All bitcoin miners whether CPU, GPU, FPGA
or ASICs are creating hashcash proofs-of-work
which is the blockchain evolution and validate the
blockchain transaction log.
Algorithms hashcash uses hash function s
as a building block, in the same way that HMAC, or RSA signatures are
defined on a pluggable hash-function.
This is commonly denoted by naming an algorithm-hash: HMAC-SHA1, HMAC-MD5, HMAC-SHA256,
RSA-SHA1, etc, hashcash can be instantiated with different functions,
hashcash-SHA1, hashcash-SHA256^2 (bitcoin),
hashcash-Scrypt(iter=1).
History
Hashcash / proof-of-work function invented in 1997 by Adam Back,
and proposed for anti-DoS attack uses preventing the anonymous remailer
and mail2news gateway abuse.
The name "nym" on nymservers is a pseudonymous for remailer severs and as a general email
anti-spam, and general network abuse throttling.
Before bitcoin hashcash
was used by SpamAssasin, and the incompatible format by Microsoft named "email postmark" in hotmail, exchange, outlook etc and
by i2p anonymity network, mixmaster anonymous remailer components and
other systems.
Hashcash was also used by Hal Finney's bitcoin precursor RPOW as a way to mine coins.
Wei Dai's B-money Proposal, and Nick Szabo's similar Bit Gold proposal bitcoin precursors, also were proposed in the context of hashcash mining.
Hash functions
In 1997 algorithm hashcash that used SHA1, because at that
time, this is/was their defacto and the NIST recommended hash, and the previous
defacto hash MD5 had recently started to show signs of weakness, and as all do over time.
Bitcoin
being specified/released in 2008/2009 uses SHA256 and improving.
There is no
strong reason SHA1 will not have worked, and hashcash relies only on
the hash partial preimage resistance property which is a security up to hash-size,
160-bit with SHA1, and security up to
80-bit), so the SHA1 hash is big enough, but...
Bitcoin is built to
128-bit security related to 256-bit ECDSA being used, which also offers
128-bit security.
The SHA256 is more
conservative choice and SHA1 has started to show some weaknesses.
Cryptanalytic Risk
An issue switching to hashcash-SHA3 is it will
invalidate all existing ASIC mining hardware, and is a security risk.
There is
no indication that SHA1 or SHA256, or SHA256^2 are vulnerable to
pre-image hacker attack.
The motivation is missing absent new cryptanalytic
developments.
If SHA256^2 became easier due to
cryptanalytic attack, as miners start to using whatever the new
algorithmic was, regardless, as difficulty
would just adapt to it.
One side-effect will be to introduce more memory or computation trade-offs could
make ASICs unprofitable and currently is.
Computation advantages willo replace the hash with SHA3. Withoutl speculation as pre-image affecting cryptanalytic
attacks are found on SHA256 is catalyst for change.
Hashcash function
Hashcash algorithms relatively simple to understand.
These idea
builds on security property of cryptographic hashes, designed to make difficult to invert, regards, any pre-image resistant
property attack.
Version 0 of hashcash protocol (1997) used a partial 2nd
pre-image, however the later version 1 (2002) uses partial pre-images of
a fairly chosen string, rather than digits of pi or something
arbitrary, 0^k (ie all 0 string) is used for convenience, so the work is
to find x such that H(x)=0.
Adding purpose
The service string could be a web server domain name, a
recipients email address, or in bitcoin a block of the bitcoin
blockchain ledger.
One additional problem is that if multiple people are mining,
using the same service string, they must not start with the same x or
they may end up with the same proof, and anyone looking at it will not
honor a duplicated copy of the same work as it could have been copied
without work, the first to present it will be rewarded, and others will
find their work rejected.
This is what hashcash version 1 and bitcoin does. In fact in
bitcoin the service string is the coinbase and the coinbase includes the
recipients reward address, as well as the transactions to validate in
the block.
Bitcoin actually does not include a random start point x,
reusing the reward address as the randomization factor to avoid
collisions for this random start point purpose, which saves 16-bytes of
space in the coinbase. For privacy bitcoin expect the miner to use a
different reward address on each successful block.
