Happy New Year DRKers! We're now in 2015 down here in Sydney (and we just had the most awesome fireworks display over Sydney Harbour to welcome it in). May the year bring much that's good and useful. The very best to you all.

Edit: added a couple of pictures

Yes, good job Onetime. It's great to see people being enthusiastic and producing content like this.

I agree with YourMother though, the "sell job" factor is pretty high. I think we need to be very careful in making statements like (at 3:23) "running your own masternodes pays a guaranteed lucrative return". It's certainly not guaranteed nor assured to be "lucrative" as DRK (and all crypto) could completely tank at any time and the continued gradual decline of BTC's price doesn't auger well in the short term. However, I understand what you're trying to convey and how you're attempting to reach new people that don't know about Darkcoin and for that you should be commended.

The other section of the video which continues to be of concern to me is how sound bites from Ron Paul's interview have been selected to avoid the parts where he mentions Bitcoin, making it appear, because of the way it immediately follows the Bloomberg segment, he's talking about Darkcoin. I just think this is lacking in integrity. From the original Fox Business video the full sentence he's saying (at 6:18) is "If Bitcoin is out there and gold is out there it can be a participant in bringing down the dollar". There's no reason why you can't include that whole sentence to avoid a manipulative edit, otherwise you're misleading the viewer into believing Ron Paul has made positive comments about Darkcoin when he clearly hasn't.

Darkcoin.

I have been following the developer and his very clear commitment to the project all year. It sits above all the hubris and hyperbole that characterises the comments typical on a thread like this and I think it's eventually likely to become far more mainstream than any other alt.

Sorry lonecrouton but that is the sort of answer I'd expect from some arrogant young punk on a support line somewhere. Perhaps you're being sarcastic?

I'm waving the "hey guys if we want to see wider adoption this thing has to be lifted up out of technobabble speak" flag and your "simple" response is just more technobabble.

I'll ask again. Is there a plain-English guide to some of these commands that explains what they achieve and what the best practise is to ensure you're not going to lose your coins?

Yes I understand it's not so complex. I'm religiously backing up my wallet.dat, saving it in multiple locations and have it protected by a complex password. I guess my main concerns are that if someone not particularly technical is reading this thread and sees so much complexity when a competent user like xxxgoodgirls goes to move 1005 DRK, performs a basic test first by sending 1 DRK (which is successful) then follows through with the 1004 balance and it all turns to crap, it's hardly assuring. Six pages of intense interaction later and it's resolved (thank goodness; good work everyone) but people who aren't inclined to get that down and dirty into the guts of everything are just going to perceive it's techo-territory, very risky something will go terribly wrong and not a real product yet.

I agree the 2FA will make a huge difference and substantially mitigate the risk of having your coins stolen. And I think the virtual randomly-place-key keyboard would be a great feature too.

Is there a guide somewhere that explains what "dumpprivkey" actually does? It's mentioned here in this thread again and again but I've never seen any real explanation of what this achieves, why it's important and how it helps protect you. I'd really like to see more plain-English explanations of these various functions and how to maintain best practise with wallets re hot and cold storage, paper, etc.

I absolutely love Darkcoin and all the people that make up this community, but reading through all that's just happened to xxxgoodgirls and what stonehedge went through with the hack he suffered recently one would have to come to the conclusion that managing your locally stored Darkcoin is far from certain and assured. It's alarming to me that substantial amounts of value can be lost so easily and with such accompanying confusion that entraps even very experienced people.

Until the retention and securing of coins in wallets can be lifted up and out of this level of technical confusion and need for extreme (almost forensic) troubleshooting, Darkcoin is NOT going to be used by regular people. To read through pages and pages of someone battling to understand where their thousands of $ have gone and finally admitting defeat is terrible (so sorry for your loss xxx; l sure hope something gets resolved and you can retrieve your DRK somehow).

This really is an aspect of crypto that will prevent many people from getting involved (read: virtually everyone who is outside of these levels of technical ability which is 99.9%), We really need to spend a whole lot more time and effort on firming up wallet apps and infrastructure if Darkcoin is to be taken seriously as the potential to inexplicably lose all your DRK is very real.

