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[DISCLAIMER: see disclaimer of conflict of interest at the bottom]

Sigh, I'm a bit tired of seeing the same talking points from the DRK FAQ, etc., but just once I will respond because I think in general AlexGR you are pretty sincere.

You are missing the point.

Quote: "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud"
  -- Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Antifragile; credit to opennux for the quote).

First of all, on the matter of redistribution:

DRK/dash supporters frequently claim that the instamine happened but it "doesn't matter" any more because the coins have been redistributed. This is repeated in the DRK FAQ along with several other unsupported statements about who does or does not own certain quantities of coins. However, these statements are at best supposition, as it isn't possible whether it actually happened as claimed.

The problems is, you don't know 90% of what happens in the markets. You can say "coins traded at such a price" but you don't know who was on each side of that trade. If I were trying to legitimize my instamine, the first thing I would do is trade it around, move the coins between wallets, and generally create an appearance of redistribution. To contend that there are not pump groups, whale groups, shady coin developers and others who engage in manipulative and sham trading of altcoins is absurd to the point of ridiculous. This is not the New York Stock Exchange (even there, you probably shouldn't trust everything you see). There is simply no way to know that didn't happen or if it did how much of the activity it represents. This applies at both low prices and high prices.

I will grant that if the coins were traced to a theft at Mintpal and then dumped, that was probably actual redistribution; I don't think the Mintpal scammer was tied to the DRK instamine scam (but you never know with these things; scammers gonna scam). But at best that was a minority of the instamine (and wouldn't early instaminers and other adopters logically have had their in masternodes by then?)

Now I agree it is certainly fair to say that the coins might have been redistributed or could have been redistributed. I would not object to that at all.

But to continue to present this as fact (in the FAQ and frequently used as a talking point by dark supporters) is unsupportable and effectively fraudulent.

In addition, the DRK FAQ claims that the 2 million coin instamine happened over 48 hours, and this talking point is also frequently repeated by DRK supporters.  However, this grossly understates the severity of the instamine, and perhaps paints a picture of a short mining period over which outsiders could still realistically decide whether or not to participate.

In fact:

1. Within the very first hour over 500,000 coins were mined

2. Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mined, which is most of the instamine.

On the matter of the instamine itself, to focus on the amount of the instamine and the subsequent disposition of the coins is to ignore a whole host of extremely deceptive and arguably fraudulent practices that surrounded it:

3. That Evan misled people into thinking that the launch would not happen for days (and specifically "definitely" not in "hours"), then it happened in a few hours, late at night in the US and during the early morning hours in Europe. Considering the >500K coins mined in the very first hour alone, the effect of this "ambush" was enormous.

4. That the stated reason for delaying the launch for days was to do more testing and fix bugs. Yet when the coin was lunched it still had a "serious error." Why was the rushed ambush launch done in this manner?

5. That Evan withheld information about the purpose, features, and goals of he coin development until after the instamine was complete. It was absolutely impossible for you to have any reason to mine this coin unless your strategy was to mine 100% of new coins that were launched, you just happened to stumble into it, you were friends with Evan, or you were Evan. In effect it turns the instamine into a premine, because the coins were mined before the coin was properly announced.

6. That various changes have been made to rewards, etc. multiple times., always in the direction of reducing/restricting/locking up supply, to the benefit of existing holders. The latest version of this is masternode payments, which look very much like a HYIP (a form of financial fraud which attracts new investors by offering high yields to the benefit of earlier investors)

7. Renaming the coin has been proposed by Evan and then later later implemented to reduce attention on instamine, the previous withholding of information, the manipulation, and the misleading and deceptive statements that occurred in connection with the previous name(s).

Now it is possible all of this was an accident. If so, you are asking us to believe in a string of extraordinary coincidences all apparently (by sheer luck) benefiting the same party or parties.

If it is instead not all an "accident" then it is evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of the person or persons still involve with running the project. That is certainly relevant and troubling information, even if the nature of circumstantial evidence (even strong circumstantial evidence) is that it can't be 100% proven. Things might be different if there were a complete and transparent change of leadership (as for example with BitMonero->Monero, and probably some other coins). But that is not the case. The person (assuming, not necessarily with certainty, that he acted alone) responsible for everything reported above is still there.

None of this proves it was not an accident, but given the fairly strong circumstantial case, I'm going to not only stay away, but advise other people to stay away.

AlexGR further claims that the instamine was okay "because satoshi did it too" or that "satoshi solomined" (paraphrases), a frequent defense of various premine/instamine/fastmine/ninjamine scams. That is a fairly absurd justification, even if it were a valid equivalence in this particular case, but it is not. Let's review (using the numbers above):

1. The rate of Bitcoin mining followed the published schedule. There were no extra coins mined at the beginning (in fact I think some of the early blocks were quite slow). It took 2-3 months to mine 500K coins, not one hour

2. It took the better part of a year to mine 1.5 million BTC, not 8 hours.

3. The Bitcoin launch was announced well ahead of time, the code was reviewed by several people who help finish it, and it happened on schedule. No misleading statements were made about the time of the launch. "Many people" are reported to have mined during the first several thousand blocks. Certainly many mined over the following months as well.

4. There were indeed bugs in the code, and some mined coins were even lost to fix them, but none of this involved a "serious error" right after launch when an enormous number of coins were mined.

5. satoshi did not withhold information about the features and goals of the project. He engaged in a detailed and extended discussion about how it would work and what it was attempting to accomplish before it was launched.

6. No changes were made as satoshi made it clear that to have legitimacy as a decentralized system, the parameters needed to be "set in stone"

Furthermore it isn't even true that satoshi was the only one or one of only a few mining in the early days of Bitcoin. "Many other people" were mining in the first several thousand blocks, according to gmaxwell.

One more thing to add. The part of this that is (probably) fraudulent is not that Evan got a lot of coins, its that it was held out (and in many ways continues to be held out) as a public open distribution process, when in reality what happened was in effect more of a premine (see items above esp. #6), and I believe at this point that was very likely the intent. If he had forthrightly presented it as a premined coin, one might think that was a bad idea, but there would be no claim of probable fraud, at least not by me. I've never claimed that an openly premined coin was a fraud (maybe a bad idea, maybe something that should be relaunched sans premime, but not a fraud if done honestly).

DISCLAIMER: I am a Monero core team member and I do not deny a conflict of interest. Nevertheless I endeavor to be factual and I suggest that readers consider the facts, check the facts, reach your own conclusions about what happened and how it matters today, and finally to avoid the temptation to attack the person stating the facts or the coin(s) with which he might be associated]

EDIT: add disclaimer, various typos, writing cleanups, reformatting, add references.



References










https://i.imgur.com/dSe9cRz.jpg

I see you took a break moderating your shitty mooning topic "Monero speculation".

Hope you're enjoying this, it must be hard for you to remove every comment you don't like :(

Just so you know, zero comments on this topic have been removed from the Monero Speculation thread (forum mods are welcome to confirm), and in fact very few posts have been removed ever; every single one has been noted with a moderator comment. I strive for 100% transparency and open debate. Thank you for asking.

BTW, the decision not to moderate this thread was deliberate. Opposing views welcome (and expected).

But why an other one of this topic?

i guess this is broken down better and pin points the many times discussed topic.

also it would be nice if you could link up some of the sources or post that could speculate them

Yes good point I will work on that. There is nothing on my post that is speculation except what I label as such afaik.

The problem is, as I explained above, this is all conjecture. It certainly could be true, and it could also be false. There is simply no way to ever know, so the present this as fact in the DRK FAQ or here is misleading, ultimately overstating the facts, and therefore fraudulent.

I don't even think the distribution necessarily matters as long as the same people are in charge. They are personally accountable for what happened under their watch, even if (it is a big if because I don't necessarily believe it) "the coins have been redistributed."

With a clean break, new leadership, etc. maybe. Otherwise all this talk about "redistribution" is just smoke and mirrors to obfuscate and minimize the scam (and it therefore becomes part of an ongoing scam)


That doesn't explain the ambush launch when he promised to test more (which it clearly needed) and then launch in a few days. Actual launch: with bugs, three hours later

Again, there are possible innocent explanations for all of this, but you really have to ask yourself whether it is more likely all these "good reasons" or "mistakes" or "misjudgments" that just happened to benefit the instaminers might have not been just a crazy coincidence after all. To me there is enough of a question here to raise serious alarms.


The whole equivalence with Bitcoin is absurd for so many reasons, some of which I've already covered, but just factually Evan was solo mining DRK in the first hour. There was no pool mining at all, everyone mining (though it seems likely it was pretty much just him and maybe a few friends) was solo mining. Within minutes he offered someone 5000 DRK to compile it for Windows.

I think there is a large color spectrum that involves "fraud" and "illegitimacy".

The classic form of scam/fraud is a scheme were people put their money and then lose it.

Does DRK have these characteristics? Are people losing money here? Or have they multiplied their bitcoins 10-100-1000x depending their point of entry?

Year to year performance (and March 23 of 2014 was over two months after the launch of Darkcoin) is something like 12-14x. Month-to-month is also exceptional (1.7x)


Some times, you do.


I've addressed the distribution part on the reply to Joshuar which I'll repeat here:

---
Some of us who follow DRK closely know who the DRK whales are / were and we know their stories. Personally I've talked with most of them (or if I haven't, I've read their stories). I know how they got their DRKs and this pretty much narrows down what Evan has. It's not two million and it's not one million either. If my assessment is correct it should be closer to 300k coins - some of which he probably bought for 0.25btc/10k DRK. I believe he must have suffered serious losses with the Mintpal "confiscation" and consequent dumping at market prices.

I was also there while wave, after wave, after wave of dumping was happening every day at Cryptsy near the 0.0012-0.0016 range. Every day the same bitching "ohhh the dumping". We're talking quantities that were multiple the daily production. How can the instamine be ...intact if all this dumping had occurred? But now we are >10x that price with 0.017, so, in retrospect, it was very cheap distribution.

Same with thousands of coins during the first exchange days. Quite a big volume in DRKs (not so much in BTCs) at insanely low prices (0.000020-0.000080 then 0.000180, then 0.000500, then it got to 0.002 before the c-cex hack of 330 btc which brought huge reshuffling in the market). Hacker bought DRKs up to 0.008, moved them to the poloniex and was selling/dumping them for 0.0008-0.0012... again, significant re-distribution of coins.

Then you have the May pump... you have coins that you have acquired at 0.000025 up to 0.001x and the price goes 0.028 by the massive whale, which IMO was probably a stolen-BTCs-whale playing with various altcoins and having DRK as his "pet"... so at that point, the market took over the redistribution.
---



The "48 hours" is the usual trolling floating around.


The effect is not "enormous". It is as much as the market decides it is.

You can make Smoothcoin and you can mine it to 100% of coin supply (and there are PoS coins out there that were 100% premined and distributed) but it will not be worth anything until you somehow give it value, and people value it. The scam-way to do that is with promising the world, pumping, then dumping on the new owners without delivering anything. It's a win-lose scenario that tens of scamcoins have followed. The scammer / dumper wins at the expense of the naive buyer.

The DRK scenario is a win-win for developer and DRK-owners. Developer has a vested interest in assigning value to the coin he initially made as a worthless coin, and after working and working on it for months and years, and expanding its feature set and adoption, price rises and all participants gain.

Personally I dislike Evan's tactic* on how he went about it, but on the other hand, I have to be a realist on the aspect of fairness. How would it be "fair" if everyone mining Darkcoin became 10-100-1000x richer and Evan, who made it all happen for them, was doing it as a ...hobby, getting peanuts? Likewise, how would it be "fair" if BTC whales and hackers and scammers, had more Bitcoins than Satoshi who actually invented Bitcoin?

* Although I also have to point out that Evan offered an airdrop of a couple million extra coins, I think it was 2-3 months later. It was voted down by the community. People had already seen too much dumping happening and the consensus was that initial distribution was not an issue. But diluting the coin supply would be a greater issue (lose-lose for most parties involved).


I cannot answer this for Evan, but IT people do tend to have strange hours. BTW, even fork decisions have been questioned for the days they were introduced by Evan.

