Darkcoin is based on Bitcoin's blockchain which gives it something like 3-4 years development lead, not 4 months.


The main feature is online right now. It's the payments of masternodes that are being delayed.

Personally I'm more worried of things like inability to scale, government 51% kill switch through massive NSA-owned ASIC farms and quantum computers.

Suppose a coin has its block subsidy reduced to 1/10th of what it was yesterday. Some miners will bail, thinking its not worth their effort, and some will stay. Thus there is a mining equilibrium as a self-correcting mechanism. If fewer stay, they split the fees into bigger chunks. The paradox lies in expecting a constant number of miners from the POW inflation phase to the tx fee phase.


From a game theory perspective, the security of BTC's network is played in multiple parallel games. One of these games is the mining game and its equilibrium of hashrate and rewards. Another of these games is the interest of stakeholders.

If you have a real-life fortune, surely you are paying something in some form or the other to secure that fortune from threats. If you have a digital fortune stored in the blockchain you can equally assign some funds (mining costs) to secure your fortune from threats. This means that large stakeholders (aka bagholders) have a vested interest in protecting the network. These stakeholders can operate even when the mining reward is negative for the average miner because the alternative is a non-option. Their cost/reward analysis is different than the average guy because they are co-factoring that if  they had the wealth in physical form they'd still have to pay to secure it.

So you have the mining equilibrium plus the stakeholder backup to secure the network.

For the receiver, it may be... But the sender is the one who is using the currency for spending. So the spender either has the inflation-ridden transaction coin or the inflation-free store of value coin to do his spending.

- If the sender keeps a stash of "transaction coins" then that stash, by way of inflation, will be losing value which won't really be alleviated by reduced fees during transactions.

- If the sender keeps his stash to a store of value coin, with zero inflation, then he will use it for spending because the alternative (ie converting to transaction coin and then spending) will take a lot more fees during the conversion.

Let's just say there are not enough buyers to absorb 28.800 x 0.0013 (=37btc) per day and thus inflation is eating them alive... DRK is at 0.016 and yet requires only 46 BTC.

Same issue as with cryptonote-based coins. They can spike for a while but they can't preserve price because BTC demands per day escalate to something like 100+.

It will depend on adoption and number of transactions... If say Bitcoin has 100x adoption compared to an altcoin, doing an enormous volume of transactions, then it can afford to lower its fees and still pay for the miners (given that Bitcoin's price will also be significantly revalued toward the higher end)...

Coins for transactions with block rewards will produce inflation therefore they will devalue themselves relative to a "static" / deflationary coin with no new block rewards. The entry/exit from a store of value to a transaction medium and back and forth etc etc, requires exchange fees... and if you just keep the "transaction coin" to avoid entry/exit fees in the exchanges, it just gets devalued more. So you don't win in the end keeping the "transaction coin" with the lower fees. Or so it seems to me at this point.

With no functional anon...

At least XC showed something even with its design flaws and limitations. The latest trend is "show a whitepaper and start the pump"

The number of coins is irrelevant really. Even if half the BTCs are lost, nothing will change in terms of transactions. Price will rise to compensate for the increased scarcity and instead of using 50 satoshis to buy something, you'll just use 25 satoshis.

Regarding the economy and how it can't operate with a deflationary currency, the main fallacy of this argument is in the fact that BTC does not dictate a national economy or the global economy. It operates in parallel with national & international currencies which are inflationary. So national economies & the global economy are ok because there is adequate extra monetary supply to keep things moving. Gold is also increased by 2.5 kilotons per year.

When BTC is considered a better store of value compared to national & global currencies, and, say, 90% of it is hoarded, the remaining 10% for transactions will revalue accordingly (upwards) to cover the transaction volume that is needed by it.

It is the same argument like "we can't go to gold standard because there is not enough gold to cover M1"... yeah well, the world operated with gold & silver for millenia, so there was no real problem. Besides 7 trillion USD worth of gold would simply be revalued to something like 5x-10x and the problem would be instantly solved - as the need for large quantities of gold to create coins would make the price skyrocket. Same goes for silver.


Now that's a problem that one must deal with. Bitcoin can't scale to a lot of transactions per second without requiring terabytes. So we either go the supernode way (centralization) or a distributed model to every peer where each one holds only a portion of the blockchain (something like holographic storage) - but that would require a lot of bandwidth in network chatter to compensate.

If someone wants to say something bad, they'll find something... that's the only constant in cryptoland.

You can take the same event and spin it in any way you want... for example a cpu coin can be considered fair for being available to all (for mining) or it can be considered unfair due to botnet raping.

Wow... DRK=Apple... ahaha that's huge...

Btw, I was checking LTC on btc-e... the 150k buy wall is been dumped upon continuously in the past days... right now it's like 45k LTC buy order remaining. After this wall crumbles, I'm weird to see where LTC is headed.

Added...

Added...

Have I missed anything with all the excitement?

XC (X11 / PoW/PoS): It's going at it the wrong way (coin forwarding from wallet to wallet). They will have to change strategy.
Cloak (X13 / PoW/PoS): WTF, laundering through exchanges, yeah right.
Vericoin (Scrypt / PoW/PoS): Do they have anything working?
Pinkcoin (X11 / PoW/PoS): Centralized mixer
Cryptcoin (X11 / PoW/PoS): Do they have anything working?
Libertycoin (X11 / PoW/PoS): Do they have anything working?
Honorcoin (X11 / PoW/PoS): Do they have anything working?
NXT (PoS): Have they decided in favor or against anonymity?
Anoncoin (PoW Scrypt): IP obfuscation / Dead (?)
TIPS (PoW Scrypt): Central mixer / Dead (?)
Bytecoin-BCN (PoW): 99% premine of circulating coins
Bytecoin clones (PoW): Increasing in numbers every day diluting that field. MRO gets a special mention due to being the first clone.
Zerocoin: DOA (?) / delayed

Interesting...

