It's true I haven't done much coding since mid-90s or something... I played around a bit with mining software and stuff around '13-'14 for scrypt and x11, but other than that, no. Anyway 1.25 lines of code per hour seems totally absurd even with inherited code. After all, there are coins out there that build their anonymity systems from scratch. Their programming work should be valued in the tens of millions per this type of accounting

Just 1.25 lines of code per hour of work? Isn't that exceptionally slow?

This is a 4bn marketcap that could potentially be 40 or 400bn marketcap in the mid-to-long term. The cost of "controlling market perception" (and by extension => price) through multiple shills, a few paid articles etc, is peanuts in comparison.

If I read correctly, there was an effort to raise 200k USD for it? I really fail to see why this would require 200k USD (?)... Is it a "downsized" version? What am I missing?

Cloak was doomed since its inception when it announced ...anonymity through exchanges to ride the anon train.

Who in their right mind would take such a concept seriously, or the dev team behind it seriously? No matter what their future plans were, or their "POSA" and stuff, when you make an entry as a "clown", you can't be taken seriously.

Even at replacing 1% of Gold, it'd be 70bn marketcap. And chances of that are severely over 5%. Actually it's a pretty good bet that it'll happen, but people in countries with hard currencies cannot really understand why that will be.

For example, having the 'security' of USD or EUR (=being American or European), you tend to see BTC as irrelevant, while if your national currency is junk, you value BTC just as you would value hard-to-find-assets like gold and hard currencies. It's a concept that is very elusive to western minds / developed countries.

Even the apparent "stability" and boredom that makes traders cringe for the 250$ mark, may be a +20% gain for someone living in a country where their national currency is on a declining curve during the last months.

There is nothing mutually exclusive for people to both make money and coin adoption to take place. It's not binary 0 or 1.

There is a reason why "dark has been a good payer". It's called fundamentals.

There are two ways to make money here (excluding scams).

You can either trade the waves of low and high as a daytrader, or you can invest in the long-term.

Now if you are a daytrader, you treat everything like P&D... If you are a hammer, you treat everything as a nail.

But DRK came to fill a vacuum on privacy and fungibility - needs that do have a market. 13-14 months ago I foretold that the anonymous market will get at least 1% of the transparent coins marketcap, which back then was close to 8bn USD while DRK+ANC (the only two anon coins) were something like 2-3mn combined.

By May 2014 it had already occured (market cap for anonymous coins exceeding 1%), and we are still hitting the >1% of BTC's marketcap right now for anonymous coins (DRK+others).

When a market (anonymity / privacy) goes from zero % of the pie to even 1% of the pie, it has explosive growth potential (long-term). That's why 365 days ago DRK was 0.001 and now it's 0.017. Is it being adopted? Yes it is. It is #2 after BTC in some cryptocurrency betting sites and precious metal dealers. Can it go beyond that? Well... do bears shit in the woods?

Check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPAP

This is the Greek, ex-state owned (now privatized) monopoly on gambling.

The important stuff:

Revenue   €6.140 billion
Operating income €1.122 billion
Profit €1.021 billion

So just one gambling monopoly, of a small bankrupt country like Greece (10mn people), and it does in revenue twice the marketcap of ...BTC (!).

In order to ensure that money flows to this monopoly, the state is even banning IPs and DNSes of foreign sites, while also imposing severe financial penalties on players who play abroad. Penalties are also enforced against web pages for displaying promotional banners of foreign gambling companies. Players are also choked at the bank (when they will have to get their money back, after winning on a foreign gambling company). So money transmission of winnings is highly problematic when the bank must report to the state and the state has to fine you, say, 5000 euros.

Can you fathom what it means for cryptocurrencies when people start breaking free of these artificial restrictions? Crypto is the only available medium to do that right now. And gambling is just an example - it's just one market. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand the adoption potential and market cap implications.

So what are you saying here? That people should pay you a Masternode / 1000 DRKs to stop trolling?

Hmmm...

Highly inflationary altcoin curves create a hooking addiction, where you must constantly throw more money to bring yourself to a better cost-average price, as the supply inflates and price is pressured to go down.

Most investors don't have the pockets to chase their losses all the time, neither are they willing to constantly feed their investment to get to a lower and lower price / cost-averaging their way. So those who don't have the pockets lose out, and those who do chase the investment (kind of like gambling where you are chasing your losses), get a lot of coins and an unexpected size of investment on their part (they wanted to go with an X amount of BTCs and ended up doing 5-10X).

One must admit that there is a "hooking the investor and get tons of his BTCs" element in this type of emission scheme. Fairness, in this context, is problematic because the regular guy can't simply buy 10 coins and expect ROI when the market is flooded with new coins. So, in a sense, only the deep-pocketed whales can gain - and even them might lose quite a few if they are invested from the start. You need a very weird investment strategy on when to enter, in order to not lose money.

That's a proof-of-talent case, where investment is attracted for this reason alone. But it might help the investment case if there wasn't a 1mn bag of BTCs looming over. It would also help with some underground / anti-establishment guys if they were more comfortable that BTC is not an NSA-funded project or NWO-tool or a diversion from Gold/Silver investment (anti-fiat guys).

In a sense, despite the success of BTC, it could have been bigger.

Btw, I doubt Satoshi is really anonymous as far as the establishment goes. They are probably well aware of who he is.

If something *seems* legit but it isn't, it has the potential to scam people more money.

However this isn't about scamming anyone with SDC. Obviously there has been work done in the rings on a btc blockchain, so there's proof-of-talent so to speak. It's just that to the whale investors, it seems that a project has greater accountability when the devs are known and that's when they can invest more. Everyone profits indirectly as the price goes higher.

