Latest / Monero Talk / Using Statistics to Improve Monero with Rucknium | EPI 323
Transcript
- Doug all right what's going on hold on i'm just i'm just tweeting this out jump on live with us now with Ruknium how's it going man i know uh so i guess we should explain to our listeners so Ruknium is with us live but he will not be using his own voice he has somebody else patchy 319 who will be using his voice as Ruknium types and uh yeah we're you know obviously we're we're the Monero community we completely uh we always respect people's privacy especially especially that of our devs our contributors we want to keep them protected and safe so uh no problem doing this i just hope we could kind of make make it flow so uh much appreciation to Ruknium for jumping on and doing this i believe this is his first Monero talk interview i don't think we've had him on Monero topia either he presented at Monero topia uh but i believe this is his first interview i guess that's my my first question patchy do you want to quickly introduce yourself though first before i before i ask the first question to Ruknium Patchy319 Yeah, absolutely. I'm Patchy319. I've mainly been in the Monero Discord community, not the Matrix or anything like that. I got to know MoneroBull over the past year, and he figured I would be a good choice to voice Ruchneum in this circumstance. Doug Very cool, very cool. The Monero community always finds a way. So yeah, first question to Ruknium, and I'm sure Patchy will be talking a little bit too on our own as we wait for Ruknium to type at times. Doug First question to Ruknium, is this the first time he's ever done an interview? If, you know, Monero interview or other, I believe so, right? Patchy319 Yep, this is the first time he's done an interview. Doug Very cool. I'm psyched to get the exclusive here, to get the first of Ruknium. Like I said, I know he presented at Monerotopia, obviously, last year. He presented remotely. I just went back and watched that. Doug We had a ton of content from that conference. So actually a lot of it kind of went under the radar. It wasn't wasn't fully it wasn't getting enough appreciation as it should. One of those presentations was from Ruknium. Doug I thought he did a fantastic job and went back and watch it. I recommend anybody who wants to kind of learn more of who Ruknium is and what he's all about to go back and watch that presentation from last year. Doug Ruknium, how would you describe your role in the Monero community in terms of what your your contributions are, the things you focus on? I think he's going to go ahead and type there. Anybody who's what we got. Doug We got 40 live viewers, guys like retweet. Let's get the word out. Let's get get a bunch of live listeners and watchers in here. We're live on X. We're live on YouTube. And you guys could ask your questions. Doug You can use the chat. We prefer you use the super chat feature that we built for these purposes. XMR chat dot com slash Monero talk. I will put it in the chat. XMR chat dot com slash Monero. Talk. I think I got all right. Doug I can't really see. Yeah, guys, go there. It's super easy. If you ever sent any any Monero transaction before in your life, you'll be able to figure out how to send us a super chat by that link and any super chats you send us, I will then read those aloud. Doug Hopefully, you know, there'll be questions geared towards Ruknium. Patchy319 All right, I'm an empirical microeconomist. That skill set allows me to use real data and theoretical analysis to improve Monero's privacy, resistance to attack, user and merchant experience, and security. Doug Very cool, very cool. So yeah, so basically, my, my understanding is, yeah, ruckium is, you know, he's, he specializes in probability and statistics. And he uses those skills to essentially analyze Monero. Doug I'm sorry, I'm sure he's analyzing other things as well. But what we're concerned about is his analysis of Monero. Why Monero? Why? Why did he get into Monero? I kind of I kind of remember it when it, remember him coming on the scene a couple of years ago. Doug And I was very excited, always excited to see new contributors come on the scene. And why did he choose Monero? Why did he get, why did he get involved? Why is he putting his brainpower, his statistical brainpower towards analyzing Monero? Doug We're waiting Patchy319 Oh, don't worry. He's typing quite a bit. He's still got more for your first question. So he works with other researchers in the Monero research lab to answer important questions that programmers in Monero ecosystem have. Patchy319 And he's looking at this like an economist. What caught my attention about Monero early was its fungibility. Let's go back to the Bitcoin white paper. Just the first page describes a protocol that could challenge the middleman of the traditional financial system. Patchy319 Satoshi proposed a system that would allow electronic payments without having a trusted third party involved. Satoshi may not have realized it at the time, but Bitcoin's limited privacy and therefore its lack of fungibility meant that middlemen would have to come back to haunt Bitcoin users. Patchy319 Today, online merchants have to give about 2% of their sales revenue to an electronic payment processor. That's a huge amount of waste. And it makes prices higher for consumers. The Visa credit cards company is one of the 20th largest corporations in the world. Patchy319 They are very successful and powerful. But if there were a viable alternative low cost electronic payment system, Visa would mostly go away and all the profits that it is earning would go back to consumers and merchants. Patchy319 Unfortunately, transparent blockchains are reproducing the same middleman system. Say I'm a merchant, an informed one. I know that if a transparent cryptocurrency, there's a chance that the coins are linked to a cryptocurrency theft and hack. Patchy319 I want to reject payments that are linked to thefts because my suppliers and employees won't acknowledge them either. I also know that I have the capability to check all the coins before I receive them. Patchy319 It is a specialist knowledge. Therefore, I outsource the tasks to chain analysis companies who check the coins for me. I pay them a fee, a middleman again. With a fungible currency like Monero, a merchant doesn't have to pay a middleman to check the history of the coins being used as payment. Patchy319 That was a mouthful. Yeah, it was a mouthful. Doug So basically, the fungibility is what attracted him to Monero, basically saying that Monero is what Bitcoin was meant to be, not to put words into into ruckmiums, into ruckmiums out there. But yeah, the lack of fungibility in Bitcoin leads to essentially an inefficient system, where outsiders are able to analyze the chain. Doug And those using Bitcoin are sometimes essentially required by the state to analyze the chain because they can. Whereas with Monero, that option doesn't doesn't really exist. We'll get into that, though, because I want to talk to things. Doug Monero can be analyzed, but we'll we'll get into later. But sticking on kind of his his genesis story in Monero. So fungibility is what attracted him to Monero. Was he previously in Bitcoin? Was he like a Bitcoiner that made his way into Monero? Doug Or was Monero his his first crypto? And guys, as ruckmium types out his answer, which patchy will read, please like and retweet, get the word out. I know this is a little awkward here, the way we're doing it. Doug But who cares, guy, this is this is what we do here in in Monero land in Monero talk. We don't play by the rules, we don't make content that's necessarily easily digestible, or, you know, super, super clicky, right? Doug This is what we do here. And we're doing it now today for these reasons, because ruckmium wanted to remain anonymous. And we completely obviously completely respect that for it for his safety and the safety of the Monero projects. Doug So we're going to put up with it. But in the meantime, in please, please like and share and retweet and think about the questions you might want to ask and you can send us a super chat. And we will read it out loud. Patchy319 Yeah, it's important to highlight the work he's doing because we want Monero to be secure so we can keep using it and have that private form of payment. I think you summarized what he said perfectly, though, and he's typing out his next response, I'm sure. Doug Okay, still typing that out. Patchy319 I