fullmetalScience

A couple of months ago, rumors about TradeOgre blocking withdrawals for an unrelated crypto asset circulated.

I began avoiding the exchange, but when the other day a user urged to trade on the platform, I decided to publish this tool regardless. It might prove useful to some people in the community.

OGRE is a terminal interface, both console and CLI, optimized for swing-trading XMR<->BTC on TradeOgre.

It is similar in use to XMRPC, but instead of managing your Monero RPC, you manage your orders on said platform.

Please refer to the corresponding section on xmr.zone.

A new version of XMRPC - the alternative Monero CLI has been tagged.

Highlights

• Portrait-view for mobile and narrow terminals
• Read wallet password from PGP-encrypted file
• Auto-save wallet data
• Auto-select Tor node

As will be held commonplace with XMRPC, every important aspect is tweakable through environment variables.

By default, it does what it can to get new users set (using maximum privacy available). As they advance, they may employ options to confine XMRPC to select preferences.

For more details refer to the documentation or download the new version 0.2.0-beta directly:

If you haven't previously cloned XMRPC

git clone --branch v0.2.0-beta \
    https://gitlab.com/fullmetalScience/sxmo-onfire.git

If you are working with an existing clone

git fetch origin tag v0.2.0-beta
git checkout tags/v0.2.0-beta

Your feedback and questions are welcome!

You may also be curious about the initial announcement.

If you are anything like me, you much prefer a good CLI over clicking around in a GUI.

Now, with Monero it's never "fire up, issue transaction, exit".

Catching up on a week's worth of blocks can mean a long wait - especially if there are anonymity networks between you and the node.

If you decide to cope by leaving the CLI running, you find your tx-notes gone after a reboot. Less recent versions would even loose your sync level. Uff.

You could make it a habit to follow your set_tx_note up with a save, but that's not ideal.

XMRPC

To tackle the issue for myself, I've started to write XMRPC, a POSIX-compliant shell script that allows you to interact with monero-wallet-rpc.

This way you can have the RPC continuously syncing in the background and interact when necessary.

In fact, XMRPC takes care of launching the RPC and also creates a wallet if you happen to be starting from scratch.

The tool is aggressive in that it doesn't require user confirmations. If you tell it to transfer, it will try to do just that - with whatever fee or delay the official Monero client suggests at the given moment.

It can be launched interactively as seen in the image or as "one-shot", where only the command passed as argument is executed (e.g. ./xmrpc.sh balance).

Support for labelling transactions has yet to be added, but some parts of XMRPC have already been powering the OpenAlias-service XMR.ID successfully for a while.

You can check out this first version, tagged 0.1.0-beta, at https://xmr.zone/sxmo-onfire/xmrpc.

The test for improved XMR ID sign-ups has concluded on stagenet and the form is now active for mainnet-registrations of "real" XMR ID's at https://xmr.id.

With this, the parts of the sign-up that do not require human interaction got a boost - while nothing has changed for active XMR ID's. The qualities of those are the same - regardless of when and how they were registered.

For those interested in the test's findings, here's a report for transparency.

If you'd rather be spared the details, feel free to head over to [email protected] instead, where I publish tips and announce software aimed at making your Monero-life easier.

Sign-up Test Report

Three major issues were encountered and taken care of:

DNS outage

Our provider for the xmrid.com (secondary) domain experienced a partial service outage. For a couple of hours the DNS wouldn't return any responses to queries.

Our internal monitoring reported the error at around 11 p.m. local time. Even though the primary domain xmr.id was unaffected, such issues are particularly stressful, as their resolution depends on a third party.

After resolution, the provider explained:

"It was an issue with some domain updates that got triggered by adding records."

Spam detection

Some major email providers categorize messages from @xmr.id as spam, preventing further sign-up instructions from reaching the user.

There is the drawback of the new, form-based approach: Since you no longer message us first, your hoster doesn't know that our response is desired email.

At the time, the best way to handle such a situation is to send us an email or message on one of the other channels mentioned in the description box at c/XMRID.

Emoji support

A user tested the form with an emoji username - thereby reminding us that this "edge case" hadn't been automated by the time.

Adding emoji support demanded most of the resources since the test. It is now working with support for both, Unicode and Punycode submissions and as an added (internal) bonus it also led to establish a more efficient method for automated testing.

Onward

I have decided to leave the stagenet form active for the time being, so that developers and curious users have a playground for testing OpenAliases in Monero. Note that I will clean up names every once in a while.

So, if you want to try an emoji just enter a heart 🧡, an animal 🦅, a ninja 🥷🏿, some flag 🏳️, your favorite ᚱune or a simple (anti-)smiley 😡 into the username field when filling out the form :)

Independent of the topic of registrations, there's an integrators guide around the corner. There are certain things that wallet devs can do to further secure XMR-ID use. Oh, and the guide will be accompanied by a tool for simplified Monero transactions that fans of "suckless" software are bound to love ...

Finally, a big thanks to all the testers who participated!

(Note that none of the stagenet restrictions apply to "real" XMR ID's from https://xmr.id.)

As we ramp up to celebrate Monero's 10th birthday, here's an opportunity to get acquainted with Monero ID's - easy and free!

TL;DR: Fill out the form at get.xmr.id/form.html to get your very own stagenet OpenAlias.

OpenAlias is great: You hand someone a simple domain name and their Monero client resolves it to a destination. No copy-paste, no QR-code scanning - just ready to send!

To make your life easier, XMR.ID provides this as a service.

Now with faster activation

Previously, setting up your "XMR ID" required significant manual intervention, that delayed the process more than necessary.

After a broad set of optimizations, new aliases are now typically ready-to-use within 15 minutes.

The new automations repect XMR.ID's design goal of avoiding web-based self-service, thus maintaining the previous level of security.

Wanna play?

Before enabling this new method in production, we will test in on STAGENET - a parallel Monero network that works just like the real deal, but with its funds considered worthless.

If you haven't used stagenet before, this may be a great opportunity for you to not only get acquainted with XMR ID's, but create a risk-free playground for your own experiments!

It takes about 5 minutes. At the end you will have an account that can receive funds at <yourname>.stagenet.xmr.id, filled with some zero-value Monero, ready to be sent around.

To try it, simply fill in the blanks at https://get.xmr.id/form.html (onion). No ninja-skills required - and you may contact me about any issues or inconveniences you encounter.

Hackers welcome

Put your white-hat abilities to the test, fool around a bit, probe and report any faults or security flaws if you want to help harden this part of the Monero ecosystem - or just do a speed-run and get your alias.

Your stagenet-alias

This test is set to run for a week, starting today, but your alias will remain active afterwards.

Contact

Let's chat in our Matrix room #xmr.id:monero.social or message me directly at @f:monero.social.

c/XMRID is our place in town. There's also an email address. You'll probably run into it as you go.

Talk soon, f

calling qualified developers