rpietila Altcoin Observer

[Brilliantrocket]

My hypothesis on the decline of darkcoin is the following.  (Not that I care much, but I'll watch it attentively for the fun).

The hype is already partly over, and will keep declining, this is inherent to the life cycle of "hype" alts. Add to this the better cryptonote technology, recently instantiated in a fair-launch coin with monero, whose high-quality community keeps growing and will quickly attract part of the darkcoin one.
So the decline seems unavoidable, but noting unusual at this stage.

But, unlike other alts, darkcoin is relying on master nodes that require at least 1000 coins. Running a masternode earns the owner some interest. What I think will happen is that once the first masternode owners realize they will make better profit by selling their +1000 coins now rather than earning interest on a coin which is loosing value, well they will sell! This will be a catalyst to lowering even more the price, making more masternode owners realize that they'd better do the same as soon as possible, etc.
So the decline might be faster than "usual", due to this domino effect, waiting to trigger.

Not very good with finance, I see. Don't worry, few are. Thankfully the Darkcoin developer is one of them

[Brilliantrocket]

Monero supporters are almost as bad as the religious cuckoos that deny evolution. What part of cannot scale don't you understand? Have fun trading your proof of concept amongst yourselves. Just hope the community doesn't grow too big, or you won't even be able to send coins!

[darkota]

Are you being disingenuous or do you just suck at math? If you have twice the blockchain growth with just a tiny fraction of the transactions, what do you think will happen if you were at real volumes?

Transaction identification by prefix: this feature will let us to cut off ring signatures from blockchain that under checkpoint - save space by 30-70%(depends of mixin usage) -Crypto_Zoidberg, Boolberry

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=577267.0

Whoa, I wonder what that is, I wonder if you seperate the daemon and wallet, that you can create light clients so you dont have to download the full blockchain, just like with Bitcoin!

It's funny to see that you completely ignore the other points, when you've been outed as a Liar. Lmfao.

[darkota]

Did you forget this Brilliantrocket?

I've listed the Flaws of Darkcoin and Monero.

Darkcoin's Flaws:

1) Darkcoin has a 50% instamine by it's own developers during launch, as the block reward was set to 500, and there was no windows wallets/miners. Evan, the developer, and Internetape, the other developer, instamined over 1million Darkcoin's within 24 hours.

2) Darkcoin's name itself, Darkcoin, will always be affiliated with illegal activity like the Darkweb, Drugs, etc, and the name itself ensures that Darkcoin will never reach anything close to mainstream acceptance.

3) Darkcoin's "anonymity" is based on coinjoin, it simply mixes users coins around, making it harder to track it. However, if even the slightest taint if found when mixing the coins, an investigator will be able to deduce who sent what and who received what. The maker of coinjoin, Gmaxwell, deeply criticized Darkcoin since it's coinjoin based "anonymity" is basically a joke.

4) Darkcoin's mixing system/coinjoin relies on something called Masternodes, Masternodes are nodes that are set up by people, anyone can set one up, and Masternodes are the things that mix the coin around. Masternodes also present many risks besides giving trivial "anonymity", if all masternodes are owned by one individual, he will be able to "de-anonymize" Darkcoin and see all transactions clearly.

5) Darkcoin's Masternode Payment system has forked the network many times, and has failed Twice in the effort to pay the owners of Masternodes.

6) Darkcoin's Masternode/Darksend system is closed source, so that means the developers could be stealing coins, or doing any other malicious things, and it will remain unnoticed

7) The Masternodes can always be DDOSed, effectively shutting them down, if the majority of Masternodes were taken offline(they are mostly hosted on Amazon servers), then Darkcoin's trivial anonymity will completely shut off

There are many many other flaws, it will take up too much space to list, so I've listed the main ones.

Monero's Flaws:

1) Monero's bloating/scaling is an issue, where the blockchain itself takes up a lot of space on someone's computer, however, there have solutions to this, as shown by Crypto_Zoidberg, after he fixed this issue with his own coin. The issue has pretty much been fixed anyway, since bloating was caused by dust payments from pools, and with a recent update, those dust payments have been taken off. But because I think it will look to unfair compared to Darkcoin's 101 flaws, I had to list a "flaw" for Monero

2) That's it.

Or this?

