Yes it was an imports restriction, a severe one.

There were two stories:

a) The bullshit story about the trade deficit and the need to curb gold as the culprit for the problem (=bullshit, the numbers don't add up, yet the ban was enforced and thus smuggling started to take effect)

b) The other bullshit story about reduced demand in India because the people could not affort the tax, that supposedly made gold expensive. Well, even with the tax it was lower than what they were getting it a few months earlier = bullshit. But it was enough to send gold some shockwaves of "oh, people of India stopped buying aggressively, gold demand is doomed".

That too is meaningless. They are moving around the gold as needed. One day it is here for the audit, the next day the gold is 10.000 miles away to cover some delivery for a paper contract and a week later it is back again in the vault arriving from another vault.

The Elite control the network of central banks and private repositories and thus have no issue to "present" gold when needed for an inspection, or deliver as needed. It's not like it will be needed simultaneously at every single point - that's when they'd have a problem.

Indeed. I like the dark scheme too.

edit: I added slight color and contrast to the total black/whiteness: http://s30.postimg.org/fit9fqilr/download_4.png

Their emails are stuck. There is approx a 2hr delay.

If you can play around and provide say 5-10 variations it would be nice

Date/time   Type   Operation   BTC/DRK   DRK/BTC
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    4152.42602507 DRK for 12.45727808 BTC   0.003   333.33333333
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    65.33669256 DRK for 0.19601008 BTC   0.003   333.33333333
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    5 DRK for 0.015 BTC   0.003   333.33333333
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    6.71980567 DRK for 0.02015942 BTC   0.003   333.33333333
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    20.03970929 DRK for 0.06011913 BTC   0.003   333.33333333
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    300 DRK for 0.9 BTC   0.003   333.33333333
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    5 DRK for 0.014995 BTC   0.002999   333.44448149
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    5.27924 DRK for 0.01583244 BTC   0.002999   333.44448149
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    0.998 DRK for 0.002993 BTC   0.002999   333.44448149
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    79.85073257 DRK for 0.23875369 BTC   0.00299   334.44816054
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    92.19616287 DRK for 0.27290064 BTC   0.00296   337.83783784
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    1 DRK for 0.00295 BTC   0.00295   338.98305085
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    100 DRK for 0.29 BTC   0.0029   344.82758621
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    500 DRK for 1.45 BTC   0.0029   344.82758621
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    1 DRK for 0.0029 BTC   0.0029   344.82758621
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    217.35628301 DRK for 0.63033322 BTC   0.0029   344.82758621
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    300 DRK for 0.87 BTC   0.0029   344.82758621
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    200 DRK for 0.58 BTC   0.0029   344.82758621
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    548.9 DRK for 1.5912611 BTC   0.002899   344.94653329
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    100 DRK for 0.288001 BTC   0.00288001   347.22101659
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    500 DRK for 1.425 BTC   0.00285   350.87719298
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    100 DRK for 0.28 BTC   0.0028   357.14285714
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    500 DRK for 1.4 BTC   0.0028   357.14285714
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    598.9794588 DRK for 1.67714248 BTC   0.0028   357.14285714
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    100 DRK for 0.279 BTC   0.00279   358.42293907
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    500 DRK for 1.375 BTC   0.00275   363.63636364
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    100 DRK for 0.27 BTC   0.0027   370.37037037
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    500 DRK for 1.35 BTC   0.0027   370.37037037
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    500 DRK for 1.35 BTC   0.0027   370.37037037
2014-02-23 17:11:27   Bought    20.99859168 DRK for 0.05585625 BTC   0.00266   375.93984962

I GIMPed the prototype for a few edited variations (sorry for the pixelization in the dark ones - just to get an idea).
http://s30.postimg.org/sht03kh4h/samples.png

Again, I'm telling you, the whole story was leaked to the goldbugs so that they can get excited with the elite playing the delivery card in the future and crashing the goldbug speculation + reputation.

If people are looking for real gold shortage stories they should investigate India and how the people got blocked from buying physical for cheap.

