Security Analyst: "Actually boss they aren't decentralised at all."
Serious Investor: "What do you mean?"
Security Analyst: "Well in theory the security of the network is provided by many thousands of individuals and their mining machines, but in practice only 2 people and 2 machines need to be compromised to own, dictate the policy of, or destroy the coin."
Serious Investor: "But aren't there many thousands of miners?"
Security Analyst: "There are, but 1000000 miners all directing their efforts through 2 pools is from a security POV exactly the same as there being just 2 miners. Control those 2 pools, or the people that run them, and you effectively own the whole currency."
Serious Investor: "Well, I'll be taking my $millions elsewhere then, thanks." OK - you've been hammering on this issue for some time now. I would argue with your title by stating that if one address: XnuCAYmAiVHE6Xv3D7Xw685wWzqtcfexLh has 350,964 Darkcoins or $852,842.52 per today's Cryptsy DRK/USD price at $2.43 or another XwXtGyj1NZnmHfWFDYjGsyY4qzkJXBLCjV has 153,555 Darkcoins or $373,138.65 per today's Cryptsy DRK/USD price at $2.43 so these are pretty big investments for a project in its initial phases, by I am not going to. What your Security Analysts says is true but slightly misleading: -- there are more than 2 pools controlling majority of MN; -- there are many countries hosting the MNs i.e. a crude, outright criminal, physical attack on the said services / or the people running would have to deal with different jurisdictions (Jacuzzi will have to cooperate with Mafia etc.) assuming an attack is ever going to happen. But, I am wondering, if Darkcoin isn't even like Mega i.e. it is not a tool enabling something the authorities deem illegal, but, as cash (or beans or clay toys or dollars or pre-paid mobile-phone minutes as a currency in Africa) can be used, mostly, for legal activities. So, if the danger of this tiny little innovation is so huge for a multi-trillion dollar Financial Crime Cartel industry and their political minions that they would be ready to strangle the toddler in its crib, so be it... but how real this is? BUT - I agree, your concerns are valid so the question is: how to lessen the concentration of the MN in too few hands? I was talking about mining, not Masternodes, but I'll try to answer your points: OK - you've been hammering on this issue for some time now. I would argue with your title by stating that if one address:
XnuCAYmAiVHE6Xv3D7Xw685wWzqtcfexLh has 350,964 Darkcoins or $852,842.52 per today's Cryptsy DRK/USD price at $2.43 or another
XwXtGyj1NZnmHfWFDYjGsyY4qzkJXBLCjV has 153,555 Darkcoins or $373,138.65 per today's Cryptsy DRK/USD price at $2.43 so these are pretty big investments for a project in its initial phases, by I am not going to.
Yes, a few people have large amounts of DRK, but those amounts were mostly amassed when the price of DRK was much lower than it is now. Even if that were not the case, would it not be better to attract far more Serious Investors by having a far less risky system? What your Security Analysts says is true but slightly misleading:
-- there are more than 2 pools controlling majority of MN;
-- there are many countries hosting the MNs i.e. a crude, outright criminal, physical attack on the said services / or the people running would have to deal with different jurisdictions (Jacuzzi will have to cooperate with Mafia etc.) assuming an attack is ever going to happen.
Pools do not control Masternodes at all. The MNs running on so few VPS providers is also a concern, but subsetting of MNs per transaction makes MNs inherently orders of magnitude more secure. You need to control far more of them to have even a small chance of any successful attack. But, I am wondering, if Darkcoin isn't even like Mega i.e. it is not a tool enabling something the authorities deem illegal, but, as cash (or beans or clay toys or dollars or pre-paid mobile-phone minutes as a currency in Africa) can be used, mostly, for legal activities. So, if the danger of this tiny little innovation is so huge for a multi-trillion dollar Financial Crime Cartel industry and their political minions that they would be ready to strangle the toddler in its crib, so be it... but how real this is?
Are you seriously asking if the criminal sociopaths that rule the world would ever do something bad? BUT - I agree, your concerns are valid so the question is: how to lessen the concentration of the MN in too few hands?
