rigor: a sudden feeling of cold with shivering accompanied by a rise in temperature, often with copious sweating, especially at the onset or height of a fever.

rigour: the quality of being extremely thorough and careful.

/editwar

It's that time again, here are two drafts for the press release for open source. Kudos to Tungfa, David, Minotaur, Vertoe, & others for this.

This is for the more technical audience. The short release for mainstream audience is already out and done.

Please tell us which version you think we should go with, and if you spot any fixes we need to make or things that you feel strongly should be reworded. This is planned to go live fairly soon so we don't plan on doing any major rewrites at this stage.

[Edit: rigors -> rigours]
[Edit: we know https://darkco.in/instant-tx doesn't currently work]
_______________________________________________

Tungfa Version >1

Darkcoin Solves Bitcoin Privacy Challenges; Releases Open Source Code

Darkcoin is designed to ensure financial privacy by making it virtually impossible to trace a transaction back to its source. This is accomplished with a key piece of technology called Darksend, which works by mixing up the digital fingerprints of the user's coins. Darksend’s technology is based on the Masternode Network, currently 900+ Servers spread around the world (Decentralized) and maintained by DRK supporters.

Darksend was developed as a closed-source technology while the kinks were worked out and bugs were squashed. Following last Monday's release of the newest version of Darkcoin, called RC5, the developers of Darkcoin are confident that their software is ready to meet the rigours of mainstream use and has opened the Darksend source code. Darkcoin is now the first fully open-source cryptocurrency with financial privacy built directly into the software.

Open-sourcing of a financial software such as Darkcoin is vitally important. It allows people to be confident that their financial privacy is protected and leads to increased confidence in the quality and performance of the software. Furthermore, the community can go through the code and improve it, as has been done over the years with Bitcoin.

The core developer of Darkcoin, Evan Duffield has also announced that Darkcoin has moved out of the beta stages of development and is ready to drop the "release candidate" label. Darkcoin is now considered ready for mainstream, real-world use.
Future updates to Darkcoin are expected every few months, and will include such things as an Instant Transaction system, described here: [https://darkco.in/instatn-tx], which will allow Darkcoin to compete with credit cards in terms of transaction speed. The release of Instant Transaction technology will also make Darkcoin the fastest-confirming cryptocurrency in the industry.

The Darkcoin client and more information can be obtained at our website:
http://www.darkcoin.io.

Media Contact: press@darkcoin.io
Future Press Releases: http://www.darkcoin.io/media.html
_______________________________________________

New Tungfa Version 2>

Darkcoin Solves Bitcoin Privacy Challenges; Releases Open Source Code

Darkcoin is a revolutionary new cryptocurrency which offers privacy at fast transaction speed. Four years ago, the mysterious and brilliant Satoshi Nakomoto developed a revolutionary piece of software called Bitcoin. In doing so, Satoshi created both a digital currency (so-called "cryptocurrencies" are decentralized and secured by cryptography, rather than by a government) and an inexpensive payment network. Bitcoin uses a decentralized financial ledger called a "blockchain" to keep track of everybody's balances and to transfer money from one bitcoin address to another.

Yet, Bitcoin has two shortcomings. First, because it operates on a ledger system, anybody can freely view the account balances and transaction history of other people. Secondly, the Bitcoin network takes up to an hour to transfer money and fully confirm it, which makes it less useful in day-to-day retail environments. Darkcoin has already solved the first problem, lack of privacy, and is rapidly advancing toward a solution of the second Bitcoin Issue, speed. Instant Transactions for DRK were announced by Evan Duffield for the next Release after Open Source Code.

Open-sourcing of a financial software such as Darkcoin is vitally important. It allows people to be confident that their privacy is protected and leads to increased confidence in the quality and performance of the software. Users can also easily inspect the code to ensure there are no vulnerabilities, backdoors, or the like. Furthermore, the community can go through the code and improve it, as has been done over the years with Bitcoin.

The core developer of Darkcoin, Evan Duffield, has also announced that Darkcoin has moved out of the beta stages of development and is ready to drop the "release candidate" label. Darkcoin is now considered ready for mainstream, real-world use. Future updates to Darkcoin are expected every few months, and will include such things as an Instant Transaction system, described here: [https://darkco.in/instant-tx]. Instant transactions will allow Darkcoin to compete with credit cards in terms of transaction speed. The release of Instant Transaction technology will also make Darkcoin the fastest-confirming cryptocurrency in the industry.

The Darkcoin client and more information can be obtained at our website:
http://www.darkcoin.io.

Media Contact: press@darkcoin.io
Future Press Releases: http://www.darkcoin.io/media.html

That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind!

Hoping it'll be Neil Armstrong.

Just an unofficial status check... by reply or PM whichever you prefer, how many Darkfans do we have who are good enough writers of a non-English language that they could do a high quality translation of a short semi-technical text such as a press release?

I wonder how the mintpal outage might affect the price if it continues through Monday and there's a surge in demand for Darkcoin.

I suspect it will reduce the supply far more than it reduces the demand. The asks currently on Mintpal wouldn't be able to stand in the way of a rise as they otherwise might, and many people who might be inclined to sell are likely to wait for Mintpal to get fixed, or wait to see how the scenario plays out, but if the buyers start to get worried about missing the train they'll just get it from whatever exchange they can, chasing whatever few Darkcoins are there. There'd be nothing to stop it going to the moon, at least briefly. But would it form an unstable bubble that will crash when Mintpal returns to normal, or stay fairly high after the jump?

