if DarkSend works without any flaws, then DarkCoin will be better than Bitcoin. before all the other coins copy-and-paste the DarkSend code, we should really establish DarkCoin as the world's main crypto-currency. we need professional-looking user-friendly phone apps, paper wallets, video tutorials, promotional literature like brochures, ads, etc. and good social media presence. we need it to be totally simple and straight-forward for merchants and retailers to accept DRK and store it securely. and it would be nice to get DarkCoin on
CoinMKT.com where you can buy and sell them for $USD with money orders or bank transfers.
actually, for a long time I've been enthusiastic about Megacoin, and I still am. but now that Eduffield and InternetApe are about to achieve the implementation of anonymity in DarkCoin's core protocol, I'm shifting a lot of my focus here now.
I made
this video for Megacoin. (it was a LOT of work!) if I get enough extra time, I'd be willing to make some similar videos to promote DarkCoin once DarkSend is successfully implemented.
if DarkSend source is openly given out to the other coins, who knows if DarkCoin would benefit that much from having been the original anonymous coin, or if other coins with more of a head-start would just stay in the lead when they also implement it.
thinking about it now, maybe DarkSend's source code should be kept secret for quite a while. eventually it will need to be released of course, but so long as DarkCoin is the only anonymous coin, it will be better money than Bitcoin and will get adopted by the whole world. if the source is kept secret, I think DarkCoin price could go up to
thousands of dollars per 1 DRK this year, adoption could spread like a wildfire, and, unlike Bitcoin, DarkCoin would be essentially unregulatable. transactions with DarkSend can't be easily tracked, they're just like physical private cash transactions.
financial anonymity is an inevitability. it's ultimately what everyone wants. outlawing and prohibiting this technology would be against the will of the people, just like alcohol prohibition was. eventually it just can't be stopped.
closed-source would require the world to trust DarkCoin's developers, but it's obviously in the devs' interests to develop a functional anonymous coin that's totally fair and square, especially since the code will eventually be released anyway. why would they try to rig it if that would just destroy the coin's value?
trusting DarkSend code seems to me like less of a stretch than trusting some of these Bitcoin and alt-coin exchanges with your real coins.
-onetime
Having watched a number of coins launch now, I have a few thoughts about this:
1) Making a coin is not making money. If the devs are interested in cashing in and cashing out, the coin isn't a medium of exchange, it's a medium for commoditization. If it become a commodity, it will bounce around like bitcoin currently does, making it almost unusable.
2) If you don't have open source code, the only people who find your security holes are hackers - and that probably isn't the best for your security. Yes, it should be tested privately to some extent, but in the final analysis, it isn't code secrecy that will make this coin successful - it is the anonymity that the coin itself provides. If other coins copy that, so much the better for the rest of the world.
3) If this is the only coin that uses Darksend, it will get shut down and/or blacklisted by a number of governments, perhaps even the US government. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I DO know that crypto coins are being looked at closely, and if multiple coins adopt the DarkSend code, the genii is out of the bottle, so to speak. It will take some of the heat off DarkCoin when/if that time comes.
4) Frankly, I mine coins more for the fun of learning than for profit. I like this coin because I like this community and the devs. Part of that is the openess and willingness to try things. Two weeks ago, this was a CPU only coin. Today, we have a GPU miner that isn't a sneaky secret - eduffield posted the link on the darkcoin site! That is the kind of community I want to be a part of. That is the kind of community that I hope other people will be drawn to for the right reasons, not just for a quick profit.
[gets off soapbox]