More Precise Work
Hashcash as originally proposed has work 2^k where k is an integer,
this means difficulty can only be scaled in powers of 2, this is
slightly simpler as you can see and fully measure the difficulty just by
counting 0s in hex/binary and was adequate for prior uses. (A lot of
hashcash design choices are motivated by simplicity).
Work, difficulty & cryptographic security
Bitcoin also defines a new notion of (relative) difficulty which
is the work required so that at current network hashrate a block is
expected to be found every 10 minutes.
It is easier to deal with high difficulties in log2 scale
(a petahash/second is a 16 decimal digit number of hashes per second),
and makes them comparable to other cryptographic security statements.
The EFF "deepcrack" DES cracker
project built a hardware brute force machine capable of breaking a DES
key in 56 hours to make a political point that 56-bit DES was too weak
in 1998 at a cost of $250,000 design time.
By
comparison bitcoin network does 62-bits (including +1 for double hash)
every 10-minutes.
This is 537,000 times more powerful than deepcrack, or
could if it were focused on DES rather than SHA256 crack a DES key in 9
seconds to deepcracks 56 hours.
Miner privacy
In principle a miner should therefore for privacy use a different
reward-address for each block.
Why
Satoshi's early mined bitcoins were potentially linked, was because
while he changed the reward-addresss, he forgot to reset the counter
after each successful mine, (penetrations advisory), which is a bitcoin mining privacy bug, and a great loop-hole already fixed.
In
fact with bitcoin the counter also should be obscured revealing your effort level, and with increased mining power
that will imply who the coin belongs to.
Bitcoin does this via the nonce
and extra-nonce. Nonce starts at 0, but extra nonce is random.
Together
these form a randomized counter hiding the amount of effort that went
into the proof, as no one can tell if it is a powerful and unlucky
miner who worked hard, or a weak miner who was very lucky or hacked.
The introduction of mining pools, and the miner
uses the same reward address for all users, which is what the current
mining protocols does which is a risk that users may redo work.
Avoiding miners redoing work, the miners hand out defined work for the users to
do.
However this creates an unnecessary communication round trip and in
early protocol versions and which means the miners are not
validating their own blocks, and this delegates validation authority,
though not work, to the pool operator, reducing the security of the
bitcoin network.
Recent mining protocol version allows miners
to add their own block definition. This unnecessarily incur round
trips for handing out work allocation.
Scrypt proof-of-work
A misunderstanding about the Scrypt proof-of-work is a scrypt not intended as a proof-of-work function.
Scrypt proof-of-work scrypt is a stretched
key-derivation function.
Scrypt proof-of-work can not be used to make an efficiently publicly
auditable proof-of-work, as verifying costs the same as creating.
Hashcash with the internal hash function of "Scrypt" may be denoted
hashcash-Scrypt(1). Scrypt, by Colin Percival, is a key-derivation
function for converting user chosen passphrases into keys.
It is salted
(to prevent pre-computation/rainbow table attacks), and the hash is
iterated many times to slow down passphrase grinding.
Scrypt is similar
in purpose to the defacto standard passphrase key-derivation function
PBKDF2 and which uses HMAC-SHA1 internally.
The differentiator is why
people choose Scrypt rather than PBDF2 is that Scrypt's inner hash
uses more memory so the GPU.
This does not use the key-stretching feature of Scrypt so mining
is not actually using Scrypt directly.
The inner Scrypt hash
(accessed by setting the iteration parameter to one iteration).
Scrypt's key-stretching function is not being used at all to contribute
to the hardness, unlike its normal use for key protection eg in deriving
the encryption key from user passphrase to encrypt bitcoin wallets.
Scrypt's key-stretching can not be used for mining
this simultaneously makes more expensive to verify by the same
factor.
Hashcash variant will be denoted
hashcash-Scrypt(iter=1,mem=128KB) or shortened to hashcash-Scrypt(1).
