Does that include me for quoting his Pizza reviews ?  

-->    <-- "Goon squaded".

Which chart ?

The 15 minute crosses over and back every hour or two so regardless of trends.

Thanks for that, but if we're updating for the first time since rebrand, do we just rename ./darkcoin to ./dash ?

Is there other stuff to be renamed ?

Nice. Sounds like everyone's falling over themselves to be more "invisible" than the next. If anyone thought Darkcoin had a branding problem then selling "invisible money" to the masses should be interesting.

IM Vendor to potential adopter:

Hey mate ! You should check out this new money. It's invisible.

Potential adopter:

Really ? But how do I know it's real ?

IM Vendor:

Easy ! We'll give you this special key so you can only see your money and no one else's

Potential adopter:

Really ? But how do I know their's is real ?

IM Vendor:

Easy ! You can see them buying stuff with it !

Potential adopter:

Really ? Where ?

IM Vendor:

Easy ! There's this thing called the block......

oops  

So your saying it was your spirit that was hacked, not your bitcointalk account ?

You got exorcised ?

At least we can agree on that 

I like the idea of the "viewkey" from the perspective of personal privacy. But a financial system has 2 aspects:

[1] - disegregated private facing one.

[2] - an aggregated, public facing one that provides integrity and accountability

The viewkey opens a "peekhole" on a granular level for one person, but for it to have any value it has to be part of a greater whole who's existence is open and accountable. It has to have confidence and integrity which comes from demonstrating that it squares with the sum of its parts. The public aspect of any financial system is huge. Companies report balances, nations declare and spend budgets, wages are paid etc. (We can check Target2 to see how much money everyone owes the Germans   )

In the fiat money system, accountability is managed for us by the counterparty network known as the “banking system” plus armies of auditors who check that totals equal the sum of their parts. Without that aspect of it you's have no confidence and no value - you'd just have a very private account in an invisible, dead network.

What Satoshi did was to remove the counterparty layer and put the whole thing in public hands, thereby putting "us" in the role of auditors. That public, transparent aspect of the blockhain is absolutely a core principle that underpins its security, integrity and therefore value. In this model, privacy is replaced with anonymity.

I've got no objection to innovation and pursuing new ways to enhance personal privacy in crypto. But what Dash is attempting to do is an optimal approach - i.e. greatly enhance Bitcoin's anonymity without compromising the public ledger. That is an admirable objective that's difficult to acheive. Because it's difficult to achieve, it's easy to shoot holes in it over all kinds of low level technical implementation issues, but hey, what technology in the history of the internet wasn't like that. Http was leaky as a sieve. Add an "s" and it's unbreakable.

Likeways, the Cryptonote tech and persuit of totally "invisible" money is an admirable pursuit. But sell it for what it is not what it isn't. The material difference isn't nuances of cryptology but rather the priority you give to having a public ledger or not.

The contradiction that keeps hitting me in the face with Cryptonote is this: It's "selling point" is  ultra security and ultra privacy, whereas for me the one thing that Bitcoin brought as that supports integrity and security far more than any algo is public visibility.

IMO, if I wanted to corrupt a cryptocurrency, what are the two strategies I'd employ ?

[1] - remove the public ledger from view

[2] - give myself a backdoor to the encryption algo

I've never been a proponent of the second of those conspiracy theories because I generally think that if both the research papers and the code are in the public domain then it's fair game for public use and can be sufficiently scrutinised. But the first of those two - if that goes then no algo is going to secure the system IMO.

The motivation behind that post is that the Monero team have an implicit (though open) agenda which they have been attempting to play out for months without ever stating it plainly. That is to divest us of one of the principle tenets of Bitcoin and Satoshi’s vision and the one which will probably herald the biggest revolution in finance since ‘the Fed’ - the public ledger.

To acheive this, they’ve got to convince people of three things:

[1] - that the public ledger is of little or no benefit to them either collectively or individually and it is in fact “a threat”

[2] - that any technology attempting to enhance anonymity directly while preserving the concept of the public ledger is either flawed, a scam or unsecure

[3] - that “visibility” and “fungibility” are interchangeable monetary properties and therefore that money will retain its value even if “invisible”

IMO, the deception and slight of hand involved constitutes far more justification for the “s” word than the issues with Darkcoin’s launch that forms such a central element to their artillery. Hypothetical attack vectors on a technology which is directly addressing fungibility and anonymity without recourse to impacting on visibility would actually be useful if not made in such a sinister context.

Ever heard the phrase “show me the money” ? That derives from the fact that all else being equal, visible money is far more valuable than invisible money. So according to this agenda, not only would the system be divested of the public ledger, but also suffer an adverse impact on its monetary worth. You’d end up with something that’s private but worthless.

Finally, none of the subtleties of this debate are going to mean anything unless the whole phenomenon of Bitcoin and crypto as a whole gets something approaching mass adoption. In that regard, if you thought selling people the idea of virtual money thats visible was hard, good luck with selling them virtual money thats “invisible”  

+1 The 4-hour is on its fourth attempt at closing. Looks like it might succeed this time.

