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Here is a article:

http://cryptolife.net/darkcoin-the-next-big-thing-or-just-another-pump-and-dump/ (http://cryptolife.net/darkcoin-the-next-big-thing-or-just-another-pump-and-dump/)

DarkCoin – The Next Big Thing, or Just Another Pump and Dump?

Released just shy of 5 months ago, darkcoin has quickly ascended the ranks of the cryptocurrency world, securing the #4 spot on coinmarketcap. Boasting what appears to be an impressive suite of anonymity features, darkcoin has successfully marketed itself as the rare breed of substantive altcoin. Is it, though? Peer beyond the surface, and you’ll quickly discover that darkcoin is not dark in name only.

Darksend Drama


Overhyped and misunderstood, darksend is touted as the killer feature that’ll send darkcoin’s price to the moon. What is darksend? In short, a protocol that groups transactions in such a way that the source and destination of the coins are muddied. As previously mentioned http://cryptolife.net/breakdown-anonymizing-cryptocurrencies/ (http://cryptolife.net/breakdown-anonymizing-cryptocurrencies/), darksend is not a comprehensive anonymity solution. At best, it provides pseudonymity. In spite of that, the people promoting this coin still use misleading buzzwords like anonymous payments and hailing the feature as something totally unique and groundbreaking, and perhaps the greatest thing since bitcoin itself. The reality of it all couldn’t be farther from that.

Darksend itself is not even a unique feature, nor was it created by Evan Duffield, Darkcoin’s lead developer. Darksend is merely an implementation of the CoinJoin specification https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0)  originally created by Greg Maxwell, one of the bitcoin core developers. Still, Duffield does his best to avoid giving any credit to Maxwell. Take a look through his posts, you’ll not see a mention of CoinJoin or Maxwell.

To make matters worse, darksend is closed source. Take a moment to reflect upon how ridiculous it is to take open source software (bitcoin), layer an open source specification on top of it (coinjoin), and then keep the result (darksend) closed source. It goes against the fundamental principles of the cryptocurrency movement, and is reflective of the motives of the developer.

Amusingly enough, Maxwell himself is on the record  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg6804719#msg6804719 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg6804719#msg6804719)  stating that CoinJoin is inferior to other anonymizing protocols that are already available. Put simply, Darksend does not live up to the hype that surrounds it. It can not ensure anonymization of payments.

Darkcoin makes use of so-called ‘masternodes’ that assist with darksend transactions. Last week, a bug in the code unleashed havoc upon the network, causing it to continually fork and putting the coin into a nonfunctional state. A hardfork had to be issued to fix the issue.

Having said all that, Duffield is no idiot. He knows the limitations of darksend. But he’s not concerned about it. Why, you ask? Darksend is very good at generating hype. Hype leads to price apprecation. And who benefits from price appreciation? Coin holders, of course. Which brings me to my next point…

Huge instamine and subsidy reduction

Since I’m writing about it, it should come as no surprise that this coin has an instamine associated with it. This one went unnoticed for quite some time, but by taking a quick look at blockchain data we can see what went on. During the first 15 hours, between block 1  http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm (http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm) and block 4000 http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm (http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm)   , approximately 1.75m darkcoins were generated.

Immediately after this period, Duffield claimed that there was a ‘bug’ in the block reward calculations, and issued a hardfork to address it. After this fork, the block reward quickly dwindled down to an insignificant amount. Right now, it sits at a pitiful 5 DRK. A farcry from the 500 that it used to be.

The result? Darkcoin is currently at 80,000 blocks, but there’s only 4.3m DRK out there. Five months later, the 1.75m generated during those first 4200 blocks still represents 40% of all DRK in existence.

Dark beginnings

Darkcoin was initially released as XCoin, and didn’t attract much fanfare. This is partially because it was released without a working windows client, one of the obvious marks of a scam,  http://cryptolife.net/the-anatomy-of-a-scamcoin-7-things-to-know-before-investing-in-an-altcoin/   (http://cryptolife.net/the-anatomy-of-a-scamcoin-7-things-to-know-before-investing-in-an-altcoin/  ) making mining it very difficult.

Who, then, was in the best position to mine the initial 4200 blocks? None other than Duffield and his buddies. The truth of the matter is that the aforementioned block reward ‘bug’ was intentional and allowed him to mine a large number of coins for himself, in an attempt to avoid the negative stigma associated with obvious premining/instamining… and it seems to have worked.

With a current market cap of just over $50m, Duffield has no doubt profited quite handsomely off of this scam. The real question is, how many of these coins have been dumped on the market? How many are in the process of being dumped? Hard to say without deep blockchain analysis, but it’s irrelevant either way. The price of altcoins are held up largely by people’s reluctance to sell. When one person, or a group of people, control a majority of coins, this creates a situation where the price of the coin is either artificially inflated, or gets pounded into the ground. A poor investment to be sure, made even poorer when you take a look at the 30 day price history. If you think growth like this is sustainable, history would like to have a word with you.

http://img01.taobaocdn.com/imgextra/i1/888367355/TB2uodDXpXXXXXFXFXXXXXXXXXX_!!888367355.png

Conclusion

All hype and no substance, darkcoin is far from a serious contender in the altcoin world. Its suite of ‘anonymity’ features are falsely advertised, offering pseudonymity at best. At the end of the day, darkcoin offers nothing of true value over other coins. Couple this with shady release tactics, a sizable instamine, and unsustainable price increases, only a fool would dare ‘invest’ in this coin right now.

 :o  Truth or FUD ??

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FEzAhZJC.jpg&t=540&c=byF9JOWsCHnh8Q

All ending in "Crypto" and apparently have the same post history. ;D

Very good article.

Yes, very entertaining, especially for anyone who doesn't own any.  Let the drama unfold.

Great explanation of DarkcoinScam, but too many people fell for it :/

The instamine is no secret, and is described & explained here: https://darkcointalk.org/threads/the-birth-of-darkcoin.162/
and here: http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Was_Darkcoin_Instamined.3F

http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Is_Darkcoin_fully_and_100.25_anonymous.3F
http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#What_can_I_expect_in_terms_of_traceability.3F
http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#I.27m_a_little_paranoid_with_security._How_can_I_achieve_maximum_anonymity_and_security_with_Darkcoin.3F
http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Was_Darkcoin_Instamined.3F
http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Did_Darkcoin_have_a_fair_launch.3F
http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#I_read_somone_who_wrote_that_50.25_of_the_coins_in_circulation_are_owned_by_the_devs
http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Why_is_Darkcoin_hated_so_much.3F_Why_so_much_FUD.3F_Why_all_this_disinfo_campaign.3F

/end thread - nice try fudsters haha :)

Tired of the FUD ? Read the FAQ : http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ

Was Darkcoin Instamined? (http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#Was_Darkcoin_Instamined.3F)

I read someone who wrote that 50% of the coins in circulation are owned by the devs (http://wiki.darkcoin.eu/wiki/FAQ#I_read_somone_who_wrote_that_50.25_of_the_coins_in_circulation_are_owned_by_the_devs)
The Birth Of Darkcoin (https://darkcointalk.org/threads/the-birth-of-darkcoin.162/) (Mar 29, 2014 by Evan Duffield)

Of course mudslinging is easier than innovation. So keep creating new accounts while the Darkcoin team is innovating. Have a good day !

It doesn't explain why 50% of the coins are not held by Dev.

so both Truth and FUD in this article?

It doesn't explain why 250% of the coins are not held by Dev either :P

Premine = the dev creates a coin where a number of coins (from 0.0001% to 100% of the coins) goes straight to a certain address and is then used/distributed etc.

Instamine = fast mining (where many are mining). Example = PoW/PoS coins which the entire monetary based is instamined within a week. Now, just because something is mined fast doesn't mean the dev has 100% hashpower. Go to the Darkcoin thread and look at the miners and their WTS 10.000 DRK for 0.25 BTC.

Everywhere I get mixed reactions when I ask the same thing, some thinks its real some say it's scam but people who got in on it earlier, profited from it real well.

OK, so this is a 50% premine in my opinion. Dev sold them at a low price level because they didn't expect DRK to become so expensive as now.

First 15 hours, 1.75 million dark coin were mined.

Darkcoin is currently at 80,000 blocks, but there’s only 4.3m DRK out there. Five months later, the 1.75m generated during those first 4200 blocks still represents 40% of all DRK in existence.

 ???

Huge instamine and subsidy reduction

Since I’m writing about it, it should come as no surprise that this coin has an instamine associated with it. This one went unnoticed for quite some time, but by taking a quick look at blockchain data we can see what went on. During the first 15 hours, between block 1  http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm (http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm) and block 4000 http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm (http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm)   , approximately 1.75m darkcoins were generated.

Immediately after this period, Duffield claimed that there was a ‘bug’ in the block reward calculations, and issued a hardfork to address it. After this fork, the block reward quickly dwindled down to an insignificant amount. Right now, it sits at a pitiful 5 DRK. A farcry from the 500 that it used to be.

The result? Darkcoin is currently at 80,000 blocks, but there’s only 4.3m DRK out there. Five months later, the 1.75m generated during those first 4200 blocks still represents 40% of all DRK in existence.

Or part of them were sold.

TLDR: There is no other coin on the market that is even in the same league as DRK - why even bother trying fudsters - all questions have been closed off and answered :)

https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/announcements

Dear customers,

We are pleased to announce that Darkcoin will be available to trade on the Bitfinex platform starting at 6PM CET. It is rare for us to add new trading products, but we believe that the advent of privacy-centric cryptocurrencies warrants our attention. Specifically, we believe that Darkcoin and the team behind it represent the most credible foray into this important frontier, and now that Darkcoin's market capitalization has reached non-trivial levels, we have decided to offer it as a trading option to our customers. As one might expect, will support trading in DRK/BTC, but, in addition, we will the first exchange to support trading in DRK/USD.

While we have no crystal balls at Bitfinex, we do nonetheless believe that the new features that Darkcoin aims to implement represents a substantial development in the cryptocurrency space, and we believe that any innovation that enhances privacy deserves our attention. Naturally, we do not condone the use of Darkcoin for illicit purposes, but we do believe in the right to privacy.

Initially, we will only offer cash exchange transactions. In time, as our order book deepens and Darkcoin successfully navigates certain milestones, we will also possibly allow swap leverage and shorting, should Darkcoin's risk profile and volatility merit it.

Darkcoins can't also be used as collateral for margin transactions.

We hope that you that you find these new trading products to be of value to you and we, of course, always welcome your feedback.