Btw, I've also seen the opposite argument for fairness, which is like this: "If we launched at a predetermined hour, instead of doing a ninja-launch, then all the cpu farms would flood the coin at that instant, with PC users getting nothing - so it's fairer to the average miner".


You are pretty off here.

1) There was enormous incentive to mine it due to being a cpu-mining only coin suitable to cpu farms and desktops that desire more profitable coins to mine compared to GPU-saturated algorithms. Just the fact of having a different algo (x11) was in itself a serious "magnet" of interest, even without knowing the upcoming feature set. The reason is that there was serious saturation of GPU algorithms and CPU raping by botnets and server instances (for other cpu coins).

2) The announcement of the future directions did not change the price. 10k DRKs still cost 0.25btc to buy. Actually when it hit the ccex echange in early february there were even lower prices (0.000020btc/DRK). So, objectively speaking, did the revelation of Evan's vision for what DRK will some day become, change the price or the desirability? And even if Evan had announced his vision, along with the launch, at the times you mention (late-US / early-EU times),  wouldn't you still hold it against him as it would be "irrelevant"?


The changes have been made, indeed, but if it is of benefit to existing holders, it is also of benefit to a buyer that decides to buy NOW. If a deflationary change is made that preserves one's wealth better, or an economic incentive is placed that will increase value in the long term, why would a buyer that buys NOW, not get the same benefit that the current holder has? They will gain equally.

Ensuring that the coin does good is also ensuring the interests of the participants. This does not constitute a fraud / scam. You can argue that future buyers will buy at an increased price, but they will still buy because of that specific feature set that will give them even greater price at a later point of time.

On the other hand, if, say, you tuned a coin to be more inflationary (with current holders losing), this is also something that will impact current and future buyers 6 months from now. They will be thinking "why buy this over-inflationary coin if it can't preserve my BTCs?".


Yes, but it only took 1 block to get 50 BTCs and less than a week to get 34.000 BTCs (the entire worth of DRK's instamine right now).

If DRK is a scam, the scam has an economic value. Say you are a reporter and you have to make an article on how big a scam DRK is. You'll either use Jan 2014 valuation of the 2mn DRKs, or current valuation of the 2mn DRKs.

The 2 prices you will come up is 50 BTCs (0.000025 x 2mn coins) or 34.000 BTCs (0.017 x 2mn coins).

And, again, 50 BTC was just the initial block of Bitcoin and 34.000 BTCs are like what? 4 days of solo-mining it?


Problems at launch happen with a lot of altcoins. IIRC even LTC has an instamine issue due to problems with the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DRK was forked by LTC btw).


Yes, but the concept was too alien at the time for people to relate, resulting in a solo-mine. Now, if we are negatively biased toward Satoshi we could say that the solo-mine is "evidence" that he didn't really try to market it well enough, on purpose, so that he could solo-mine his coin and then retroactively call him the 300mn dollar scammer or something, using today's valuation for his then worthless coins.

If you really look hard, you can find a negative spin for everything.


That's were DRK's DNA is different, in that it is not a fixed coin. It's like a development platform with new features added. For example there were no DarkSend or masternodes to begin with to get masternode payments. And DRK is also responsive to economic circumstances. What good would it be if it had top notch tech and died due to inflation?

Unlike Bitcoin which has the 5-6 year advantage, the steady inflationary curve doesn't work for altcoins that start now. If I launch today and know that tomorrow the coins will double and in four days they will double again, why would I want to ...hold? You have to apply new economic strategies that work for the new field (altcoins) and ensure that people get the most for their money.


The problem was publicly admitted and remember that he offered an airdrop solution that was voted down from the community. Evan knew that the instamine issue will be brought up again and again and that's why he wanted it solved. It's not his fault that people voted down the airdrop. At that point Evan's responsibility and blame ends, and it becomes a community responsibility. And the community had its reasons to say no.

As for the "fraud", remember what I said earlier. If people are getting massive ROI, they aren't really "scammed". A quote that brings a smile to my face is some forum members who were writing (as they watched their DRK worth multiply) "Evan scam us some more"...  :D

Evan's modus operandi is like that. He can have 5 versions of the wallet out in the same day, with >1 being ...a mandatory update.

There are other cases where decisions were announced they would go one way and then were rushed to other directions, with fast patches that did something else. Not in the launch period, but during June-August, forks, etc. One day the solution would be this, the next hour it would be something else. Evan is getting "excited" pretty easily with coding and some times the ideas he comes up with to fix things in a hurried way are not always the best. That's just the way he is - and you'd know it if you followed DRK's evolution (which I have).


The equivalence is in terms of economic impact.

What's the size of the scam we are talking about?

50 btc? Or 34.000 btc?

50 btc = first bitcoin block
34.000 btc = first few days of solomining bitcoin (which probably ended up with >1mn coins)

And then there is the question: Who lost these 50 or 34.000 btcs exactly? Who is the victim of this scam?

thank you guys for taking this off-line.  (as in, out of a general cryptocurrency thread).

For me, ultimately, the instamine (and many other aspects of darkcoin) hinted at financial incentive. And sure, you can present the whole "well people should be rewarded for their work" yeah, but that shouldn't be the main motivating factor. From what I can tell, the original bitcoin developers made bitcoin because they thought it would be fascinating. Not because it would make them rich.

So for me, instamine + masternodes were enough for me to ignore darkcoin.

And, to some extent, I think people are just different. Some people are going to look at these aspects (instamine) of the coin and go "yeah, so what".

you can lead a horse to water.

When you think about it, it's impossible to justify the instamine with the statement that it gives "incentive to developer". Yea, that's awesome for the developer, but basically ruins the point of crypocurrencies in the first place where you're not supposed to have things like that happening. It's outright dishonest. It's basically the block reward and max coin supply being sliced and diced that ruins it, that made what turned out as just a high output of coins into a outright dishonest instamine.

June 17, 2010: The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.- Satoshi Nakamoto

Yet Satoshi has 300mn worth in bitcoins.

Look people can be unintentional scammers. I've known people like that IRL, having nothing to do with crypto at all. Maybe they don't plot and scheme to deliberately scam, but they're careless with their promises, forget to mention things, and somehow, someway, everything always ends up being a "mistake" in their favor (almost never the other way). In general you learn to recognize the difference between these people and ones who are merely spontaneous and a bit scatterbrained, and just not to deal with the former people (I happen to adore the latter, however), or at least I have learned that.

Look we're playing with millions of dollars here and ultimately people are very likely to lose money (because all alts are very likely to go to zero objectively speaking). If it happens because they took a risk and lost, that's all fair and I have no issue with it. But if it happens because someone is lying to them, or is the type of person who maybe isn't deliberately lying but has a problem with ethics or candor or honoring his own promises, then I'm going to speak up about it.


If you want one specific victim (and that's all that's really needed in most criminal fraud cases), it could be the miner Evan told to go sleep because it "definitely" wouldn't be launched for a few days. So he foolishly believed Evan and by the time that guy woke up a million coins or so had already been mined!

But the more significant victims are people who do not realize the kind of slippery and profiteering character they are dealing with, and decide to invest in a scheme that somehow, some way, may well end up with a "mistake" or an "accident" where Evan has money in his pocket and others don't.

I'm going to speak up about that possibility, because I think he evidence suggests it is quite likely.

He didnt change Bitcoins block reward or coin supply at all like what happened to darkcoin. So he mined those bitcoins fairly. Also bitcoin is the first cryptocoin and kind of immune from that, even if you consider Satoshi mining bitcoin a mistake, you shouldve learned from that mistake, not do the same thing and make it 10x worse.

How can it be 10x worse, when Satoshi's coins alone are worth 10x the entire DRK marketcap? Anyway.

In addition to what Joshuar said above, the situation was completely and utterly different. There were no crypto exchanges, the coins satoshi was mining had no realistic short or even intermediate term prospects for being monetized. He made all of his plans public before launch. The launch was scheduled well ahead of time. The code actually worked properly for other people during the period the coins were being mined. None of these things were true for DRK.

Once crypto turned into a money game the rules change completely. Fair that satoshi mined a lot? Maybe not, but he didn't mislead, rely on "mistakes","accidents", or selective disclosure to get a leap in a crowded and competitive altcoin market (there was no market). He just took a leap of faith and it paid off.

The only real similarity is that satoshi and Evan both made money from mining. Other than that, 100% is different.

EDIT: AlexGR the way it can be 10x worse as that we aren't measuring the ethics or propriety of what happened based on the number of BTC/dollars/whatever that were made. They are judged based on the actions of the actors and the situations they are in, which were completely different.

? I'm not talking about prices of the coins, Marketcap is irrelevant in this discussion.

It's not money that he actually lost, unlike real scamcoins where they say "buy into this ICO/IPO" and then ...pooof. Your money is gone.

And even if that specific "victim" was mining and lost half a million coins (supposing he solomined that half a million - which would be impossible if the announcement was spread wide, so he'd definitely get a very thin slice with many miners), that would be ...12.5btc worth with the prices of then....

Or should he ask for compensating losses for future profits? And if he asks for future profits, implying he expected the rise, why didn't he buy when it was 0.000025btc/DRK to gain 1100x profits? All sorts of questions can be raised.


Well that's quite vague, isn't it... "Somehow", "some way"... well... with somehows and some ways, some BTC people are already at 20% of their initial investment. Some LTC people are even worse in this regard. And I haven't even mentioned the dozens of actual scamcoins with "total loss" status for investors, or the dozens of 100% instamined PoW/PoS coins (with very expensive initial distribution through the market that led to huge economic losses in most cases).

Well... Evan offered to airdrop millions of new coins to fix the distribution. The community almost lynched him at the idea.

-If he didn't propose it: He would be truly unethical for not wanting to fix the issue
-If he went ahead and airdropped coins regardless of what the community said: "He would be the dictator"
-He listened to the community and didn't airdrop new coins: "He is still a scammer..." Why? Because he should have invented time travel to go back in time and re-perform the launch as the only acceptable solution.

It's an impossible argument to win.

Jesus Christ, go do some work DEV! You sound like a whiny teenage bitch.

Are you threatened? Do you see Evan in here slumming?

So again, we have a situation where it "wasn't his fault" but somehow the coins ended up staying in his pocket?

Don't you find that a tad bit convenient?

Question: Why did he ask the community about this? They were his coins, right, don't you think he could have just given them away if that's what he wanted to do?


This is the problem with forums in a way. Everything turns into an argument one way or another is supposed to "win."

Sometimes when you screw up (deliberately or otherwise), there is now way to unscramble that egg, and you just live with. He fucked up the launch, deliberately or accidentally, I can't which at this point, but you know I'm skeptical of the convenient-series-of-cosmic-accidents story. There doesn't necessarily have to be a way to fix that, aside from simply recognizing that it is a crooked instamiened/premined scam coin and moving on. It's not like there is some shortage of other coins to choose from.

I know, I know, you probably like DRK and all that. Evan seems like a friendly likable guy, and that's part of it (nearly universally true of scammers btw), but get real, DRK not a puppy or sports team, its a crypto coin in a nasty, ugly world filled with scoundrels, scammers, and whales waiting to dump their bag on your ass. A little detachment is helpful.

Well then you would just make a class action argument where many people were hurt a little instead of one hurt a lot. There is no way that Evan can legitimately come out ahead the way he did as a result of his deception and withholding of relevant information without there being some group of victims.


Well sure, I don't have crystal ball so I don't know exactly how this is going to play out but I do think that somehow "accidentally" Evan and his buddies will end up with money and you (if you are still involved with DRK) won't. The rest only the future will reveal.


No question there have been tons of instamined scam coins that have failed. To me, Evan did the exact same thing, but turned it into a slightly longer and likely bigger con with the masternode HYIP stage (probably in cooperation with some whales) and DRK hasn't failed yet. Other than that, pretty much the same.

It's not so simple because instamining is not solomining. It just means faster mining for whoever participates and this could be tens of miners, not just Evan.


I am detached, don't worry. There are various things that I don't like with DRK, but its economy is not one of them because it actually works.


You do understand that you are stretching the victim argument here, with those that would mine but never did. There are dozens of cases where people have actually lost money that they gave out for scamcoins, not because ...they didn't mine.

