【Truth or FUD???】DarkCoin – The Next Big Thing, or Just Another Pump and Dump?

[Ozziecoin]

Ozziecoin, Your pump and dump dance would probably be more effective if you were less transparently dishonest in your approach.  I'm normally happy to ignore the nonsense in the altcoin subform, but since you saw fit to go distrupt the coinjoin thread with some offtopic insult hurling I thought I'd bring the extensive response back here where its topical.

CoinJoin is trustless— which is orthogonal with centralized or decentralized, it could be implemented several ways (though trustlessness is usually a prerequisite to a decenteralized implementation). Post 5 in the CoinJoin thread writes in depth about implementing it in a decenteralized way, none of which appears to have been implemented by the darkcoin developers as far as I can tell— from what I've heard it seems that they're not even able to understand it. (This is a disappointment to me, since I was trying to describe these ideas clearly so others could understand them.)

More amusingly, what DarkCoin does is highly centralized because the software is closed— you can't get more centralized than closed source. What the actual behavior is, is anyone's guess— it's impossible to review due to it being closed— though "masternodes" does not sound like something decenteralized, it sounds like something that creates a small chokepoint which could be used to deanonymize its users.

As I've said before CoinJoin is interesting because it's inherently part of Bitcoin already— it just needed better tools (and now there are some, e.g. darkwallet) to make it available to people.  It's a privacy improvement over not having it, but it isn't perfect, but it also didn't require any changes to Bitcoin (much less a whole altcoin) to deploy it.  In an incompatible system much better is possible as is proposed by ZeroCash and much better is actually _realized_ by Bytecoin (and its forks... Monero, Fantomcoin, etc.), the later are actually working (if immature, due reinventing many wheels) implementations of much stronger privacy, decenteralized in their implementation, all released under a good open source license.

Now who is doing the pumping for his coin? As I see it coinjoin as it stands is highly centralised and subject to being co-opted. So, until I see many coinjoin services being setup and used randomly by people, all of the time, I'm going to ignore your theoretical BS; such as "which is orthogonal with centralized or decentralized".  Basically, you have not demonstrated a workable, random, anonymous system in reality.

Why would you attack Darkcoin?  Afterall, the devs themselves have said they will make the code available soon. It seems to me you are prejudiced against Darkcoin.  Why? I cannot fathom nor am I interested.  However, I am interested in using a system of random Masternodes performing coin mixing services rather than your 1 centralised coinmixing server.

As for you saying that CoinJoin is inherently part of Bitcoin; how so? It is not part of the protocol.  I do not see many people use it on a day to day basis. It is not part of computer wallets. Which part of it is actually "inherent".  Why cannot Litecoin use it "inherently" tomorrow if they wanted to? I see nothing inherent about it at all.

Please, Zerocash is totally closed source right now so how would you know it is better?  And bytecoin and its various forks have problems with blockchain bloat. So, I think you should do some research before offering baseless opinion about Darkcoin.

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[eltito]

ITT: Silly people who don't know the difference between standard CoinJoin and Darksend.

Also, silly people who live in a world in which Darkcoin RC4 hasn't been announced.

[Ozziecoin]

For the record:

I think gmaxwell should clarify that the bitcoin coinjoin model is centralised whereas Darkcoin has decentralised coinjoin.

I think you should keep your garbage pump and dump crap out of this thread, put it someplace people won't annoy me by reporting it.

The things I described above in this thread can be implemented in a decentralized manner, as is described in some depth in post five. What darkcoin does doesn't sound decentralized at all— it depends on selected servers— but whos to say? Last I checked software was both closed source and not even working. When darkcoin was announced it claimed what it was implementing, however, was coinjoin.

looking like they are stalling

Bitcoin is openly developed software, anyone who wants to work on it can contribute to it, and last I checked none of the people who have ever worked on it are your payroll. If you're honestly concerned about privacy in Bitcoin you could do some things to help improve it. Pumping some sketchy altcoin in the wrong sub-forum, however, is not going to help, nor is attacking people who have no responsibility to serve your interests.

Coinjoin as currently exists, is centralised. Do you want to disagree with me and tell everyone it is decentralised?

Well should you not do some research on the Masternode implementation before calling it pointless? Where is the basis for your accusations?

In fact Evan wanted to work on the privacy aspect of bitcoin but realised it was pointless.  So did Amir Taaki, hence why DarkWallet was designed from outside the bitcoin dev team.

