Meeting 1.5hrs monero-project/meta #651

Be there or be square. :)

meeting time monero-project/meta #651

1. greetings

hello

Greetings.

Hi there

Hi

Hi hi

hi hi hi

for (int ...

ehm.... sorry.

2. Does anyone want to give updates? What has everyone been working on?

Myself: I haven't done much with Monero the past week. I am trying to improve at software design so when I dive into the seraphis/jamtis wallet poc I can knock it out in one go without deep revisions.

I'm having success with my time series prediction software. Let me quickly repost:

This is how this looks before the training. The blue line is the true value and the green one is the predicted value.

After a short training:

Almost 30% better than the baseline prediction.

(in-sample)

Out of sample (2 months later):

Still didn't loose much of the relative performance

Which means, that you don't have to retrain it very often

Me: Not much Monero-specific work from me this past week either. I hope to dive back into revising the OSPEAD technical specification for a lay audience next week. Again, if anyone would like to see the current version, just PM me and I will send it along.

Not to take too much time right now, if somebody has questions, I can answer later.

mj-xmr: What is the time series value you are forecasting?

mj-xmr[m]: can you remind us what you want to do with this software?

The highs of the total transaction numbers for the given hourly sample

Which means, that on average you'd expect there to be that many transactions.

If not, you know how much you have to decoy.

s/not/the number is below/

I did tests with jberman[m] 's view tag PR branch; everything ran flawlessly. It's now running live as "Technet" here: monerotech.info/Wallet

Code review however is still missing, despite a bounty of over 20 XMR ...

UkoeHB: The software itself shows what model has the best chance to work. It's expected then to rather extract the model from the conglomerate and use it as a class of itself INSIDE monero.

This will also help avoid any licensing issues.

So basically we can pair this with the Seraphis performance tests and perhaps estimates of low-end hardware performance to get a sense of where we may be hitting a "danger zone" for computational expense.

s/avoid/avoiding/

This too. In fact you can plugin anything that changes across time. If there are predictable patterns in the series, it will immediately let you know.

FYI, the images you uploaded come through as image.png, not even a clickable link on IRC side. mj-xmr[m]

localmonero05: Thanks. Lemme correct.

It is probably bridge's fault, not yours...

Don't know whether you should try imgur or whatever else, individually. Seems time consuming. But if you can and want to, by all means.

they are visible in matrix

Yes, precisely why I emphasize IRC side, not Matrix side.

thank you for that rbrunner :)

Welcome :)

Perfect! Thanks.

It seems there are a number of PRs stuck needing more review. It might be unreasonable to expect vtnerd to cover all these. If we had 1 or 2 more people able to review the big tough PRs that would help a lot.

Can we have that as a t-shirt?

The MAGIC Monero Fund committee plans to have its first meeting on Friday. If you have any input into how the grants process should work (or plan to submit a grant application yourself!) please let me or someone else on the committee know:

Nice Rucknium[m]1.

I am aware of at least one research grant application that is probably coming down the pipeline.

It does start to look like the beginning of a review crisis ...

UkoeHB: Has Rucknium[m]1's idea re: seeking talent for Monero activities bear any fruits yet? As in, any possible candidates to help vtnerd review PRs?

Note that grant recipients must do KYC since MAGIC is a nonprofit organization registered with the U.S. tax agency.

Damned KYC...

rbrunner: Unfortunately I can't help with the strictly cryptography related stuff. I coop with selsta and others at GUI on more IT-related stuff.

I have seen wernervasquez[m] and dr_overdose[m] seem to have a grasp/interest in the deeper protocol details, however idk if they are interested and able to review PRs.

Same problem for me. That stops me from reviewing the complete view tags PR.

Hopefully one or both can lend a hand to vtnerd then.

wfaressuissia is certainly qualified, but does not seem available for PR reviewing

localmonero05: The short answer is no. However, according to my criteria, no "active recruitment" has yet been done. The Reddit post was just a starting point. Once I get through more of my TODO list I will return to it.

Rucknium[m]1: Sounds good. Thanks.

I haven't been following the PRs on GitHub, but can kayabanerve help?

Honestly it takes a lot of time, effort, and learning to really get into any of these PRs. A difficult problem

Definitely.

UkoeHB: Yes exactly. We need a long pipeline to bring in talent. As in, investing in recruitment now will pay off in several months or even a year.

