LOL you guys. Well it was pretty much guaranteed this old troll thread would be revived when the Monero price went up a little.

Have fun with your little games. I'm pretty sure 100% of the people here know damn well there is no astroturfing. A Monero developer got upvoted on a thread about a Monero supporting service. Obvious astroturfing! Wow, such evidence!

There is no precedent for that. Property of all kinds involved in various illegal activities and most especially the drug trade is routinely seized, auctioned, and the new owner gets a clear title.

Returning could possibly be argued, if there was no evidence that was part of illegal activity (I understand there was some small amount of legal trade on SR). That would of course only be a tiny minority of cases. But there is no precedent for destroying otherwise ordinary property that is otherwise legal to own (as opposed to illegal drugs for example). Seize and sell is the norm.

I have no strong opinion the feasibility of tainting, whitelisting, etc. but putting that aside I certainly believe the government can seize tainted, partially tainted, etc. coins and sell them as clean untainted, whitelisted, whatever coins under existing law.

It is written into the law that seizure auctions clean the title, same as with seized cars, houses, etc. If anything that might be one reason for strong interest in these auctions. If you are a buyer with repetitional concerns the only two ways to buy known untainted coins are from a government auction or direct from a (reputable and verifiable) miner.

Okay talk about how it compares then. That's certainly valid.

Icebreaker doesn't work for Monero or even with Monero (we do have various conributors and people who work closely with us besides the core team, but he's not one of them). It's not reasonable to think that just because he likes Monero that we get to tell him what to do right?

I can ask him to not spam Monero stuff over there (and he'll see this post so, icebreaker, consider this such a request) but if he wants to comment about DRK on the DRK thread that is ultimately on-topic and his call.

The problem is, as I explained above, this is all conjecture. It certainly could be true, and it could also be false. There is simply no way to ever know, so the present this as fact in the DRK FAQ or here is misleading, ultimately overstating the facts, and therefore fraudulent.

I don't even think the distribution necessarily matters as long as the same people are in charge. They are personally accountable for what happened under their watch, even if (it is a big if because I don't necessarily believe it) "the coins have been redistributed."

With a clean break, new leadership, etc. maybe. Otherwise all this talk about "redistribution" is just smoke and mirrors to obfuscate and minimize the scam (and it therefore becomes part of an ongoing scam)


That doesn't explain the ambush launch when he promised to test more (which it clearly needed) and then launch in a few days. Actual launch: with bugs, three hours later

Again, there are possible innocent explanations for all of this, but you really have to ask yourself whether it is more likely all these "good reasons" or "mistakes" or "misjudgments" that just happened to benefit the instaminers might have not been just a crazy coincidence after all. To me there is enough of a question here to raise serious alarms.


The whole equivalence with Bitcoin is absurd for so many reasons, some of which I've already covered, but just factually Evan was solo mining DRK in the first hour. There was no pool mining at all, everyone mining (though it seems likely it was pretty much just him and maybe a few friends) was solo mining. Within minutes he offered someone 5000 DRK to compile it for Windows.

AlexGR please be polite and take it to the other thread, unless there is some relationship to Monero. It's valid to respond when comments are made here but the entire discussion doesn't have to happen on an OT thread. If this were the DRK thread and we were talking all about Monero for multiple pages that would off topic too right?

Looks like your blockchain file got corrupted during shutdown. You should download a new one, the link is in the first post of this thread.

Yes good point I will work on that. There is nothing on my post that is speculation except what I label as such afaik.

Agree

If you don't mind please move your comment to the other thread I noted above, as this is not directly relevant to Monero any more.

Just so you know, zero comments on this topic have been removed from the Monero Speculation thread (forum mods are welcome to confirm), and in fact very few posts have been removed ever; every single one has been noted with a moderator comment. I strive for 100% transparency and open debate. Thank you for asking.

BTW, the decision not to moderate this thread was deliberate. Opposing views welcome (and expected).

[DISCLAIMER: see disclaimer of conflict of interest at the bottom]

Sigh, I'm a bit tired of seeing the same talking points from the DRK FAQ, etc., but just once I will respond because I think in general AlexGR you are pretty sincere.

You are missing the point.

Quote: "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud"
  -- Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Antifragile; credit to opennux for the quote).