Other major scrypt parameter denotes amount of memory to 128kB. Decentralization: hash-cash-Scrypt vs hashcash-SHA256
This 128kB Scrypt memory footprint is less vulnerable
to centralization of mining power arising from limited access to or
ownership of ASIC equipment by users resolves a profit based industry working against miners.
The hashcash-SHA256^2 is very simple. This
simplicity ensures that many people will do it and ASICs should become
less available that only serves mining farms and nto the common people.
In hardware the time-memory tradeoff would be optimized to
find the optimal amount of memory to use, and it is quite possible the
optimal amount would be less than 128kB.
This makes validating scrypt blockchains more
CPU and memory intensive for all full nodes.
May The Crypto-Forces Be With You Always, and Be Careful/Safe!
Monero is the 9th cryptocurrency based on market capitalization.
Monero is designed to be private, secure and untraceable cryptocurrency.
Official ticker-symbol of Monero is XMR.
Monero Team is motivated building Monero into a primary cryptocurrency leader on the international market, larger than Bitcoin, and always easier to buy and trade for everyone equally and just not the wealthy...
Monero takes decentralization into a prime-directive of function.
“Governments monitor Monero and rarely intervene unless you appear criminal in activity”.
Monero is the gold standard of privacy among cryptocurrencies.
Monero’s prime-directive is being untraceable digital currency to lower hackers, but not upper government, unavoidable.
Monero obfuscates all information on the blockchain with cryptography.
All Monero activities of transaction amounts, senders’ and receivers’ addresses they are all hidden.
The Prime-Directive is Monero default.
No Monero user can undermine the privacy of other users.
Monero have been In development since April 2014.
Monero’s core team included only seven people.
Monero is an open source project.
Monero had many people add to it over time-line of years durring it's existence since April-2014.
Monero didn’t have any ICO (Initial Coin Offering) and wasn’t pre-mined.
The emission of Monero is divided into two phases:
The main emission includes about 18 million coins which will be mined by May 2020.
Afterwards, the tail emission kicks in, locking the reward rate at 0.6 XMR per 2-minute block, leaving the inflation rate at around 1% a year.
In the near future, Monero inends adamantly to further increase its security by reaching the milestone dubbed the Kovri project.
Kovri aims to create a protected overlay-network across the internet, allowing users to effectively hide their geographical location and internet IP address from high-range, mid-range, and to low-level hackers.
It is based on the open-source decentralized and encrypted communication protocol I2P (somewhat similar to TOR and Onion routing, but far more efficient).
Those Who Have Influenced Monero:
Riccardo Spagni:
One of the seven core developers and one of the two who publicly revealed their identity. Riccardo has an extensive business experience and understanding of cryptocurrencies, cryptography and software development.
Francisco "ArticMine" Cabañas:
Has been researching and investing in cryptocurrencies since 2011. He holds a PhD in Physics, has an extensive business and non-profit experience and focuses on the economic, social, regulatory and long-term viability aspects of cryptocurrencies.
Technology and Fungibility:
The word, fungibility means that any two currency units of the same size can be mutually substituted for each other.
Monero is fungible, because the currency provides no way to link transactions together or trace the history of any particular XMR Monero-Coin.
This is a stark contrast to Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies with an open blockchain.
Some large Bitcoin companies were blocking, suspending, or closing accounts that have received Bitcoins used in online gambling or illegal activities without the receiving party’s knowledge.
Monero has been built specifically to avoid this problem by having transactions private.
Stealth Addresses (Recipient Privacy):
Monero's stealth addresses are random one-time addresses created for every transaction on behalf of the recipient of XMR, each and every time, creating privacy for all traders and buyers.
While the recipient has a single public address, every transaction goes to a different unique address on the blockchain and transactions thus cannot be linked to the receiver.
Ring signature (Sender Privacy):
Ring signature is a digital signature which uses a group of people to sign on a transaction.
It is nearly impossible to determine which of the group members’ key was used for the signature.
Ring Confidential Transactions (Amount obfuscation):
There was a modification to the original CryptoNote protocol implemented by January 2017, which hides the amount sent in a transaction. Based on Confidential Transactions from Bitcoin but used with ring signatures.
Advantages:
Complete privacy and an anonymous blockchain.
