The level of profit mongering from these two is quite impressive!

From his posts it is clear that he is very passionate but also extremely knowledgeable. I appreciate interacting with you, blockafett, but you have a lot of posts that are critical and insulting to the point of rudeness, so I think your approach is very opposite to his.

I'm glad you indicated it is just your opinion, as I am inclined to listen to someone who is actually doing something productive, and it takes two minutes to confirm that he has contributed to Monero development. I wish I could verify your contributions to the Dash codebase.

I must go as I am going out for the evening but the last thing I want to say is that I don't think the argument anyone should be making is that Darkcoin is vulnerable to theft. That is not the problem. If I just wanted protection from theft I would use Bitcoin, but I want something with absolute fungibility. I thought Dash was that, but now that my eyes have been opened and I am able to perceive the situation more rationally I am not convinced that Dash is well designed (otherwise gmaxwell and andytoshi would have said so).

I am not going to be running to Monero right now, but I will look in on it again in 6 months. My time with Dash is unfortunately over, and now I must Dash out the thread and Dash into the shower. Au revoir!

You just indicated that there was a chance with MasterNodes? I don't think you can compare 'small but measurable chance' with '0 chance'.

Historical information is only unrecoverable if the MasterNodes don't keep logs, and we have no way to confirm they don't keep logs.

I'm into Bitcoin. I started diversifying a bit, and now I'm pulling back into Bitcoin. This thread is just about me explaining what I have realised about Dash that has led me to pulling my investment out. I do acknowledge that Monero seems nice and elegant, and doesn't have problems that Darkcoin has, but it seems premature for me to diversify out of Bitcoin once I've pulled my Dash investment back into Bitcoin. I'll evaluate this again in 6-12 months time.

From this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140726142214-262891-pricing-0-day-exploits-in-the-face-of-0-day-defenses

'Typical pricing for a relevant 0-day is $40,000 - $250,000 according to Frei'

Even if you need a few different 0-day exploits for Windows and Linux and maybe a Mac one you are still going to end up spending a lot less. MasterNode operators can't make themselves impervious to a 0-day exploit, as it is unknown by definition.

I saw a post on this thread by fluffy pony that explained the minimum that MasterNode operators would need to do to maintain security, and I agree with him. I think that it is difficult to keep the MasterNode network secure and if it is attacked then it isn't going to be able to withstand it.

This is not a good argument.

If you gain 51% of the Monero nodes you would have 0% of both. With Bitcoin maybe you could argue that being able to link a node to a transaction will let you follow the blockchain trail and figure out stuff that node has been involved in, but I also guess that it's a harder link to prove.

I'm sorry blockafett but I can't agree with you.

If you compromise a Bitcoin node what good does it do you? You don't get paid so you can't steal money, and every node receives the same blocks and the same transactions. That is what makes Bitcoin special, that every node is the same and in consensus. MasterNodes are not in consensus, each of them processes small pieces of a puzzle that other MasterNodes know nothing about. In other words, if there are only 2,000 Bitcoin nodes and you have secret access to 1,950 of them you can't see anything more than you would by just running a node of your own, except for the educated guesses you can make for the originating IP address of transactions. If you have secret access to 1,950 of the 2,000 MasterNodes the entire system is no longer fungible or safe.

And they say there are no ladies in crypto!

Thank you darling:)


I started buying Dash because I read much more than 1,000 posts on the Dash thread. I have taken the time to read many threads on the Monero thread although I don't think I've read nearly as many Dash threads. Don't think that this thread was my first stop!


My research has demonstrated that is incorrect. Monero was launched by thankful_for_today and it was based on the cryptonote reference code. That is note dubious that is fact. You can verify this easily by going on github (when it isn't under attack) and checking old Monero commits when it was forked versus the cryptonote reference code they have. It is the same and it is not dubious.

Cryptonote was new and exciting so of course there were forks. You say that there were 13 forks like its a bad thing but Dash has 40 or 50 forks. And isn't Dash a clone of Bitcoin? When I look at the code it looks that way, and MapofCoins says it is just a clone of Quark that is a clone of Bitcoin.


That is revisionist history. The cryptonote whitepaper is from October 2013, long before Evan even imagined Darkcoin. Also Evan said he was going to add ring signatures to Dash but never did, so even Evan would admit that the 'best tech available at the time' was cryptonote.


