OK, let's see. 

(DISCLAIMER: I'm not a mathematician, I just fucked around in a spreadsheet....feel free to rip this to shreds and I will eat humble pie)

If I fire a gun into a crowd the probability of hitting someone is either 1, as you suggest, or very close to 1.

If I compromise 15% of the masternode network (per your example) and, for the sake of argument, everyone is mixing with 4 rounds of Darksend, the probability of tracing a transaction - i.e. having a complete set of data for a transaction is:

1.22265E-66

Let's say there are 1 million transactions in 24 hours, so multiply that figure by 1 million and we get:

0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000122265

This is how many complete transactions we are likely to sample in one day at 1m tx/day. So divide that into 1 to find out how many days are required to (probably) assemble a complete transaction:

817898000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Assuming my calculations are correct (see disclaimer) and I was a betting man, I'd go with firing the gun into a crowd

Of course this doesn't take into account possible extrapolation techniques that fluffy referred to, but does address your point on probability (probably, again see disclaimer )

These probability calculations are misleading because they are from the perspective of the individual transactor as opposed to the attacker.

Evan is basically saying "The networlk isn't secure, but there's so fucking many of you that the chances of your transactions being traced are slim. Here's a really low percentage to distract you: 0.000000000000001%. Wow!"

So?  What is your problem? Big pharma companies buy smaller ones so they could stop the development of current drugs as to eliminate competition.
In this case Evan bought a name. Your developers who sold it are to blame!
Its a free market, you could have bought it off from your developers. Were your developers transparent? Did they tell community what was going to happen?
Your developers saw an oppurtunity to get out with some cash and they did, you guys should do the same as you got the boost!
Also should direct all the hatres towars  your developers who sold the project, your developers abonded your coin! Deal with it !

I rest my case!

This is a noble sentiment, but not entirely true. There are certainly any number of gradations on the scale running from St. Francis of Assisi, to Bill Gates. Now while I consider BG to be little more than a criminal, on any number of measures he could be considered of more help to humanity than S.t Francis. The fact is that the desire for fiat and to help humanity are not mutually exclusive. More to the point of this discussion is the fact that even a "pure" desire to help humanity will not settle this debate.

I suspect (in a completely unfounded way ) that I have more in common with the first person sited above, than most folks on this forum; my pursuit of fiat has been, for the most part, to be able to help others who are not in a position to do so. 10 months ago, on a mountain in the middle of a jungle, connected by a feeble long-distance wi-fi link, I wasted some time browsing, and found an ongoing debate between advocates of something called Shadow coin, Monero, and Darkcoin. As a technophile, and someone who witnessed first-hand the devestation wrought by banksters, I was intrigued.

The vulgarity, and crudeness were hard to stomach, (not to mention the name "Darkcoin") but for the sake of those I wanted to help, I continued investigating. In the end, having only limited resources of time and even less of money, I had to decide to follow only one. In spite of its name I chose Darkcoin. I chose it not based on superior technology, (which I suspected it had) but on the basis of superior people. They had their share of trolls and FUDers, but they also had a reasoned core of supporters (such as majamina here :-) who reasonably and politely stood up to the FUDers and trolls, or simply ignored them. Even more importantly, Darkcoin's developer, did not live in shadows or participate in the trollfest, but continued, day-in, and day-out, to improve the coin. I saw no ongoing development in the other coins, and their developers did not even deserve the term, from what I could see; they certainly weren't willing to show their faces in the light of day.

I returned to the U.S. to teach last September, and began participating in the DRK community, lobbying along with some others for a name change, and slowly trying to acquire a masternode of my own. I now own 908 DASH and hope to buy another $80.00 worth tomorrow. (That is after sending $280 (which is half my pay) to help those I left.") In retrospect  seems clear I have made the right decision. Shadow coin is no longer worth discussing, and the general tenor of Monero backers supports the market's judgment of them.  In large part it was the incessant screams of "instamine," which I was perfectly capable of investigating on my own, which drove me from them. Maybe they are right, and their tech is better, to me it makes no difference, the caliber of their people out-weights any consideration of the tech.

It grieves me to think that most of you probably have no idea what I am talking about, and will never know the joy of being invited to share a meager meal with those who would not be alive but for your small involvement with them. Should you want to experience this, pm me, and I will be happy for you to accompany me on my next trip. It is my hope that it will not be too long before a masternode will relieve me of the need to return to the States to refill my coffers.


If I am wrong, and DASH becomes worth nothing, and Monero takes over the world, I will sleep easy, knowing that Evil men often rule the day while goodness lurks in the dark; that money is but a means to an end, and that character determines the nature of that end.

I pray that you all end well...

Absolutely!
It's a gem for this reason if nothing else.
Glad to be around.

so if I want to use a mouse with Monero I need to learn to code and compile first, *before* getting the trusted third party wallet which I then have to review for malicious code.  How long you think the GUI will take then it seems like a bit of a priority and you have a lot of devs around?