imagine so I doesn't have his typing indicator on. We stopped him. No, no, no, I just mean like anytime he types it doesn't show it like it was for Monero bull. Although I haven't matrix that much. Patchy319 Okay, he's he's got something now. So I've been aware of cryptocurrency for a long time as an observer, Monero wasn't the first on my radar. Other coins have cost and benefits different from Monero. For example, Monero is heavy for node runners and users. Patchy319 Other coins aren't as heavy. Monero has a lot of bandwidth use, even just to sync a wallet. Yeah, it's like, what's the current blockchain at? It's a lot. Doug the size. Yeah, I don't know. That's definitely one of the criticisms that's often thrown at Monero. Maybe a follow -up question to that. What does he see as the greatest criticisms of Monero? What are the things that he thinks needs to be improved in Monero? Doug Obviously, he was always focused on ring signatures and fixing those. The full chain membership proofs will be coming along hopefully to completely eradicate ring signatures and the need for them to be improved. Doug But just in general, what are the types of things that Rockneum feels Monero needs improving of? Patchy319 So it's at about 200 gigs for an unpruned node, he said, and I'm sure he's typing that now. Doug right so that sounds like one of his largest criticisms of Monero just the the ease of the ease of running a full node given given the large size although I mean to date that hasn't really been a problem but yeah I would like to hear his overall thoughts on kind of his list of criticisms of Monero Patchy319 Yeah, 200 gigs isn't that bad right now because storage is a lot cheaper but he does have a response now. User experience is bad compared to other coins. Users need to wait minutes to sync a wallet if they don't open it frequently. Patchy319 With a transparent blockchain, sync is basically instant because it's a transparent database lookup and he says developers are working to improve it. Um, could you elaborate on that? Oh he's got his typing indicator back now. Doug Well, I mean, I know that that's a good one. Obviously sync time is an issue Given the way minute Monero works you essentially have to count any time you open up your your wallet if it's a pure wallet This you have to scan the blockchain since the last time you opened it to see if any transactions were sent to you Patchy319 Yeah, and that happens even if you have your own node hosted locally. If you just don't have the client open for a while, you have to recheck with your node. Doug So usability is up there as an issue and obviously these are things that are being worked on. Anything else that really sticks out in his mind as things he would criticize Monero? Patchy319 So a recent improvement to the sync speed there was a view tag feature added which increased the decryption speed on the wallet side on the last hard fork of Monero. Okay he's throwing that up there. Patchy319 And yeah he's got he's got more he's typing. And Serphalis plus Jamtus I hope Seraphis and Jamtus there we go was supposed to have a new type of view key that would allow for fast sync without privacy downsides but that's up in the air still with full chain membership proofs which may be implemented instead. Patchy319 Now what is a full chain membership proof? Maybe elaborate on that? Doug Yeah, we can get into that. I mean, that's a whole big topic. I kind of want to go down the road and we'll get to that. Before we get to that, let's kind of like stay in the introductory zone here. What are some of the things that Rockneum has done for Monero? Doug I know he's done quite a bit in terms of statistical analysis, like I said, analyzing rank signatures, trying to prove those, trying to prove decoy selection. But yeah, if he could kind of list out the things that he has contributed to Monero just so those listening in can fully appreciate who we're talking to here today. Patchy319 Yeah, absolutely. I know he listed in our little private chat here some some things he did. Here it is. Some items he's worked on. He's worked on the discovery of mining pool configuration. Sped up average time to finish transaction confirmation by 60 seconds. Patchy319 Privacy vulnerability report to Exodus Wallet about nonstandard fees, which was successfully resolved. He wrote a small paper about the formula for accuracy of guessing Monero real spins using fungibility defects. Patchy319 He's identified privacy reducing nonstandard transaction fees. Analysis of privacy impact of mordinals, the Monero NFT platform. And he had the Monero Topio 2023 presentation that you mentioned a statistical research agenda for Monero. Patchy319 And finally, the statistical privacy analysis of P2 pool Coinbase outputs and ring signatures. So those are all dealing with statistics. Doug Yeah, the one that sticks out to me is the increase in speed. Can he describe a little bit more what was done there and how he came across that and that improvement? Patchy319 It was an accidental discovery. The best kind of discovery. That's awesome. I'm sure he's elaborating more. Yeah, I'm sure he's elaborate. Yeah. Doug God damn it, Ruckio, I just wish I could talk to you, but I understand. You know, I've gotten used to this, though, with Monero people. Patchy319 Is this the first interview you've done like this, where someone else voices? Doug Yeah, I believe so. There's obviously people in Monero that I've never spoken to, had any voice conversations with, only text and DM. Anarchio, for example, who's built XMR Bazaar for us. We never had a phone conversation or anything. Doug We just DM. For a guy like me, it's a little difficult to get used to. I like being able to get on a phone, talk things out, but I've become accustomed to it and used to it, so it's okay. But yeah, I'd love to hear the rest of his answer there because that was a pretty big improvement that... Patchy319 Yeah so he was collecting mempool data because he wanted to analyze possible ways to improve the transaction fee market and he needed to see what people were paying fees for and when based on mempool congestion conditions. Patchy319 So the queue right and then he noticed something strange in the data. Transactions were not being confirmed in the block after they were broadcasted. They were confirmed two blocks later. Doug And so now I guess he's describing what the fix, the fix was that he made. Patchy319 So he shared the strange finding with others like such one Doug Suck Patchy319 Second one. Thank you. Minding pull operators were only updating their block templates once the previous block had been mined instead of continuously. Doug OK. Patchy319 Yeah, he's typing more. Once I confirmed this finding, many volunteers contacted mining pool operators to change their configuration. Doug So it wasn't really a protocol level change that we got the increase. Patchy319 Yeah, it seems like how the miners had it configured. Doug Very cool, very cool. And cool that he kind of just stumbled upon that, which is maybe perhaps a lesson to be learned by everybody out there. You know, there's, you could be the next person that stumbles upon an improvement for Venera. Doug So don't assume that it's already being done and things are already as efficient as working efficiently as possible. There's always, always room for, for improvements. I guess another, another topic maybe is cryptographic flaws. Doug He had brought that up in his presentation that he did in Monero, Monero topia, bugs that have been found some kind of, you know, infamous bugs that have been found in the past in various cryptocurrencies. Doug Can he give us any insight into the cryptographic bug that was found in Monero that allowed for unlimited supply? I think he's kind of, kind of well versed on that. Just his, you know, his thoughts, his thoughts on that. Doug Let's see. Not to scare anybody listening. This is, this is something that happened many, many years ago and to my understanding was effectively caught before it was ever used. And it's, and it's was discovered in such a way where it was proven that it wasn't taken advantage of a bug that would have allowed for basically unlimited supply to be produced for, for Monero, an inflation bug. Patchy319 It shows how important it is to review the mathematics and review the code. As the importance of Monero increases, the amount of scrutiny that new cryptography must receive must increase. Doug And I guess maybe he's saying more, but