You are oversimplifying things, blockafett. I have looked at Monero and cryptonote and you have to crack a 256 bit key to remove the anonymity. If you read the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack it says "Breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires 2¹²⁸ times more computational power than a 128-bit key. 50 supercomputers that could check a billion billion (10¹⁸) AES keys per second (if such a device could ever be made) would, in theory, require about 3×10⁵¹ years to exhaust the 256-bit key space."

With Dash you are trusting 1 in 2,000 MasterNodes which is only 2¹¹. I don't think you can imagine how big 2²⁵⁶ is.


Greenaddress solved it before Evan even thought about it. From what I have read InstantX is the same as the greenaddress system except you have to trust the MasterNodes. I also think that every Dash investor needs to read this article: http://cointelegraph.com/news/113482/jeff-garzik-on-instant-confirmations-hope-is-the-denial-of-reality - "Jeff Garzik on Instant Confirmations: 'Hope is the Denial of Reality'"


I'm a Bitcoin holder. I've seen my holdings crash from over $1,000 per Bitcoin to the $240 it is at now. The market is stupid and irrational. I can't trust them to make a decision for me.


I don't think they have to develop 'features'. I think they have to build on their solid foundation, and maybe in 6 months or a year when I want to get back into this space I'll buy in to Monero. From what I can see the tech is serious and long-term, but I want to give it time to mature.


The instamine is real but I take what Evan says as fact. I do believe that there are others besides Evan that mined hundreds of thousands of Dash in the first day. Maybe it will kill Dash when they cash out, I don't know. I also know that MasterNodes are centralised and I bought Dash in spite of it. I'm getting out of Dash partly because of it. Let's not pretend MasterNodes are somehow decentralised as all we are doing is insulting the cryptographers and computer scientists that are smarter than we are and who actually design decentralised systems.

majamina I'm going to play devil's advocate with you, so bear with me here.


Easily? If all I want is to obfuscate I can send it to myself 1000 times through various transaction splitting and recombining, and I can send it it and out of exchanges. I can even setup a BitPay account and pay myself for fake goods. If every step in my self-mixing path has a 50/50 chance of being mine then a mix of 1000 steps plus some exchanges and BitPay is 1010 steps for example. So the chance of figuring out its me is 2 to the power of 1010. Google says that your chance of deanonymising me is 1 in 10 to the power of 304. I saw some 10 to the power of 40 numbers thrown around earlier, so are we safe in saying that Bitcoin can easily be made 7 times more private than Dash?


MasterNodes are also a trusted mixing service. How do you as a user prove that the MasterNodes you use not keep logs or aren't reporting to some adversary?


Security I'm less worried about, but how are MasterNodes trustless? I know, I know, there's a 1 in 10 to the power of something chance, but then why not just use Bitcoin? If you think that a 35 year old neck-beard living in his mother's basement can secure his MasterNode that is quite worrying. I never thought about it in those terms until a few hours ago. Read this and then tell me if you think that even an advanced MasterNode operator can keep it secure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures_(2013–present)

I do respect what Evan is trying to achieve but this thread has opened my eyes. Just in the past 24 hours I have read about how British Airways got hacked and Slack got hacked for days, and Nigeria's Electoral Commission website got hacked. If powerful organisations can't secure their servers what makes you think that 2,000 MasterNode operators will be any different?

Because if someone identifies outputs I own as being tainted then they can be blocked by merchants or exchanges or whatever.

"But you can just Darksend them!" is the reaction I have seen. Except that in Bitcoin you can send them to yourself and boom - new outputs. Does that make Bitcoin magically fungible? Or what if I mix the outputs using BitcoinFog, does that make Bitcoin perfectly fungible?

Fungibility is destroyed the minute you can trace transactions through the blockchain, it doesn't matter how you mix them and who is involved. Otherwise just use Bitcoin and send the funds back to yourself if they're tainted, no Dash needed!

You can check my post history and confirm that I have taken an interest in exactly zero altcoins. I recently started getting a little bit interested in Dash because I see Bitcoin's fungibility problems. Unfortunately Dash has the same fungibility problems no matter how much they try and hide it, and the sheer stupidity of the community members is not inspiring.