Even if that very stretched argument is presented by a bunch of hypocritical would-be-miners, a judge will ask: How much was the damage incurred? So even if a whole bunch of people gathered to mine the 2mn coins, it would still be 50 bitcoins worth of coins at 0.000025 btc/DRK. That was their market value. You would have to apply retroactive pricing to "magnify" this.


It's not the same because DRK

a) has a vision behind it. Few coins have a vision / a plan to go somewhere. That's what people don't understand. Success is not something that just happens. It's the outgrowth of a vision. Even if obstacles or accidents or mistakes happen, the vision can pull you through.

b) it's not a con: DRK entered the privacy market segment which Bitcoin can't cover. DRK covers a real need and that's why it's getting investment. It then expanded its arsenal with instant transactions and is now heading to a more scalable architecture. Compare that to coins who came in, with pseudonymous "devs" / scammers, showed an ANN page, a mockup wallet client of extraordinary features or a scam-white paper and run away with the money. There is simply no comparison with DRK (developer with a name that actually codes something and tries to deliver). It's a win-win for dev and invested parties as long as DRK delivers and stays cutting-edge.

With all due respect its impossible for you to know that.

If and when Evan unexpectedly and unavoidably walks away because of some "personal" matter or some other "accident", but conveninently has already dumped his coins (along with a few of his whale friends) you will be left with a worthless bag.

Or perhaps when whales pull their support for whatever reason and the market cascades down in an avalanche of people rapidly trying to salvage some value out of the coins they had tied up in masternodes for the yield (but never really planned to expose to large losses). Most likely Evan and the whales will have already dumped (at least some of their coins). You and especially newer buyers will again be left with a worthless bag.

I can't guarantee that any of this happens, but the red flags of deception and self-interested behavior with poor ethics are there. This whole thing reminds me a lot of people who used to argue with me about MtGox or a few other scams. No way that could be a scam, they said, just technical problems, temporary banking issues, etc.  I'm making money trading there, why should I pull my coins out? (I pulled my coins out even though I too was making money trading there.)

Anyway, we'll have to agree to disagree somewhat.

I'll leave you with this tidbit though. Satoshi did not solo mine, not ever:

Could be confirmation bias on your part. And if it's not, then consider how unlikely it is to win a coin flip 10 times in a row, but still there's always someone who does so in the coin flip championships with 1024 participants.

bitwho,  I added several references to the OP. The formatting isn't great, but I'll clean that up later.

If there are any factual claims I make in the OP that are not supported by a reference please point them out. It is not my intention to make unsupported claims.

Are you kidding ?

The entire thrust of your argument is that the dev is (to use your exact word) "fraudulent". That he has "scammed" his community and coin holders. Also that he is "incompetent".

You've also attempted to promote the idea, both here and in other threads, that his motivations are questionable and your's are in good faith.

Those are pretty damning and categorical accusations and I think your lucky he's kept quiet about it so far. It's not that you've simply stated this as an opinion in some random thread. You've waged a one-man campaign across the length and breadth of bitcointalk and reddit to malign the integrity of a generally well respected individual who's identity is in the public domain.

Clearly people are free to make up their minds as to the circumstances and implications of Darkcoin's launch but what your up to goes way beyond that. Calling it making "unsupported claims" would be polite.

When and if crypto ever hits the mainstream, this entire industry will look like it was "instamined" by the general public. A great deal of them already look upon it as a one huge ponzi scam by a bunch of bedroom scamsters so be prepared to be tarred by your own brush and don't expect any claims of "it was a fair launch, you had a chance to mine" to wash with them.

Post what technical details you like about who mined what when at what time in the morning and what difficulty. But the broader question of motivation is only one that can be answered by subsequent actions, i.e. like "he dumped his instamine on the market, it went to zero and the dev sloped off to a Caribbean island never to be seen again". If that had been the case then your "intention not to make unsupported claims" with regard to motivation might have a shred of credibility.

As it is, if it's a question of your word against his I sure know who's I'm taking.

No.

Please identify which factual statements are not supported. They will have sources added or they will be removed.

You are entitled to disagree with my opinions. I disagree with that. :)


I don't use reddit at all. Oops.

Agreed. But you know what. I didn't look closely at 1024 different coin launches. I looked at one (or maybe in my life maybe a half dozen or so). Still, maybe that 10-in-row came up this time. Could happen.

I wasn't alluding to your "factual statements". I was alluding your "unsupported claims" with regard to motivation.


No, that gets left to you co-hort who's also a conflicted devteam member. So make that a 2-man campaign.

You know what is interesting. The only response so many of the drooling DRKtards have to criticism and skepticism is to bring up another coin. This excludes illodin and teknormal who are at least responding on substance rather than going into attack-the-messenger mode.

Those are my opinion based on the facts presented, and my decision to decline to interpret each and every fact in the manner most favorable to DRK so as to invalidate any inference of possible impropriety and get to the "it was all a mistake" conclusion. You need not share it, just as I may not share yours.

I'm asking if you dispute any of the facts.

And why did you decide to cherry pick that one? Because it gained success? And because herds of trolls spamming about instamine day in day out? Now that might be the confirmation bias in action again.

Because the dashcoin "buyout" happened to turn into an obnoxious shitstorm from the DRK folks on a thread I was watching because they had a chain fork six months ago, and that motivated me to look a little closer and more critically at what this DRK thing was all about.

Hard to see how you get closer to random than that, but I still am not entirely discounting your suggestion. It just fairly unlikely.

Also, if people are spamming instamine day in and day out, I've never seen it, at least not until I got onto the DRK thread. It's not something I follow normally. I have seen the devtome instamine thing and yes as I said before an occasional mention of the DRK instamine but never paid much attention to that either.

Well, Evan is coding and delivering on promises. He's not scamming people with promises or actual scams of the "take the money and run" type.


That might happen a year ago when DRK was one-man's project. DRK now has an entire dev team and it could expand to include more. Besides, Evan's initial commitment was for two years in the project as a full-time job and then gradually taking a more co-ordinating and presentation role...

Even the dump scenario isn't frightening. I've seen so many dumps that it's not even funny. Hacked BTCs to DRK dumps, prolonged daily dumps, fork dumps, uber-whale dump, mintpal cold wallet dump, whale-dumps etc... and price is at 0.017, while fully factoring-in the instamine.

Dumps are manageable if a coin has true value. Btw, even in the scenario where Evan dumped his coins (which I estimate in the 300k range) the long-term fundamentals for coin distribution get better and the uncertainty of a dump is reduced. The same applies for BTC if Satoshi decides to do it with BTC (and the market price of BTC also factors-in the Satoshi stash). It will have a one-off effect and then fundamentals will get even better for the long term prospects...




For consistency sake, if "Bitcoin was worthless then", wasn't the same true for Darkcoin?

To attack Darkcoin one must bend logic and apply today's facts to mid-Jan 2014 reality. A reality which was like "with a coin that spews millions, these coins are worthless" - and nobody paid serious money for these worthless instamined coins.

That's precisely why these coins had a price of 0.000025btc/DRK and not 0.017btc/DRK. It's as simple as that. It's very easy to discern hypocrisy when you see it in DRK's criticism, as the entire scam argument is based on retroactive pricing. It's like saying "wow, people were really idiots for buying a 10.000 BTC pizza" when in fact, at their time-space coordinates, these 10.000 BTCs were worthless, just as the instamined Darkcoins were.

If people could become rich by simply launching an instamined coin, they would do that. Premines, instamines, ICOs, plain scams - we've seen it all. It needs substance to have value and preserve that value in the long run and DRK has that.

Agree, and I never claimed otherwise.


Hey like I said, nothing like this may ever happen. Everything may go great and DRK may go to the moon. I see (very) red flags, you don't, that's fair and that's why we have markets.


No because there was a financial infrastructure to sell into if you have a plan to accumulate cheap or free coins and then pump them. For the first year or two of Bitcoin, even the concept Bitcoin could even be worth money at all was a fantasy. No exchanges, no trading, no price, no nothing. That's why people didn't even keep their mined coins. Seriously would you considering mining a coin today and not even keep it, just in case it goes up? Obviously the difference here is rather enormous.

XPOST:


If you were ripped off by the DARKCOIN scam, here are some proper authorities who may help bring the perpetrators to justice:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=999084.msg10846841#msg10846841

Just because it's profitable it doesn't mean necessarialy it's not a scam. For example, Herbalife is a typical case of a Ponzi, but more than 30 years later it's still profitable for a lot of people.


You are trying to claim about redistribution in an anonymous coin. But even if this wasn't being an anonnymous, how could you claim about the ownership of the new addresses?


Hey, Bitcoin dropped very hard on its price, we think the problem is because we are generating more coins than the market can absorve, so, let's change the block reward system now and reduce the amount of coins per block from 25 to 20.

Or in other words: "hey, we are not liking the results, we are loosing in this way, so, let's cheat this and change the rules of the game."


What a nonsense. Let me explain one thing: I'm not against instamines at all. Serious. For example, Blackcoin was entire mined in less than 2 weeks and after this, they turned at a 100% proof-of-stake coin. But there's an important difference here: they stated this at the announcement when they putted how the reward system would work. OTOH, Darkcoin at the launch never claimed anything about this. Probably Darkcoin at the first hours launch couldn't be considered an instamine case. But what happened? They changed the reward system, so, proportionally, they generated a lot of coins in the first blocks than it should be generated. Did Bitcoin do this? No. And when this happened ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.0;all ) they fixed the exploit and the block too. Darkcoin changed the entire rewards system in order to benefit themselves.


One thing is an in issue about block interval caused by an issue in the difficulty adjustement (and BTW, Litecoin uses the same dificulty adjusment scheme of Bitcoin). Another completely different thing is generating more or less coins per block than it should be generated.




2-3 months after the incident happened he purpose this? Also, how this would be posible at that point? Of course he wasn't being serious about that proposal and a conclusion of this was just did to create a false sensation of legitimacy to the coin wouldn't surprise me.

If you go the Pyramid/Ponzi route, every crypto has the same characteristic, including Bitcoin. Buyers buy and expect to sell higher to someone who will buy at a higher price, later, either due to speculative reasons, or the technology reaching a point of greater maturity and adoption.

In the same wave-length, Satoshi is a pyramid "scammer" for establishing a "pyramid" with deflationary characteristics over the longer run, coupled with scarcity, while he owns 1m coins that have made him a 9 digit net worth....



DRK wasn't anonymous to begin with. Serious anonymity started being implemented by summer 2014 and even then, few people started mixing. Coin mixing is optional, not mandatory. So, in a sense, DRK can be used exactly as BTC, or it can also be used with DarkSend. It's not a prerequisite.


Even if we accept the above example, who exactly is cheated? People who have the coins get better value for it. People who don't have it, gain or lose nothing as they are not invested. As *potential buyers*, and if they choose to buy, they will gain more wealth preservation from a lower-inflation model.

The only people who feel "cheated", are in the context of an informal altcoin race, where altcoin holders of other coins perceive the change in inflation of a competitor as something that negatively affects their own coin, as it becomes less preferable to the competitor with less inflation and better price-potential.


The differences in launches and parameters are known. How does that invalidate the economic impact of each "scam"? Why are you saying "nonsense"?

2mn coins x 0.000025 = 50 btc max, with the scenario of Evan solomining and retaining everything (it didn't happen like that, but anyway let's say it did). That's the furthest extent of the proposed "scam" with the economic value back then.

And again, 50 btc was just the first BTC block.


Nobody would be happy anyway, so it's useless to discuss any of this.

If it wasn't the instamine, it would be "masternodes", it would be the economic incentives, it would be the closed source and the NSA "backdoors" (as it was for quite a while) and other $hit like that.

The reality is that some people are butthurt because they have some other coin that like to do well, but it typically doesn't and thus they are anxiously trying to troll DRK to somehow bring it down in their twisted logic. This isn't working (because the FUD or legitimate criticism they are using is already priced-in) and they get even crazier, and then they troll harder etc etc.

If you classify premined coins as "scams", then instamined coins like drk who've had their block reward and coin supply drastically changed after a huge amount of coins were emitted at launch, should be in the same category. It's basically the same thing honestly.

