Daemons intended for public use can be set up to require payment
in the form of hashes in exchange for RPC service. This enables
public daemons to receive payment for their work over a large
number of calls. This system behaves similarly to a pool, so
payment takes the form of valid blocks every so often, yielding
a large one off payment, rather than constant micropayments.
This system can also be used by third parties as a "paywall"
layer, where users of a service can pay for use by mining Monero
to the service provider's address. An example of this for web
site access is Primo, a Monero mining based website "paywall":
https://github.com/selene-kovri/primo
This has some advantages:
- incentive to run a node providing RPC services, thereby promoting the availability of third party nodes for those who can't run their own
- incentive to run your own node instead of using a third party's, thereby promoting decentralization
- decentralized: payment is done between a client and server, with no third party needed
- private: since the system is "pay as you go", you don't need to identify yourself to claim a long lived balance
- no payment occurs on the blockchain, so there is no extra transactional load
- one may mine with a beefy server, and use those credits from a phone, by reusing the client ID (at the cost of some privacy)
- no barrier to entry: anyone may run a RPC node, and your expected revenue depends on how much work you do
- Sybil resistant: if you run 1000 idle RPC nodes, you don't magically get more revenue
- no large credit balance maintained on servers, so they have no incentive to exit scam
- you can use any/many node(s), since there's little cost in switching servers
- market based prices: competition between servers to lower costs
- incentive for a distributed third party node system: if some public nodes are overused/slow, traffic can move to others
- increases network security
- helps counteract mining pools' share of the network hash rate
- zero incentive for a payer to "double spend" since a reorg does not give any money back to the miner
And some disadvantages:
- low power clients will have difficulty mining (but one can optionally mine in advance and/or with a faster machine)
- payment is "random", so a server might go a long time without a block before getting one
- a public node's overall expected payment may be small
Public nodes are expected to compete to find a suitable level for
cost of service.
The daemon can be set up this way to require payment for RPC services:
monerod --rpc-payment-address 4xxxxxx \
--rpc-payment-credits 250 --rpc-payment-difficulty 1000
These values are an example only.
The --rpc-payment-difficulty switch selects how hard each "share" should
be, similar to a mining pool. The higher the difficulty, the fewer
shares a client will find.
The --rpc-payment-credits switch selects how many credits are awarded
for each share a client finds.
Considering both options, clients will be awarded credits/difficulty
credits for every hash they calculate. For example, in the command line
above, 0.25 credits per hash. A client mining at 100 H/s will therefore
get an average of 25 credits per second.
For reference, in the current implementation, a credit is enough to
sync 20 blocks, so a 100 H/s client that's just starting to use Monero
and uses this daemon will be able to sync 500 blocks per second.
The wallet can be set to automatically mine if connected to a daemon
which requires payment for RPC usage. It will try to keep a balance
of 50000 credits, stopping mining when it's at this level, and starting
again as credits are spent. With the example above, a new client will
mine this much credits in about half an hour, and this target is enough
to sync 500000 blocks (currently about a third of the monero blockchain).
There are three new settings in the wallet:
- credits-target: this is the amount of credits a wallet will try to
reach before stopping mining. The default of 0 means 50000 credits.
- auto-mine-for-rpc-payment-threshold: this controls the minimum
credit rate which the wallet considers worth mining for. If the
daemon credits less than this ratio, the wallet will consider mining
to be not worth it. In the example above, the rate is 0.25
- persistent-rpc-client-id: if set, this allows the wallet to reuse
a client id across runs. This means a public node can tell a wallet
that's connecting is the same as one that connected previously, but
allows a wallet to keep their credit balance from one run to the
other. Since the wallet only mines to keep a small credit balance,
this is not normally worth doing. However, someone may want to mine
on a fast server, and use that credit balance on a low power device
such as a phone. If left unset, a new client ID is generated at
each wallet start, for privacy reasons.
To mine and use a credit balance on two different devices, you can
use the --rpc-client-secret-key switch. A wallet's client secret key
can be found using the new rpc_payments command in the wallet.
Note: anyone knowing your RPC client secret key is able to use your
credit balance.
The wallet has a few new commands too:
- start_mining_for_rpc: start mining to acquire more credits,
regardless of the auto mining settings
- stop_mining_for_rpc: stop mining to acquire more credits
- rpc_payments: display information about current credits with
the currently selected daemon
The node has an extra command:
- rpc_payments: display information about clients and their
balances
The node will forget about any balance for clients which have
been inactive for 6 months. Balances carry over on node restart.
One considers the blockchain, while the other considers the
blockchain and some recent actions, such as a recently created
transaction which spend some outputs, but isn't yet mined.
Typically, the "balance" command wants the latter, to reflect
the recent action, but things like proving ownership wants
the former.
This fixes a crash in get_reserve_proof, where a preliminary
check and the main code used two concepts of "balance".
New CLI wallet variable: export-format with options "binary" (the default),
or "ascii". "Binary" behaves as before, "ascii" forces the wallet to convert
data to ASCII using base64.
Reading files from the disk tries to auto detect what format has been
used (using a magic string added when exporting the data).
Implements https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/2859
- Trezor: support for device address display (subaddress, integrated address)
- Wallet::API support added
- Simplewallet:
- address device [<index>]
- address new <label> // shows address on device also
- integrated_address [device] <payment_id|address> // new optional "device" arg to display also on the device
c12b43cb wallet: add number of blocks required for the balance to fully unlock (moneromooo-monero)
3f1e9e84 wallet2: set confirmations to 0 for pool txes in proofs (moneromooo-monero)
36c037ec wallet_rpc_server: error out on getting the spend key from a hot wallet (moneromooo-monero)
cd1eaff2 wallet_rpc_server: always fill out subaddr_indices in get_transfers (moneromooo-monero)
Specifying SSL certificates for peer verification does an exact match,
making it a not-so-obvious alias for the fingerprints option. This
changes the checks to OpenSSL which loads concatenated certificate(s)
from a single file and does a certificate-authority (chain of trust)
check instead. There is no drop in security - a compromised exact match
fingerprint has the same worse case failure. There is increased security
in allowing separate long-term CA key and short-term SSL server keys.
This also removes loading of the system-default CA files if a custom
CA file or certificate fingerprint is specified.
The setup-background-mining option can be used to select
background mining when a wallet loads. The user will be asked
the first time the wallet is created.
f825055d wallet_rpc_server: error out on getting the spend key from a hot wallet (moneromooo-monero)
67aa4adc wallet_rpc_server: add a set_daemon RPC (moneromooo-monero)
705acbac wallet2: init some variables to default values if loading old wallets (moneromooo-monero)
f82bc29e wallet_rpc_server: always fill out subaddr_indices in get_transfers (moneromooo-monero)
01efdc6a wallet_rpc_server: set confirmations to 0 for pending/pool txes (moneromooo-monero)
These commands let one freeze outputs by key image, so they
do not appear in balance, nor are considered when creating
a transaction, etc
This is helpful when receiving an output from a suspected spy,
who might try to track your other outputs by seeing with what
other outputs it gets spent.
The frozen command may be used without parameters to list all
currently frozen outputs.
moneromooo-monero
luigi1111
stoffu
Tadeas Moravec
Dusan Klinec
Howard Chu
Riccardo Spagni
Lee Clagett