Best regards,
The Bitfinex team

I am really interested in how many DARKs you hold, hmmm....

If they kept their coins (same with Bitcoin): Too many coins were sold as miners tend to sell and not keep. Let's just say there weren't many expecting Bitcoin to reach 1000$ when they were selling their BTCs for cents, neither were many expecting Darkcoin to reach 17$ when they were selling 100.000 DRKs for 2.5 BTC.

As I am sure you are well aware AlexGR, that's an extremely weak argument to defend a massive instamine and unfair distribution.  It holds absolutely no water.  

it seems somebody want to delete this post.....

 ???

it was deleted because you were replying to yourself, and because you were posting the same thing (essentially bumping the topic). other deletions were because you were posting it in other coin's threads.

Fairness to who? Late miners? By this definition all instamined PoS/PoW are 10 times more unfair than DRK.

If darkcoin is a pump and dump its the longest pump and dump coin in crypto history. If you noticed most coins do this in the first week or two.  I also know a lot of people made a lot of money with this coin.

So the dev made money? Good at least he is still around working on the coin. Not many coins can say that 6 months in.  Please learn what a pump and dump is before you throw around terms you don;t understand.

Premine? Maybe maybe not. Pump and Dump no lol just no.

Steve

We need move on~
A lots of coin can make money .like BOST,CRY .....

drk epic instamined... lol

And to think these knobjockies think their shit doesn't stink and have every right to attack any other coin.  You coin is one massive scam and all the dark cheerleaders are doing is protecting their investment

Its funny they like to dish out the crap but cant take it when its in their face. They think everything is right and all kosher on the surface.  Fucking Delusion. The lot of them are.


Fancy 80% of the people on this forum have a cry at ANY PREMINE and think something as little as 2-5% premine is UNFAIR, yet these guys own 40% -

 Words cannot explain the stupidity from its fans defending this shit but they will try and try and sound smart with semantics and yet are FAILING BAD with every line. You cant defend this.


A fair launch should have meant  RE LAUNCH with everything working and bugs fixed.  Not "oops" and act like its all ok

I think gmaxwell is wrong on Darkcoin because the coinjoin model is centralised whereas Darkcoin has decentralised coinjoin. So, I can't see that it is pointless. His support for ring signatures is academic in the sense of "nice in theory but frankly not workable in real life". Those that have experience ring sigs know how buggy and alpha the software. Therefore, for those of us living in the real world - go the darkcoin.  Gmaxwell and his bitcoin devs should realise that the IRS has already mapped out all significant bitcoin addresses to social security numbers, whilst they talk debate the alpha tech of ring sigs but yet are doing NOTHING to fix. The bitcoin dev team are looking more pathetic to me everyday.

I think that over time the opinions of the miners will reflect less in a coin's price than the opinion of investors and traders.  If the devs and the community keep the coin innovative, the original distribution methods will matter less and less in the future.

Early adpotrers of pump and dump benefit too that's the point...but after that instamine calculation and no credits for darksend it seems like a scam to me.

so something wrong with bitcoin core dev?

gmaxwell  implies that darkcoin can not achieve totally Anon features through coinjoin technology???

 ???

Gmaxwell supporting ring sigs is a joke. The software is totally alpha and unworkable. Gmaxwell did not say that coinjoin cannot achieve anonymity. He said he believes the coinjoin implementation in Darkcoin is pointless because coinjoin already exists for bitcoin. He is not about to bad mouth coinjoin because he invented it.

However, what he failed to acknowledge was that coinjoin in bitcoin is centralised and subject to gov't co-opting it. Like truecrypt. Therefore, decentralised coinjoin in Darkcoin is NOT pointless. It is damn good anonymity, originally conceived by gmaxwell but made into a decentralised system that is many times better and stronger in Darkcoin.  I think non-english speakers are struggling to pick up the nuances of what Gmaxwell is saying.

"Why CoinJoin, as Used in DarkCoin,does NOT bring Full Anonymity"

http://www.scribd.com/doc/227369807/Bitcoin-Coinjoin-Not-Anonymous-v01



From Evan (of DRK) himself: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg7060893#msg7060893
So with DRK, we have an UNFINISHED product that will NEVER be 100% anonymous.  #FAIL

The above will be fixed in RC4, when full source codes are released by the Darkcoin team. You cannot hold me to that timetable as the Darkcoin dev team made those representations and they can change at anytime. But, I'm going by what they say as they have been good with their word to date.

Ozziecoin, Your pump and dump dance would probably be more effective if you were less transparently dishonest in your approach.  I'm normally happy to ignore the nonsense in the altcoin subform, but since you saw fit to go distrupt the coinjoin thread with some offtopic insult hurling I thought I'd bring the extensive response back here where its topical.

CoinJoin is trustless— which is orthogonal with centralized or decentralized, it could be implemented several ways (though trustlessness is usually a prerequisite to a decenteralized implementation). Post 5 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg2984051#msg2984051) in the CoinJoin thread writes in depth about implementing it in a decenteralized way, none of which appears to have been implemented by the darkcoin developers as far as I can tell— from what I've heard it seems that they're not even able to understand it. (This is a disappointment to me, since I was trying to describe these ideas clearly so others could understand them.)

More amusingly, what DarkCoin does is highly centralized because the software is closed— you can't get more centralized than closed source. What the actual behavior is, is anyone's guess— it's impossible to review due to it being closed— though "masternodes" does not sound like something decenteralized, it sounds like something that creates a small chokepoint which could be used to deanonymize its users, like a server based CoinJoin but worse since you have to hold a huge pile of coins to run a server.

As I've said before CoinJoin is interesting because it's inherently part of Bitcoin already— it just needed better tools (and now there are some, e.g. darkwallet) to make it available to people.  It's a privacy improvement over not having it, but it isn't perfect, but it also didn't require any changes to Bitcoin (much less a whole altcoin) to deploy it.  In an incompatible system much better is possible as is proposed by ZeroCash and much better is actually _realized_ by Bytecoin (and its forks... Monero, Fantomcoin, etc.), the later are actually working (if immature, due reinventing many wheels) implementations of much stronger privacy, decenteralized in their implementation, all released under a good open source license.

From what I can tell the only purpose DarkCoin serves is to depress me about the state of humanity.

Now who is doing the pumping for his coin? As I see it coinjoin as it stands is highly centralised and subject to being co-opted. So, until I see many coinjoin services being setup and used randomly by people, all of the time, I'm going to ignore your theoretical BS; such as "which is orthogonal with centralized or decentralized".  Basically, you have not demonstrated a workable, random, anonymous system in reality.

Why would you attack Darkcoin?  Afterall, the devs themselves have said they will make the code available soon. It seems to me you are prejudiced against Darkcoin.  Why? I cannot fathom nor am I interested.  However, I am interested in using a system of random Masternodes performing coin mixing services rather than your 1 centralised coinmixing server.

As for you saying that CoinJoin is inherently part of Bitcoin; how so? It is not part of the protocol.  I do not see many people use it on a day to day basis. It is not part of computer wallets. Which part of it is actually "inherent".  Why cannot Litecoin use it "inherently" tomorrow if they wanted to? I see nothing inherent about it at all.

Please, Zerocash is totally closed source right now so how would you know it is better?  And bytecoin and its various forks have problems with blockchain bloat. So, I think you should do some research before offering baseless opinion about Darkcoin.

ITT: Silly people who don't know the difference between standard CoinJoin and Darksend.

Also, silly people who live in a world in which Darkcoin RC4 hasn't been announced.

For the record:


Coinjoin as currently exists, is centralised. Do you want to disagree with me and tell everyone it is decentralised?

Well should you not do some research on the Masternode implementation before calling it pointless? Where is the basis for your accusations?

In fact Evan wanted to work on the privacy aspect of bitcoin but realised it was pointless.  So did Amir Taaki, hence why DarkWallet was designed from outside the bitcoin dev team.

Yes, I am doing something very positive about privacy by defending good tech against baseless opinion. I did not mention anything about Darkcoin's price.  No one is doing any pumping whatsoever. It is you who is talking about price. I do not expect you to serve my interests.  However, it is wrong of you to malign that which you did not research and call pointless for no good reason.

As for contributing code, we all understand it is a political process. Please do not pretend it is otherwise. I am glad I annoyed you because you annoy me.

omg I thought developers would at least have a certain amount of pride to know a bit about a subject they are willing to give their strong opinions on. Trolls and traders and other clueless people I understand, but developers... man...

The true position of GMaxwell and his dislike of Darkcoin is as follows:


Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work and he defends it by saying that CoinJoin is already part of Bitcoin. I beg to differ. CoinJoin is an add on.  Moreover, masternodes perform coin mixing via a decentralised network of hundreds of masternodes, chosen at random.

It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random. 

Nicely written article. Thanks for the post.

I will stay clear or DRK for the next while.

I haven't promoted anything here, except arguably the Bytecoin/etc. ones which aren't mine by any means.

You're asserting this but you haven't justified it. I can't counter an assertion because I don't even know what you're saying is centeralized or how you believe it could be co-opted.

Because it's closed source stuff of dubious quality which appears to being deceptively marketed.

This isn't how cryptosystem development works. History supports taking the position that is closed should be automatically assumed to be snake-oil if not an outright trojan until proven otherwise. It's highly suspect. Systems which are good do not need to hide their operation, not if you're going to ask other people to use it.

Why do you ask why and then claim disinterest? I am prejudiced against vaporware, closed source, and pump and dump nonsense. I am prejudice against things which exploit the technical work I've done, trade on it's name (as Darkcoin did at first, until I started blasting it it), to the apparent purpose of extracting funds from people who are less technically sophisticated. Beyond the basic immorality of it, I worry that this fundraising style will remove people's willingness to support real improvements that aren't scams, since its hard for them to tell them apart.

What are you talking about here?  Nothing I've ever described involved a singular "coinmixing" server.

I'm now suspecting that you've never read the CoinJoin post at all— pointing out that it was part of the protocol was the point. It's also inherently a part of Litecoin or anything else that copied the bitcoin code slavishly. It's a result of how signatures work in Bitcoin. Getting wallet interfaces and such developed for it was the motivation for the CoinJoin post, and now there has been good movement on that front.

Closed source? It's not actually implemented yet, but unlike "DarkCoin" they've extensively described their approach in their academic publications and subjected it to extensive peer review. I'm not a fan of the security assumptions it makes, but the privacy properties the system should achieve are basically perfect.