That kind of personal attack is dumb and doesn't even fit the facts. If you assume that I'm making these points because I'm butthurt because Monero "isn't doing well," then you have to ignore the fact that the XMR/DRK ratio has been in an approximate trading range for six months and has favored XMR over the past month. It doesn't fit at all.

How about you go back and look at the specific numbered items in my original post and instead of endeavoring to refute them like some kind of spin doctor or debating society, consider how a reasonable person might interpret them in such a way as to make an inference that is unfavorable.

If you can't see that then I will respectfully acknowledge a difference of opinion with you. If you can, then I think we can still respectfully acknowledge differences of opinion or interpretation without getting into alleged motives to attack DRK that don't even make any sense.

Joshuar, I agree that premines and instamines are largely the same and I don't consider them fraudulent if everything is clearly disclosed up front and not changed later. They might be "scams" in the looser sense of not being a good deal of the investor or a model for long term success (much the same thing), but that's quite different. I draw a distinction between that and an instamine that is "accidental", and which had misleading statements, withholding of information and other actions taken to disguise it as something other than a premine.

I simply said what the reality of the situation is. No intention of personal attack.

I have no interest in further participating here. I started writing the same things to answer the same arguments, but it's just going circles.

The arguments have been heard and it's going over and over the same.

If someone thinks DRK is a scam, and they somehow risk losing money, just don't buy it. It's as simple as that.

"butthurt" = reality of the situation and not a personal attack?

I think you need to take a step back and recover a little objectivity here.

Maybe you weren't referring to me. If so, then I'd definitely agree with you that some people behave in that manner.

I still think it's reasonable to ask you: Is it possible for reasonable person to interpret the facts stated in my numbered items in such a way as to make an inference that is unfavorable. Yes or no?

smooth

Start showing some class man. It just might make a bigger difference than all these threads attacking other coins, their developers and even the cults. You don't code, you have a bit of a technical background but you abuse it all the time and bring disrepute to yourself and anything associated with you. This has been mentioned countless number of times. In the past pony used to act a lot more classless but at least he has toned down the rhetoric.

You, othe, Latapie, on the other hand are on a different planet altogether. Even if a scam, CryptoNote is a boon from some really hard core, gifted people. Just because we forked it for good, doesn't provide you or anyone acting in the core team to start acting like you need to liberate people of their misery. Just because you paid someone to write code doesn't make this your own project and or provide you the license to act like the way you have been doing.

All smart techs have great marketing behind it. If you can't win people over, at least don't alienate them for us. Just keep your head in the grindstone and let the community sort it out.

Hello puppet. And you will never get it either. And you always wonder why DRK goes up and you have to shill day in and day out and no one gives two shits. Start alienating more people. You will make it big one day. You are the new elite.

Too bad Mintpal is gone. Would be a perfect time to slap the images of dumps happening during those times.

The "reasonable person" is a rubber that can be stretched any way you like.

For example, I believe that an objectively "reasonable person" could contemplate the possibility that BTC is a pyramid that will enrich its creator since its creator reached billionaire status with his solo-mined / stealth-mined coins.

In the context of this thread, this "reasonable person" is a hypocrite, as he will only "see" a scam in DRK and not BTC.

So, we return to the rubbery definition that suits any argument.

In the end of the day, the financial value of the entire DRK instamine was 50 BTC at that time. And that's just the size of the first BTC block.

When one says about BTC "it was worthless coins then", he must also see that the same was true with DRK more or less.

If one applies retroactive valuation with todays prices, things look far worse for BTC (34k BTCs vs 1mn BTCs).

And when the argument comes, that Evan proposed to fix this with airdroping new coins and was voted down by the community (while Satoshi didn't offer such a distribution fix), we get "ok, it's his coins, why didn't he distribute them"... Like the same question can't be asked for Satoshis 1m coins...

See the hypocrisy and double standards?

And I'm not saying Satoshi is a scammer btw or that bitcoin is a scam. I'm just highlighting how a "questioning skeptic" can see these things. In fact one of the first times I read about bitcoin, it was just a critique of how the hell is it supposed to beat the elites and the financial oligarchy, when it introduces a new class of elites with the creator being on top of a huge pile of coins he created...

Okay I'll take it you don't want to answer, and want to continue the spin doctor, debating society approach. Fair enough, you aren't required to answer my questions if you don't want.

Peace AlexGR.

BTW:


My question was about the numbered items in my original posts, factual events (to the best of my knowledge) that did not occur with BTC and did occur with DRK.

So, with this this logic, the guy who bought 2 pizzas with BTC 10000 should be a big retarded.


Summer of 2014 in the South hemisphere is between December and March.  ::)




The economy and the contracts per si are being cheated, and probably miners too (except the early miners).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=970176.msg10612547#msg10612547




The discussion is not about economic value. It's about unfair practices.



Bitcoin didn't change the rules of emission, although of its inumerous crashes. This is why it doesn't have any unfair practice. Other coins are instamined too, but they stated this in a clearly way before their launch. Darkcoin didn't this.

About masternodes: Well, the idea is not bad. The lack of economic incentives to run a node in the classical proof-of-work coins is a serious issue in my opinion. Darkcoin at least seems to more worried about providing a solution abou this, although the way how is this being done is very discutible. Beyond Darkcoin, NODE is another cryptocurrency which has a technology which can solve this issue with the proof-of-activity concept.




Don't worry. Unfortunately in this world many people and institutions with questionable practices are the winners. The top 10 coin market cap is a beautiful example of this. Only 3 or maybe 4 of these coins really deserves to stay at that list. The guys behind Darkcoin has the right resources: marketing, PR, contacts on the media and a lot of arguments about how a cryptocurrency should be.

I saw some Darkcoiners at the DRK announce thread on this forum making some sactires about Litecoin. It seems they are really looking to surpass Litecoin's market cap. In my opinion it's really hard to have a convicent answer to why Litecoin. It's a legit coin, with fair launch and respectable people behind its development. But unfortunately, they have a very commodist position, as I stated here one month ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=956231.msg10486790#msg10486790

So, that being said, unfortunatelly Dakcoin/DASH is really a serious candidate to this (and probably this will happen). There are a lot of coins which really deserves to stay about Litecoin. But Darkcoin, with its cheating, doen't deserve this position.



Close topic.

Thanks for the info. I've stayed away from DRK just because the Masternode structure is an unnecessary hack given that CryptoNote coins exist (and that credible Zerocash coins may exist at some point). I've paid little attention otherwise; good to know there are other reasons to ignore it.

This thread has nothing to do with cryptonote. Agree or disagree, please keep it on topic. Thanks.

Get the gist of my post. It wasn't about CryptoNote.

Nachoig I said I'll refrain, but since you posted after that, I'll reply to this one and I'm out for good.


That's why you can't have both "back then" and retroactively applied reasoning.


Yes, I was talking about North...


Future miners mine a more precious coin, so it evens out.


Actual scams tend to have both victims and an economic size. "A scam of X size was perpetrated against Y parties". That's why I insist on these two. If there are no such identifiable variables, it is extremely hard to fit the "scam" profile.


Fairness is very, very relative. In this case we take Bitcoin as the standard-bearer and then compare others to it. But Bitcoin itself is not the fairest coin either: It did favor early miners (and I'm not talking about Satoshi, but about the programmed block reward reduction). It was also pre-programmed to evolve that way into the future. But future miners now get far more valuable coins. So, in a sense, they get way more. But they also have to compete much harder and with expensive equipment.

Then you have issues of mining (cpu vs asic), you have issues of fairness regarding whether the devs should get something or it should be all about the miners and investors, you have issues regarding democracy and voted by the community reductions that have no impact on other parties, etc etc. It's a huge discussion all around.


Actually Litcoin also had an instamine, it's just that nobody was trolling them for it... they were even self-marketed as fairer compared to BTC:

This thing you have about bringing up coins other than the one being discussed as if they are somehow relevant is getting tedious.

But since you did bring it up, let me ask:

What actions were taken by the LTC developer to deceive, mislead, conceal, expand or otherwise exploit the instamine?

In other words was anything like these things done:

Help me out please. I can't find the part of your post that was about darkcoin/dash.

Smooth, you do realise with the amount of effort you have spent slandering and bringing up the 1+ year old instamine non-issue, you could have had a working GUI wallet, fixed monero's problems and kept a little class......

Why not let things be, put your head down and do something useful with your time to help Monero and its community?

Then maybe, JUST maybe you may see a glimmer of hope that Monero might actually be worth something one day.....or not...

Subject: Re: Why the darkcoin/dash instamine matters


Wow, people really do have a problem staying on topic around here. Must be something in the water.

No probs ill create a thread just so you can answer

Edit: here you go, now you can stay on topic: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1001299.0

Dark coins been out for months now. Why is everyone upset about an instamine now?

Because it was dying until Evan came out with the artificially inflating Masternode pyramid scheme

The same goes when you try to see the price of these instamined coins in BTC.


I don't care. I live in the South hemisphere, but in opposite to Notherns, I don't try to enforce the using about the stations of the year over the internet. It would be great if people from North stop this practice.


So, why offer new coins at mining now? Drop the new coins to zero, put only the transaction fees, and people (including miners) will gain a very very precious coin and speculators will be very happy. Coins which are still offering rewards at every new block are scamming you with inflation.


There are a lot of coins with no economic value at all which are scams because the way of the mining schemes. The fact of nobody gived a shit to these coins and so the coin didn't gain economic value doesn't stop the fact of being a scam.


Of course every single coin here favours more early miners/adopters than the laters. But there is an important difference here: Bitcoin didn't change the rules ex-post to favours (even more) them. Darkcoin changed. And also, to have a deflationary coin, or a coin where at a point doesn't generate new coins, you'll need at some point to cut the rewards until they stop to generate new coins.


devtome only looks about the relation between the number of the coins mined in the genesis block or in the first hours and the present number of coins. This is very superficial.

In the case of Litecoin, his was caused the blocks were generated at a more fast rate than the 2.5 minutes interval. This is common at the launch, specially if you don't have a difficulty adjustment per block (like BTC, LTC adjusts its difficulty every 2016 blocks). But every single block at Litecoin generated the right number of coins. In Darkcoin, what happened is totally different (credits to fluffyponny for the graph):

https://i.imgur.com/1KyeATF.jpg

This comment is also relevant about this: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2zufu1/a_great_podcast_by_lets_talk_bitcoin_discussing/cpn7fgn

They are not upset about the instamine, they are upset about the price rise of DRK over these last few months.
They fear it directly undermines their own coin.

DARK is trying to steal the name of Dash, a Cryptonote coin with real privacy.

The reason is the Darkcoin Foundation wants to escape their poker/gambling/darkmarket past and take start marketing their HYIP to normal people.

Pushing Ponzis on Bitcoin Rich crypto-nerds for lulz and profit is one thing.  Tempting with ridiculous ROI decent folks who work hard for their money is another matter.

"It's the Next Bitcoin^TM and the Next Visa^TM all in one; get in on the Ground Floor^TM" they say.   ::)

https://i.imgur.com/P1MNRpL.jpg

(dear Mods, before you delete me, this is not off topic because this pic represents how Smooth doesn't really care about drk public launch emission, instead he cares because he is the layabout Monero core dev who submitted 3 lines of code in the last 12 months and is butthurt because a real coin is owning his thinly valed investor scam)

Please stop with these FUD threads  :( the price is rising way too fast because of you


Thanks retard.

Conclusion to OP's topic ''why the darkcoin/dash instamine matters'' :

it doesnt matter, all that matters is the amount of work put into development of Darkcoin and its ability to actually achieve what it set
out to achieve only a year ago. The market regnonices and confirms the progress in price correction.

Of course it's about the price . There are many dozens of premined/instamined/scam coins but there is no point in worrying about them because they amount to nothing. Having a "suspect" coin growing so big is of concern and worth investigating.

LOL

So why 2 of your devs pass hour and hour in our thread, and bashing us on reddit??

For your information thanks to them I'll never ever invest a $ in this shitcoin and speak about this to all my friends:


I hope that more and more people will see that Monero Devs have no clue, only option attack the success coin.

Edit : loosers !  :P

Maybe you forgot InstantX..

