How many litecoins does the litecoin creator has, in terms of $$$?

The government agencies probably know who he is for years. They have resources that journalists don't have. And if a journalist can find him, well...

Perhaps the damage was already done with the 2008 paper (?).

I can't be sure because I wasn't monitoring the hashrate at the time, but it had to be, otherwise there's no reason the diff would spike for several blocks.

Seems like there was a whale miner who jumped in a few blocks earlier (the Π effect on the difficulty) and left prior to cracking that one block and then the rest had to process the increased difficulty. Glad these occurrences are only for one block and not for days or weeks  

Exactly... and when one includes energy costs, it's even better.

The governments are doing a pretty "solid" job to bankrupt themselves without the assistance of bitcoin. I doubt bitcoin will really play any role in their bankruptcy and certainly not from lost taxes. What bitcoin can do is to reduce the faith in national currencies by people switching to it.

Most governments are not really 100% dependent in tax revenue for their operations - and that's especially true for western governments with national currency / own issuing of money (eurozone is an exception). If they have a deficit (more expenses than income) they simply print more money to cover the difference.

If the US for example was basing all of its operations on the tax income, then these operations would need to be slashed by 25% because the tax income is not enough (income ~2.7 trillion / expenses ~3.5 trillion). Instead, the US government borrows more money which is covered by the Fed, indirectly. So there is always money to go around, as long as the issuing of new currency doesn't destroy people's faith in it.

Bitcoin is an alternative to national currencies but gold and silver are also. And when you have "preppers" for the economic armaggedon stacking gold and silver coins for like a decade, that's a larger problem for a government than Bitcoin because it's about person-to-person transactions that aren't monitored from a central console like the movement of bitcoins, nor can they be regulated by software solutions.

So if they do an audit tomorrow and, say, 95% of the quantity is there, would that mean that they have the gold?

Audit = no proof because they are moving it around between western/globalized vaults.

Proof = when there is simultaneous audit in various large western vaults, both national and corporate, so that it can be ensured that the gold is not being moved around or melted/recasted into new bars with other serial #.

Given sufficient time lag for preparation, you can present ten thousand tons of gold in one vault this month, another 10ktons of gold in another vault in the next month etc etc - and give the appearance that everything is in order.

It's possible because it's nowhere near "horribly unprofitable" territory.

Inflation is good to secure a network but it has to be spread out over a long period. If you aim to issue all the coins in one year, then you have a problem in your hands for the future-proofing of the coin. And if you "fix" that with an endless number of coins, you are violating basic economic rules.

If you have coin A and coin B and their only difference is the scarcity of A, the price of A will be larger in the long run. This means that coin B is not good as an investment & store of value, except for quick profit making.

If you think that the founders of Bitcoin knew not of these things and that DOGEcoin "fixed" their flaw, ok, then sell your house and buy DOGEcoins. Maybe you can buy a mansion. Or you can end up homeless, living on the streets with the dogs

If I had 10k euro invested, I'd take out at least my investment capital. Fundamentally, there's no future in a "let's issue a few hundred billion coins for the fun of it". Kittehcoin died, despite a reduction to 25bn, and DOGE will die too - the coins in circulation are simply too many and the inflation is bad too. It's bad economic planning from a coin which wasn't even intended to be serious. That's my take on it, at least.

I love the stupid dog face, it's epic trolling with the "such currency", "wow" etc etc, but 10k euro? Just get the capital out so that you won't have RL losses and leave some of the profits behind if by any chance the coin goes to the moon. (Personally I'd also cash out the profit and taking the "risk" of losing a future spike).

Indeed - that too can play a role. Satoshi made the same point for the value of BTC with a dull metal analogy where you could buy it for a while to perform a transaction: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583.msg11405#msg11405

So if BTC is taxed, some people may need to find an alternative... As the crackdown escalates against BTC and an increased number of countries places restrictions and taxes, naturally people will try other solutions. This type of news actually translates to indirect "pump material" for DRK and other private coins that will follow.

I believe that DOS-prevention (much less immunity) is not the strong point of any cryptocurrency network, unless it is sufficiently large (and still it can be attacked in so many different ways). That includes Bitcoin btw - however people adopted it despite not being DOS-immune. DOS on DarkSend could be somewhat different though if transactions collapse due to it - I'm not sure how it works.


No, I just threw it out as a suggestion. But I think small bounties for thorough feedback and larger bounties for hacks could give a great incentive for testers to diagnose a wide range of problems.

Yeah but Max had TV airtime and youtube exposure through Keiser, and despite this massive awareness it's a few places down in coinmarketcap compared to DRK. If you beat a coin with TV awareness with no marketing whatsoever, you must be doing something right + you have the potential to explode if you market yourself (while the other has already passed that point).

