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October 2015 Budget Proposal

I'm lost. How do you reward someone for mixing? Where does the reward money come from? Might as well get rid some of the fees, esp. the collateral fees and that would be our reward? :)
By "reward" I mean payments by faucet-like script. Basically spend those $300 from proposal (or whatever part of it will be needed) by setting up (and filling) this mixing-reward faucet-like script instead of direct payments to selected LPs. And no, we can't remove (collateral) fees, they are protecting mixing from malicious participants.

On another note... The more I think of this the more I wonder if we can implement this on a protocol level... as an actual part of block reward... That would be another hard-fork though in that case, I see no easy way around it... :sad:

PS. Another idea (to address prioritisation issues) is that we can incentivize miners to include mixing txes in block by slightly raising block reward for blocks containing mixing txes (i.e. it's like paying some fees directly from blockchain). Again, this will require hard-fork too but in case we are going to implement mixing incentive on protocol level we could do both of them at once. (Changes like this should go through testnet first of course so it's more like ideas/long term fixes, not a temporary replacement for LP.)

PPS. Hmm, I'm getting off topic pretty fast today :grin:
 
By "reward" I mean payments by faucet-like script. Basically spend those $300 from proposal (or whatever part of it will be needed) by setting up (and filling) this mixing-reward faucet-like script instead of direct payments to selected LPs. And no, we can't remove (collateral) fees, they are protecting mixing from malicious participants.

On another note... The more I think of this the more I wonder if we can implement this on a protocol level... as an actual part of block reward... That would be another hard-fork though in that case, I see no easy way around it... :sad:

PS. Another idea (to address prioritisation issues) is that we can incentivize miners to include mixing txes in block by slightly raising block reward for blocks containing mixing txes (i.e. it's like paying some fees directly from blockchain). Again, this will require hard-fork too but in case we are going to implement mixing incentive on protocol level we could do both of them at once. (Changes like this should go through testnet first of course so it's more like ideas/long term fixes, not a temporary replacement for LP.)

PPS. Hmm, I'm getting off topic pretty fast today :grin:
Is this even going to be needed in the future, though? Evan said that there is not going to be a Darksend anymore, and that Dash will be anonymous by default. You know anything about that? You say long term solutions to liquidity issues, but if what Evan's saying is true, you're wasting your time, no?
 
I'm lost. How do you reward someone for mixing? Where does the reward money come from? Might as well get rid some of the fees, esp. the collateral fees and that would be our reward? :)

It's centralized payout through Ghost....

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but completely centralized....
 
I'm lost. How do you reward someone for mixing? Where does the reward money come from? Might as well get rid some of the fees, esp. the collateral fees and that would be our reward? :)

It's centralized payout through Ghost....

Sign-up
Play
Paid

but completely centralized....
Sorry MB, that's not what Udjin is talking about. We're trying to find a long term solution, this is overdue... :)

sorry - didn't realize you was on our level with this - should have known better
- just trying to start you off on the basic's - haha

right then - carrie on


luvs ya - misses ya
kisses luv
 
I'm reading about bloating the blockchain by a few people and I'm confused. Aren't we ready for thousands of people mixing at the same time?
 
I don't think there is a mixing problem... I volunteered to be an LP, but do we really need it? I have no problem DSing anytime I turn it on.

Seems like a solution in search of a problem. There's plenty of mixing going on.

I was looking at it more as a simple, easy, cheap, doesn't hurt anything way to play with the budget system. There isn't a real need for it tho.

I'll vote against my own volunteering... lols.
 
I fully agree, this proposal does not make any sense. We are trying to "fix" a "problem" by throwing money at it.
It doesn't make sense in the long term, but it's only $300 to play around with it...

I think the point is to see somebody vote "no" on something already... To see the system work. The point being to see what happens to a mediocre proposal in the wild, instead of how we've theorized it will work out. To see if "wisdom of the crowd" really exists. To see if MN operators really are a more educated, more responsible bunch than the rest of the unwashed masses.

I am not interested in "earning" anything as a liquidity provider, just to have the cost of my fees covered... But, frankly, looks like a solution in search of a problem. I don't see any problems with mixing... It's not broken. So, not only are we throwing money ate a problem to fix it, it isn't even a problem to begin with. Just throwing $300 at the wall to see if anybody votes on it... A cheap way to see if MN operators really are any less stupid than the barely sentient (L)users. Either way, it's only $300... A cheap mistake compared to many...

More expensive mistakes have been made. On this project. By me. Hell, I've given away as much DASH as I still have... Think of that... Twice as many masternodes, and I just gave it away...
 
My only goal is to see DS+ speed up. Since this part of our service is the most confused by new users in the sense that they have to mix before they become anonymous having the initial mix go fast is a real bonus for them. I have given new users the wallet and they are like I wants anonymous coins and I'm like you need to mix first bro and they are like wtf they mix for 15 mins then close their laptop and forget about it.