Yes, I am doing something very positive about privacy by defending good tech against baseless opinion. I did not mention anything about Darkcoin's price.  No one is doing any pumping whatsoever. It is you who is talking about price. I do not expect you to serve my interests.  However, it is wrong of you to malign that which you did not research and call pointless for no good reason.

As for contributing code, we all understand it is a political process. Please do not pretend it is otherwise. I am glad I annoyed you because you annoy me.

[illodin]

More amusingly, what DarkCoin does is highly centralized because the software is closed— you can't get more centralized than closed source. What the actual behavior is, is anyone's guess— it's impossible to review due to it being closed— though "masternodes" does not sound like something decenteralized, it sounds like something that creates a small chokepoint which could be used to deanonymize its users, like a server based CoinJoin but worse since you have to hold a huge pile of coins to run a server.

omg I thought developers would at least have a certain amount of pride to know a bit about a subject they are willing to give their strong opinions on. Trolls and traders and other clueless people I understand, but developers... man...

[Ozziecoin]

The true position of GMaxwell and his dislike of Darkcoin is as follows:

Yea, well the darkcoin thing was pretty offensive to me in general, I feel that it commercially exploited my work promoting coinjoin— itself not so bad, but it was frustrating that it was also stupid: the attraction of coinjoin— for all its limitations— is that you don't need a new coin, it's already just part of Bitcoin.  I've been continually disappointed by the level of hype around Zero*, especially when it comes at the expense of attention to other techniques which are very interesting themselves.

Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work and he defends it by saying that CoinJoin is already part of Bitcoin. I beg to differ. CoinJoin is an add on.  Moreover, masternodes perform coin mixing via a decentralised network of hundreds of masternodes, chosen at random.

It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random. 

[adaseb]

Nicely written article. Thanks for the post.

I will stay clear or DRK for the next while.

[gmaxwell]

Now who is doing the pumping for his coin?

I haven't promoted anything here, except arguably the Bytecoin/etc. ones which aren't mine by any means.

As I see it coinjoin as it stands is highly centralised and subject to being co-opted.

You're asserting this but you haven't justified it. I can't counter an assertion because I don't even know what you're saying is centeralized or how you believe it could be co-opted.

Why would you attack Darkcoin?

Because it's closed source stuff of dubious quality which appears to being deceptively marketed.

Afterall, the devs themselves have said they will make the code available soon.

This isn't how cryptosystem development works. History supports taking the position that is closed should be automatically assumed to be snake-oil if not an outright trojan until proven otherwise. It's highly suspect. Systems which are good do not need to hide their operation, not if you're going to ask other people to use it.

It seems to me you are prejudiced against Darkcoin.  Why? I cannot fathom nor am I interested.

Why do you ask why and then claim disinterest? I am prejudiced against vaporware, closed source, and pump and dump nonsense. I am prejudice against things which exploit the technical work I've done, trade on it's name (as Darkcoin did at first, until I started blasting it it), to the apparent purpose of extracting funds from people who are less technically sophisticated. Beyond the basic immorality of it, I worry that this fundraising style will remove people's willingness to support real improvements that aren't scams, since its hard for them to tell them apart.

than your 1 centralised coinmixing server.

What are you talking about here?  Nothing I've ever described involved a singular "coinmixing" server.

As for you saying that CoinJoin is inherently part of Bitcoin; how so? It is not part of the protocol.  I do not see many people use it on a day to day basis. It is not part of computer wallets. Which part of it is actually "inherent".  Why cannot Litecoin use it "inherently" tomorrow if they wanted to? I see nothing inherent about it at all.

I'm now suspecting that you've never read the CoinJoin post at all— pointing out that it was part of the protocol was the point. It's also inherently a part of Litecoin or anything else that copied the bitcoin code slavishly. It's a result of how signatures work in Bitcoin. Getting wallet interfaces and such developed for it was the motivation for the CoinJoin post, and now there has been good movement on that front.

Please, Zerocash is totally closed source right now so how would you know it is better?

Closed source? It's not actually implemented yet, but unlike "DarkCoin" they've extensively described their approach in their academic publications and subjected it to extensive peer review. I'm not a fan of the security assumptions it makes, but the privacy properties the system should achieve are basically perfect.

And bytecoin and its various forks have problems with blockchain bloat.

All cryptographically strongly-private decenteralized cryptocurrencies are going to be unprunable to some degree, which is an unfortunate scalability tradeoff— but considering that no Bitcoin implementation in production today implements pruning anyways, it's hardly a fatal one— at least in the medium term. The tradeoff here is fundamental: if you don't know what coin has been spent, you can't forget any of them.  Of course, a system could have less privacy and things forever out of the anonymity set could be forgotten but thats the tradeoff you get.

