Source
r/Monero•
Coin-Fiend

Monero protocol questions

I will preface by making readers aware and i am never wrong about anything so obviously i have been piling schekels into monero because its the only cryptocurrency that will be useful when Joe the taxman comes sniffing at your newly acquired 24 karat gold estate gates.

But yet it remains dormant, docile and limp dicked so my question is this given the opaque nature of the protocol how do we know funds arent being siphoned off by some sneaky developer who back doored some infinity production for monero? How is the creation of moneros verified? Do we simply not know and take it on good faith that the developers have the best interest of the community at heart 😂.

Given censorship resistant coins history of emission fuckery with bytecoin having shady developers and bitmonero having the same issues of which monero is a fork how can the community trust in any way that there is not tomfoolery afoot and how can the emissions of monero be verified and by that i dont mean some developer saying oh no its all good me and my 4 other dev friends here can assure you all is well carry on. I mean mathematically verified and proven and published with consistency and understandable for the lay person, so that people can have confidence in the protocol.

Expecting the usual monero community responses of go get a phd in cyber security and live in a basement for 5 years deriving sustenance from beans bought on underground web markets and than ask questions but maybe there is a simple resource i have missed. Thanks 🙏🏻

Posted Jan 9, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

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rbrunner7XMR Contributor•

I mean mathematically verified and proven and published with consistency and understandable for the lay person, so that people can have confidence in the protocol.

Please have a look at Zero to Monero. Just a look is enough, scan every page diagonally and note how most of them have 50% or more of mathematical formula. Then take note that this thing has no less than 154 pages.

And then think about those "lay persons" you mention that you want to get confident by understanding Monero.

By the way, that book is excellent. It lowers the barrier of entry dramatically, with one of the alternative ways into deeply understanding Monero being directly consulting the C++ source code. But this stays hard and complex stuff, even if presented in an excellent way.

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Coin-FiendOP•

I understand that monero is highly technical and the possibility of onboarding lay people to understanding concepts behind monero difficult to near impossible. But i thinkk in this case a work around can be developed to establish more trust in the protocol even if not perfect. There are a lot of technically difficult projects that have more trust than monero simply by having technical spokespeople who have established trust or a more open community in terms of sharing knowledge and having patience with new comers and non technical people. I understand this has drawbacks for the idea of decentralisation etc but you can still have a decentralised protocol with spokespeople who help onboard people to its importance, usefulness and trust in the protocol Antonopoulos is the obvious example for btc. I will look a little closer at the link thanks for sharing my glance indicated it was overall technical but still had important and understandable elements to explaining monero.

2
UkoeHB•

Only the first 81 pages are about the core protocol, so it isn't quite that daunting :p

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m_g_h_w•

[edit] I wrote this while the previous response was being written - apologies for any overlap etc

I mean mathematically verified and proven and published with consistency and understandable for the lay person

All the above together is quite a difficult thing to do :-) It is very hard to truly mathematically verify/prove something in a way that is understandable by the lay person. Is this actually done for any blockchain/crypto project?

There are several resources that explain the monero protocol, cryptographic techniques etc in an understandable way, but they certainly are not mathematical proofs. I quite like localmonero.co/knowledge articles (easy to understand), Zero to Monero, MasteringMonero (more complicated and in depth). See https://www.getmonero.org/library/

To my understanding, key aspects of the cryptographic techniques used have been researched and audited/peer-reviewed. I personally have not read any of the reports and am sure someone else is better versed to point you in the right direction for them.

In terms of proving/guaranteeing there is not a backdoor for "devs" to syphon off a load of monero, I guess the bottom line is that the code is open source. Good luck reading and understanding all the code, especially if not familiar with C++ :-)

I can't point you to the code that dictates the mining reward/monero emission, but can say that Pederson commitments (if you accept the mathematical proof) ensure there is no leakage in transactions.

I think this is a great question and look forward to other more expert and detailed responses!

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Coin-FiendOP•

“All the above together is quite a difficult thing to do :-) It is very hard to truly mathematically verify/prove something in a way that is understandable by the lay person. Is this actually done for any blockchain/crypto project?”

I dont know of projects that do necessarily consistantly but for example this is only a behaviour (backdooring funds) that i worry about with my monero and other privacy holdings because rightly or wrongly othr protocols principally btc have established trust that this does not occur. But with opaque chains and the monero forks history of devs backdooring and unexplainable price actions with monero it truly bothers me and i have some level of anxiety that it could be occuring now or in the future which is a huge turn off. I cant code along with many others so i simply cant be convinced through code but if it cant be explained with relative simplicity than i would fear its generally poorly understood which means the ability for it to be happening is more likely. I will read some more through the links youve posted and hopefully i can assuage these concerns this way if not i will simply lower exposure, Thanks for reply 🙏🏻

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m_g_h_w•

You are right that in the end it involves a degree of trust. Even for transparent blockchains. And I agree that with a private blockchain the required degree of trust is higher (or at least there appears to be more "magic" going on).

Your question has piqued my interest, and when I find the time I will look into the emission code.

Personally I am confident in Monero's integrity, that transactions don't leak, that miners (and pools) are happy with their rewards and that number of emitted coins can be seen on explorers like https://minergate.com/blockchain/xmr/blocks (ie the maths "adds up").

Thanks for posting the question!

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Coin-FiendOP•

I would be interested to see what you find if and when you get around to it 😁

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m_g_h_w•

u/Coin-Fiend I thought you might be interested in these articles:

https://www.getmonero.org/2020/01/17/auditability.html

https://www.getmonero.org/get-started/faq/#anchor-thin-air

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Cryptonote-Social•

Ultimately you have to trust the eyes that are on the code, and Monero has some of the best and some of the most of any coin. This applies even to transparent blockchains -- Bitcoin has had inflation bugs for example -- but it's true with transparent blockchains that you could possibly detect an issue by monitoring the blockchain itself rather than auditing the code. Still, by then it could be too late!

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truedissent•

Sorry bud. your asking god why you exist. Your not going to get an answer you haven't already stumbled across. You can't read code so your essentially looking for a human face to give you confidence in the code, kind of a long work around for just becoming comfortable with monero. Download cake wallet and hold or dump your shit and leave.

At worst your a concern troll at best your naive. Good luck with the tax evasion if you live in a first world country, not going to get you far.

Saul - the tax man see's you out on the town partying hardy, knocking boots with the chicky babes, ah who is this? Its the tax man. whats he see? he sees a young fellow, fancy house unlimited cash. whats he think?

Jesse - Im a drug dealer

Saul - wrong a million times worse, your a tax cheat

As to price action, you've got the FUD you posted, you got the de-listing fud, you got the regulation fud etc etc etc coupled with recent network attacks.

hopefully i fulfilled the response you outlined in your last paragraph

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Coin-FiendOP•

Took the first two words to know the rest would not be worth reading, but thx for your reply 🤙😊

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truedissent•

same for your post, hang loose man

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