From an LP stand point the only negative part to constantly mixing is constantly having to pay the collateral fees. I would gladly leave a wallet open and mixing if I could apply somewhere to have those collateral fees returned. I have been trying for literally 5 days to mix less then a few hundred dash. I see a few ds denoms get included in a block every couple of hours but nothing more.

I think out of all this the idea I like the most is to incentivize the miners to include the mixing into the blocks. We have taken so much from the miners it would be nice to start thinking about them and giving back to them. To me it seems moocowmoo point about ds denominations being left out of blocks is the biggest issue we are currently seeing this slowdown in mixing currently on mainnet. Perhaps the only solution needed is for these pools to update. I mean come on it isn't enough that you can 51% the coin but you also have to not include ds denom's? Mining pools are supposed to be first class citizens and I'm not seeing that from some of them.
 
Is this even going to be needed in the future, though? Evan said that there is not going to be a Darksend anymore, and that Dash will be anonymous by default. You know anything about that? You say long term solutions to liquidity issues, but if what Evan's saying is true, you're wasting your time, no?

I wonder about this too. If it is a temporary solution, I don't think it's so bad and Evan did give the impression that it would be temporary. As others have mentioned, one problem right now is the Darksend Mixing (DM) time.

That said, I don't think coming up with proposals to solve the problem is a waste of time at all. The idea of a faucet lottery for LPs is interesting, however, if it proves to be a valid solution, to the DM problem, it would take some time to test and implement. The $300 from the budget could be used to improve DM speed until the lottery idea is implemented, or Evan's "anonymous by default" offering, if it is to be implemented in the not too distant future. Perhaps, if there's someone out there who feels that they would be capable of writing the code for the faucet lottery, they could submit a budget proposal. If it's not a huge amount and is from a well-known community member, I imagine that it would get decent support. Even if it only makes it to testnet it would still be some sort of progress in solving a current problem that Dash has.

With all the funds being spent on videos and marketing it is vital that potential Dash users are met with a functional product.
 
I have given new users the wallet and they are like I wants anonymous coins and I'm like you need to mix first bro and they are like wtf they mix for 15 mins then close their laptop and forget about it.
This may simply be retardation... How long does your money just sit in your wallet? You paper money in the wallet in your pocket, I mean. What if, during all that time, it was getting anon? Why sit and stare at it?

It's kinda like people who can't understand charging an electric car while they sleep... Your car just sits there anyway, why shouldn't it be charging itself? Why be obsessed with standing there watching it?

You tell it to mix and then com back later. The fact that it can't be timing analyzed is part of the damn point. I wouldn't want it to go faster, because I'm smart enough to know what's wrong with that...

Some people can't handle anything more complicated than a fart, even when it doesn't require their attention.

I mixed 40 DASH in the time it took to write this message.

It's kinda like morons who modify TOR routes to be faster. They just eliminated 98% of the network and negated the whole point of using TOR... Too stupid to realize it.

I can mix an entire masternode worth of DASH in my sleep. Why would it need to be "faster" than that? Well, unless I'm dumb enough to sit there and stare at it instead of go do something else...

People this dumb don't have much money anyway...
 
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Here's a general idea, feel free to rip it apart:
We can have a faucet-like script that will look for mixing txes and choose a winner address for example every 24 blocks (~1 hour) based on the block hash. Then it just should pay the winner some small amount. Like a normal wallet it can be refiled at any time to make it work (and potentially speed up mixing).

First of all, regardless of how exactly the winner is chosen or how often one is declared, I think we have to make sure what exactly we incentivize and how we can avoid incentiviztation of things we do not want (like more bloat).
I Think the expected return needs to be less than 1. So for every 1 DASH that averagely gets paid as a collateral while mixing, there needs to be less (max. the equal amount of) DASH in the winner pool.
That way, there would be no incentive to game the system, because you cannot win anything. Sure, you could still try your luck, but there other, more enjoying games in the crypto-space to do just that.
The problem would be that one had to track the mixing attempts that are eligible for potential collateral payment. Thats a lot harder than just looking at the transactions, yet I think it's necessary in order to not make the expected profit go above 1.

I have to admit I really like that "lottery" way... Can't find big issues with it so far though I'm not quite sure about unlinkability of winners' rewards.

