[ANN][DASH] Dash (dash.org) | First Self-Funding Self-Governing Crypto Currency

[oblox]

Good read as it relates to BTC.

http://www.coindesk.com/anonymous-bitcoin-backgrounder-policymakers/

[GhostPlayer]

********* Amber Alert in Euro Debt bubble Land ***********

Box of pins spotted on the horizon...



http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-25/greek-exit-polls-hint-massive-victory-syriza-live-webcast

Damn... this is going to send shockwaves throughout Europe. If Greece drops the Euro, the Euro project is basically doomed to failure (even though it will be alive and kicking for a good while)

[oblox]

********* Amber Alert in Euro Debt bubble Land ***********

Box of pins spotted on the horizon...



http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-25/greek-exit-polls-hint-massive-victory-syriza-live-webcast

http://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-30975663

Just need to see Greece exit the Euro and adopt crypto as their national currency as going back to the Drachma isn't going to end well either.

[GhostPlayer]

Just need to see Greece exit the Euro and adopt crypto as their national currency as going back to the Drachma isn't going to end well either.

Get real, that is not going to happen for a loooooooong time, but never give up on a dream  

 The amount of effort, education, infrastructure and deployment to get whole country within regulatory compliance to maintain a society is... well... an encyclopaedia in the writing.

 It will happen, no doubt. Eventually

[Minotaur26]

I think you are a little confused about how InstantX works, InstantX just locks a transaction in place for a period of time, it is secured in the blockchain separately.

I was the wrong side of a "couple" of glasses of Saturday Riocha when I made those posts originally so I apologise if they sounded over assertive, all the same I still think there's something reassuring about having the mining network do the confirmations and for them to take a bit of time.

Look at it this way. Think of the masternode / blockchain configuration as a client-server architecture. The blockchain/miners are the server and the masternode network the client.

Right now, there is an elegant delineation of responsibility where ththe "client" and "server" are reasonably independent. Also, the mining process is the aspect of the architecture that provides consensus AND buries transactions in the blockchain. I just thought that making the masternode network responsable for confirmations would create a nasty coupling between these two that may be regretted. And for what ? To save a few minutes off the confirmation time ?

If a need emerges for such urgency then it's a nice card to have up your sleeve but I can see as many problems as benefits from making it the default configuration of the Darkcoin architecture - namely it departs from the classic proof or work convention.

But as mentioned, I may not have a full enough understanding of what's proposed to properly jusge.

Got it, I now see where the misunderstanding is.  Here is the thing, Masternodes and InstanX, won't be replacing mining in any way or changing traditional transaction confirmation. Normal block confirmation still happens just like it does now, and there is mining and blocks are mined and transactions are confirmed every 2.5 mins.  InstanX  and transaction locking is a warranty that the transaction will be mined and there will be no double spends, so the people involved with the transaction don't have to wait for the blocks to be mined, they can leave the premises with their goods after 20secs once the transaction lock is in place, the transaction will still be mined in the next block after a couple of minutes, the transaction lock (Instant X) just guarantees that will happen.  The way we are thinking about InstantX right now, there is a transaction lock after 20 seconds, the person can leave with their groceries at that point, after a couple of minutes the transaction is confirmed in the blockchain and after a number of blockchain confirmations the transaction lock from InstantX is released. As you can see the transaction lock is an additional layer, a warranty.


Now having said that, having a transaction lock whose duration can be adjusted is very powerful in other applications. You can put a transaction lock that lasts for several normal block confirmations, so instead of facilitating a quick transaction you can produce a delayed transaction for a different application. You pay someone for something but you dont want that person to be able to spend those coins half an hour later. You want the transaction to be locked for a week so you can see that the car they sold you is in good condition.  Now the transaction is not reversible, after the week the person will be free to spend the coins, but at least it gives you time so if after a day testing your new used vehicle you find a major problem you have time to go to their place and kick their ass as you know your money has not been moved yet. So paying in a delayed fashion where you can control the locking time, will have a lot of applications too.

[oblox]

Just need to see Greece exit the Euro and adopt crypto as their national currency as going back to the Drachma isn't going to end well either.

