What do you think about the updates of DASH

[generalizethis]

Monero and Dash are both worthless bagholder coins.

Name 10 shops in real life were you are able to pay with either on of them.
You can't!  

Technically you can use shapeshift (or xmr.to with Monero) with dash and moneroj to pay anywhere that you can with bitcoin. As to your point that there aren't places to spend Monero or Dash without those types of services, I'd say that i always viewed moneroj as a store of wealth and that the consumer side would expand once the official GUI was released and marketing efforts were made in earnest by the community and developers. If that makes me a bagholder, then I'm a bagholder.  

shapeshift and xmr.to are not a solution to the problem of not being able to use dash and monero directly. In this asspect, both coins are useless. Simply becuase using a third party to use any coin, especially when the coin aims atprivacy and aninimity, is far from perfect. If I would like to use a third party service to  pay privattly, I could just use any bitcoin mixing service. There is absolutly no need for monero and dash, if you cant shop with them privetly without any third parties involved.

The only advantage of monero over dash in this asspect is that monero can do mixing without any masternodes. So no third parties are involved in the mixing process.

Smooth covered the benefit of XMR.TO over a bitcoin mixer here, but you're still missing the usefulness of using monero as a private store of wealth--though I agree monero will be even more useful when adoption grows.

Lol at XMR being insignificant..This is hilarious .... Monero is the most trusted, and most used anonymous cryptocurrency on the planet.
Everyone has adopted Monero for it's anonymous, untraceable properties. There is nothing like it.


I don't even own Monero, but I respect it.

Who adopted to monero? Can you provide some example merchants who adapted it? Or you mean adaptation for trading on polo in circles, for the sake of trading without any real life usage?

There are many things I like about BBR

However, in term of merchant acceptance, no alt coin can surpass XMR.  Why? Because with xmr.to Monero is accepted by 100% of all bitcoin merchants today!

100% of bitcoin merchants can be paid with Monero anonymously today.

Check out https://xmr.to/ to learn more. They also have an API merchants can use to make things even easier

One caveat is that xmr.to offers one way conversion as of right now (which is fine for paying btc merchants). shapeshift conversions are 2 way

Involving third party (xmr.to) to your private and anonymous transaction is far from good and has no sense. If you want to involve third part to you transaction to pay btc address, you can just involve any bitcoin mixing service or whatever and use bitcoin directly. No reason for having monero at all.

This is not correct because BTC on both sides of a mixer is traceable, so if the mixer is logging or spying on you (or itself being spied upon), you are pretty much screwed and may not even know it. On the other hand, if you have a service like xmr.to that takes XMR in and pays BTC out, then the XMR can be untraceable, meaning even if the BTC side is traced, and even if the service itself is spying on you, your transaction still can't be traced.

(Of course it goes without saying in this discussion that xmr.to does not require user registration and that you are accessing the service web server in some untraceable way, whatever you think that is; VPN, Tor, public WiFi access point, etc.)

That's a pretty good reason to use it. In theory this applies equally to other reasonable cryptonotes (including BBR), although in practice having the most usage, most users, and most liquidity still gives XMR the edge.

But where we agree is that more usage overall directly without needing any gateways would be better, in an ideal world.

*We need to create a library of Monero Developer's responses to the most common misunderstandings about Monero. Of course this won't help anyone with short term memory loss. 

[smooth]

So, back to the topic...Dash, a coin with real original features and code

Please tell us what portion of the code in Dash is ripped off from Bitcoin?

All these discussions about "features" and "innovation" in Dash ignore the fact that below the surface the vast majority of the functionality and code is just a Bitcoin copy.

It is more like a Litecoin copy, including my favorite the fixed blocksize limit.

Virtually all Litecoin code and functionality is also ripped off from Bitcoin so there is not really a difference.

It does appear they rebased Dash on a newer Bitcoin release though, so what Minotaur26 said about it no longer being a modified Litecoin fork appears correct for the current code, though historically that's how it was developed.

