...and others just melt them anyway, because they know the law can't be enforced, especially in small operations involving a few people.

Refining to purity is what requires a larger operation. If you just melt the coins into bars or cubes, it's not 99.9% copper, so you have to ship the bars to the refinery to make them 99.9... if you do that, then you are using two heat cycles one for initial melt and one for refining (=more energy expended) so in that regard there is a loss. But it's still cheaper than moving them to Canada for melting (as they used to).

As far as I can recall, Hirocoin wasn't really interested in being anonymous... and all the rest of the code is already opensource, so... he can literally use whatever he wants.

The good news is that Evan has help so that he can work on multiple issues, faster.

As coins101 would say: More devs = all the way to the darkbank

Official inflation numbers are problematic because the indexes are constantly re-adjusted. If you use the official indexes of 1980 or 1990, you see inflation is much larger (applying these indexes in 2014). If you want to lower inflation these days, all you have to do is increase the percentage of technological products and services in the index and say "see? the prices are going down because you can get a mobile phone for less, a better laptop for less, a telecommunications contract for less etc etc".

Growth = increase in GDP minus inflation. So it "pays" when you under-report and hide* your inflation, as you can show a larger "real" increase in GDP. Additionally no-one complains because if you give people 3% interest and they have 5% low inflation, they'll rise up and go to PMs.

So instead of trying to convince people that they are "gaining" money by leaving their money at the bank, they undereport the inflation to make it "obvious" that people will "gain". Inflation 2% (instead of 5% actual), interest 3%, so 1% "profit" instead of 2% loss. Much easier to sell it in this way.

The larger the inflation, the more visible this under-reporting is. In some countries inflation is running at 20-25% and the government is reporting like half of it. That's visible and people complain because they can see that their money are running out FAST. 3-5-7% isn't so much and people at this level are under the influence of the Al Gore frog analogy... the frog is boiling at a rate too slow to notice. By the time the frog "gets it" (after a decade of depreciated bank deposits) it'll be too late because the interest doesn't cover the losses. So it has to be some other asset that protects people from inflation. Whether gold, silver, BTC etc etc - things that either inflate to a lower degree than fiat, or that have an increase in demand which is larger than their inflation.

* There are things you can hide, and things you can't... In US coinage, right now, pre1982 copper pennies cost more than 2cents in copper value compared to the 1cent face value.

Nickels (5c coins) are also very marginal as the metal costs 99% of the coin's face value. As it crosses over 100-110-120%, hoarding of nickels for melting, or as a way to counter inflation, will start to occur.

In Europe it's extremely "fascinating" that our 1c, 2c and 5c coins have a copper look, but in fact are made of dirt-cheap iron with a copper plating. You can't make this stuff up... copper is used for plating! They want to give people the impression of "value" and that nothing changed relative to the past (abundance of copper coins for small denominations in most european countries) because if people saw the iron they would immediately understand these are "cheap" coins... But they can't afford to go copper. The money's face value cannot afford to buy the metal it's minted on.

Thank you too.

The whole hypothesis here is based on a single premise: Whoever mined DRK, ever, has never sold a single coin - and the distribution has remained fixed ever since. So there is nothing crazy because the buyers are factoring things that you don't factor-in, or ignore.

Newsflash: People sold tonz of coins. They sold at 0.00002, at 0.0001, at 0.002 and all the way up to 0.028.

Btw acquiring 100.000 DRKs would cost you 2.5 BTC in january and early february.

That's how the distribution happened.

The "keep the bounty" part was particularly epic.

If I state my opinion that the trusted model is flawed, it's not FUD. If an intermediate node can steal the money it's a train wreck waiting to happen. And it happened when the first coins started to disappear - which is not what should be happening.


I'm implying that you perceive me more as a binary-type of guy where if I support DRK I will not support something else. I will support anything that is good or anything that has decent prospects. The fact that I have DRKs doesn't prevent me from hedging it with MRO, XC, etc etc. I do have some XCs... although I dumped most of them at 0.004+ when I saw the copied code. It wasn't bad for profit as I bought these at 0.00007 (>60-70x).


