Hype? No. A whale started buying like no tomorrow and then everyone came onboard. There was no marketing or hype.

Hype, buzz, whatever strategy, are overrated whether RC5 is ninja'ed or it's programmed. The moment it is announced that it will be launched at X date, then the market will price-in this launch after the announcement, and RC5 itself will be the "ok, now what?" point. Or something like that. So it doesn't really make a difference.

Hmm... that was interesting (as predicted / discussed earlier):

The reactions of the others are like "lol, someone finally said it"

I care. Because contrary to your statement there aren't "plenty" of other anonymous coins that satisfy proper criteria of usability, inflation/store of value, PoW, scaling etc.

As for the incompetence charges, yes, it must be through all this incompetence that DRK placed anonymity on the map (prior to DRK there was no meaningful marketcap for the anonymous market) and why after months and months of "anonymity" scams, nobody brought to the table a serious alternative except the cryptonote/bytecoin devs through the ring sigs. XMR devs are apparently "highly competent" in just ripping off the codebase of BCN including all the bugs, intentionally crippled code and booby traps Awe-inspiring competence.

Anyway this conversation is highly counterproductive for the worth of my XMRs. You should realize that some of the XMR holders are into anonymity before XMR or BCN even appeared on the scene, because they actually see potential in the anonymous market in general as something that has actual value due to the inability of Bitcoin to cover this market segment. Poisoning the anonymous market by attacking everyone else for competitive reasons, will only lead to XMR getting attacked in return.

You can't claim incompetence for others without others highlighting the incompetence of XMR devs in multiple issues, or the fact that XMR in itself is just a clone that hasn't developed anything and is not the original.

You can't claim "fuckups" or "mistakes" when this has happened in the XMR.

You can't attack others (like BBR for instamining due to the GPU client) and pretend fairness when you have 100x miners on the loose for weeks.

You can't laugh about the forks of others, that happened when they tried to develop/innovate/upgrade the network functionality in new ways, and then be suddenly forked by an overflow exploit.

These stuff do tend to come and bite back.

Well, I do know this: A large list of coins that wanted to "save humanity" from the "scam" that DRK is, used it as an excuse to actually scam their investors of their BTCs. From large and known coins down to ...Honorcoin.

The planet is now in a better shape than before

At least investors -after several months of scams- now know who can develop anonymity and who can't.

We are talking about DRK here so I'm not assuming anything. I know DRK's price / volume and ascent from when it was 0.000025 (jan-early feb), to 0.00008, to 0.00018, to 0.0005, to 0.002, to 0.001 (after the 300 btc ccex hack that was turned to DRK then dumped to poloniex etc), to 0.0011-0.0016 for months, to 0.028 with the pump.


If there's such an imbalance that renders a coin DOA, like Bytecoin for example, the market simply reflects the price and marketcap accordingly.

Initial distribution would only be a problem in a world where markets do not exist. When the markets take over, distribution is sorted out according to demand.

The assumption made is that initial distribution is somehow frozen into eternity when it is not. People buy, people sell, coins change hands. Miners also sell because that's what they do. They mine and sell for profit. Again, coins change hands. And when pumps happen (let alone with multi-million USD volumes per day), that's even more coins that change hands. This has a tremendous effect on distribution.

There is no such thing as fair distribution. The world is imbalanced (wealth-wise) and this affects every distribution scheme.

The situation can only get worse by things like instamines, 100x miners*, accelerated reduction curves, barriers to entry / barriers to trade, etc.


* As the poster above said, BBR was crucified as unfair for having someone with a faster/GPU miner. Now the truth has come out that XMR has been mined for a lengthy period with heavily accelerated miners. You can't have double standards about these issues.


If you "guarantie" it, then it must be true.

DRK is based on coinjoin. Which means you throw your 10 DRKs in a bucket, I throw my 10 DRKs in the same bucket and they go out 10 + 10 to different destinations but nobody can tell which is which. It can't be "dangerous to the network".

Masternode consensus on who gets paid, that's another issue altogether because it introduces a second layer of consensus on top of who gets paid the block, and yes that one can be dangerous to the network and it has forked the network on prior implementation attempts. (Masternode protocol is open source btw).

Aha ok.

The entire DRK instamine cost less than 50 BTC for two weeks after the launch.

dga & partner (and who knows who else) made hundreds of BTCs with the 30-50-100x Monero miner.

And DRK is the "scam".

Ok.

Price matters because cheap price = coin spreads.

Don't seriously tell me that XMR, a coin that has a very serious technological barrier to entry for non-computer geeks, running on frickin' command line, is better distributed. People couldn't even compile a wallet or move money between themselves or exchanges. Even now they can't.

A technological barrier to entry ensures problematic distribution for all except those with way-above-average technical knowledge.


Except for the part that 100x gains were possible for the miner and some people were mining that way... that's the "concept" / initial XMR conception.