Especially when *tons* of new code will get written for the switch to Seraphis, all needing review.

Pressing issue is, hard to find mathematicians, cryptographers, or coders who are actually interested in learning the ropes of XMR, no?

Besides allocating funds for recruitment of experts, it should also have some monies for the right person to shill the project, to entice them. Ha.

Yes, it does require a lot of skills in one go. I myself have proposed an ambitious friend but she gave it up.

localmonero05: Yes. I think they are out there, but they don't know about Monero, or they know about Monero vaguely but don't know that their skills could be of use. Or they need better funding options.

Many infosec, et. al. people look down on cryptocurrencies, generally speaking.

Correct. MAGIC might aid that situation, since some may be looking for just fiat retribution for their work, and not be concerned re: KYC procedures. Agreed.

And don't forget that there are researchers writing about Monero right now and publishing papers, but they are not within the Monero Project infrastructure. So we could go to them first.

By the way, there was an idea from last September or so to make a code freeze for the next hardfork on ... drum roll ... January 16 :)

Such as? Any examples? Just curious.

rbrunner: this one? monero-project/meta #630

Right.

Should we hold a -dev meeting, or something? Cc. luigi1112, selsta, binaryFate.

May be in order, yes.

In any case, if there is anyone out there lurking who is enthusiastic about the protocol details and wants to make sure it is implemented correctly, we need you :). We don't urgently need code writers so much as people who can make sure the code is solid (and help improve code proposals).

Aye, PR reviewers.

everything for the multisig fixes is PRed now, just need a final approval

Yes We need some follow up on the HF

localmonero05: I really hate to use Google, but this is easiest. Here are Monero papers with publication dates of this year:

Copy that. Thanks for sharing.

ArticMine[m]: Do you suggest a dev meeting to discuss HF topics?

selsta: Do we need reviewers for such PRs, or should luigi just merge?

Obviously, not all those papers are super relevant, but many of them are.

Yes

localmonero05: they are reviewed for the large part, just final approval is missing

Roger that. I'll follow up in -dev later today, to see what date and time is most convenient for everyone. Thanks ArticMine[m].

ideally they final approval comes from the reviewer

Got it.

UkoeHB: FWIW I don't have the deep math expertise yet (view tags were pretty simple), but I'm working on building it and am very enthusiastic about protocol details and want to see them implemented correctly. The time and effort for me to train to get to a point of being able to offer a very high quality review to spot issues in the math of the deeper crypto changes (like with multisg + BP+) is fairly large for where I am right

now, but I'm working on it

jberman[m]: great :) I am looking forward to it

That's the spirit.

That's the spirit!

Excellent

Moving on. I think tevador's jamtis is in a ~final state (maybe only some semantic changes left). Now would be a great time for people to read it over and leave your thoughts. Especially those who already gave feedback, like rbrunner and localmonero05 and jberman[m] .

link: gist.github.com/tevador/50160d160d24cfc6c52ae02eb3d17024

hermestris from #monero-recruitment:monero.social said that they have work experience managing commercial payment processing, so hopefully they could offer their opinions as well, with respect to merchant-side issues.

Sorry for being late. I'm not expecting major changes to Jamtis anymore. The only thing that might take some effort is finding a suitable BCH polynomial for the checksum, but that's a rather minor thing for the specs.

If we really can pull this off we will miles ahead of other coins ...

As in: Implement it as working code and hardfork

Sorry to intervene once more, but for the completeness sake: The prediction model can also make it easier to detect spam. Look at the right hand of this time window. You can clearly and objectively (= automatically) say, that there was a spam effort.

Idk about miles ahead, afaik Firo's upgrade will have similar features.

Is it a spam effort or just someone who wants to make a bunch of txs?

Interesting. Competition can bring motivation.

(distinction without a difference?)

UkoeHB: Essentially the same. Even if for legit purposes, if overloads the network.

mj-xmr: We'd want to combine this with a monitoring system based on the "Fingerprinting a Flood" research, which has many metrics to examine.

What about scaling in Firo?

Scaling?

I believe we're well ahead

What are you referring to exactly?

Ability to scale on chain

As technology improves

Oh

Well, we are at the end of the hour so I'll call the meeting here. Thanks for attending everyone

TY everybody.

Thanks

Thanks, all.

Thanks

UkoeHB: Same day, same hour next week?

s/hour/time

yes