Potentially yes (depending on the resources of the Darkcoin Foundation to try and restrict someone back-filling the hole left). And that is another reason why there's considerable risk associated with changing the name.

I agree with you Oblox (and enjoy all your posts too). The "Darkcoin's all about anonymity, but wait, it also now does InstantX which is a game changer!" is confusing if we start pushing InstantX as the main feature to facilitate wide-spread adoption. You're 100% right about mainstream adoption being off the table with the name Darkcoin; it's just never going to get up. The mere mention of the "dark net" or "dark markets" is a complete and total turn off for the mainstream. People who occupy the world of nine to five, regular income, stock-standard finances and bank accounts/credit cards will have about as much interest in a thing called Darkcoin as they will with Silkroad; they're just not going to have anything to do with it. So Darkcoin will initially be addressing the darker side of human financial transaction activity. And while I'm not at all comfortable to be marketing it this way (and frankly each time I hear someone getting all excited about how the drugs, gambling and porn industries "will just love it" it makes me feel even less attracted to it) I think the natural uptake in these realms will bolster Darkcoin and give it a huge leg up. Then, if we keep pushing for clarity that Darkcoin is about privacy as a human right, eventually the concept that, just because it's used by people doing illegal things doesn't mean it's "bad" in the same way that the US dollar is used by people doing illegal things yet it's not considered bad, will start to dawn on people and there'll be less worry about it.

There's a big fight brewing over privacy and the big guns (like what we saw from the MasterCard exec talking down crypto in his Youtube video) are going to attempt to convince the public that cash is bad and only the big financial institutions have the legitimacy and appropriate tools. During this mindset war, Darkcoin (with it's outrageously in-your-face name that describes exactly what its about) is likely to become the poster-child of what/why financial privacy is so important and it will be attacked on every front as being "badder than bad". I think its name will (over the very long term) be an asset but we're going to go through hell first.

The alternative is to completely re-brand but I think that's actually far riskier and I can't see what that pathway genuinely entails that will result in it having any specific edge. InstantX maybe, but that's a hell of a big unknown i.e. we really don't know if it's going to be "a few seconds" or 20 to 30 seconds or potentially longer once it's deployed for POS applications in the field. If InstantX still requires 30 seconds or so to confirm that's way longer than current credit cards can provide and it won't be acceptable (think about a long line of customers at the checkout at Walmart; 30 seconds for each customer where they're probably currently getting around 5 seconds adds long delays; retailers won't accept it).

Good discussion (and yes, the "fanboy" element worries me too).

It's not so much about "sticking to our roots" Tao, it's about the name's ability to instantly (InstantXly?) define that Darkcoin addresses the entire realm of ever increasing  government and big business incursion into the financial transactions of everyone. Its name is an immediate differentiator to Bitcoin and sets it apart from virtually everything else. While many people are very worried about the name's almost total (in perception) connection to the world of nefarious human activity, that's one way of defining the word "dark" and doesn't mean it will always be seen this way. The name carries connotations that are both positive and negative.

I've voted to keep it as Darkcoin; I don't think it could have a better name that ruffles feathers so much and gives it such an edge. There just isn't another name that comes close to cutting  through rhetoric and making it clear as to exactly what it achieves. So many businesses won't touch it, but many others will and as attitudes to the "I'm from the government. I'm here to help" assurance start to wane towards the realisation this is often a facade, there'll be greater widespread understanding as to what anonymity is really all about and the lights will start to come on in people's thinking.

Darkcoin; forever Dark!

I've read every post and response on this. I can understand your concern wozzek23 but I do think you're failing to comprehend some of the key aspects of Darkcoin's economic architecture. You're speaking and hypothesising from the basis of a notion that coins are "rapidly disappearing" because of their use in MN's. As has been pointed out, they're not "locked up", they're simply reserved for the MN they're associated with. They can be removed from that situation and in back in circulation within seconds, so in essence they've never been taken out of circulation. There's a balance between people selling their DRK for gain and people holding their DRK for potential greater gain and/or MN income. The various pressures/forces involved keep things in relative order. When adoptions starts approaching something more akin to prime time, we'll see the MN numbers rise and fall as people make their own interpretations of risk/reward. I think the economic architecture is pretty sound.

