Typical asshole.  Yeah, I'm an idiot. What happened to the internet genius? It has been regulated. Hence, protecting people from being harmed (for the most part, and not counting stupidity) So, that is what I am saying and you yourself have proven... bitcoin as it stands cannot and will not grow to the mainstream acceptance until some sort of regulation is placed on it. Facts of life. I don't like it but it is what it is.

It is kinda like space flight. Yeah, we lose a few people every once in a while but the good out weighs the bad. But you didn't see them put 500,000 people on Apollo 2 for a reason.

Again, get away from the killing issue and look at small demands that these people can make. Without bitcoin, there are few tools that help hackers find new ways of stealing funds. Today is the first day that I realized that this is just a tool for scammers and the implications of its adoption far outweigh the benefits of the same.

Then could you maybe take a minute or two to explain what they have done more properly in their beta anon than cryptonote/Shadowcoin please. They both use quite sophisticated schemes, I would genuinely be interested in learning if they have been improved upon. 

time to weed out those that are on the ropes or have failed.

Guys calm down. When Ethereum joins the game, almost all coins will be obsolete. So no sense in discussing wether LTC/DOGE or DRK/MON is better, they are all doomed.

Again, your disputing my real world facts of numbers with your hypothetical world.

I suggest you learn a thing or two and read better.  I didn't say that a gimmick "will" win, I said often times it does.  Additionally a silly gimmick did and has made Doge very successful.  You say it doesn't, but it is very clear that it has for a fact.  Your imagined world where tech always wins over gimmicks is not better than the real world of facts that I can prove by looking at market cap.  For a fact Doge has a higher market cap, better liquidity and more transactions than Namecoin, Darkcoin, and Peercoin despite those being better tech wise.  And Litecoin which you dismiss is still doing better than Namecoin, Darkcoin, Peercoin, Monero, and NXT combined.   (full discloser, I own none of these coins)

Furthermore major corporations will often spend far more on advertising and marketing then they do or product development.  Why?  Because they know being cool and have a gimmick sells better than having good tech.  It doesn't matter which product is actually better, it only matters which product the consumer thinks is better and most consumers are simply not knowledgeable about a product to truly discern which product is superior.  This holds true with toothpaste, cell phones, jeans, sushi, cable packages, and prepackaged vacations. Gimmicks sell.  

Furthemore, if gimmicks are so powerless why do you have a gimmick username that is a blatant rip off?

And as for anonymity it doesn't matter if it is achieved wallet side or protocol side.  If you are anon then you are anon.

This is a nice thread.  I’ll summarize what is going on as quickly as possible which for me is not quickly.

BTC- no comment necessary

Doge and Litecoin – You dismissed these but you very well shouldn’t have.  Litecoin has by far the biggest marketcap despite going down like 90%.  There is a very real chance on the next BTC pump, that Litecoin will pump even harder.  In fact it almost doubled on the Coinbase news.  And for Doge, it has something that all these other coins listed don’t have, which is widely underestimated; it is cool.  Ultimately when you put a cool product next to a different product that is far superior, it is often times that the cool product wins.  Nobody wants to be a dork.

Darkcoin and Monero – I see a lot of arguments about which is better, and it really doesn’t matter.  In a year from now BTC will have its own anon options with projects such as Coinjoin or Darkwallet which will make theses alts obsolete and pointless.

Namecoin – forget about it

XRP – lots and lots of more people are coming over to Ripple.  It does what it does really well, but will that be enough? 

PPC – Was a great step, but we can gather that probably Bitcoin’s POW or other newer and more robust forms of POS will win out in the future, which leaves Peercoin left behind in either scenario.  To avoid this it would have to develop itself extensively, and to be fair lots of new development is coming out of the Peercoin team, but ultimately they are limited with their code and just what they can do.  A newer and more robust 2.0 system will just have so much more functionality. 


Now for the two more controversial coins because up until now, it has been pretty easy to discern.

Bitshares – Not really a coin as others have said but more of a 2.0 platform.  As stated earlier they will do anything to make a buck and don’t hide it. So at least you know where they stand. 