Regarding unlinkability... well, theres always something an output can be linked to, and often that completely irrelevant for anonymity. I think the important thing is that the funds cannot be traced back to the original source, which I generally refer to as traceability. Maybe we mean the same thing though :)
I am going to assume the algorithm used for the lottery cannot trace coins through multiple DS rounds (because that would break DS in itself).
So we'll have to look at every output and determine for it separately if it is eligible for the jackpot or not. The winner will get the funds to the corresponding address.
That address is now containing the DS denomination and the lottery reward. If this was the last DS-round, the DS denom will remain there in order to eventually be spend and so does the lottery reward.
This can lead to problems if the lottery reward is spend somewhere for shopping (it cannot be used in a DS Tx anyway before mixing), while the DS denom is used somewhere else via Darksend.
Now my first idea was to reset the DS dounds of the denomination in question and just do some additional rounds. While this would work if the reward was already paid, in this proposal, the reward isn't paid right away. Say the DS denom has already been used and now the lottery reward gets paid and the user uses it for shopping, then whatever info he enters at wherever he is shoping is linked to the DS Tx he did BEFORE the reward was paid.

This, btw, is also an attack that can be used to de-anonymize DS Transactions. I explain:
Person A uses mixed coins to pay for something. The receiver of the Coins, Person B (or anyone else observing the Tx)B now sends an amount X to one of the input addresses of the DS-Tx in question.
Person A receives those funds as non-DS funds and in case he doesnt mix again but just use it somewhere, person B can now trade the Coins of which he knows they belong to the same person that made the DS-Tx in question.


And since the thread currently seems to be all about faster mixing, I got several proposals that might speed things up:

First of all, we take so much effort splitting our coins into different denominations and mix them just to eventually recombine them for a payment. But why? Technically, we do not have to recombine them for a payment.
For the DS Transaction, instead of just sending a single receiving address, the receiver could send a unlimited amount of addresses of the form of a public key seed similar to what hierarchical deterministic wallets use for watch-only copies that do not have any private keys or seeds thereof, but can calculate any amount of receiving addresses to which the private keys can be generated by the same private seed.
For now, i will call this an "HDPS", Hierarchical Deterministic Payment Stream.
How this would work in practice:
The receiver sends the sender the required payment information, which the sender enters into the client and then sends the money (via DS Tx). The difference is that instead of sending a receiving address, and HDPS public seed is sent (which will look similar to an address, a bunch of seemingly random numbers and letters).
Just as with addresses, the receiver would have the corresponding HDPS private seed, which can create all the private keys associated with all the addresses that are generated from all the public keys generated by the public seed.

The pros of this:
- the seeds would never show up on the blockchain
- an outside observer could, in most cases, not tell if this is a mixing round or a Payment, which makes tracing even harder
- the client could be programmed to make it even harder to tell the difference between Payment Tx or DS Tx pretty easily, making is almost always impossible to tell the difference.
- DS denominations won't have to be recombined in order to do a payment
- when mixing the incoming funds, no initial denomination creation transaction is required (therefore reducing bloat)
- there wouldn't be any leftovers when when starting the mixing process with HDPS-received funds
- the overpayment that is common with DS Transactions would go to the receiver instead of the miners. This is good because if incentivizes DASH acceptance (you will almost always get a little extra) [I admit this is not a huge pro, just listing it :)]


The cons:
I honestly don't see any besides the work required to implement it.

So how can this speed up DS mixing?
Well, it's possible to use HDPS' in an actual DS Tx, combining the 2. This would make is impossible for an outside observer to sell which funds are being mixed and which funds and being used for a payment in that one Tx.
It would provide extra liquidity for mixing and extra traceability protection for payments.

And I got another one... with HDPS making in unnecessary to every have non-denominated outputs and it being basically a big sea of denominations, one could mix coins with itself. Just imaging you make several denominations and a few are mixing at a time. So instead of always doing it via a masternode, the client could sometimes just throw in an extra round with a few of ones own coins. No other people needed, once your own coins are reasonably mixed, mixing them just with themselves wont look any different than an actual mixing round. The difference being that it takes close to no time to do it.
If you want to do 8 rounds and do 2 self-mixing rounds and 6 normal ones, thats already an about 25% speed increase. With only a single one thats already an around 12,5% increase.


Alright, this got longer than expected... again :)

Oh, and sorry for not having been that active in the DASH community within the last few months.[/QUOTE]
 
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Any I got another one... with HDPS making in unnecessary to every have non-denominated outputs and it being basically a big sea of denominations, one could mix coins with itself. Just imaging you make several denominations and a few are mixing at a time. So instead of always doing it via a masternode, the client could sometimes just throw in an extra round with a few of ones own coins. No other people needed, once your own coins are reasonably mixed, mixing them just with themselves wont look any different than an actual mixing round. The difference being that it takes close to no time to do it.
If you want to do 8 rounds and do 2 self-mixing rounds and 6 normal ones, thats already an about 25% speed increase. With only a single one thats already an around 12,5% increase.

