people
29:11
how do you make it difficult for an
29:13
attacker to attack the project by
29:16
attacking the people how do you make it
29:18
difficult to create a rift in the
29:19
community or when the rift in the
29:21
community happens because it will always
29:23
happen how do you make it how do you how
29:26
do you structure things in a way that it
29:29
doesn’t destroy the project and the way
29:31
you do that is by focusing on the fact
29:35
that people are important but nobody is
29:37
irreplaceable everyone is it can be
29:41
replaced by someone else
29:42
so things that that we try and encourage
29:45
within the Monaro community and within
29:47
the Monaro developers and contributors
29:49
is don’t keep knowledge to yourself
29:51
educate those around you make sure that
29:55
newcomers are welcome make them feel
29:56
useful if they’ve submitted a pull
29:58
request but it’s not great or they’ve
30:00
made a suggestion but it’s a stupid
30:02
suggestion that should be the knee-jerk
30:04
reaction to say oh this is the Sicilian
30:07
that’s terrible and this is horrible how
30:09
do we help people how do we encourage
30:10
them to do better the next time how do
30:13
we help them to to take what they’ve
30:15
done and make it into something good
30:17
make sure other people know how to do
30:19
your job you know if you if you are
30:21
really good with markdown and so you’re
30:24
hacking away at the website are you
30:26
sharing that with other people do they
30:28
know how to edit that and do they know
30:29
the tricks that you’ve that you’ve
30:31
applied during your editing hand of
30:34
responsibilities to others if you’re
30:36
working on an open-source project this
30:37
is generally true for any open source
30:40
project you can’t hand over everything
30:43
but can you distribute the
30:44
responsibility as much as possible
30:46
so that no single person is a best
30:48
factor and sometimes you need to do less
30:51
to give others a chance so when we
30:54
started the Monaro Stack Exchange we
30:56
were sort of hell-bent on making sure
30:57
that we passed the beta with flying
31:00
colors
31:01
by making sure that we’re asking many
31:03
questions a day and answering many
31:04
questions a day and what ended up
31:06
happening is
31:07
as people wanted to answer questions on
31:09
on Stack Exchange but by the time they
31:12
saw the question an Arabian answered and
31:13
so you know eventually the sort of two
31:18
three people who were answering all the
31:19
questions learnt to answer less or at
31:21
least to give a little bit of time to
31:23
pass so that more people could get
31:25
involved with answering questions and
31:27
don’t ever think you’re irreplaceable
31:29
because the minute you do somebody will
31:31
replace you see thankful for today who
31:33
started my narrow and always highlight
31:36
the efforts of others because something
31:38
that I’ve seen that tends to happen
31:40
especially in this space is people tend
31:43
to take credit for things that they
31:44
haven’t done sometimes not knowingly or
31:47
on purpose or maliciously but they just
31:50
fail to give credit to others around
31:52
them that made it possible and and
31:56
that’s really how you do that now why
31:58
bother why is this important it’s
32:01
important because nobody should ever be
32:02
able to control the network but also
32:05
nobody should ever be able to introduce
32:06
a backdoor and you don’t need to control
32:08
the network to introduce a backdoor you
32:10
just need to be able to influence the
32:11
contributors but more importantly
32:15
perhaps no single person should mean the
32:16
life or death of a project because
32:19
that’s deeply problematic considering
32:21
that the work that we do is not for
32:23
ourselves but it’s for the users of the
32:25
project and if anything is centralized
32:28
or it comes down to one person’s vision
32:30
or anything like that original vision or
32:33
otherwise then you might end up with a
32:35
scenario where you are the best factor
32:37
so that’s what all I have to say about
32:39
Munira the the least professional
32:42
digital currency I’m open to questions
32:48
[Applause]
32:57
[Applause]
33:02
Nicholas how do you measure transactions
33:05
from one exchange to the other is that a
33:07
transaction or people actually using it
33:10
how is that done so the the difficulty
33:14
with having a probe private or privacy
33:18
enhancing digital currencies you can’t
33:20
tell what people are doing so you can
33:22
see that that there’s a transaction for
33:24
example but you can’t tell if it’s the
33:25
person just sending it to himself if
33:27
maybe he’s moving from one wallet to
33:29
another if he’s buying something if he’s
33:31
paying for the bar tab last night that’s
33:34
impossible to tell the fact that you
33:36
can’t even tell the amount that’s being
33:37
transacted means that we can’t tell if
33:39
money is moving in and out of exchanges
33:41
we can’t even guess that so a Trudy is
33:44
privacy enhancing all we can see is the
33:46