Untraceability of the coin.
Hidden amounts of transactions.
Scheduled hardforks.
CryptoNight PoW, an ASIC-resistant algorithm.
Dynamic blocksize.
Dynamic fees.
Disadvantages.
Rate of Blockchain growth.
Smaller and slower adoption of the crypto.
Whitepaper.
Monero does not have a whitepaper, the currency's technical solution is based on CryptoNote.
CryptoNote's whitepaper examines Bitcoin's POW algorithm, hard-coded constants, irregular emission and other shortcomings of Bitcoin and presents how CryptoNote is tackling these with the egalitarian “one-CPU-one-vote” CryptoNight algorithm.
Real examples of use:
Monero has fewer uses compared to Bitcoin and bitcoin-based currencies.
There aren’t any Monero ATMs at the moment, it will take some time for Monero to be integrated into hardware wallets, but the developers community is already working on it.
The most prominent use of Monero is with drug dealers, mafia's, and other black-project agencies on the darknet.
All governments around the world are spreading Monero among ordinary people that just don´t want to be spied-on, buy excessive use of this currency in their black projects...
What is Monero?
Monero is the leading cryptocurrency within the privacy alt.coin cryptocurrencies.
All transactions on the blockchain are obfuscated by default
Monero is fungible - individual coins cannot be tainted
Decentralized development by cryptography experts with exception to quantum entanglement sentient technologies.
The Complete Guide to Monero Cryptocurrency:
Monero, Regards Bitcoin and Ethereum are literally hundreds of other coins, and each of them claim to offer different improvements on Bitcoin and this does never will manner in any extreme case!
Why? They offer no privacy from the big banks and their agency puppets from putting you in prison.
Some have cheaper transactions, some may be faster but, Monero is one of the most and completely anonymous.
That’s right!
The high-tech cryptography programmers, the sender, receiver, and the amount of Monero sent is impossible to view by anyone else.
Monero is founded on this unique technique of escape and evasion of international bank ibdustry.
Monero’s have strong cryptography and privacy
The History of Monero:
To trace the historic origins of Monero, we need to look at a different cryptocurrency – Bytecoin.
Bytecoin was launched in the summer of 2012.
It was the first digital currency that was written using a technology called CryptoNote.
CryptoNote today is the backbone of most of the privacy-based cryptocurrencies that exist and this includes Monero.
The privacy of CryptoNote coins is ensured by grouping public keys together.
By combining several keys in a single transaction, it’s impossible to tell who sent it!
The use of these “ring signatures” to sign transactions provides the anonymity of the CryptoNote technology.
Bytecoin is an effort at anonymous cryptocurrency. There are issues with bytecoin initial distribution. There was 80% of these coins were already in existence.
This lead a group of seven developers to fork the Bytecoin blockchain and the new currency would be known as Bitmonero. This was eventually shortened to simply Monero which is Esperanto for “coin”.
Of the seven developers who originally created Monero, five of them decided that they would keep their identities secret. Only two of these Monero developers are known about – Riccardo Spagni (the main developer today) and David Latapie. Riccardo Spagni is also known by the nickname “Fluffypony”.
What Makes Monero Different?
Monero is an an open-source project that is entirely permission-less and private.
There is no authority that can stop you from using Monero cryptocurrency, not ever, not one on Earth.
This means that those without access to modern banking facilities can take part in a digital economy in the way they never could before privately, securely, and without being traced.
All they need is an internet connection and a device to connect to it.
There are literally millions of people around the world that lack access to banking facilities but have smartphones and local Wi-Fi hotspots.
India is a prime example of a country with many of these “unbanked” citizen activities.
Privacy:
The
main thing that gives Monero value is its extreme privacy features.
No one can
link you to a Monero cryptocurrency transaction.
This makes it a
favorite currency for those who are concerned with privacy for a variety
of reasons.
Not all these reasons will be illegal although some
obviously will be.
Fungibility:
Another
very important feature of the Monero cryptocurrency related to privacy features is entirely fungible.