First of all, on the matter of redistribution:

DRK/dash supporters frequently claim that the instamine happened but it "doesn't matter" any more because the coins have been redistributed. This is repeated in the DRK FAQ along with several other unsupported statements about who does or does not own certain quantities of coins. However, these statements are at best supposition, as it isn't possible whether it actually happened as claimed.

The problems is, you don't know 90% of what happens in the markets. You can say "coins traded at such a price" but you don't know who was on each side of that trade. If I were trying to legitimize my instamine, the first thing I would do is trade it around, move the coins between wallets, and generally create an appearance of redistribution. To contend that there are not pump groups, whale groups, shady coin developers and others who engage in manipulative and sham trading of altcoins is absurd to the point of ridiculous. This is not the New York Stock Exchange (even there, you probably shouldn't trust everything you see). There is simply no way to know that didn't happen or if it did how much of the activity it represents. This applies at both low prices and high prices.

I will grant that if the coins were traced to a theft at Mintpal and then dumped, that was probably actual redistribution; I don't think the Mintpal scammer was tied to the DRK instamine scam (but you never know with these things; scammers gonna scam). But at best that was a minority of the instamine (and wouldn't early instaminers and other adopters logically have had their in masternodes by then?)

Now I agree it is certainly fair to say that the coins might have been redistributed or could have been redistributed. I would not object to that at all.

But to continue to present this as fact (in the FAQ and frequently used as a talking point by dark supporters) is unsupportable and effectively fraudulent.

In addition, the DRK FAQ claims that the 2 million coin instamine happened over 48 hours, and this talking point is also frequently repeated by DRK supporters.  However, this grossly understates the severity of the instamine, and perhaps paints a picture of a short mining period over which outsiders could still realistically decide whether or not to participate.

In fact:

1. Within the very first hour over 500,000 coins were mined

2. Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mined, which is most of the instamine.

On the matter of the instamine itself, to focus on the amount of the instamine and the subsequent disposition of the coins is to ignore a whole host of extremely deceptive and arguably fraudulent practices that surrounded it:

3. That Evan misled people into thinking that the launch would not happen for days (and specifically "definitely" not in "hours"), then it happened in a few hours, late at night in the US and during the early morning hours in Europe. Considering the >500K coins mined in the very first hour alone, the effect of this "ambush" was enormous.

4. That the stated reason for delaying the launch for days was to do more testing and fix bugs. Yet when the coin was lunched it still had a "serious error." Why was the rushed ambush launch done in this manner?

5. That Evan withheld information about the purpose, features, and goals of he coin development until after the instamine was complete. It was absolutely impossible for you to have any reason to mine this coin unless your strategy was to mine 100% of new coins that were launched, you just happened to stumble into it, you were friends with Evan, or you were Evan. In effect it turns the instamine into a premine, because the coins were mined before the coin was properly announced.

6. That various changes have been made to rewards, etc. multiple times., always in the direction of reducing/restricting/locking up supply, to the benefit of existing holders. The latest version of this is masternode payments, which look very much like a HYIP (a form of financial fraud which attracts new investors by offering high yields to the benefit of earlier investors)

7. Renaming the coin has been proposed by Evan and then later later implemented to reduce attention on instamine, the previous withholding of information, the manipulation, and the misleading and deceptive statements that occurred in connection with the previous name(s).

Now it is possible all of this was an accident. If so, you are asking us to believe in a string of extraordinary coincidences all apparently (by sheer luck) benefiting the same party or parties.

If it is instead not all an "accident" then it is evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of the person or persons still involve with running the project. That is certainly relevant and troubling information, even if the nature of circumstantial evidence (even strong circumstantial evidence) is that it can't be 100% proven. Things might be different if there were a complete and transparent change of leadership (as for example with BitMonero->Monero, and probably some other coins). But that is not the case. The person (assuming, not necessarily with certainty, that he acted alone) responsible for everything reported above is still there.

None of this proves it was not an accident, but given the fairly strong circumstantial case, I'm going to not only stay away, but advise other people to stay away.

