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Monero pays a large price for its fungibility, by making the UTXO set of (potentially) unspent outputs equal to the set of ALL outputs. Whereas synced bitcoin f

by tromp 5y ago

Monero pays a large price for its fungibility, by making the UTXO set of (potentially) unspent outputs equal to the set of ALL outputs. Whereas synced bitcoin full nodes can forget all about spent outputs, Monero full nodes must keep some info about them, and be able to efficiently index this info. For its initial block download, a node must download and verify rangeproofs for all outputs, not just the unspent ones. Wallets must be able to sample decoys from a large fraction of all historical outputs. This makes Monero much more bloated than Bitcoin. A more detailed comparison between Monero and Bitcoin can be found at https://gist.github.com/phyro/ec37d8bfedd36102b0ea5824580d06e4 https://gist.github.com/phyro/ec37d8bfedd36102b0ea5824580d06...

Geee 5y ago
Great comparison. Grin is the only cryptocurrency that fundamentally competes with Bitcoin in the long term.
sgp_ 5y ago
I work for Cake Wallet and Monero.com so I'm biased, but you should try one of the wallets that does this relatively burdensome scanning task locally to see that normally it's not the end of the world. It takes me only a few seconds to scan a month of blocks.
- acdha 5y ago
  > It takes me only a few seconds to scan a month of blocks. How many transactions is that, however?
  - sgp_ 5y ago
    About 25,000 transactions per day right now. So about 750,000 per month. Edit: here's a good comparison chart https://moneroj.net/percentage/ https://moneroj.net/percentage/
jason0597 5y ago
> This makes Monero much more bloated than Bitcoin. Would you call bloat something that is essential for privacy?
- tromp 5y ago
  I do when comparable privacy can be reached without, and with even much less historical bloat than bitcoin: https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart
  - sgp_ 5y ago
    It's not comparable though. The simplified (though slightly wrong) way to think about Grin is that its privacy is like Monero but without Monero's ring signatures. Its transaction graph privacy is quite weak. While the author of this article makes some mistakes, here's an example of that weakness: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/breaking-mimblewimble-privacy-model-84bcd67bfe52 https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/breaking-mimblewimble-... Grin developers said in response: > The Grin team has consistently acknowledged that Grin’s privacy is far from perfect. While transaction linkability is a limitation that we’re looking to mitigate as part of our goal of ever-improving privacy, it does not ‘break’ Mimblewimble nor is it anywhere close to being so fundamental as to render it or Grin’s privacy features useless. Hiding addresses and amounts is certainly better than Bitcoin, but the transaction graph privacy offered by Grin is significantly weaker than Monero. It's not the same.
    - tromp 5y ago
      I was comparing MWCS (Mimblewimble + CoinSwap) with Monero. Quoting from https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal We present a coin shuffling proposal with the following properties: Users submit self-spends throughout the day. No interaction needed for shuffling. Shuffling is performed at the end of the day by a set of mixnodes that cannot steal any coins. Invalid self-spends are automatically filtered out. No need to abort or restart the shuffling. As long as at least one mixnode is honest, then no one learns the input output links. The size of the shuffle is limited only by blocksize and could easily be over a thousand. Each shuffle only grows the chainsize by a small constant (~100 byte per mixnode), thanks to MW cut-through. Widespread use of the protocol would leave the transaction graph mostly obscured.

by tromp 5y ago

Geee 5y ago

Great comparison. Grin is the only cryptocurrency that fundamentally competes with Bitcoin in the long term.

sgp_ 5y ago

I work for Cake Wallet and Monero.com so I'm biased, but you should try one of the wallets that does this relatively burdensome scanning task locally to see that normally it's not the end of the world. It takes me only a few seconds to scan a month of blocks.

acdha 5y ago
> It takes me only a few seconds to scan a month of blocks. How many transactions is that, however?
- sgp_ 5y ago
  About 25,000 transactions per day right now. So about 750,000 per month. Edit: here's a good comparison chart https://moneroj.net/percentage/ https://moneroj.net/percentage/

jason0597 5y ago

> This makes Monero much more bloated than Bitcoin. Would you call bloat something that is essential for privacy?

tromp 5y ago
I do when comparable privacy can be reached without, and with even much less historical bloat than bitcoin: https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart https://forum.grin.mw/t/scalability-vs-privacy-chart
- sgp_ 5y ago
  It's not comparable though. The simplified (though slightly wrong) way to think about Grin is that its privacy is like Monero but without Monero's ring signatures. Its transaction graph privacy is quite weak. While the author of this article makes some mistakes, here's an example of that weakness: https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/breaking-mimblewimble-privacy-model-84bcd67bfe52 https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/breaking-mimblewimble-... Grin developers said in response: > The Grin team has consistently acknowledged that Grin’s privacy is far from perfect. While transaction linkability is a limitation that we’re looking to mitigate as part of our goal of ever-improving privacy, it does not ‘break’ Mimblewimble nor is it anywhere close to being so fundamental as to render it or Grin’s privacy features useless. Hiding addresses and amounts is certainly better than Bitcoin, but the transaction graph privacy offered by Grin is significantly weaker than Monero. It's not the same.
  - tromp 5y ago
    I was comparing MWCS (Mimblewimble + CoinSwap) with Monero. Quoting from https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal We present a coin shuffling proposal with the following properties: Users submit self-spends throughout the day. No interaction needed for shuffling. Shuffling is performed at the end of the day by a set of mixnodes that cannot steal any coins. Invalid self-spends are automatically filtered out. No need to abort or restart the shuffling. As long as at least one mixnode is honest, then no one learns the input output links. The size of the shuffle is limited only by blocksize and could easily be over a thousand. Each shuffle only grows the chainsize by a small constant (~100 byte per mixnode), thanks to MW cut-through. Widespread use of the protocol would leave the transaction graph mostly obscured.