I think you're also getting strung up on whole amounts of DRK versus DRK divided down into it's 8 decimal places. As per Tao's tweet just now, Darkcoin will eventually consist of a total of 21,000,000,000,000,000 units. That's really how it needs to be looked at. Liquidity will be fine because any single DRK is in fact 100,000,000 duffs and there are coins being added every day through the mining process.

It's an important discussion though and I think it was good you've raised it.

Incredibly interesting concepts in that Ted talk; thanks for posting it.

Here's another aspect of the challenge of getting the many billions of unconnected people connected that's also very interesting.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/29/peering-into-the-minds-of-the-4-3-billion-unconnected/

It's going to take many intelligent people with great levels of empathy to work through this and come up with solutions.

Great work Tante! I'm just a little disappointed the gnome didn't get involved too.

Just one minor point: At 2:20 you talk about removing the tar.gs file extension of the zipped linux file. I would be surprised if you have to do this. I use Express Zip and it just unzips them fine as they are. Maybe try that to see if removing the extensions is a redundant step.

And perhaps you should put the name of your hubby's book into the YouTube comment field on the video so people can find it.

My vote is for Evan Duffield from Darkcoin.

Evan would have to be one of the brightest, most innovative and creative developers within the crypto world to date. His understanding of the need for anonymity and privacy, and the deeply fundamental aspects these attributes hold for the future of society is the driver behind his extraordinary development work on Darkcoin. He's held with tremendously high regard by the many members of the Darkcoin community. His commitment to Darkcoin's integrity, sustainability and future success appears to know no end. I've been following his work from the beginning and he embodies the leadership qualities the crypto-currency movement needs in order to be taken seriously and attract the type of investment that will be required to see broad adoption. I really appreciate his honest no-hype approach to the project.

(PS - I've been on BCT since early 2014. I don't contribute that often but have written over 300 posts. I don't really understand what "activity" is here on BCT versus "posts". At 300+ posts I hope my vote can be included)

That one was an absolute classic. But all of these examples of closed minded people not realising the unlimited extent of human ingenuity and how technology transforms sit in the shadow of this all-time visionary's far-sighted prediction:

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." — Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

Clicked on lyrics link.
Elevator appeared in lounge room wall and doors slid open.
I couldn't resist and stepped in.
Doors snapped shut and it started going down quickly.
Stopped suddenly and seems to be stuck between floors.
Was just told via internal intercom "it's not stuck it just takes eternity to get there....welcome to purgatory. Please enjoy the music while you wait"
Guess what's playing...

A few hours ago my MN received the biggest payment I've had to date 2.403 DRK. Great to see the payments working so well.

wozzek that is the most torturous "music video" I think has ever been made. I left it running for a little while, moving the slider an hour along every minute or so to see what sort of effect it had on me. After a minute I started believing the walls of the room were closing in on me. After a couple of minutes I started unconsciously chewing the lounge chair arm off. After several minutes I realised it wasn't the lounge chair arm I'd been chewing and I'd have to now become left-handed. As I moved the slider to 9:59:00 to see if there was some sort of grand ending, I started thinking the Trololo guy was the sexist man alive. I've only just managed to extricate myself from almost going comatose. Don't ever post that again.

Wow, that song and film clip seems to have been custom made for what's happening here. Revolution indeed!

I feel like I'm in the wrong thread lately. Who's CoinHumper illodin?

Good grief!!!

Good f~^*ing grief!!!

Shojayxt I simply cannot believe you are running this line!!! FFS of all the people to be talking like this!!!

Have you completely forgotten all the unbelievably disgusting, regrettable, nasty and obnoxious posts you've written in this and other threads!!!

You wrote this only in July...


...and it's just one of dozens and dozens that you've written. There are others that are so disgusting, so appallingly foul mouthed and abusive/aggressive  I simply cannot believe you are now suggesting a "coordinated attack" on YOU.

Go back and read the pages and pages of revolting posts and attempts to rubbish Darkcoin and everyone involved with it that YOU wrote and then come back and tell us all it's all about everyone else and not you (and we will then know you are certifiably insane).

At a minimum you, WHO HAS BEHAVED SO ABOMINABLY, could (as I've previously suggested) apologise to this community you have abused and rubbished so badly.

Unbelievable hypocrisy!