XMR vs DRK

[fluffypony]

Clearly you need to brush up on statistics and the importance of sample size.

But I would be happy for a poll on Bitcointalk to decided this, limited to users with at least 50 posts. If the poll reaches 800 users and the result is 60% in your favor I will be happy to say you have won the the bet.


Poll Question - Is a working GUI wallet better than Moneros current Stop-gap solution?

A)Yes
B)No

As for holding the funds in escrow I am happy with those terms and any of the bigwigs in the darkcoin thread works for me.

LOL - your terms are entirely unacceptable, and completely NOT representative on ANY level of the initial bet. Let me remind you of your absurd claim that you're now trying to prove -

Problem is they can't work and Monero as a currency doesn't work. Right now I can sit my father down help him download the Dark\Dash wallet and have him up and running in a few minutes. Let me reiterate that, in a few minutes he understood it, but also he could go use it.

To suddenly turn that into the ridiculous poll question you've proposed just goes to show how devious you are. This conversation is over, you are not participating in the spirit of this thread.

[smooth]

The biggest problem with Monero is that it's being lead by people with zero business sense.

If it were a business your opinion on the matter of our "business sense" might count for something, but it isn't and it isn't trying to be one either. You might reconsider your statement in light of that. I have a pretty good idea you have no clue what you are talking about.

are you not trying to compete in a space where big business is increasingly present....some business smarts would count for something, surely?

I think you are digging yourself into a hole (more like a bottomless pit) if you think there are no "business smarts" on the Monero team.

There is a huge difference between that and suggesting that an open source project be treated as a business rather than an open process including engagement with the broader community (not just true believers) and being not only open to but participating in public criticism and debate. That's way too much like sausage making for most businesses (e.g Starbucks withdrawing from social media recently), but it's how open source works.

i nearly fell asleep halfway through your paragraph. which coupled with how you broke the first rule in business 'never be seen to slander the competition' suggests that he has a point.

There is so "slander" as my statements are true and all backed up by factual references. BTW, if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop. And again, this isn't a business, it is public criticism and debate about open source projects.

wow - legal threats now?

No, you'll notice I made a suggestion not a treat. Yet, again, though, you falsely accuse me of making a threat.

Carry on.

[BlockaFett]

I didn't know there were 5 MONERO DEVS on here. That is hilarious

EDIT: if you so idle why don't you apply for job as Drk dev, they are hiring hard working devs!!!  oh, wait,

After working on their project, some people watch TV or video to relax. Me, I eat popcorn reading the DRK drama unfolding again. That's how I found 18 reasons why DRK i broken. FYI, I found 7 more last week. And 1 more again today.

All of this is my free time. You know, the one when I'm not working on making the world a better place.

so you are going to publish your results here, and go collect the drk bounty for finding security issues?

You should read more closely. I help you: look the parts I bolded.

sorry, i didn't see you are a Monero dev.  It's just another vague accusation without a) links b) references c) any facts d) tries to divert the reader without answering the question.  My bad!  

[BlockaFett]

The biggest problem with Monero is that it's being lead by people with zero business sense.

If it were a business your opinion on the matter of our "business sense" might count for something, but it isn't and it isn't trying to be one either. You might reconsider your statement in light of that. I have a pretty good idea you have no clue what you are talking about.

are you not trying to compete in a space where big business is increasingly present....some business smarts would count for something, surely?

I think you are digging yourself into a hole (more like a bottomless pit) if you think there are no "business smarts" on the Monero team.

There is a huge difference between that and suggesting that an open source project be treated as a business rather than an open process including engagement with the broader community (not just true believers) and being not only open to but participating in public criticism and debate. That's way too much like sausage making for most businesses (e.g Starbucks withdrawing from social media recently), but it's how open source works.

i nearly fell asleep halfway through your paragraph. which coupled with how you broke the first rule in business 'never be seen to slander the competition' suggests that he has a point.

There is so "slander" as my statements are true and all backed up by factual references. BTW, if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop. And again, this isn't a business, it is public criticism and debate about open source projects.

wow - legal threats now?

No, you'll notice I made a suggestion not a treat. Yet, again, though, you falsely accuse me of making a threat.