Since you are in drawing curves, also draw one for the profitability of a normal XMR miner and a 100x XMR miner... yes, very fair and unsuspicious for everyone involved.


If you say so.

Has anyone ever anonymized a single coin with bitcoindark?

If I ask you, what was the cost of the entire DRK instamine at then-running prices, and what was the cost of the unfairly mined XMRs with >50% of the hashrate at then-running prices, do you know the answer?

Do you also know the answer which was the biggest "scam", in terms of BTCs?

Hint: The entire DRK instamine costed <50 BTC for the first 2 weeks of DRK's life as the prices were at 0.000025 btc per DRK / 0.25 BTC per 10k DRK / 2.5 BTC per 100k DRK.

Hint2: Read the post of the XMR miners on the 100x mining program on how much they were making.

Hint3: Don't throw stones while living in a glass house.

Hint4: Don't apply retroactive valuations to call "scam", because then it poisons the system with fallacies like "Satoshi is a 1bn-USD scammer for solomining Bitcoin" - like the 50BTC blocks he mined back then were worth anything. If they did, we wouldn't have 10.000 BTC Pizzas. Likewise instamined DRKs were traded for peanuts / they were considered nearly worthless and thus were sold in five-digit packages.

Yeah I'm starting to become an expert at anticipating failures

My DRK predictions:



(btw the candle at 6$ and the flash crash, actually happened due to the fork fail )


The only one I failed to anticipate was the second RC3 fork (IIRC), where I was "cautiously optimistic" due to all the testing done... And as it turned out, the network was working half-decently by realigning correctly after forking but it just took longer than the confirmation window (>15m or 6x2.5m blocks) so it had to be rolled back. So, in terms of prediction, it wasn't entirely a fail but it wasn't entirely a success either.

The game here is to bypass hype and try to understand what you are dealing with in terms of technology, whether we are talking about Darkcoin, Monero or something else.

Yes, well, DRK forked because it was a planned upgrade in terms of system functionality and it could either work or not... XMR forked just because some hacker exploited their codebase. From what I read the suspicions are on the BCN camp as there has been some animosity lately between Monero and other CN-coins.

Personally I had highlighted what happened these last few weeks (low cost spam attack + vulnerability exploits of the code) as possible future risks:


Having a 5yr code vs a few months old code, is certainly not the same in terms of being tested and robust.

Well, as we know[1] the value of a network is proportional to its use, so the argument is actually suicidal for investment purposes. "Hey not many people will use it, so it should be relatively ok..."

If you want to be "online cash" / ecash, you have to lift a tremendous amount of "weight" in terms of transactions. When Visa has a peak transaction volume of ~40.000 transactions per second and more than 200mn tx per day, there's a real problem for cryptocurrencies that desire to get a percentage of that action... Btw, that also includes Bitcoin blockchain tech, which is an order of magnitude leaner than Cryptonote tech.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=655792.0

As the weather becomes more autumnish and then winterish over here, that'll probably be the case...


+There is nothing inherently incompatible between an IP obfuscation tool and DRK as an anonymous currency (which requires an IP obfuscator anyway - and the market solutions right now are not entirely adequate).

The obfuscating technology of ring signatures is superior in terms of anonymity compared to coinjoin-based solution. However it is impractical and doesn't scale, therefore rendering the cryptonote-based coins as something like proof-of-concept, rather than usable coins that can experience wide adoption.

Also note that superiority of ring-signatures does not automatically translate to something like NSA-proof level of anonymity. Both DRK and Cryptonote can be practically anonymous for any third private party that watches the transactions on the blockchain but both can be vulnerable to NSA-tracking. If you are an individual using either DRK or Monero for example, coupled with good IP obfuscation and a high-level mixing, nobody will find your transaction. The NSA though, might.

This means that on a practical level, the technical superiority of ring signatures cannot translate into a market advantage, as both coins are anonymous as far as third-private-parties are concerned, but they both are vulnerable to NSA-level resources (where monitoring networks and even hardware devices is a reality).

If DRKTor -or whatever it's named- is a good enough alternative compared to I2P or Tor, then DRK might become the only NSA-proof anonymous coin, as it will have covered the IP obfuscation in a sufficient manner that I2P or Tor hasn't. The fact that the IP obfuscation nodes cannot be sockpuppeted without significant cost, is quite a plus. However it will require a much greater degree of decentralization where Masternodes are installed outside "big" data centers known to cooperate with government agencies.

Why don't we completely eliminate the moral problems of MN owners by encrypting all data transferred and stored, so that MN owners don't what they transfer or what they have in storage or what others are accessing etc etc?

In April price was 0.0011. How did DRK go to 0.028? Someone threw in MILLIONS of USD / thousands of BTC. The demand on his part was enormous. If he checks out, yes, there will be a gap in demand as he acquired a very large number of coins.