AlexGR further claims that the instamine was okay "because satoshi did it too" or that "satoshi solomined" (paraphrases), a frequent defense of various premine/instamine/fastmine/ninjamine scams. That is a fairly absurd justification, even if it were a valid equivalence in this particular case, but it is not. Let's review (using the numbers above):

1. The rate of Bitcoin mining followed the published schedule. There were no extra coins mined at the beginning (in fact I think some of the early blocks were quite slow). It took 2-3 months to mine 500K coins, not one hour

2. It took the better part of a year to mine 1.5 million BTC, not 8 hours.

3. The Bitcoin launch was announced well ahead of time, the code was reviewed by several people who help finish it, and it happened on schedule. No misleading statements were made about the time of the launch. "Many people" are reported to have mined during the first several thousand blocks. Certainly many mined over the following months as well.

4. There were indeed bugs in the code, and some mined coins were even lost to fix them, but none of this involved a "serious error" right after launch when an enormous number of coins were mined.

5. satoshi did not withhold information about the features and goals of the project. He engaged in a detailed and extended discussion about how it would work and what it was attempting to accomplish before it was launched.

6. No changes were made as satoshi made it clear that to have legitimacy as a decentralized system, the parameters needed to be "set in stone"

Furthermore it isn't even true that satoshi was the only one or one of only a few mining in the early days of Bitcoin. "Many other people" were mining in the first several thousand blocks, according to gmaxwell.

One more thing to add. The part of this that is (probably) fraudulent is not that Evan got a lot of coins, its that it was held out (and in many ways continues to be held out) as a public open distribution process, when in reality what happened was in effect more of a premine (see items above esp. #6), and I believe at this point that was very likely the intent. If he had forthrightly presented it as a premined coin, one might think that was a bad idea, but there would be no claim of probable fraud, at least not by me. I've never claimed that an openly premined coin was a fraud (maybe a bad idea, maybe something that should be relaunched sans premime, but not a fraud if done honestly).

DISCLAIMER: I am a Monero core team member and I do not deny a conflict of interest. Nevertheless I endeavor to be factual and I suggest that readers consider the facts, check the facts, reach your own conclusions about what happened and how it matters today, and finally to avoid the temptation to attack the person stating the facts or the coin(s) with which he might be associated]

EDIT: add disclaimer, various typos, writing cleanups, reformatting, add references.



References

Run 3 threads (the formula is L3 cache divided by 2 MB). 7 is much too high. 3 will probably give you the best performance, less system load and less heat. If it is still hot you can reduce to 2.

Get a utility that reports your CPU temperature and if it gets too high then stop mining, but this shouldn't be an issue if you don't have the vents blocked or something. Once you cut threads you may find the fans quiet down, which is a good indication of reduced heat.

Adam still posts, he posted an update on a ring signature cryptographic scheme yesterday: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=972541.msg10842017#msg10842017

Here's their repo: https://github.com/Blockstream

As I said I was speaking generally and just pointing out some of the complications. It's also true that some of us are available on different schedules, have varying commitments, etc. so in some cases this could very well work. I was sort of agreeing with both of you, not one or the other. It depends.

I appreciate your efforts to brainstorm on funding ideas and I hope my comments are not seen as discouragement or rejection because it wan't intended that way.

Thank you for reminding me of that quote, it certainly fits. One of my favorite authors and thinkers.

Speaking in general terms here, its pretty hard for someone to give up ongoing current employment for a commitment of only three months of pay. Some people in some circumstances might be able to take a leave of absence or something and then have a job to go back to, but in general that doesn't really work unless people are by nature temporary workers or the like. Without a big chunk of funding to actually hire people ongoing (at least a year say) you are ultimately stuck with "available time" for the most part.

Its logically more relevant to speculation given that the coins trade on the same markets, sometimes move together, sometimes opposite, and the future prospects of both coins are in some sense related to the other. I don't see how you can discuss speculation without that.

It doesn't directly relate to technology development or use of the coin itself to discuss other coin except as direct feature comparison maybe. I don't have a problem with responses to issues already discussed here though; no reason to be one sided about it. If you were showing up cold and spamming about DRK that would be different.

Cool video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqNGW0oOXE4

child_harold: the blue one is shadow, okay?

Giving one's opinion on a topic of relevance is not being a "moral crusader". Labeling someone who does is really not an effective response. Though I'd also say the documented facts (as opposed to opinion) such as those I laid out a few posts back aren't as well known as you suggest. I would guess you didn't even know those, right?

Note by the way, that I have never said that DRK is a bad investment, short term at least.