Carry on.

sure, you are trying to retract from making this implied threat of legal action against me:

if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop

unfortunately you typed it already  

EDIT: even how you selectively snip out anything that might put you in a bad light, you are a classic scammer lol

here is the text you snipped from my post above whilst leaving the others:

[wow - legal threats now?]  You have the exact M.O. of a scammer in every sense of the word.   Check my sig and read about Alex Green, he just talked marketing BS all day, did no work, and always threw legal threats around every time anyone got close to his massive BS marketing scam just like you too.  How's that?

[Brilliantrocket]

We should have more of these discussions. The Darkcoin price is up around 75 cents after a few days of people accelerating their pointing out of the instamine. Maybe people agree with my assertion that an instamine is actually a positive quality.

[smooth]

sure, you are trying to retract from making this implied threat of legal action against me:

if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop

unfortunately you typed it already 

EDIT: even how you selectively snip out anything that might put you in a bad light, you are a classic scammer lol

"Implied" threat is your imagination, or perhaps guilty conscience. There was no threat.

Also, I'm not Alex Greene and I've committed no relevant or significant criminal acts such as say, stealing a lot of people's money (I exclude the normal "crimes" most everyone commit as a consequence of ambiguous laws and other overcriminalization) You're out of line and ridiculous suggesting a connection or similarity.

[fluffypony]

1. How is running a MN different from running a tor or a bitcoin node?
2. A MN uses around 500MB in and 500MB out per days, that's 5.7 kb/s. Tor would handle it with no slowing down.

1. VASTLY different. The incentives are what takes us into FinCEN / SEC territory. There's also a very big difference between being paid to facilitate illegal activities (which gives LEA so much leverage against you using tax laws etc.) vs. unknowingly or unwittingly facilitating it (eg. running a Tor / i2p router)

2. Latency is the issue, and the reason that Tor works well against DoS attacks is because it purposely slows routing down (also to prevent timing attacks). Moving all the MNs behind Tor is a commendable attempt, but ultimately futile in that it restricts the level of functionality available (eg. imagine InstantX transactions taking 10-20 seconds because of routing failures).

Also just to clarify, in case there was any doubt, these are hypotheticals. I'm not stating that MNs definitely do require an MSB license, just that it appears on the face of it that they do, or that they are at least going to be up against the wall on income tax. Similarly, I'm not saying that routing InstantX transactions on Tor would definitely take 20 seconds each time, just that my thumb-sucked paper-napkin calculations indicate something in that bracket.

[BlockaFett]

sure, you are trying to retract from making this implied threat of legal action against me:

if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop

unfortunately you typed it already  

EDIT: even how you selectively snip out anything that might put you in a bad light, you are a classic scammer lol

"Implied" threat is your imagination, or perhaps guilty conscience. There was no threat.

there isn't a lawyer on the planet that would say that that wasn't an implied legal threat, so you obviously no nothing about lawyers

[smooth]

sure, you are trying to retract from making this implied threat of legal action against me:

if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop

unfortunately you typed it already  

EDIT: even how you selectively snip out anything that might put you in a bad light, you are a classic scammer lol

"Implied" threat is your imagination, or perhaps guilty conscience. There was no threat.

there isn't a lawyer on the planet that would say that that wasn't an implied legal threat, so you obviously no nothing about lawyers

You mean the same lawyers who would say you falsely accused me of slander for factually true written statements?

[David Latapie]

sorry, i didn't see you are a Monero dev.  It's just another vague accusation without a) links b) references c) any facts d) tries to divert the reader without answering the question.  My bad!  

Ad hominem. Now you shall move to the next step, ad personam (as for accusations, I already replied).

OK, session ended for me, it was fun too read, also a bit repetitive. I think I won't watch the next season.

[xxxgoodgirls]

1. How is running a MN different from running a tor or a bitcoin node?
2. A MN uses around 500MB in and 500MB out per days, that's 5.7 kb/s. Tor would handle it with no slowing down.

1. VASTLY different. The incentives are what takes us into FinCEN / SEC territory. There's also a very big difference between being paid to facilitate illegal activities (which gives LEA so much leverage against you using tax laws etc.) vs. unknowingly or unwittingly facilitating it (eg. running a Tor / i2p router)

2. Latency is the issue, and the reason that Tor works well against DoS attacks is because it purposely slows routing down (also to prevent timing attacks). Moving all the MNs behind Tor is a commendable attempt, but ultimately futile in that it restricts the level of functionality available (eg. imagine InstantX transactions taking 10-20 seconds because of routing failures).