What did you hear on the news? Trade deficit, blah blah blah, have to take measures, blah blah blah etc.

The trade deficit attributable to gold import was like 3-4% in 2012 - the other 96-97% was imports and foreign payments of all other types.

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

Imports   $488.6 billion (2012 est.)
Exports   $309.1 billion (2012 est.

(deficit = 179.5bn)

India imported ~860 tons in 2012 x 53.7mn USD per ton = ~45bn USD gold imports in 2012.
They also exported 39 bn USD in jewelry and gems, making the actual deficit in that department around 6bn out of the 180bn trade deficit.

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/content/en/mineweb-gold-news?oid=198286&sn=Detail

And what was banned? Gold. Why? Because of "trade deficit" reasons

Other bullshit stories circulated later on mid-to-later 2013 on why demand on India had been curbed by the gold tax, when, in fact, gold was actually cheaper (due to extremely low international price) even after factoring in the tiny gold tax.

Yesterday it went from 0.001 to 0.0021 within a few hours (>100% rebound).

A small “rounded” review of mine for DarkCoin features / potential issues / criticism.

You can edit it, republish it, correct points you don't like, link to it for people asking about DarkCoin etc:


1. Hashing algorithms

Unlike SHA256 and Scrypt of Bitcoin or Litecoin, DarkCoin uses 11 different hashes (blake, bmw, groestl, jh, keccak, skein, luffa, cubehash, shavite, simd, echo) that provide multiple layers of safety and added resilience against commercial ASIC solutions that may be developed in the future.

Coins which are based on different hashing functions represent a diversification option for the portfolio of Bitcoin investors and, as such, they can be considered as an alternative store of value or “insurance” if something goes wrong with BTC itself.

2. Transaction times

Darkcoin offers relatively fast transaction times at 2.5 minute block time – which is 4 times faster than Bitcoin and on par with Litecoin. At 2.5 minutes there is a relative balance of speed, blockchain bloating over the long run and protection from forking / creation of orphan blocks.

3. Difficulty algorithm and retargetting

The difficulty algorithm ensures that the difficulty escalates disproportionately with the addittion of increased hashing power. Retargetting is done after every block with Kimoto's Gravity Well. These two features combined prevent big miners from jumping in/out to mine and dump for profitability purposes for small periods of time. This combination also seems to work against mining & dumping operations in general as the coin's profitability is reduced when a lot of miners rush in. For the time being however DarkCoin is still more profitable than most other coins.

As far as price is concerned, with mining/dumping out of the equation and by making the coin less profitable than other coins when hashing power is spiking, it becomes more viable for those really interested in DarkCoin to mine something else and buy DarkCoins – elevating its price as a consequence. Less dumping and more buying is always good for the long-term price prospect.

4. CPU and GPU Mining

Currently (Feb 23 2014) there are both CPU miners and GPU miners for DarkCoin. According to what has been posted on the forum, high-end overclocked desktop i7s can get around 800+ KH/s making use of AES/AVX instructions, while high-end tuned GPUs like AMD 290 can get around 2.4 MH/s. This is a ratio of approximately 1:3 for top CPU's vs top GPUs, which is significantly better than scrypt (ratios of 1:10 to 1:15) or SHA256, making DarkCoin quite CPU-friendly.

Both CPU and GPU miner clients could be improved at the future but the ratio does not seem like it can change much higher than 1:5 even if the GPU miner is improved further (seems to have more room for acceleration).

In terms of maturity, the CPU mining client works well while the GPU miner still needs some work due to various bugs (it is in development phase / experimental).

On top of that the GPU miner is reported to run cooler and with less power than Scrypt or SHA256. It's power draw and heat output is ranging from 50-75%. This creates a more summer-friendly coin due to less heat generation. It also means that energy costs involved will be lower.


