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25 XMR prize for the best ELI5

Since I asked for this thread, I thought it would be good to start it off with a contest. So whoever can describe Monero in the easiest, most understandable way gets 25 XMR for their work. Use metaphor, image, good ol' plain English--hell, you can even rhyme--just make sure your dumb cousin on your dad's side can get the gist.

--Contest starts today and ends Friday 10/24.

--I'm fronting the XMR, so I'll make the call--but I will take all comments into consideration.

--Also, if you're more visual, there will be a meme/art contest starting 10/25.

Replies: 23
sylviaplathlikestobake edited 8 years ago Replies: 2 | Weight: -861 | Link [ - ]

And the winner of the 25 XMR prize is hillbilly!

Thanks to everyone who participated. Tomorrow will start the Meme/Art contest.

Hillbilly, please post a Monero address on your profile or pm me on reddit. I'm user nanosapian on reddit.

Reply to: sylviaplathlikestobake
hillbilly posted 8 years ago Weight: -327 | Link [ - ]

Hey I'm back. Want to donate my 25 XMR winnings to the dev funding project. If you could facilitate that for me, that'd be amazing.

Reply to: sylviaplathlikestobake
hillbilly edited 8 years ago Weight: -854 | Link [ - ]

Thanks so much! I'll hit you up.

hillbilly edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -878 | Link [ - ]

I'm really new to Monero, so please feel free to correct me on any of this. This is a work in progress.

Monero- ELI5 BUT also have a basic understanding of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin did a lot of things right, but it forgot about privacy. Monero solves that problem.

Some easy things to get out of the way first, though. Here are some basic differences Monero has to Bitcoin that are easy to grasp:

Monero * Max. Coins: 18.4 M * All Ready-Mined Coins (%): ~22% * Block Time 1 Min 10 Min 2.5 M * Difficulty Re-Targeting: Every Block Every * Hashing Algorithm CryptoNight (ASIC resistant)

Bitcoin * Max. Coins: 21 M * All Ready-Mined Coins (%): ~64% * Block Time 10 Min * Difficulty Re-Targeting: 2016 * Hashing Algorithm SHA-256 (NOT ASIC resistant)

Darkcoin * Max. Coins: 22 M * All Ready-Mined Coins (%): ~21% * Block Time 2.5 M * Difficulty Re-Targeting: Every Block Every * Hashing Algorithm X11 (ASIC resistant)

Anonymity The interesting part of Monero is the way that it achieves anonymity. It also happens to be the most complex part. Monero utilized Cryptonote technology, which is an open-source tech that works to anonymize payments. There are two difficulties with making a block chain anonymous. It is a big ledger, remember. In the Bitcoin ledger, people can see how much money is in each address by checking where large spend amounts went and adding it up. Go check this website really quick, http://bitcoinrichlist.com/top100. That’s not good for privacy. Another problem is that all the transactions you make are traceable. In other words, you can trace the movement of money throughout the history of its life, right back to its inception, just by looking at who sent it where. Both the sending and receiving of coins needs to be made private. Mixing coins together isn’t enough because with enough analysis, governments, large corporations, and criminals will be able to deanonymize users over time. So how do we do it?

Where did the money come from?: Monero uses Ring signatures to stop people from being able to trace where the money has come from. In a normal Bitcoin transaction, you take your private key and a public key to sign a transaction. By signing the transaction, you are proving that you (used to) have control of the coins and are now passing them on to another person (or address). The problem with this is that everyone can see that you (or your address) spent X coins. Ring signatures are crypto invented in 2001 that allow you to use many different people’s public keys, as well as your own public key and your own private key. The resulting transaction will be shown as a single transaction, but people looking at it will not know whether it was you or the fourteen other people who sent the transaction. The more transactions that take place within the network, this one in fifteen chance of being able to identify an owner diminishes exponentially.

Imagine that each transaction is a magical pizza pie. There are eight slices of the pie. Each slice has a picture of someone on it, and it is one of those famous people who made the pie. You can guess which one it is, but unless you ask them personally, you'll never know. The pie looks amazing, but you soon come to realize that the pie isn't edible. It looks and smells delicious, but eating it just doesn't seem to do anything satisfactory, (just like eating money or gold). People, however, are dazzled by your pie, and keep asking for it. You finally get sick of your pie and give it away, but when you do, eight different faces appear on it, only one of them being your own. The new owner might know who the pie came from if you give it to her face to face, but if you just mail it to her, she will never know it was you because there are no cameras or google image search in this imaginary world, you silly goose.