Also just to clarify, in case there was any doubt, these are hypotheticals. I'm not stating that MNs definitely do require an MSB license, just that it appears on the face of it that they do, or that they are at least going to be up against the wall on income tax. Similarly, I'm not saying that routing InstantX transactions on Tor would definitely take 20 seconds each time, just that my thumb-sucked paper-napkin calculations indicate something in that bracket.

1. I miss the point where running a MN facilitates illegal activities. You are just providing the service of obfuscating the coins and broadcasting the instantXs. You are not responsible of how the coins are gonna be spent. Also, coins get mixed WITHIN the wallet, they don't flow through the MNs and come back to your wallet, so, no money laundering involved. It looks like me that running a MN is the same of running a tor node.

2. I do not have acknowledge on the latency issue, but I remember a guy that was pretty sure, on the subject, that a latency of 50ms was not a huge deal. Claiming that only the first connection would have took 1 or 2 seconds (assuming they are connected 24/7), but after that all data transfer would be almost instant.

[fluffypony]

1. I miss the point where running a MN facilitates illegal activities. You are just providing the service of obfuscating the coins and broadcasting the instantXs. You are not responsible of how the coins are gonna be spent. Also, coins get mixed WITHIN the wallet, they don't flow through the MNs and come back to your wallet, so, no money laundering involved. It looks like me that running a MN is the same of running a tor node.

2. I do not have acknowledge on the latency issue, but I remember a guy that was pretty sure, on the subject, that a latency of 50ms was not a huge deal. Claiming that only the first connection would have took 1 or 2 seconds (assuming they are connected 24/7), but after that all data transfer would be almost instant.

1. The distinction is because there is money involved. As I mentioned, it doesn't have to involve criminal investigations for facilitating purchases at all, they may find it most effective to use the SEC or FinCEN to strong-arm operators into cooperating with investigations (silently, through gag orders).

2. I haven't spent oodles of time analysing MN trafficgrams, but again - layering it behind Tor will lead to a massively degraded experience. I also fail to see how mobile clients will be able to (easily) connect to Tor and then to MasterNodes, I think you're just creating an ever-more-complex design to fix flaws that only exist because of poor design decisions. Complexity doesn't fix bad design, it only makes it more fragile:)

[fluffypony]

I'm off to bed. This has been a very enlightening discussion - I'm sorry that the few interested in a level-headed discussion had to try read around bickering and meaningless personal attacks. I'll be in Germany and other parts of Europe in May, so if anyone wants to discuss this more thoroughly feel free to come through to the little Monero gathering we'll have in Berlin on May 24th and we can put it down as a talking point.

One last thing before I go sleep. I hold nothing against those that think Darkcoin has potential because they lack the knowledge to be able to see what I see, so please don't take things I say as some sort of personal affront. I don't know Evan personally or professionally, so I am unable to speak to his person, so I can only infer by observation, and things like his handling of the first 48 hours of DarkCoin and his subsequent design decisions are extremely disconcerting.

This sort of architecture designed around fundamentally flawed thinking (eg. thinking of transactions as a flow between nodes instead of thinking in terms of inputs and outputs) is extremely common among altcoins, so I don't expect it to change, but Darkcoin is different. Any other altcoin making idiotic design changes that are shoehorned into a consensus model would be "just another altcoin", but because people are using Darkcoin expecting a reasonable measure of anonymity it has vast consequences if that anonymity is poorly designed or broken by design. Seeing the voracity around it reminds of the last episode of Black Mirror season 2 - I can only hope that this is not what has happened to Darkcoin on the back:



Anyway. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

[BlockaFett]

I'm off to bed. This has been a very enlightening discussion - I'm sorry that the few interested in a level-headed discussion had to try read around bickering and meaningless personal attacks. I'll be in Germany and other parts of Europe in May, so if anyone wants to discuss this more thoroughly feel free to come through to the little Monero gathering we'll have in Berlin on May 24th and we can put it down as a talking point.

One last thing before I go sleep. I hold nothing against those that think Darkcoin has potential because they lack the knowledge to be able to see what I see, so please don't take things I say as some sort of personal affront. I don't know Evan personally or professionally, so I am unable to speak to his person, so I can only infer by observation, and things like his handling of the first 48 hours of DarkCoin and his subsequent design decisions are extremely disconcerting.

