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.
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
I saw one when landing on www.tribler.org, and it seemed
like a good idea to have something similar, alongside some
more general "what is monero" text.
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.
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.
- import only key images generated by cold signing process
- wallet_api: trezor methods added
- wallet: button request code added
- const added to methods
- wallet2::get_tx_key_device() tries to decrypt stored tx private keys using the device.
- simplewallet supports get_tx_key and get_tx_proof on hw device using the get_tx_key feature
- live refresh enables refresh with trezor i.e. computing key images on the fly. More convenient and efficient for users.
- device: has_ki_live_refresh added
- a thread is watching whether live refresh is being computed, if not for 30 seconds, it terminates the live refresh process - switches Trezor state
- enables to perform rescan_spent / ki sync with untrusted daemon. Spent check status involves RPC calls which require trusted daemon status as it leaks information. The new call performs soft reset while preserving key images thus a sequence: refresh, ki sync / import, rescan_bc keep_ki will correctly perform spent checking without need for trusted daemon.
- useful to detect spent outputs with untrusted daemon on watch_only / multisig / hw-cold wallets after expensive key image sync.
- cli: rescan_bc keep_ki
When doing a first refresh on HW-token based wallet KI sync is required if money were received. Received money may indicate wallet was already used before the restore I.e., some transaction could have been already sent from the wallet. The spent UTXO would not be detected as spent which could lead to double spending errors on submitting a new transaction.
Thus if the wallet is HW-token based with the cold signing protocol and the first refresh detected received money the user is asked to perform the key image sync.
- simple device callback object added. Device can request passphrase/PIN entry via the callback or notify user some action is required
- callback is routed to wallet2, which routes the callback to i_wallet_callback so CLI or GUI wallets can support passphrase entry for HW tokens
- wallet: device open needs wallet callback first - passphrase protected device needs wallet callback so user can enter passphrase
* support in wallet2
* support in monero-wallet-cli
* support in monero-wallet-rpc
* support in wallet api
* support in monero-gen-trusted-multisig
* unit tests for multisig wallets creation
- device name is a new wallet property
- full device name is now a bit more structured so we can address particular device vendor + device path. Example: 'Ledger', 'Trezor:udp', 'Trezor:udp:127.0.0.1:21324', 'Trezor:bridge:usb01'. The part before ':' identifies HW device implementation, the optional part after ':' is device path to look for.
- new --hw-device parameter added to the wallet, can name the hardware device
- device reconnect added
The secret spend key is kept encrypted in memory, and
decrypted on the fly when needed.
Both spend and view secret keys are kept encrypted in a JSON
field in the keys file. This avoids leaving the keys in
memory due to being manipulated by the JSON I/O API.
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