...
LOL okay by DOS you mean command line, because I was wondering what the hell Linux and Mac users had to do with DOS.

But in any case there is no official GUI. There are five third party GUIs, four of them are open source (the fifth is de facto open source since you can see the source in your browser).

Using open source third party wallets doesn't seem to bother users of Electrum, Multibit, etc. I'm still a little perplexed as to why Monero opponents are so obsessed about it.

You can say that, but history would suggest otherwise. Would you really not utilize a useful product if it had a shady past?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2663635/Revealed-How-Nazis-helped-German-companies-Bosch-Mercedes-Deutsche-Bank-VW-VERY-rich-using-slave-labor.html

If using slave labor organized by the Nazis didn't hurt Mercedes, then truly anything can be forgiven.

It may not be a literal business, but it's a competitive environment that is similar to running a business. Evan is using his experience with finance and investing to not only create an anonymous payment solution, but to create it in a way that most benefits investors. You guys have this false notion that people care about emission schedules. You have very idealistic notions, and that will hurt Monero in the long run. The world is not ideal, and no one will use Monero just because it's the fairest coin.

Evan understands this, and the instamine actually allowed him to fund development, while you guys have to beg for donations because of your stupid ideals. It's a shame, as I will freely admit that Cryptonote is a more elegant solution than Darksend.

If the spork key was programmed to last only x number of blocks after a hardfork, like a week or so, would that ease the concerns?

...
How so? A single individual controls a key that can remotely disable code portions on the entire network. I know of no other cryptocurrency with a remote disruption switch like that.

In response to unforeseen issues with the rollout of RC3, the Darkcoin development team created a mechanism by which updated code is released to the network, but not immediately made active (or “enforced”). Communication is sent out to users informing them of the change and the need for them to update their clients. Those who update their clients run the new code, but in the event of errors occurring with that new code, the client’s blocks are not rejected by the network and unintended forks are avoided. Data about the error can then be collected and forwarded to the development team. Once the development team is satisfied with the new code’s stability in the mainnet environment – and once acceptable network consensus is attained – enforcement of the updated code can be activated remotely. Should problems arise, the code can be deactivated in the same manner, without the need for a network-wide rollback or client update. This innovation allows for far smoother transitions than in the traditional hard fork paradigm, as well as the collection of test data in the live network environment. We set out with the intention of calling this method of updating the “Soft Fork”, but the Darkcoin community quickly dubbed it the “Spork” and the name seems to have stuck.

That's a naive calculation. If you want to enter the market now to run 2300 masternodes, you simply cannot obtain 2.3 million coins on the open market. The money required to obtain a sizable fraction of the masternode network is exponentially higher than $11.5 million.

And don't bring the black helicopters into this. By your same 'drop in the bucket' argument, unlimited hashing power can be bought and manufactured. Therefore, Bitcoin mining (or the mining of any other crypto) can be owned by a sufficiently determined nation state. Once they control what's written into the blockchain, it's curtains.

It's patently obvious from history that governments are not keen on relinquishing the power of the purse. I doubt they will build the hashes to pwn Bitcoin, so TPTB will just keep changing the laws to tame the public's interest.

Can someone explain whether Peter Todd's concerns from the Reddit post a few days ago are valid? What is the plan as far as mixins go?

...

i ask u, why all monero fanboys are here for trolling, make a nice GUI wallet and i'll buy ur monero....or maybe the dev team did not have abiity just to make GUI wallet ?

The monero trolls are an embarrassment to crypto. Even the monero devs waste time trolling instead of doing basic things like putting together a official working GUI wallet, So sad.

Satoshi never premined/instamined/fastmined/etc. a single Bitcoin.

He publicized his system to essentially 100% of the people in the world who could possibly understand it, worked with a few of them to clean up his code before launch, announced the launch I think a week ahead of time (not sure of the time period, maybe I'm wrong here), and then everyone had years to mine it using ordinary computers before it even had any monetary value whatsoever, with no guarantee it ever would. Of course, the monetary parameters of the system were "set in stone" (his words), were never changed after launch, and the actual mining has turned out to match the schedule stated in the white paper quite closely.

The suggestion of even the slightest similarity between that experience and DRK is ridiculous and insulting, not only to Satoshi but to the intelligence of anyone reading it.

You guys are in good company though, the Bytecoin scammers who ninja-premined 82% of the coins on their system tried the Satoshi Defense too. Right around the time they were claiming that Bytecoin was created by aliens.

It is so exciting !!! I'm glad to have bought at 0.0026. I almost didn't buy because I was waiting for 0.0014 !!! But there's still a huge wall at 0.0032

Since dark and monero are rising in tandem, it suggest the possibility that this rally may be a reaction to bitcoin fungibility concerns resulting from btc-e blocking evolution stolen bitcoins.

Who was it who was speculating that with a drk price decline that we would see an xmr bump? Now drk seems to be mooning are you speculating that the inverse is true ?