RE: An overview of Monero, the privacy-focused Bitcoin alternative that is up 100% in the past 24 hrs
Good intro. I would be happy to answer any specific questions.
Note that Monero has been steadily increasing over the past 6 months to a year. While nothing as dramatic as the past few days, that steady progress set the stage for the latest fireworks. Over its 2 1/2 year history, the Monero project and technology has increasingly gotten positive comments and mentions from various experts in the cryptocurrency space and development has moved forward on some new items, specifically including a new GUI and a new protocol called Ring Confidential Transactions (which hides the amount of payments in addition to the sender and recipient).
Small correction:
Once the total number of Monero reaches 18.3 million. then money supply will stop decreasing
In fact once the total number reaches about 18.3 million, what stops decreasing is not the money supply but the rate of increase in the money supply.
Thanks, updated. One of the most interesting aspects of my research was seeing you as a core dev. Two questions:
1.) How much time do you spend on Monero vs Steem?
2.) How would you compare the developer communities, governance, and decision-making processes in Monero vs. Steem?
I'm not a developer of Steem at all, just an early miner, witness and community member. As such I really can't comment on the development process aside from what I've seen from that perspective. The time I spend on it is based on my own initiatives to build the ecosystem, not core development. I do split my time between Steem initiatives, Monero, and some other non-crypto work (though since adding Steem to the mix, I've reduced the latter).
I can say that Steem is developed by a company which has funding from their own early mining. In terms of governance, Steem has elected witnesses who decide what consensus software to run, and we consult with the developers to give them our input, but mostly the direction is set by the developers unless witnesses give them strong feedback against the direction they are setting (which rarely happens).
Monero is community-supported and the developers are either funded by crowdfunding or volunteers. The governance is by a voting system among the core team members, ratified by the community's ability to fork the project. Since Monero was itself started as a community fork of another project, the idea of the community having this power is well-understood and prominent in the value system of Monero. The core team serves the community.
So overall it is quite different, but both seem to be working.
Thanks.
On that note, who are the core devs of Steem beyond @dantheman? Are there any? I haven't seen anything written about or talked about regarding this and its important. Monero's actually got a great "about" section that describes the people involved (even though most are anonymous, at least it refers to them by rep on forums). For Steem, publicly it appears its just Ned (non-technical) and Dan.
Steem has several other core devs including @theoretical, Valentine, Michael, James and probably some others I'm forgetting. They're all visible on the github repo and most are active on Steemit as well.
I really like dashes governance. Does monero have a comparable way to allocate funds?
There is more of a semi-centralized crowdfunding system that uses the forum (custom software was written for it). It doesn't work on the blockchain the way Dash does, but it does work. It supports proposals, milestones, etc., pretty much what you would expect in terms of funding and workflow. Most of the development and some other tasks over the past year or so has been handled that way. I think every serious proposal, after going through a discussion phase to define the scope and plan, has been successfully funded.
Don't nodes need to know which address has how much in order to validate transactions? If not, why not?
They don't. Instead they validate some mathematical properties that ensure integrity of the chain without knowing specific amounts. Specifically that each output is only spent at most once and that each transaction has inputs = outputs + fee.