Invisible money = useless money 

No they're not, they're invisible which is different.

Being "anonymous" in a publicly open financial system like bitcoin and being undetectable simply because the entire financial system is buried from view are very different things. (I would say).

Hello Debora

I also read through your post and appreciate your points which are clearly made in good faith so I'll respond in kind.

Without going through it point by point, I understand that you think that any form of service oriented functional diversity in a cryptocurrency network amounts to "centralisation" by the definition you cite, and is therefore "bad".


What you've done here is start with your conclusion (centralisation) and worked back to the hypothesis. If you do that with almost any aspect of modern information systems you’ll get a “result”.

Lets be specific. A single Dash wallet may use several, randomly selected network peers (running exactly the same daemon) to provide it with a ‘service’. In the specific context that that one node depends on those other nodes to deliver the service, then there is some interdependency which you are free to interpret as you see fit. If you call it “centralisation” then you must at the same time dismiss any kind of service oriented functional diversity in the network as such. I’d see that as the “functional” aspect of the debate.

As far as the ‘structural’ aspect goes (the network composition), it’s academic. The network is in no way, shape or form centralised because no recourse to a central authority is required to operate a deamon in a service capacity (with ‘masternode=1’ in its config) and their function is reproducable as many times as you like. Nor can they be characterised as centralised by their hosting profile. Regardless of the hosting service, nodes remain functionally independent and secured by coin collateral. You can’t “take over” a masternode without having access to the private key that collateralises it. Even Vertoe himself endorsed this view:



https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=939072.msg10344491#msg10344491

What he alluded to as “centralised” was the fact that that the project has a lead dev who is probably irreplaceable. Well I won’t argue with that - at least in terms of his ideas - but I’m happy to accept it and take the risk for now as long as he looks both ways when he’s crossing the road.


Fair enough. I’m happy to accept that there’s something distinct there, but all I’m aware of is viewkeys and a database to hold the blockchain bloat. The problem here - at least for an investor - is that Cryptonote is a tiny market thats getting ever more crowded and my ‘off-the-shelf” remark refers to the fact that all the players subscribe to a common approach. For example here comes Bytcoin with a spanking new GUI wallet, the lack of which XMR holders have lamented for the best part of a year, but the anon-tech is stock.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1008146.msg10939927#msg10939927


There is a much bigger point at stake here than what your alluding to.

A financial system is inherently a public asset. It is at once an economic continuum and a collection of private interests that have to be protected. The revolution of Bitcoin was to bring it into the open while anonymising its participants which it has done with incredible success (to see that, try tracing any of the heists that have taken place). People love the ecosystem of blockchain analysis tools, transparency, sense of participation and simultaneous preservation of their financial anonymity. It is the “holy grail” of money and it isn’t going away now that it’s “out there”.

What we don’t need IMO is to throw that entire revolution down a cryptographic black hole and send ourselves back to the dark ages - specially in the name of “disempowering the “elite”. Make no mistake, the “elite” will find it far easier to usurp a system where nobody can see anything than one who’s mechanics can be observed by everyone, that’s in the ‘ownership’ of everyone and that’s statistically accountable to everyone.

What bitcoin is missing is the ‘cash drawer’ metaphor that optimises its fungibility and protects anonymity at the same time. You don’t make an electronic monetary media more fungible by making it “invisible”. To be fungible, cash has to be visible otherwise what’s the point ? A viewkey that only lets you see a single address is ok for that one person, but you can’t run a financial system on that basis. If it's decentralised and free of counterparties (a banking system) then the economy as a whole has to be able to see it and audit it.

I’ve heard the arguments about cryptography vs Dash’s mixing algos and - although I accept that cryptography can do a better job of ”hiding” a transaction -  they don’t convince me as to their practical merits because; A) the practical difference in detectability is so marginal and B) they always compare 1 single pass of cryptographic ‘protection’ with a single pass of mixing which is totally unrealistic and always works in the Cryptonote’s favour. The reality is that in an open system with pre-emptive mixing the entire coin supply is being continually anonymised in the background. This IMO does justice to the twin objectives that Bitcoin had of an open, publicly accountable and owned financial system, combined with optimal preservation of its participant’s privacy.

That is what I meant by “legacy compliant”. The ability to take advantage of mobile wallet tech, commercial API’s and reporting tools are a handy bonus.


Again - I don't doubt that they are all interested in crypto. I just don't see anyone who's a full time dev turning out core new features month after month. I see people who are either full time marketing or may "dip into the code" now and again. I don't know that to be categorically the case - I'm just saying what it looks like so happy to be corrected, but maintaining a code base is a very different skill to developing original work.