in the meantime, I'll start to come up with my follow up question, which is basically, what would he kind of put the odds at of another inflation bug ever being discovered in Monero? Doug I mean, this is something that's, you know, one of the major criticisms of Monero is that you can't as easily audit Monero compared to Bitcoin. Obviously, you know, you can audit Monero, but it's not as obvious. Doug You can't look at the blockchain and add up all the values to determine that all the, you know, Monero is there. Auditing is taking place every time a transaction is sent. The nodes essentially are making sure there is no double spent being sent using things like bulletproofs so you can audit the code and obviously hope that the code is working as intended and the cryptography is working as intended. Doug But how does he feel overall in terms of the security of the Monero protocol and whether or not a hidden inflation bug is something that's likely or not? I mean, obviously, I don't think he thinks it's likely, but is him being a statistician, what would he put the odds at? Doug Does he think there's a chance that there could be another inflation bug in Monero? Patchy319 Yeah, so it's hard to put a probability on that, a fatal protocol flaw like that, but the more expert eyes on the mathematics and the code, the lower the chances. He also mentioned that the with the full chain membership proof, CAPI and NERV is leading to a lot of reviews and a lot of different changes in the protocol. Patchy319 So XMR is being spent to have these review changes and an analysis of the code. And the idea of putting a probability on a fatal flaw like that gets into the philosophy of probability, which is something that can just happen once. Doug hopefully that is the case here. Any recommendation or advice, things that he has to say about that topic? Obviously, like you're saying, Kabaya Nerve, Luke Parker is developing full chain membership proofs. Doug And with that is additional auditing that's happening. But does he see a need for deeper audits of Monero as it exists today? Or does he feel as though Monero has been thoroughly audited throughout the years? Doug Have there been enough eyes on Monero's cryptography and its code? Patchy319 typing. Doug We have 156 live viewers, guys like and retweet. Getting many people as we can in here to witness the first interview of Rockneam. As close as it gets. A long time contributor to Monero. Not super long time. Doug I think he came, I think he started contributing in like around 2020. I could be wrong, I could be wrong about that. But yeah, not super long time, but he's contributed quite a bit. And we definitely owe him a big round of applause. Doug We owe Rockneam a big round of applause, much more than that. Which is another question that we can get to. How is Rockneam being funded? Is he just kind of working out of the kindness of his heart? I think he's done CCSs and he gets funding along the way. Doug But I want to ask about that as well after he answers this question. Patchy319 Yeah, so he's pushed Cabba Nerve hard on this when he suggested the FCMP, the full chain membership proof. Yeah, last year he's a friend of Ruckum and full chain memberships are hard to get or impossible to get into the protocol without very rigorous review because of the possible risks. Patchy319 And he's been working on Monero about since 2021 publicly. And he thinks Cabba Nerve would have pushed for the reviews anyways, but there was a need to bring it up ASAP with the FCMP edition. Doug And how about like the protocol outside of full chain membership proofs? Does he have any thoughts on that in terms of how well it's been audited and reviewed? Obviously, things like even like confidential transactions themselves. Doug Obviously, you know, that was created created by some some well -known cryptographers, Bitcoiners meant for Bitcoin implemented in Monero. But yet even things outside of full chain membership proofs. Doug Other, you know, other parts of the protocol. You know, what's what's his take on that in terms of how well it's been audited and reviewed? Patchy319 The longer something is in a production environment, the less likely it is to have a flaw. So where Monero's been a project for so long, he thinks that anyone could attack it and get benefit, like free XMR. Patchy319 So if someone were to do that, they would have done it or just contributed to the project. So if someone were to do that, they Doug Okay. So obviously, Rockneum has always are kind of mostly focused on, like we're saying, ring signatures. I think that's kind of what he's most known for is analyzing ring signatures and how decoy selection works and making sure we're using the best decoy selection algorithm we possibly can use to disallow those that want to analyze the Monero transactions to do so, to gain any insight, any heuristics. Doug But with ring signatures hopefully being removed and full chain membership proofs being implemented, does that then kind of eradicate that whole issue? Or is there still some potential heuristics that could be gathered, even with full chain membership proofs implemented in place of ring signatures? Patchy319 So he's going to type a response to that. But what I had said previously is he's talking about the bounty system, where on GitHub the code is available. And if you find a flaw like that, if you find a big flaw in Monero, it's important for there to be an incentive for people to fix it. Patchy319 And in terms of the funding, the community crown funding system is funding his research. And he'd like to thank all the donors. In the past month, he's been researching ways to improve Monero network privacy thanks to the funding. Doug Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I'd like to I'd like to hear more on that once he I guess answers the last question I lobbed at him Patchy319 Yeah, full chain membership proofs, which could be activated as soon as next year, would be a huge improvement over ring signatures. Instead of every transaction input having 16 possible ancestors out of one real ancestor, any transaction in the blockchain history could be an ancestor. Patchy319 There would still be ways for wallet developers like Exodus, for instance, to accidentally distinguish their transactions by using non -standard fees, for instance. We are working on that issue. Doug Okay. Are there other things other than just non -standard fees? Like what are the heuristics that we need to worry about? Assuming ring signatures is eliminated, full membership proofs are implemented. Doug What are the different ways a transaction can be analyzed and differentiated from other transactions? Like kind of what's left with ring signatures no longer existing so you can't analyze, you know, decoys, there's no eval, sieve attacks. Doug He just mentioned non -standard fees. Are there other things that still kind of stick out in how people use or how people will use Monero even with full chain membership proofs that could differentiate one transaction from another? Doug And to be clear to anybody kind of listening in, I think even Rakhneem would agree, Monero isn't really traceable in any way but with ring signatures there were some weaknesses that could be taken advantage of that would give some potential statistical insight, not in a deterministic way at all, but some potential statistical insight into who a sender may be. Doug If you had had additional data from perhaps like exchanges that were involved, there were potentially ways to analyze a transaction just in terms of the sender. We're not talking about revealing amounts at all. Doug There's been no, you know, as far as we know there's no way to gain any insight into that. We're not talking about breaking stealth addresses, right, which is like analyzing who the receiving wallet is. Doug We're just talking about this one particular arm of Monero which is obfuscating the sender which we now, which anybody listening should be well aware of full chain membership proofs which will be implemented which will hopefully completely eradicate that issue. Doug But what I'm trying to ask Rakhneem, are there any other things that a chain analysis company could even look at when analyzing Monero? Is there anything left to even analyze? Rakhneem had mentioned non -standard fees so I guess saying when you send a transaction if you're using kind of a custom fee so you could kind of perhaps stick out in that regard. Doug Is there anything else