number of transactions not any other
33:48
information about them can you just say
33:52
something about scaling sure so scaling
33:55
with with block chains in general is
33:58
very difficult and scaling with Manero
34:01
is doubly difficult because manera
34:02
transactions are harder to validate and
34:04
verify the in Bitcoin transactions
34:06
they’re also bigger than Bitcoin
34:08
transactions we have a dynamic block
34:11
size limit which is nice because it
34:14
means that the the block size expands as
34:16
there is demand all the blocks as
34:18
limiter expands as there is demand but
34:21
that can also be abused so we sort of
34:25
you know that’s sort of reasonably
34:27
tightly governed from an algorithmic
34:29
point of view I I don’t I’m of the
34:32
opinion that that’s scaling things on
34:34
chain as a long-term goal is not really
34:38
feasible I think that there’s a lot that
34:40
we can do to improve on chain
34:42
scalability we’re busy we’ve implemented
34:45
single output bulletproof which is a
34:48
much more compact range proof format
34:51
that some researchers created recently
34:54
and bulletproof reduces the maasai
34:58
similar transactions by about 80 percent
35:00
single app a bulletproof sand multi
35:02
output approval will provide a
35:06
a different scale for multiple outputs
35:08
the the unfortunate thing is even there
35:13
Munira transactions are still expensive
35:15
to validate and there are still
35:16
relatively large compared to Bitcoin so
35:19
I don’t consider it feasible to try and
35:22
pack everything on chain and and there
35:25
are a lot of developers in the manera
35:26
community hue also cognizant of this so
35:29
from a scaling perspective whilst we
35:31
will always try and make sure that
35:32
people can access main chain for
35:35
whatever we you know how for whatever
35:37
reason they want to if they want to
35:38
build a business that works on main
35:39
chain we want to try and make sure that
35:41
they can the the reality is that well I
35:45
I don’t think we’re ever gonna get to a
35:46
point where Manero is used for buying
35:48
coffee in the morning and that goes on
35:49
the blockchain it’s that’s not really
35:52
feasible definitely not considering
35:54
manero’s ever-growing accumulator and
35:57
the lack of aut Exocet and that sort of
36:00
thing so instead we have to have to look
36:03
at other options so we’re busy looking
36:06
at things like building out a lightning
36:07
Network gruta in rust that supports
36:10
Manero and we’re looking at doing things
36:12
like can we can we build out a side
36:16
chain a mumble mumble based sidechain so
36:18
these are all things that various people
36:20
in the community are looking at myself
36:22
included because I think that what we
36:24
really want to do is give people scaling
36:26
options you know if we build out a
36:27
lightning Network routes and nobody uses
36:29
that I don’t care but if a bunch of
36:31
people use it great they will always
36:34
have the option of that or main chain or
36:37
whatever
36:45
so I talk then he plans to organize some
36:48
kind of like Mineiro
36:50
developer conference or community
36:51
conference so yeah sure do you wanna
36:55
organize one you should I you know the
36:59
the thing is it’s with manera being so
37:02
self-organizing I think that there’s
37:04
definitely it’s the right time maybe
37:06
this year to do a contra Mineiro
37:07
conference and there are enough entities
37:10
and organizations that that are involved
37:12
with Manero that there could be some
37:14
really interesting speakers even if it’s
37:16
was talking about the challenges of
37:18
building a you know legend come talk
37:20
about the challenges of building a
37:21
Manero how do I want it there’s so many
37:24
different different aspects to that but
37:26
it’s definitely the right time and we
37:28
have this amazing community who crowd
37:30
fund things so we have something called
37:32
the Forum fund raise fund raising system
37:34
and you can go and say okay cool I want
37:36
to host a manera conference and in order
37:38
to do so there are a couple of basic
37:40
costs I need a cover before I can sell
37:42
tickets and so I’d like to you know
37:45
raise whatever 100 Manero or whatever it
37:47
is to do so and these are the milestones
37:49
I’m going to hit and then the community
37:51
donate to that and it gets held in
37:55
escrow by members of the core team and
37:57
then as you hit those milestones you go
38:00
and post about it in the minute the
38:01
community says you’re sure you’ve
38:03
delivered on this milestone and we pay
38:05
that out so there’s there’s the ability
38:07
not only to do that but to get paid to
38:09
do that and yeah I think it’s the right
38:12
time for it I’ve got two questions first
38:15
one is hopefully an easy one there are
38:17
rumors that Manero is in fact not really
38:20
an altcoin resource but a scam but I’d
38:23
like some words on timing
38:25
sure so so obviously it is you know I’ve
38:29
got my gigantic pre mine which I plan on
38:30