That does not mean I am interested in Monero, except maybe in the technology underlying it. I am not going to divest in Dash and invest in Monero. I am just going to divest in Dash and hold Bitcoin for the moment. Maybe in a few months or years I'll take another look at Monero, but saying that I'm "XMR people" is wrong.

Because their ongoing stupidity has highlighted my own stupidity in buying into this in the first place.

I wanted to buy a MasterNode because I calculated that my Dash would be safe in cold storage and that I would be able to double my Dash over 3 or 4 years. I can see now that Dash won't be around in 3 or 4 years because it is being propped up by people with no knowledge or sense (I don't mean you this is just a general observation).

The dev team, the website, the buyers are all unecessary. The network "transport" heavily relies on cryptography when it is authenticating to a node during a handshake.

Maybe I can help with an example. Bitcoin is like a highway, large sections of concrete and bitumen painted with guidelines and reflective cats-eyes. The Monero developers see this design and decide to make a similar transport system, maybe a high-speed railway line in this example. The Bitcoin and Monero developers don't care what vehicle (GUI wallet) you choose to ride, as long as it obeys the rules of the road or rail. They also do not pretend that their transport system prevents accidents, because that would be silly.

On the other hand I am starting to see that Dash is like a rickety school bus. It is built on top of Bitcoin's code and all the hard work developers like gmaxwell have done, and so it is appropriate to view it as riding on Bitcoin's 'highway' in our minds. It doesn't matter if there is one rickety school bus (Bitcoin Fog!) or 2,000 of them (Dash) you still have to hope that the driver of the rickety school bus isn't suicidal and has actually serviced his engine. You might ride with some good bus drivers today, but what about next week or next month? I'm understanding now for the first time that I don't need to trust the driver of the bus when I can take a step to the left and use my own train on the high-speed railway.

I never said they are stupid, I said that what they said was stupid.

It's like the run-up to an election, you support a candidate and you think he's not entirely stupid. In a debate just before the election his supporters make signs and go on interviews saying that they don't think the opinion of the people is important, and they fully support the presidential candidate making all the decisions. The candidate keeps quiet. Eventually former presidents come forward to point out how disconnected this thinking is from reality and how dangerously close it is to supporting a dictator.

Would you keep the faith, and just ignore what is becoming more and more apparent?

I had been quietly amassing a little pile of Dash, but these two responses have crystalized the debate for me. BlockaFett got asked a question by a highly respected Bitcoin researcher and he is too afraid to answer, choosing instead to deflect and try point out Monero's failings (especially when the continuous shout of 'gui' is crap, I can see several options on the Monero website). toknormal got smacked down by a Bitcoin core developer for saying things I can only describe as childish rubbish.

I don't know if I'll ever buy Monero but I do know that Dash is perfectly described by gmaxwell in the post above: a lot of harmful garbage and dysfunctional software. My Dash is going to be sold over the next few days. I refuse to a cryptocurrency where the fanboys imagine that cryptography is uneccessary. What a stupid thing to say.

I suggest the Dash boys go read a book on crypto before they come back to this thread. They're embarassing themselves and they're embarrasing Evan Duffield. There's a very, very small chance Evan can come into this thread and respond to andytoshi and gmaxwell and redeem Dash from the mess these idiots have made...but I'm not holding my breath.

I'm loving Forever at the moment. Great series:)

If you can buy using Paypal (had your CC integrated there obviously), then I would choose to go for Localbitcoins as instead of going for an account and giving CC details, I would prefer to buy it using LB as escrow.

Keys ain't a problem keeping, the problem is storing them at a right/safe place.
I have seen viruses on PCs which steal them and the other day, you won't see your Bitcoins in your account just because you don't have some highly trusted Anti-Virus installed.

Storing them offline seems more secure to me than keeping them online with so many coins stored in a single key.

I don't think that the events or moves in Forex has anything to do with Bitcoins, they are totally different subjects.
Bitcoin can't be called a part of Forex, as it works completely different, ain't just being a currency but being as a whole lot of speculations, sentiments but these things come into forex though, so they are in each other on one hand, and on the other, they have nothing to do with each other.

If Bitcoins are to get regulated, people will fear to gamble, stop using them for wrong deeds (such as terrorists), transactions may become reversible (in least cases possible, as if one person will be allowed to hold just one address/IP or /PC), it would be easier for Centrals to track everyone's transactions as they might give the orders to either make public notes that for what purpose the funds are being sent, etc.