All cryptographically strongly-private decenteralized cryptocurrencies are going to be unprunable to some degree, which is an unfortunate scalability tradeoff— but considering that no Bitcoin implementation in production today implements pruning anyways, it's hardly a fatal one— at least in the medium term. The tradeoff here is fundamental: if you don't know what coin has been spent, you can't forget any of them.  Of course, a system could have less privacy and things forever out of the anonymity set could be forgotten but thats the tradeoff you get.

Let me help you: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/50384/release-candidate


I can play games with bolded text too!  :)

I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.

Doesn't Gmaxwell own large amounts of cryptonote coins he's trying to hype? Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based, the anonimity upgrade coming in RC3 will distance it even further from the basic implementation. Evan has been working towards one goal for months now and it has paid off so far. People are crying out about not getting perfect anonimity but every moment the implementation is getting better and the main goal is giving you privacy as a default, not an option like darkwallet. Cryptonote has flaws, Zerocash has problems to solve before release as well, Darkcoin has flaws too.

The energy invested in trying to bring down Darkcoin is simply amazing. The entire crypto community gets regularly fucked in the ass by scams and begs for more but when you have a developer put his face behind his creation and work for months to bring a quality result to the market, he is attacked by everyone and worse than the scammers who we quickly forget. Fuck this forum and everyone in this thread too.

And how would you know that?

Yes you have. You have promoted Cryptonote, Bytecoin, Monero, Bitcoin and your CoinJoin service.

So the biggest worry is the source being closed. The source is not released while it's in release candidate phase. This was decided months ago, and the community was strongly behind it.

This was the only correct choice:


The idea of how Darksend works has been discussed in the forums extensively, so if anyone wants more information, it's out there.

And there we have it folks. The reason why GMaxwell is upset. Can you not just have said to Evan: "Please acknowledge the work that I did on CoinJoin" Instead of this BS about masternodes being centralised and pointless? 

It's exactly this. No one is forcing you to use Darkcoin right now while Darksend is still closed source, even Bitfinex said that they won't run closed source code and are only running the open source version of the client for their exchange. And yet they still added Darkcoin as a top 3 coin in the world. Shitcoins would have copy pasted it from day 1 and complained, there's no doubt about it. Darkcoin wouldn't be where it is, where it deserves to be, without having the code be closed source at first, there's simply no other way to do it in a highly competitive world such as this one.

1) Masternodes are just a term. They could be called "decentralized nodes". With 500 nodes on the network, it's hardly "centralized". The number of desktop wallets running will probably be less than the nodes themselves.

2) The argument about centralization and closed source, is invalid. There is no intention for DarkSend to be ...trusted by its users. The open sourcing has been decided and will be done once the code is finished. What's the point of opensourcing it while the specifications are not yet finalized?

3) The coins required for the masternode are in order to prevent bad actors through a cost disincentive that escalates as one tries to accumulate more nodes (less coins in the market, price spikes, accumulation of extra nodes = problematic). DarkSend does not use blind signing, and, if I remember correctly, the reason is that the implementation had DOS issues and the attacker could get away with it. So given that the node knows what it signs, the next alternative was to do multiple darksends through the nodes. That, along with the cost disincentive, would reduce the statistic probability of the bad actor controlling all the nodes of a transaction and hence knowing the money flow. I am not aware of plans to implement blind signing (they could exist, or not - it's up to the dev of darkcoin).


If it was part of Bitcoin, it wouldn't require Dark Wallet, would it?


How is a trusted solution (due to the accumulator) better?

"CoinJoin was invented by Gmaxwell" = "quite liberally".  Hmm.

:)



Well, we know that ring signatures are out.  Maybe if you'd stop pretending that Darksend in its current iteration is the final product...

CoinJoin isn't a service, ... I guess you've pretty conclusively shown you have no clue what you're talking about.

Nor have I promoted Bitcoin here— I haven't said anything positive about it at all.  WRT the Bytecoin & forks I don't really believe that I'm promoting them, they suck in a number of ways unrelated to their privacy features, and the decision to make an altcoin out of it seems shameful and greedy to me... but the privacy part is really quite brilliant, and thats just my opinion as someone who has been working on privacy in this space for a long time.

Nope. I have a bit so I could try them out, and some people have made use of my monero tip address, but its all trivial amounts. I think altcoins are generally inadvisable, and in the long term I have plans that should remove all reasons for having them. I think the promotion or opposition to these things based on profit motives is incredibly sleazy.

I've seen no concrete evidence to support this. Can you point me to some?  I'd certantly be happy to find that I was incorrect, I think privacy technology is interesting and important and while I think creating an 'altcoin' for it is counterproductive (immediate loss of anonymity set) and pointless, if something good is developed I'd welcome it.  But after sitting quietly for some time the indications that darkcoin is largely substance-less vaporware and hype have grown stronger, not weaker.

Fixed.

It's interesting that you lash out at others for making claims about closed source (for now) code, then turn around and do the exact same thing, just with a different slant.

The last sentence makes the rest of the paragraph feel more than a little bit disingenuous.

Clearly this is about you feeling your IP has been exploited. I think it was a genuine error and no one is trying to use your name or CoinJoin to promote anything. The Darkcoin devs were merely trying to communicate that the coinmixing was done by a decentralised network of masternodes. If you want acknowledgement, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to acknowledge your valuable work.

Look, we can keep going but it's pretty clear to me what is happening here. You feel pissed. Perhaps rightly so but this could've been handled very differently. I'm not going to waste more energy on this negative stuff.

Right, this is a centralized approach... a central server can deanonymize people. There may be many of these servers, but you're still trusting them to not be bad.  It may be acceptable— it's probably better than nothing at all.  But things like this is precisely what Ozziecoin is slamming.  Ironically, because the CJ thread post 5 describes how you can deal with the dos attacks while actually being private for everyone:  If the transaction fails, everyone deanonymizes their attempt, and anyone who fails to deanonymize (or is directly shown to be the party refusing to sign) is banned. It's a PITA to actually implement, I agree.

Having something in the protocol doesn't mean that there is an interface to it. I was doing CoinJoins back in 2011-2012, in public too— https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139581.0 ... no software was required for it once the raw transaction interface made it into a release. The point here being that none of this needs an altcoin, yes it may need all sorts of client software and such, but there is no need to invoke another currency except to Make Money Fast.

I feel like I'm making semi-witty quips to myself here :(.


He's since announced that he's not implementing ring sigs due to bloat issues.  RC4 is slated to include significant improvements to anonymity, so take from that what you will.

During the first 15 hours, between

block 1  http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm (http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm) and

block 4000 http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm (http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm)  



approximately 1.75m darkcoins were generated.
The result? Darkcoin is currently at 80,000 blocks, but there’s only 4.3m DRK out there. Five months later, the 1.75m generated during those first 4200 blocks still represents 40% of all DRK in existence.

No, in fact I already previously _demanded_ they stop promoting it with my name, which they were doing initially.
Yes, you came and trolled all over the CoinJoin thread in a desperate attempt to convince people of your untrue comparative claims wrt darkcoin. While I'm normally content to more or less ignore this hive of scum and villainy that is the altcoin subforum, when it spills over and interrupts discussion elsewhere, pinging my email with report-to-mod hits, it gets my attention.  So… you have my attention now. Lucky you.

There is some profit, but it's still FUD. Would never invest in altcoins like these. You can have them ;)

I think you're jumping to conclusions and judging everyone. In the case of Darkcoin, the devs barely made much money for 4 months. Then they provided a tech solution that the market needed because privacy was not being implemented in bitcoin; hence why the coin value jumped. To imply that this is a pump and dump - frankly, that stuff should be beneath you.  I for one did not buy darkcoin to pump it up. I do however believe it is fundamentally more valuable than bitcoin and litecoin because it appears to my eyes to have a functioning privacy layer, which is sadly lacking in the other coins.

Sounds nice... for the few who got on the BTC train early. Sounds like profit motives, incredibly sleazy.



Out of curiosity, if they never mentioned your name at all, what would've you demanded then?

I can't figure out what you're saying here. Is the idea that I can't say anything at all about something thats closed?

Thats not my position at all. My position is that that a closed source cryptographic currency is inherently centralized (via control of the source), and that experience suggests that most such systems are snake oil (they don't deliver the things they claim to) if not being outright trojans.  Indeed, you can't tell— maybe it's actually great, but great things usually don't need to hide in the shadows. The safe assumption is that they're not great at all.

I've never been involved in Bitcoin to make a profit. If I add up the tips and such I've received for hard technical work I've done it would be well below minimum wage. I've been involved a long time— since before it was worth much of anything, and seemed like an insane dream that it ever would be— because the technology is interesting and important. I've also sold most of my Bitcoins since long ago— was never looking to win the lottery. And yes, I feel completely comfortable looking down my nose at people who showed up late rabid with dreams of effortless profit, at least when they go around promoting zero-sum trades to enrich themselves— not pointing any particular fingers here... I assume the people I'm talking about know who they are.

I'd do mostly what I did anyways— say nothing and see if anything interesting happened. I only piped up recently because of what I perceive to be misinformed heavy handed promotional efforts spilling out into threads where they are off-topic.

Thanks for your attention. See, I think you're just an arrogant dude who thinks that all altcoins are pumps and dumps. This is not something deficient with respect to altcoins but rather your attitude because the altcoin space is the boiler room for tech improvements that the bitcoin team are unwilling or unable to develop.

keep pumping and pumping...because Dark dev team have controled most of the darkcoins now...

they can even sell them at the price 1 Drk= 1BTC.....and they will buy at this price by themself, and attract some new comer buy at that price...

 ???

Ok Greg, this thread has your attention, good.

Darkcoin is open source except for the anonymity for now. https://github.com/darkcoinproject/darkcoin/commits/forkfix
Look in the altcoin section. Notice the flavor of the month? This is because of Darkcoin. If it was open sourced from the get go, it would never stand a chance.

When Darkcoin is completed, it will be vetted by a respected Developer and if no issues are found open sourced.
You created coinjoin. Darkcoin is created from coinjoin. Would you be interested in vetting the code? 

it's not fud when it's true.

There is very little technology development in the altcoin space... but there sure is a lot of deceptive hype from people eager to separate people from their money, no surprise when many of the people creating altcoins hardly know how to work a compiler. Most of the time when there are non-strings changes at all, it's just another worthless ill-considered proof of work variant that hasn't seen a drop of peer review (and which is compromised, e.g. failing to meet its "cpu only" promises, the moment someone does review it). In the rare event that there is interesting technological development that I'm aware of— I credit it— which is why I brought up the bytecoin&forks in the context of privacy technology, even though I think creating an altcoin for it is not a good idea and I'm not involved with its development.