Where did the money go? : You’ve just sent some Monero to your cousin Bob in Timbuktu and nobody knows it was you. Hooray! But where did you send the money? If your cousin Bob gives out his public address on his website, everyone will know what it is and can look for incoming transactions. To solve that, Monero turns the address it’s sending money to into a public key. Or rather, you do. You send money to a one-time public address calculated by Bob’s public key and some random data. Because of the random data you added to Bob’s address, no one can really tell who that money is going to. Bob, however, with very simple checking, can look over the current transactions and, using his private key, see that money was sent to him. When he sees the transaction you sent him, he just writes it down (not really, his computer will do that) and doesn't have to do anything else until he wants to spend those funds. When he does want to spend the money you sent him, he can use his private keys in conjunction with the the random data you used above to create a one-time private address. He then just signs his outgoing transaction with the private address to prove that the funds were really his and not just made up. In that way, every time you send money to Bob, it goes to a different address. Additionally, Bob (and you) knows he received money. Make sense?

A Side-Note
Bitcoin wallets are starting to use HD, or hierarchical deterministic wallets. That means that basically, you can easily create new addresses for each time someone sends you money or you need to give yourself some change while spending money. This way, you'll never re-use an address. If you have ring signatures all ready in place to hide where the money's coming from, why not just implement something where people can easily never re-use addresses? Well, because you've still got to give your address to people. With bitcoin, you've got to give someone a public address to send money to, and even if it is unique, anyone overhearing that communication will be able to know that money is moving to that address (and maybe you don't want people to know how much).
With this system, you don't have to worry about never re-using address. You are able to give everyone the same "address" (your public key), and it is the sender who takes care of making the address unique. This makes address books much easier to use. When you give your boss your bitcoin public address, your paycheck will accumulate in that address until you give her a different one. With Monero, you need only give her your "address" (public key) once and she will be able to create unique, one-time addresses for you every time she uses it, using a random number added (not exactly added of course) to your public key.

How do I prove I sent money to that dirty eBay vendor? He’s pretending that he never got the money! Remember that random numbers are mixed in with public addresses to create the 'real' addresses that all this money's sent to? You can just wave that random number in the air. Only you and Bob can figure it out, but if you show everyone, they will then know that X money was sent to that dirty eBay vendor's public address.
Additionally, if Bob needs to prove that he’s a millionaire or wants someone else to take care of transaction processing for him, he can give out a portion, but not all of his private key. With this, a third party can check to see what transactions were sent to Bob, but cannot actually spend his money. Neat trick.

Drawbacks:

-Monero's supply distribution gives about 80% of the XMR (monero tokens) in 4 years. That's a lot to give to early adopters.
-Monero's block-chain size is about six times larger than the Bitcoin blockchain. Some say that will kill the coin, especially if it gets very popular. I think technology will probably save us on this aspect, but who knows.

It only gets more complicated, but if you want to learn more, check out the resources below. Here’s an ELI3 explanation of Darkcoin, because it much easier to understand, if I understand it correctly.

Darkcoin is another coin that addresses this issue, albeit in a different way. Darkcoin relies on the trust of so-called master-nodes. These master-nodes are basically private mixers of coins. The owner of a certain amount of coins must trust the master node that it has not been hacked or given away their private information.

**Resources: **

  • Official Forums: https://forum.monero.cc/
  • https://moneropool.com/ Total hash rate,
  • https://cryptonote.org/
  • http://coinwik.org/Monero
  • http://bitmonero.org/
  • Cryptonote Whitepaper (detailed break-down): https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf
  • Monero Whitepaper Review: http://monero.cc/downloads/whitepaper_review.pdf
  • https://forum.cryptonote.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=162
  • More ELI5, Cryptonote: https://cryptonote.org/
  • BTC ELI5: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rls76/official_eli5_bitcoin_thread_round_ii/
  • Darkcoin ELI5: http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/darkcoin-anonymity-is-now-fully-functional-and-open-source-instant-transactions-on-the-way

Charts of Coin Supplies Over Time:

  • Monero: https://i.imgur.com/lDqIdyd.png
  • Note on Monero: In the future, Monero might have a 1% increase in supply every year as inflation to help miners pay for costs.
  • BTC: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/161/how-many-bitcoins-will-there-eventually-be
  • DarkCoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg5845210#msg5845210
Reply to: hillbilly
Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -877 | Link [ - ]

bretty good

Reply to: Nekomata hillbilly
hillbilly edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -876 | Link [ - ]

Thanks. If you see anything wrong in it, please don't hesitate to call me out.