dumping in 2023 I haven’t chosen the
38:33
exact dates in 2023 it depends on when
38:36
my off gets delivered because I’m
38:38
planning and fluff are throwing an exit
38:40
scam yacht party and of course you’ll be
38:42
invited
38:43
you know I thank you and second question
38:46
is with regards to hardware wallets can
38:48
you just touch on maybe some of the
38:50
difficulties that our Hardware while a
38:52
manufacturer would have been putting
38:54
monaro on the wallet in tins you know in
38:57
case in case there’s a hotbed of
38:59
I wanted manufacturer in the room so so
39:02
yeah the the challengers really is that
39:04
Manero is not based on bitcoins code and
39:06
it doesn’t even use bitcoins elliptic
39:08
curve so with any of the the scam coins
39:11
that are just copied from Bitcoin then
39:14
you know you’ve got back sec P 256 K one
39:16
stuff lying around that you can use with
39:18
manera a lot of that has to be
39:20
re-implemented and there’s not a lot of
39:23
stuff of there’s a lot of low level
39:25
stuff that you can just rip out and use
39:27
but but yeah it’s it’s really I think
39:30
that’s the the greatest challenge the
39:32
nice thing is that ledger for example
39:34
and the the guys that are building their
39:36
own manera wallets have done a lot of a
39:38
lot of work that can possibly be
39:40
borrowed from and re-implemented so I
39:42
think it will become easier but that’s
39:45
really the greatest challenges is the
39:46
fact that there’s nothing there’s
39:48
nothing else out there that uses
39:49
Meniere’s protocol extra narrow and at
39:53
this point in time it’s it’s not even a
39:56
terribly well-documented protocol so
39:58
there’s there’s definitely a lot of
39:59
digging and and asking and figuring out
40:01
I the community is growing bigger and
40:05
bigger and I think with that there will
40:08
be more conflicts of interest within the
40:10
community so my question is how are we
40:12
going to figure that out how do you make
40:15
sure that the community finds consensus
40:17
so it’s a it’s a challenge and I don’t
40:20
think it’s a solvable challenge you know
40:23
they they’re they’re people who in the
40:27
manera community that think that any
40:29
pursuit of lightning network at all is
40:31
bad as an example and and I feel
40:35
differently in there other people who
40:36
feel differently so really the only
40:39
thing you can you can do is try and
40:41
identify the rifts before they happen
40:43
and and then sort of try and figure out
40:46
ways to bring people together you know
40:49
when the mayor community was much
40:51
smaller it was very easy to say oh you
40:53
know we all think alike and we’re all
40:55
aiming for the same thing but now that
40:57
Minerva is bigger that that’s going to
40:58
become substantially difficult I’m I
41:00
think this the the challenges that
41:03
Bitcoin is faced as it’s scaled those
41:06
challenges
41:08
have been many of them have been faced
41:10
by aetherium and they will be faced by
41:12
my narrow if my narrow gets bigger so
41:14
you know you can’t avoid those
41:15
challenges you just have to kind of
41:17
embrace them lovingly realize that
41:20
there’s gonna be a lot of angry words
41:22
around on on reddit and lots of angry
41:24
medium posts written and ultimately you
41:28
know people have got to do what they’ve
41:30
got to do if they’re if they’re a group
41:31
of people that feel that forking the
41:32
project is the best way to do it then
41:34
that’s what they must do you you know
41:37
you can’t you can’t prevent that and I
41:39
think preventing that is as deeply
41:41
problematic because you’re restricting
41:43
people’s choice
41:43
yes yeah the you have worked in a non
41:46
hierarchical way for a long time in your
41:50
life most people in the world have you
41:51
know come from the hierarchical side so
41:54
so what’s your outlook variance is
41:55
amazing that you can do a quality
41:57
project like this and get this far so
42:00
does this mean you guys are gonna take
42:02
it all over I mean what’s your outlook
42:04
um get this way I I think it is a lot of
42:09
strength provided by this this lack of
42:11
structure or this unstructured structure
42:14
and and I think that changing that and
42:17
and you know sort of trying to try to
42:20
have any sort of top-down structures is
42:22
ultimately first you’re gonna get
42:25
pushback from the community but secondly
42:26
it will just weaken everything so we
42:29
would never really want to try and and
42:31
and do that at the same time they are
42:33
members in the mayor of the manera
42:35
community who are I think they come from
42:38
a more structured background they’ve
42:40
worked at large I’ve worked at large
42:42
corporations so you know I’d love to
42:45
have daily stand-ups and scrum meetings
42:47
but that’s that’s not really feasible
42:49
and and it it seems to me that perhaps
42:54
with with the work groups that we’re
42:56
doing now it’s much better that each
42:58
work group can can form whatever
43:01
structure at once there’s nothing