Here is the post I referrenced earlier. It's quite a long post, but the part concerning CN is near the middle. And please don't bring up where he says Darkcoin is simple coinjoin (older post) , he acknowledges that it isn't further down.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=557732.msg7513123#msg7513123

CryptoNote doesn't hide the amount and the payer is mixed with a limited number of numerous other potential payers, so the IP correlation can be used to narrow the possibilities statistically and home in on identity, by observing patterns across all users. Thus the lack of IP address obfuscation in CryptoNote (assuming Tor is really a honey pots, and or most users fail to employ Tor) reduces the anonymity. -gmaxwell


While it may not be able to scale at Bitcoin levels, Monero's chain atm is twice Bitcoins, which is very reasonable considering it gives the highest level of anonymity there is for cryptocoins right now. He also doesn't say Anything about it being impossible to reduce, why you may ask? Because Crypto_Zoidber already reduced it for his own coin and reduced bloat by 50%-70%, and Monero also reduced the majority of the bloat, which was caused by dust transactions. Again, BrilliantRocket, it's either you greatly misinterpret information given to you, or you lie and try to manipulate others with selective wording

_______________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________

CoinJoin’s algorithm suffers from not being atomic and thus it can be repeatedly jammed by an adversary, i.e. denial-of-service. This is because first the inputs have to be collected, then the outputs have to blind signed with a group signature, and then finally all inputs have to signed. If any one of the participant senders fails to complete all the steps, the transaction is jammed and the process must start again. All proposals for throttling or blacklisting adversaries was argued to be ineffective and intractable. Darkcoin innovated CoinJoin by adding a collateral payment which is forfeited by participants who fail to complete all steps. This requires a random master node to break the unlinkability as it knows the matching output of each input. It is assumed that not all master nodes will be adversaries and thus sending multiple times through different master nodes will provide a probablistic level of unlinkability. The master nodes are purchased and it isn’t clear that a sufficiently powerful adversary couldn't sufficiently Sybil attack by acquiring a larger percentage of the master nodes. There is also concern this might also enable the adversary to steal collateral payments. Also the master nodes aren’t untraceable and thus could perhaps be held liable by governments for breaking AML and KYC laws. CoinJoin and Darkcoin suffer from the simultaneity timing problem that other spenders need to send spends of the same amount simultaneously. -gmaxwell

Gmaxwell also shows that while Darkcoin have "advanced" coinjoin, it still suffers from the same issues, not to mention the Masternode centralization problem.

Darkcoin's anonymity is simply put, Trivial and Inferior to Cryptonote anonymity.

[surfer43]

Monero supporters are almost as bad as the religious cuckoos that deny evolution. What part of cannot scale don't you understand? Have fun trading your proof of concept amongst yourselves. Just hope the community doesn't grow too big, or you won't even be able to send coins!

The same argument can be applied to Bitcoin. It only increases the disk space required to run a full node. The current blockchain size of just under 1 GB can be significantly reduced.

In an extreme case, what if the blockchain gets to 1 TB in ten years? That is hardly a huge amount of space now, and will be even more trivial then.

[Brilliantrocket]

If I spent time addressing half the idiocy that you have the audacity to call a point, I'd be here a while. I think I'll go with Anonymint over your lazy devs. What have they even accomplished other than some half baked pool fixes?

[darkota]

Ok brilliantrocket, you've been proven wrong on every single post you've made...this is just a waste of time responding to you, read the posts above and you'll see how you've been wrong on literally everything..

I wonder what Evan's plans are for his 1million+ Instamined Darkcoins? hmm...

Well im going out, goodbye and dont let the continuous price drop, failed rc3 launches, trivial coinjoin based anonymity, drug/illegal-themed name, and has a dev who instamined over 1million(50% of all drk) darkcoin within 24 hours during it's scam linux only launch, bite you!
 

[Brilliantrocket]

Ok brilliantrocket, you've been proven wrong on every single post you've made...this is just a waste of time responding to you, read the posts above and you'll see how you've been wrong on literally everything..

I wonder what Evan's plans are for his 1million+ Instamined Darkcoins? hmm...

Case in point. Darkcoin was announced in advance of its release. There were many people mining. You could easily see that if you bothered to check. You are a troll and it isn't worth my time to respond to you any further.

[Brilliantrocket]

In regards to Anonymint, when he speaks I would pay attention. He is at genius / near genius levels when it comes to cryptography and math. If he says it cannot scale, it cannot scale. The blockchain CANNOT be pruned anywhere near enough for it to be a practical, anonymous currency.

[surfer43]

In regards to Anonymint, when he speaks I would pay attention. He is at genius / near genius levels when it comes to cryptography and math. If he says it cannot scale, it cannot scale. The blockchain CANNOT be pruned anywhere near enough for it to be a practical, anonymous currency.

Can you support your claim that a large blockchain makes it not practical or anonymous?