I review many interesting looking things as I have time available, but only if they are open source. I am uninterested in handling anyone's private code, however.

It's getting a little late. This system was created month and months ago, but there is still nothing for me to look at... and now aggressive promoters are spilling into other threads and degrading other efforts that are already delivering or are at least out in the open.  I hope you can understand how this creates a very negative impression from my position.

How could you justify this. There is 1.7 million coins premined, at an average price of 0.001 btc, that would be 1700 btc. If he sells half of it, it will be 850 btc.
You are just talking bare lies that 1700 btc or 850 btc is bare zero money.

A question comes, ozziocoin, who are you, how do you know the developer of DRK make bare zero money? I suppose you have some possibility to be the developer.

Also, you are talking the PoW/PoS coins such as Cinni have very short PoW time as "instantmined", however, do you understand what is instantmined? Instantmine is defined as at the early stage of PoW stage of a coin, the mined coins accounts for a large amount of the total PoW stage. DO NOT LINK your instantmined DRK with us, ok?

Now it is very clear, DRK is instantmined by a single person before others could use the qt and miner. Because the developer hold 40% of coins, he is trying to do whatever he want.

I would also trust gmaxwell, because he has pointed out the clear scam. Please don/t try to hide anymore.

Now it is very clear, you don't have any idea what you're talking about.

I think the thread speaks for itself. I'm leaving now. gmaxwell, good luck to you mate. I've never seen a more "determined" person. You have certainly covered yourself in glory today.

I don't care about DRK one way or the other, but this thread is quickly leaving me with the impression gmaxwell is just another coin developer who feels his particular coin is the One True Coin, and so he slams all others.  

Things can be unfair or a bad deal, or simply a failed offering without being a scam.  I too might too easily lapse into the language of "scam" around here, — and there is no shortage of actual ill motivation in the altcoin space— but I do think more of it is really people getting in over their heads.  Cryptosystem work is very difficult, and Bitcoin seems to have resulted in people thinking that creating this stuff is no big deal since they can just copy the code... but in a cryptosystem the details matter, greatly... a single line changed can have subtle effects that ruin the security properties completely.

Hm?  Thats pretty weird, considering that I've said nothing positive about Bitcoin here, and only positive things about cryptocoins (and proposed cryptocoins) that I have had basically nothing to do with. :)

1.7mn DRKs had a cost of 42.5 BTC in january.

You are applying retroactive logic (current valuation to the circumstances of the past) of the kind "oh those idiots who bought the 10.000 BTC pizza, now would be millionaires". Yeah, well, nobody knew. Same with DRK... 100k DRKs = 2.5 BTC. In some cases even 2 BTC.


All pow/pos coins are instamined since future miners cannot mine them at all. Contrast this to DRK where 2 were instamined and another 20 could be mined later. Which is fairer to late miners? The one where you have to buy it from the bagholders (no mining possible), or the one that you can actually mine it too? It's hypocritical to argue about fairness to late miners when you are supporting any pow/pos 100% instamined hybrid.


Most miners use linux.

we have to talk to satoshi nakamoto about this.

Well now that's not what I said at all, is it? :)  You stated that indications were pointing more and more to the fact that Darksend is "substance-less vaporware", which I found odd in that the status of its code availability hasn't changed from the beginning.  Which indications, exactly?  Has it somehow become "more" closed source since the beginning?

You said yourself that alt-coin land is a hive of scum and villainy (or something like that).  What, exactly, do you think would have happened if Darksend had ben open source since day 1?  Also, why must everything good (in your estimation, it would seem) come through Bitcoin?

The safe assumption...sure, I'll buy that.  But there is such a thing as a totality of the circumstances.

is the anonymous transaction ever possible? and when do you think Bitcoin would have this implement or addon?

Looking at your previous post, I think you are lying by saying "you dont care about DRK one way or the other".
You are a DRK holder, arent you?

The whole crypto coin world should think seriously about the current situation of DRK, it has too much negative effects in the shadows, and now it is being revealed by the community.

Those who defend DRK here have a lot postings in DRK community, you know what that means.

To ozziecoin, make sure your points stand when you try to argue, otherwise people do not trust you.

First they lough at you, then they fight against and finally you'll win!

Each time a new "anon" coin pops up there is new fud against DRK from "investors" of shitcoins
who missed the DRK train.

What they still don't know, they have only missed the first x10 .. x15 of DRK.
If they would do some research about dark instead of spending time and money in shit like XC
and Veri they could be part of the next step of DRK.

Fundamentals could be seen over weeks on a price around 0.00125 ... 0.00145.
DRK is one of the best distributet coins ever. You could read over weeks and again again DRK is only
a pump and dump and people were acting like a pump and dump and a lot of coins changed from hand to hand. as the past has shown it isn't pump and dump, it is DRK and DRK will change the still small crypto world!

People start thinking whats going on here.

BTC core dev is fighting against a shitcoin. Why is he spending time on shit DRK ?

Belive me, he knows why and you should also. He maybe has more DRK than we alltogether.

also a big dark holder for some profit?
and develop a shit coin named  Ozziecoin???

http://img03.taobaocdn.com/imgextra/i3/888367355/TB22vw3XFXXXXbvXpXXXXXXXXXX_!!888367355.png
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=578881.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=578881.0)
[ANN] [0.9.1] Ozziecoin - Australia's first widely distributed digital coin

I have what, 2 previous post in a DRK thread, both of which indicate I think the price is going to go down and continue to do so.

How you get from that to me being a DRK holder must require some interesting gymnastics.

I don't think DRK is a scam, but I do think it's been overhyped.  I also think the dev is likely in over his head, knows it, and that's why he won't open the source yet.

In the end, I don't much care if DRK lives or dies. If it fails, some later iteration won't.

I like to see diversity in altcoins. I think it's a good thing to have a lot of chaos on the fringes. Some of that will bubble up to be good ideas.  It doesn't matter if 99% of them are copycoins or poorly implemented. New ideas are good for the ecosystem.  Even hype of previous ideas is a good thing, it promotes the concepts to wider audiences.

Gmaxwell has made it very plain he does not like altcoins. He's stated it directly.  I disagree with him on this point, and in fact I think it's quite dangerous to centralize on one coin with one set of developers.

1.Now I can see you are trying to argue without standing point. Did you see 1.75 million DRK sold in January?
Only a idiot will believe he sold all in january.
Suppose even if he sold all in january, is 42 btc bare no money? In January BTC worth more than 700 usd.

2. Instantmine is that one or few person mine a ton of coin in the beginning of release, mostly because of low difficulty. Do you see in BC, Cinni or other POS coins case, one or few person mine a 40% of PoW coins?
In PoS coins, the developer make a ANN that everyone can mine from beginning, do you call this instantmine?

3. I cannot agree with you that most miners use linux, because according to what I know, majority of miners use windows.
Look at the discussion of cgminer, sgminer, etc, you will see most forum members are discussing how to use windows based miners.

that's make sense. ;)

i use windows, and i do believe dark dev team may also buy more cheap dark coin when dark coin hit a market, because they know they will pump it later.??

are you kidding???

gmaxwell, I think it would be great if you could spare some of your time to review Darkcoin's code once Evan has completed it.

I have no doubt that you would be able to provide valuable constructive feedback to Evan. Collaboration I see is the key to evolution and advancing ourselves in the crypto technology space - I am sure with both of your minds together something great could happen!

will dark be pumped higher???

I couldn't figure out what you were saying, thats why I asked. :)
Because not being open on (or even before, at least in the form of a clear technical whitepaper) day one is bad, but it only gets worse the longer it goes on.

If it were open source and usable then presumably it would have been adopted. Even as an altcoin, if it were something good I'd speak positively of it... even if the system itself weren't open a clear description of the techniques it was using (like zerocash has) in a whitepaper would allow peer review and analysis of the techniques without the crappy competitive landscape of the altcoin ecosystem coming to play. Keep in mind though, 99% of the design of these things in 99% of the cases is straight up copied from Bitcoin. Before anyone is too territorial about their own precious inventions, they should keep in mind that they're just variations of a tune created by giants whos shoulders they're standing on— something only possible because those people released their code and their designs instead of keeping them secret.

Must wouldn't be the right word— should would be more correct.  In systems of money Metcalf's law applies much more strongly than in other things because the value of a money is derived exclusively from its liquidity and from people being willing to accept it. If our hope is that trustless cryptocurrencies are broadly successful, we undermine that effort if we disrupt their network effect over and over again by starting a brand new currency for this feature or that. It's like having to build a separate internet per program, madness. There is no technical justification for it... and it endangers the success of the entire field, at least to some extent.  Some starry eyed folks think this is a revolution which cannot fail, I am more cynical than that. Doubly so when the frequent outright scams and failures discourage people from investing in infrastructure in the space.

If there are actual good things developed outside of Bitcoin, I'm happy to see them.

As an aside— the "so and so has XYZ foocoin" assumptions might be pretty spurious, its completely reasonable for people to sell off large amounts of coins they have while they're nearly valueless— if you have a lot and who knows what the future holds. I know this is true for most people who were involved in Bitcoin early on, it may well be true for other things. Or not.

Bitcoin does not have only one set of developers. There are several complete re-implementations, some with active development bases— something you can't say about (AFAIK) any of the altcoins. Moreover, the permissive licensing of Bitcoin means that you aren't, and shouldn't be, dependent on any particular developers... you can freely fork the code at any point for any reason, and many people have. For similar reasons, people working on Bitcoin generally don't make incompatible changes in the software (with a protocol gateway, Bitcoin is compatible with the very first release, and without a gateway, 0.2.10 from 2010 will still happily synchronize with the network, though old versions are not very reliable anymore).

If you're depending on developers to take an active role in the real operation of you decentralized cryptocurrency then it's not really all that decentralized, it's still controlled by the politics of men instead of math. Having a choice of one master out of many is not really freedom.

Another coin heavy with closedness, its hard to analyze and so you won't see much if any serious review. The initial snippits of code they published had a clear and obvious nothing-at-stake vulnerability (http://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf), and so far I've not seen any explanation as to how its actually viable at all. Perhaps none of the people who actually understand it speak english, but the people who've recently posted about it in the tech subforum didn't give a positive impression at all to others who are clueful about distributed consensus systems.... but this is totally offtopic here.

