Bitcoin Forum

links to the founder of terrahash, good to see all the money that went missing went to good use.

Dark Wallet needs $50k to finish its development and testing

Dark Wallet is an "Easy-To-Install plug-in that sits discreetly on users' chrome and firefox browsers

Another trick to get funded by the name Bitcoin. Tell me, what is wrong with Electrum? You make a wallet, you save your secret key, you dump your btc's on it which you want to preserve and you dump Electrum from your pc.
Electrum make hundreds of btc addresses and as long you use a different address for every transaction, you are anonymous as hell. Want to dump money again on your Electrum? Just install Electrum, give in your secret key and voila, there it is again.

Sorry, but i do not like these kind of fund raising ideas.There are people who deserve a lot more credits for making wallets then 50k $ for making another wallet.

Dark Wallet is an "Easy-To-Install plug-in that sits discreetly on users' chrome and firefox browsers

how is a browser plugin discrete at all? it's as discrete as a browser bookmark to a (porn) site.

usage: The words discrete and discreet are pronounced in the same way and share the same origin but they do not mean the same thing. Discrete means ‘separate,’ as in a finite number of discrete categories, while discreet means ‘careful and circumspect,’ as in you can rely on him to be discreet .

in this case, i don't see how a browser plugin is more "discrete"(separate) than any other app.

Using multiple addresses doesn't make transactions untraceable, just more complicated.  There's a big difference between security and obscurity, and you're describing the latter.

Further, there is a big difference between anonymity and and privacy.  Bitcoin is already anonymous, but it has absolutely no privacy.

This some new  ???  ::)

Can someone explain how their donation address starts with a 3, and not 1? https://blockchain.info/address/32wRDBezxnazSBxMrMqLWqD1ajwEqnDnMc

I think I read somewhere that Bitcoin addresses can only start with 1, and the feature for addresses starting with 3 has not been developed yet.

Why do they need $50k for that? are they hiring a software firm? Are they using the money to compensate themselves for the work they put in?

Their "dark wallet" is a browser plugin, so it's probably connecting to a third party server. Unless the plugin directly connects to the bitcoin network, it's far less secure and anonymous than the satoshi client.

A quick skim of their indiegogo page shows more idealism and buzzwords than any actual planning. This is mirrored by the massive gap between what they want for bitcoin (anonymity, resistance to censorship, anti corporation/goverment), and what they've done (browser plugin wallet).

tl;dr: a group with more ideals than work wants money

Why do they need $50k for that? are they hiring a software firm? Are they using the money to compensate themselves for the work they put in?

Their "dark wallet" is a browser plugin, so it's probably connecting to a third party server. Unless the plugin directly connects to the bitcoin network, it's far less secure and anonymous than the satoshi client.

A quick skim of their indiegogo page shows more idealism and buzzwords than any actual planning. This is mirrored by the massive gap between what they want for bitcoin (anonymity, resistance to censorship, anti corporation/goverment), and what they've done (browser plugin wallet).

tl;dr: a group with more ideals than work wants money

More ideals than work? That's unfair. Amir and his team have borne quite a bit of impressive fruit over the years. Here is a small sampling of it:

libbitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=30646.0;all
sx wallet: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291576.0
coinjoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg3016952#msg3016952

We are interested in scaling up the Bitcoin infrastructure in an intentionally subversive and empowering direction- taking Bitcoin just where it has been threatening to go. Towards an integrity of values, and a neutrality promoted by anonymity and a resistance to censorship. Software can stand for something.
[...]
Bitcoin is the next battle ground in the fight against supranational political domination. Nation states harrass their governed populations with parades of open lies, and dedicate their time to the modern statist paradigm: developing emergency powers and containing the growth of new technologies. Digital anonymity and freedom of financial speech are some of the last tools left in the dwindling garrisons of Liberty.

We are by turns threatened and mocked by neoliberal social engineers and their Boomer bagmen. We face an "architecture of oppression."