A real beauty...

Edit : double loosers  :P :P

Well, from what I know, there are about 2300 masternodes. As each masternode needs 1000 DRK to operate, so there are 2,300,000 DRK "frozen" (these coins can be moved only if you want to shutdown the masternode), or 44% of the currently supply (about 5,200,000).

Around 15% of the total monero coin supply was instamined by several groups including the original dev who was removed from the project for scamming. Smooth has admitted only 5% being instamined with a optimized miner from one group that went public, the other teams are still on the loose waiting to dump coins on newcomers. They had everyone mining on a "crippled miner" while elite insiders had optimized miners. smooth is one of the original bad holder and possible the ousted original anon dev.
The nsa involvement is bad enough but the inflationary distribution model will kill this coin before the massive bloat does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoNote#NSA_involvement

Blowing the lid off the CryptoNote/Bytecoin scam (with the exception of Monero)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=740112.0

Zerocash is a monero killer! RIP
Dump it now, thank me later.

https://i.imgur.com/1RwLjC4.png

Nothing was instamined, the emission curve is totally perfect and sheduled how it was meant to be.
The NSA involvement, well, sounds good - the NSA knows how to make crypto systems way better than Mr. Duffield - thank you.

Blowing the lid off - with the exception of Monero, thank you again; do you know what exception means?


Peters comment is MRL-0001 which got fixed with MRL-0004 -  a totally theoretic attack anyway :-) Unlike the Darkcoiners we aren't as arrogant to not attack our own crypto and make it better :-)
You could paste the other comments from Peter maybe?


MRL-0004 is worth reading btw, but i doubt you can understand it  - but maybe give it a try:
MRL-0004: Improving Obfuscation in the CryptoNote Protocol - https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0004.pdf

.... then zerocash is also a DRK killer... unless instanx is all it worked up to be.

"leads to a lot of ugly situations that zerocash WILL resolve"

FTFY

(as in its not here yet.)

I do find it interesting that after 4 pages of attacks, not one person has even attempted to (reasonably) address smooth's points in the OP.

I saw this:

https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizardry/brs-arbitrary-output-sizes.txt - Ring Signature Blinding

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=768499.0

The very design of the two-tier approach falls on the back of the masternode network. You're paid to provide a service--at the moment, IX locking and Darksend mixing. If you freelance your time in graphic design, should you not get paid for it? For some, they could give two shits about masternodes but they are the structure of the coin and what offer DASH utility. From a price standpoint, they are an investment and an income stream--no different than mining in that regard. The difference is you're trading hardware depreciation and resale value for currency speculation (good or bad depending on direction). The fact that so many people have opted to setup masternodes tells you a lot about them believing in what the coin has to offer and they are getting a return for doing so. From a price discovery standpoint, S&D factors come into play with where an equilibrium of masternodes to justify the value of the coin, stabilizes. I don't expect you to understand.

The block reward portion of the masternode payments is not negotiated and made by the person purchasing that service (by contrast with fees). It is set by the developer in a fairly arbitrary manner, and paid by miners to whom the masternode operator provides no service (in fact InstantX competes with miners). So at best (if it is not an investment scheme), masternode operators are a commercial vendor of the developer, or a confederation of the developer along with miners.

It is certainly not the same model as mining. At best there are some vague similarities.

As for the issues Smooth described in the OP:

Numerous existing holders aren't pleased with the beginnings of the coin but its just that, beginnings. A starting point. No one expected Darkcoin to morph into what it is presently and the masternode concept wasn't even a thing back at launch. The reality of the situation is that its an unfortunate reality but one in which miners decided to continue supporting the codebase as well as buyers/sellers continuing to transact in coins. People invest for numerous reasons: utility offered, speculation, etc. The coin as it stands today isn't what it was in the beginning, not even close and it continues to innovate and branch out--part of the reason for the name change. People looking at taking a position have been able to see over the course of the year what the development team has done and certainly on a weekly, ongoing basis, heard nonstop about the instamine. People still continue to support the project because in the face of its history, it continues to offer utility and has differentiating factors that separate it from other coins. People buy into company stock all the time when IPO's float only a portion of ownership while retaining the lionshare. And on that note, there was ample opportunities for anyone if they desired to pick up coins on the cheap over a course of a few months of non-stop stagnation in price and constant dumpings.

The block reward of nearly every coin is arbitrary. As for competing with miners, its a double-edged sword. The whole utility aspect of the coin is based entirely on the masternode network, without it, the miners would have "no value". As for IX competing with miners... hardly. There still needs to be a POW confirm for IX to work. Further, if IX fails, it defaults back to conventional POW confirms.

We're still not even at the starting point of cryptocurrency. To feel locked into something that was launched in a deceptive and misleading manner by the person or people still running it just because a millimeter or two of progress has been made on a million meter journey is silly.

There are plenty of alternatives that don't have that, er, baggage.

The block reward is arbitrary, but it is not paid by one party to another based on instructions from a third.

I'm saying the structure is different and you can't say that something is "just like" something it is not just like, either logically or legally.

Nice pwnage smooth.

I feel sorry for these Darkscammer kids.  It's almost like cruelty to dumb animals.

EG, oblox can't reason out the technical details so he rambles about 'freelancing in graphic design' and attempts to argue by analogy.

"Hurr durr you should get paid for freelance graphic design, therefore Masternodes aren't a HYIP."

WTF do they teach in schools these days?  Is the curriculum now 100% social justice and sports?

We get it smooth, we understand your stance. It's fine, it has been said. Beginnings are all relative. In regards to the scope of active users of crypto, yes, we are still very much millimeters in a marathon. Having said that, in the past year, people have decided to support the direction of the coin even with its flawed beginnings by continuing to mine on that codebase and continue to update release after release, fork after fork, spork after spork. You magically rehashing something that is over a year old (and has been discussed to death inside and out) just as Dash is starting to gain momentum again just looks a bit sad (and obviously, with project bias).

I don't think the Monero guys are going to get anywhere with this. People just don't give a fuck. All people care about is whether the technology works. I don't think that anyone has traced a Darksend transaction, so unless that happens, you guys are getting nowhere. Another criticism I see is that masternodes "unfairly" benefit the holders of the coin. I, and many others, see that as an important feature! It also does wonders for the price.

You guys can build your fair and morally grounded coin. Just know that the market doesn't really give a fuck about those things. That's why I supported cutting the emission of Monero. Better to mine quickly like Darkcoin did, and then have a very low emission afterwards. Sometimes I regret that Monero isn't being lead by more business savy people, like Evan.

Darkcoin changed its emission several times. Did that preclude it from being successful? No! You can do anything you want,(within reason) and people will just shrug and say "meh, it's still the best out there" and use it anyway. If you guys don't understand it, the market will eventually teach you.

Y only darksend takes a few light years before it actually transacts value.
Monero too, its all not the solution.
Better go SDC. Instant transfers. Trustless, no 3th partys. Only house partys

Speak for yourself. You don't give a fuck. That's your prerogative. Other people do give a fuck, including some who have posted on this thread, and many, many more who have not.


In that case, darkcoin is also likely doomed given the opinions of nearly every qualified expert who has ever weighed in on it.


Isn't that a bit risky, to stake your future on something that hasn't failed yet, which has no solid mathematics or other theory behind it, and the opinions of many qualified experts against it?

The technical stuff is off topic though, and indeed even the "will darkcoin succeed" question is off-topic. Please take it to the XMR vs. DRK thread or whatever.

Off topic, but just so you know SDC uses the same method of mixing as XMR

You guys have done your best in informing everyone on all the details of the instamine over the last week or so, and the price is up ~75 cents. You certainly haven't harmed it. At least not by the only metric that is relevant to me. Of course some people give a fuck, you and others with an interest in competing currencies. But in general, having an instamine hasn't really harmed Darkcoin. Once again, by the only metric that matters, price.

That is not the only metric relevant to everyone.

BTW, if we come back and continue this discussion during a time period that the DRK price declined, does that mean suddenly people started caring about the instamine?

I think you would have to agree that it is difficult to attribute price movements to one particular factor or another.

Also, consider: If darkcoin were not saddled with this baggage, maybe it would be higher than it is now.

Yeah, I guess it is difficult to determine exactly what contributed to an increase or decline. But it looks like the overall sentiment for DRK is positive, despite your efforts.

Perhaps, perhaps not. None of the people I pitched investing in Darkcoin to seemed to care much about the instamine. But then again, most of them had no prior experience in crypto. I actually made a point of explaining the Darkcoin instamine versus how Bitcoin was mined, and most just thought it was unfair in both cases. (Because they didn't get to mine from the start in either case  ;)) Anecdotal evidence, but it's pretty convincing to me.

Did you tell them about the numbered items in my OP, and that the same person/people are still running the project?

My experience with investors (granted it is probably a slightly different audience than yours) is that they react to even questionable conduct on the part of insiders much the same way superman treats kryptonite.

No, as I didn't know about some of those until you pointed them out to me. But I basically told it from the worst case scenario, that it was 100% premeditated and an intentional way of securing more coins. Look, I get why you don't like it. You guys did it the honest way and you're losing to guys who (possibly) didn't. If I had to choose, I would hope that the honest team succeeds. But the world doesn't always favor honesty. I'm just doing what's best for my future when I invest in Dash.

That would be correct IMO, if this wasnt cryptocurrencies. These were basically designed so things like that(block reward/coin supply changing etc) wouldnt happen, at least according to Satoshi. I honestly dont believe dash will survive in the longrun, mostly because the purpose of cryptocurrencies is to be the opposite, open, credible, decentralized/fair. It might work in the short term, but why did anyone even come to Bitcoin in the first place?

I came because Bitcoin is backed by math, it's open, and decentralized both on the protocol level and with it's development, if something such as a instamine happened(block reward/coin supply being touched), then I would have not bothered giving Bitcoin a 2nd look. It eventually led me to Monero, but if Bitcoin didn't utilize those prospects then I wouldn't have touched it(metaphorically).

Objectively speaking none of these coins has much chance longer term, and the only real reason to pay attention here is interest in the technology. I think you are a little too caught up in the latest pump to see that though.

So what? It is a decentralized consensus after all, people accepted the new code by downloading and running the new wallet and mining using the new code. Anyone can make any modification to the code and release it. It depends on all the people running the network whether they like it or not.

It is a nice sort of high to see the digits increase  ;D I do acknowledge that crypto as a whole is an uncertain field. Who knows what will happen. It'd be nice to relax on a beach rather than toil at my boring job though.

I can call this a 51% attack.

"If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud"
  -- Nassim Taleb

geat, thanks. It's now in my sig.  ;D

fraud is fraud. so dash is.

Trolls, how much are you being paid?? Any jobs going?

yes evan intentionally launched the coin with a "bug" to get rid of every early miner
yes evan misled people....
yes evan withheld information...
yes evan instamint premined
yes evan had a gpu miner long before anyone else
yes evan is a fraudster
yes evan lied, ASIC Resistant, the max coin amount is 84,000,000......
yes evan was an active buyer in the "redistribution" phase
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg5007248#msg5007248 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg5007248#msg5007248)


XCoin->Darkcoin->Dasher
https://i.imgur.com/z3u5zGj.gif

Yes, in a way, we are being motivated by spending, but it seems to be Dash's side as it unites people who aren't obsessed with greed and care more about real functionality than they do about rainbow dreams of instawealth.

Very quick diagnosis. The dash instamine matters because: even though BTC by all accounts had a fair launch, it still enjoys the label of ponzi by some in the media and still has yet to jump any mass adoption hurdles. What do you think this same media will do if dash were to make a play as BTC's replacement? Do you think a coin that looks, smells, and most importantly reads in Evan's own quotation marks as a fraud is going to be ushered to the throne without a massive media assault?  Because billionaires and governments like having their money replaced by a top heavy band of pseudo-cypherpunks with the moral compass of a fraternity next to a rohypnol factory. So yes, dash supporter, everyone is paid to get you, but ironically by your own hand. And if you think it is bad now, you have no idea of the shit storm that would be leveled at you if you even got a whiff of BTC's market cap.

