A question about the release of Darkcoin/Dashcoin

[adhitthana]

I don't see where you answered my question.
What I am concerned about is this. Let's say Dash starts to become more popular and widely used. To the point where journalists and regulators look at it possibly. So as it getting more attention by this stage, people begin to ask about the early launch, and Evan at that point get's asked about it.
That could IMHO lead to problems

You claim the imperfect launch is going to get Dash into trouble? Why?

No, I said it might be a problem. Which is why I am trying ascertain whether Evan ever explained it

For what reason? Why the fuck would that have any impact? The only thing that's worth a damn is whether the proposed features work or not.

People might not like the idea that Evan appeared to have misled people. IIUC, he told people he would launch at a certain time, but then launched it earlier, and during that time a massive amount of coins were mined.

It just could look bad and make people or regulators avoid Dash, if the project ever starts to take off.

If the proposed features are open source then anyone can copy them, so that may not be such a huge advantage.

[toknormal]

A mew thread about Dash's launch ?

How quaint.  

[adhitthana]

A mew thread about Dash's launch ?

How quaint.  

Well it is just really about one aspect. And from the replies here it seems there was never any acknowledgement or explanation. So we might as well clear it up.
I would like to clear it up anyway so that I can better ascertain dash's prospects, and any risks that may be there

[ArticMine]

A mew thread about Dash's launch ?

How quaint.  

Yes. Another pointless thread on the Dash instamine issue. Dash has way more serious design issues on many levels that make the whole instamine insignificant by comparison. A proper discussion on the technical, regulatory and economic issues that Dash has is far more relevant and useful than this endless instamine debate.

[adhitthana]

A mew thread about Dash's launch ?

How quaint.  

Yes. Another pointless thread on the Dash instamine issue. Dash has way more serious design issues on many levels that make the whole instamine insignificant by comparison.

Where are they being discussed?

A proper discussion on the technical, regulatory and economic issues that Dash has is far more relevant and useful than this endless instamine debate.

I was assuming that Evan Duffield had at some point provided an explanation for this as it has been pointed out before. It seems a good question to ask.

[Days]

Why like 99% who talks about Dash are guys from Monero including a developer? (҂⌣̀_⌣́)

I never cared why Monero developers did a shady launch either and somehow the old crew just left and we have a new group who did not do much since Monero came beside bug fixing. (•̀o•́)ง

It just makes you all look like a certified A class haters really; because you are not competing with technology nor innovation...you are really just hating here on forums on the project and Evan himself.

Go fill Monero Ann thread with new updates at least the developers who are like everywhere " one is a gambler, one is hating on forums about another developer, another is in France with some issue....NO SYNC between all of them" None is working on Monero project it seems that is why it's taking you over a year man. Get things done please I already invested on Monero as well but man should I sell while it makes sense to me to just sell now?

Anyway, I came here like a month ago and I already regretting it, can't handle to much hate feels like internet drama here is getting on a personal level. (҂⌣̀_⌣́)

[generalizethis]

A mew thread about Dash's launch ?

How quaint.  

Yes. Another pointless thread on the Dash instamine issue. Dash has way more serious design issues on many levels that make the whole instamine insignificant by comparison.

Where are they being discussed?

A proper discussion on the technical, regulatory and economic issues that Dash has is far more relevant and useful than this endless instamine debate.

I was assuming that Evan Duffield had at some point provided an explanation for this as it has been pointed out before. It seems a good question to ask.

Here's TPTB_need_war's post that sums up the deficiencies in instantx and their privacy model (even with evolution's promises). AFAIK Evan has yet to respond.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13293657#msg13293657

Funny thing is I wasn't going to post this, but seeing days attack the attacker post made it a non-decision.

[ArticMine]

...

Here's TPTB_need_war's post that sums up the deficiencies in instantx and their privacy model (even with evolution's promises). AFAIK Evan has yet to respond.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1219023.msg13293657#msg13293657

Funny thing is I wasn't going to post this, but seeing days attack the attacker post made it a non-decision.

This is the kind of technical discussion about Dash that is needed. What TPTB_need_war is discussing there is the incorrect application of the Binomial Theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_theorem. How this can be construed as "hate" is beyond me. As for developers from other coins raising these issues it is hardly surprising, since highly technically competent people would naturally raise what they see as basic errors.

[oblox]

If Dash really is flawed and vulnerable, it should be easy to raise the funds to attack it while it is, by all accounts, young. Why wait for a juggernaut to get even larger... if anything, prove the flaws and in theory, crush the desire to hold it. There are countless rehashed arguments about the launch and masternodes and this and that. If you don't like the history, don't buy the coins. If you just heard about the launch (which is impressive given that it's now nearly 2 years old) and are displeased or feel betrayed, sell your coins. It's exhausting hearing the same shit over and over again. Masternodes, IX, blockchain voting, DS, etc all didn't exist for months after the initial launch.

