issue for the net dev meeting: monero-project/meta #684

Hi all, just joined for updates

Hi everyone. Is there anything in the monero codebase that's "tribal knowledge" which would be needed for a new group of devs to continue the project with a fork?

dartian[m] what do you mean by tribal knowledge?

I assume "undocumented stuff". I guess there's a lot.

I'm referring to information about the design/architecture/code that's undocumented anywhere clearly, but known amongst the developers, and would cause a new team major headaches to figure out or may not figure out at all.

yeah probably a lot of that

A lot can be inferred/understood with experience and knowing how it is all supposed to work, but that can be a long journey.

Several people forked monero, so I guess it's mostly small stuff though.

I'd be pretty afraid of making big changes with a new team.

Or they had access to someone in-the-know. I was hoping to have another way to address people who argue monero "is centralized." These responses actually do help me do that without making assumptions... which people do far too often

thank you

One of the main arguments for "monero is centralized" that's really contemptible (there might be others, my point is just about this one) is:

"there is just one monero team"

That is disingenuous and probably dishonest on purpose, because it bundles many independent people into one team. You could make this argument with anything.

People have come and gone, and mostly don't know each other in real life.

So to dump all of them into "one" single party is dishonest.

It's basically taking "decentralized" and claiming it's "centralized" by decree of the claimant.

moneromooo: its centralized because it only uses 1 blockchain

True, but then there's only one planet.

Everything is centralised. We need mars.

Can one person hit a button and stop the miners? No, it's not centralized...

iom

Putin can hit a button and stop the miners ^_^

*imo

I like that way of framing it - the group of people who work on monero can always be clumped into 'the group' (singular), no matter how dispersed they are.

bit_thanos[m]: china did just that to bitcoin last year

less centralized than Zcash though :D

not 100% of miners but enough to grind the network to a halt

theres a difference between technical/theoretical decentralization in decentralization in practice

r4v3r23[m]: I think there are more individual hashrate than centralized farms

s/in/vs/

i think your wrong

could be

but even if not, the fact remains. the network is borderline unusable for 2 weeks

s/is/was/

I'm reasonably sure there are more individual miners than farms in monero, but also there's more hash rate from farms than from inividual miners...

moneromooo: we need to up the game than :D

Oh. What's unusable ?

is it true the the difficulty adjustments changes after every bloc in XMR?

It is.

so a china miner shitshow a la bitcoin cant happen on Monero

moneromooo: awesome

r4v3r23[m]: in what was has the network been "borderline unusable for 2 weeks" ?

r4v3r23[m]: timestamp outliers are discarded, you'd still need to wait like 20+ blocks for things to fix themselves if hashrate plummeted.

i was talking about bitcoin during the miner outages last year

way*

china exodus & flooding episodes

Oh. OK.

just another monero does things better

* just another way monero does

2 weeks is forever during a network crisis

Is that true if no one was mining, one cpu could pick up where the chain stopped?

Yes, but it'd take a loooong time.

moneromooo: considerably :D

Like 700 blocks or so I think.

If you got trapped in a small isolated network long-term (e.g. due to an apocalypse), you'd probably need to hardfork to restart the cumulative difficulty.

so every miner should learn how it works just in case lol

though in that scenario it might be better to just make a whole new chain, or start using a physical commodity for money...

If that happens we have bigger things to worry about sure

from talking to bitcoin maxis, there is a deeply ingrained sense of distrust regarding forks, with a preference to build on top of bitcoin or workarounds. "Easy to fork means you can change the 21M to a new number!" and, for whatever truth there is to that for bitcoin, it's not applicable to understanding monero's forks.

dartian[m]: maxis are fundamentals, meanign they dont think and hate change

"think of the guy whos been in a coma for 7 years"

ok well just update your wallet

s/fundamentals/fundamentalists/

s/fundamentals/fundamentalists/, s/meanign/meaning/

dartian[m]: There is a distinction between 'what a cryptocurrency does' and 'how it does that'. The former can be stated as a set of invariants (including supply mechanics), which the latter must satisfy. You can then add 'invariant-changing invariants', which are 'rules about how the 'how' may change'. The main such invariant is 'the original variants may never be violated'. As long as no invariants are broken, you can hardfork

every day without undermining the project. All of Monero's hardforks have been invariant-compatible (except maybe that one block with a buggy merkle tree, I don't remember).

<r4v3r23[m]> "maxis are fundamentals, meanign..." <- I like to think this is something with a nugget of truth, carried too far. Bitcoin has always maintained predominance over all forks of bitcoin, and it's impractical for all users to evaluate all forks for merit, so a method to dismiss forks quickly creates a level of resistance most forks never overcome in their sphere. "Bitcoin has the most developers and resources to evaluate

changes, and so if a fork is doing something better, bitcoin would already be doing it." or in other words "why don't you bring your idea to bitcoin instead of forking?"

there are ulterior motives to bitcoin developement that take precedence over progress towards 'peer-to-peer electronic cash"

s/'/"/

that's a good point. I presume you mean currently so, but it reminds me of Satoshi's departure. Saw where the project was going, realized they could no longer lead it in a Satoshi way, and couldn't even remain part of it without turmoil. Then did everything possible to step away in a way supportive of the project.

<r4v3r23[m]> "there are ulterior motives to..." <- I have a question for you

Are you bullish on Monero?

nahnahnah722828[: ill answer you in #monero:monero.social

jberman: background sync feature will allow keeping your wallet fully synced without giving away your viewkey like in lws right?

so for example monerujo can use background sync & remote node without loss in privacy

Think you meant to say spend key?

jberman[m]: doesnt background sync keep the viewkey hot when you close the wallet?

That's the idea yep, and keeps the view key in the client

right, so itll have the same affect as lws of keeping the wallet synced, but without giving the viewkey to a (potential) third parth

s/parth/party/

Right yep. I see what you were asking

and were free to continue using remote nodes

awesome