Reply to: hillbilly Nekomata hillbilly
sylviaplathlikestobake edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -875 | Link [ - ]

--it's should be its in the anonymity section. Got it right in the next line, so obvious typo in a well-written piece.

Reply to: sylviaplathlikestobake hillbilly Nekomata hillbilly
hillbilly edited 8 years ago Weight: -874 | Link [ - ]

thanks

Q edited 8 years ago Weight: -881 | Link [ + ]

As you might have heard by now, bitcoin is a new sort of money. You can use it to buy about anything these days. But bitcoin has a problem. To explain this, imagine bitcoin as a train. The rails on which the train is riding, is called the Blockchain in bitcoinland. When you pay someone, everyone can see the rails on which your bitcoin is going from you to someone else. This is not good, because criminals, advertisers and even the tax office, can see these rails too.

They do not know the name of the train or who's train it is, but by looking at the stations where the train is going, they can still get a lot of data about your financial behaviors, because you are the guy waiting in the train station. And that is bad, because money is like free speech. It must be possible for people to pay anonymously, for example if they want to donate to wikileaks, or want to rent kinky videos.

Now imagine Monero, as a subway train. The bad guys can only see from a helicopter, and so they cannot see which train is running underneath. They can see trains going in and out the stations, but they have no clue where the train left, or even if the train maybe joined and split with other trains while underground. So there is no way to see if you bought a kinky video or if the train is en route to Switzerland. Buy hey who needs Switzerland if you have Monero...

NewLiberty edited 8 years ago Weight: -882 | Link [ + ]

Monero is global private money, which no force but your own will, can ever take from you.

Jojatekok edited 8 years ago Weight: -886 | Link [ + ]

Monero is a digital currency which provides mathematically proven advantage of anonimity, and ease of use at once. Unlike other forms of electronic cash (like bank accounts), there are no third parties required to manage your money, but you have the opportunity of becoming your own bank using a stylish application. Worldwide money transfer has never been easier, faster, safer, and more comfortable than that!

Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -889 | Link [ + ]

Monero is the rebirth of our inherent human freedom in cryptocurrency form, the CryptoNote core is a powerful mathematically proven algorithm that allows a decentralized and anonymous network to be enjoyed as currency and store of value for all + without the fear of surveillance or unwanted seizures. From its humble beginnings as a Bitmonero, Monero still in the realm of CPU-mining and the ASIC-resistance will prove to be a balancing force that is lacking in other cryptocurrencies right now.

Since this is an Art thread I also made a Haiku:

a transaction is made

unlinkable, untraceable

to only where matter

Reply to: Nekomata
Quanttek edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -889 | Link [ + ]

Here's the original
Not sure whether you wrote it too (account deleted itself), so I make no false accusations. Would be nice, if you clarify it

@OP: You should watch out for replies stolen from our 500 subscriber giveaway thread

Again: I'm not accusing you of stealing it. Actually you could very well be the author, because your 'new' account was only active after this

Reply to: Quanttek Nekomata
Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -889 | Link [ + ]

LOL yeah I wrote it but i didn't won that time so I copied here and made better, its me you can see the address there is the same as the one in my profile, just google the address and you'll find other posts related to me.

I deleted that reddit account because I was being harassed by BCN trolls at the time.

"nice one" Quanttek.

btw Monero's twitter last missive is outdated, who is on charge of it?

Reply to: Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata
Quanttek edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -890 | Link [ + ]

LOL

> Not sure whether you wrote it too

> Actually you could very well be the author, because your 'new' account was only active after this

Did you even read this? I intentionally and clearly stated that it's really likely, that's that your old accoutn, but that I can't be sure about it. You don't have to attack me "ad hominem" then.