[Brilliantrocket]

In regards to Anonymint, when he speaks I would pay attention. He is at genius / near genius levels when it comes to cryptography and math. If he says it cannot scale, it cannot scale. The blockchain CANNOT be pruned anywhere near enough for it to be a practical, anonymous currency.

Can you support your claim that a large blockchain makes it not practical or anonymous?

With a 50% or more reduction in size, CrytoNote's blockchain bloat will be only slightly more than Bitcoin's blockchain bloat.

Certainly not right now. In 5 or more years, who can say.

[Brilliantrocket]

In regards to Anonymint, when he speaks I would pay attention. He is at genius / near genius levels when it comes to cryptography and math. If he says it cannot scale, it cannot scale. The blockchain CANNOT be pruned anywhere near enough for it to be a practical, anonymous currency.

Can you support your claim that a large blockchain makes it not practical or anonymous?

You won't have enough full nodes. Bitcoin already has trouble getting people to run them!

[Roy Badami]

no immediate urgency to deploy a database

Most computers cannot use XMR without a database, because the chain doesn't fit in memory.  I'd consider that urgent.  Not urgent enough to do it wrong, however.

I'm not sure I'd buy most.

Runs fine on my over-three-years-old baby MacBook Air 11 inch.  Admittedly 4GB RAM, but it wouldn't surprise me if most computers have that much these days...  (Certainly you'd be hard pressed to buy one with less these days.)

roy

ETA: Maybe most Windows boxes are already struggling badly?  For reasons I never really understood, back when Armory was storing the blockchain in memory Mac and Linux users seemed to survive much longer than Windows users did (I think even than 64-bit Windows users did).  My aging Mac carried on running Armory fine right up until the RAM reduction code made it into a stable release; Windows users were IIRC having to upgrade to 8GB RAM to have any chance of accessing their coins.  Would be interesting to know if that phenomenon is being repeated here...

(Not disagreeing this needs to be fixed before it becomes a major issue, of course; just slightly surprised to learn that it might already be a major issue for some people).

[GreekBitcoin]

In 5 or more years you will have 1TB ssd on... mobile phones running nodes...

[Brilliantrocket]

In 5 or more years you will have 1TB ssd on... mobile phones running nodes...

See you then. Meanwhile, Darkcoin will become the go to privacy-centric in several months. There are already solid ideas on how to make unmasking transactions through node collusion exceedingly difficult. Impractical even for an entity that controls half the nodes. So once that is done, what exactly does CN have to offer?

Adaptive block sizing means right now it's hard to get money around in XMR chain because it is saturated. However, over the next hour the blockchain will expand its blocksize and this will be less of an issue. Please wait for your tx to be included in the blockchain.

Just wait for your transaction to be included guys. LOL That'll go over well with the real world.

[GreekBitcoin]

In 5 or more years you will have 1TB ssd on... mobile phones running nodes...

See you then. Meanwhile, Darkcoin will become the go to privacy-centric in several months. There are already solid ideas on how to make unmasking transactions through node collusion exceedingly difficult. Impractical even for an entity that controls half the nodes. So once that is done, what exactly does CN have to offer?

yeah i was looking into Darkcoin many months ago when in a few weeks everything would be open source, when soon 10DRK limit wouldnt exist, when ring signatures would be implemented soon etc. See you also in a few months.

[Brilliantrocket]

In 5 or more years you will have 1TB ssd on... mobile phones running nodes...

See you then. Meanwhile, Darkcoin will become the go to privacy-centric in several months. There are already solid ideas on how to make unmasking transactions through node collusion exceedingly difficult. Impractical even for an entity that controls half the nodes. So once that is done, what exactly does CN have to offer?

yeah i was looking into Darkcoin many months ago when in a few weeks everything would be open source, when soon 10DRK limit wouldnt exist, when ring signatures would be implemented soon etc. See you also in a few months.

Getting things done takes time. I know you're used to coins that just copy and paste, make some insignificant changes , and then claim legitimacy. Masternodes are paid directly from the block reward. Just a little bit more difficult than pool optimization, no? Also, last I checked, your lead dev isn't even full time! That sure inspires trust in the project.