Anonymity isn't a binary state, there are degrees. Really strong anonymity is very hard to achieve, and needs more than just some features— it's a lifestyle, even a state of mind. I think perfect anonymity is generally beyond human capability except in very limited circumstances.  _Better_ anonymity, or— perhaps more correctly stated as "better privacy"— is possible... and things like the darkwallet and the other tools that implement coinjoin in Bitcoin let people get better privacy today.  Even stronger privacy is possible, but it comes with tradeoffs, which is why it might not be desirable to implement the stronger systems in Bitcoin even though we know how to create them.

Because some darkcoin pumpers showed up in an entirely unrelated thread and started crapping on other people's efforts in order to promote DarkCoin. I certantly wasn't interested in seeking out this discussion, but since it came to me I don't have any problem in responding to it. :)

Let's say I know at least 7 people who bought batches of ~50k coins each totaling 350.000 coins from early miners and exchanges (early feb). And these are those I know of.


Who is "he"? There wasn't one guy mining. Go to the DRK thread and see the WTS 10.000 DRK messages by individuals.


If you have a coin with, say, 16 mn coins, and by day 7 you have distributed them all, you are instamining something like 2mn coins per day. The difference being, that after the 7 days no new coin will ever be mined - so late arrivals will have to buy from the bagholders.


All the large farms and at least half the miners (as individuals) run on linux. The aggregate hashpower is enormously in favor of linux. Remember that DRK did not launch as a GPU coin, but as a CPU coin. X11 didn't have a GPU miner until mid february.

Also remember that Windows QT wallet launches of CPU coins are criticized heavily due to being botnet raped.

If the dev launches with Windows QT one would say "ohhh that's a botnet coin, fu"... if he didn't "ohhh that's only for linux miners". Damn if you do, damned if you don't. If someone wants to find something bad to say, they will say it.

Only an idiot will believe he was only one who mined. Oh, that's you.  ::)



One or few persons did not mine 40% of DRK. There was an ANN, and there were HUGE number of people ready to mine the second it was released.



Windows wallet was available 4 hours after the launch. And, a HUGE number of MINERS run Linux on their Windows computers via vmware or virtualbox anyway. So yea, cryptohunter and you were probably the only ones dumb enough not to.

I will, if someone remembers to point me to it— ideally if it also comes with a high level design document so I don't have to extract all the behavior from the code (doing so is very time consuming).

As an aside, and apart from the privacy tech—

Whats with the claims here that the subsidy was changed after some millions of coins were created?  Thats pretty damning if true— shades of Solidcoin.

The whole too-low-initial-difficulty plus exponential distribution thing seems to be a trope now. Bitcoin's initial difficulty was high enough (relative to existing hardware and software) that it couldn't even keep up with its 10 minute target during the first year.  If I were crazy enough to launch an altcoin I'd set it so that the real mining didn't begin until it crossed some somewhat reasonable difficulty to reduce the land grab intensity, because it smells pretty fishy otherwise.

Altcoins don't have the luxury of bitcoin. Not even litecoin has it (next year it'll produce another 10mn coins over the existing 29mn - requiring >100mn USD to buy these, so its price has only one way to go... DOWN)... In effect steady minting of coins leads to dead coins due to inflation.

People can't afford to have a coin that goes like 1mn coin this year, 2mn next year, 3mn the year after etc etc. It's guaranteed suicide in terms of investment. Especially in the first months, inflation can be like 2-3% per day, requiring hundreds of BTCs to keep prices steady.

Hence the fast-reward at the start / slower or even no reward (PoS/PoW) thereafter for modern coins.

(With DRK it was a case of too low diff at the launch and too slow diff retargeting which spewed coins like crazy.)

I agree.

And what's new?
This instamine? Everebody know it since a long time.
Not a fully anonimity coin? Yes, devs always said that wasn't a real anonymous coin, but a compromise.
Closed source? It should become an open source when darksend will be fully operational.

Anyway, all answers will be given when the MN payments is working, and sources are realeased.

Continue to fight back without standless point.
1. I will not responde, it is clear that the coin is instantmine and people can guess who mine them.
2. You are still trying to argue without ground. If you look at facts, suppose a huge number of miners jump on DRK in the first 15 hours, the difficulty change will not be as shown in the block chain.
3. That is not the wallet that majority of miners can run after 4 hours of release. You say the majority of miners as dumb, while you guys dont provide an equal opportunity for all the miners?
I question who you are and why your quality is so low

Now DRK is being manipulated, i would not be surprised that they are trying to cash out DRK before all the negative effects are revealed.

Thank you :) - Will let Evan know!

I guess something positive did come out of all this!

To the OP - your intentions were clearly bad - but there's a silver lining in every cloud haha

Btw, this is my alleged pumping link that Greg took exception to: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg7159773#msg7159773

Yeah well and I can guess satoshi and his friends mined the first million bitcoins. There was no announcement, and of course you weren't notified of its future success... So by your rationale bitcoin is a 10bn $ scam.

DRK was preannounced. Its success wasn't though (and that's why people were selling 100k DRKs for 2.5BTC). Now a lot of people are butthurt because either they lost the train, or their own anonymous coin sucks so bad that it's not even funny.

Now go open some threads about why NXT is a huge scam since nobody mined anything but were given the stakes. Or Ripple. Or IPO'ed coins and would be IPO'ed coins like ethereum... Or Counterparty with the burned bitcoins... or all the POS and PoW/PoS hybrids with the 100% instamines... yeah much fairness for future miners in all those. But DRK gets all the attention. No surprises there though.


And? We know the totals in terms of coins.


There is no such thing as "equal opportunity". Early miners always have the advantage. Especially in the PoW/PoS hybrids that you don't see a problem with their instamine... what can the future miners mine in these coins? And you care about "equal opportunity"? Yeah, right.

This Hazard guy who wrote this article is pretty well known in the community and his prediction is usually correct. Normally I enjoy his writing and respect him, but to be honest I feel some of his hostiles to a lot of coins. Of course he has some reasons to feel like this, and I understand why some devs who are very passionate about their creative child sometimes see others children as fatal virus / bacteria to their own child.

Hazard has written another article about NXT and call it scam. That's the reason I don't invest in NXT when it was at its lowest and now you all can see how NXT performs.
I mean every coin has its own weakness, but the most important thing is how it evolves later. You can hate DRK and avoid it, nobody forces you to invest in DRK if you don't want to. Everyone has his/her own opinion. So invest your time and money in what you believe, research about it. If you choose some coins to invest because you want to make fast money, you're in the wrong place. The same even for BTC, DRK or NXT.

Just my 2 DRKs.

Regards,

I seriously doubt this will achive anything in a future.

Not including the two (IIRC) other OT posts of yours that I outright deleted.

Uh, yea when the coin has no real value to folks and is just a speculative bubble or a speculative hedge... thats what happens. Not my cup of tea at least. As I've said, I normally leave the altcoin stuff alone— except for the rare novel idea, or someone pulling me in for an opinion in one way or another.

gmaxwell what about XC?

^^^^^^^^^^ ignore every lie this person says.^^^^^^^^^^

this same moron is clearly there at the top of page5 of the drk thread accusing the dev of instamining ... his very comments were

"wut.. no premine but you have 5k to throw?"


this below was posted before the first windows qt and there were no pools either..




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Re: [ANN][XCO] XCoin | CPU - Fast, Easy Mine, * NO PREMINE * | Official Thread
19-01-2014, 09:07:36
Reply with quote  #103
{
    "blocks" : 2983,
    "currentblocksize" : 0,
    "currentblocktx" : 0,
    "difficulty" : 0.25000000,
    "errors" : "",
    "generate" : false,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "hashespersec" : 0,
    "networkhashps" : 87061476,
    "pooledtx" : 1,
    "testnet" : false
}

by the time the first windows wallet was released 2983 x500 + another 30mins of 500coin blocks coming in every second coins had been mined. We've been over all of this before, but this person keeps spouting the same stupid lies. That first windows qt was compiled by an unofficial source and only the most daring would have used it anyway.

So yeah after nearly 2M coins mined in  a few hours some other person put out an unofficial windows QT.

The block explorer clearly shows only a handful of wallets sucked up all of those early coins.


But even better than this part of the scam was the part where they reduced the final minting by 75%.


That was a brilliant idea to turn their 12.5% of current minting to 50% :)




No point arguing with fools like this turd because he is telling the dev he is a scammer at the top of page 5 but now he got in on the scam is defending it.

What a scum bag, just put that tool on ignore because he addes nothing to the debate but LIES.
He makes dark a laughing stock.

Funny thing is lately, i was taking down some rigs because the fans stopped spinning due to them being shitty msi and i was backing up all the wallets since i though i may as well clean the mobos as well and cpus. My cousin and a couple of his pals had been having a go at mining on my rigs before buying their own just to get the hang of it.

I don't know where they had stored the qt or perhaps they even deleted it. However in the roaming folder i found a darkcoin folder. So i got a new qt and found a nice stash of drk lol. I'm now wishing i had found it at the very peak. However it is a generous stash. YUMMY. Nice to have a little bag of drk scam coins to cash out.

Who cares i guess now, it was a scam, yes one of the largest scams. However there are tons of scams on here and the drk scam is well known by everyone, i guess they can choose to invest or not. Up until now it seems ED is the ONLY  dev that can make an anon coin? yes of course he won't make it open source but then again if other devs can't create a working anon coin, that is their issue. The scam i think went wrong for evans in a way. He didn't launch with a windows qt and grabbed a lot more coins than if the hoards of windows miners and pools were there. HOwever other big miners with 1000's of cores on launches are linux based anyway. I bet lamb took a ton of it and others. Now evans is left working his ass of for perhaps a couple of mill when really he could have been looking at a coin with a huge market cap and potentially tens or 100s of millions if it was not tainted with the launch and a wider base of people behind it. There are only a handful of hardcore supporters on this board, you notice the same names over and over defending it. This coin could have had a cap of 200M if it had started better and the minting not slashed.

XC (which i now discover i have less financial steak in that drk) seems to be having a crack at it along with the devs from cinni, cry, and another 20 coins. I have said weeks ago we will see a host of anon coins now. It will soon be standard. However whales please pump drk again to another peak because with my newly discovered wealth i have my eye on a few nice things.

Surely we are all getting bored of the dark scam coin threads. It was a scam no doubt, then again everyone could have grabbed up some cheap scam coins before it went crazy in price. I didn't and was real upset, more upset because i wanted to mine and was prevented from doing so because of no pools and no windows qt. However since finding a bag of it i had not noticed before has smoothed over the fact i'm not making millions with the other instaminers a few k is better than nothing.