It's not a blocker if there's work going on that seems ok, even if the dev is unknown. It just increases the possible investment if people know him.

Case in point: Spreadcoin. DRK people kind of learned about two projects from the DRK thread. One was SDC due to the proposed merger (and many of us came here and invested a few coins) another one was Spreadcoin as Spreadcoin was the first one to try to clone DRK and evolve a bit on the code on some stuff. At some point the Spreadcoin dev found a bug in DRK and that gained the DRK communitys attention for investment.

Anyway, things were going well with Spread, price was rising and then the anonymous dev went AWOL, never to be seen again. Now it's on a community takeover status with price at 1/10th or something from the peak. It's kind of "reminder to self: Never go big with unknown devs"...

If DRK is to be used just for gambling purposes (so as to avoid the fungibility problems of BTC with "gambling money"), DRK should be able to take a couple % of the BTC marketcap - which is already quite heavy with gambling.

And I'm not even mentioning other uses... like...well... Dark Markets.

If a single dark market has like 130.000 BTCs / 1% of BTC marketcap, well... ok. Figure out the rest.

I wouldn't have a problem ideologically as long as the devs could be anonymous even from the authorities (think NSA-level resources). But since this is extremely hard or improbable to achieve, their anonymity is not really against the establishment, rather the ordinary people, forums, investors etc. And, when that happens, people are more hesitant to throw money in a project due to all the scams and fails that are way too numerous to mention.

Well, LTC was trending near 0.03 for quite a while, despite having 6x coins and a 10fold emission that required millions of dollars to absorb. DRK doing 0.03+ is nothing in comparison.

Theoretically it should but cryptsy is no indication due to the problematic wallet there.

I bought around the time of the SDC-DRK proposed merger and prices were around 0.00025... then they spiked a bit to 0.0003 and then dropped to 0.00015 or something... meanwhile DRK, which is a heavy-marketcap coin, moved to 4-5x (from 0.005 to 0.02-0.025) - so I'll need at least a 0.001 - 0.00125 price for SDC just to get what I'd get for buying DRKs (!) and much more than that to justify a proper gain. In theory it's always easier for a small marketcap coin to gain a lot, so it can happen.

One thing that DRK has working for it, is developer transparency with Evan being a known person. XC got a high marketcap, because ok it was one of the first marketed as a DRK-alternative, but it also had a dev whose name was known. If the dev is not just a nickname who might do something stupid and run away, it's easier to have trust and easier for funds to flow in.

The name simply changed from Darkcoin to DASH and a new wallet reflects the new name.

If block size is the same for DRK, and it produces 4 times more blocks per 10 minutes (due to block per 2.5m), it should already be at 4x in terms of max transactions per second compared to BTC.

But Evan is planning something even bigger than that, although it'll be an experimental concept to see if it actually works. If it does, he says that scaling will go to a whole different level (billions of transactions capacity).

Nachoig I said I'll refrain, but since you posted after that, I'll reply to this one and I'm out for good.


That's why you can't have both "back then" and retroactively applied reasoning.


Yes, I was talking about North...


Future miners mine a more precious coin, so it evens out.


Actual scams tend to have both victims and an economic size. "A scam of X size was perpetrated against Y parties". That's why I insist on these two. If there are no such identifiable variables, it is extremely hard to fit the "scam" profile.


Fairness is very, very relative. In this case we take Bitcoin as the standard-bearer and then compare others to it. But Bitcoin itself is not the fairest coin either: It did favor early miners (and I'm not talking about Satoshi, but about the programmed block reward reduction). It was also pre-programmed to evolve that way into the future. But future miners now get far more valuable coins. So, in a sense, they get way more. But they also have to compete much harder and with expensive equipment.

Then you have issues of mining (cpu vs asic), you have issues of fairness regarding whether the devs should get something or it should be all about the miners and investors, you have issues regarding democracy and voted by the community reductions that have no impact on other parties, etc etc. It's a huge discussion all around.


Actually Litcoin also had an instamine, it's just that nobody was trolling them for it... they were even self-marketed as fairer compared to BTC:

The "reasonable person" is a rubber that can be stretched any way you like.

For example, I believe that an objectively "reasonable person" could contemplate the possibility that BTC is a pyramid that will enrich its creator since its creator reached billionaire status with his solo-mined / stealth-mined coins.

In the context of this thread, this "reasonable person" is a hypocrite, as he will only "see" a scam in DRK and not BTC.

So, we return to the rubbery definition that suits any argument.

In the end of the day, the financial value of the entire DRK instamine was 50 BTC at that time. And that's just the size of the first BTC block.

When one says about BTC "it was worthless coins then", he must also see that the same was true with DRK more or less.

If one applies retroactive valuation with todays prices, things look far worse for BTC (34k BTCs vs 1mn BTCs).

And when the argument comes, that Evan proposed to fix this with airdroping new coins and was voted down by the community (while Satoshi didn't offer such a distribution fix), we get "ok, it's his coins, why didn't he distribute them"... Like the same question can't be asked for Satoshis 1m coins...

See the hypocrisy and double standards?

And I'm not saying Satoshi is a scammer btw or that bitcoin is a scam. I'm just highlighting how a "questioning skeptic" can see these things. In fact one of the first times I read about bitcoin, it was just a critique of how the hell is it supposed to beat the elites and the financial oligarchy, when it introduces a new class of elites with the creator being on top of a huge pile of coins he created...

I simply said what the reality of the situation is. No intention of personal attack.

I have no interest in further participating here. I started writing the same things to answer the same arguments, but it's just going circles.

The arguments have been heard and it's going over and over the same.

If someone thinks DRK is a scam, and they somehow risk losing money, just don't buy it. It's as simple as that.