If you use your imagination I'm sure you can see that these components not only lead credibility to the project, but paint a clear picture of where it actually begins. Still, the unfortunately reality is that software development takes time -- a lot of time. If the developer(s) in question are not independently wealthy and wish to focus on the work without distraction, that time costs money. $50K seems conservative to us for such an ambitious project.

what you have planned: browser plugin wallet with coin mixing.

https://darkwallet.unsystem.net/whydw.html

50k won't go far if we pay salaries. we have to be smart with the money and invest in common permanent infrastructure. we should find better ways to pay for ongoing costs by creating sustainable businesses.

50k won't go far if we pay salaries. we have to be smart with the money and invest in common permanent infrastructure. we should find better ways to pay for ongoing costs by creating sustainable businesses.

RE: bitcoin-security mailing list:  bottom line is I don't trust you.

I think you have made irresponsible decisions in the past, and I don't trust that you would handle sensitive security issues responsibly.

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=204 - the projects there were incomplete implementations and mostly recent.

Care to share some links to back this up, for us newbies, please?

I think it may stem from this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/10/3233711/second-bitcoin-lawsuit-is-filed-in-california

TL;DR: genjix was involved in Bitcoinica, a former exchange that shut down and lost a bunch of customer's money. Some people think that the circumstances around the money being lost were suspicious.

How will you ensure privacy of blockchain queries?
New versions of ZeroMQ support encryption between endpoints. We can go further too, but this will require more research. What is clear however, is that blockchain servers are the future of usable Bitcoin wallets where the user owns their keys. We have to innovate around the reality.

As long as Bitcoin remains open and decentralized, cypherpunks and entrepreneurs are not working at cross purposes, no matter how suspicious they may be of each other. The real regulatory threats to Bitcoin are the bonkers bananas proposals to centralize Bitcoin like we saw in the recent WIRED article. Luckily, that article misses the point of not just Bitcoin, but of this moment in history. Decentralization is what makes Bitcoin genius, it’s what attracts both the radicals and the entrepreneurs, and it’s not going away.

I'll just add this article to the discussion, for those of you who haven't already read it yet:

Bitcoin is going mainstream. Here is why cypherpunks shouldn’t worry. (http://techliberation.com/2013/10/31/bitcoin-is-going-mainstream-here-is-why-cypherpunks-shouldnt-worry)

It's a very interesting argument.
Both sides consider the other naive - the 'Foundation' side thinks it naive to think Bitcoin can grow without finding a common ground with the authorities, the 'go dark' side think it naive to think the authorities will ever cede any control voluntarily.

To be honest, whichever side I personally fall on, I'm happier knowing that both sides of the argument exist, and I'd like them both to continue to exist.

I don't think Amir will actually do that though, because that might suggest that maybe Gavin and Mike aren't idiots who work for the Illuminati.

We're never going to agree on tactics.  I'm a pragmatist, so if putting star patches on my air guitar gives the people in power warm fuzzies, I'm happy to do it. I'll ask them exactly what type of star they'd like me to use and exactly where they'd like me to apply it, and while they were busy figuring that out I'll be busy working hard to get a few million more air guitar users.

Being a majority protects people from assaults.

However, I do declare, Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, that you seem to be complete assholes.

So they take a giant dump on Bloom filtering - which I proposed and partly designed to solve this very problem - then it turns out that their "Obelisk server" doesn't have any alternative solution. It has a cool name but no solutions to difficult privacy problems. So in fact your privacy is much better protected by using the regular P2P protocol, talking to the regular P2P network and uploading a noisy Bloom filter (or sharded set of noisy filters). Too bad Amir regards that scheme as impure, rushed and a "debasement", otherwise he could just use it in Dark Wallet.

Oh yeah, last thing - he says that his preferred design is "the future" and "the reality", despite that the wallet Amir praises most for its usability (Hive) uses the P2P network with Bloom filtering. That seems to contradict his own point. You can easily build usable wallets, today, that talk directly to the P2P network with no special servers required, and it's more decentralised and gives better privacy to do so.