[qwizzie]

I think update v12 was a great improvement with the decentralised budgetting system implemented and the Bitcoin updates integrated. We are also getting hints from the dev-team that update v13 is gonna be huge and will be instrumental into fixing all of Bitcoin's shortcomings (mainly fungability, decentralised anonymity and the ability to do fast micro payments are areas where bitcoin has seriously dropped the ball and which Dash has either adressed already or will be improving upon greatly with next update v13).

Make no mistake, Dash is here to compete with Bitcoin directly and time will tell if they will be successfull or not..

In the mean time i would like to emphasize to anyone reading this thread to keep an open mind about any cryptocurrency they come across and do some investigating work of their own as a lof of fud is spread by people who either have a conflict of interests or simply have a different agenda. Questions any serious investor should ask themself are :

- what kind of roadmap is out there for the cryptocurrency i'm interested in ?
- what kind of progress has been made towards reaching the goals in that roadmap ?
- what kind of community am i dealing with ? On how many forums / media channels are they represented ?
- what kind of dev-team am i dealing with ? Are its dev-team members publicly known or are they totally anonymous ?
- how small or large is that dev-team ? what kind of skills does the dev-team have at coding and what kind of
  track record do they have with regards to bug squashing ?
- how many products and / or services can be bought with the cryptocurrency in question ?
- in what ways can one profit or get rewards from the cryptocurrency in question ? can one only obtain miner rewards
  or are there other kind of rewards that could be interesting to look into ?

Dash came to my attention when it was at its peak at the time (somewhere 2014) and i have been investing in it each month ever since, slowly building up the number of masternodes i own .. and it has been profitable to me as my lower price buys have started to outway my higher price buys by now. Its just US dollar wise that i'm still running negative but thats with pretty much every crypto currency out there unless you as newcomer entered this market just now.

[illodin]

Dash and idea of masternodes is terrible. The idea that I have to trust some strengers running masternodes controlling my privacy and aninimity is rubbish. And if I want to have my own musternode, I have to pay for it? This is stupid. I may just trust and pay bitcoin mixing services.

Anonimity and privacy should be obtained without any third parties. The idea of masternodes is oposite to what decentrallization mean. ANd the 1000 DASH fee is only blocking more poeple running musternodes, and leaving only those who can affort it anyway. As far as I am concerned, all masternodes can be run by NSA. Because why wouldnt they, if the only way to have privcacy and anonimity with dash is to use masternodes. Regular dash users cant afford it.

Avoid any centralization and pay-walls if you care about privacy and aninimity. If you dont care about these, than just use bitcoin or litecoin.

At the moment you have to trust that no one is controlling 99%+ or something of the masternodes spread across the globe in different countries to be able to follow the mixing process. And yes, in the long term that is not ideal. But development is not over, eventually masternodes won't be able to link inputs to outputs i.e. they will be effectively "blinded" (I think Evan mentioned this is coming in V13), so then you don't have to trust even that 99%+ case not happening.

That is one advantage off-chain anonymity has, you can keep improving it and if later a weakness is found, the old transactions are not compromised as they are not on the chain e.g. if DASH takes off and in 5 years NSA gets interested and takes over all the masternodes and assuming for some reason masternode blinding is not implemented by then, they couldn't follow the mixes happened in the past because they aren't on the chain for them to read.

PS. As far as I am concerned, your computer can be run by NSA.

[smooth]

Dash and idea of masternodes is terrible. The idea that I have to trust some strengers running masternodes controlling my privacy and aninimity is rubbish. And if I want to have my own musternode, I have to pay for it? This is stupid. I may just trust and pay bitcoin mixing services.

Anonimity and privacy should be obtained without any third parties. The idea of masternodes is oposite to what decentrallization mean. ANd the 1000 DASH fee is only blocking more poeple running musternodes, and leaving only those who can affort it anyway. As far as I am concerned, all masternodes can be run by NSA. Because why wouldnt they, if the only way to have privcacy and anonimity with dash is to use masternodes. Regular dash users cant afford it.