Get real, that is not going to happen for a loooooooong time, but never give up on a dream 

 The amount of effort, education, infrastructure and deployment to get whole country within regulatory compliance to maintain a society is... well... an encyclopaedia in the writing.

 It will happen, no doubt. Eventually

lol, I wasn't saying this is an overnight change but a change of events could be started on an exit from the Euro. Germany being incredibly pissed having traded their Deutsche Marks in for Euros with weaker countries continuing to fall down the rabbit hole. Greece can't really go back to their Drachma either, not with their unemployment, faltering economy, etc, etc. No one would take on the counterparty risk of holding Drachmas again given their debt and economy.

[GhostPlayer]

Just need to see Greece exit the Euro and adopt crypto as their national currency as going back to the Drachma isn't going to end well either.

Get real, that is not going to happen for a loooooooong time, but never give up on a dream  

 The amount of effort, education, infrastructure and deployment to get whole country within regulatory compliance to maintain a society is... well... an encyclopaedia in the writing.

 It will happen, no doubt. Eventually

lol, I wasn't saying this is an overnight change but a change of events could be started on an exit from the Euro. Germany being incredibly pissed having traded their Deutsche Marks in for Euros with weaker countries continuing to fall down the rabbit hole. Greece can't really go back to their Drachma either, not with their unemployment, faltering economy, etc, etc. No one would take on the counterparty risk of holding Drachmas again given their debt and economy.

Things would speed up if Andreas A. ran for the greek presidency. He's quite eligible I believe  

[toknormal]

InstanX  and transaction locking is a warranty that the transaction will be mined

Thanks for the explanation. I thought something like that might be the case. I'm pleased that the basic mining confirmation is in fact what's still happening.

All the same, I think it would be instructive for people to understand more about the mechanics of the payment processing world. I'm pretty confident in asserting that blockchain transactions will NEVER be used at retail point of sale systems of any significant size (such as large supermarkets, IKEA etc).

It's simply a technology that's not suited to the job, nor was it ever intended to be no matter how fast it confirms. Apart from anything else, retailers *want* to work with payment processors because they support all kinds of other merchant services that can only be supported by the merchant having complete control over the payment process.

http://www.streamline.com/card-machines?mh_keyword=ag_Competitor_Merchant_Services&gclid=COL_jKP1r8MCFeKWtAodFxgA1g

http://www.instamerchant.com/mastercard-visa-merchantaccount.html

[anonymousxx1503]

Security Advisory for CoinShuffle and Darkwallet

I've posted the security advisory on r/Bitcoin, so far it's just getting downvoted. Can we get some upvotes? It's getting downvoted just because it's from a competing currency, however, they should know that all of the mixing technologies they have presently are broken.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2tmopl/security_advisory_for_coinshuffle_and_darkwallet/

Classic r/bitcoin - Downvote anything from an Altcoin and anything that could hurt their investment. UPVOTE THE HELL OUT OF THIS LINK.

[GhostPlayer]

 OMFG... sh!t just got real. Syrzia is on the verge of parliamentary majority...

[eahmadov]

OMFG... sh!t just got real. Syrzia is on the verge of parliamentary majority...

Yea, Germany is shitting its pants They know that Italy and Spain is next.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/jan/25/greek-election-syriza-confident-of-victory-live-updates

[miningpros]

I’ve always maintained that adoption is everything. In that vein, this Litecoin announcement…

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2tgjto/official_litecoin_developers_and_litecoin/cnywl9x

Has had this market impact…

Could evans new update of coin shuffle be presented the same way ? , would be an even greater impact
Or is it just the Chinese that react that way

[TanteStefana2]

you mean 99 or 299?

I mean 99.

What's the reason for another crash?  I don't get it?

Speculation.

Right now, most of Bitcoin's value has been speculative. In other words it hasn't been needed as a currency and its speculative value as such is available to chart traders to make money on. They can take the value anywhere as long as the monetary value (the amount of Bitcoin that's needed to fill the pipes of retail merchants, international money transfers and all needs other than those of speculative 'gamblers') remains below the market value.

If the Bitcoin price were to go to $99, the marketcap would still be around $1.3 Billion. Probably more than enough to cover the turnover of the current bitcoin economy when you exclude speculative trading.