Before any users get themselves hurt here by this misinformation, be warned that right now Electrum-based wallets are significantly more private than any of the bloom filter using wallets. No bloom-filtering wallet that I'm aware of supports connections through Tor, so when you send a transaction you immediately reveal what coins are in your wallet. Those wallets also all reuse addresses which links all your transactions together, again making it easy to see how many Bitcoins you have and where you've sent money too.

The insults and anger you aim toward Mike and Gavin seems pretty over the top. I read the G+ link you gave, and while it's true that they are less anti-government than you, it looks like they just have a genuine disagreement with you about priorities and tactics.

I'm probably more on your side of the debate about how much priority should be given to making Bitcoin something that can be used to escape government control, but even if Mike and Gavin were the scum that you claim they are, what's the purpose of all the over the top insults?  

We created Tor.framework (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264767) for our wallet with the intention of it being usable for the "apps" in Hive, as well as the network itself. Unfortunately at the moment there is no proxy support in bitcoinj, so it is only available to the former. This is something we're not happy about and we hope to see proxy support in bitcoinj soon. If we had the knowledge and resources we would try to add it ourselves, but alas...

nohup torify hive &

Now, I don't mean to say that the two of you go around crushing kittens or such, but look:

- You two CONSTANTLY harp on Amir's fuckup with Bitcoinica. Amir DID fuck up there, bigtime.

(...because that worked so well in Warsaw, Godwinbergheimgrad, etc.)

A more relevant analogy would be PayPal in the USA, which came under severe governmental assault and eventually survived because they managed to build up (via eBay) a large enough userbase that they became difficult to mess with, politically.

I would be more impressed by Mike's position if he found a way to go back to the USA, then set up an ran an unlicensed, anonymous exchange for a decent length of time. He knows perfectly well that isn't possible though.

Actually I think it's the first time I've ever mentioned it, and only because it came up in this thread - Amir was asking Gavin why he wasn't allowed on the security list and his prior treatment of sensitive data was quoted as a reason. Our community grew a lot since then, so some people aren't familiar with that incident.

Can you please point to examples of me or Gavin "constantly harping on" about it? I don't even like to bring it up, it's ancient history when measured in Bitcoin-time, but it's also a relevant answer to the question posed.


A more relevant analogy would be PayPal in the USA, which came under severe governmental assault and eventually survived because they managed to build up (via eBay) a large enough userbase that they became difficult to mess with, politically. Too many ordinary citizens were enjoying auctions on eBay and would have made a huge stink if something had happened to them.

I suggest reading this page, it's very interesting:

http://www.screw-paypal.com/history.html

PayPal actually started out as being very much in line with Bitcoin's vision. But they weren't able to sustain it in the centralised model and were nearly wiped out. Hopefully Bitcoin will do better, but the reason there's such a focus on regulatory issues in the USA is because the USA is an incredibly hostile environment in which to do business. Ultimately the only way to avoid shut down and jail there is a combination of finding ways to work within the rules and building up a large enough userbase, quickly enough, to give political cover.

I would be more impressed by Mike's position if he found a way to go back to the USA, then set up an ran an unlicensed, anonymous exchange for a decent length of time. He knows perfectly well that isn't possible though.

NSoogleA

Lol I know, but could not find something else!

But the idea behind and the question is real good...

America is out of controle!

some people worship profit: https://darkwallet.unsystem.net/bitcoinica.html
bitcoin attracts the worst types of lying sociopaths.

wow, thanks for writing this

Exactly right, in my humble opinion.

I suspect you're going to have a hard time figuring out how to arrange yourselves without becoming a Corporation of some State and still have a business model that sustains sufficient quality assurance and customer support to make Dark Wallet a success.

PS: I'm really happy to see other implementations happening!  Diversity is great!

PPS: y'all should give the Foundation at least a LITTLE bit of credit for funding CoinPunk...

We are providing an alternative. With 1% of the BF resources, we will do 10x more development and continue serving the community. Free market ftw.

RE: bitcoin-security mailing list:  bottom line is I don't trust you. I think you have made irresponsible decisions in the past, and I don't trust that you would handle sensitive security issues responsibly.  Happily there have been approximately zero cross-implementation security issues in the last six months, so it is more of a theoretical issue that you're not on the list....