Avoid any centralization and pay-walls if you care about privacy and aninimity. If you dont care about these, than just use bitcoin or litecoin.

At the moment you have to trust that no one is controlling 99%+ or something of the masternodes spread across the globe in different countries to be able to follow the mixing process.

Incorrect. One round of darksend uses a single masternode. If that masternode is compromised then that round is worthless. You can do multiple rounds, which takes a lot of time and adds resource usage (and probably direct cost in terms of fees, but I'm not really sure what Dash does with fees), and if some of those masternodes used by the multiple rounds are not compromised, then you have some real privacy, but it may not be much. (One round of darksend doesn't really obscure things that much on the blockchain, and if N-1 of the masternodes that you happened to use are compromised, that's all you end up with.)

And yes, in the long term that is not ideal. But development is not over, eventually masternodes won't be able to link inputs to outputs i.e. they will be effectively "blinded" (I think Evan mentioned this is coming in V13), so then you don't have to trust even that 99%+ case not happening.

Now you have the problem that these same protocols (e.g coinshuffle) can be used directly on Bitcoin. The idea of darksend was to provide a safe(r) way to do coinjoin with some protection from the intermediaries being Sybil attacked by someone wanting to spy (where 99% of the masternodes could be compromised if there were no cost to creating more of them). I doubt whether the economics of it actually work effectively, as I've stated elsewhere, but that's another story. In any case, with the intermediaries being oblivious using blinded coinjoin or coinshuffle, there is no longer such a risk, you can just rendezvous on any communications channel (joinmarket uses IRC, but that is just one example). So the whole thing becomes even more pointless.

Finally none of these systems offer useful Sybil protection against other users (only, possibly, against Sybil masternodes). When you darksend you are mixing only with other users who are darksending at the same time. If all or most of those are an attacker, you are screwed, blinding or no blinding. Again you are likely worse off here than something built on Bitcoin, simply because Bitcoin has far more users, which raises the cost of such a Sybil attack (it is still problem there though).

[illodin]

Incorrect. One round of darksend uses a single masternode. If that masternode is compromised then that round is worthless. You can do multiple rounds, which takes a lot of time and adds resource usage (and probably direct cost in terms of fees, but I'm not really sure what Dash does with fees), and if some of those masternodes used by the multiple rounds are not compromised, then you have some real privacy, but it may not be much. (One round of darksend doesn't really obscure things that much on the blockchain, and if N-1 of the masternodes that you happened to use are compromised, that's all you end up with.)

Yes, one round is probably something like using mixin 1 in Monero. Anyone who actually wants to maintain some privacy is using values way higher.

Now you have the problem that these same protocols (e.g coinshuffle) can be used directly on Bitcoin. The idea of darksend was to provide a safe(r) way to do coinjoin with some protection from the intermediaries being Sybil attacked by someone wanting to spy (where 99% of the masternodes could be compromised if there were no cost to creating more of them). I doubt whether the economics of it actually work effectively, as I've stated elsewhere, but that's another story. In any case, with the intermediaries being oblivious using blinded coinjoin or coinshuffle, there is no longer such a risk, you can just rendezvous on any communications channel (joinmarket uses IRC, but that is just one example). So the whole thing becomes even more pointless.

Could you open up this some more I'm not sure I follow.

Finally none of these systems offer useful Sybil protection against other users (only, possibly, against Sybil masternodes). When you darksend you are mixing only with other users who are darksending at the same time. If all or most of those are an attacker, you are screwed, blinding or no blinding. Again you are likely worse off here than something built on Bitcoin, simply because Bitcoin has far more users, which raises the cost of such a Sybil attack (it is still problem there though).

The DASH mixing has a fee, isn't that useful Sybil protection? An attacker can keep doing that only for so long before his resources are exhausted.

