Absolutely agree. I went there to proselytize between the other attendees and meet the guy, not because I hoped to achieve that integration.

What I meant with that is that they are going for big mainstream, even if they have to make a few concessions along the way. They are trying to be really good friends with regulators and banks. They admit that they will close your account if you interact with illegal partners in a broad way. On the other hand, they are making a great educational effort to bring more people into crypto, and that benefits everyone even if they start with Coinbase's closed garden.

I don't think/want that Darkcoin can be tamed down so much. And it would only bring complexity to their offering (as any other altcoin, Litecoin's creator works for them full time and they don't accept Litecoin) and risk. Let them bring people to crypto and do the initial education. We'll convert them later And I fully agree, when we go big things will be different.

There are already some payment processors that accept Darkcoin. I have had direct experience with CoinPayments and they work great. As far as I know they the biggest altcoin payment processor.

Minotaur is working with a few others that already accept Bitcoin to also accept Darkcoin. I think that is the way to go because for the it should be relatively easy.

I was recently in a meetup with Coinbase's CEO. In the QA I gave him a hard time when I asked about sneaking into customer's accounts to close those transacting with forbidden parties (the meetup was organized by Coinbase, so questions were all softballs). Afterwards, I went to chat with him and he was quite nice. He was aware of Darkcoin, but we agreed that we are opposite poles in cryptoland, it would not make any sense for them to integrate us. In another recent meetup I had a similar experience with regular bitcoiners, people are starting to listen.

I'm not really into mining, but there are many interesting innovations out there.

This summer they published another interview with a couple guys that have defined what they call 2 factor mining. It makes it very difficult to get to high percentages of hash power precisely because of the risk starting at 25%. Basically, to solve the block you need to solve two problems. The first one is normal PoW, but for the second you need your private key. You can adjust the difficulty of the second problem to be a percentage of the first one. That would limit the growth of pools because for the second one they would have to use their own miners, so they could not accept more miners that what they can cover. At a 10% difficulty of the first problem they would need to directly control 10% of the hashing power they have:

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-126-make-it-costly-to-be-big

There is also a podcast in Let's Talk Bitcoin about published yesterday (not the main show, in Beyond Bitcoin):
http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/beyond-bitcoin-21-consensus-without-mining

I haven't had the chance to read or listen yet

I've switched to Electrum recently and I've had no problems with VPN so far. I'm running 1.9.8 on W7.

Have you tried different exit servers with your VPN? the only explanation I can think of is that the IP of the server your are going out through is banned by the electrum server for some past abuse... it is twisted, but I can't think of any other reason.

Don't be so hard on yourself! Everyone here has done something similar some time. I once managed to start two masternodes with the same wallet and messed up things so much that I had to stop them for a couple days so they disappeared from everywhere

Beautiful!!

BTW, you've already beaten the productivity world record for a developer in a weekend with all the (7?) updates, get some rest!!!

Ghost, I think you were right. I have 16.6 masternodes that I can't see but that appear online on elbereth's site and have been paid while they were supposedly down.

That looks really neat. I'll send win screenshot later, there seems to be something wrong with my python installation, besides being long unused, but I have to go now and can't test.

It could very well be. Yesterday I was paid in a masternode in 16.5 when it didn't show itself in its own masternode list, but appeared in other lists. Today I have received a payment in a masternode in 16.6 that had been restarted some time before and was not in lists sometime after, but I'm not sure when it dropped, so I can't be sure.

It is happening to all us, you haven't done something wrong. We'll have a solution soon and it will be posted to all forums. In the meantime you can keep restarting or just forget for a few hours and solve later.

If there were more posts in the middle I would bump this

Just want to add that it is not only the countless hours that go into maintaining that site. Elbereth pays a lot for that server!

We are all marked and watched already!

Even if you only use the internet to read some news... now that I think about it, reading news and keeping oneself informed is an act of rebellion, that will get you marked for sure Scratch that. Even if you only use the internet to see cute cat photos, you are being watched.