that could make a user of Monero potentially stick out? Patchy319 Yeah. So when I was looking at his GitHub last night, he has these different graphs with statistical probabilities of the research he's done. And fees are a big one. But there is also some other values that can be used like TX extra, which can be used to embed information and distinguish transactions. Patchy319 But even if we eliminate TX info, a wallet developer could accidentally or deliberately embed info into signatures. I believe TX extra is used by the mordinals, right? The NFTs. Doug Yeah, it was being used by that, but I thought it's no changes had made to basically eliminate. Patchy319 out. Doug Okay. It being used in that way. Got it. But I think you know, I guess what he's saying is no matter what you do, there's still there's still ways to put data into the blockchain if you wanted to go out if you want to go out of your way to do so Patchy319 Transactions can be distinguished by their number of inputs and outputs. If that number is restricted, then it would improve transaction uniformity, but user experience would be impacted negatively. Doug So non -standards fees, transaction extra, and the number of inputs and outputs, are those the kind of the three main ways in which a transaction can still be distinguishable? Or are there other things as well? Patchy319 Um, we had custom unlock time, but in August the new release prevented new custom unlock time from being relayed by nodes. So progress is being made. So that was another thing, custom unlock time, but it's no longer a thing, no longer an issue. Doug And that was basically, for those listening in, that was a way for you to send a transaction and set when the transaction would actually be released, unlocked. And giving people that ability sounded like good in theory is a nice little feature to have, but it was a way to, unfortunately, if you're using that feature, you were probably unique and that could stick out as a user. Doug Is that basically what he's saying there? And then that feature no longer exists. Patchy319 Yeah, that feature no longer exists and that is exactly what he said. Okay. Doug What else could he tell us about the inputs and outputs and what could essentially be done there and I guess the direction he sees things headed in terms of fixing that component of the protocol so that nobody does accidentally make themselves stick out. Patchy319 So the big thing he is rooting for is FCMP. That's going to be where our network private. Yeah. Full chain membership proofs that are going to be the next big thing for network privacy, and he can talk a lot about that. Patchy319 He says. Doug Okay. Patchy319 If you're using full chain membership proofs, the anonymity set of a single transaction would be approximately the whole transaction history of Monero. That is true if an observer only has access to the blockchain data, an adversary with resources could have access to more data than that. Patchy319 That's one of the reasons I've started to research ways to improve Monero's network privacy. When devices are communicating through the internet, the origin and destination of information is linked with IP addresses. Patchy319 By default, IP addresses can be tied to entities to the identities of people, and if an adversary had access to network information and the Monero protocol made no effort to obfuscate the network information, all the effort to anemone the blockchain data could go to waste. Patchy319 Monero has already good network privacy. I will talk about a few ways that it might be improved. Doug Awesome. Yeah, so he's talking about network level privacy. Obviously, we have dandelion plus plus. My understanding was that that does a pretty good job of obfuscating your IP address or the IP address of where a Monero transaction is propagating from. Doug I guess he'll talk about that. Yes, that is exactly right. Patchy319 Exactly what he just, he just pasted this. In 2020, Monero implemented Dandelion++. It was originally designed in 2017 by seven researchers who wanted to improve Bitcoin privacy. It's a two stage protocol. Patchy319 In the first phase, called the STEM phase, the node that is the origin of the transaction sends the transaction to a single peer node. Then that peer node sends it to a single other peer node. Then again, there is a random probability that one of the nodes in this chain will be seen in the fluff phase. Patchy319 When the STEM phase transaction reaches a fluff phase node, the node broadcasts the transaction widely to all its peers. So the ripple in the network spreads out from the fluffing node, not the origin node. Patchy319 Dandelion++ does a good job of hiding the true IP address origin of the transaction. And you may ask, why go through all this trouble to design and implement Dandelion++ when Monero could just use the Tor network, which hides user IP addresses by default? Patchy319 The reason is CIA. I don't know what CIA stands for, but I bet he's about to say it. Not the CIA that you are probably thinking of. In the information security field, there is a set of criteria known by its CIA acronym, confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Patchy319 Your information security system needs to have all these three elements to be good. In Monero, confidentiality is accomplished through its privacy technologies. Integrity answers the question of whether the data has been improperly altered, accidentally or maliciously. Patchy319 Monero's proof of work blockchain and cryptographic signatures take care of its integrity. Now the availability. Can users get the data they need? Putting the entire Monero network on Tor fails the availability test. Patchy319 In the past few years, the Tor network has experienced several denial of service attacks. Someone has overloaded the Tor network with excessive data requests, slowing down the whole network to a crawl. Patchy319 Tor is already slow, but during the attacks, it got even worse. Say that you put the Monero network on Tor. Then when the Tor network goes down because of an attack, Monero goes down too, which is not good at all for a payment network. Patchy319 Besides the bandwidth available on Tor is limited. If Monero transaction volume increases a lot, Tor wouldn't be able to handle it. And some governments block their residents from using Tor anyway. So you need a good network privacy for Monero on the clear net. Patchy319 And that's what Dandelion++ does a great job of. It hides the origin IP address of the transaction. Doug I love that. I never heard it explained that way in terms of why we're using that versus using Tor. That's fantastic. So are there concerns that, you know, how do we avoid Dandelion++ from being attacked in similar ways to which Tor itself has been attacked? Doug This could just lead to so many questions. Yeah, there is. Patchy319 Yeah, I mean, that was a very detailed explanation, and it helps me understand that. There is one important exception to the great job that Dandelion++ does. First I have to explain how Dandelion++ chooses the peer nodes to send to the stem phase transaction to. Patchy319 Monero nodes basically have two type of connections to peer nodes, incoming and outgoing. From the names, it sounds like data flows in one direction only, but that's not the case. They are named incoming and outgoing because of which node initiates the connection. Patchy319 If my node reaches out and connects to another node, my node considers then an outgoing connection. If another node reaches out and connects to me, my node considers that an incoming connection. Outgoing and incoming connections have different security concerns. Patchy319 When my node chooses a peer node to connect to, my node controls that choice, so it's less likely to be a spied node or something. When another node connects to mine, it could be anyone, including a chain analysis company. Patchy319 Dandelion++ stem phase works in a way that you have to choose to only send transactions to outgoing or incoming connections. The Dandelion++ researchers designed a protocol to send stem phase transactions through outgoing connections only. Patchy319 Remember, the stem phase is the phase that protects user privacy. This creates a problem for many users who are running a node at home behind a router. By default, most routers block incoming connections. Patchy319 If you run a node at home, you may have seen this message in your Monero node logs. No incoming connections check