[adhitthana]

Just to be clear. If Evan released early so he or others could instamine or just mine early and some people missed out, I don't necessarily think Evan did anything wrong. What I'm concerned about is that it may come up as an issue at some point in the future and negatively impact the project

[adhitthana]

If Dash really is flawed and vulnerable, it should be easy to raise the funds to attack it while it is, by all accounts, young. Why wait for a juggernaut to get even larger... if anything, prove the flaws and in theory, crush the desire to hold it.

Why?

If you don't like the history, don't buy the coins.

But if I don't ask questions how will I know the history?
I actually thought that when I asked the question someone would just point me to where Evan had explained the early release.

[entertheabyss]

x/dark/dash was never about privacy or instant transactions or distributed consensus

Oh really ?

I've been following this project for almost a year and a half now and as far as I can see that's ALL it's about. The dev team to little else than pursue those precise technical objectives to the exclusion of almost all other priorities.

Maybe you just haven't noticed.

There are people that care about some ideological principle and there are people that care about making money. Dash devs fall into the later category. That is not to say that they are unable to make valuable contributions, but for edduffield its a means to an end. Ive been on this forum on and off since 2013 and i remember when the whole instamine thing happened, i remember the first darkcoin testnets and i also recall distinctly when Evan announced that he was reducing supply from 84mil to whatever it is now. This specific action was pretty fucked up and points to the crux of my criticism of dash.

That is not to say that it wont be successful, lots of successful bullshit in the world a lot less principled than the dash community. I support dash trading on my exchange.

[generalizethis]

If Dash really is flawed and vulnerable, it should be easy to raise the funds to attack it while it is, by all accounts, young. Why wait for a juggernaut to get even larger... if anything, prove the flaws and in theory, crush the desire to hold it. There are countless rehashed arguments about the launch and masternodes and this and that. If you don't like the history, don't buy the coins. If you just heard about the launch (which is impressive given that it's now nearly 2 years old) and are displeased or feel betrayed, sell your coins. It's exhausting hearing the same shit over and over again. Masternodes, IX, blockchain voting, DS, etc all didn't exist for months after the initial launch.

Why would it be easy to raise the funds to attack dash? Is there a bounty? Is it substantial enough to pique people's interest? My guess is that it would have to be in the 5 to 6 figure range to adequately motivate an attacker (this is only guess). I'm a theoretical thinker, so I don't need bad things to happen before I see a bad outcome. My guess is that many in the Dash community aren't and will have to see the ship sunk to realize the ship was badly designed.

[arielbit]

If Dash really is flawed and vulnerable, it should be easy to raise the funds to attack it while it is, by all accounts, young. Why wait for a juggernaut to get even larger... if anything, prove the flaws and in theory, crush the desire to hold it. There are countless rehashed arguments about the launch and masternodes and this and that. If you don't like the history, don't buy the coins. If you just heard about the launch (which is impressive given that it's now nearly 2 years old) and are displeased or feel betrayed, sell your coins. It's exhausting hearing the same shit over and over again. Masternodes, IX, blockchain voting, DS, etc all didn't exist for months after the initial launch.

it is only a month after launch but eduffield already have plans for his instamine...i think he have that plan much earlier, before he posted.

In reply to: http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/1yit1a/using_coinjoin_for_anonymity_is_errorprone/

I'm posting this here, for everyone's benefit. Thanks!

Hi, I am Gnosis, the Anoncoin developer working on implementing Zerocoin. First of all, I think it is excellent that there is so much interest in developing a fully anonymous currency. I am not just a developer but also a user, or I will be when an anonymous currency exists! When coin creators compete, the coin users win!
However, CoinJoin has been around for a while, and it has not seen much use for anonymity. There's a good reason for that: it's not very anonymous.
Quoting my bitcointalk post:

CoinJoin has questionable anonymity compared to Zerocoin. The reason is that with CoinJoin, two or more users must somehow partner up and forge a transaction together. They communicate over a secure channel to do this. The coins are only mixed among these "partners." Picking partners you can trust is a significant obstacle: how can you know that your partners will "forget" the mixing that happened? One may try to repeat this 10 times with randomly chosen partners, but how can you know that your partners are not all just sock puppets of one malicious entity (on an anonymous network, it is trivial to create as many fake users as you want )? If that is the case, then your efforts are in vain.
Compare this with Zerocoin, where you put your coins in an accumulator, and they are mixed with the coins of all users who have put coins into that accumulator, since the beginning of Zerocoin. There would be a different accumulator for different denominations of Anoncoins (1, 5, 10, 50 ANC, etc.).
To put it simply, the more users' coins your coins are mixed with, the more anonymity you have.
I cannot speak to Darkcoin's implementation (or planned implementation) of CoinJoin since I cannot seem to find any specs or code on their Github or their site. If anyone knows, please point me to them.

I look forward to a practical and secure solution for anonymity from the DarkCoin devs!

First off, these are fantastic questions. The answer to implementing this in such a way where it is very difficulty to exploit is by adding cost and verification.