If Evan had really wanted to replace BTC, he would have foreseen every thing I just outlined and realized there were only two options: 1. a fair relaunch or 2. admit it was an instamine and said "a dev has got to get paid how a dev has got to get paid". He didn't--he wanted the benefit of an instamine without the perception of greed, but didn't think far enough ahead to see his creation as a replacement for BTC and what the consequences of his actions would be if he ever truly got on the same playing field as BTC. The fact that his coin made it to the top five with this hanging over its head should be congratulations enough--the market rewarding his misplayed strategy with being the heir to Satoshi's kingdom is a pipe-dream wrapped in rainbows flecked with fairy dust.

I really don't understand the hate in the crypto world? If you don't like the project and think its a scam, call it a scam and leave it at that. Yes i know you say your here to save the noobies but remember people have to choice to invest or not and ultimately it should fail if your right.

I actually own both DASH & XMR and find it hilarious...

And I don't hate dash (it's an inanimate code) I just hate that I'm told by Dash shills that the instamine doesn't matter (ethically and strategically it does) and that Evan won't own up to his leadership failure in that pivotal moment, but insists on maintaining that Dash is replacement worthy of BTC--I don't know if he drinks his own koolaid or is too stupid to realize it was impossible from day one.

Imagine, if you will, that you have a good friend who has been diagnosed with cancer. It's malignant, but operable, as it has been caught early enough.

Your friend tells you that he's decided to forego the operation, as he's heard about this Austrian guy, Dr. D Uffield, who has developed a cure for cancer. Plus it won't interfere with his lifestyle, all he has to do is eat 2 carrots a day, 1 African potato, and every month at full moon he must slaughter a chicken and dance around it. Surely you would be shocked to your very core that he's foregoing conventional treatment for what is clearly garbage with no basis in medical science?

To make matters worse, a cursory check reveals that Dr. D Uffield has no medical degree, and instead has a doctorate in theology. He isn't even licensed to practice any form of medicine, much less practice modern medicine as a medical doctor. You tell your friend, in the hopes of helping him avoid catastrophe, but he insists that this is going to cure him. In the face of all reason he ignores your advice and barrels ahead with this crazy treatment.

Months go by, and every time you try and remind your friend that there is no scientific basis for this treatment he screams at you, insulting you and telling you that you're just jealous that he has found this treatment and you haven't (you don't even have cancer!) To make matters worse he starts roping in all of the cancer patients at his support group, convincing them to quit their medical treatment and move to this alternate care regimen. Eventually you catch a break: Dr. Uffield moves his practice to America in an attempt to find legitimacy on the Dr. Oz show. In the mess of the move his chief aide, Nurse V. Ertoe, promptly resigns, and publicly calls out the sham.

This is it, you think, you finally have the piece of evidence to convince your friend! You print out all of the medical research you've collected over the months, and present it to him at his support group along with this clincher of a statement from the nurse. Instead of being convinced, he doubles down on his beliefs, and the cancer patients alongside him shout you out the room with cries of "FUD!" and "TROLL!" One of the more prominent members of the group has even left a pamphlet on your car explaining why Dr. Uffield's carrot/potato/chicken/dance regimen is "fit for purpose", and that modern medicine is just "weighed down with mountains of medical science" when all you really need is a visionary, regardless of where he got his doctorate and what field it's in.

At this point how would you feel about Dr. Uffield and his regimen? Irrational hate? Disgust at his abuse of power?

And would you just shut up indefinitely, or would you try and help newcomers that join the support group not get tricked into using medical care that has virtually no basis in medical science?

So it is for us when we observe snake oil and an obvious scam being punted by means of a cryptocurrency that has virtually no basis in cryptography.

Did you read what your hero gmaxwell said what actually is cryptography?



Regarding your story, the difference is that you know what a carrot, a potato, full moon, and a chicken are. Whereas you have been very keen to point out shortcomings of DRK/DASH without actually understanding what it is.

For example, you have claimed InstantX is just Bitcoin's Green Addresses, which it isn't. From reading the description (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Green_address) it is clear they are very different, as a Green Address recipient has to trust the previously published sending address not to double spend whereas InstantX is trustless.

Another example, you were criticizing DarkSend thinking you'll get tainted coins back as a change after a transaction. That would severely weaken the anonymity, which is why DarkSend doesn't work like that. 

All this baffles me, as you seem to be familiar with cryptography, at least enough so to understand DRK/DASH if you bothered to find out about it.

https://i.imgur.com/dSe9cRz.jpg

End of thread.

Sure your being dramatic enough there ?

First he's a newb coindev who gets his retargeting wrong and spills out too many coins for 2 days.

Then he's a scheming coindev who planned it all along - including the massive demand and marketcap rise presumably.

Now he's a treacherous rogue masquerading as a cancer curer who causes the untimely deaths of his unsuspecting faithful. (e.g. me presumably)

U need help.

You really don't want to be quoting gmaxwell to support your point, and you really have missed his.


So you don't have to trust that the MasterNodes that vote aren't colluding? You have a bizarre definition of trustless. You also haven't taken the time to understand where GreenAddress instant transactions have gone to subsequently, which is especially ironic as you accuse me of the same shortcoming. "I just read the description and thumbsucked everything else, but I can do that because I'm a DASH supporter and thus not a troll"


I stated the risk as I understood it, it was pointed out to me that it has been dealt with, and I acknowledged my error and dropped it from my very brief overview of fail points. That's literally the end of it, constantly bringing it up doesn't make me look bad, it makes you look like you're desperate to criticise me rather than acknowledge the clear evidence of a scam.

It was in response to Jeff8247 who asked why there was so much "hate". I used an example to illustrate how those emotions could develop.

I have never claimed Duffield is a "newbie coin dev", I just think that he has demonstrated an incredibly poor grasp of very fundamental cryptography (eg. chaining hash functions leads to preimage attacks, which is why the winner of the sha3 standard wasn't "all of the hashes combined!!") and his actions subsequent to the instamine demonstrate either incredible ineptitude or outright deviousness.

What help do you suggest I seek in this matter?

Start with help telling the difference between a purveyor of fake cancer cures who ends up killing people and a coin dev who potentially ended up with too many worthless (at the time) coins.

It's called metaphor--you should learn about it; it is very useful for illustrating a point. Some of the best at it were Shakespeare, Dickinson, Keats had a few good ones, Frost almost always wrote in metaphors for death (though it was subconscious on his part), almost any writer worth talking about used/uses metaphor, even Jesus used them in the form of parables.

Not anymore than (and not even as much as) having to trust the 2-3 largest Bitcoin pools aren't colluding. Yea, I'm bizarre that way.

And throwing Bitcoin under the bus refutes what Fluffy is saying how?

I think you got strawman and metaphor mixed up there.

Meditate on that, you're an "INTJ", you should be able to figure it out.

Nope, you thought wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_metaphor

If you can't explain it, just say so.

Do you consider Bitcoin trustless? Do you consider Monero trustless?

I think I just tried to explain it to you. If you don't want to understand it, I can't help you.

Where is your explanation of how throwing Bitcoin under the bus refutes what Fluffy said? Did I miss it? Where is it? I'm looking above but all I see is a question and an implication but not an explanation. Why don't you explain to us why Dash is more or less trustless than Bitcoin or more or less trustless than Monero and in what way? Do I need to fear a double spend or a masternode attacking my masternode? Are those an even-swap of risks. Seems like Dash has too many working parts for it to be an even-swap, so I asked for an explanation. I'm going to bed, but I'm looking forward to this like Christmas, so please don't disappoint.

I like this quote...


...that was a year ago when Darkcoin's price was 0.0038.

Well it "sank" up the way by 326% after a year of "instamine" reminders culminating in them going desperate full throttle recently.

A "perfectly launched" clone did appear and it did this:

https://i.imgur.com/usw2j29.png

XPOST of high relevance:


Thanks cryptohunter, good work!

Update:

The latest cargo cult dogma declares the Dash insta-mine to be OK, because

1) it's all been re-distributed
2) Bytecoin did it too

Nevermind that


As far as rationalization skills go, Tash and illodim get a D minus.   :D

I don't know much, but I would say that the inventor/implementor of a NEW technology is entitled to his/her share of the profits/winnings, wouldn't you agree?
Isn't that how it works in the real corporate world? You build a new startup in the hopes of a profit and investors investing in your technology and your inventions get out there...
But what do I know..

Sure, just be honest and transparent about it.

[ANN] [DASH] Dash | First anonymous coin | 50% mined first day by insiders

And don't claim the coins have been "redistributed by the market" when there is no possible way you can prove that, or that it was an "accident" when actions on that day, and contemporaneous statements by those involved such as illodin suggest otherwise.

Given clear and honest disclosure, if people want in, they want in. Fair enough.

Of course, given that there hasn't been that kind of disclosure for over a year, with many people getting involved based on false, misleading, or hidden information, I'm not sure you can erase the fraud after the fact. What's done is done.

Corporates do this behind our backs and so do startups and the US president? =D, I'm not saying it's right, but we do have to live in the real world thou..
If I remember correctly Bill Gates didn't even have the OS ready when he sold it to investors, was this false, misleading or hidden information, or just good business?
And so in in time everything comes into the light and there truth has to be told what ever it is...

That's exactly the point.

Corporations and presidents have plenty of critics calling them out when what they do is seen as wrong, do they not?


I don't know exactly what Bill Gates told IBM, investors, etc. Let's stick with what we do know -- about Dash -- and that's referenced in the first post here and subsequent discussion.

We can leave digging into Microsoft to the dozens or hundreds of lawyers, writers and journalists who have investigated it over the decades. Why should Dash get a pass from the same scrutiny?

Yes there are, but you know what, you can't satisfy every person out there, there are always critics and different thinkers, that's the way life is...
But that's the freedom of speech, which is great!


This is exactly my point, we don't know the future of this yet.

We certainly know dash's past even though they keep changing the name on us. And if you think institutional investors (whom dash will need to get to their moon objective) are going to look past shadiness, you need to think more clearly on the subject.

"You want me to trust your assertion that you accidentally mined 2 million coins and didn't relaunch to validate your claim of a fair launch?" says Institutional Investor.

"But it was an accident!" says Evan.

"Get out of my office." says Institutional Investor.

That's one way of looking at it and there are several others, you certainly are entitled to that.
But there are also other ways of looking at it, for one there's the matter of inventors compensation (see law discussions on this). If you claim it's fraud, some other could claim it's inventors compensation and there's nothing wrong with that one. That's the thing that kickstarts projects keeps inventor happy and motivated to develop the product and so on...
There are several inventors of software products that are rich as hell. I'm not envy of them, they certainly earned it....

That's a faulty comparison because inventors and corporations don't accidentally give themselves a huge payoff and then claim that it was fairly launched--doing that sort of thing during an IPO would land you in hot water. There seems to be a cognitive dissonance when I say that the problem is that he gave himself a payoff (accidentally) , but also claims it was a fair launch. If Evan had just given himself a payoff, but never claimed that the coin wasn't insta or fast-mined there wouldn't be a problem. At least I wouldn't have a problem with it. But as it stands, it looks like he's bating people into one perception of the coin, and then when investors find out, they either get out or play a (conscious or unconscious) game of greater fool and hope that others on the outside will rationalize it the same way they have to because they are stuck with their own (conscious or unconscious) buyer's remorse. Smooth did a public service with this thread, sorry it ruins the gameplan.

You know that investors/corporations only talk money. As long as they make the money they don't care if somebody else has some funds or any other stuff for that matter and that's the cold fact.

Why?



If masternodes start getting taken down by the authorities of some country, they get moved elsewhere, the incentive to run them is there and getting larger the less there are nodes / the more are taken down. But why would they have a problem with masternodes btw? Hackers however, hmm, how?

It's a cold rationalization. Good luck finding greater fools.  ;)

I would add, that if you knew or had a hunch that putting 1 dollar into stocks would grow in a few days to 10 dollars, wouldn't you take it? As long as it's legal of course.
I know I would and would be tempting to invest more, for example 100 dollars that would be 1000 dollars..
but that's only my opinion, if this makes a person a fool then so be it, but he/she would be a rich fool =)

Because mathematically proven 'good crypto' is preferable to Dash's 'bad crypto.'

https://downloads.getmonero.org/whitepaper_review.pdf

You can't simply glue privacy onto a Bitcoin-like transparent protocol/blockchain.  A house is only as strong as its foundation.