firewall routers to allow port 18 .0 .80. Users can manually open the peer port on their router, but many don't. Patchy319 It's possible that a majority of Monero nodes do not have incoming connections enabled. There's a lot of ISPs now that you can't port forward connections on, so that can be part of the reason to it. I know my ISP is one of those, so I have to do an SSH tunnel. Patchy319 But why does this matter for Dandelion++ privacy? If my node has incoming connections, I am relaying stem phase transactions that other nodes send me and my own transactions. The nodes that I am sending the stem phase transactions to cannot tell if stem phase transactions I send them are my transactions or the transactions from other nodes. Patchy319 So that's something important to do. If you port forward, then it obfuscates it a little bit. Now if I have no incoming connections because my router blocks my port, I will only be sending my own transactions to the stem phase. Patchy319 Other nodes can tell if I block incoming connections. If I am connected to a spy node and send it a stem phase transaction, it would figure out that my node was the true source of the transaction, and that is a problem. Doug So what is the, uh, is there a potential solution there other than users just manually, you know, opening up, opening up the port so they can have incoming as well as outgoing, or is there, there are other things that can be done to, to fix that across the board. Patchy319 So, he says there's a possible solution coming to that, but I think a big point from that is that if you are hosting a Monero note right now, you should have that port forwarded for ideal privacy. And it looks like he said something else with this. Patchy319 In 2022, some researchers published a paper that described an alternative to Dandelion plus plus, keeping with the small plant naming convention, it's called the Clover. So Dandelion Clover, according to the papers simulations, the privacy of Clover is about equal to the privacy of Dandelion plus plus, but the protocol has a major design difference, which is that Clover sends stem phase transactions along both incoming and outgoing connections. Patchy319 So it wouldn't have this problem of nodes having closed ports and transactions being potentially identifiable from that. The downside is that the analysis in the Clover paper wasn't as thorough as the Dandelion plus plus paper. Patchy319 Clover has mostly been used in simulations instead of stranger theoretical. Clover mostly used simulation results instead of stranger theoretical results from mathematical theorems. Results of a simulation can depend on the specific numerical parameters that you choose. Patchy319 The next step could be further analysis by me or someone else in the Monero research lab to make sure that Clover is up to Monero privacy standards. Then after thorough review, Clover could be implemented to eliminate the closed ports privacy issue. Doug Beautiful, that's exciting to hear. So Clover could potentially replace Stand Align plus plus and solve that issue. Patchy319 Yep. Doug Fantastic. What will Rachneum be presenting on at Monerotopia in Mexico City? Obviously, he's going to be doing it remotely and anonymously. Does he know what his topic will be? Patchy319 Let's see. He's also working on improving the bandwidth usage of the Fluff phase for Dandelion++ at the moment with Boog 900. The title of my talk is Hard Data on Banking the Unbanked through Cryptocurrency. Doug hmm very cool so I guess he he's he's done analysis of how crypto whether or not it's actually helped you know bank the unbanked Patchy319 he's got a preview coming okay digital payments are increasingly important for accessing the necessities of modern life but not everyone can get credit cards and bank accounts in theory cryptocurrencies can fill the digital payment gap for people on the margins of the financial system but in practice do people lack traditional bank accounts actually tend to use cryptocurrency for payments according to new high quality data the answer may be yes the u .s federal reserve 2021 2022 2023 survey of household economics and decision making shed and the european central bank study of 2022 on space their acronyms right so shed in space for america and europe data provide a large sample rigorous sampling design and a wealth of detailed socioeconomic data their survey questions about cryptocurrency distinguish purchasing cryptocurrency as an investment and instead using it as a payment method for goods so he's going through preliminary regression analysis on people who lack bank accounts and that they're much more likely to use cryptocurrency as a means of payment in the united states and europe and but in the u .s data other measures of financial marginalization tell the same story being rejected for credit purchasing a money order from a non -bank source cashing a check out some place other than a bank taking a payday loan taking a pawn shop or auto title loan experiencing discrimination in banking or loan application and getting a tax refund advance are all positively associated with using cryptocurrency as a form of means of payment so that's kind of long but i think how we would summarize that is if you do those behaviors you're more likely to use cryptocurrency as a actual payment source Doug Very cool. Very cool. And we could expect him to do that analysis for the Monerotopia conference coming up, which, by the way, anybody tuning in, Monerotopia conference is happening in November in Mexico City. Doug Rachneum will not physically be there as far as we know. I don't know, maybe, maybe he will be among us and then he'll, I'll go ahead and do his, his talk remotely. And we won't know whether or not he was actually there with us, but there'll be many who will be there among us. Doug A lot of, you know, various devs from the community, like Luke Parker, we were talking about, Justin Berman, a bunch of, a bunch of different people. You can check out Monerotopia .com. We have various projects that we'll be participating. Doug Obviously Monero, it's primarily Monero focused, but we've opened up the stage as in years past to other privacy tech projects, mostly so we can kind of air them out in the open and compare them to Monero, the pros and cons of what other privacy tech tech projects are doing. Doug XANO is one, Fiero, BasicSwap. We even have Pirate Chain, Wow Narrow, and kind of the list, the list is growing. So if you haven't already grabbed your tickets, come on down to Mexico City. It's an amazing time. Doug We did it at the same venue last year. It was epic and a ton of content came out of it. Reach out to us if you want to participate in any way, Monerotopia at protonmail .com. If you want to come and be a speaker or whatever, whatever it is, you want to come DJ, reach out. Doug But definitely grab your tickets and come down there. It is an amazing scene. And the best part, I think, is just being able to kind of rub elbows with fellow Monero digital cash enthusiasts, hang out with them. Doug That's another tremendous part of the conference, is we have a marketplace built into the conference that accepts Monero. Dozens of vendors, almost like 100 vendors that will be there, local vendors accepting Monero. Doug So you can literally come down and live off of Monero for the four days. So we don't just talk about the technology. We actually use it and we use it for the purposes that it was created for, which is allowing people to transact peer -to -peer without censorship. Doug So it's super cool how to shill it, how to get the word out, and very excited that Ruknium will be presenting again, remotely. And like I said, for all we know, he'll be among us, he'll be there. Another question. Doug What does Ruknium think about other aspects to Monero's tech in addition to its privacy? So we've mostly been talking about its privacy tech. We're talking about full chain membership proofs soon being implemented, which will replace ring signatures. Doug There's obviously confidential transactions. There's stealth addresses. There's network level privacy that we get from Dandelion++. But how about other aspects of Monero? So not not its privacy tech, but other elements like its dynamic blocks. Doug What are his thoughts on or its ASIC resistant miners? Just curious about his thoughts about the other aspects of Monero's tech and things that he perhaps, I don't know, finds notable or that he admires about Monero outside of