Here’s the gist of how I envision DarkSend to work in the long run. Some of what I’m going to mention is done, some of it I’m working on currently. I’d love some ideas on possible attack vectors on my implementation, so we can make it as bulletproof as possible.

Pools

DarkSend adds various extensions to the Bitcoin protocol for implementing transaction pooling. Like normal Coinjoin the pools take transactions in stages. The stages currently are:

POOL_STATUS_IDLE
POOL_STATUS_ACCEPTING_INPUTS
POOL_STATUS_ACCEPTING_OUTPUTS
POOL_STATUS_SIGNING
POOL_STATUS_TRANSMISSION

So the users relay these items throughout the network as the stages happen. After all items are gathered into the pool, the transactions are merged together into one, remotely signed and then broadcasted.

Masters

To defeat propagation problems, master nodes are elected each new block. They are responsible for being the authority of what goes into the joined transaction each session. This is done in a tamperproof way, but I think it’s not important to the discussion.

So what is the cost?

There must be a cost to using this anonymous network, otherwise like you say there will be issues with millions of accounts popping up. I’m not dead set on which solution(s) to implement, but here’s a couple ideas:

Burnt Identities

Higher difficulty shares to the current block would be mined and then stored in the blockchain permanently. Multiple of these would be used for each transaction and would be “burnt” when misused, causing the attacker to have to mine them again.  

Verification?

To use the pools it will require unique unspend outputs, someone that wants to mess with the system would have to have a large pool of funds in many addresses. So to attack a pool with 100 slots, you would require funds dispersed to 99 addresses, on 99 nodes working in common.

Other possible fee-less solutions?

There is interesting research on protecting against sybil attacks that lends itself really well to a decentralized ledger, such as this paper:

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/InformationSecurity/slides/gamesandreputation.pdf

The idea is to build a social graph of the inputs and outputs of each entry and they should all know different people. If 99 of them all have the same “friends” that they associate with, then they’ll have to enter a different pool. Which will ensure the pool is not full of the nodes belonging to the attacker.

An application for machine learning?

I’m been making models for trading equities for over 7 years now. I ran a financial firm that sold the signals for a few years and I have experience with natural language processing using classifiers. So, I could make a classifier and actually embed it into Darkcoin to determine which pool a node should use, to separate out nodes that seem to be in common.

Other ideas?

I’m open to ideas on how to provide the best security to the network. I would love to hear what people have in mind.

I’ve been working on DarkSend about a month and we’ve already fixed the decentralization and propagation issues, this is just another bridge to cross in the future.

Thanks!

[smooth]

Masternodes, IX, blockchain voting, DS, etc all didn't exist for months after the initial launch.

it is only a month but eduffield already have plans for his instamine

It didn't take a month. The plans were already in place before the instamine. Read the bold carefully.

Great, now that everything is stable, I'll be posting later about the vision of this project and milestones! Time to move on to actually implementing what I set out to do.

[arielbit]

having said that masternodes are the "mining farms" of DASH

comparing DASH to Bitcoin.. Bitcoin mining farms existed years later on...while "DASH mining farm/s"(masternodes) existed since the instamine happened.

[arielbit]

smooth pointed it out...It was planned all along  

Masters

To defeat propagation problems, master nodes are elected each new block. They are responsible for being the authority of what goes into the joined transaction each session. This is done in a tamperproof way, but I think it’s not important to the discussion.

connected

Great, now that everything is stable, I'll be posting later about the vision of this project and milestones! Time to move on to actually implementing what I set out to do.

Great indeeeeed $$$$$$$$$$

[target]

Why like 99% who talks about Dash are guys from Monero including a developer? (҂⌣̀_⌣́)

I never cared why Monero developers did a shady launch either and somehow the old crew just left and we have a new group who did not do much since Monero came beside bug fixing. (•̀o•́)ง

It just makes you all look like a certified A class haters really; because you are not competing with technology nor innovation...you are really just hating here on forums on the project and Evan himself.

Go fill Monero Ann thread with new updates at least the developers who are like everywhere " one is a gambler, one is hating on forums about another developer, another is in France with some issue....NO SYNC between all of them" None is working on Monero project it seems that is why it's taking you over a year man. Get things done please I already invested on Monero as well but man should I sell while it makes sense to me to just sell now?

Anyway, I came here like a month ago and I already regretting it, can't handle to much hate feels like internet drama here is getting on a personal level. (҂⌣̀_⌣́)

the drama actually helps the forum going. just sit back and take your localry popcorn.

[Yatsida]

Dash was ninja mined by the dev himself.  I say good job to that.

Obviously it's good for them, but is it good for me?

That is the reason many people do not touch Dash. Otherwise it could be a successful anonymous coin.

[smoothie]

Just to be clear. If Evan released early so he or others could instamine or just mine early and some people missed out, I don't necessarily think Evan did anything wrong. What I'm concerned about is that it may come up as an issue at some point in the future and negatively impact the project

Are you saying that Evan misleading people to think he would launch later than he actually did is okay?

Meaning he basically lied to people from the launch?