I blame the scam defenders for keeping this going? i mean if they just stfu and said ...yeah was a scam, we got in on it you could have got in on it but didn't. Let that be the end of it then it would die out. HOwever their stupid insistance that it was all an accident and not a scam, and reducing the minting by 75% was good for everyone, and making it 1000 drk for a masternode was in no way meant to make the price go crazy....bla bla  is dragging these threads on and on and on.

The dev was really going to do the air drop, this was enough for me to believe he regrets the launch and the slashing of the minting. The other instaminer greedy slags are to blame here, they probably have more than evans and he is doing all of the work.

The lesson to future devs with some coding skills, launch fair take a bunch of coins for yourself but don't say no premine then try to instamine a ton. Don't change the rules after launch. Build a wide base of support and good will, give no reasons for negativity at all.

What happened with bitcoin was unique and non-replicable because it started its coin minting by generating zero-priced coins. So from zero price it could only go upwards, despite new coins being added to the monetary base (inflationary effect).

Bitcoin's inflation has hampered it much later in its life, like what's happening right now (3600 BTC x 650$ = 2.34mn USD required every day to keep price steady). This is the only barrier to the price getting to five digits right now.

Altcoins are different because they start with some expectation from the start. They have an initial value per coin that can't be kept steady. For example, we launch a coin today, 1000 coins are mined and it is listed in the exchange for 0.01... Second day we get to 2000 coins... so with the price being steady at 0.01, there is a +10 BTC requirement to absorb the new +1000 coins. Otherwise the price of all 2000 coins crumbles.

Even cryptonote-based coins have extremely bad inflation right now. Their price went up too fast and it wasn't sustainable given the inflation rate (so they crashed back down). Hundreds of BTCs per day are required just to keep CN-based coin prices steady. So real-life value and application cannot overcome the inflation issue. Investors simply don't have that type of money to throw in, every day. Nor can one wait 3-4 years for the inflation to get better and then buy. By that time the coin will be perceived as dead so there's no way one would seriously consider it. So it's a problem for altcoins on how to distribute the monetary base in a way that is fair, that does not kill the price (and the coin) through inflation and also preserves the PoW to future-proof levels.

+1
Some harsh words but I feel pissed too.
I meet some nice people in crypto but most of others are truly unbearable. They just simply pissed off because they missed the opportunity to make good investment or their coin is become less famous / get less attention than one coin. It is like your neighbour bought a new nice car and you pissed off because you can't afford this, but you still say nice thing to him like congratulation, blah blah. And your inner swine is angry. In cryptoland you just don't care about that and let's your inner swine goes wild. That's sick.

While the reason behind ignoring the altcoin subform makes sense, I wish individuals like yourself would come out and speak up more often. It's refreshing to hear the truth, but it's extremely difficult to know who to trust.

So, for that, I thank you.

What you need to know about cryptohunter to understand where he is coming from, is that he was on _every_ coin launch with his (windows) rigs ready wanting to instamine and complaining about every little detail that didn't favor him, such sense of entitlement. And when everything wasn't set just right for his preferences, he would blow up and start throwing scam accusations left and right.

So you can imagine his feelings when something as outrageous as a launch without immediate access to windows wallet happens, and the coin later gains some value. When all he would've needed was to install free Linux running on free VirtualBox on his computer. Or, buy thousands of coins for basically free in the first weeks. But no, all he wanted was to instamine more than anyone else and dump as soon as possible, because that's the mindset of those launch sharks.

And btw, I'm also soooo jelly for the dude who had sooo many bitcoins that he could pay 10,000 for a pizza, but I don't stalk every bitcoin thread crying about it.

But wait you were crying on page 5 of the drk thread....and accusing the dev of instamining

The simple fact of the matter is this.

1. you can't say no premine in big letters suggesting fair distribution and then stop 80% of the board that uses windows or pools to mine from mining, whilst you and your buddies mine blocks of 500coins every second.

2. you can't after mining 2m coins release a windows qt and fix the diff up so that they can't mine 500 coin blocks on low diff like you did.

3. you can't also say to everyone else, we have mined 12.5% of all the current coins, but now we want that to be 50%


this is not on.

Stop saying anyone objecting to this behaviour is crying. Stop telling lies also.

If you believe this is a good way to launch coins then make a thread and take a vote. You will see many will not agree with you.

Funny thing is i now have a nice bunch of drk too. I still say it had a VERY BAD start though.

Please stop defending the start, you can't change the facts. Spend your time doing something constructive for drk and get the price back up to peak because i will not be happy if i missed the top of the bubble.

The initial 84mn formula with moore's law difficulty adjustment + annual reward halving, would produce no more than 10mn coins. 84mn was the theoretical maximum. The practical maximum of the initial formula was 10-11mn, not 84.

This was then altered (after community consultation) to 84mn (due to the formula being too restrictive) which, again, after discussion and a poll took the final form of 22mn with 7% annual reduction.

I don't believe the launch was perfect, far from it. But it happened, and I've stopped crying about it. And I don't think it really even matters. Those who suffered from the launch the most are those who instamine every launch with windows only (!) intending to dump as soon as someone is willing to pay something for their mined coins because they are busy mining the next 10 launches. Those who see the value in the coin could've easily bought thousands of coins basically for free from the previously mentioned launch sharks. Let's say there was a windows wallet immediately at launch. You would've probably instamined as much as possible and then sold all for 0.5 BTC and be just as pissed about it as you are now.

Um, of course it does.

If you're so sure about it, please evaluate pros and cons of these both approaches and how they affect how successful a coin will be:

Fast distribution + low inflation
vs
Slow distribution + high inflation

Whether or not the coin will be successful is irrelevant.

Instaming 1,750,000 darkcoin in 15 hours, then changing the block reward from 500 to 5, matters to any sane person.

Isn't that the most important thing?



It wasn't changed to 5, a HUGE amount of miners mining it made it that way. Block reward would be higher if there wasn't such a high hashpower mining.

Thanks gmaxwell.

Let darkcoin live on with Aurara, Maza, Max and friends. I've only been on bitcointalk for a few months but I've seen a regular trend.

I'll admit that Darkcoin sounds neat. If it's still strong in a couple months, I'll look at it then.  But now it's an unknown code, worth a lot of money, borrowed it's tech, and devs and friends probably own way more than half. I imagine said stake holders will relentlessly prop this coin. I would too if I had $500,000 worth of it.

You seem to be a very sane and smart person, being careful is always good. However,

Unknown code - yes, will be open after release candidate phase.
Borrowed its tech - no.
Devs and friends own more than half - no.

But don't take my word for it, do your own research or wait couple of months, it most likely won't be too late even then. But I'd keep a close eye just in case the breakthrough happens sooner.

The audacity these rats have coming out from the dark hole is unbelievable. Taking open sourced linux, and open sourced bitcoin make a closed source vapour ware, get half the coins for nothing and then sell the rest to fools paying vastly inflated prices.
 
This money grab makes the banker gangsters look like real amateurs.  

This thread is amusing. And ridiculous.
Scam claims are FUD, as soon as you use even a little bit of logic.

Several people have conspiracy theories about the instamine by "dev & friends".

Yeah, sure. If you believe that every pre-announced coin in the altcoin section is instamined by "dev & friends", you need to step back and do a reality check.

The reality is, that ever since the altcoin became profitable, there are hundreds and hundreds of people monitoring the section and mining EVERY SINGLE COIN.
No exception. Every announced coin is mined by hundreds and hundreds of people.

And you know what happens next? The moment coin hits first serious exchange, most early miners dump the coins. That's if they haven't sold through forum already.
Why? Because 99.9% of the coins does not EVER rise more than that. Guaranteed.

The only way for "dev & friends" to get easy coin is:
1) pre-mine
2) ninja launch

None of this happened, and you have exactly.... 0 proof that "dev & friends" holds millions of coins.

Do you still believe "dev & friends" hold millions of coins?

If this wasn't enough, do you really think that mystery buyer would spent 6.2mln USD in BTC between 26/05 - 02/06 buying coins dumped by panic sellers?
Having that much money, you're not stupid, especially buying at such dips.

Do you really think someone smart enough to have 6.2mln USD would have dropped that much money into DRK, if he had even a slight suspicion of it being a scam?
If yes, I'm afraid that even reality check might not help, you've lost it.

You have already been told many times that the source will be opened soon enough. The options were either

a) not make the release candidate DarkSend feature publicly available at all until it's ready, or
b) make it available so people can help development by running it and give feedback.

It should be obvious why option a) is better. Making release candidate level DarkSend open source is not an option, as has already been stated previously in this thread.

And wrt inflated prices, speculators do what speculators do, they speculate. Darkcoin dev (or the "team") can't help or enforce prices. He has already mentioned he is not interested in the price discussion or the price itself at this point at all.

Most early miners don't mean all, and "dev & friends".

What you just posted doesn't answer the fundamental logic flaws in your hypothesis and accusations.

It sounds like you have memorised a couple lines and keep posting without employing any logic.
Repeating baseless claims (in red) does not make it valid, does not prove that "dev & friends" hold millions and does not prove that particular coin is a scam.

It's very easy to throw accusations around, but without any substance, these are just accusations, and majority don't care about baseless accusations - otherwise DRK would be long forgotten in the crypto cemetery, as countless coins.

Coin has been out for almost 6 months, is actively developed and enjoys steady progress, so I'm not surprised that in environment ridden with scams, failures and sharks looking for easy money, any real work, dedication and success brings a lot hatred.

wait for the offical response , will we see it ?

Being the objective staff/moderator that you are of course. Well done mate. Keep it up. You're showing everyone what centralised authority is capable of. Moreover, I have not posted anything on this issue on IIRC.

Wow, so I think you need to go back and look at how Darkcoin started. It was my hobby, I wrote X11 in a weekend and launched it. I was thinking I might be able to write the anon tech into the wallet using a variation of Coinjoin, which I started afterward. Darkcoins success was much like Dogecoin, an accident. Please read this:  https://darkcointalk.org/threads/the-birth-of-darkcoin.162/

Had I know what was going to happen, I would have obviously taken much more care with the launch and tested everything thoroughly. It's too bad we can't all get past that, it irritates me seeing this constantly everywhere.

If you want to checkout the source for Darksend and see how it works I'm open to that. I think you'd be the best person to look it over before it's opened anyway.