BIP 70 should be about trustless mixing instead of using certificates and trying to move away from Bitcoin.

RE: bitcoin-security mailing list:  bottom line is I don't trust you. I think you have made irresponsible decisions in the past, and I don't trust that you would handle sensitive security issues responsibly.  Happily there have been approximately zero cross-implementation security issues in the last six months, so it is more of a theoretical issue that you're not on the list....

Can someone explain to me what the fear is here? That he would disclose some information to the public?

Read his description of what happened with Bitcoinica that he linked to earlier in this thread. It doesn't seem like he realizes what a huge mistake he made with the security breach, and he doesn't seem to really own up to it. It's more like "oops, oh well.. moving on...". People who take security seriously tend to have a certain mindset (listen to some interviews with the guy who created Armory), and from what I've seen that mindset is lacking in Amir.

Btw, it looks like this is the thread where Amir notified everyone of the breach (or a similar one, hard to tell because I think Bitcoinica was hacked 3 times): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93074

Yes! You guys are extremely efficient ..

But the idea behind and the question is real good...

America is out of controle!

So they take a giant dump on Bloom filtering - which I proposed and partly designed to solve this very problem - then it turns out that their "Obelisk server" doesn't have any alternative solution. It has a cool name but no solutions to difficult privacy problems. So in fact your privacy is much better protected by using the regular P2P protocol, talking to the regular P2P network and uploading a noisy Bloom filter (or sharded set of noisy filters). Too bad Amir regards that scheme as impure, rushed and a "debasement", otherwise he could just use it in Dark Wallet.

- You tolerate a dangerous, rather-much-extremely-more-extremely-more-mentally-ill-than-Amir-or-me beast like luke-jr

did I hear on lets talk bitcoin that there is going to be some launching event in Milan for Dark Wallet?

Planning event.

Ref: Let There Be Dark! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=322328.0;all)

Greetings from Bitcoin Singapore!

Hive will be attending unSYSTEM's DarkWallet meeting (https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/DarkWallet/Meeting_Nov2013) in Milan on the week of the 24th. We propose that the outcome of this meeting be, at minimum, the establishment of a v1 "Dark Wallet Certification", a set of best-practice guidelines for wallets focused on decentralization and anonymity.

This topic is has been opened in order to get the community thinking about what exactly a "Dark Wallet" should be: We assume the use of Tor, CoinJoin, CoinSwap and other such developments. We assume the lack of centralized services wherever possible. We presume that we can evolve ideas about authentication (see the work of John Light, Joe Casico etc)... Still, our ignorance is vast and we would like to come armed at this meeting, with your feedback.

What ideas or thoughts do you all have?

If anyone wants to come participate in development, you're more than welcome.

https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/DarkWallet/Meeting_Nov2013

This is the event for starting everything. We have more public talks in the first week of December, and spaces if people need a place to sleep (although it will be quite busy). If you have a proposal for a talk or need a bed then send me a PM. Feel free to visit if you're around.

Our mailing list:

https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unsystem

Posted to the foundation forum,
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/483-bitcoin-dark-wallet/page__st__20#entry5410
 
Dunno if you have a membership or not.
 
 

He's right, but the way he's right is not at all the way you probably think he's right: Bitcoin mining can and almost certainly will be regulated, and by regulating mining you regulate all use of the Bitcoin protocol.
 
The first problem is ASICs, specifically the huge gulf in performance per unit cost between commodity hardware, or even hardware possible to create on a small scale with FPGAs, and ASICs. The nature of IC manufacturing is such that a very small number of companies, about two to three, can afford the immense capital costs required to operate top-of-the-line chip fabrication facilities. Put another way, the entire world's economy is unable to support a diverse IC manufacturing industry at the current level of technological sophistication.
 
Control those chip fabs and you control mining. It would be extremely easy for the US government to tell Intel and TSMC that from now on any wafers they process capable of doing Bitcoin mining must include additional circuits that let the US government control how, and by whom, they are used. This is a problem in general with computing, but controlling the manufacture of a special-purpose ASIC is far easier and simpler, both technologically and politically, than controlling the availability of general purpose computing hardware. Fortunately it is possible to create proof-of-work algorithms where custom ASICs have less of an advantage over general purpose hardware, but Bitcoin itself isn't going to change the algorithm.
 