the fact that it is fungible. Doug He spoke about his concern with Monero scalability in terms of its nodes, the transactions being very heavy. But does he think Monero is scalable on chain because of technologies like dynamic block size? Doug So just overall looking to get his opinion on Monero outside of its privacy tech and its fungibility, but these other technologies that it has implemented. Patchy319 Yeah, I think it would be a good idea to get a copy of this, like, transcript of his words, his exact words. I'm reading them mostly word for word, but I just, I think it would be a good idea to attach that at the end here. Patchy319 Okay. So people can review that. I'm sure we can send that to you. Okay. Okay, go ahead. Doug Oh, no, no, you go ahead. I was gonna say, are there things that you missed that he had typed that you didn't get to read? Patchy319 No, no. I just mean I try and rephrase it a little bit for flow. Because he types very detailed, right? He's typing very detailed, and I try and rephrase some of it for flow. For the most part, I'm reading it line for line. Patchy319 All right, go for it. All right. So he said this in the 2023, Monerotopia, that Monero needs more research attention to its dynamic block size and fee policy. I have not seen papers that specifically analyze it. Patchy319 I like the dynamic block size. I'm a big blocker. The Lightning Network on Bitcoin has not performed up to the promises of its proponents. It has poor privacy, reliability, and scalability. Doug So that's interesting that he's a big blocker because he does also, like he says, he perhaps something that he's concerned about, or maybe that's the wrong word, but something that he pointed out as an issue with Monero is the fact that, you know, it's transactions are large, right? Doug Given its privacy, the technology that it uses fundamentally has heavier transactions. Large, larger blocks lead to heavier transactions as well. So how does he kind of weight weigh those things? So he's he's a proponent of dynamic blocks, he likes that Monero can scale on chain using dynamic with ever and ever large increasing blocks, given the amount of transactions that are required of the network. Doug But how does he then weigh that against his concern with the fact that transactions, that blocks may get too large, and may make it difficult for people to to run notes. Patchy319 Yeah, so with Monero we have like test network, stress network. He's working on the stress network, which is a empirical test of dynamic block sizes. So it stresses the blockchain out on that network. Patchy319 And he's taken action with others to put it to the test. StressNet is a fork of Monero's testnet where we are testing how Monero nodes respond to huge transaction volumes so that bottlenecks can be discovered and corrected. Patchy319 I create a little app with real -time charts showing StressNet stats at monitor .stressnet .net. So that's monitor .stressnet .net. You can go to it right now if you want and view real -time charts of the StressNet. Patchy319 Now, the way the StressNet was made is that after the suspected black marble transaction spam earlier this year, Spackle announced that he would like to form a group to create a StressNet. I think you've talked with Spackle about his work analyzing the dynamic block size algorithm. Patchy319 No one took him up on the invitation, so the idea stalled. Later, I started to analyze the best defense against a black marble attack, basically figuring out ways to discourage or defeat the black marble transactions that reduce user privacy. Patchy319 The two main ways to do that are to increase the transaction fee, which make it more expensive to create block spam transactions or you increase the ring size, which means there are more decoy slots that black marbles cannot fill. Patchy319 I found that storing more data from larger ring signatures on Monero nodes is actually pretty cheap, even with an estimated network size of 10 ,000 nodes. So it seemed better to increase ring size instead of transaction fees if there were a hard fork in the near future to discourage another black marble attack. Patchy319 After I presented my analysis, Celsta, who's a long -time Monero developer, warned that some nodes had trouble with processing large transaction volume during the black marble spam, not really with storing the data, but verifying transactions as they arrived, high bandwidth usage, et cetera. Patchy319 To debug those issues and discover bottlenecks, you need to reproduce the environment that causes them. So then I teamed up with Sparkle to revive the idea of a stress net to create a testing ground for Monero developers to fix the problems that nodes experienced during the black marble spam. Patchy319 And I see here you have the website up. We asked volunteers to run nodes in the stress net. We got to about 40 nodes on the network, then we started spamming. So you can run a Monero node yourself for the stress net if you'd like. Patchy319 Even have a Reddit post up right now there. And he'll give an analogy. The purpose of the stress net was to find and solve problems, but not to test Monero's theoretical maximum transactions per second. Patchy319 It was like going into an attic that you've never been in before to clean out cobwebs. The purpose was not to measure the height of the attic ceiling. Still, I'm sure you want to know how high we poked our heads into the attic. Patchy319 The maximum transaction volume we reached was 40 transactions per second. We ran into problems pretty early on the stress net. Basically, there were some default limits on how node synced blocks that do not work well with large blocks. Patchy319 So those limits are being changed. There have been other things like the stress net. There have been other things like that as the stress net has continued. Zero X F F C is a newish Monero developer and has helped fix code that was causing problems on the stress net, I assume. Patchy319 Spackle, right? He wrote a summary that you have up right there. And the stress net is continuing for another month. People can join if they want. The instructions are at that GitHub link that you have up there. Patchy319 If anyone wants to join and make a Monero stress note, it's gonna be up for another month. KATHRYN forecast this morning... forecast this morning... Doug very cool, very cool. Just to the question at hand though, how does he weigh his love for big blocks with his concern that it becomes more difficult to run full nodes? What's kind of his simple answer around that? Doug Because that's often a criticism of big blockers that the network won't be able to easily run full nodes. Just how does he weigh those two things and rationalize it? Why is he okay with being a big blocker if he knows that it comes with the sacrifice potentially of being able to run full nodes easily? Doug We're getting from radioactive. This is so good. Thanks for the presentation. Awesome. Yeah, I'm glad people appreciate this. Obviously, it's not as smooth as some of our other interviews because we're talking to a proxy here. Doug But it's obviously valuable information and we greatly appreciate Rakhneem doing this. And we greatly appreciate everything he's done for Monero in terms of contributing as I've said before. So very happy to have him here spending time with us today. Patchy319 So, economics is all about trade -offs. You accept something bad to achieve something good. Right now, Monero is doing fine. The blockchain is smaller than the new Call of Duty game. That's a good metric. Patchy319 There are some large games out there, especially with hardware getting cheaper and better constantly. Thank you. Type in more. Doug Guys, if you're, if you're just tuning in, although we're, we're nearing the end of the interview here, we're interviewing ruck neem, but we're doing it through patchy three one nine, who's the voice of ruck neem today. Doug And he's reading ruck neem's responses as he types them out, uh, so he can maintain his anonymity. Patchy319 Yep. So with full chain membership proofs, the potential bottleneck I'm most concerned with is transaction verification time, which uses the CPU. If there is a large transaction volume, nodes working on slower hardware can fall behind. Patchy319 Now, I guess that that's pretty decent concern because right now for my Monero node personally, I just use an older computer. So if it's going to be more CPU intensive, then that's something we'd have to