I can forgive the instamine, it may have been a mistake, may have not been. What I can't forgive though is the Dark cartel charging 80 cents to a dollar for the coin for months when it had no anon function. Unless you were lucky to have a mining rig to get all those coins in its first 24-48 hours, Dark has always had a high barrier to entry for most people to accumulate a serious amount of coins. Not sure who to blame, if anyone for any of this, but that is really my main issue, it seems greed has dominated the coin since day 1 by the whales.

Keep the noise down drk shill. I want drk back up to peak .... you guys defending the scam are bumping these threads and i'll never get to sell at the price i want for my nice bunch of drk scam coins.

The drk shills are all over other coins claiming scam, picking holes. Stick to your own thread and perhaps the price will go up again. There have been around 20 threads highlighting the pow distribution was a turkey shoot for drk devs and pals. They are mostly bumped by dark shills justifying or denying it happened.

Remain quiet and perhaps people will tire of this scam and find other new scams that can actually be stopped before they grow out of hand.

DRK dev is pretty good at what he does, if he had the entire 2m for himself it would not be so bad as you bunch of greedy slags that got a a bunch for next to nothing by mining when windows miners could not or you scooped up some early sells. I totally changed my mind about evans when he offered in public to do the airdrop. He would have gone for it since he is way smarter than the rest of the drk community. He knows this would have smoothed over the start and allowed the coins to gain a much wider support base.

The start was TERRIBLE so just shut up accept it and these threads will probably die out as more and more scams seem to pop up daily. The focus will eventually shift away from dark if this crap does not rage on forever.

There is no debate, the coin should have been restarted seeing there was no windows wallet and the diff stuck on super instamine settings for hours. However the tempation was too great to keep the coins. We get it. Let's just not let future devs think they can do this kind of stuff.

Respect to you Evan for offering up the code to scrutiny like this, as you promised. And who better to check it out...

Evan people just behave like that because your coin successes while they forgive for DOGE because DOGE never explodes in term of price like DRK.

+1

Man,for newcomers its so hard to decide what coin to invest in.(first btc bought at 800€=idiot)
I invested like 20BTC and thats everything i could spare into crypto on Darkcoin from 0.0036 all the way up to 0.0145.

Yes i am starting to panic seeing that price drop from 0.0280 but i decided to strap on a extra pair of nuts and go all or nothing meaning i will hold my DRK.
tbh i dont think DRK is a scam like for example FLAP&co what wtf do i know? nothing.
What will the market=people all over the globe do ? buy or sell,invest or ignore..who really knows?charts dont predict everything.

All i know is that i am swimming in a sea full of hungry nasty sharks and for me it depends on luck if i get to the beach safely.

To Evan:goodluck and godspeed with your coin man;know there are shrimps like me out there that invested heavily into your coin just hoping for the best and some financial luck,tired of being squeezed out like a lemon by corrupt banks and goverments.

To all the trashtalkers spreading fear and panic: go fuck yourselves  >:(

so much FUD on this thread

It was offtopic, posting about DarkCoin and IRS black helecoptors over and over again in an unrelated thread… exactly the sort of stuff that gets deleted every day. Post in the correct threads and your posts won't be deleted.

WRT having contact info for the other coins, the bcn&forks have the nice property that I don't have to constantly change the addresses to avoid reuse as I do in Bitcoin. I didn't have any Bitcoin address listed at all except I have to have one to get the moderator payments from the forum, and so I'm stuck replacing it every time it receives a payment. I posted some design criticisms in the bytecoin thread and I got asked to post a donation address, since it doesn't have the reuse problem. I'd list anything else I tried that didn't have the address reuse problem, at the moment thats limted to the bcn&forks.  Altcoins are a mess but I'm happy to take tips of whatever people want to send. Whoptie do, my profile is open and non-secret.


That things happened which you never expected are all the more reason to not take the concerns or criticism personally.  That people are finding cause to speak out aggressively is because of the promotion other people are doing, ... but you don't control them so you shouldn't worry about it too much.

I'll be glad to look at it when its actually released. I don't have the time or interest to review closed systems.

I have seen that chart pattern before .. it's time to sell

Buy the Rumor, Sell the News

Just the next pump and dump like auroracoin was before.

I am still following this thread.  Very interesting. 

+1 for Evan offering up the code, and +1 for Gmaxwell saying he will look it over when it is open source. 

Really, this is what the community needs.  An open source code that devs are willing to share and that others have proofed. 

It seems like more and more of the top 10 coins are not releasing their code to protect their investment.  I get it.  Money is important.  At that point though, the concept of crypto has far strayed from Satoshi's bitcoin of radical financial revolution and instead turned into a money making venture. 

The problem for me is that now that I know it is about the money, it is hard for me to give my money to somebody who is so concerned about getting rich. 

To me, darkcoin's price is really high.  A high price to some means a good coin.   To me, a good coin means a high price.  With this coin, how can I really know if it is good until it is reviewed?

I believe that the biggest scam of all altcoins was litecoin.  It doesn't really offer much value over bitcoin.  At least with something like Darkcoin, there is some kind of additional service.  But still... is this anything that Bitcoin won't be able to do with Coinjoin?  If Bitcoin can, than I say just stick with it.  If it can't, then Darkcoin deserves to be worth a lot.

Are you sure we are talking about Darkcoin?

For half a month the price was like 0.2 / 0.25 BTC for 10.000 DRKs. It hit the exchanges for 0.1 BTC / 10.000 DRKs (0.00001)... it was a month after launch, when the first pre-alpha of Darksend was trialed at testnet that price rose to 0.002.

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FRIIgALY.png

Check here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=471321.0

And here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=468804.0 (this is full of epic quotes... nah, 0.35$... too expensive, I'm not buying... it's at the top... etc etc).


Not really. DarkSend will be open when it's finalized in a few weeks. This has been decided months ago by the community & dev as closed source is DOA for someone who wants to be anonymous. There were many in the community that believe that scamcoins shouldn't be allowed to clone it, but the advantages of opensourcing it were weighted in its favor. Closed source=unacceptable.

The paranoia is a significant factor and you don't wan't people looking over their shoulders if the software they're using is somehow rooted. It's also an exploitable FUD-vector that can be easily avoided. It's just that price caught up with the development plan (=not yet final) and is now acting as the spotlight.

Besides, since the implementation in Darkcoin is based on both DarkSend+economy+game theory, it's not easily duplicated by other coins. Given that in the current design the nodes know who is transacting with the other, a way had to be devised to solve the bad actor problem. The 12.000 USD per node is the dis-incentive to buy a lot of nodes. When an altcoin is launched a month from now, implementing the opensourced DarkSend, it does not have the same dis-incentives for the bad actor as he can buy the entire monetary base (and the nodes) for peanuts. Thus, from game theory perspective, the implementation won't really work as effectively as with a coin with good distribution + established value. For example DOGEcoin or Litecoin could implement it better than a new coin with zero price.

As for the vision of Satoshi, things are complicated because even going against the transparent public ledger is a deviation on our part... His vision, in my perspective, is less of a vision and more of ...time traveling. Although it doesn't really involve physically going back and forth in the timeline. Under certain circumstances some people are able to "tune" their consciousness in the future modus operandi of humanity and open a portal between the future and the present. I believe Bitcoin is precisely that - a portal to the future, anchored in the now. And some things that don't make sense (ie why would he empower the people with a decentralized financial system but not give them protection from government oppression) actually do make sense from his future-aligned-consciousness perspective.


To add a few further info to the above, this reality is actually a constructed reality / a virtual reality. Scientists are beginning to realize this as they analyze its "fabric". The most complete theoretical models / unification theories for the universe, are based on the virtual reality hologram - yet they are still on the "fringes" of acceptability despite being superior in the way they predict and explain phenomena.

Consistent with a programmed reality, the things of value that the "players" of this reality are programmed to really value are gold and silver - in specific ratios. These are hardcoded consts in the reality hologram. Select humans/agents are now repeating the pattern of their creator-gods by programming this reality with a new type of money - essentially causing a systemic "rebellion" with far reaching ripples.

Fiat money was not so much a rebellion as a way for the elite to hoard precious metals while giving people "paper money" to toy around with. You can't have precious metal hoarding if people are transacting with it daily. So you make all the fiat money (scam money) that you want, and you then use it to take real money (=hardcoded money, like gold) out of circulation and hoard it.

Now we have the "rebellion" where both gold + fiat are in doubt versus Satoshi's construct. The forces that are behind Satoshi on one hand and the Elite on the other hand are ancient / primordial. Each one tries to leverage the reality hologram towards specific directions although the Elite's side (which are also aligned with the creator-gods of this reality) have stronger physical leverage. Satoshi's side is more in line with a consciousness-revolution where this reality construct is seen for what it is and everything that is limiting to the "players" is teared down. Transparency is a key element of his "strategy". Layers of deception and obfuscation is the strategy of the "opponents"/Elite. They are masters in this game and that's why our own efforts to create, say, NSA-proof solutions will be "quite difficult".

Thanks for the reply.  I appreciate your taking time to not just scream but explain things in a logical manner.  You also seem in the know about DRK, so I have one more question about these nodes.

I get it that if you are sending money through darksend that I can't see it the same way I can track you on the bitcoin blockchain.  So it keeps me from looking at you, but I am not really worried about person to person tracking.  And 12,000 USD keeps most people out of the node game for sure.

12,000 USD for the NSA, it isn't even dust. 

If the NSA was watching DRK and bought a dozen nodes, wouldn't they be able to see where the money in those nodes is coming and going from?  I mean, they might have to do some extra computer leg work, and cracking, but wouldn't they be able to monitor just where the money coming into their node is coming from and where it is going?  It is their node after all and they are privy to the data coming in and out. 

Thing is, the price isn't static. The more you buy, the more the price rises. So it would be impossible to control, say, half of the darkcoins in circulation or 3/4ths, without the marketcap exploding to something like a billion usd. They'd still have the money for that though, no question.

Regarding traceability... assuming the NSA controls something like 60% of the nodes (that's a lot), if you darksend the money multiple times, and assuming a random selection of node for each round of laundering, the possibility of getting tracked is:

One Darksend: 60%
Two Darksends: 60% x 60% = 36%
Three... = 21.6%
Four = 12.96%
Five = 7.77%
Six = 4.66%
Seven = 2.79%
Eight = 1.67%
Nine = 1%
Ten = 0.6%
Eleven = 0.36%
Twelve = 0.21%
Thirteen = 0.13%

But the NSA in particular has extra ways to discover what you do (controls networks, devices, ip obfuscation nodes, has advanced AI pattern recognition software etc), so that's not even a really accurate reflection. And I think there's also a problem with linking change addresses during DarkSends that might be recombined in some joint future spending. This would probably require something like a scheduled laundering service, like the "windows defrag" for the disk, but that would perform something similar for change addresses. I'm not sure of what the next version of DarkSend will do regarding change denominations.