Go buy some DRK and run a Masternode, or get together with some friends, pool your DRK, run a Masternode. Preferably not on Amazon. Pays better than mining.  |
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This is a pessimistic assessment and assumes that the miners will not react in the coin's best interest when a genuine threat to the balance of power emerges. Prior incidents of over-concentrated hashing power with Bitcoin and more recently with Darkcoin (w/r/t suchpool) show that hashing power will move away from threats that could jeopardize the coin's value, and so the miners' interests in the coin security is obtained via coin value.
I know there is a push to make DRK p2pool only but there are less heavy handed methods we can try. For example, masternode operators could elect to donate a percentage of their earnings to p2pools so that p2pool payouts are more attractive than mining pools.
Why should MN ops subsidize miners who are too apathetic to do the right thing themselves? Most miners are in it for the money and don't care about the security or best interests of whatever they are mining, they just dump for BTC/fiat as soon as they can. And p2pool is already easier to use and less risky for miners than centralised pools are. Hoping for the best is not a plan. p2ool has issues too, although greater p2pool use would be good, but there are ways of making solo mining (which is the best way of securing the blockchain) far more attractive to miners and making pooled mining much costlier. - It just requires enough DRK supporters to acknowledge the problem and desire such a solution to be implemented. Then we would actually have a decentralised currency. At the moment it isn't. |
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As I have a little experience in venture capital, let me provide some perspective. If Evan was for some reason going to seek venture capital, he would speak to someone (or a group of people) who would be asking a lot of hard questions. Many of those questions would be about risk and limitations. If Evan didn't have good answers for what the risks and limitations of DRK were, there's no way in hell he would ever see a dime.
Smart investors know that there is risk in any investment. They want to know that those in charge are aware of them and have sound plans to mitigate those risks. As DRK begins to gain broader exposure and interest, I suggest this community answer the difficult questions with maturity. Saying something along the lines of, "That's a good question and beyond my technical knowledge, but we'll make sure [member of the dev team] sees it and answers it for you" is perfectly acceptable.
With all that said, it may be time that DRK begins to present itself in a more marketable way. No, I'm not saying name change, but present its strengths and weaknesses in a manner that will garner greater interest among those with deep pockets.
Risk Management 101 - Why Serious Investors won't touch DRK:Serious Investor: "I've heard about these decentralised currencies, like Darkcoin, where no one person or group controls the currency, what do you think, pet Security Analyst?" Security Analyst: /goes away for two minutes and finds this graph - https://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/#!extractionSecurity Analyst: "Actually boss they aren't decentralised at all." Serious Investor: "What do you mean?" Security Analyst: "Well in theory the security of the network is provided by many thousands of individuals and their mining machines, but in practice only 2 people and 2 machines need to be compromised to own, dictate the policy of, or destroy the coin." Serious Investor: "But aren't there many thousands of miners?" Security Analyst: "There are, but 1000000 miners all directing their efforts through 2 pools is from a security POV exactly the same as there being just 2 miners. Control those 2 pools, or the people that run them, and you effectively own the whole currency." Serious Investor: "Well, I'll be taking my $millions elsewhere then, thanks." |
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How many MM are used during mixing?
Each round of mixing happens via one Masternode chosen at random from the total number, with (currently, IIRC) two other participant mixers. You may repeat this process between 2 and 8 times via the setting in the wallet, or as often as you like by taking coins already mixed through 8 rounds and repeating the process. |
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If I was strategy commander for Darkcoin (which I'm not by the way  ), I'd create some kind of contingency whereupon the mining majority could somehow protect the masternode majority in some kind of symbiotic dependency. i.e. to subvert the masternode population you'd have to subvert the mining population as well. I imagine that to do this, the mining population would somehow have to have an awareness of what code the masternodes "should be running" and shutdown bad actors (or just ignore them). I don't know - maybe this is the way it already works, but I've always wondered how secure the masternode network is given that there's so few of them compared to he mining population. Forget the cost of subversion - a few $million is peanuts. If cost is the only barrier to disruption then there's no barrier. There has to be some kind of decentralised protection I think. You have that utterly arse backwards. 90% of mining goes through 5 pools. And you would need at most 3 of them to control or destroy the coin. Mining provides exactly fuck all security. |
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1) Would it be necessary for all MN's in the mixing rounds to be bad actors? Maybe just the "entry" and "exit" MN? Plus one in the middle?