When I first bought my monero on the old cryptonote exchange I used a crappy old command line wallet to download it. That was the first “hint” I had that this project wasn’t ’very customer oriented’ and lacked developmental capacity. When I came back 9 months later I still had to use that thing and, despite what the websites say, getting simplewallet to run on a Mac under Terminal is murder - even if your a coder. What I was expecting was something like this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1008146.msg10939927#msg10939927

That roadmap at least alludes to some basic, user-oriented principles and adoption-oriented priorities (difficult to deliver on) as opposed to a load of downloaded academic quotes, graphics and theories (easy to deliver on).


I’m passionate about most of the tech in crypto - even cryptonote beleive it or not. What prompted me to contribute in the ‘tribal warfare’ of late was that I’d had enough of the Monero core team crawling over every thread that discussed Dash for the last 3 months and smothering any constructive discussion with a stream of emotive terms such as “broken”, “scam” and “fail” while incessantly maligning a perfectly good dev for being “incompetent” and even “fraudulent”. It’s been a campaign of defamation which has bordered on a witch hunt at times and is odious to watch.

Another reason the wars and mud slinging is unnecessary is because, as I’ve described above, it’s an apples and pears product comparison like Concorde fans berating 747 fans for being too slow. The real comparison gets totally lost (which may be their intention) and that is:

[1] - an open, transparent financial system that’s accountable to both the individual and the collective economy VS a closed one who’s only observable facet is a single account by a single individual

[2] - functional diversification of cryptocurrency networks into service oriented architectures VS mono functional, high redundancy ones

You pays your money and takes your choice. I don’t mind which one you pick, but if someone tries to convince me that the choice is between a “broken” and “working” architecture when the reality is much more profound, then I can only assume they’re trying to disguise the poverty of their own offering.

What you folks don't seem to realise is that it doesn't matter. It's a minority tech. The time to push it was 18 months ago when there was a genuine challenge on Bitcoin's technical approach (i.e. when your dev team was busy flogging mining furniture, writing pizza reviews and generally having this whole agenda pass them by).

Now priorities have consolidated. The whole world's tooling up with Bitcoin tech, APIs, hardware wallets, mobile features, explorers - you name it and your gonna turn up at the party with.....Cryptonote !  

If formula one teams used 'cryptonote' logic they'd turn up with a double decker bus and extra fuel tanks then trash all the other teams for having 'crap' cars that needed a pit stop.  

Aren't you the guy that thinks that if I dump a lorryload of sand in your garden it'll have more market liquidity than a bar of gold ?

You folks sure are ubiquitous - hovering over the Dash thread on a hair trigger for the slightest hint of challenge to your pet tech.

Where is always is. At 3-5 times the cap of your value-added-free, trainspotting sh*tcoin  

Actually - I’m wrong. After an entire year of development you are about to get “something”….


A database ! Nice Wonder what you need that for. Value added services ?



...ah. Silly question. No worries, maybe next year santa-pony will bring you an upgrade to this piece of junk, since after your "nice" rise a few more people are going to be running into it



...then again, maybe not  

Hey - don't be too hard on him. he does make the odd good point....


....absolutely. Some things are beneath even you (now that your part of 'the community')

r.o.t.f.w.l.  !!

Icebreaker: "I'll stop trolling you if you give me money" 

Then in the Monero thread he's on his knees "please give us a GUI wallet"....



P.S. The reason you can't get your wallet mate is that that would require coding and there's no development capacity in that project - there never was. It's run by journalists and businessmen with a second hand codebase and off the shelf anon. Value added no existe. So feel free to keep trolling on my account as I think I know where the real "scam" is and your the one on the end of it  

Dash and XMR are not comparable in their objectives.

One is implementing a functionally diverse form of decentralisation that is going to manage everything from anonymity to network quality control and performance while the other is no more than an an off-the-shelf technology for 'hiding transactions' shared by 20 other projects.

One is compliant with the entire bitcoin legacy commercial infrastructure and APIs, the other isn't (whatever you think the merits of that are). One works like Bitcoin with recognisable procedures for managing blockchain addresses, transmitting funds, the other still doesn't even have a cross platform GUI wallet.

One is the original anonymous-money project and is now consolidating and advancing the whole feature set, of which pre-emptive anonymisation is only one. The other is a one trick pony that will be banging the same drum for its existence in months and years to come.

One has a dev who adds value to the project day in day out according to a clearly defined roadmap that gets delivered on consistently. It's hard to know if the other has any devs at all.

As I pointed out in another thread, Dash is now starting to deliver the fruits of it's dual layer, service-oriented approach (they will be many) in the latest release which implements decentralised quality minimums for the network.

This is *proper* decentralisation folks - functional diversification. Not reproducing the same mono-dimensional robot operation a million times (thats called redundancy). The first ever cryptocurrency network that is going to check itself for quality and performance standards on an ongoing basis. (What flight computers do for example).

Although that's a pretty mundane feature from a user's point of view, it's the type of stuff that makes a network useable and practical which has been one of the highest priorities for the Dash project since its inception = 'make it useable'.



Enjoy !