Cryptography applications on the superpowers level is something like a zero-sum game... if you are into gathering data, you want everyone to be "weaker" than you so that you can see right through them. The information advantage toward your rivals or the public is enormous and that is considered to compensate for the broader lack of security (which is considered unbreakable by most anyway).

Preservation of advantage = you win.


I guess they have, otherwise they'd be considered useless. However I'm no cryptography expert to give a definite answer... I'm studying these things in my free time, asking questions and trying to figure them out myself to the best I can.

The forward-looking mentality is essential, otherwise it is a "weakness" that can be exploited in so many ways. Either the market will say "oh you are not futureproof enough" or an exploiter will use the exploit when the time comes, etc etc.

Bitcoin is unlikely to hard fork first by "mere speculation". They'll only do it when it's too late. But cryptocurrencies must be available to the public whether Bitcoin goes down or not. Right now Bitcoin is the #1. If however it experiences a problem (whether it is a "simple" fork, or a huge attack of some kind) people will only have altcoins to transact with (provided they aren't vulnerable or targeted for the same thing).

When Bitcoin forked in the past, people could only transact with Litecoin... It was thus "appreciated" for remaining stable and providing a service which the Bitcoin network could not provide reliably at that point. If we extrapolate this to some kind of attack (whether 51%, quantum attacks, massive DDOS etc) then major altcoins with diversification as to the attack-vector vulnerabilities should also be there to provide the ability to transact (which we consider a given, when it may be not) - or to remain as an alternative store of value (if the attack vector is to depreciate Bitcoin).

To be sure, this is not a pressing issue (anonymity / nodes etc are right now), but I think it will be good if coins start transitioning to quantum-resistant code. If Dark does it first, all the better for the innovative advantage - however this will need top-notch consultations as to pick the right algorithm. Just saying it's quantum resistant for the marketing and picking something which has other type of vulnerabilities, can be a serious issue.

Regarding the strategic advantage thing

=>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis

History

The discovery of differential cryptanalysis is generally attributed to Eli Biham and Adi Shamir in the late 1980s, who published a number of attacks against various block ciphers and hash functions, including a theoretical weakness in the Data Encryption Standard (DES). It was noted by Biham and Shamir that DES is surprisingly resistant to differential cryptanalysis, in the sense that even small modifications to the algorithm would make it much more susceptible.[1]
In 1994, a member of the original IBM DES team, Don Coppersmith, published a paper stating that differential cryptanalysis was known to IBM as early as 1974, and that defending against differential cryptanalysis had been a design goal.[2] According to author Steven Levy, IBM had discovered differential cryptanalysis on its own, and the NSA was apparently well aware of the technique.[3] IBM kept some secrets, as Coppersmith explains: "After discussions with NSA, it was decided that disclosure of the design considerations would reveal the technique of differential cryptanalysis, a powerful technique that could be used against many ciphers. This in turn would weaken the competitive advantage the United States enjoyed over other countries in the field of cryptography."[2] Within IBM, differential cryptanalysis was known as the "T-attack"[2] or "Tickle attack".[4]

...just a "tiny" 15-20 year advantage while everyone thought they were "safe"

The thing with the "if" is that you (not you specifically) don't know it. It's an assumption. It's like stealth bombers (f117) in the late 80s/early 90s... they weren't supposed to exist, and some apparently believed that their defences were good enough with a mentality like "surely we will see the enemy coming on the radar and shoot them down with A/A missiles" and then, with no radar-bleep, bombs started raining.

That's the thing with strategic advantages. They are not revealed until the time is right.

This particular computer (dwave) is not yet classified as a 100% quantum one. If a qc comes out (or if it already exists in secret), most cryptos will be (or already are and they don't know it) in trouble.

Bitcoin is already 5y. old and the elliptic curve system for public/private keys (which isn't quantum resistanct) is gravitating towards its end.

Darkcoin and all bitcoin clones will be futureproof once they have solved that issue, otherwise all public keys that have ever been published through the blockchain will be cracked and the addresses "emptied". Personally I prefer to do it first, rather than later - although the exact algorithm chosen must be chosen extremely carefully and in consultation with top-notch cryptography experts.

Everything is based on the assumption* that things are ok because, well... if someone had a QC they would have surely told us - when in fact there is simply no incentive to do so as a QC is able to crack military grade encryption and it, therefore, represents a strategic advantage to its owner. The same is true for concealing its existence.

* Assumption = the mother of all fuckups.

Regarding the anonymity part, Cryptonote coins (Bytecoin/Monero etc) & Zerocoin/Zerocash are breakable by quantum computers.

Correct. I was talking about demand in a narrower frame but I'm ok with a redefinition of a sum of parameters being calculated in the demand side too.

There are many parts in the equation

- Coin supply (~7 times less for DRK)

- Coin demand

- Coin utilization (anonymous market / private market - LTC can't cover that and by extension competes with Bitcoin - while DRK takes a new market all by itself)

- Store of value: +28.800 coins per day vs +2880 coins per day for DRK - positioning DRK in a much more sustainable trajectory

- Price potential: Due to the inflation barrier a coin cannot go any further in the market than the rate at which new coins can be absorbed. LTC can't go, say, double price to 0.034 and sustain itself there. It would require 636.000 USD per day to maintain its price, vs 63.600 USD per day for DRK at 0.034.

- Future prospects in terms of coin characteristics: An evolving coin has better prospects than a static one.

- Other features: DRK's ability to self-mine itself through nodes giving a 30-40-50% ROI, while LTC requires external investment to buy ASIC equipment and power

Yeah, I can't see 74$ for Litecoin / 11$ for DRK, sorry