Good luck with Honorcoin, I'm just dropping a few notes regarding the announcement:
The problem
In the Honorcoin team, we are concerned about the privacy issues Bitcoin-based cryptocurrencies have. Right now, the 99% percent of the altcoins have not addressed this problem, mainly, because many developers do not have the expertise to develop a solution.
May I ask why the sudden interest in "privacy", beyond the "
it's the latest trend"?
Darkcoin was concerned about the privacy issues like months ago... People said "
oh, who will want to have Darkcoins... sounds sketchy... the government will ban you... it's a futile effort... it's money wasted as the exchanges will surely ban you... no no, that's a small niche we don't want to be associated with" - and other things like that.
How is it that suddenly everyone and their grandma "sees" the problem while they marginalized Darkcoin for seeing it and actually trying to address it?
Only a few coins have come with a solution for their own Blockchains, such as Darkcoin, Fedoracoin and others. Their solution is against cryptocurrency fundamentals, and what Satoshi Nakamoto wanted for Bitcoin. They have come up with a solution that is not open source, and they are not willing to share it with the rest of the coins, and teach how to implement it.
This crosses into misinformation territory.
DarkSend was always intended to be open-sourced, once it is finished. The development plan itself, is updated often and has as the last milestone the release of the code to the community.
Time horizon for this was around early July now it's gone back by a month or so due to the issues that Darkcoin itself encountered in RC2. The anonymity aspect is still being worked and will get an upgrade in RC4.
Close-source solutions are dangerous to the Cryptocurrency space. If Bitcoin’s source code was not open source it would not have succeeded. Open source and cooperation is what drives cryptocurrencies. We need to stop closed-source solutions.
You are right on that closed-source solutions are dangerous. They also require trust. DarkSend aims to be trustless and open when its finalized. It is not finalized and its peripheral elements (masternode payments) caused forking issues. Nobody is delaying this because they want to. It's simply evolving organically, as it did for months - it's just that now people take notice due to the rise in price.
As for cooperation between cryptocurrencies, that's almost absurd. Dark is crucified all day and night by Bitcoin + altcoins. Cooperation is not really the intent here.
The intent is "give me your code and I'll make a clone coin to cash out in a pump & dump" - just like it's happening already with all the coins that claim anonymity through some kind of central mixer or ...coin-forwarding-wallets that only cause laughter.
Let's be honest: Coins and coin devs don't care about the user's anonymity. They didn't care in the past (no interest in developing anonymity a few weeks or months ago), they don't care now. They only care to ride the latest train - and put their users privacy at risk while doing so. The only ones who do care and actually made something that works, go out in transparency, with their own name on the line, and are vilified with false information about "closed source" bs, when it's a known - in every development schedule of Darkcoin - that opensourcing will happen in a few weeks.
On top of that, DarkSend uses a heavily dis-incentivized system of having extremely expensive masternodes as a method to prevent "bad actors" from mapping the network. This value per masternode dis-incentive is a part of the game-theory component that makes DarkSend operational in Darkcoin.
Say DarkSend was opensourced right now and a new clone coin says "we will implement it". How are the users of that coin protected from having their transactions mapped when the marketcap of that coin is peanuts and anyone can buy all the nodes and map all transactions? Case in point, DarkSend would not really be an adequate solution for such coins and new solutions would have to be implemented anyway. There would be no 12.000 USD disincentive per node for bad actors because the coin marketcap is useless.
The only reason one would implement it would be to cash out on the ignorant because it would provide no security guarantee, outside the context of the game-theory component.
Again, good luck with the project + the anonymity solution you are working at. As citizens we'll need all the improvements we can get in that area.