I agree that Bitshares will do anything to make money, and that includes lie and cheat.  When you look at the amount of money going in and out of Bitshares, it is almost nothing and has a terrible liquidity problem, so even if you did put a lot of money in (which would be very easy) you would have a really hard time taking it out.  If you look on the inside of Bitshares there is lots of liquidity.  One may suspect that there are just a few Bitshare’s holders holding a lot of shares and trading with each other to fake liquidity.  After all, they will do anything to make money.  Bitshares also has shills out in large numbers plugging this coin and that is evident on this thread too.

NXT – is the most advanced feature wise of all these coins by far (note what I said about Doge earlier because sometimes it doesn't matter.  In theory if features were more important NXT would have smashed Doge, but in reality it is the other way around).  It can’t be counted out but has had a really rocky start.  It’s platform is also quite splintered and as a first mover has had to forge into territory that was unknown and often didn’t do nearly as well as it could have.  All around some of the most exciting work being done in crypto is being done at NXT, and will continue to be done there, but the real question is "Can they pull it off?"   

My summary.

Value.
- Bitcoin

Probable Value.
- Dogecoin
- Litecoin

Possible value.
- Ripple
- Nxt
- Bitshares

No value.
- Namecoin
- Peercoin
- Darkcoin
- Monero

Missed platforms: Gems, Maidsafe, Storj, and NEM because each one of these will be bring new things to the market that no other platform has done before if they can pull it off. 

The only two coins that have successfully pulled off their niche is Litecoin and Doge.  Litecoin has achieved being the known trading pair to BTC and Doge has pulled off being cool.  Those factors might not carry them through, but at least they won a battle.  None of the other coins haven't really proven themselves enough to get into my "probable" category.   

And one last test is to look at market cap.  I feel like to be safe a coin needs to be over 10 million USD, and I also feel like anything under 1 million USD has utterly failed.

LeoCoin founders meet UK Deputy Prime Minister,The founders of LEOcoin met senior leaders of the UK Government at an event on Tuesday 28th January at the Cabinet War Rooms in London. Dan Andersson and Atif Kamran, spoke to Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister about the potential of LEOcoin to transform global financial institutions.

more info and pics here guys


http://www.buy-leocoin.org/news/dan-andersson-and-atif-kamran-meet-with-nick-clegg

Those people are climate scientists.

you ignore the facts.

Coinbase is registered with FINCEN as being MSB for ALL THE USA

http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstateselector.html

What does mean? It means they admit the fact that they are MSB in all the US. Are they licensed in all the US? No, they are not.

Let's take the New York state. Make a search on internet: "bitcoin unlicensed money transmitter". See what you can find and then you come to comment

Before searching, I will tell you what you will see; something like : 2 year prison term for bitcoin unlicensed money transmitter

Now, see Florida : "charged with felony violations of Florida’s law against unlicensed money transmitters — which prohibits “currency or payment instruments
 

So, Coinbase is operating illegally New York and Florida. These are only 2 cases. But they operate illegally in many other states

The law MUST be for everybody.

My English isnt great (as you all have already noticed, haw haw.) But to me "moner" sounds to much like "moaner".
You wont get a girl in discothek, when you say: "Yo baby, I am better and wealthier then your Bitcoin boyfriend. I am the real deal, I am a Moner."

TNX shitaifan2013 for correct Esperanto-spelling.

-an (O->O): member, adherent, participant of the root.
      komitato = committee               komitatano = a committee-member
      Budho = the Buddha                 budhano = a Buddhist
                        ano = a member

therefore esperanto would be "Monerano" imo, see http://donh.best.vwh.net/Esperanto/affixes.html#nouns

Fair point.  Can I rephrase it to say that they are assisting others in sending their coins to other persons for the benefit of others?

The problem with this analysis is that it is too myopic and loaded to be instructive about how either of these technologies (DRK / Cryptonote) will play out ultimately.

There are loads of modern day services that the NSA can theoretically "snoop" which don't detract from their practical or market value. The best you can say is that there is unlikely to be any anonymous technology which is guaranteed 100% to be "unstoppable" - neither the cryptonote approach or the 2-tier one.

But that's not the point anyway. Most people are not terrorists on the run from the NSA. The NSA are unlikely to be spending zillions of dollars on capturing masternode logs (because they'd need EVERY last one - ALL of them to have a remote chance) and then another few million plus several weeks pouring over them attempting to trace a solitary few transactions.

Even if that were theoretically possible (which I don't accept it is) it's well beyond a practical level of financial privacy which is what the goal is here.