2) Three-letter organizations don't necessarily have to pay for DRK (hacks, seizures etc)
MOST IMPORTANTLY
3) Even if there was only a 1% chance of your anon transaction getting de-anonymized by bad actors would you really take that chance? And if it were a 3% chance?
You take my point I'm sure.
#1. There's no way of knowing which MNs are the 1st and last points, you'd need all or them. #2. Forget about defeating the NSA/CIA/MOSSAD/etc. You're not equipped. Not even remotely. You have no fucking clue at all what you are up against. 3 letter agencies aren't going to cock about buying MNs or devising supercomputers to crack encryption. They are going to bundle you into a van and cut your genitals off. Or kidnap your children and cut them up in front of you. #3. You are 100x more likely to give yourself away via other channels than by having your DRK transactions traced. Arguing about MN security when you could completely control the blockchain for a trivial cost thanks to centralised pools is obtuse. |
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Devs, you need an exchange in India where you can but direct in rupees, or buy with phone credit or whatever.
Forget cryptognat crooked bullshit like bittrex/cryptsy etc., they're worthless to you, concentrate on your target market.
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DarkCoin Open Bazaar integration is far away. OpenBazaar Project has alot of work todo.
Open Bazaar is a marketplace, not a payment processor. You can buy and sell in whatever currency you want. |
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Getting 51KH/s with a 270 and cgminer 3.7.8 -I 13 -w 32 -g 2.
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As far as I can tell, InstantX is working perfectly on testnet.  |
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ip obfuscation is already implemented in drk.
Not yet it isn't. really? i thought the masternode packed routing mechanism was already implemented.. evan already announced how it will be implemented, maybe after instantx You know the US gov is watching this and I want my MN's IP hidden, this should have been implemented from the start IMHO. Hell, they even probably own master nodes, and have a deal with GIT to allow secret insertions into codebases...... Tin foil hat at the ready. Terrible that there's no way to check what new code is added to the repositories.  The day the NSA start submitting code to the git repo is the day we've won. |
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I just operate on the assumption that they are all crooks and liars.  |
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On a totally unrelated and slightly stalkerish note, Eduffield have you lost weight? From earlier pictures that I saw of you it looked like you had a bit more ... consistency? Now the latest youtube video you look really slim. Maybe you're overworked lol?
Back to InstantX
What latest youtube video? |
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This has been looking much nicer these last couple of days:  Are you kidding? Looks like a timebomb to me. Would you be happy if 4 people controlled 86% of all Masternodes, or 86% of all the DRK in existence? And all those Masternodes and all that DRK were all on just 4 physical machines? |
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nah I'm just saying BCX has massive crypto ecred
Given that 95% of cryptognats are dunderheads, this doesn't mean much. |
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Bots are known parasites of any exchnage. We all know how much harm bots have done to markets.
Yet where is the demand for bot-free exchanges? Some guy was advertising his new bot friendly exchange here earlier today - what the christ do we need yet another one of those for? I'm not a big trader but I'd prefer to trade on an exchange where I wasn't getting constantly shafted by witch-programmed malware. |
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Masternodes, because a small subset of the total get chosen each time, are orders of magnitude more decentralised, and secure, than mining or staking.
Proof of Service: they actually do something useful, and make things like InstanTX possible.
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Really baffles me that so few people seem to care about this. It basically destroys the whole value proposition of a cryptocurrency. I hope Evan care spare it some thought. |
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Blackwavelabs (full disclosure I'm one of the lead developers) has released a new exchange that offers continuous proof of reserves, full API and real-time UI. We have two Darkcoin markets: https://exco.in During our beta we were asked how we would add new coins and we responded in an announcement when beta ended. We added Darkcoin to our exchange because we feel it qualifies as one of the innovative cryptocurrencies: https://blackwavelabs.com Ditch the trading parts of the API and you might tempt some refugees from your botriddled competition. |
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