[smooth]

In any case, with the intermediaries being oblivious using blinded coinjoin or coinshuffle, there is no longer such a risk, you can just rendezvous on any communications channel (joinmarket uses IRC, but that is just one example). So the whole thing becomes even more pointless.

Could you open up this some more I'm not sure I follow.

There is no reason you need designated masternodes with 1000 Dash collateral with e.g. coinshuffle. The point of that is to deter bad actors from flooding the system with hostile masternodes. But since these methods give other participants or intermediaries no useful information, this doesn't matter. You can post the whole interchange in a public place and it is still secure.

[owm123]

Dash and idea of masternodes is terrible. The idea that I have to trust some strengers running masternodes controlling my privacy and aninimity is rubbish. And if I want to have my own musternode, I have to pay for it? This is stupid. I may just trust and pay bitcoin mixing services.

Anonimity and privacy should be obtained without any third parties. The idea of masternodes is oposite to what decentrallization mean. ANd the 1000 DASH fee is only blocking more poeple running musternodes, and leaving only those who can affort it anyway. As far as I am concerned, all masternodes can be run by NSA. Because why wouldnt they, if the only way to have privcacy and anonimity with dash is to use masternodes. Regular dash users cant afford it.

Avoid any centralization and pay-walls if you care about privacy and aninimity. If you dont care about these, than just use bitcoin or litecoin.

At the moment you have to trust that no one is controlling 99%+ or something of the masternodes spread across the globe in different countries to be able to follow the mixing process. And yes, in the long term that is not ideal. But development is not over, eventually masternodes won't be able to link inputs to outputs i.e. they will be effectively "blinded" (I think Evan mentioned this is coming in V13), so then you don't have to trust even that 99%+ case not happening.

That is one advantage off-chain anonymity has, you can keep improving it and if later a weakness is found, the old transactions are not compromised as they are not on the chain e.g. if DASH takes off and in 5 years NSA gets interested and takes over all the masternodes and assuming for some reason masternode blinding is not implemented by then, they couldn't follow the mixes happened in the past because they aren't on the chain for them to read.

PS. As far as I am concerned, your computer can be run by NSA.

But still you have to trust some external masternodes, run by someone. What worries me most is that I cant join them. 1000 dash is too expensive. I dont understand why there is paywall? For me, logical would be that everyone can run masternode for free. Therefore,  there would be more masternodes, thus, more decentralization and security. Why would dash want to limit number of masternodes, making it de-facto less decentralized?

I read on dash website that 1000 dash fee is for security reasons, so that attackers cant "buy" many masternodes. If so, why not make it 10000 or 1 milion dash? Then there would be only one or two masternodes, super secure, run by one or two people that are super "trust worthy"? For me, it seems strange to limit number of masternodes by having a pay-wall. I dont undersant this logic. And I'm sure that many privacy oriented people, would also question this.

p.s.
And yes, my computer may be monitored by nsa, like most computers outhere anyway :-( You can limit the risk of being spyed on by using proper software, but you still dont know what lurks in the hardware :-(

[smooth]

The DASH mixing has a fee, isn't that useful Sybil protection? An attacker can keep doing that only for so long before his resources are exhausted.

Yes but since there is full simultaneity the attacker only needs to do that during the time period of interest. It may be that for whatever reasons of my own, I'm interesting in attacking today's transactions but not tomorrows or next years (necessarily). That has a finite cost (and probably not very high in practice).

[illodin]

In any case, with the intermediaries being oblivious using blinded coinjoin or coinshuffle, there is no longer such a risk, you can just rendezvous on any communications channel (joinmarket uses IRC, but that is just one example). So the whole thing becomes even more pointless.

Could you open up this some more I'm not sure I follow.

There is no reason you need designated masternodes with 1000 Dash collateral with e.g. coinshuffle. The point of that is to deter bad actors from flooding the system with hostile masternodes. But since these methods give other participants or intermediaries no useful information, this doesn't matter. You can post the whole interchange in a public place and it is still secure.