Has using crypto awarded us some kind of extra attention?
Can't know, but it seems plausible.

Would using a VPN get you even more attention?
Same thing.

However, the fact that the watchers don't like something makes me like that much more. That is why I sometimes send PGP encrypted emails when there is nothing to hide. That is why I use a VPN. And that is why I use DRK. If we use encryption/privacy only when we have something to hide, the fact of using it becomes a confession.

The one thing I don't like about the VPN is that I can't know for sure if they keep logs. I have to trust them about it and I hate trust. It makes sense for them to honour their promise because they are a private business and their life depend on that. But they could be a fake company operated by a government. Or a government could have hacked them without them knowing it... That is why it can't be your only layer of privacy, it is just one more in the toolbox. By the way, there are many open source standards for VPNs, a big part of what they do can be audited.

Same goes with Tor. There are rumours about many relays run by the NSA. Nobody can't know for sure. Even the same goes with Darkcoin! You don't have to prove that you are not the NSA to own a masternode (for those who have not here for long, you would need most of the masternodes to catch a tiny percentage of the transactions, don't worry about this, just an example!)

Having said that, how a VPN works is that it forces all your traffic (or part of it if you configure it that way) through their server. The ISP can only see that you connect to the server and then nothing else. If they keep a record of VPN's IP addresses (the good ones have thousands and add new ones all the time) they will know you're using a VPN, but nothing else. If you prefer a VPN that is not US based, I have had very good results with CyberGhost (http://www.cyberghostvpn.com) They are in Germany, but remember that NSA listened to German Chancellor mobile phone, they stop nowhere! The don't accept DRK, though

There are other good reasons to use a VPN besides privacy:

-Security of the connection. You can't always trust the internet connection you are using. With a VPN the connection becomes irrelevant because you are connecting from the VPN server and all traffic to and from it is encrypted between both machines. Many companies force their employees on the road to use a VPN for this reason.

-Access to certain secured resources. Some companies user their own VPNs and you can't connect to certain network resources unless you are routing your traffic through those servers. This way they can close those resources to all other IP addresses and secure them more effectively. This is less relevant for most of us, but if you need to do this some VPN vendors (including TorGuard) can also sell you a dedicated IP to configure something similar.

-Geolocated content. As someone has said before, with a VPN you can pretend to connect from anywhere. This is quite nice to access geolocated content. For this I have been using Unblock-us (http://www.unblock-us.com/2775.html) for quite some time. They only do this, but they do it extremely well. You can cange the DNS server in your router and forget about it. They only mess with your traffic to geolocated sites.

-Torrenting. I won't go into what you are torrenting. Even if you are downloading perfectly legal things to torrent, this a behaviour that raises many alarms in ISPs. Hiding it from them can't hurt

Thanks, google was too far away

I guess we should be adding that page then.

Tried before, didn't work.

Call to all Russians around!!

Can someone please confirm if VK.COM is big over there? We have been asked to include this in the website community page:
https://vk.com/DRK_RUS

The only Russian I speak/drink is vodka, so I'm a bit limited to know if this is important enough.

Sorry to interrupt the speculation, but I've just made the perfect purchase and I wanted to share the good news

TorGuard (anonymous VPN) accepts Darkcoin!!

TorGuard is a well known VPN provider. They don't keep logs and support all protocols. They have integrated CoinPayments and now support DRK (and a bunch of other altcoins).

I was trying different services lately, but after seeing this, my decision was made. I have signed up to their service and paid with Darkcoin! I hated to see a few coins go, but it is also great to be able use them and show support. The price for their Anonymous VPN service is 5 USD per month if you pay annually.

This forum is sponsored by TorGuard's biggest competitor, Private Internet Access. Many of us asked them to accept Darkcoin recently and they didn't listen. We now have our alternative

If you also want to sign up, please consider using my referral link: https://torguard.net/aff.php?aff=806

Also, for a 20% disccount, use this coupon code when checking out: vpncoupons

You got me there! and it nearly gave me a heart attack!