It’s possible to track Bitcoin transactions from
one user to another. Depending on how the user uses Bitcoin, you might
not be able to tell their identity, but you can follow each Bitcoin from
address to address.
The advanced
privacy features of Monero allows no-one to see which transactions each coin
was actually involved in.
It would be entirely impossible to link a
single Monero coin to a past crime, but other non-privacy coins are easily tracable. There is no transaction history
associated with any Monero coins. This means they are fungible!
[Twitter]: I
am inundated by people asking me for recommendations on
cryptocurrencies. If you would use your heads you would figure out that
the privacy coins (anonymous transactions) will have the greatest
future. Coins like Monero (XMR), Verge (XVG), or Zcash (ZEC) cannot
lose.
The Monero scalability just means how well the network can
grow in relation to demand.
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies are by
definition limited in size.
For much of its past, Bitcoin has had a
1MB block-size limit.
This means that only 1MB of transaction data can
fit into each of the blocks that are mined every 10 minutes on the
Bitcoin network.
Unfortunately, when there are many users trying
to make transactions at the same time using Bitcoin, the blockchain gets
filled with transaction data.
Those transactions that can’t fit into a
block must wait for a miner to include them.
Since miners prefer
to include transactions with the largest fees attached, if the network
is very busy, it encourages people to increase the fees to get their
transactions included.
This is what happened in the Spring of 2017 to
the Bitcoin blockchain. Some transactions were actually requiring a $30+
fee just to be validated!
Monero is different.
There is no
“pre-set” block size limit.
Whilst this does allow for more transaction
data in each block, there is a downside – spammers can fill the
blockchain with transactions and this makes huge blocks.
So, The Monero developers introduced a block reward-penalty system.
The
median size of the last 100 blocks is taken. If the new block that the
miners are working on exceeds the median of the previous hundred blocks,
the block reward is reduced.
This discourages spam transactions since
miners won’t mine blocks that are subject to such a large penalty if
it’s no longer profitable for them to do so.
The
block reward will never drop below 0.3 XMR, making Monero a
disinflationary currency: the inflation will be roughly 1% in 2022 and
go down forever, but the nominal inflation will stay at 0.3 XMR per
minute. This means that there will always be an incentive for miners to
mine Monero and thus keeping the blockchain secure, with or without a
fee market.
ASIC Resistance:
Another common issue with Bitcoin is that mining the network is now only
profitable using specialized mining equipment.
These systems use
components known as Application Specific Integrated Circuit chips, (ASIC).
These mining machines are very expensive and this means that only the richest can set up mining
operations.
Monero does not conform and allows anyone with a computer to participate.
It uses an alternate hashing
algorithm in opposition to Bitcoin called CryptoNight.
CryptoNight uses a lot of
advanced features to make the production of ASIC chips suitable for
mining Monero is unprofitable and unnecessary.
The specifics of this algorithm is a little complex for introduction to the Monero currency, and all need mining Monero is by using both CPUs and GPUs of any personal computer, workstation, data-center, and-or server.
With this algorithm the currency primarily
decentralized than Bitcoin and-or any-other cryptocurrency available today.
Multiple Keys:
Monero
uses a different set of system keys in opposition to Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In these currencies, there is just one pair of keys making Bitcoin and Bitcoin variants traceable and-or more easily hackable; a public key and a
private key.
Monero uses a public view key, a private view key, and
both public and private spend key.
A one uses only stealth public address is generated by the public view key.
For checking the blockchain and verifying that funds have been received, a private view key is needed.
To verify the signature on a transaction requires a public spend key.
Private spend keys are used to create outgoing transactions.
Monero and Supply:
In opposition to Bitcoin, Monero has no fixed number of tokens that will ever be
mined.
The currency is slightly inflationary.
There will
initially be 18.5 million coins, following this the supply will increase
approximately by around 0.87% in each year.
This percentage lowers each
year. It’s estimated that it will take 117 years to reach double the
initial distribution.
For this figure to double again it will take 234
years. At the time of writing (May 18, 2018) there are 16,040,000 just in case you find the fountain of youth and live a very long life.