To make the long story short: NSA-proofing is not easy. When Evan started working on it he wasn't really trying to create an NSA-proof system, just a system that would provide good privacy through obfuscation and encryption that could only be cracked by a very serious adversary like the NSA (not even most governments).

It was after Anonymint's constructive criticism back in March and the Bytecoin & clones appearance when the pressure was built up to deliver something even better and that's where we are today, trying to make a transparent blockchain to provide an almost perfect degree of anonymity - which is of course a problem because you are going against the fundamental design of the system. So we'll see what we end up with after RC4 (anonymity enhancements)...

good info.  thanks!

WTF THIS THREAD SUCKS!! ???

NOBODY GAVE CONCRETE evidence SHOWING WEATHER ITS INSTAMINE OR NOT??

NOBODY said Yea this looks good lets go all in folks.

everyone said something different

WTF you trolls



A man buys 2 drk coin and now im thinking I either make a good purchase or i just screwed myself.

Glad i read this thread bunch a rubber neckers nobody goes one way or the other just complete confusion

YOU ALL SUCK ??? >:(

gmaxwell in no way endorsed DRK...
and has stated prev that conjoin plus special nodes is very sub-optimal

gmaxwell has been endorsing the CN group of anon coins as dramatically more optimal...
But those groups seem underfunded... and are moving slowly.

So DRK is overpriced... XMR is underpriced.

This is true, which is why I hedge. Will it be possible to implement trust less coinjoin without servers? I do not care if it is done with or without servers. Which is why I believe calling darkcoin worthless is baseless. I do suspect implementing trust less coinjoin with distributed servers is going to be far easier to accomplish than without servers as dark wallet is aiming to do.

Let us assume gmaxwell is right and that coinjoin on servers are a "chokepoint" because it is not trustless. This does not automatically mean the network of distributed masternodes in Darkcoin is worthless and vapourware.

1. You can run DarkSend a number of times assuming a percentage of masternodes are bad actors and still achieve good privacy.

2. However, let's assume there are zero good masternodes in the network; and the entire masternode system is exclusively owned by bad people; as long as it is different bad people, they will still not be able to unscramble the coinjoin unless they cooperated with each other.  

With Darkcoin as it currently stands would still provide superior functional privacy than relying on one centralised coinmixing server. You can run DarkSend multiple times assuming x% of the masternode network is bad and that x% are owned by different people and get the privacy you want. This appears to me to be very close to full anonymity.

Pretty much hate to know the fact of "premine" (not actual meaning of premine, but very close to). Dev just makes use of some tricks to fool people around, and this fact should not be hidden.

Holy Shit lUke Skywalker you made my day hopefully there isnt something hidden we all find out about till then i havent seen evidence one way or another dark coin is in the dark its either make or break and i am sure if there is a huge wallet out there somewhere that person isnt gonna sell till it passes btc if it does.

I think truth. Just take a look at it's price moving upward in the last weeks. People think this one is a long term winner. Go for it. To da moon............

One fact I read from the very fist posts of the DRK thread is someone was selling 40000 DRK for just 1 BTC. Quite sure he is not the only one holding such amount of coins at that time. DRK can be easily mined at the beginning. The rising of BTC price is partially due to reward halving. So once Dev "intentionally" reduced the reward, no wonder DRK can get high. Pretty normal. X11 & DarkSend are just boost of the rising, nothing much significant than this. 

Ahee, thanks for this info, I remember being complete newbie with only windows on hand, very disappointed about the linux only. I missed a linux-only test giveaway of 1000 drk coins, would have been nice to have them now.

DRK is just another pump and dump that only benefits the pre-miner!

I just find some good informations about the DRK pre-mine:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/26t2ur/darkcoin_premine_proofs/

But.... no proof.

So shut up kid.

Read this:


And learn how to leak properly, little newbie of internet.


edit: http://cryptolife.net is down for ever, said thank you guys.

you sell now.  you not lose so much money

Yes, the author give the proofs. Read the topic:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/26t2ur/darkcoin_premine_proofs/

About the bug, can you prove it? The dev can say that was a bug but I don't believe it.
And even if this was a bug, the developer would have had to make a airdrop with these pre-mined blocks.

Yea, the "bug" is code that was put there purposely by the dev.

Check that guys:
http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins#darkcoin

thanks

Of course its a scam, but in the cryproworld its just another one to add to the ever growing list.

It originaly launched a few minutes before the official launch time on the 18^th January 9:58 (5pm EST)
https://i.imgur.com/d05XfD6.png

Because the code was full of bugs a restart was necessary, it then officially launched at 11pm EST
https://i.imgur.com/EAejE5l.png

The coin was 5 min old the first screams of instamine
https://i.imgur.com/16lzo4y.png

.

So we finally mate it to the active blockchain. The dev mate sure it is the worst possible launch time for Europe and America, but he at least it was a good time for Kiribati. :D
Sunday at 4 am in the morning is a sure time you find most miners waiting for a launch.
https://i.imgur.com/ckf4utA.png


The coin is barly a few minutes old and the dev is already throwing the coins by the thousands
https://i.imgur.com/4fLPHMX.png


Yes its raining coins, but he enjoy it will it lasts.
https://i.imgur.com/aioU3En.png


If the dev would have been serious about the instamine he would have relaunched after having discovered yet another bug, after all it was done before.
Equally the dev is flat out lying in his claim the algo it is ASIC resistant and it being anonym. All it does is displaying his true character.

I believe most "costumers" that come here are aware that this is the wild west. Hate the missing windows but only be-course I missed out. If I take a little larger perspective, I would still chose to invest in drk knowing that the dev have good incentive to continue support in many years.

+1

I hope the dev has at least 100k so he can commit to full time development for the next 2 years.

I dunno. Do you really think at the time of launch Evan would know that Darkcoin would go on to have this kind of success? How many cryptos out of the 500+ launched in the last 2 years have made it to the market caps that Darkcoin has?

In the few months I've been here I've already seen a lot of sinister and shady characters spout a bunch of b.s. that went on to translate to losses for whatever coin they were behind. At this point its getting kind of easy to spot. DRK does not fall into this category -- neither does its price action.

Much like NXT, Blackcoin, Dogecoin and a few other coins, I don't get scammy vibes from the most vocal members of the DRK community. What I read is thoroughness and dedication to reality rather than hype and psychological manipulation.

Having said that, yes its quite possible DRK could have some flaws and a competitor takes its spot. But we are all pretty much beta testers, determining which features and qualities are beneficial for cryptocurrencies, and there's no need to get too emotionally attached to any one coin.

Excellent post. I feel the same way and have invested accordingly. The developer has proven to be adept at using constructive criticism to improve the coin... and the massive cacophony of non constructive FUD is just par for the course in crypto.

The market will decide DRK's fate, and I've made my bets. A low effort blog post by a self-styled expert means precisely nothing.

And in the name of Darkcoin FUD, it has now become fashionable to promote scam anon coins

Well maybe it's time to engage the upstairs department on the odd occasion.
Apart from the instamine there is of course also the mining with ultra high reward in the first month which gave the miners more coins than the bitcoin miners produced in over a year.

Anyway, now lets move on to the goose with the gold laying eggs, mastermodes.
The idea is to hord as many coins as can be  and set up masternodes then wait for the golden shower. Except when everone just hord's the coins it leaves non for circulation and starves the coin to dead. No usage no pay. Holding just one masternode want be profitable, but its not such a problem as the instaminers have lots of them anyway.   

Of course the biggest issue is anonymity. Someone providing the masternodes is not anoym only people using there service. So the moment someone claims to have used the service to extort some money after having someone kidnapped anyone offered the help by providing the mixing service becomes an instant accessory to the crime. Drug dealing, money laundering killer for hire you name it, just about every crime you can think of you become part of by operating the money mixing service for the ill-gotten lot.
Yeh sure that sounds about the best investment ever. One thing it will ensure you to have sooner or later a nice chat with some of Benjamin Lawsky colleges.
Good luck with this smart investment, as far as i can see its a "Dead coin walking".

Oh the hate is strong with this one. This has already been answered in the drk thread.

Darkcoin is here to stay.With so many services it is associated with and so much coverage it can't be another pump and dump.

Darkcoin is a solid coin.
The lead darkcoin dev made, open sourced & released the X11 algo / most new coins use it.
The lead darkcoin dev made, open sourced & released kimoto gravity well difficulty adjustment / most altcoins used it.
Then the lead darkcoin dev made, open sourced & released dark gravity wave / most altcoins use it.
Darkcoin wasn't "instamined" the darkcoin dev created the difficulty readjustment mechanism that all other alts use today
in response to the difficulty issues at lauch...
Just because he said "enjoy them while they last" does not prove unethical behaviour.
The lead darkcoin dev has open-sourced all of his work to date, why would he re-neg on darksend ?
This thread is pure garbage. fud lies & more fud.

With the above innovations Darkcoin deserves to be the # 3 cryptocoin.
With Darksend, it deserves to be # 2.

Just a pump and dump coin.  :P

Its also not illegal to run a Tor node in most countries, which is basically the same thing.

Thats right - it is just a typical pump and dump coin like vertcoin was before. ;)

And now they are threatening pool operators to comply with their 20% tax on miners to support the masternodes that are run primarily by large DRK holders.

They have gone so far as to use an image of a terrorist in their threats.

The following pools are apparently have not complied with Darkcoin directives and miners are not yet taxed 20%.  Mining on these pools is 20% more profitable.  I hope the pools refuse to comply with the 20% tax on the miner that is given to the masternode operator just because they have 1000 Darkcoin to leave sitting in a wallet.

These are the major pools that pay 20% more DRK

nicehash.com
ghash.io
x11.ltc1btc.com
darkcoin.cryptocurrency.tw
dark.hashrate.eu
dark.v2.dedicatedpool.com


Here is what they have the nerve to post:




Here is my reply:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg7802505#msg7802505

Ive read almost everything I've been able to find about DRK. Not a scam. Not sure where all the haters are getting all their info from. If you don't like it, don't buy it. SIMPLE :)

Still no one has explained why they would use DRK instead of XMR if they wanted to anonymously move cash around (for ilegal reasons in most cases)

Pump and Dump may be just like dogecoin