Do you think you answered the question?

And why would this matter, Windows was built on top of DOS, and still it's the most widest used OS, and that's only one example.

An astute investor will never touch Dash. The targeted audience is the simple minded individual buying the all curing snake oil.

Windows is not the most widely used OS for FinTech infrastructure.

Are you saying Dash is good enough for consumers, because it is the DOS of crypto?   :D

You based this FinTech infrastructure claim on what? (oh yeah, and please take into account that there are hypervizors under there nowadays).
And the end users of Fintech they use what OS mostly? I guess it would be Windows.
So what's really wrong with it if everybody uses it?

There are a thousand coins and no reason to think that Dash is the way to "make the money". If they're going to look beyond Bitcoin at all (a long shot to begin with) they're going to be very, very selective. I don't see Dash with its baggage making the cut.

There could be several coins that could be selected because of only their current market cap (money talks), which reflects the trust of any coin.
But currently bitcoin has the most trust of course. I hope lot's of coins would be added to example (NYSE) trading posts..

You bolded statement doesn't apply when there is potential manipulation due to a highly concentrated supply, only when that market value is the result of a credible market process. Which is exactly why serious investors who need to cover their ass^* are going to stay the hell away from anything with such enormous red flags: because the market prices can't be trusted.

No doubt a few speculators will buy it, especially in a rising market, and there might be a bit of money to be made, but the big money won't go anywhere near it. The smell of fraud is Kryptonite to institutional investors, just as generalizethis astutely explained to you. Ignore at your peril.

If there were no other alternatives, then maybe, just maybe, the big money would hold their nose and go in. But that's nowhere near the reality. There are many alternatives. Dash won't make it past the first screen.

^* "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." i.e. If, as an asset manager, you buy something without enormous red flags and it loses money, you took a reasonable risk and it didn't pay off. If you ignore the enormous red flags and buy something that loses money, you are incompetent, or in on the fraud, and you get fired or sued.

And this goes for any coin, I don't even know if bitcoin is an exception in this, this is how the virtual currencies are.

If you think Bitcoin is bad then Dash is 100x worse. I shouldn't even need to explain why, but if I do just take a look at this thread.

That's really the point. When someone is surveying the market and looking for reasonable investments, they can find ones with far, far less in the way of red flags than Dash. If anything gets rejected on the basis of reputation and fraud risk, and many will, that will certainly include Dash.

The Dash leadership pretty much knows this which is why they keep changing names. It makes sense to at least try to get away from the past that way, but it won't work.

Markets do choose the coins, they choose the coins where there are the highest market caps and value for trading and margins And why? again money talks.
Basically virtual currency market cap = trust of coin

Yes please buy smoothcoin! It has a premined supply of one billion coins and I just sold one the other day for $1 = market cap $1 billion, right?

The Bytecoin premine disguised as a ninjamine is far worse than the Dash instamine.

People would buy/sell the coin, if it had been proven in crypto-exchanges to be a valid coin and traded for years, so it really would have some "stable" value, which in turn comes into coins market cap.

The value is extremely stable. I sold another coin for $1 a few weeks ago, and a few weeks before that I sold one for 50c, so there is a nice rate of return going. I suggest you get in right away.

And whom are you calling a fraud?

According to you it is all good as long as it makes the money.

So basically what you are saying is that market cap is what counts but only if it meets the standards you have set for credibility and integrity.

What I'm telling you (and generalizethis is telling you, and anyone else who knows how these things work would tell you) is that Dash will likewise not meet the standards set by institutional investors. Just too many red flags in a competitive market where other coins don't have the same baggage.

I'm not focused on end users (ie consumers, ie lusers).  Last I checked, Windows isn't part of OpenStack.   :D 

AFAIK, Fintech's core infrastructure runs on *nix (Debian, Red Hat, BSD, and Solaris variants, with Java.Scala overlays thrown about randomly).

But never mind all that.  The point is Dash is a scam, and Monero is the only real alternative for security and privacy-centric applications.

When you have market cap and it's been traded and listed years, it meets the standards you have set for credibility and integrity, people trade the coin so they trust it. Bigger the trust bigger the market cap.
Sorry to sound like a broken clock, but again money talks in this business.
That's why some new coins get listed on exchanges that previously were bitcoin and litecoin only.

Sorry to break it to you, but openstack is barely a well tested hypervizor for any business, you would have to go with vsphere or hyper-v, hmm Windows=hyper-v, which is gaining market share in alarming rate for vmware, why because it's good and secure.

Almost all of these nowadays run on top of...  wait for it hypervizors.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion.

Like PC is better then MAC
or Android is better then IOS

There are always opinions, there's nothing without them...

Icebreaker doesn't like DASH's 2-layer architecture because it should be done at the protocol level, but loves sidechains and blightning network because they shouldn't be done at the protocol level. You know what they say about people who contradict themselves according to their agenda.  ::)

Also, are you trying to imply Bitcoin protocol/blockchain is not strong enough of a foundation to build on?

I don't like DASH's 2-layer architecture because it is "bad crypto" and "snake oil."  I'd sooner invest in 2-layer toilet paper.

To paraphrase Szaboshi, "A "trusted third party" Masternode is a nice-sounding synonym for a wide-open security hole that a designer chooses to overlook."

OTOH, SC/LN are good crypto so I support them.  IOW, I'm saying we need to build on Bitcoin's Layer 1, not bloat it until it breaks.

Dash is just trash.  It doesn't belong in a discussion about legitimate cypto and coins.  Dash (and the other fraud/scam coins) are Layer F.   :D

So you don't like DASH, you should've just said that instead of contradicting yourself with illogicalities about building or not building on top of strong foundations.

I don't like Dash because of its "bad crypto" tech and "snake oil" marketing.

Dash's glued-on fake privacy kludge is a joke, not mathematically proven "good crypto."

I've asked you repeatedly on numerous threads to explain (in detail) your statement, but all you do is repeat the same name-calling exercise.  Here is yet another chance to prove that you have more substance.  Back up your statements with facts, proof, theories, dam near anything or just shut up.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8WuevWCMAAnWjY.jpg

The burden of proving Dash's crypto isn't snake oil is on you DashHoles, not me.

But here's the best beat-down of Dash's "bad crypto" I've seen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2zufu1/a_great_podcast_by_lets_talk_bitcoin_discussing/cpmvogy

"Definitely not."


https://i.imgur.com/vm9DUcS.png

Such as?

https://i.imgur.com/KEUGMgz.png

I noticed that you didn't include a rebuttal.  For completeness, I have copied it here

https://btc-e.com/
https://www.bitfinex.com/

Ok, thx.   :P

Did Dash rename (again!) to Novacoin because otherwise I don't see it.

https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/btc-e/

One example again, where money talks and nothing else, pure and simple.

why should it be there? I was talking about new coins getting listed.

My mistake. I thought you were suggesting that Dash was able to meet the standards of exchanges such as btc-e (not listed) and bitfinex (delisted). Obviously it is not.

It's absoletely not irrelevant in this discussion, people are talking about fraud, Satoshi did exactly the same, and his coins alone are more than the TOTAL market cap of dash, how is that not relevant!?

Satoshi misled people about the launch time, mined >40% of the current outstanding coins in <2 days, withheld development plans until after the instamine, and then later cut the coin supply after launch? That's very interesting news. Thank you for revealing it, I had no idea.

And I repeat this again, so we are all clear on this.
One example again, where money talks and nothing else, pure and simple. There's no conspiracy behind there.
This is pointless, we will see the results in the future as I mentioned earlier.

And a COLD money fact,
Litecoin trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 51
Dogecoin trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 47
Dash trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 31
Monero trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 6

What the hell are you even talking about? The money is not going into Dash, that's exactly why bitfinex is pulling it.


There is little interest for something with that kind of ugly history and repetitional risk outside of a few existing true believers.

The true believers are for the most part incapable of making this analysis and saving themselves from a total loss because they are blind to how most people actually operate in the real world. They're mostly self-selected to not care about the issues of integrity and repetitional risk that actually matter to long term success. "Golden donkey? Sure, sign me up!"

What is important is to keep this information highly visible so that other people don't get sucked into involvement with something they would regret.

What did you not understand, the money goes both ways! As it was mentioned When it's not profitable enough it get's pulled and vice versa. As it read it didn't have enough volume there.

And a COLD money fact, this also reflects the markets that want a piece of the money cake.
Bitcoin trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 52
Litecoin trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 51
Dogecoin trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 47
Dash trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 31
Monero trading pairs listed in coinmarketcap 6

Let's play a little game. Which four of these do not belong on a thread about Dash?

I'm going to go with Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Monero. Did I win?

The important question is, why is Dash's trading volume not growing sufficiently to meet the expectations of Bitfinex? Answer: because Dash has saturated the market of true believers willing overlook "mistakes"

Actually they do because you said that why that matters, I have proven my point over and over about the money runs the investors, corporations and trading. And that's why those coins also matter.
And where does it say that in bitfinex announcement? answer: and nothing to do with that bitfinex is largest BTC market.

I'm not going to go on with this, this is pointless.
I will leave this thread to DIE. As others should too.
There's no way getting it to you that capitalism is that controls the world.

I bid you farewell!

I'm guessing not. Page 22 out of 881 on all time views and climbing. People apparently do think that the darkcoin/dash instamine matters after all.

Proving that the developer did not enrich himself or a few people at the expense of the widespread distribution needed to gain network effects, is not only ethical but also probably wise.

We'll have to see how it ends up in Darkcoin/Dash's case.

Ultimately I think investors and users of anonymous coins are going to choose the best technology. Someone will need to speak to the market in a clear language because users and investors are not familiar with technobabble.

Usually what happens in a market where there is confusion over contenders, is something changes where suddenly there is something that is head & shoulders better and the market sees it clearly.

I expect that will be the case again soon.

There being an actual use case for the coin might be more important at least in the beginning. But if there is something that has both the use and the technology - well, that's a game changer.

The true believers of the cargo cult have a new article of faith.  They now spread the myth that Dash's Layer 2 of trusted 3rd party masternodes are in some way equal to BTC's trustless sidechain/Ligntening.

I understand the technical crypto-magic of the opcodes which allow BTC's Layer 2 to be trustless are esoteric, but that's no excuse for pretending Dash's 'bamboo runway' version of Layer 2 is comparable.

And the market agrees with your analysis of Dash's exhausted demand:

https://i.imgur.com/QlzG7ij.png

Aren't you the same guy who thinks using larger numbers in the code makes the software larger?

Hanlons' corollary: in cryptocurrency, malice & stupidity are indistinguishable and equally dangerous

Dash community members continue to claim, as far as I can tell, falsely, that the community voted in favor of not relaunching and keeping the instamine. (I've seen no evidence of such a vote. Where is it?)

The reality is a bit more "complicated". See below.

On the matter of cutting the emissions, we have this quote from Evan:


In fact, currently the blocks seem to return about 4, not 15 as previously stated. Clearly a cut was made to favor the instaminers and early insiders (boosting their share of supply).

I guess "no matter what" is similar to "definitely" in Evan-speak.

love your new motto / slogan under your avatar.

Keep up the good work. I had no idea thats how the "airdrop" vote went down.

After reading the airdrop exchange, I realize that Evan's a politician: tell the people what they want to hear, then do what the money tells you.

Well the blocks return about 4, of which 2 of them go on top of the instamine stash

Unbelievable.......

The more evan speaks the more he incriminates himself.

One can imagine this is why he says barely a word in bitcointalk anymore... he cannot even post in a thread such as this.. he is hiding in Dashtalk where he can control the flowing of information

What a scam though... did he really think no one would notice?



YEah, this doesn't sound as if he planned it at all  

I love how "now that everything is stable" = "now that i'm done instamining" in Evan-speak  (DUFFsplanations)

::)


"Something stinks here. Big time."

No. If it did, it would've been a hard fork and miners and users would've had to choose which fork to support. And by the looks of it, not many would've supported the new fork.



Depends on what you mean by shady. Given the agenda you're driving you probably imply a scam, which it isn't and wasn't.