tackle. Patchy319 I know some people run their node on a VPS. I don't know if you can run it on a Raspberry Pi anymore, but I know some people have done that. Doug We have our Monero Nodo project. That's a plug and play custom Monero Nodo hardware that we developed, MoneroNodo .com. So basically what he's saying, it's obviously cost benefit. So he's OK with the costs that come along with big blocks. Doug And I guess he's saying, as of now, that cost isn't too great when you compare it to things like the size of current video games. Does he overall see it becoming an issue in the future? Or obviously, I guess, does he believe that Nielsen's law and things like that will keep pace with the growth of the blockchain itself to the point where it won't be a problem? Doug Nielsen's law and Moore's law, these are things that Francisco always talks about. And he uses analogies like that comparing Monero's size to whether or not it will be a problem in the future, given how fast hardware is developing and how fast internet bandwidth is improving. Doug I assume he shares a similar viewpoint with Francisco that long term, he doesn't see that being an issue. Patchy319 So, frankly, I think cryptocurrency will stay a niche for the foreseeable future. Maybe not a popular opinion, but Monero is an important lifeline for some people around the world. I still type in. Doug OK. So I guess he's saying he doesn't see explosive growth overnight to the point where it'll be difficult to run full nodes. Patchy319 I mean, even if you compare it to like a theory, isn't a theory about like one or two terabytes or more? The hardware will keep up with it like 10 or 20 years. Hard to say after that. Is that what he's saying? Patchy319 Yeah, hardware is going to keep up with the future use of cryptocurrency for about 10 or 20 years. But after that, he wouldn't really know. Doug Does he think there will be obviously improvements within the protocol itself as well that will add to the efficiency of transactions? Obviously I have to assume he believes that's the case, I mean he himself discovered an efficiency but is that something he's banking on as well that will figure out how to make transactions more efficient in terms of size? Patchy319 So Moore's law and those sort of hardware laws, in his opinion, are about increasing capacity. They're not really laws. They're historical trends. So it's just a trend we've seen over time that everything gets better and better to a point. Patchy319 It's not really a law. It's just a trend. Doug right so he's saying don't don't bank on on more it's Moore's law computing power may not continue to improve at the same rate that it has to date obviously Patchy319 Yeah. Efficiency improvements will always be important. Bulletproofs decrease Monero transaction sizes by about 80 percent if I recall correctly. Doug Fantastic. Anything else? Patchy319 It's important not to be wasteful with user storage, CPU, and RAM. There always needs to be a balance. Recently, my work was signed by a chain analysis company, so that was new. Doug Recently what? What was it? Patchy319 Yeah, so he had one of his works cited by a chain analysis company. It was two researchers at TRM Labs. They presented a paper at a conference titled Monero Traceability Heuristics, wallet application, bugs, and the Monordinal -P2 pull perspective. Patchy319 They cited the analysis I did on privacy impact of the nordinals. Doug and Patchy319 emails, which were a short -lived copy of Bitcoin NFTs on Monero, as we previously discussed there. The work of Istamas and Acj to other researchers associated with Monero Research Lab were also cited in the work. Patchy319 Oh, what was that? No, that was my phone. I, I, yeah, that was the notification. Doug All right, so we're rounding out, we're over an hour here around an hour 15. I guess, I guess we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll finish it off. I want to ask, uh, maybe ruck neem, what his thoughts are on, cause I've heard him kind of talk about this in the past, then the need to, to always continue to grow, uh, the amount of contributors we have that are actually doing research like he's doing and doing, Doug uh, development like Luke Parker is doing and doing cryptography. What are his kind of latest thoughts on how we can bolster that? I, I, I personally, from what I'm seeing, I, I'm seeing more and more people getting involved in Monero, obviously Monero usage is going up from his perspective, uh, being a contributor to Monero, what does he think? Doug I guess what first question is one, does he, does he think we're at a healthy place in terms of the amount of contribution we're seeing? I guess with things like Luke Parker working on full chain membership proofs, that kind of answers that question, but his take there that is, is the ecosystem healthy in terms of the current amount of contributions we're seeing and to what can be done to bring in more contributors such as, Doug you know, like himself that that found his way to, to Monero. Thank you. We're waiting for ruck neems fine. This will be the final question for the evening I didn't really see any questions or super chats come in for ruck neem if you have them send them now For those just just tuning in it's almost over we've been interviewing ruck neem through patchy 319 so ruck neem can remain anonymous and I will shill one more time and erotopia .com Conference happening in mexico city in november Ruck neem was a speaker last year remotely He'll be a speaker again this year remotely and there'll be many many many other speakers that will be there in person So come on down get your tickets. Doug We will probably most likely have remote Remote conference as well virtual conference for people that want to watch it remotely We haven't listed the ticket yet for that. I'm trying to wait as long as possible I rather push people towards actually coming to the event Because there's just so much value that you get out of being there and other people get that value when you're there So trying to push people to actually attend in person But ultimately will probably Create a way for you to attend virtually as well What do we got here? Doug Did he did he give us his final answer? Patchy319 Yep, so I may still type in more, but he's got something here to work with. I have seen a lot more developers appear in the Monero developer channels. As an economist, I sort of attribute that to the developer job market now, which the job market isn't great for reference. Patchy319 We have a good healthy ecosystem. We have indirectly brought in a few former Monero researchers, like Sarang and Saru Noether. Noether, is that right? Sarang? Noether, yep. Noether, okay. They have been analyzing full chain membership proofs and other Monero protocol issues. Patchy319 I am on the magic Monero fund committee that funds research and development. This year we helped fund VTNerd, a long -time Monero developer. And he's typing Doug We love VT nerd. He's the one that I think is most credited with implementing dandelion plus plus Hoping to get him down in Monero topia too, by the way Patchy319 Yeah, but sometimes it is hard to get researchers to focus on Monero. We actually reached out to a few researchers that had worked on Monero before, but they didn't want to be funded. But surprisingly, later we saw them publish a paper that was very Monero relevant. Patchy319 So sometimes we get research for free. By we, I mean the magic Monero fund. In summary, we have mixed success. Doug Okay. So it sounds like he's, you know, from his perspective, he's, it's positive, he's saying more contributors, not less, which is a good thing. I guess things we could do as a community is obviously just continue to grow, you know, get the word out on Monero, so people, more people discover Monero, anybody that's, you know, working in fields of cryptography, or statistics, or probability, or, you know, Doug any, any computing field, spread the word out on, on the Monero project to your networks, and you never know, maybe you'll, you'll find somebody else who becomes passionate about it that wants to contribute and work on it. Doug Does Ruchnium have anything that he wants to put out there? Any, any statements, any, anything that he wasn't able to get out in the questions I asked him, any information he wants to put out there? I guess now, now would be the time. Doug He's typing. All right. In the meantime, we got a tip by Anon using xmrchat .com. Tip the dollar. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for your work, Ruchnium. In my, in my opinion, people have been too willing to accept scaling limits that are much lower than possible or reasonable. Doug Dream boldly. Very nice. Anon, thank you for the dollar tip. Patchy319 The Magic Monero Fund also had an issue where we had a research proposal to analyze churning, but with FCMP happening so soon, hopefully, we asked them to alter their proposal, and we haven't heard back. Patchy319 This was a research group at the University of Zurich. Doug I guess, yeah, so with the implementation of full chain membership proofs, then churning becomes a thing of the past, right? There wouldn't be any necessity to churn once full chain membership proofs is implemented. Doug Does he have any final thoughts on full chain membership proofs itself? Obviously, we're all anticipating the implementation of it. Does he have any thoughts on whether or not it will be successful? Obviously, we hopefully think it will. Doug In theory, it will be amazing. Does he have any concerns or things he wants to voice about full chain membership proofs itself? There was that kind of debate at one point of when we'll be trying to implement it versus improving ring signatures in the meantime. Doug There was kind of a debate that was happening among the devs. Do we continue to improve ring signatures while we wait for full chain membership proofs to be implemented, trying to continue to increase the ring size? Doug Or do we just kind of focus all our efforts on full chain membership proofs and get that implemented as soon as possible? I guess any thoughts he has on that, comments he has on the implementation of full chain membership proofs itself and his opinion of it. Patchy319 So he has a blog at his personal website, which is a ruck ruck named me. And he posts analysis and data on there. It's also a remote public node for Monero. And it also maintains Monero research info, which has over 200 Monero relevant research papers. Patchy319 Amazing. Yeah, he's still typing more. But those are two websites you can check out of his. Obviously, as his GitHub profile, which also has a lot of graphs, I looked at and interesting information about the black marble research. Patchy319 The nice thing is that the research skill set for full chain membership proofs and possible spring signature increases are separate. So we can progress both of them in parallel. Full chain membership proofs research and audits have been going very well. Patchy319 Almost no problems. Doug Awesome. And he's saying, obviously, we could also be improving ring signatures at the same time, kind of as a backup plan. Patchy319 I think that's what he's saying. He's typing still. Doug And hopefully that won't be the case. And we just get full chain membership proof sooner than... Yep. Patchy319 later exactly this is that's exactly what he said okay okay so we manage risks in case one of them doesn't work out all right Doug We will... Patchy319 him. He's got one more thing to mention. He's been involved in helping Townforge which is a Monero based blockchain game and it just started a new testnet. So he's also been working on that. Doug Very cool, very cool. Yeah, we have, we've, we get to do kind of a show dedicated just to Town Forge is, I don't really know much about it. I've been hearing about it for years. I don't really know. Is it like actively being used, played to what level of development, but we could, we could save that for another, for another day, unless he has something he wants to mention about it. Patchy319 Um, so he says he learned a lot of his skills on how to work with a Monero node by working on Tamforge. Doug Oh, wow, very cool. Patchy319 and I want to make sure he doesn't have anything else to add. It says time to shine. So this year, MoneroMoo, a very long time Monero developer implemented hybrid proof of stake and proof of work on Town Forge. Patchy319 Oh, OK. So that's. MoneroMoo is the main developer of Town Forge. Doug I don't want to go, I don't want to go open up a whole nother can of worms here, but since you brought it up, what is his take on hybrid proof of work proof of stake, just proof of stake in general, does he think Monero should potentially move in that direction of implementing a hybrid proof of work proof of stake system, like we've seen on on xana. Patchy319 It defends against certain attacks that can happen with merged mine chains. With merged mine chains. TF will be merged mined with Monero, Town Forge. I imagine if he's working on it, he's going to be in favor of it. Patchy319 So let's see. Doug I don't know if he's in favor of it coming to Monero itself, though, I'm curious. Oh. Yeah, obviously, Monero is a pure proof -of -work coin. We broached this topic last year at Monerotopia. We had a panel discussion on it. Doug We had Francisco Cabanas, Arctic Mine, who's obviously a very big just pure proof -of -work advocate in terms of Monero. And then we had Andre from Xanno, where they implemented a hybrid proof -of -work proof -of -stake system, actually with the help of Ko, who's a Monero developer and contributor. Doug They developed the first, essentially, private proof -of -stake system, so a way to do proof -of -stake without revealing any information about the staker. But yet, curious what Rucknium thinks about that, if Monero should ever consider moving in that direction or if it should maintain its pure proof -of -workness. Patchy319 Yeah, so MoneroMoo hasn't suggested a change to Monero's proof of work system. He wanted it for TF specifically because it defends against a low hash rate chain that is merged mined with a high hash power chain. Patchy319 So you have one that's low and one that's high, which is Monero. And he wrote a blog post on the townforge .net website about proof of settlement. And anyway, with the current testnet, 95% of Coinbase rewards still go to proof of work. Patchy319 5% go to proof of stake. So that's the townforge testnet. Doug OK, so no real opinion on as to whether or not it would ever make sense for Monero to implement this. You just saw it as making sense for Town Forge because of its merge mind with Monero. And it's obviously has much less hash power than Monero. Patchy319 Um, yeah, I think ruck needs to answer that. I didn't ask him specifically. I doubt he would support on Monero. We're asking you, uh, Rockom, if you would want to see, see it implemented into the main Monero chain. Doug yeah or if he has you know if you have an opinion Patchy319 about it. Doug Yeah, an opinion about it whether or not Monero should ever consider going down that road. Patchy319 I don't have a strong opinion about it right now, I would need to do a lot more research. Doug OK. All right, we will we will leave it at that. This was this is fantastic. I greatly appreciate Ruch Nehem taking his time to do this. And obviously all the contributions he's made to date. Patchy, thank you, man. Doug Thank you for jumping in and being the voice of Ruch Nehem. And I'm just curious, how did this come about? How did you how did you become the voice of Ruch Nehem today? Patchy319 So Manaribul messaged me because he would have done it, but it was really late in his time zone because he's in Europe. So with me being in America, it just made more sense for me to do it. And I had friended Manaribul about a year ago from the Manaro Discord. Patchy319 He's a great guy. Rooknium's very intelligent. I didn't know about him at all until yesterday, but they're all great people. So I'm glad to be here. Doug Just any chance we see you down at Montero Topi in Mexico City in November? Probably not. Patchy319 But I would consider it, but you're probably not going to see me. I got a lot going on with house renovation and stuff, so probably not going to be in Mexico in November. Doug No worries. Well, I greatly appreciate you doing this today. Thank you to you both. Thank you, Rakhneem. Thank you again. Thank you to everybody that tuned in today to another live episode of Monero Talk. Doug We basically do these shows once a week. We do Monero Topia every weekend, Saturday at 11 a .m. and we do a Monero Talk show like this usually once a week. I've recently started doing them live again and I'll probably continue to do that for some time. Doug So I'll go ahead and close it out here. Thank you so much, guys. Greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, everyone. And then let me go ahead and play the outro. Later, guys.