Remember, Overstock only took around $3 million in bitcoin sales last year. Lets be generous and multiply that by 100 to pretend that Overstock's Bitcoin turnover is only 1% of the industry total. That gives you a marketcap of $300 million which, when you factor in the coin supply, comes out at a bitcoin price of $23 dollars.

So 23$ is the bottom below which it's undervalued. Therefore even at $99, speculative trading would still have a margin over the 'real' monetary value of bitcoin. They are not likely to go below that though because the future prospective monetary value is so high that the speculative premium would be huge at that price level and such a low valuation would be unlikely to last long.

This is why I keep saying that adoption is everything. By garnering adoption you raise the floor below which speculative traders cannot go. Darkcoin has huge mileage to be gained in this domain and, to me it's going about it the right way. By taking the "warts an' all" approach where the problems all come to the surface early, thereby keeping the speculative premium low. The developer team can try things out and on a community that's reasonably accommodating and keep the balance between consolidation and development at an optimum without causing huge disruption in the markets. (The tiny wee DRK market that we have right now).

There is one thing that any market values over everything else when it comes to technology: reliability. It's like air safety. Something that's never spoken about by airlines but that underpins the value of everything they do.

If a cryptocurrency project is taking on a challenge as difficult as total anonymity (in addition to the 'double spend' problem which has only just been solved after decades of research) it would do well to concentrate on nothing else.

A product that does very little but very well is a dead cert for adoption. People don't care about bells and whistle's, they care about doing the big things right, and right every time. Mundane repetitiveness sells which is why I made my post yesterday about Darkcoin starting to leave the competition behind.

InstantX would be nice but we must not be distracted. Cryptocurrency is a monetary base - not a payments system. Anonymity and speed of confirmation are way different objectives and one should not be compromised for the sake of another.

The reason that I am not bothered about InstantX and that I think Darkcoin should not be wasting its time on it is that point of sale systems (POS) will never be be doing direct transactions with the blockchain. That will be taken care of by payment processors. The blockchain is a clearing system that is at least 1 tier away from point of sale. It doesn't matter if blockchain confirmation time gets down to 5 seconds, it still will never be able to compete with a buffered point of sale system that can instantly reverse the packet of cornflakes that the cashier accidently rung through from the person behind you in the queue.

For that reason, for me, Bitcoin's blockchain clearing time of 30 minutes to 1 hour is going to be much more attractive to the retail industry that a confirmation time of 20 seconds. 30 minutes at least sounds like it has reliability behind it whereas 20 seconds will sound flaky as f*ck.

Banks have a clearing time of 1-2 days so there isn't exactly a lot of urgency.

Stick with the anonymity priority for this coin because that's what it does well and a reduced blockchain confirmation time will only make it look like a toy.

I never thought of that.  However, I thought we wanted to get away from clearing houses and the banking industry?  I thought we wanted it all to be a pure cash like system?  No place for government to get involved.  I see now that the old system is going to continue to control what's going on despite all this work.  Hummm

[TanteStefana2]

*********** Philosophical Alert **************

In summary:

[1] adoption is everything

[2] Darkcoin should keep InstantX in its pocket but, like a nuclear weapon, not deploy.

Bank clearing times are 1-2 days. Bitcoin clearing times are 30 minutes to 1 hour at most. Bitcoin's long clearing time relative to other crypto's has a big 'realiability' stock value. Although it's an 'annoyance' for many, Bitcoin is gaining a reputation as a monetary base and as such its slow clearing time ADDs to its value rather than detracts form it.

A 20 second clearing time will just look like a toy.

It still won't match payment processors who do 5 seconds by buffering the cornflakes from the "blockchain / interbank clearing system". Visa, Mastercard and Sagepay will not want to touch a 20 second clearing time with a bargepole. If cryptocurrencies eventually succeed in forming a monetary base then payment processors will be interested only in reliability, not clearing times.

We need to advance the debate on cryptos. They are trying to do everything at once and that's just stupid. Cryptos are a monetary base, not a payments system and therefore should be concerned with accruing adoption as a currency and not as a payments system.

Gold does not not get transferred quickly and yet still has a high value. You can trade it in an instant on Wall Street. Payment processors can wipe the floor with cryptos on POS technology so we shouldn't even try.