You wouldn't want such a merge plan to leak because scammers would game the markets before the valuation date of the coins that determine the percentage each holder will get the new coin.

A coin that has 10% of the marketcap of the other (can't remember what the exact percentages were back then but around that number I presume) can easily be pumped by 100% or 200% to get unfair gains that don't reflect true market value.

DASH is oversold at the moment. There are many altcoins which have premine but I don't get it why many people are attacking DASH.

Of course DASH is a scam run by scammers. What else would you call an intentional scam instamine then lying about it being a bug? Some more proof of fraud below. My personal favorite is the sham vote, now that's classy. But the hyping of exchange buys while selling OTC is also an instant classic


Daesh Developers setting up sham votes ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=525093.msg13123276#msg13123276 )


Daesh Developers hyping the coin by announcing publicly they're buying on exchanges while actively selling OTC? ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1220204.0 )

XPOST, in case the first one gets moderated Because Reasons other than being completely on-topic for the DASH [ANN].

Perhaps you should've bought some @0055 and sold @017 if you are able to see "patterns". Or do you hate money?

No thanks, I'm very happy with my BTC, XMR, XPM, XCN, VIA, and dCred.

Those are fairly launched and marketed coins, unlike DASH's instamined HYIP scam.

Enjoy your dirty shitcoin pump-and-dump money while you can.  dCred is eating Dash's PoS lunch, if you haven't noticed...

No thanks to 3x profits you could've put into XMR, XPM, XCN, VIA, and dCred?



Yes, here's a good example of your fair marketing: https://forum.bitcoin.com/post3253.html#p3253

I can't believe you are still here trying to defend this scam. You were here at the start defending this when I first broke it wide open on this board. It's a known scam please get back to the bitbay thread and use your energy to do something useful for that community Where is that other one slapper or whatever he was called.  I have no idea what you seek to achieve by bumping these anti dark threads over and over. I need it back up to $10 by the time i had my wallet online it sunk like a stone again. Let's not get all the anti dark threads bumped back on here for heavens sake. It started as a huge scam - captive instamined - then the minting chopped to magnify the instamine... .we've all been through it a million times. Don't get all those threads with the exact details of how it went down popped up here on to the first page again.

If something is a scam, it should be proven so with facts, not by making up agenda driven fud and lies. Correcting fud and lies is not scam defending.

Don't know about the instamine, but how is Dash doing now?  It's been almost a year since OP wrote this.  I bought some Dash not too long ago, and I have to say that the volume on Yobit is absolutely awful.  Is it that way on the other exchanges?

After the Mintpal scam was over, the Dash (then Darkcoin) scam found a new home on Cryptsy's scam exchange.

Like Paycoin (http://coinjournal.net/breaking-cryptsy-owns-hyper-staking-paycoin-prime-controller/) and Shaun Bridges (http://www.coindesk.com/cryptsy-bankruptcy-millions-bitcoin-stolen/), Dash was a close friend of Cryptsy (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/darkcoin-now-supports-instant-transactions/). 

Besides the malingering Dash HYIP, that shady nexus of intrigue and scamming has mostly dissipated in clouds of scandal and drama.

Dash is currently experiencing the relative disadvantage of being traded mostly on a reputable exchange, with competition from non-instamined coins that use good crypto (https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_xmr) and the looming threat of lending rates higher than masternode yields (https://poloniex.com/lending#DASH).

That is almost never, if not actually never, possible to prove until after the scam has collapsed, at best (meaning some scammers get away with scamming, i.e. it is never proven).

Evidence suggestive of a scam is not FUD. When Madoff's ROI numbers were pointed out as suspicious, that was not proof, nor was it even possible to prove it with facts available (because the only one with all the facts was Madoff himself, and he wasn't about to reveal them until forced to do so). What it was is evidence strongly suggestive of a scam.

Likewise, misleading statements from Evan about the launch time and then the early launch, withholding development plans until after the instamine, Otoh getting a large number of coins directly from an instaminer, repeated renames, inconsistent self-contradictory statements from Evan as to the nature of the project (hobby vs. for-profit venture), etc. are all evidence strongly suggestive of a scam, but no, not conclusive proof.

I get that it's being traded on reputable exchanges now and as I pointed out the volume on Yobit sucks, but Dash doesn't look too bad price-wise.  Is it completely a failure?  I mean, compared to any other shitcoin?

I don't even know what the mintpal scam was.  But RIP Cryptsy.

Not at all!  Dash is the Cadillac of shitcoins.

It enjoys a market cap and volume above all other shitcoins except Ripple, and a (suspicious, disconcerting) degree of apparent immunity from the numerous laws and regulation it flagrantly breaks/ignores/disregards.

But its future isn't looking bright.


Even the cultists know the Evolution roadmap-to-unicorns is a giant nonstarter.

It has been proven in detail many times. Should we bring all the dash investigative threads back to the front page here again? so you can spend you days trying to show that black is white?

You have corrected NOTHING.

Revist all the threads I see nothing from you or anyone else to refute the fact it was trick after trick with the pure intention of mining as much for themselves then slashing the minting to magnify their instamine.

Do you want all of the old darkcoin is a scam threads pushed to the front page here again? go ask the darkcoin community and then report back??


You have always tried to say that the instamine and slashing of the minting is not a scam. That's fine is you don't define that as a scam. But most people disagree with that.

If you try to pretend it's a totally fair launch and everyone has a fair chance at coins but it isn't and they don't .... and then you add injury to insult by magnifying those unfair gains then yes that is a scam to most people.

Let it die you are causing more prolonged damage to dash with this. If you sold out and are now anti dash just come out and say it because i can see no logic at all to dragging it all up again.

I mean you are one of the first people in that thread moaning about the launch and the instamine.....on page 2 of the dash thread at the bottom...dont even bother to edit it.

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Re: [ANN][XCO] XCoin | CPU - Fast, Easy Mine, * NO PREMINE * | Official Thread
January 18, 2014, 10:04:31 PM
Reply with quote  #39
Quote from: Xilard on January 18, 2014, 10:03:20 PM
It would be so hard to realse a coin with compiled wallets? Oo
No but it would be hard for dev to instamine with them


so there you are basically saying ....yes it's fucked up he didn't launch with a windows qt so the vast majority there can't mine and he and his pals can get a better jump on the instamine....

then again you are moaning on page 5


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



it's crazy how you are now trying to say all was fair and correct on launch. Everyone knows there was a Huge instamine.

just let it go now I mean I don't personally think from reading some of your other posts that you are stupid at all in fact you're probably way smarter than me. However the blinding obvious thing here is this.

Why is the person that can be seen to be moaning the most about the instamine in the dash thread in real time as it is happening is now that last man defending the very things he was moaning about when it was happening in real time. I mean why the change of heart?? These are the possibilities i see.


1. you managed to mine/buy some eventually so you want to protect your stash and basically go back on everything you are saying as the instamine happened in real time infront of your own eyes. That's called lying

2. You sold it all and want it sink in price to get back in - so you keep trying to stir up dash instamine threads by going back on everything you are saying as the instamine happened in real time in front of your own eyes. That's called lying.

Now then if you say actually no i accept there was a captive instamine and you can't refute the minting getting slashed back either but you see evans saying here comes a totally fair launch where was all have fair chance to mine - that's called lying too.

If telling lies like that isn't still scamming to you ....that's cool. But you need to explain your definition of a scam i think.


Dash would in my opinion run away with the markets and gone way over $50 or even more if he had not launched it as he did. They were out way before the main anon fad hit and should have cleaned up. Sure he made a chunk but really he could have made tons more himself and seen dash become way more adopted that it is now if he launched in a more fair way.

Trying to dismiss the instamine and minting slashing even defending it calling it fud after you're there in real time being the main moaner is not good.


Just leave it man. I watch you and you have good eye for new projects.... move on to the next one and put as much effort into that one.

I didn't think I would have to quote the whole post when replying in order to not lose the context to which I was replying to as I posted immediately after, but here goes:


There I am correcting fud and lies about the proposed merge of ShadowCoin and Darkcoin. Now if you want to refute that then please do so instead of claiming me doing something else which I didn't say.



Please no strawmen. I'm not trying to say that.

There I am correcting fud and lies about the proposed merge of ShadowCoin and Darkcoin. Now if you want to refute that then please do so instead of claiming me doing something else which I didn't say.


fair enough... didn't read that bit.

More trouble for Dash:



First you tried to deny the instamine happened, then you tried to spin it as a good thing.

That didn't work; people still despise Dash for its shady, dishonest, centralized, unfair origin.

Now you want to trivialize the term "instamine" by making it into a joke and wearing out the impact via repetition.

That won't work either.

There are serious, well-armed, highly-motivated people coming who don't play such silly games, but are keenly interested in the original instamine and the compounding interest gained thereof.

Here is my next rebuttal to AlexGR's scamming:

Dash instamine scam confirmed:


This is Dash's narrative.  It's not one Evan's Gate cultists want the public to see, but that's just too bad.

Any new investor researching Dash is going to find overwhelming overwhelming evidence of incompetence and/or malfeasance in the fiasco of a launch, bad crypto in the code, and snake oil marketing in the community.

Warning to all scammers, you will not win a debate against me. Go ahead and make my day by trying:

You might find this (http://blog.ted.com/the-upside-of-losing-an-argument-andor-being-wrong/) more comforting than endlessly quoting yourself.

Just a thought  ;)

Another Dash scam accomplice playing mind games with readers.

It is war and the Dash scam will be erased from the face of the earth by the time I am done. And it won't be only words.

Just wait until I have more on my own personal money to expend on attacking the Dash system and making it very obvious that it is not secure. Operation shit coin cleanout will begin in earnest once I am a multi-millionaire again.

Hey - just trying to help. Wouldn't want to get in the way of your passionate crusade.

b.t.w. you sound strangely familiar  ;)

If that wasn't a lie, then you wouldn't be defending an instamine/perpertual masternode funnel scam. How can you look at yourself in the mirror?

Some of us are here because we are very unhappy about the direction of the burgeoning fascist totalitarianism in the world. You fucks are here only to leech on our idealism and fuck up the chances of our success by obfuscating the truth.

Become a positive force for change, then you will have my love and support. Continue scamming and you will face the wrath of the truth.


BCX attacked coins for profit. I will attack them for honor.


P.S. I did not state that I don't want to earn a profit. But not profit from attacking coins, and not profit from leeching on others.

Pity that the defence of "honour" requires millionaire status these days.

Sign of the times I suppose  ;)

It may not. But in my case at age 51 (June), no retirement, no pension, no savings and health issues, I would first need to take care of those issues before spending my idle time on purely honor tasks. Also it is possible one might need such resources to attack a coin that is PoS based on its masternodes. Maybe not. The technical details will have to be worked out at that future time, and after Evolution is released. I am confident that due to the necessity of retaining the masternode funnel, it will be impossible for Evolution to produce a secure design. If the masternodes were not stake (deposit) based, then I wouldn't be able to say that. Note it may become necessary to short the coin in order to cover the cost of attacking it. Again all these details have to be sorted at the appropriate time. It is possible that one digs in and discovers there is no actual volume that isn't the insiders and/or massive collusion amongst insider masternodes in violation of the protocol, and in that case the entire coin is fake and not worth attacking, as well as being impossible to attack perhaps in that case.

It may also be the case that it is personally more efficient to hire a hacker than to be that hacker. Delegation is what wealthy people do.

Hey snap !!

A '65 baby. I just sneaked into '64 by a couple of weeks. I think it was my mum taking me to see "Hard Day's Night" before I'd dropped that did it.

I wouldn't worry too much about pension and savings though. Everyone's in the same boat, they just don't know it yet. At least you do. I also wish you improved health.

Unofortunately I have an appointment with the mundane now in the form of a trip to Ikea to view some furniture. I'll try that mirror thing you suggested when I get back though  ;)

(P.S. I'm trying to think of ways to make you a millionaire since your attack vector appears to involve making me a millionaire in turn in which case we could both retire and slope off ski-ing to discuss matters 51-year olds if your health improves. I'll get back to you on that one).

You should change your username for AttentionWhore next time, then it would be obvious ;)