I think that's a pretty cool idea
icon_thumbsup.gif
:smile:
 
I don't like temporary solutions. In the country where I live, people have been giving temporary solutions all the time, but these temporary solutions always last forever, becoming definitive, so look at all the mess around here :/

But for DASH today, there's the perspective of the definitive solution of being anonymous by default. So I see this LPs solution as something like a "bootstrap", to last only while anonimity by default is implemented. So it might indeed be a useful proposal.

Also, I have seen great ideas for possible solutions here, and that's what I find amazing and motivating about these proposal debates, it's like constant community brainstormings.
 
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This may simply be retardation... How long does your money just sit in your wallet? You paper money in the wallet in your pocket, I mean. What if, during all that time, it was getting anon? Why sit and stare at it?

It's kinda like people who can't understand charging an electric car while they sleep... Your car just sits there anyway, why shouldn't it be charging itself? Why be obsessed with standing there watching it?

You tell it to mix and then com back later. The fact that it can't be timing analyzed is part of the damn point. I wouldn't want it to go faster, because I'm smart enough to know what's wrong with that...

Some people can't handle anything more complicated than a fart, even when it doesn't require their attention.

I mixed 40 DASH in the time it took to write this message.

It's kinda like morons who modify TOR routes to be faster. They just eliminated 98% of the network and negated the whole point of using TOR... Too stupid to realize it.

I can mix an entire masternode worth of DASH in my sleep. Why would it need to be "faster" than that? Well, unless I'm dumb enough to sit there and stare at it instead of go do something else...

People this dumb don't have much money anyway...

I think the main problem is mixing up larger amounts. I have tried mixing up enough coins for a masternode and just given up after a few days after a lack of any substantial progress - hardly what I would call mixing Dash in my sleep. Even mixing up much smaller amounts can take quite a long time, depending on how many rounds you are mixing for. Obviously, at some times there will be more mixing than at others. By incentivising liquidity providers (hopefully temporarily) an effort can be made to reduce the chances that when someone tries to mix, there are not enough others participating.

I don't agree that anyone claiming the mixing takes too long is a moron. Is it possible that there exists an almost instantaneous way to anonymise coins in a trustless way? Probably. Just because it's not implemented in the current version of the Dash client, doesn't mean that it isn't theoretically possible. In my opinion it should be a priority to improve the speed of Dash anonymisation to be almost instantaneous - while retaining security, as not everyone has pre-mixed coins (think about those buying Dash for the first time). It is fairly easy to imagine situations in which people would want, or even need, access to anonymised funds quickly.

Is it possible to improve the speed of the current mixing process by incentivising liquidity providers? Yes. Sure, it's not trustless and therefore as a permanent solution is not a good one. I would like to think that there are members of the community willing to act as liquidity providers who can be trusted though. In terms of the larger amounts required for mixing, with the current system there needs to be some incentive because the fact that people are incentivised to run masternodes either solo or by pooling resources is in effect a disincentive to provide DM liquidity with those funds.

To sum up. I don't think wanting anonymisation to happen quickly means that people are stupid. Even if it did, stupid people can have big mouths, so they might well tell others of their bad experience mixing and persuade other potential Dash users not to bother.
 
Is this even going to be needed in the future, though? Evan said that there is not going to be a Darksend anymore, and that Dash will be anonymous by default. You know anything about that? You say long term solutions to liquidity issues, but if what Evan's saying is true, you're wasting your time, no?

Bumping this. Evan has already said that the problem is permanently solved in v13. Why spend all this time reinventing the wheel when the entire system (Darksend) is about to be deprecated anyway?
 
Spending anything on liquidity providers doesn't make any sense for me:
1) you can't really prove were they working or not
2) they will be mixing with each other because they can't distinguish themselves from "normal" users (otherwise there is no anonymity left) bloating blockchain for no good
3) $50 is way too much

1.) I think we can use trusted members of the community. Actually, of all of the people that have applied to be liquidity providers, many of them are trusted members, so we have our pick of people.
2.) What if we just have 2 liquidity providers instead? Mixing takes 3 participants to begin, therefore they will never be able to just mix with each other.
3.) Is it? If they spend $15-20 a month in fees (which is quite possible) and spend 3 hours a month monitoring it they're making about $10/ho, which is a normal rate in the US
 
Bumping this. Evan has already said that the problem is permanently solved in v13. Why spend all this time reinventing the wheel when the entire system (Darksend) is about to be deprecated anyway?

I think you're right, why shouldn't put too much effort into DS because it's going to be deprecated. That's why I thought the liquidity providers were a good idea for the short term until v13 is ready.
 
I think you're right, why shouldn't put too much effort into DS because it's going to be deprecated. That's why I thought the liquidity providers were a good idea for the short term until v13 is ready.

Since I haven't been that active in this community the last few months, can you update me regarding the DS replacement?
 
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