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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Yet Satoshi has 300mn worth in bitcoins.

Well, cryptos and PMs are the only real alternative to fiat scam. But their use and practical issues are different.

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?

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"...  

It took me a while to write the answer to Joshuar, and hadn't see that you wrote a reply... I'll reply to your reply in the other thread, no worries.

Btw, I actually came for a whole different reason to the XMR thread and then I got caught up with the DRK instamine discussion which I found. Anyway, it was actually more of a request... please ask IceBreaker to refrain from trolling the DRK thread if you can. Some of us DRK holders, also hold multiple anonymous currencies to cover the whole anonymous segment (or the more promising candidates of that market). There is no reason for such a fight. Over and out.

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.


Does that change the measurable financial impact of each 'scam"?

DRK's instamine was worth 50 BTC at the time it happened and for 3 weeks. That was its market value. That's just the first BTC block (=50BTC)

DRK's instamine today is worth 34.000 BTC. That's its current market value. That's not even a week of solomining BTC with 7200BTC/day. And yet DRK wasn't solo'ed, nor was the initial distribution kept intact (unlike Bitcoin).


The reward was changed many times. First came the difficulty scare with the cpu whale that people thought he was a GPU miner which reduced reward... But it was also a problematic approach (I thought it was a security vulnerability) because it gave incentives to DDOS pools to reduce overall hashrate to get the higher reward. And thus I notified Evan and he issued a patch to lock the GPU reward structure into place. Then the initial formula would not produce more than 10mn coins despite the 84mn theoretical. People asked for more, they got more, then there was another round of whether to reduce it and it became what it is now. Then came masternode mining and tweaks on how many each masternode was getting.


It already had a failed launch and relaunch. Twice might be perceived as a joke. If you go down the conspiracy road, then you can also say that if he relaunched twice, someone could come along and say 'ohhh we know why you relaunched twice... you wanted us to think that this is a shitcoin with a shit dev so that nobody bothers while you solo-mine it and then you added DarkSend to give it value... all this "I'm useless / shitcoin" was just a facade to leave you alone while solomining the supposed fail-coin".

Give me any scenario where there is a genuine trouble and I will find you a dozen accusations that can ensue. And I remember at least 15 genuine problems with DRK over time... whether forks, security-related, MN-related, etc...

I only addressed distribution (and made an economic assessment of the scam itself in parallel/contrast to bitcoin) - not the fact of the instamine (which for most PoS/PoW hybrid coins it's a feature anyway).

What part specifically is a lie?

Probably more.

Remember that gold is priced in ...troy ounces.

There are like 6 billion troy onces of above ground gold and they could be >10 billion by the time bitcoin reaches it's 21m coins.

So on one hand you have (right now)

14.000.000 btcs

and then you have

6.000.000.000 troy ounces of gold.

The scarcity ratio thus is somewhere around 1 btc per 428.5 ounces, or 13.3kg of gold.

Again: 1 BTC is as scarce as 13.3kg of above ground gold (costing $510.000 right now).

And while BTC is "capped" as far as its max number goes, gold is not. In the next century above ground quantities could double or triple or ...4x/5x/6x/10x (depending new mining innovations, AI involvement, new detection techniques, possible cheap energy breakthroughs etc).

BTC isn't dead. We are looking at this from an altcoin-perspective of "innovation", "privacy" etc etc. BTC is still leaps ahead of traditional financial systems like swift, banks, paypal etc and its adoption is just starting. As adoption increases, so does its network effect and price. Besides, even as a store of value, it'll be far better than most national currencies and it will also continue to be a hedge for precious metal owners (could be something like 8-10 trillion market cap) that have to endure the manipulation of that particular market.

However DRK (and some altcoins), has/have even larger potential of expansion, if things go well.


When DRK overtakes LTC, it's possible that all hell will break loose price-wise (for DRK). People simply do not understand the scarcity of DRK. There are no 28800 DRKs produced every day like LTC. It's more like <1/10th of them.

I had a dream the other day, when it was 0.011 that it would go 0.0134... and it went... (actually it went beyond that).

Today I had a dream of "0.036".

I tend to dream things like that, but they usually have varying degree of accuracy. I've also dreamt of 18.000$ btc in 2016 a few months ago - if that happens it'll be pretty interesting.

Now, if DRK is around 0.05 by that time, we could be seeing 1000$ DRKs...

In terms of fundamentals, DRK needs to capture just 2% of BTC's marketcap (2016) of such a 18k BTC scenario (~250bn market cap) which would make it a ~5bn coin / ~5mn coins in circulation => ~1000$/DRK.

Nice... 

I can only imagine the number of coins lost by traders during the rise... coins that were supposed to be bought back later and lower, and ...well... that never happened.

Just 2k drk at cryptsy for 0.016... I think the pumper will hit it.

It's a reality already over here (greece) for a couple of years.