> btw Monero's twitter last missive is outdated, who is on charge of it?

Srsly? Wow, that's the worst kind of attack. A, to the discussion, completely unrelated thing, disguised as innocent question, but where you exactly know, this is soemthing the victim is responsible for. In every normal moderated forum, you would've been banned for this. I very well know, this "pinned tweet" is often outdated, because no ne looks on the profile and I also don't notice it that often because I sue a Twitter client

Reply to: Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata
Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -889 | Link [ + ]

LOL, you keep saying I stole my own comment, it was not even that good I spent less than 5 min to write it.

> LOL > Not sure whether you wrote it too

I wrote it, you are attacking again my honor saying I 'stole it', but hey, not saying I 'stole it', serious? I'm not retarded, what is your problem, I dare you find if I copied it from somewhere, its over for you, you lost any kind of argument against me now.

> In every normal moderated forum, you would've been banned for this

Thats why you are not a mod, and most certainly will never be now.

Don't try to make you the victim now, if you had spent 5 seconds checking the address on the comment you would know it was from my deleted account, but you preferred to cast doubts over my character, In any normal civilization this is defamation.

I see that you edited your original comment to make it sound less provocative so I wont take it personal and end this here.

@sylviaplathlikestobake sorry for derailing your thread.

I would now like to contribute 5 XMR to the prize and I'm taking myself out of this competition.

Reply to: Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata
Quanttek edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -889 | Link [ + ]

> I wrote it, you are attacking again my honor saying I 'stole it', but hey, not saying I 'stole it', serious? I'm not retarded, what is your problem, I dare you find if I copied it from somewhere, its over for you, you lost any kind of argument against me now.

I only stated that this was not the first time for this comment to appear. NOWHERE I stated, that you stole the comment lol.
> > Actually you could very well be the author, because your 'new' account was only active after this

This line seems relevant again.

> Thats why you are not a mod, and most certainly will never be now.

If I would want, I could now ban you on Reddit, but I won't do it, because I'm not an asshat. You made this comment here and it's up to the core team. Also this was just an observation. In strongly moderated forums like cryptocrypt this would be a bannable offense, hey, even AM got banned.

> Don't try to make you the victim now, if you had spent 5 seconds checking the address on the comment you would know it was from my deleted account

I'm deeply sorry that I didn't checked your address, but that doesn't mean you have to insult me so extremely. I NEVER stated you stole it. I just showed that this comment existed already. I really don't understand your sudden aggression against me really - I have nothing against you and just wanted to point out, that the nice summary already existed

Reply to: Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek
Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -888 | Link [ + ]

Yeah and it would look really bad for you banning one of the few users that contribute to that reddit, I already said that you edited your provocative comments and I have taken no offense. I'm already out the competition so you win, congratulations.

peace

Reply to: Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata
Quanttek edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -888 | Link [ + ]

> I already said that you edited your provocative comments and I have taken no offense

Nope, haven't edited anything. That's a really poor move to end a discussion

EDIT: test edit

Reply to: Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek
Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -888 | Link [ + ]

same for you, I have not saved your original so I can't prove.

Reply to: Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata
Quanttek edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -888 | Link [ + ]

> same for you

Nope, you are accusing me to manipulating the post, not the other way around. Hence you can't even say, what it was before I supposedly edited it

Reply to: Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek
Nekomata edited 8 years ago Replies: 1 | Weight: -889 | Link [ + ]

How did this clown get to be Monero community manager? I'm sure wasn't the only that read you original comment, even if I was you can't lie to yourself.

I gave you chance because I thought you had some integrity but you back-stabbed me the moment I turned back, so now let me really terminate this discussion with a sayonara.

Reply to: Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata Quanttek Nekomata
Quanttek edited 8 years ago Weight: -887 | Link [ + ]

> I'm sure wasn't the only that read you original comment

Then say to me atleast what was written there. I can promise I haven't changed anything in my reply. In your anger, you just imagine a more harsh replay to justify your ad hominem attacks.

Also > same for you, I have not saved your original so I can't prove.

isn't really a way of > I gave [giving] you chance because I thought you had some integrity

but just another way to diminish the fact you made up the manipulation by me

I will not further respond to this silly discussion after you have called me names. Sorry @sylviaplathlikestobake for writing so many off-topic nonsense in your thread