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.
If the peer (whether pruned or not itself) supports sending pruned blocks
to syncing nodes, the pruned version will be sent along with the hash
of the pruned data and the block weight. The original tx hashes can be
reconstructed from the pruned txes and theur prunable data hash. Those
hashes and the block weights are hashes and checked against the set of
precompiled hashes, ensuring the data we received is the original data.
It is currently not possible to use this system when not using the set
of precompiled hashes, since block weights can not otherwise be checked
for validity.
This is off by default for now, and is enabled by --sync-pruned-blocks
2cd4fd8 Changed the use of boost:value_initialized for C++ list initializer (JesusRami)
4ad191f Removed unused boost/value_init header (whyamiroot)
928f4be Make null hash constants constexpr (whyamiroot)
9f68669 blockchain_blackball: add --historical-stat which prints historical stats of spent ratio (stoffu)
2425f27blockchain_blackball: use is_output_spent instead of ringdb.blackballed for spentness test (stoffu)
50813c1 ringdb: fix bug in blackballing (stoffu)
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".
It does not leak much since you can make a fair guess by RPC
version already, and some people want to avoid non release
clients when using third parties' nodes (because they'd never
lie about it)
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
c8709fe wallet: do not print log settings when unset (moneromooo-monero)
7b18e83 unit_tests: check return values on test data parsing (moneromooo-monero)
According to [1], std::random_shuffle is deprecated in C++14 and removed
in C++17. Since std::shuffle is available since C++11 as a replacement
and monero already requires C++11, this is a good replacement.
A cryptographically secure random number generator is used in all cases
to prevent people from perhaps copying an insecure std::shuffle call
over to a place where a secure one would be warranted. A form of
defense-in-depth.
[1]: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/random_shuffle
new cli options (RPC ones also apply to wallet):
--p2p-bind-ipv6-address (default = "::")
--p2p-bind-port-ipv6 (default same as ipv4 port for given nettype)
--rpc-bind-ipv6-address (default = "::1")
--p2p-use-ipv6 (default false)
--rpc-use-ipv6 (default false)
--p2p-require-ipv4 (default true, if ipv4 bind fails and this is
true, will not continue even if ipv6 bind
successful)
--rpc-require-ipv4 (default true, description as above)
ipv6 addresses are to be specified as "[xx:xx:xx::xx:xx]:port" except
in the cases of the cli args for bind address. For those the square
braces can be omitted.
- 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
9bfa4c20 Fix allow any cert mode in wallet rpc when configured over rpc (Lee Clagett)
3544596f Add ssl_options support to monerod's rpc mode. (Lee Clagett)
c9aaccf3 Fix configuration bug; wallet2 --daemon-ssl-allow-any-cert now works. (Lee Clagett)
98fb98f9 wallet_rpc_server: adding missing return on error in set_daemon (moneromooo-monero)
9074c0d8 wallet_rpc_server: return false on error in set_log_categories (moneromooo-monero)
968848a7 wallet_rpc_server: fix crash in validate_address if no wallet is loaded (moneromooo-monero)
If we have fewer outputs available on the chain than what we
require, but the output we're spending already has a ring,
it would loop picking outputs randomly, but never find enough.
Also tune logs for better debugging this kind of thing.
In the case where previously a second unneeded output would be
added to a transaction. This should help *some* of the cases
where outputs are slowly being consolidated, leading to the
whole balance being locked when sending monero.
Loading the same wallet as the currently loaded one would autosave
the current state after loading it, leading to some kind of rollback
effect. We now save before loading to avoid this. If loading fails,
it means the current wallet will be saved (or maybe not, depending
on where the failure occurs: most of the sanity checks occur before
saving). There is a new autosave_current flag to open/restore calls
so the (enabled by default) autosave can be skipped.
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)