[eltito]

From Evan (of DRK) himself: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg7060893#msg7060893
So with DRK, we have an UNFINISHED product

Let me help you: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/50384/release-candidate

that will NEVER be 100% anonymous.   #FAIL

Darksend isn't finished yet and was never promised to be 100% anonymous unless you use great care.

I can play games with bolded text too!  

[gmaxwell]

Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work

I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random.

Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.

[anonymousxx1503]

Doesn't Gmaxwell own large amounts of cryptonote coins he's trying to hype? Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based, the anonimity upgrade coming in RC3 will distance it even further from the basic implementation. Evan has been working towards one goal for months now and it has paid off so far. People are crying out about not getting perfect anonimity but every moment the implementation is getting better and the main goal is giving you privacy as a default, not an option like darkwallet. Cryptonote has flaws, Zerocash has problems to solve before release as well, Darkcoin has flaws too.

The energy invested in trying to bring down Darkcoin is simply amazing. The entire crypto community gets regularly fucked in the ass by scams and begs for more but when you have a developer put his face behind his creation and work for months to bring a quality result to the market, he is attacked by everyone and worse than the scammers who we quickly forget. Fuck this forum and everyone in this thread too.

[Ozziecoin]

Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work

I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random.

Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.

And how would you know that?

[Ozziecoin]

Now who is doing the pumping for his coin?I haven't promoted anything here, except arguably the Bytecoin/etc. ones which aren't mine by any means.

Yes you have. You have promoted Cryptonote, Bytecoin, Monero, Bitcoin and your CoinJoin service.

[illodin]

So the biggest worry is the source being closed. The source is not released while it's in release candidate phase. This was decided months ago, and the community was strongly behind it.

This was the only correct choice:

Imagine DarkSend source being open from the RC1. There would already be coins that had copy-pasted the RC1 code and their devs and supporters hyping it up, and people throwing their monies into it. And some or even most of those coins would've already ran into a lot of problems because they couldn't have been able to keep up with the constant development speed by Darkcoin team, and finally abandoned because they couldn't copy-paste masternodes or whatever functionality or solve unwanted forks correctly without breaking their own coin and people losing their monies. After all this mess, who would they blame? Well Darkcoin of course. Even though the real reason would've been their own greed and inability to cope with non-finalized release candidate level source.

The idea of how Darksend works has been discussed in the forums extensively, so if anyone wants more information, it's out there.

[Ozziecoin]

It seems to me you are prejudiced against Darkcoin.  Why? I cannot fathom nor am I interested.

Why do you ask why and then claim disinterest? I am prejudiced against vaporware, closed source, and pump and dump nonsense. I am prejudice against things which exploit the technical work I've done, trade on it's name (as Darkcoin did at first, until I started blasting it it), to the apparent purpose of extracting funds from people who are less technically sophisticated. Beyond the basic immorality of it, I worry that this fundraising style will remove people's willingness to support real improvements that aren't scams, since its hard for them to tell them apart.

And there we have it folks. The reason why GMaxwell is upset. Can you not just have said to Evan: "Please acknowledge the work that I did on CoinJoin" Instead of this BS about masternodes being centralised and pointless? 

[anonymousxx1503]

So the biggest worry is the source being closed. The source is not released while it's in release candidate phase. This was decided months ago, and the community was strongly behind it.

This was the only correct choice:

Imagine DarkSend source being open from the RC1. There would already be coins that had copy-pasted the RC1 code and their devs and supporters hyping it up, and people throwing their monies into it. And some or even most of those coins would've already ran into a lot of problems because they couldn't have been able to keep up with the constant development speed by Darkcoin team, and finally abandoned because they couldn't copy-paste masternodes or whatever functionality or solve unwanted forks correctly without breaking their own coin and people losing their monies. After all this mess, who would they blame? Well Darkcoin of course. Even though the real reason would've been their own greed and inability to cope with non-finalized release candidate level source.

The idea of how Darksend works has been discussed in the forums extensively, so if anyone wants more information, it's out there.

It's exactly this. No one is forcing you to use Darkcoin right now while Darksend is still closed source, even Bitfinex said that they won't run closed source code and are only running the open source version of the client for their exchange. And yet they still added Darkcoin as a top 3 coin in the world. Shitcoins would have copy pasted it from day 1 and complained, there's no doubt about it. Darkcoin wouldn't be where it is, where it deserves to be, without having the code be closed source at first, there's simply no other way to do it in a highly competitive world such as this one.