Monero and a Wider Cryptocurrency Market:
The current price for a single XMR coin is to-date: July-21st-2019 is $84.25 at present.
The currency is the 12th most popular in terms of total market capitalization.
Below, is included a graph of the Monero coin’s performance since it was
launched.
As you can see, like most cryptocurrencies, the value spiked
around January 2018 and has fallen back quite a bit since its all-time
high of $480.
How to Store Monero:
Storing
Monero used to be quite a struggle.
You would need to run the wallet
using command lines or a hard-wallet.
Although this made you feel like you were hacking
into some secret government database, it wasn’t exactly user-friendly!
Fortunately, there is now a much easier way to store Monero!
First head to www.mymonero.com.
Click “create account”.
Read and understand the page about the importance of securely storing your private key login information.
Write down your private login key.
Type
the private login key into the box below the key. This is to check you
actually did make a note of it. The one pictured below is an empty
account. You can check it by all means but you will be wasting your
time!
You’ve just created your first Monero wallet. Lets assume you want to put some XMR coins in the wallet. Outlined below are
steps to do this:
Storing XMR
Make a note of the address at the top of the Account overview screen, OK?
Go to the exchange account that you want to send Monero from.
Enter the address you just made a note of under the exchange’s withdrawal section.
Follow
the on-screen prompts to complete the withdrawal. Some exchanges might
ask you to confirm that you are making the withdrawal by clicking a link
in an email.
If you’re receiving Monero from a friend, simply send them the address and they should know what to do with it!
If you want to send Monero from your wallet, I have provided the instructions to do this as well.
Sending XMR
First, click “send”.
Enter
the address that you wish to send Monero to. You will get this from
either an exchange, a contact (friend or colleague, etc), or any service
that accepts Monero as a payment option.
Type the amount you want to send in the box labeled “amount”.
Select how private you want the transaction to be. The greater the “ring size” the higher the transaction fee will have to be.
Hit “send payment”.
That’s
it, that’s all there is to using the MyMonero wallet. I think you’ll
agree it’s much easier than wrestling with the command prompt wallet.
However, you won’t win many elite hacker points for using MyMonero!
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Monero
PROs ✓ One of the most private cryptocurrencies to date:21st-July-2019. ✓ Transactions are impossible to link to a person. ✓ Transactions are impossible to trace. ✓
The blockchain doesn’t have a limit as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. ✓ The dynamic scalability means fees are not huge even if used a lot. ✓
It’s possible to choose who can see your transactions.
[For example, if
you wanted to prove your ownership of a certain amount of Monero for tax
purposes, you can share your private view key with your countries tax
authority. This makes it less likely that regulators will try to ban
Monero.] ✓ A great team of committed developers works on the project. ✓
You can mine Monero from a local node avoiding a remote pool.
CONs ✗
Despite being ASIC resistant, there is centralization of remote miners on Monero. Roughly 43% of the hash rate is
controlled by just three remote server pools. ✗ There are only few high tech wallets that have been developed for Monero. ✗ To store
Monero in a way that is properly secure is much tougher than most other
cryptocurrencies. This might be why it hasn’t been more widely adopted
by the wider community. ✗ Monero is not based on Bitcoin, and it is harder to develop applications that interact with its blockchain.
Monero In The Future:
On Planet Earth, a world whereby absolutely nothing seems to offer genuine privacy
anymore, there is certainly a call for such privacy-focused currencies
as Monero.
Listed are both legal example where private money was a good
thing earlier, as well as an illegal but morally defensible ones equally.
Monero
allows people to transact nearly in an instant across
the world without any need for permission from any authority.
In
countries with open publicized oppressive governments, this could be used as a very
powerful tool in the pursuit of freedom.
Most wealthy individuals are criminals and also
appreciate the privacy features of Monero.
Most wealthy individuals are criminals dark-web market places whereby they
accessed an array of drugs,
weapons, and other criminal items that thousandaires, and millionaires alike love partaking in.
Monero has quickly found a place as
the currency of choice on these illicit websites.
Monero has also been used by governments such as North Korea’s to
get around international sanctions.