This sort of architecture designed around fundamentally flawed thinking (eg. thinking of transactions as a flow between nodes instead of thinking in terms of inputs and outputs) is extremely common among altcoins, so I don't expect it to change, but Darkcoin is different. Any other altcoin making idiotic design changes that are shoehorned into a consensus model would be "just another altcoin", but because people are using Darkcoin expecting a reasonable measure of anonymity it has vast consequences if that anonymity is poorly designed or broken by design. Seeing the voracity around it reminds of the last episode of Black Mirror season 2 - I can only hope that this is not what has happened to Darkcoin on the back:



Anyway. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Have fun in Europe. Vacation? 

[illodin]

2. I haven't spent oodles of time analysing MN trafficgrams, but again - layering it behind Tor will lead to a massively degraded experience. I also fail to see how mobile clients will be able to (easily) connect to Tor and then to MasterNodes, I think you're just creating an ever-more-complex design to fix flaws that only exist because of poor design decisions. Complexity doesn't fix bad design, it only makes it more fragile:)

Tor and I2P have been suggested quite vocally earlier, even to the point that the whole network would be ran under Tor/I2P (i.e. they would be built into the wallet). I've heard I2P would perform better?

[illodin]

There is so "slander" as my statements are true and all backed up by factual references. BTW, if you write a post accusing someone of slander when there is no slander, that is libel. Unless you want to continue doing that, you should stop. And again, this isn't a business, it is public criticism and debate about open source projects.

I'm not sure but I suspect anonymous screennames on internet forums can be defamed with impunity.

[illodin]

LOL 5 monero devs here and not 1 darkcoin dev. There was clearly no fucks given by the drk devs!

That's one possible view of the situation. Another possibility could be, that Drk devs know that the critics about their tech is valid , so they refrain from openly acknowledging them.

Go post in the DRK thread that "DRK GAVE ME AIDS" and see if they respond. If they don't, could it be they think it's a valid criticism?

Imagine for a moment that the marketcaps were the otherway around. If XMR would have 7x 5x the marketcap of DRK, would there still be as much support for DRK ?(Please don't answer to this question, it's meant to be rhetorical)

Then it would be DRK fanboys trying to ride on XMR's coattails. Only natural.

[Jeff8247]

I actually own both monero and darkcoins. I just find all the shit flinging hilarious actually. Its quite amusing.

[smooth]

2. I haven't spent oodles of time analysing MN trafficgrams, but again - layering it behind Tor will lead to a massively degraded experience. I also fail to see how mobile clients will be able to (easily) connect to Tor and then to MasterNodes, I think you're just creating an ever-more-complex design to fix flaws that only exist because of poor design decisions. Complexity doesn't fix bad design, it only makes it more fragile:)

Tor and I2P have been suggested quite vocally earlier, even to the point that the whole network would be ran under Tor/I2P (i.e. they would be built into the wallet). I've heard I2P would perform better?

I2p can send connectionless data, so it is better suited and would likely perform better yes, but these systems are of kind of questionable value (that doesn't mean no value, it means the value is difficult to know). On the other hand, Tor probably has far more more users (higher anonymity set) and a wider variety of use cases in practice, so that is a tradeoff. Both are susceptible to various forms of traffic analysis, MITM, etc.

Better in my opinion to use a trustless privacy scheme, and rely as little as possible on yet another third party layer that might be compromised. With Monero the amount of information that leaks even if network traffic is completely compromised is quite small. I commented further here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=975984.msg10790082#msg10790082

[megges]

The way I see it there is no completely perfect solution to the problem of how to handle decentralised trustless value transfer systems.

Nobody's claiming they have a perfect system.

On one hand you have XMR and all the other countless cryptonote clone coins which while an interesting experiment into anonymity have proven over the last year or so to be unworkable as mass adoption value transfer systems.

By "countless" you mean 23, most of which have been abandoned?

the main stumbling blocks of the Cryptonote clones is is the blockchain bloat that completely rules out mass adoption. if XMR had BTC levels of usage the blockchain bloat would render it unusable overnight.

How many BTC users do you know that run a full node? Do *you* run a full node? No, you use Electrum or BreadWallet or Blockchain.info. Why would Monero be any different? Why would it be "unusable overnight" for all of the MyMonero.com users?

The second problem is that the ring signatures are exploitable under certain circumstances so the likelihood of serious development taking place to find a solution to the bloat issue is severely reduced.