The second problem is bandwidth: the Bitcoin protocol has atrocious scalability in that to mine blocks you must keep up with the bandwidth used by all transactions. The current 1MB blocksize is small enough to make this not a major problem yet, but if you increase that (with a hardfork!) at some point you will have increased it to the level where you can no longer mine anonymously and then regulating miners directly becomes possible. Unfortunately while technological improvements have made non-anonymous bandwidth more plentiful, for anonymous bandwidth - or even just censorship resistant bandwidth - the options are much more limited. Jurisdiction hopping is an option, but even for the likes of The Pirate Bay it's proved to be a huge pain in the ass, and they only had the relatively small media industry as their enemy rather than the much larger banking industry. (and government in general) It does appear that you could make a crypto-currency with better core scalability - as opposed to the well understood and already-used ways to fairly securely transfer funds off-chain - but no-one's quite yet figured out yet how to upgrade Bitcoin itself with those improvements.
 
What's interesting is with good cryptography we've figured out ways to at least detect if miners are violating every other aspect of the Bitcoin protocol: some relatively small and backwards compatible changes to the protocol allow auditing everything miners do with peicewise audits done on low-bandwidth connections. If your wallet randomly audits 0.1% of every block, and there are a few thousand like you, the chance of fraud not being detected quickly approaches zero.
 
But auditing can only detect if miners fail to follow the rules of the Bitcoin protocol; it can't force miners to decide to include your blacklisted transactions in a block. If a majority of hashing power is under government control, there's no way we can prevent them from blacklisting whatever they want. Secondly, if the government does decide to change the rules of the Bitcoin protocol by fiat, then what? Suppose the Federal Reserve or equivalent decides that the deflation of Bitcoin is bad for the economy, and the coin distribution schedule needs to be changed. Or perhaps the courts decide that some stolen Bitcoins, that were subsequently lost, are to be returned to their former owners in an invalid transaction. They can order the majority of hashing power to follow new rules, and while you're wallet software may detect that fraud and shutdown, what alternative do you have but to "upgrade" it to accept the new rules? If you're transactions aren't protected by the majority of hashing power, you're transaction aren't secure.
 
Where Dark Wallet goes wrong
 
This is what bothers me about their efforts: I see no reason to think they understand any of the above. They're approach of making a ground-up re-implementation of Bitcoin is fundementally flawed, both from an engineering point of view, as well as a political point of view. What they should be doing is latching on to the notion that the core Bitcoin protocol is a fixed suicide pact that must only be changed with the true consent of all users. As step #1 they should have taken the Satoshi source code, stripped out everything that isn't directly related to that core consensus protocol, and turned it into an easy to use library. Only then should they have built a wallet/node implementation around that core, unchanging, protocol.
 
Where Amir Taaki and the rest of the Dark Wallet team go so very wrong is they don't understand that the Bitcoin specification is the consensus-critical part of the Satoshi source code. Instead they are pursuing a ground-up re-implementation, and like it or not, they're just not smart enough to get all the details right - nobody is. Because they haven't gotten the details right, no significant amount of hashing power is going to ever use their node implementation to mine with - what pool wants to lose thousands of dollars of profit just because yet another libbitcoin consensus bug was found? Of course, with no-one using their code to mine, they have no political power - Gavin and the Bitcoin Foundation's ability to control the core Bitcoin protocol is entirely based on the fact that almost all the hashing power uses the source code at https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
 
On the other hand, if even just a quarter of the hashing power used the Dark Wallet node implementation, and could trust it because the !@#$ thing actually implemented the Satoshi protocol properly by using that protocol's source code, changing that protocol in fundemental ways would be far harder - Dark Wallet would have a lot more genuine political weight. With hashing power using that implementation, they would be able to implement their own rules for relaying transactions. For instance while much of the community complained violently about the 0.8.2 dust rule, which made it far harder to get "dust" outputs mined, if the Dark Wallet team decided they didn't like that rule and had hashing power that trusted their node implementation, they could make the rule irrelevant. They could even come up with a anything-goes mechanism with no rules at all governing what transactions got relayed, and let individual miners make those decisions.
 