The practical implementation is working on a theoretical model which is flawed (trusting the nodes for forwarding the money). No matter the version number of the program, the underlying theory is problematic.

Let's just say if you want to make a rocket to go to the moon, and you are pointing it towards the core of the earth, no matter how many revisions you do to the rocket, you'll still not go to the moon. It's not the rocket implementation which is hampering your efforts. It's the flawed underlying premise that the rocket should be pointing down

That's the nature of trusted solutions. They have dependencies and problems arising out of these dependencies. DRK on the other hand is trustless in that it doesn't move money around nodes in the hope of them moving money to the next node etc etc. Nodes simply perform the signing of transactions. The transaction is either signed, or it's not. So money can't be lost to the node.

My assessment is that eventually, Dan will have to reconsider the approach or try to enforce this approach with hacks which will get uglier and uglier as time progresses. The "learning trust" system cannot solve the problem.

Take it as FUD, take it as an assessment, take it as whatever you want. That's what I believe right now and why I'm not increasing my stake at XC unless I see something from the dev that can give DRK a run for its money.

I'll bold some stuff and put some smilies to give you a perspective of the "common" man:

For every imagine a frustrated reader saying "wtf is this shit and why should it interest me to buy it with my precious BTCs?"


...I think now you get the point why it's going nowhere...

If you can't tell what your altcoin does in one sentence, it's DOA.

1. The thread is moderated. Do you think I can just go in and troll it? Think again.

2. I'm not a big DRK holder. I do have some though

3. The concept of nodes and applications running on nodes is a vote of confidence to the DRK model.

4. Unlike you, I don't see conflict between anon coins. I own many of them because I believe in the anon market. More specifically I expect it to reach 10% of the transparent market. That means if the transparent market has a size of 10bn, the anon market will have a marketshare of 1bn. I am thus positioned in multiple anon coins to profit from this rise. My first milestone was 1% of the transparent market - and that's achieved with a combined marketcap of anoncoins being ~80mn right now, from something like 3 mn two months ago (2mn DRK / 1mn ANC).

5. I do see problem when a certain coin is more hype than actual stuff. XC's model is currently broken (trusted nodes = lost coins) and anonymity is not so anonymous (as chaeplin demonstrated by backtracing the transaction). So "quicker progress" is not what I'd call it.

It's the nature of coin mixing: Anonymous coins that do mixing have to strike a balance between proper mixing and becoming problematic to scale (=DOA).

Bytecoin and clones have DOA characteristics when used with higher-end mixing settings. The anonymity has to be reduced (less mixing) in order for the implementation to scale.

Darkcoin - if used with something like cascading mixing in >10 nodes - would be DOA itself.

XC, if it uses a lot of blockchain size for small transaction, will be DOA.

Only non-mixing anonymity can avoid it, but still even zerocoin in its first implementation wouldn't scale / was DOA.

The problem of some top20 coins is that their characteristics are too advanced for the average buyer.

Buyer wants a coin he can understand what it does.

Litecoin he can understand. It's BTC but faster.
Darkcoin he can understand. It's BTC but faster+"darker" (private)
DOGEcoin he can understand. It's BTC + faster + "funny" + billions of coins for the lulz
Namecoin... wtf is this, yeah well we already have DNS
Protoshares...  
Ripple...  
Mastercoin...
NXT...  
Maidsafe  
Counterparty  

So how is someone to buy if there is no understanding what it does. And those who do understand thinking "oh that's great, has vast potential" etc etc, well, they are waiting for the "simple money" to jump onboard so that they can get appreciation on their early buying. But the simple money doesn't follow the large money / early investors because they don't understand what these coins do.

Cryptomarket is weird. You can sell a simple concept but not a complex one. The more complex the coin is, the better chances it has to get itself buried.

If this post has widened your understanding* of the "complex-coin market" psychology and why some coins tank when "...they shouldn't", tip freely

* This is an expensive lesson that one will figure out only if they've burned their money in "complex coins".

No I mean simultaneously in a few blocks maximum. You want to check the network for scaling issues that might occur later, both in terms of size + transaction capacity. If the coin isn't futureproof / can't scale => DOA.