5. Coin mintage

The maximum number of coins to be issued is 84 Million coins, which is 4 times the number of Bitcoins and on par with Litecoin. With 3.5 million coins generated, there are still 80.5 million to go. However, and this is very important to understand, with the minting formula being related to the difficulty alogirthm, coin generation of these 80+ million will be a slow process that will take decades with the mining curve being significantly more steep than either Bitcoin or Litecoin. In fact, given the daily reward variability, it could take more than Bitcoin to mine all the coins, making it more future-proof for providing mining incentives to secure the network's operation – as long as the price and hashrate involved makes it profitable.

At this point of time daily inflation of DRK is at approximately 0.3% compared to 0.1% of Litecoin and the 1.5% to 6% for its closest MarketCap “competitors” (MaxCoin 6.17 % / VertCoin 1.44%). Block halving every year will also reduce the rate of mining supply. All these aspects indicate that the scarcity of DarkCoin will be a major factor in determining future price.

6. Anonymity

On top of the other features, DarkCoin has currently (Feb 2012) completed a series of alpha trials for the DarkSend technology. This allows transactions to be processed in a less transparent way so that people who use cryptocurrencies can achieve a greater degree of privacy.

DarkCoin plans to embed DarkSend along with full anonymity in the blockchain at some future point – and be the first coin to do so.

7. Possible issues and criticism

7.1 Speculation on DarkSend implementation

Speculation has been focused on whether DarkSend can deliver what it promises. Anonymous transactions are more than sending an X amount through a Z party to conceal the direct transaction as other aspects have to be controlled as well in order to remove the visible traces.

7.2 The race for anonymity

Further speculation has surrounded DarkCoin and other coins in development on who is going to be the first to cross the Anonymity line – with a few promising projects all coming around the same time.

7.3 DarkSend becoming Open Source

It has been decided that DarkSend will become opensourced once it is implemented and this could give rise to DarkCoin clones, something that could potentially affect DarkCoin price. Luckily for DarkCoin, its other features are quite advanced as well and this leaves less room for improvement for would-be clone competitors. DarkCoin is also evolving dynamically as new situations arise.

Paradoxically, the open sourcing of DarkSend will protect DarkCoin itself from attack that originates from the authorities. Even if they decide to “hunt down” DarkCoin usage, the ability of others to create DarkCoin clones will make any witch-hunt totally meaningless.

7.4 Coin distribution

Given the law of diminishing returns that is embedded in the coin minting formula, early adopters, miners and investors were able to acquire more coins than what miners and investors can now acquire with the same mining effort (fractional coin mining operation versus tens of coins) or BTCs (prices 100x up). This has been criticised as unfair for late adopters.

7.5 Balancing network mining incentives with reduced inflation and antidumping characteristics

The network will require significant hashpower to maintain its function and this can only be achieved by providing adequate mining incentive. While multipool and “whale-miner” resistance has been achieved and reduced inflation means that the coin supply will experience a a stable or upward trend in terms of value, the incentive to mine has to be there in order to secure the network. Bitcoin with daily inflation rates of less than 0.1% has solved this problem through its higher price, by remaining profitable only to ASIC miners. Litecoin with daily inflation of ~0.1% has been losing miners to other more profitable coins (reaching a 1:2 ratio to Dogecoin at some point) but, due to its market position, still has significant hashpower to support it.

DarkCoin will either maintain mining interest due to its scarcity and steeper curve of diminishing production, or it will have to provide additional mining incentive. Maybe this can come in the form of anonymity costs where users of the network might pay “extra” to ensure that their money transfers are well-circulated before arriving to their destination, with a premium being paid for the best possible privacy.

7.6 Network security

At this early stage of development, DarkCoin experiences concentrated mining of >80% which comes mainly from two pools. This presents a problem for network security and efforts to decentralize the process are ongoing with the official pool declining further registrations and more P2Pool servers coming online.

7.7 Adoption from Cryptocurrency Exchanges

It is speculated that some major cryptocurrency exchanges may not accept DarkCoin for trading due to its less transparent nature. DarkCoin has so far managed more than well despite being traded on smaller exchanges. If larger exchanges accept it then it has the potential to grow more. If larger exchanges enforce some kind of ban on it, then this potential is far bigger as there is greater attraction for what is considered banned.