If I were the US Government and had co-opted the "core" Bitcoin dev team, you know what I'd do? I'd encourage ground-up alternate implementations knowing damn well that the kind of people dumb enough to work on them expecting to create a viable competitor anytime soon aren't going to succeed. Every time anyone tried mining with one, I'd use my knowledge of all the ways they are incompatible to fork them, making it clear they can't be trusted for mining. Then I'd go a step further and "for the good of Bitcoin" create a process by which regular soft-forks and hard-forks happened so that Bitcoin can be "improved" in various ways, maybe every six months. Of course, I'd involve those alternate implementations in some IETF-like standards process for show, but all I would have to do to keep them marginalized and the majority of hashing power using the approved official implementation is slip the odd consensus bug into their code; remember how it was recently leaked that the NSA spends $250 million a year on efforts to insert flaws into encryption standards and commercial products. With changes every six months the alts will never keep up. Having accomplished political control, the next step is pushing the development of the Bitcoin core protocol in ways that further my goals, such as scalability solutions that at best allow for auditing, rather waiting until protocols are developed, tested, and accepted by the community that support fully decentralized mining.
 
Dark Wallet has the opportunity to make the very idea of the "core" Bitcoin dev team irrelevant. But sadly Amir's lot seem to understand the art of PR a lot better than the political science of decentralized consensus systems.

satoshi is not a god.

Source?

Source?

It's a very interesting argument.
Both sides consider the other naive - the 'Foundation' side thinks it naive to think Bitcoin can grow without finding a common ground with the authorities, the 'go dark' side think it naive to think the authorities will ever cede any control voluntarily.

To be honest, whichever side I personally fall on, I'm happier knowing that both sides of the argument exist, and I'd like them both to continue to exist.

This.

Despite the naysayers, Dark Wallet is being built before our very eyes.

I'm hoping however zerocoin will be eventually implemented into bitcoin.

Will this implement coinjoin by default for transactions or enable one to participate continuously in the background when running?

lets wait for Zerocoin. thats a better solution:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=362468.msg3878992#msg3878992

Doing Coinjoin transactions in the background sounds like a bad idea to me.

First, it would require a network-connected machine to have access to your private wallet keys.

Second, even if randomized, the "spam" transactions may be distinguishable from real transactions.

The way coinjoin integration should work is: if you don't need to send immediately, the client should look for other coinjoin participants.

well, I have been using the sx tools to manually build transactions: without having the coins actually stored on my machine until I move them.

The project seems to be a effort to tie together a bunch of separate tools that together can replace Bitcoind that tries to do everything.

Do you mean the private keys are on your machine only at the time of a transaction?

Yes. I have been using Addresses generated off-line with Vanitygen. I only copy the private key immediately before sending the funds.

I installed multibit for "normal" transactions, but have not been able to actually spend any funds with it yet.

I think technically, all the coins are actually stored in the Block-chain :)

PS: I am not necessarily advocating other people adopt my practice. Manual transactions are error-prone and may involve unusually large mining fees if you are not careful.

I hope to upgrade to N-of-M +P2SH transactions for savings, but that is likely off-topic.

It seems a pretty safe method, except the needing to be careful part.
Sort of a manual form of trezor.

where can i buy Zerocoin? Can´t find them on Coinmarketcap or other sites, which offer an overview of
existing crypto currencies. Or is Zerocoin still to launch?

Is there a site/blog (other than darkwallet.unsystem.net) where we can monitor the progress?

it is still very organic. Based on humans. The market will decide how far this experimentation is going as a whole.

It is amazing that, no matter how complex and math based this bitcoin Core ecosystem is, it is still very organic. Based on humans. The market will decide how far this experimentation is going as a whole. It is purely a reaction - counter reaction situation. We may not see the day of the end of this experimentation but I am grateful to be alive to see this.