Personally, I prefer the concept of spreading awareness in the right places, rather than marketing/promotion (which can be considered spamming/hyping/pumping if aggressive) because indeed there is a need for people to know what it's about, but, right now, we simply have a beta and it needs tweaking before getting finalized. Impressions count and if you are promoting a half-baked product, it may create the wrong impression. For example in a beta network that does like 1 test transaction per hour the mixing is not hard to trace. But in a network that does thousands of transactions per day, that's another issue altogether.

Btw, I believe there'll have to be some hardening work, preferably a public call coupled with a good bounty, so that hackers can take a shot at the implementation and uncover potential holes before we go 100% live - or even have the bounty running even after we go 100% live (post-beta). That can also serve as a "rumor-hardening" for later stages of marketing. What I mean by that is this: When you have a complicated feature like DarkSend and most people do not really understand how it works (but are invested nonetheless), one comment that "it's broken" can cause significant fluctuation in prices. There is, in effect, a social engineering approach against the weaknesses of the market players (playing against their ignorance with your supposed superior knowledge).

The existence of an open bounty can counteract this effect: "Hey mr FUDer, if you are so good as a hacker and discovered the X flaw, then why don't you go and collect the bounty instead of spreading FUD?"... That's a safeguard right there.

I think, by seeing the graphs of DRK and other coins, that the thief on Polo just took the BTCs and got away, instead of pulling a c-cex. Keep us posted on the situation, but so far it seems "ok" (except for polo or people who lost BTCs).


Poloniex tweets.

DRKcoin is already above a huge list of a hundred shitcoins that were pumped/dumped and which are slowly dying:

Some were totally uninventive clone coins
Some were clone coins with a small twist to make them different, but without adding anything major to the crypto ecosystem
Some were meme coins that inevitably become less "trendy"
Some were scams
Some were based on flawed economic reasoning (let's issue a few hundred billion coins, like forever, and see what happens)

...so what good did it do for these coins in the long run, that people got "acquainted" with them and then dumped them with a bitter taste?

Additionally how will the community benefit from people that have a 3-day to 2-week "investing" horizon and the constant praise or whine about the prices, depending if one pumps or dumps? These people are like bumblebees who go from flower to flower, expecting to get the nectar (profit from a later pump) and leave.

If you want to be as successful as Bitcoin is, you have to go with its low key approach where people found out about it and appreciated it for what it did and not because it was hyped (instead, it was attacked and said it'll never work for quite a while). Of course I'm not implying that the ROI horizon is like 5 years here, as cryptos are much more adopted right now and things move fast (top20 coinmarket attained in ~4 weeks without hype/spamming/sponsorships etc).

As I see it, the prospect of DRK is not to be a slightly successful coin for a 2 week pump and then die, but rather to become a genuine BTC alternative, if not a BTC killer for certain uses or certain individuals who value their privacy. It's, in a way, degrading for the coin to be treated like a pump&dump scam, creating negative perception.

Don't worry about people finding out... those who are looking at the altcoins are also looking at coinmarketcap. If they want to see why Darkcoin is where it is, and why it will be rising, they can come over here and see for themselves. And those who aren't looking, well, they'll hear what you have to say as something like spamming or, worse yet, ponzi scheme tactics.

It's a fundamental trait of human psychology to value more what you discover yourself, and be skeptical of promises that other make to you - as you are suspect of their motives. So why go against the flow of human psychology dynamics and not have them work in your favor? The only thing that is required for this to work is to have adequate internet presence when one looks you up in Google, ie a Wiki entry, a good coin page, an explanatory FAQ that explains the differences in <30 secs reading - stuff like that. The rest will follow.

https://c-cex.com/index.html?p=drk-btc

Check just prior to the spike of 23rd february. (Spike was caused because of a 300 BTC hack on that exchange that were used to buy DRK and then send them on Poloniex for dumping and laundering the hacked BTCs)

Without being a cryptography expert, I would guesstimate that if you know

- the exact formula that determines how many blocks carry darksend transactions (and you know it because the code is open source)
- the difficulty at the time point when the send was initiated

...then you can calculate how it'd go. However if you also put a randomizer in there of some sort, to spice up the mix, it could be more robust (?).

As for transactions, I think time tracking of which wallet has what is of importance. Perhaps DarkSend could be used with a sliding bar from 1 to 10 that adjusts the level of privacy/untraceability. As the sliding bar goes higher, the user essentially opts for "deeper" transactions that are "laundered" more times, or that are executed over a larger time frame - perhaps waiting for moments that similar transactions are queued on the network. At setting 10, maybe the fees are higher, but if the person involved wants to pay them for a better "laundering" service, why not.

Yep, you are right. 1.5k not 1.5mn...