7.8 Marketing

The lack of marketing / promotion and the fact that DarkCoin has been “born in the shadows” has been a point of concern for some adopters. Issues surrounding the logo, wikis, reddit presence and brand awareness have been raised and some of these are being worked on – perhaps, it is argued, not as much as they should. The marketing and aesthetics seem to have a lower priority than the functional side and this seems to be a point of differentiation between DarkCoin and other recent coins or non-innovative clone coins where self-promotion is the only real aspect that a coin community has to work on.

Yet, DarkCoin has managed to attract interest and thus exceed in market capitalization other coins with practically no marketing or “pumping” schemes. Despite the lack of adequate logos, websites, wikis etc, the attributes of the coin have made it look like a rough diamond, waiting to be polished, cut and faceted so that its full brilliance can be seen.

The fact that DarkCoin has achieved its rise without self-promoting itself, without marketing, without coins giveaway, without self-promotional fund raisers and without viral memes*, all the while being traded in a few small trading exchanges, speak volumes of its potential.

* It is possible that the Dark Knight themes, quotes etc can, perhaps, become quite “catchy” in viral propagation for all things related to DarkCoin.

7.9 Market adoption for goods and services

There are practically no merchants accepting DarkCoins right now. Most alt-coins suffer from the same problem and that is not something which is easily solved since even Bitcoin has quite limited level of acceptance. DarkCoin or other anonymous solutions might be the only coins which come close to, or exceed Bitcoin's level of acceptance because they are offering something that Bitcoin cannot offer: Privacy.

7.10 Negative publicity

A less transparent model of transaction will definitely come under attack from the establishment “control freaks” who desire to monitor every single activity of the population. This attack, which may come in the form of negative media portrayals, might be very good for the indirect promotion of DarkCoin (there is no such thing as bad PR, people say) but it may be bad for the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem which may come under scrutiny and even enforced regulation. Yet, anonymous coins must exist so that a bypass of regulation can render obsolete any attempt to regulate and control cryptocurrencies. Regulation equals centralization and decentralized systems cannot be dependent on the decisions of central / government authorities.

There are also fundamentals in place regarding minting which hint to the price dynamic even if one doesn't know what the chart looks like...

276.480 Maxcoins per day vs 4.475.000 MAX = +6.17% inflation per day
28800 VTC per day vs 2.000.000 VTC = +1.44% inflation per day
12000 DRK per day vs 3.430.000 DRK = +0.35% inflation per day

DRK = 17.5 times less inflation than Max
DRK = 4.1 times less inflation than VTC

...so no surprise really that their charts are the way they are.

That would be great news indeed. The "forbidden" coin...

I think it may be related to panic selling @ poloniex specifically. I mean some people were cashing out at any price. That's why on c-cex there was no cheap DRKs.

Yeah I don't like to presume things but I'm doing arguing-counterarguing myself for saving time on discussion....

Personally I really, really, really doubt it has to do with location. It affects for sure, but only if your connection is lagging in terms of seconds. Otherwise, even if you are connected from the most remote part of the planet you'll still have 300-400ms ping times which is not enough to raise stales to 5%. I have 0.2s ping times and I'm like at 0.5% reject rate. When I emulate further delay by increasing bandwidth load in my adsl line, I don't get significantly more. So latency is clearly a lesser issue.

Run a cpuminer for a test and check its stales. If it's the same percentage after a day, you are right. If not, there's something wrong with GPU settings.

It does make a difference. You are probably using too high an intensity on the miner which renders it less interactive. Thus it's wasting time on obsolete workload. Decrease your intensity and KH/s and get more money by actually submitting more relevant data.

The ultimate measure of success is not KH/s but rather how much A: difficulty per hour you have. The converted sgminer doesn't have A: but lower your hashrate until you hit <1% in rejects (unless you are losing insane amounts of kh/s).