The last IRS news makes me think how visionary Satoshi was.

Believe a bitcoin's coming, ups and downs, have greatly small disturbance, but can not be denied is the currency has the characteristics and Enlightenment of it, the future value of more people to be long-term focus. I hope we will be able to see all this

Whats wrong with the normal bitcoin wallet ?

Dont think dark wallet will be a good name, makes it sound bad, why not use White wallet?

Let me guess.  You're white.
-B-

Dont think dark wallet will be a good name, makes it sound bad, why not use White wallet?

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bitcoin-dark-wallet

Something doesn't add up. Even though they hoped to raise $50K USD, they did reach that goal, and then some by amassing $52,075 USD. But, once you subtract the PERKS that have to be doled out, depending on what funding level one contributed at, a big chuck of that $52K+ USD was no longer available to Team Dark Wallet.

Also, their donation address - https://blockchain.info/address/32wRDBezxnazSBxMrMqLWqD1ajwEqnDnMc - currently has 7.08661531 unspent BTC, equating to $3,175.51 at today's exchange rate.

This post is not meant as a diss, for I have no qualms with any of those involved in this noble project, but presented such for full disclosure purposes only.

God speed, all.

~Bruno Kucinskas

If there is any doubts about how they are spending the money you should ask the questions to them so the world can see. I am not involved with the project. I thought it was a cool concept. Now if I can't trust the people building that wallet why would I want to use it or anyone else for that matter?
Anyway competition is good so may the best "dark wallet" project win (as I am simply guessing this project is not the only one)

To be clear, I wasn't questioning them as to where/how the money was/is to be spent. I was just pointing out that $50K USD was needed to further the project, further stating that that wasn't really enough, but due to the PERKS that need to be doled out, a major chuck of the $50K USD will be/is spent. Also, for being cash-strapped, why are donations just sitting? At least move/split them up to make it seem like they were used, albeit transparency is welcome.

Again, have no qualms with Black Wallet.

~Bruno Kucinskas

Don't forget NOT to put all your bitcoins in any alpha projects people  ;D

You guys make us happy.

Question: will the May 1st alpha release include a download for Firefox as well? I only see the code for the Chromium extension on GitHub.

i really don't understand what is it... ??? ??? ??? ???

Will be dark wallet free? or even opensource?

Why would you support Chrome first, when it's obviously less respecting of your freedoms than Firefox?

Nobody in their right mind would use bitcoin software with wording like:

http://vimeo.com/93034788

You are supposed to use testnet coins and help test the software at this stage.

[2014-07-23 23:54:44+0200] < zodman> d3:  the testnet of darkwallet is  offline you can turnon ?
[2014-07-25 18:08:16+0200] < keep_on_mining> i have a question , : is testnet server up?
[2014-07-25 18:09:29+0200] < keep_on_mining> Connecting to unsystem testnet @ ws://85.25.198.97:8888
[2014-07-27 10:40:48+0200] < chevdor> hello, I am  testing DarkWallet but it fails connecting to unsystem testnet.
[2014-07-31 09:15:44+0200] < dansmith_btc> hey, can someone confirm that darkwallet's testnet server is not down?

Thing is, testnet server seems to be more down than up.

freenode/#darkwallet:

Here some other ones to try...

https://wiki.unsystem.net/en/index.php/Obelisk/Servers

Is there anyone out there who could give an overview of the architecture of Dark Wallet?  This thread seems to give the impression that it is a collection of different software and technologies.  How do these work together, exactly?  What does the browser plug-in do?  What does Obelisk do?  What other components are necessary?  How do these pieces interact with the Bitcoin network?  Thanks...

These 3 pages should answer your questions:
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6234/what-libbitcoin-and-sx-are-and-why-they-matter/

https://wiki.unsystem.net/en/index.php/Main_Page

https://www.darkwallet.is/

Thanks for trying, but I see nothing on any of those pages that answers my question.  The first one doesn't seem to have anything to do with Dark Wallet.

How do these work together, exactly?   How do these pieces interact with the Bitcoin network?