Thanks. There are other aspects to it as well though. It's a way to reward full nodes and run services on top of it, for example InstantX. It's a way for holders to earn money in exchange for helping the network. Whether it will evolve into a network where masternodes are not needed anymore in the future, I don't know, it's possible?

Also, without a collateral, you could launch millions of mixing nodes that would just stall the process effectively DoS'ing the mixing process. Unless you mean a trusted party would maintain a node or a set of nodes (which could then be easier DoS'ed)?

[illodin]

The DASH mixing has a fee, isn't that useful Sybil protection? An attacker can keep doing that only for so long before his resources are exhausted.

Yes but since there is full simultaneity the attacker only needs to do that during the time period of interest. It may be that for whatever reasons of my own, I'm interesting in attacking today's transactions but not tomorrows or next years (necessarily). That has a finite cost (and probably not very high in practice).

The DASH mixing is "pre-mixing", i.e. you can mix your coins today, and spend them privately next month. So when there is this period of interest, the transactions happening could be coins mixed a year ago.

[smooth]

The DASH mixing has a fee, isn't that useful Sybil protection? An attacker can keep doing that only for so long before his resources are exhausted.

Yes but since there is full simultaneity the attacker only needs to do that during the time period of interest. It may be that for whatever reasons of my own, I'm interesting in attacking today's transactions but not tomorrows or next years (necessarily). That has a finite cost (and probably not very high in practice).

The DASH mixing is "pre-mixing", i.e. you can mix your coins today, and spend them privately next month. So when there is this period of interest, the transactions happening could be coins mixed a year ago.

Yes it could, or it could not. It depends. In particular you can't possibly have mixed the coins last year if you just received them. So that puts a bound on it if a particular "target" is of interest.

[illodin]

The DASH mixing has a fee, isn't that useful Sybil protection? An attacker can keep doing that only for so long before his resources are exhausted.

Yes but since there is full simultaneity the attacker only needs to do that during the time period of interest. It may be that for whatever reasons of my own, I'm interesting in attacking today's transactions but not tomorrows or next years (necessarily). That has a finite cost (and probably not very high in practice).

The DASH mixing is "pre-mixing", i.e. you can mix your coins today, and spend them privately next month. So when there is this period of interest, the transactions happening could be coins mixed a year ago.

Yes it could, or it could not. It depends. In particular you can't possibly have mixed the coins last year if you just received them. So that puts a bound on it if a particular "target" is of interest.

Heuristic wallet could detect when there are 2x more mixing happening in the network than usual (just like it could detect when 50%+ of the masternodes are offline) and warn the user (or do this automatically) that the coins should be mixed again at a later date. Just having this kind of protection in the wallet would deter someone from attempting such an attack, so it probably wouldn't even have to be used ever. So the downside of the feature that it could hinder usability for the end user is a moot point.

[smooth]

The DASH mixing has a fee, isn't that useful Sybil protection? An attacker can keep doing that only for so long before his resources are exhausted.

Yes but since there is full simultaneity the attacker only needs to do that during the time period of interest. It may be that for whatever reasons of my own, I'm interesting in attacking today's transactions but not tomorrows or next years (necessarily). That has a finite cost (and probably not very high in practice).

The DASH mixing is "pre-mixing", i.e. you can mix your coins today, and spend them privately next month. So when there is this period of interest, the transactions happening could be coins mixed a year ago.

Yes it could, or it could not. It depends. In particular you can't possibly have mixed the coins last year if you just received them. So that puts a bound on it if a particular "target" is of interest.

Heuristic wallet could detect when there are 2x more mixing happening in the network than usual

That sounds pretty unworkable given normal fluctuations in honest usage (or at least not user friendly and introducing even more delays into mixing that I'm told is already pretty slow), and it also introduces an easy denial-of-service attack, but who knows maybe something like that could be made to work. It is hard to say without a specific proposal and probably field testing.

Or you could just use Bitcoin which has vastly more usage to begin with.