I know you think that "but if I have 5% more hashrate then I won't care about the 5% rejects" but you are not only wasting processing time on those shares that were actually rejected, but also to those works which never solved the share and never sent it. When a change of block occurs you need the GPU to be interactive (lower intensity) in order to get instructions to change its workload to something else. If its taking like 3 seconds for the GPU to take the signal, you've wasted these 3 seconds processing outdated crap - whether you solve something and submit it as outdated share, or not solve it and move on to the next.

The high intensity & rejection problem is higher if you go to coins with block issuing in 1m or 30secs and less severe in coins like Lite or Dark with 2.5m.

The story is like the hook... you see gold bugs (and prominent gold figures) will go on saying "aaaaah... THERE is the evidence that there is gold shortage"... and much ink will be wasted on that story and this story will be crushed when the US decides to deliver - rendering the "gold shortage" issue as a "conspiracy story" that was promoted by "idiots", blowing their reputation.

As I said, 600 tons is nothing serious and for the USA and Germany it's a non issue as the Elite control both (it's like moving money from their right pocket to their left pocket). The delivery card will be played when gold prices are becoming unmanageable on the paper-manipulation scheme in order to calm the fear of shortages.

There are real stories and there are bullshit stories. The German gold is a bullshit story that has been leaked as a hook and it is entirely manageable. Lucky will be those who are NOT basing their gold manipulation/shortage theories based on this one story. There is a real issue with gold, there is a real issue with oversold gold, but 600 tons from a globalized country to another globalized country is truly a non-issue.

Cpu mining or gpu?

I've not been here since day one, nor do I have serious hardware to mine - I just mine with my 2 PCs. Having said that, I think there is a tremendous difference between premine/instamine and a launch which says: These are the rules, these are the launch dates, if you want come and mine - and everyone can do that. If some come with more hashrate than others they'll also get more coins.

Now if some people didn't mine it's ok but they can't say that this equates with coins being somehow given to someone. I mean if I were here from the start, for sure I would have taken more coins. I wasn't here, I didn't mine them, so tough luck. Same with bitcoin. I wasn't there in 2009* and thus I'm not a BTC millionaire buying 10.000 btc pizzas with cpu mining. Compared to the cpu mining rates of early bitcoin adopters and what people get today after having to buy ASIC monsters, these were like gods of mining / instaminers... But who says that? Everyone is like "oh man, I wish I was there to mine some".

Even so, when DRK hit the markets, even for someone who hadn't mined, they could get it for like 1/100th of what it now costs directly from the miners and in ample quantity like tens of thousands of DRK. Now, after this second chance, who's to blame again?


* What you said with: "At the end of the day, they control a significantly larger amount of coins than the amount of work they put into mining them relative to those that come later, regardless of what they choose to do with them" can be said for practically every coin that became successful later on, including btc, ltc, etc.

"Who has 600 tonnes?" That's like 3 months of mining supply. If the Chinese can get 1000, can't germany find 200 x 3 years = 600? What's the problem with that?

Yes, let's see the other points:


Addressed.


Money would be delivered, just like every other money transfer. Banks. Ones and zeros in banks accounts. These are not to be kept as money but to be converted to gold.


Huh? Cash settlement is always about the spot price at the time when it occurs. Not the price of now and taking the money in 10 years. That would be meaningless.


Same place as the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Dubaians, Turks, etc.


Same guarantee that any purchase has from all other countries that buy gold - why would the Germans be exempt from this rule?

Now tell me what the guarantee is that Germans will take their gold from the USA? Oh, yes, there is none.

One of the "unintended" consequences of gold price manipulation is that you can buy the entire annual mining supply with "just" 100bn USD. 600 tons are like just 24bn USD, or 17 billion euro. I assure you if Germans have tens of billions to lend to Greece, they can also buy gold (if they wanted to). But they aren't.

The reason why western countries are not buying gold and they are not creating friction between them for things like "oh I want my gold back" is because they are loosely controlled by the same centers of power. All the western world is, in fact, "one country" as far as the Elite are concerned. That's why you see coordinated central bank operations and gold moves, to cover "problems" as they arise.

Who buys gold? Those who are yet to be "globalized" - ie fall under the same unified center of power that controls western nations.