Hi,
I've been real fan of Darkwallet. Privacy is a human right. Amir Taaki was my Bitcoin hero until I found out that he started Darkwallet but isn't finishing it. Is it because he just lost interest? Or the money dried up? I don't know.
Here's what I propose.
1. We could crowdsource funds to make a big donation with a string attached. They must finish the Darkwallet not as an alpha nor beta, but polished final consumer product. The funds will be given in parts after completing milestones specified.
2. We could see if Amir Taaki would be amenable to finishing it. If not, it is open source, so if Amir documented his coding well enough, then another programmer or group of programmers could be brought in to complete it. It could be a totally new group of people, not even related to Amir and Cody.
This, in my opinion, is the biggest block of Bitcoin to mass acceptance. Every knowledgeable person who knows about bitcoin but refuses to use it states that the reason is lack of privacy. The other current solutions are not acceptable;
1. darknet mixers are thieves at worst and at best, are very hard to use as the user will have to install TOR and monitor his connections like a hawk for man in the middle attacks from malicious exit nodes. Even if you know what you're doing ,it is frustrating to have to wait hours for the mixers to work. Reddit is full of threads that claim bitcoin fog is a "ripoff" but a couple of hours or even a day later, the poster reposts, "oh, I finally got my money?!" Oh, and there's the 1-5 percent fee. And, you have to trust that the anonymous business is NOT a honeypot for the NSA or PRC.
2. blockchain.info's coinjoin's code was modified some time ago to allow for easy tracking of funds. Did the government request this? & they complied?
3. switching to an alt coin that has privacy, then switching back to bitcoin in another wallet. You get hosed from the exchange spread, even if they don't charge you a fee. shapeshift.io , for an example, costs about 10 percent round trip from BTC to XMR, then back to BTC.
A dark wallet would be THE thing that would pull Bitcoin's depressed price back up.
I'm willing to put up 0.1 BTC now, but I'm also starting a Bitcoin business and if I succeed, I'll donate 10 percent of my gross income to the project. Even the business fails, I'll still dontate 0.1 BTC to the project.
How much will YOU pledge? (thanks)