Ok, to others: cancel that

Can somebody make a test and report back:

Use a script / .bat and perform 1000 mixes of 0.1-1 XC each back to a single address of yours.

- Report how many of these 1000 transactions got back (to check the reliability of the network in conducting transactions in terms of %) and what's the total amount back in your single address. For example, I got back 995 out of 1000 and the amount is 995 instead of 1000.

- Report the block # you initiated the transfers (so that we can check consequent numbers in terms of blockchain bloat / megabytes) to calculate the spam attack vector vs the blockchain

- Report any unusual stuff

If anyone is going to do that, state that "I'm doing it" so that no two people are doing it at the same time.

When there is a process, no matter what it is, it can the be scripted.

When it's scripted you can have a block explorer that takes the obfuscated transactions, processes them with a script and then makes them ...transparent with probabilities like 50-100% this went from A to B.

When this happens, coin is DOA.

But it will also be DOA if it's based on trusting the nodes to not steal.

Btw if multiple mixing occurs, with transactions splitting 5-10 times all over the place it will also be DOA due to scaling issues. You don't want half a megabyte transactions for moving around 1 XC. Not only would this be problematic but it can also be an attack vector against the blockchain itself (bloating it to FUBAR levels) in which someone will pay something like 1 btc in transaction fees and make the blockchain unusable in terms of size.

Might be... Lots of people lost coins due to FUD so it's not inconceivable. 0.003, 0.005, 0.008, 0.014, 0.028 etc... every time the same stuff about ok now the crash is coming, people liquidated some part of their position but were unable to buy their way in later because the price had reached a new bottom which was higher than what they sold. Especially for the <0.01 prices when loads of coins were bought for nothing.

There is a weird coincidence between all the hate/fud tactics and DRK's price. Ever since the haters started to act in organized manner back in April, price has been steadily increasing from 0.0012 to 0.025/0.028. There was nothing like it in the period preceding this.

Of course FUD and price do not have a causal relation for the uptrend, nor can anyone claim that there is (unless a huge buyer wants to FUD the heck out of everyone else and buy their coins) yet the trend is showing it happens nonetheless.

Try around different settings and see. Check 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 etc and leave it where you feel comfortable.

The Mh is low... you should have ~2 to 2.4 with sph-sgminer: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475795.0

There is also a faster miner available: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=623409.0 That should give you ~3MHs but it might require a bit more work to make it run.

Use the above threads for questions related to the mining programs.

-I 13 will take care of gpu use... Lower the number => the less GPU is used (-I 12 less, -I 11 less etc)

No damage to GPU, don't worry.

Speaking of which, I was contemplating the issue of anonymity while purchasing.

HTTPS is probably not the most secure way to conduct trade. Say you go to a website and you want to buy something with Darkcoin...

- at some point the merchant will generate an address to which you'll send the funds
while
- the buyer will have to transmit what he wants / where he wants it delivered / special notes etc etc.

So from a third party watching the transaction, the anonymity breaks. The payment may be anonymous but the overall transaction isn't.

The way I envision this happening is like this: User goes to site, and he chooses Darkcoin as a method of payment (before placing any order etc). A popup emerges with an on-demand encrypted channel through which the address to pay-to is transmitted to the buyer. Thus no-one except the buyer and seller know the address involved. The buyer will also provide, through this encrypted channel, his own address where stuff can be delivered etc.

This should be very high-level encryption, even QC-resistant. Perhaps we can issue a bounty for something like that, get the copyright of the code for the DRK community and then brand that software as DarkSomething(commerce related)... This allows Evan to work on his code while also expanding on the ecosystem by having developers do stuff in parallel.

Another thought I had, again regarding commerce, was the idea of having specific stores run their web servers on masternodes in an internal HTTP/S network of Darkcoin that will be accessible with something like a modified firefox. This hosting can either be done in a single masternode or in a distributed fashion - depending the topology selected. Thus these stores will not be "controlled" by the DNS limitations of ICANN, IP restrictions of certain countries etc etc - as they will be in the intranet. Having an intranet within Darkcoin can be interesting in terms of possibilities.