[illodin]

CoinJoin’s algorithm suffers from not being atomic and thus it can be repeatedly jammed by an adversary, i.e. denial-of-service. This is because first the inputs have to be collected, then the outputs have to blind signed with a group signature, and then finally all inputs have to signed. If any one of the participant senders fails to complete all the steps, the transaction is jammed and the process must start again. All proposals for throttling or blacklisting adversaries was argued to be ineffective and intractable. Darkcoin innovated CoinJoin by adding a collateral payment which is forfeited by participants who fail to complete all steps. This requires a random master node to break the unlinkability as it knows the matching output of each input. It is assumed that not all master nodes will be adversaries and thus sending multiple times through different master nodes will provide a probablistic level of unlinkability. The master nodes are purchased and it isn’t clear that a sufficiently powerful adversary couldn't sufficiently Sybil attack by acquiring a larger percentage of the master nodes. There is also concern this might also enable the adversary to steal collateral payments. Also the master nodes aren’t untraceable and thus could perhaps be held liable by governments for breaking AML and KYC laws. CoinJoin and Darkcoin suffer from the simultaneity timing problem that other spenders need to send spends of the same amount simultaneously. -gmaxwell

Gmaxwell also shows that while Darkcoin have "advanced" coinjoin, it still suffers from the same issues, not to mention the Masternode centralization problem.

Darkcoin's anonymity is simply put, Trivial and Inferior to Cryptonote anonymity.

"There is also concern this might also enable the adversary to steal collateral payments"
Badly behaving nodes are banned by the network.

"master nodes aren’t untraceable"
Doesn't monero have nodes? Yes? Are they untraceable?

"other spenders need to send spends of the same amount simultaneously"
It's all automatic, users don't have to worry about that. User clicks send, and Darksend will wait until there are sufficient sends in the pool. And after the Darksend becomes mandatory (or default option) this won't be a problem as there will be a lot of people actually using the coin and creating transactions, as the coin can actually handle > 5 transactions per block.

"Masternode centralization problem"
Doesn't monero have nodes? Yes? => "centralization problem"


And, the most important thing - Darkcoin has a dev who is committed to developing Darkcoin further full time for 2 years still. So improvements are coming with every release.

[Quanttek]

In regards to Anonymint, when he speaks I would pay attention. He is at genius / near genius levels when it comes to cryptography and math. If he says it cannot scale, it cannot scale. The blockchain CANNOT be pruned anywhere near enough for it to be a practical, anonymous currency.

Yes, Anonymint is quite a genius in that regard, but Moore's law shouldn't be forgotten about. Yes it scales worse than Bitcoin, but that's the cost for the true anonymity it offers (unlike Darkcoin. Let me quote gmaxwell (about btc nodes): "[14:22:44] <gmaxwell> Zomg $1 in diskspace required to run a node!" Even if the blockchain is 1 TB in 10 years it isn't hard to run a node. Yes there is some entry barrier for new users to not run a spv-client. 20GB is nothing! It maybe takes a few hours to download, but diskspace will never be a problem of cryptocurrencies, hence this "scaling issue" is even worse with DRK, because CJ splits tx into hundreds of sub-x, that bloat the blockchain way worse.

Monero supporters are almost as bad as the religious cuckoos that deny evolution. What part of cannot scale don't you understand? Have fun trading your proof of concept amongst yourselves. Just hope the community doesn't grow too big, or you won't even be able to send coins!

It's nice to see how informed you are about CryptoNote...
First off, the scaling issue AnonyMint was talking about it diskspace, that has nothing to do with the maximum of allowed txs in blocks/the maximum block size.
XMR has adaptive block sizing up to 5MB with 1min block time, so block saturation - like in btc - shouldn't be a problem for a long time

If I spent time addressing half the idiocy that you have the audacity to call a point, I'd be here a while. I think I'll go with Anonymint over your lazy devs. What have they even accomplished other than some half baked pool fixes?

It's nice to see how informed you are about CryptoNote Monero...

• Optimizing the alg 50 times
• Fixing bugs(a whole lot), clearing and unobfuscating the BCN code
• Mnemonic wallets
• Open-source pools (not just a fix for them lol). Before there was only Minergate for BCN, closed source and 10% fee
• built-in I2P implementation in c (in development)
• Proper database implementation for the blockchain(in development)
• tx-auto-split
• RPCwallet
• daemonized daemon
• Multiple GUI wallets

And the list is not even completed. Here are some reasons to add why you should use XMR

[surfer43]

In 5 or more years you will have 1TB ssd on... mobile phones running nodes...

See you then. Meanwhile, Darkcoin will become the go to privacy-centric in several months. There are already solid ideas on how to make unmasking transactions through node collusion exceedingly difficult. Impractical even for an entity that controls half the nodes. So once that is done, what exactly does CN have to offer?

How would it become exceedingly difficult? AFAIK right now it can be done by any masternode.

Even if it's impossible, the Darksend privacy is still fundamentally flawed, see http://www.scribd.com/doc/227369807/Bitcoin-Coinjoin-Not-Anonymous-v01 and http://www.coinjoinsudoku.com/advisory/.

Monero has practical working anonymity now.