Ring signatures are not "exploitable" on any level under the random oracle model. Given the level we're having this conversation on it's clear you aren't knowledgeable enough about cryptography to grok this, but I'll say it anyway: Monero has proof that the ring signatures are impossible to double-spend, are exculpable (ie. funds cannot be stolen by other members of a particular ring, including the "real" signatory), are unforgeable (cannot be faked), and are anonymous. Since you've made the accusation I won't take on the role of the common Darkcoin cultist and say "put up or shut up!", I'll instead show you what burden of proof means (and this is literally taken straight from the whitepaper) -

Proof of double-spend protection:



Proof of exculpability:



Proof of unforgeability:



Proof of anonymity:



The burden of proof is on Monero, and there is the proof. Now do the same for Darkcoin, please.

Why would any professional developer spend the required time to fix the bloat issue if there are other fundamental issues regarding the anonymity provided by the ring signature system?

Fixing the bloat "problem" isn't on our agenda right now. We can achieve linear reductions in blockchain size through various schemes, but none of them make a particularly large impact. If anything we will implement a lightweight wallet that uses a bloom-filter-like approach to tell full nodes which set of viewkeys its interested in, and then left those nodes do the heavy lifting. In fact, we can offer a lightweight pruned blockchain right now by only maintaining a limited set of blocks as well as the txoset and the key image set, which will give you a fully operational Monero node that needs less than 1/10th of the current blockchain space. That tooling is premature, though, as there are other priorities (eg. headers-first sync up) before we can focus on that.

the final nail in the coffin for mass adoption of cryptonote derived coins is the fact that merchant adoption is hampered significantly by the fact that the API is incompatible with platforms developed for BTC, this means that to implement XMR payments a whole new payment platform would have to developed and tested which a huge an potentially disastrous proposition.

Same goes for Ripple, and they seem to be doing just fine without BTC compatibility. Also you'd do well to check the Merchant Additions section of our Design and Development Goals: https://getmonero.org/design-goals/ - you'll notice something just for you.

DRK/DASH on the other hand has none of the above issues and has the huge benefit of the 2 tier masternode system which is already nearly a year old and provides Instant transactions world leading levels of anonimization and the potential to support future services.

Bitcoin already has a 2-tier system: full nodes, and SPV clients. Even better: full nodes can do anything MasterNodes do, and they can be incentivised through micropayment channels. A choice quote from that blog post is: "If we’re going to have a free market for services between nodes on the Bitcoin P2P network, we need a mechanism via which the nodes can pay each other. This mechanism exists in Bitcoin now, and it’s called micropayment channels. Any two nodes can connect and they have this mechanism via which, if they can agree on who owes what to whom, they can construct a payment and they can adjust that payment as rapidly as they need to and settle it infrequently on the Bitcoin block chain."

It boggles my mind that Evan didn't design the protocol around micropayment channels, where every full node could be incentivised to mix transactions or vote on InstantX transactions or whatever. It would make the anonymity set so much larger.

here is an over view of the utterly unique revolutionary DRK value transfer system.

It's easy to bander the term "unique" around until you sit down and think about it:

- Darksend: a poor implementation of CoinJoin. To quote the actual inventor of CoinJoin (gmaxwell) on the topic of Darkcoin: "That other stuff was initially "hey this coinjoin stuff is great, we put it in an altcoin!" to which my result was "hey, idiots, the whole point of coinjoin was that it already worked in bitcoin. If you're talking about something incompatible there are much better approaches" ... and they've since gone off to do other things, but uh.. seemingly without a lot of thought in advance."

- InstantX: a clone of the GreenAddress instant Bitcoin transaction system, or more accurately a clone of Natanael L's "Secure zero-confirmation payments using temporary notarized P2SH multi signature wallets".

- Sporks: turns the Bitcoin alert key system into a remote kill switch that one person can use to disrupt the network at will. Awesome.

I must admit i have not read that wall of text.
And im not a math guru, but just by reading the following i have big questionmarks over my head. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

the following text in the monero whitepaper:
"to succed in the attack, an event whose probability is considered to be neglible" - sry like said im not a math guru, perhaps im wrong, but how could that be something valid proven. dunno if it was you or smooth but someone of you moneroguys liked to say over and over again that the anonymity of darksend has not been proven.
But isn't that exactly the same like if calculations for example say that to deanomyze a darksend transaction the probability is 0.00000000x if you don't own x or all masternodes. So its probability of this is neglible also and so its proven as anonym?!