On the other hand, always remember:

Fiat: is highly levered credit money
Crypto: is unlevered base money

That is our first strength - economics.

Secondly:

Darkoin: has total privacy protected by unlimited redundancy
Bitcoin: has no privacy

Ergo: Darkcoin's values are:

[1] Slow blocktime (like Bitcoin)
[2] Privacy (not like Bitcoin)

But one of the biggest plusses to instantX is that you can slow down your block times, say to 1X per day, which will control blockchain bloat.  I understand there are technologies happening now, where some coins are trimming the blockchain of ... however they do it , zero balance accounts?  I don't know, but with instantX, you can really put a lid on the bloat in a massive way.  I don't think it's a toy.

[thelonecrouton]

Security Advisory for CoinShuffle and Darkwallet

I've posted the security advisory on r/Bitcoin, so far it's just getting downvoted. Can we get some upvotes? It's getting downvoted just because it's from a competing currency, however, they should know that all of the mixing technologies they have presently are broken.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2tmopl/security_advisory_for_coinshuffle_and_darkwallet/

Classic r/bitcoin - Downvote anything from an Altcoin and anything that could hurt their investment. UPVOTE THE HELL OUT OF THIS LINK.

I quite enjoy the thought of all those frothing zealots downvoting my post. I have brought anguish unto their souls, and only through suffering does anyone ever truly learn.

[Minotaur26]

I’ve always maintained that adoption is everything. In that vein, this Litecoin announcement…

http://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/2tgjto/official_litecoin_developers_and_litecoin/cnywl9x

Has had this market impact…

Could evans new update of coin shuffle be presented the same way ? , would be an even greater impact
Or is it just the Chinese that react that way

You do realize that, that announcement had nothing particularly important. Their problem is not not being accepted in places, their problem is they don't have a different use case than Bitcoin. For a non crypto holder, why use LTC and not BTC?  There is no real answer to that, as there are not any substantial differentiators.

About the recent pump, well traders see opportunities and they take them, short term it will happen to all coins including DRK. Long term you do need your fundamentals.

[miningpros]

Security Advisory for CoinShuffle and Darkwallet

I've posted the security advisory on r/Bitcoin, so far it's just getting downvoted. Can we get some upvotes? It's getting downvoted just because it's from a competing currency, however, they should know that all of the mixing technologies they have presently are broken.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2tmopl/security_advisory_for_coinshuffle_and_darkwallet/

+1 upvoted

[Lukas_Jackson]

Security Advisory for CoinShuffle and Darkwallet

I've posted the security advisory on r/Bitcoin, so far it's just getting downvoted. Can we get some upvotes? It's getting downvoted just because it's from a competing currency, however, they should know that all of the mixing technologies they have presently are broken.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2tmopl/security_advisory_for_coinshuffle_and_darkwallet/

There, still, are people kids writing about 'closed source'   WTF

Evan: They should know that all of the mixing technologies they have presently are broken.
Kid: No. Because you were closed source.

[TanteStefana2]

PS. Can the masternode network act as a "payment processor"? What would be required for it to do so? Do we need a sidechain to do the "counting" so the main chain wouldn't become too large and choke?

I'm starting to sound like a commie, LOL, but as far as money goes, I would prefer it be decentralized completely, no clearing houses unless they're part of a decentralized network, such as MasterNodes.  To me, this would be optimal.

I understand where Tok is coming from, and it may be that clearing houses are going to control Bitcoin and other coins, but if Darkcoin can give the world a truly decentralized system that nobody can mess with, I'm putting my hopes there.

BTW, I think 20 second confirmation times is the conservative guesstimate.  And like posted previously, is likely to get better

[RenegadeMan]

Security Advisory for CoinShuffle and Darkwallet

I've posted the security advisory on r/Bitcoin, so far it's just getting downvoted. Can we get some upvotes? It's getting downvoted just because it's from a competing currency, however, they should know that all of the mixing technologies they have presently are broken.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2tmopl/security_advisory_for_coinshuffle_and_darkwallet/

Upvoted yours Evan and the other posters that have made sense.

What an uninformed megamouth this person is:

[–]GibbsSamplePlatter -3 points 57 minutes ago
Darkcoin deploys closed source blobs. They are not an open source project, unless they have forsaken such development strategies.