43:03
stopping a particular work group from
43:05
saying well you know this is the person
43:06
that’s in charge they can do whatever
43:08
they want they can focal workgroup and
43:10
kick the person up they can you know
43:12
like like in smaller clusters they can
43:15
have whatever structure they want but
43:18
because it’s self assembling it means
43:20
that
43:21
that there’s no sort of central body
43:23
saying well now it’s time to form this
43:25
workgroup
43:26
you know it you think it should be done
43:28
and this is the person who’s in charge
43:29
the the sort of famous a famous story
43:33
that my my dad used to tell me on gay is
43:37
when he was a foreman
43:38
he told these two guys to dig a trench
43:41
and they were happily digging away and
43:44
then he needed to put a third person on
43:46
and the third person was kind of senior
43:49
and so he he said now come and help them
43:51
dig the trench and you’re in charge and
43:53
that was when everything fell apart so
43:55
you know I sort of think that with a lot
43:57
of the stuff it tends to work better as
44:00
as a self-assembling structure and and
44:04
you can put you can put some order
44:06
around it but you just won’t don’t want
44:08
to have things to centralize and to
44:10
controlled a relatively small question
44:12
so what I don’t understand about a lot
44:15
of cryptocurrency projects is the
44:17
financial side of development yes for
44:21
Bitcoin core for example you can link it
44:24
quite closely to block stream not
44:26
necessarily all of it but some parts and
44:29
for block stream you can see the funding
44:31
is coming from these days in this
44:34
what about manera how it’s gonna be in
44:36
the future how it is now was it before
44:38
sure
44:39
so Manero has has always been a project
44:44
that has been worked on for ideological
44:46
reasons primarily and the vast majority
44:49
of come of contributors even people that
44:52
aren’t working on code but are working
44:53
in other parts of the the ecosystem do
44:56
so for ideological reasons at the same
44:58
time like I said we have this
45:00
crowdfunding system and we use the clan
45:02
fighting system all the time the
45:04
crowdfunding system pays for two
45:05
full-time manure Research Lab academics
45:08
it pays for two full-time developers and
45:11
it’s entirely crowd funded so they go in
45:14
they erase three months three months
45:15
salary and as they start working those
45:18
three months they go and raise three
45:20
months after that and they’re
45:21
continuously in this three month cycle
45:23
and the community pitches in I mean when
45:26
when a new proposal goes up for
45:29
crowdfunding stuff especially if it’s a
45:31
known contributor those things get they
45:34
get
45:34
get funded within like ten minutes some
45:37
of them 20 minutes it’s insane
45:40
so I I think that as long as we continue
45:42
to keep that arrangement as long as
45:44
people continue to work within it we
45:46
won’t really need to worry about about
45:50
the challenges of funding and and all of
45:53
that at the same time I mean I’ve got a
45:56
couple of businesses one of them is a
45:58
payment gateway and it’s one of the few
46:01
payment gateways that accepts Manero and
46:03
it’s the only payment gateway on Shopify
46:04
that accepts manera so there we are
46:08
incentivized as a business to go and
46:10
apply resources to Manero so we’re a
46:13
little bit too small right now but as we
46:15
get bigger they will come a point where
46:17
we will hire developer and his job will
46:20
be to work on Manero and because
46:21
obviously we’re making money from the
46:23
existence of Manero so I think between
46:26
companies within the ecosystem that
46:28
benefit from an error and make profit
46:30
applying those resources and then the
46:33
crowdfunding system I think that it will
46:36
continue to be as distributed and as
46:38
decentralized from a control perspective
46:41
and a financial control perspective as
46:42
possible um I have two questions the
46:46
first one is how how do you make
46:49
decisions because for example if someone
46:54
sends the code for example a new webpage
46:56
or a new tax for website you talked
47:00
about it who makes a decision it will
47:04
get uploaded to the server or not and
47:06
the second question is i working on
47:09
smart contracts because i love it on a
47:11
theorem and i think a private smart
47:14
contract would be absolutely awesome
47:16
okay so to answer the first question how
47:18
our decisions made for the most part we
47:21
use something called broad consensus so
47:24
if somebody submits a pull request and
47:26
there and there are people who go and
47:29
review their pull requests and their
47:30
knowing people in the community and
47:31
there are a number of reviews then we go
47:34
cool this generally has broad consensus
47:36
no one has gone and put a negative
47:38
review on there’s no there’s no real
47:41
concern about this or anything and we
47:43
merge it we have in the past had
47:45
