There are a couple of things happening right now that perhaps together causes this price increase :
- Darkcoin successfully established a 2-tier network which consists of POW rewards and POS (proof of service) rewards through their masternode network
The services that run on this 2-tier network right now are Darksend mixing (to anonymize the transactions on its network in a decentralized way)
and InstantX (which makes transactions within 4 to 6 seconds, effectively achieving creditcard confirmation speed). There are other services that in time and after carefull investigation will also take advantage of this 2-tier network (think about 2 factor authentication on blocklevel for example)
When Darkcoin just started a year ago it was very focussed on developing and testing Darksend and later on InstantX, however now that both Darksend and
InstantX are running on Darkcoin's Mainnet without problems and also have been opensourced the market seems to have re-evaluated the price and corrected it accordingly (so yes it had an price impact)
- Darkcoin's Masternode network does not only provide decentralised anonymization and InstantX transactions, it also rewards users who setup up these
Masternodes (currently 2389 masternodes over 34 countries). Masternode owners get currently 40% of POW mined blocks, this reward is scheduled per
month to increase untill it reaches 60% in april 2016. This provides a strong incentative to buy and hold Darkcoins.
- Darkcoin is in the middle of a name-rebranding phase, it will be renamed per 25-march-2015 to DASH, in an effort to more effectively achieve adaption and in the
end mainstraim adaption. This is a big move for Darkcoin and although the market responded negatively after the first day we can now witness a growing
acceptance and adaption towards this new name.
- Latest info from lead-developer Evan Duffield from Darkcoin also shows some promise with regards to Darkcoin's scalability :
https://darkcointalk.org/threads/rebranding-and-scalability.4254/When we started we saw a few issues that Bitcoin has and have attempted to solve them. One of the main issues we were trying to fix was fungibility. Fungibility is defined as the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution. That is, it is the property of essences or goods which are "capable of being substituted in place of one another."
Bitcoin isn’t perfectly fungible. This means that over long periods of time, Bitcoin will lose it’s fungibility due to coins being tainted by their use. Coins in the Bitcoin system carry their history around with them and that will make them “tainted” as compared to other coins.
While solving this problem, I eventually found we could create a secondary network within Darkcoin, this network would provide services to keep all of the coins fungible and at the same time could offer other services as well. Services such as protocol 2 factor authentication, instant transactions and now scalability.
Personally I believe the 1-tier approach used by Bitcoin and other currencies isn’t as powerful as a 2-tier approach. I also believe the no one besides a few people have even yet to understand what a 2-tier cryptographic currency is capable of.
The Bitcoin developers and community are talking about expanding the maximum blockchain size to 20MB. Currently the Bitcoin network can handle 7 transactions per second. This will allow their currency to 140 transactions per second, but will also result in up to 1TB per year in blockchain storage (until they successfully implement pruning).
Eventually Gavin Andresen sees blocks getting to 100MB+, with tens of thousands of transactions per block. See
http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2015/01/twenty-megabytes-testing-results.html and
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CuOEM9uwO5w-RwWGCCZpVGVFwhHHHegxJZqTP5KyapI/edit#gid=0.
After giving it some thought, I came up with a scalable architecture that supports billions of transactions per day.
Specifications of this strategy:
•The blockchain will automatically become much more anonymous than Bitcoin is.
•Fees per transaction will be very, very low. Let the micro-payment revolution begin.
•Zero-centralization
•Scalable to billions of transactions per day
•Requires a 2-tier network
•Very low blockchain bloat
I make no promises about this idea working though, I’m very early in the research stages, but it does look quite promising. If it works, it means we have solved the ultimate problem with Bitcoin and have made this technology accessible to the whole world. This strategy is just too good to let sit for very long and I need to do some exploratory coding to prove it works.
- and finally Evan Duffield also appeared on ''Lets talk Bitcoin #196 : Distortions towards Privacy'' :
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-196-distortions-towards-privacy-or-many-hands-makes-light-workAll those things together, coupled with a very very bullish sentiment in the market right now is creating this price increase in my eyes.
qwizzie