Technically we can & still be within what Evan said, as there have been ten successive blocks where 9/10 of those blocks was fully compliant. (He didn't say how long it had to be at 90% for!)

That might be considered taking the piss by some, but the only reason it isn't consistently at 90% is that x11ltcbtccom are taking the complete and utter piss, so their opinion and interests can and should be discounted.

One thing to bear in mind though is that lots of media attention is about to be pointed at DRK, so possibly Evan is just holding off for a few days to avoid stories about crying orphans muddying the water when people are writing their articles.

I'd stay away from trading anything significant on mintpal for a bit. They've put V2 out live with facepalm-inducing bugs galore on the front end, I dread to think what bugs might lurk on the back end.

That was one of mine. Those 20% were just holding you back, you're better off without them.

Imagine a woman goes to a website to discreetly buy a pregnancy test. The site invites her to enter her email into a payment web form for a 10% discount.

Days later, at work, she overhears that she wasn’t considered for a promotion because they found out about the pregnancy test. Apparently a list of email addresses of customers who bought it is publicly accessible on the web, and searchable on Google. Anyone who knows her phone number can search and find out about her private affairs.

She confronts the company, and they laugh at her. They say that’s just how that particular web form works - it broadcasts all emails of customers and sellers entered into it to the world. They say it wasn’t their responsibility to warn her, and that if she’d taken the time to fully research and understand how that type of web form works before using it, she’d have known that purchases made with it could only be private if she used an email address not tied to her identity.

Is that fair? Shouldn’t the company have pointed this out when they presented the web form? Especially when there are other web forms they could have used that are perfectly capable of not broadcasting her secrets to the world.
_______________________________________________________________________________ _____

It’s sometimes easy to forget that many things about crypto are frequently not well understood by the general public. It needn’t matter when buying alpaca socks, but when it's a transaction where privacy matters the facts should be made clear. It’s well known that many users don’t understand that they’re broadcasting their financial activities to the world. By assuming that customers will just automatically know this, businesses are negligently exposing customers and clients to privacy risks.

Any business selling a product or service where privacy may be important, and accepting non-private crypto as payment, has an ethical obligation to clearly explain the implications of this for their customers' privacy.
_______________________________________________________________________________ _____

Do you agree, and if so, what would be the best way of getting the message across?

We would need to handle it carefully. Here’s what we don’t want to do:

• We don’t want hurt crypto or give people another reason to bash it. Non-private crypto is perfectly fine as long the businesses show due diligence in protecting customer privacy by ensuring they are being made aware of the implications. But at the same time, it’s good and right to highlight legitimate concerns and risks that customers & businesses face when using non-private cryptos. It’s about making sure customers are rightly informed of the issues and that alternatives exist.
• We don’t want to bring the law into it, except perhaps as a counterargument to FUD about the legal status of private crypto. Yes, business that ask customers to pay in non-private crypto without explaining the implications to clients/customers when there's a reasonable expectation of privacy may be recklessly exposing themselves to legal implications in some jurisdictions. And not even bad laws either, valuable laws that protect the privacy of ordinary citizens. But business owners with intelligence will figure that out themselves, we don’t need to play that card. It should be about honest, well informed trade between free citizens. It's ironic though how private cryptos have been repeatedly beaten over the head with allegations of illegality and nefariousness by some supporters of non-private cryptos, when in truth it's the other way around.

https://darkcointalk.org/threads/businesses-accepting-non-private-cryptos-should-explain-the-implications-to-customers.2491/

Indeed. When the Chinese shorts wake up and exit their shorts it'll drive the price up, then one after another the slower/dumber shorts will get squeeEEEEEeeezed and it'll force it up some more...

.

For your viewing pleasure... and if this doesn't make you want to run out and buy DRK then there's no hope for you - you may as well crawl to your central bank with your balls on a silver platter whining "please master, would you like them boiled or fried?"

http://econ.st/1BTuu8N

The next major update won't be "RC6", Darkcoin is soon to be released so no more release candidates. Future updates will be named by the community.

And the Darkcoin price has already tripled in value in the last five weeks.

That big dump coincided with an apparent masternode issue that was being discussed on darkcointalk, but the person has just confirmed that it's now all fine. So possibly someone overreacted and dumped thinking RC5 was broken, and is now hoping they can buy back at a reasonable price before the press release gets picked up.

[Edit: not even a big dump ]

I've voiced this on the relevant thread.

It's worth mentioning that our target isn't Bitcoin, it's the credit card companies and other dinosaurs of the legacy financial system. Darkcoin and Bitcoin are fundamentally on the same team, both fighting the good fight, and as we pass them in our charge towards the enemy we should look back and smile, and encourage them to try and keep up. Darkcoin was built on the shoulders of Bitcoin's past innovation, and Bitcoin will be energised by the rocket trails of Darkcoin's future innovation.

30-40% are probably Shojajxt sockpuppets.

As mentioned above 99% of the thanks goes to David, Vertoe, eu-Robert, & others, I just wanted to get that latest draft in front of lots of eyes so we could get it perfect & settled.