I'm not going to speculate on the future of Ethereum ring signatures here. Monero already has a working system today - I think it will become more popular once we have more web services using it.
You don't even have a GUI, monero man-child developers (thats how Vitalik calls them) are useless. Way over 50% of hash rate are botnets.
It's dead Jim... I'm still holding a decent amount (couple tens of thousands) but the first pump that comes along - I'm out.
Oh well, I guess I'd better copy-and-paste my comment from Reddit on the state of Ethereum:
On the topic of poor design:
- Vitalik has
repeatedly eschewed and ignored
commentary from researchers and plowed ahead with poor design decisions.
- Where he
hasn't ignored the commentary, he has instead noted it and then layered complexity on top of the bad idea in order to make it workable (complexity is the enemy of secure cryptography and good system design).
- He also
repeatedly fails to cite prior research researchers, which I guess leads some to view him as more than he is, which in turn leads to an inherent trust in a poorly designed system.
- He uses mathematical notation
in a completely incorrect manner in formal papers (some of which govern the very inner workings of Ethereum) such that mathematicians are unable to peer review the paper. If you can't understand what he's trying to express, how can you confirm if the concept is valid or the mathematical proof is correct?
- When the above is pointed out to him he (naively or foolishly or disingenuously) claims that the
security of the model is "in the code" and not in the mathematical proofs. This bizarre world-view is only dangerous in light of the fact that the system has to at least protect its users somewhat.
On the topic of mismanagement:
- Instead of focusing on a single implementation they instead hired developers to
build out at least 4 of the multiple implementations.
- The consequence of this was not only
a breaking inter-implementation fork 6 months ago, but also has (as their security auditors put it) "testing needs...more complex than anything we've looked at before".
- They raised
$18.4 million, which was almost entirely spent a year later. According to the blog post on the matter they have enough money to
make it to June 2016, possibly a little beyond that. That is truly shocking, considering that
Ethereum had the 4th highest crowd-funded project funds.
- Instead of biting the bullet and immediately beginning a systematic process of converting the majority of the funds raised into a store of value that would remain relatively stable for the 3-5 years it would take for the project to be built up, they kept the bulk of it in Bitcoin, resulting in
a $9 million shortfall on their initial funding amount (when viewed in USD terms).
- Despite promising financial transparency with the money that had been raised, it took them over a year before they suddenly realised they
actually needed to come through on that. A startup needn't make their financial activities public at all, but if that is the case then don't promise such transparency. Doing so, and then failing to deliver on that promise, points to incredible mismanagement by individuals that have no clue how to run or build up a company.
