how do I explain the spike in xmr transaction fees?

January 2021

monerobull[m]1: wasn't it the rogue node asking for ~4XMR fees ?

did that happen multiple times?

I know it happened a few weeks ago but this is a year ago

This has been happening for years

Every now and then, somebody drops a tx with insanely high fees for no apparent reason

And by "insanely high" I mean >1XMR for a basic 2-in 2-out transaction

That skews the data for the average tx fee

But if you look at the median fee, it's lower and doesn't spike like that

The more informative data is the median fee (for all coins in fact), but bitinfocharts doesn't display the median Monero fee for some reason.

In general: the median filters out outliers.

Sometimes you'll want them to be included, but there's a reason for existence of the book called: "How to lie with statistics" :)

I'll just call it experimental attack or something

just ruins the point comparing it to btc a little

is sending a lot of transactions in a short amount of time bad for privacy?

have we ever discussed this idea?

would that push most of the mining time into EC operations? which would be asic-able?

Would p2pool still be possible?

It may be the case that the larger 51% attack threat is not from a longstanding pool, but rather from an outside force. Enforcing solo mining I think would reduce hashpower, leading to more threat from an outside force.

p2pool can't work with header signing

because it pays many miners in each block, and you need to know private key for each payout address to do it

<sech1> "p2pool can't work with header..." <- what are the technical differences between central mining and p2pool? Can any of those be exploited to enabled one while disabling the other?

It would be a terrible idea imo, and it would severely decrease the securirty of the network against 51% attacks

With pool mining, even someone with a few measly kH/s can still earn a few bucks by joining in with their cpu in their spare time

By forcing everyone to solo-mine, it would make mining pretty much pointless for small miners who don't have several rigs available, because it would take them from several months to over a year to find a single block

Without even considering the effects of variance and bad luck, as well as the price swings that could occur over such long timeframes

The root of the issue is the relative size of individual cpus compared to the whole network

Small miners who can't absorb the variance over literal years would be pushed out, while mining farms would be mostly unaffected

ArticMine[m]: ok, how do you use a GPU for verification? lol

If it requires custom code for all the proofs, I think that would be a 'far in the future' project. Bulletproofs + grootle proofs + seraphis composition proofs + ed25519 + strict transaction verification logic = a lot of work to do one time, let alone 2+ times.

<merope> "It would be a terrible idea imo,..." <- What if, instead of attacking "big pools", we could enable efficient decentralized anonymous pools? I have no specific idea in mind. However, as a user, if the easiest thing for me to do was install monero and press a button, that is what I would do. Assuming the payout was as good or better than alternatives.

Push button, get cookie. If it is harder to join a centralized outfit, why would I?

And if you arent making anything harder, only making other things easier, I cant imagine that would hurt the hashrate.

In the current system, from the pov of the network, a mining pool is effectively a solo miner. When you join a pool, you are effectively solo mining for the pool owner - who then promises to pay you based on your contribution

The best option we have, so far, is p2pool - a mining pool with no "owner" that allows users to split rewards fairly

We just need to make the setup more user-friendly

And there is now a 25 XMR bounty for writing code integrating p2pool into the Monero GUI wallet. Any takers?

monerod is a more appropriate place for integration because GUI wallet just calls start_mining RPC. It doesn't mine itself

but then there's an issue with licensing (p2pool is GPLv3)

I guess Monero release could distribute the p2pool binary and sources, start it and connect to it for mining without violating the license.

<sech1> "monerod is a more appropriate..." <- For the target audience, I think there should be push button access from the GUI

if possible, ux would greatly improve by running a short benchmark and then choosing between p2pool and mini and providing an expected time till first payout

currently p2pool is more like "might work, might not"

and unless you are familiar with hashrate & mining, you'll just think nothing works if you don't get any feedback after a week of mining