situations where we’ve
47:47
something and someone’s come along later
47:48
on and said oh I actually don’t agree
47:52
with that I think it should be done
47:53
differently in which case they must go
47:55
and change it and then if we get broad
47:57
consensus and they’re changed it’ll be
47:59
merged so each the the project maintain
48:01
is role really for each of the different
48:04
parts of projects is to like the website
48:06
or the GUI or whatever is to evaluate a
48:09
pull request and to evaluate the
48:12
discussion or the comments on it and and
48:15
decide as a maintainer does this
48:17
generally have consensus if there’s
48:19
something that is where there’s some
48:21
indecision then typically there’ll be a
48:25
long-form discussion on something like a
48:27
github issue and then that long-form
48:30
discussion can can often continue for
48:32
many months and we have dev media
48:36
developer meetings on IRC every two
48:38
weeks and if it is a development related
48:40
issue then we might bring it up in a
48:42
meeting so we’ll schedule it for a
48:44
meeting so that everyone knows that
48:45
we’re going to discuss this thing and
48:46
then have a you know everyone will go
48:49
and familiarize themselves with that
48:50
long-form discussion that’s happened on
48:52
github and then on IRC in the meeting
48:55
we’ll be able to have a much more fluid
48:56
interaction where people can voice their
48:59
stronger their strong opinion on whether
49:01
they feel this should happen or that
49:03
that should happen and we may as a group
49:07
of contributors at that point decide to
49:09
make a decision because you know it’s
49:11
clear that we’re going the the
49:13
community’s going one way or the other
49:15
to answer your second question about
49:18
smart contracts yes private smart
49:21
contracts would be would be great
49:23
scaling smart contracts is really
49:26
difficult
49:27
see crypto kitties so what what we’d
49:30
probably what we are looking at are
49:32
different ways of doing that ways of
49:36
doing like decentralized a decentralized
49:38
assets protocol in a way that is
49:40
scalable and that is something that I’m
49:42
personally working on because I believe
49:44
that that that is that that’s great
49:47
functionality that can be built on top
49:48
of Manero without you know swarming
49:53
you’re always gonna run into scaling
49:54
issues but was a list of the scaling
49:56
issues that aetherium has faced so I
49:58
wanted to ask you
50:00
I’ve read about the proof-of-work
50:03
algorithm that there is I don’t know if
50:06
it’s been mentioned I I’ve come late to
50:08
the party but there’s been mentioned
50:11
that it might get changed and I’m me and
50:16
two friends are running a small mining
50:18
farm and that concerns us of course if
50:22
there’s going to be changes how far in
50:25
the future is it and how would it
50:29
influence current mining terms so if
50:35
there is a change I can tell you how the
50:38
future will be and what it’ll look like
50:40
there has been some discussion about it
50:42
I think the two aspects to it the first
50:46
aspect is if we take a fundamentally
50:48
anti ASIC stance then the existence of
50:51
Asics would force us to make a change we
50:54
wouldn’t necessarily change to an
50:55
entirely different algorithm we could
50:57
just tweak the existing algorithm to
50:59
defeat those Asics but still not really
51:03
change the GPU might and cpu mining seen
51:05
there you know the the performance might
51:07
go up or down but everyone’s performance
51:09
will go up or down the same way there’s
51:13
a second discussion and that is do be
51:15
change to something a cuckoo cycle and
51:17
the advantage of something a cuckoo
51:18
cycle is that it’s asynchronous so it’s
51:22
hard to compute and to mine but it’s
51:25
really easy to validate and that reduces
51:27
things like a denial of service attack
51:29
risk at this point in time we don’t feel
51:32
as developers we don’t feel that the
51:34
denial of service attack risk is high
51:36
enough for us to make that change and if
51:40
we ever did make that change it would be
51:43
it would be something that we would we
51:45
would work towards over several years it
51:48
would be very widely spoken about and we
51:52
would spend those several years building
51:54
out the tools needed so that there are
51:57
fast GPU miners and far CPU miners and
52:00
pool software and everything by the time
52:02
that change change happens I don’t think
52:05
everyone’s performance would be the same
52:06
you know or that wouldn’t have the same
52:11
relative performance with selling a
52:13
cuckoo cycle so there might be a shift
52:16
in power between like AMD and NVIDIA
52:19
miners but at the end of the day that
52:22
that is something that we’d probably we
52:24
might want to look at if we have a felt
52:26
that the denial of service attack risk
52:28
was high enough right thank you so thank
52:33
you very much Ricardo there’s a person
52:35
having you
–>

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