[AlexGR]

More amusingly, what DarkCoin does is highly centralized because the software is closed— you can't get more centralized than closed source. What the actual behavior is, is anyone's guess— it's impossible to review due to it being closed— though "masternodes" does not sound like something decenteralized, it sounds like something that creates a small chokepoint which could be used to deanonymize its users, like a server based CoinJoin but worse since you have to hold a huge pile of coins to run a server.

1) Masternodes are just a term. They could be called "decentralized nodes". With 500 nodes on the network, it's hardly "centralized". The number of desktop wallets running will probably be less than the nodes themselves.

2) The argument about centralization and closed source, is invalid. There is no intention for DarkSend to be ...trusted by its users. The open sourcing has been decided and will be done once the code is finished. What's the point of opensourcing it while the specifications are not yet finalized?

3) The coins required for the masternode are in order to prevent bad actors through a cost disincentive that escalates as one tries to accumulate more nodes (less coins in the market, price spikes, accumulation of extra nodes = problematic). DarkSend does not use blind signing, and, if I remember correctly, the reason is that the implementation had DOS issues and the attacker could get away with it. So given that the node knows what it signs, the next alternative was to do multiple darksends through the nodes. That, along with the cost disincentive, would reduce the statistic probability of the bad actor controlling all the nodes of a transaction and hence knowing the money flow. I am not aware of plans to implement blind signing (they could exist, or not - it's up to the dev of darkcoin).

As I've said before CoinJoin is interesting because it's inherently part of Bitcoin already— it just needed better tools (and now there are some, e.g. darkwallet) to make it available to people.

If it was part of Bitcoin, it wouldn't require Dark Wallet, would it?

In an incompatible system much better is possible as is proposed by ZeroCash

How is a trusted solution (due to the accumulator) better?

[eltito]

Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work

I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

"CoinJoin was invented by Gmaxwell" = "quite liberally".  Hmm.

It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random.

Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.

PS, masternode centralization in the future doesn't cause any problems for darkcoin. I have 2 possible solutions to evaluate for V2 of darksend (ring signatures and encrypted system where the users themselves do the joining relayed through the masternodes.) . Both of these make the masternodes unaware of who is sending money to whom, so centralization isn't an issue at that point.

Well, we know that ring signatures are out.  Maybe if you'd stop pretending that Darksend in its current iteration is the final product...

[gmaxwell]

Yes you have. You have promoted Cryptonote, Bytecoin, Monero, Bitcoin and your CoinJoin service.

CoinJoin isn't a service, ... I guess you've pretty conclusively shown you have no clue what you're talking about.

Nor have I promoted Bitcoin here— I haven't said anything positive about it at all.  WRT the Bytecoin & forks I don't really believe that I'm promoting them, they suck in a number of ways unrelated to their privacy features, and the decision to make an altcoin out of it seems shameful and greedy to me... but the privacy part is really quite brilliant, and thats just my opinion as someone who has been working on privacy in this space for a long time.

Doesn't Gmaxwell own large amounts of cryptonote coins he's trying to hype

Nope. I have a bit so I could try them out, and some people have made use of my monero tip address, but its all trivial amounts. I think altcoins are generally inadvisable, and in the long term I have plans that should remove all reasons for having them. I think the promotion or opposition to these things based on profit motives is incredibly sleazy.

Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based

I've seen no concrete evidence to support this. Can you point me to some?  I'd certantly be happy to find that I was incorrect, I think privacy technology is interesting and important and while I think creating an 'altcoin' for it is counterproductive (immediate loss of anonymity set) and pointless, if something good is developed I'd welcome it.  But after sitting quietly for some time the indications that darkcoin is largely substance-less vaporware and hype have grown stronger, not weaker.

[sin242]

  My clearly biased opinion of altcoins and dark in paticular atm is clearly biased

Fixed.

[eltito]

Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based

I've seen no concrete evidence to support this. Can you point me to some?  I'd certantly be happy to find that I was incorrect, I think privacy technology is interesting and important and while I think creating an 'altcoin' for it is counterproductive (immediate loss of anonymity set) and pointless, if something good is developed I'd welcome it.  But after sitting quietly for some time the indications that darkcoin is largely substance-less vaporware and hype have grown stronger, not weaker.

It's interesting that you lash out at others for making claims about closed source (for now) code, then turn around and do the exact same thing, just with a different slant.

The last sentence makes the rest of the paragraph feel more than a little bit disingenuous.