In fact, I picked DRK *because* of its 2-tier approach, not in spite of it. Once you accept that both technologies work "within a reasonable level of practical anonymity" then practical considerations have far more impact on value than the thinking up of hypothetical vulnerabilities.

This is where DRK scores many more points than Monero and is the reason why it's maintained and grown its 5x marketcap lead.

Firstly, redundancy. Whatever disparities exist between the quality of the 2 anonymity algos, these are blown away by the fact that Darkcoin supports a pre-emptive, multiple redundancy approach to anonymisation. Cryptonote has 1 shot at it and has to work EVERY TIME. That means that you've no way of mitigating the effect of statistics as time goes on. The Darkcoin methodology is consistent with, say, painting a room where you use 16 thin coats rather than 1 thick one that leaves blank patches. This is both a huge security advantage and a practical advantage because at the point of use, Darkcoin can work like any other currency and doesn't need any exceptions to regular APIs which support it.

Secondly, the 2-tier approach leads to a far more productive and secure development cycle because the legacy API layer that's compatible with the Bitcoin retail interface can be supported independently of changes to the anonymisation algos. We've already seen this where Darkcoin went from realtime anonymisation at the point of use (like Monero) to pre-emptive - a huge revision to the philosophy - with no disruption at all to the retail interface.

Thirdly - Darkcoin is fully compatible with Bitcoin. It basically IS bitcoin and can be deployed with most bitcoin infrastructure. This was a design priority right from the start and has been maintained ever since. Again, this is only possible due to the 2-tier architecture.

Fourthly - the flexibility that Darkcoin's architecture brings in terms of design options is immense compared to a coin who's transmission and anonymising properties are so inflexibly coupled into a single lump of code.

So I don't remotely agree with you that this represents a "Broken Architecture". That's the kind of antagonistic, emotive language that people use when they have an axe to grind and want to appeal to an audience who don't have the technical depth to make a proper appraisal of the criticism. If you really want to have it taken seriously then put your point to the Darkcoin development team and have them post an appropriate response.

As for your Prisoner's Dilemma, that again is another piece of highly selective theorising. In fact the evidence in no way, shape or form supports your contention that it applies in this case. As you probably already know, there are few cases in any crypto-community of such high levels of constructive co-operation amongst peers. Masternode holders are not in "competition" with each other - they all share equally in a portion of the mining supply. Yes - their share goes up as the masternode population reduces, but it doesn't automatically follow that they'll start carrying out suicidal attacks on their own cryptocurrency network just to garner some hundredth of a percentage more yield. The loss in terms of market value from such behaviour would infinitely offset any marginal gain in coin share.

So the phrase "architecturally broken" is unjustified and I hereby request that the OP remove it from the citation at the start of the thread. Some of your points may be fair in the context of "vulnerabilities" but all advanced technologies have those. It's not a question of possessing or not posessing vulnerabilities, it's a question of what has the optimal balance of vulnerabilities against practical advantages.

Here's one for Monero which I won't do it the injustice of calling it "broken", simply a "vulnerability"....

.....if Darkcoin's algo ever gets "hacked", i.e. if a successful trace back to a sender of an anonymised transaction occurs, then only that one transaction is affected. The rest of the entire blockchain history is still safe.

On the other hand, if a solution is ever found for cryptonote encryption algorithm then the ENTIRE BLOCKCHAIN can be sprung with that one can opener. Cryptonote is therefore a timebomb. Your transaction might be anonymous today but not in 5 years time.

Be careful what you refer to as "architecturally broken".

As for 2 and 4: How is it a blow to privacy? It's not as long as no one forces you to use such exchange. Similarly, it doesn't stop anyone from creating/using decentralised exchange.

Don't know how could this be bad for bitcoin. I'm pretty happy that there are people trying to create a legit, safe and regulated businesses (Coinbase, Winklevoss) and that there are people (Amir Taaki, Cody Wilson) working on decentralised/anonymous solutions.

To give an update on this. I have begun coding a script (with database) that should include all basic functions required to accept monero (deposit/purchase,withdraw/transfer,check balance).

While doing this I can also document the functions. I'm using the available pre-built libraries for development, it seems some parameters I need to make it scalable are currently not included in those, or maybe I'm missing something (asking on irc).

Once these issues are resolved I'll continue development.

To get an idea, this is what it looks like currently (and incomplete)


Feel free to give suggestions.