Monero is used for black-ops by governments. Monero is used by the wealthy for child pornography, wealthy drug dealers, and international
terrorist organizations and human traffickers.
The non-wealthy citizens of earth that are not criminals use Monero for privacy purposes so the wealthy do not steal their money.
Remember, those millionaire who steal cryptocurrency for drugs, for child-pornography, for raping small pubecent children, kidnapping small teenage children then drinking their blood and cannabalizing them, and that common millionaire pass-time of animal sex with Monero coins is horrible.
Do not do as the evil wealthy people do, OK? :)
Since you are a common good decent moral and ethical citizen who is not a demonic prick of a millionaire then Monero is for you.
Conclusion
Before I end this blogger post, let us have a recap. You should have learn:
What is Monero?
Monero’s history.
What Monero is useful for.
A little about how it achieves its privacy and anonymity.
How to set up and use a Monero wallet in the easiest (although not most secure) way.
How Monero differs from Bitcoin.
The current and past Monero value.
The advantages and disadvantages of using Monero.
The future of Monero.
I
hope you found this guide to Monero interesting and educational! Monero
has the potential to become a very powerful tool of resistance, as well
as a handy payment method for both legal and illegal goods and
services.
With all your new-found knowledge, what do you think
about Monero? Does this project have a future, or will the governments
of the world try to entirely ban it? I’d love to hear your thoughts on
the subject!
Heads UP Monero News:
Torrent website The Pirate Bay is doubling down on its plan to use visitors' processing power to mine crypto.
In a disclaimer recently added to the bottom of its homepage, the website said that "by entering TPB you agree to [monero] being mined using your CPU. If you don't agree please leave now or install an adBlocker."
That message comes months after the site's administrators wrote in a September blog post that they were testing a monero Javascript miner in an effort to, as they put it, "get rid of all the ads."
It was a controversial effort launched by an equally controversial website, which has drawn the ire of numerous national governments for its role in facilitating file-sharing online.
Many TPB visitors cried foul as much of their computing power was harnessed for mining XMR. Bleeping Computer reported last October that Pirate Bay had brought back the feature.
The TPB torrent site's new approach represents a kind of so-called "cryptojacking" that is voluntary in nature.
Indeed, other organizations, including the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), have turned to the Coinhive open-source software as a source of revenue (though in that case, the revenues are destined for philanthropic causes).
Other instances of "cryptojacking" have been far more malicious in nature, including a wide-ranging attack this spring which targeted websites running the Drupal content management system.
Clone recursively to pull-in needed submodule(s): $ git clone --recursive https://github.com/monero-project/monero
If you already have a repo cloned, initialize and update: $ cd monero && git submodule init && git submodule update
Build instructions
Monero uses the CMake build system and a top-level Makefile that
invokes cmake commands as needed.
On Linux and OS X
Install the dependencies
Change to the root of the source code directory, change to the most recent release branch, and build:
cd monero
git checkout v0.13.0.0
make
Optional: If your machine has several cores and enough memory, enable
parallel build by running make -j<number of threads> instead of make. For
this to be worthwhile, the machine should have one core and about 2GB of RAM
available per thread. Note: If cmake can not find zmq.hpp file on OS X, installing zmq.hpp from
https://github.com/zeromq/cppzmq to /usr/local/include should fix that error. Note: The instructions above will compile the most stable release of the
Monero software. If you would like to use and test the most recent software,
use git checkout master. The master branch may contain updates that are
both unstable and incompatible with release software, though testing is always
encouraged.
The resulting executables can be found in build/release/bin
Add PATH="$PATH:$HOME/monero/build/release/bin" to .profile
Run Monero with monerod --detach
Optional: build and run the test suite to verify the binaries:
make release-test
NOTE: core_tests test may take a few hours to complete.
Optional: to build binaries suitable for debugging:
make debug
Optional: to build statically-linked binaries:
make release-static
Dependencies need to be built with -fPIC. Static libraries usually
aren't, so you may have to build them yourself with -fPIC. Refer to
their documentation for how to build them.
Optional: build documentation in doc/html (omit HAVE_DOT=YES if graphviz is not installed):