What does the browser plug-in do?  

What does Obelisk do?  

What other components are necessary?

How in hell Dark wallet can be more secure than using monero?

How in hell Dark wallet can be more secure than using monero?

Exactly right, in my humble opinion.

I suspect you're going to have a hard time figuring out how to arrange yourselves without becoming a Corporation of some State and still have a business model that sustains sufficient quality assurance and customer support to make Dark Wallet a success.

PS: I'm really happy to see other implementations happening!  Diversity is great!

PPS: y'all should give the Foundation at least a LITTLE bit of credit for funding CoinPunk...

you could also just use a traditional laundering site such as bitmixer.io, bitlaunder.com (my site), or bitcoin fog .. why bother with anything else?

In the meantime it is probably safer to simply exchange ones coins back and forth between different alts on a trusted exchange to mix them if needed.

funny that people keep mentioning this.
You don't have to exchange your coins to alts to use the mixing "feature" of exchanges.
All you have to do is to deposit .... and then withdraw. This is all.
This is also why you don't need any of those specialised mixing services; besides, those have smaller
volume and, on average, are more likely  to be scams.
(Of course the latter remark does not apply to Darkwallet or any multisig mixers; only to "collective wallet" mixers
that rely on trust.)

funny that people keep mentioning this.
You don't have to exchange your coins to alts to use the mixing "feature" of exchanges.
All you have to do is to deposit .... and then withdraw. This is all.
This is also why you don't need any of those specialised mixing services; besides, those have smaller
volume and, on average, are more likely  to be scams.
(Of course the latter remark does not apply to Darkwallet or any multisig mixers; only to "collective wallet" mixers
that rely on trust.)

i feel like seeing 3 new developments:

1.) anon/privacy-centric coins getting stronger
2.) anti-privacy-movement in bitcoin is getting stronger        
3.) sidechains are proposed -> question/big likelihood: of an anon/privacy-sidechain

Which leads me to the question:
where do you guys see darkwallet in future?                            


Bonus question:
Do you guys see Darkwallet in future as sidechain or mainchain technology/sub-subsystem?

Thank you man. I know what DW is, I just wanted to where it goes/where you see it in the future.

Is the Bitcoin Dark Wallet more anonymous than Monero? Why would you use this and not Monero?

Monero doesn't have the hashing security of Bitcoin, doesn't have the same degree of auditing and development as bitcoin, doesn't have the transaction volume bitcoin to hide the transactions, and since it is focused on privacy it is exposed to higher degree of suspect vs bitcoin which has a wide range of different types of transactions.

As far as privacy is concerned they are both similar- Darkwallet uses Stealth payments + CoinJoin mixing and will soon implement an optional coin shuffle mechanism as well. With Coinshuffle, darkwallet should be as secure or more so than Monero.

Monero doesn't have the hashing security of Bitcoin, doesn't have the same degree of auditing and development as bitcoin, doesn't have the transaction volume bitcoin to hide the transactions, and since it is focused on privacy it is exposed to higher degree of suspect vs bitcoin which has a wide range of different types of transactions.

As far as privacy is concerned they are both similar- Darkwallet uses Stealth payments + CoinJoin mixing and will soon implement an optional coin shuffle mechanism as well. With Coinshuffle, darkwallet should be as secure or more so than Monero.

What is stopping an adversary (NSA, FBI) to start advertising itself in a Lobby as a mixing node and recording the CoinJoin requests?

The big issue I see with Bitcoin Dark Wallet is the 1 MB blocksize limit in Bitcoin.

Which will be 20MB before it reaches Beta.

https://darkcointalk.org/threads/security-advisory-for-coinshuffle-and-darkwallet.3736/

What is this bitcoin dark wallet??

Cool concept. I'll be sure to donate some.

how many people are actually using DarkWallet now??

They're all in this picture:
http://ayay.co.uk/backgrounds/sports/american_football/Empty-Giants-Stadium-New-Jersey.jpg

Lol. I still don't get the idea of using Dark Wallet when you have Monero. Even mixing coins should be enough??