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

[gmaxwell]

gmaxwell, I think it would be great if you could spare some of your time to review Darkcoin's code once Evan has completed it.
I have no doubt that you would be able to provide valuable constructive feedback to Evan. Collaboration I see is the key to evolution and advancing ourselves in the crypto technology space - I am sure with both of your minds together something great could happen!

I will, if someone remembers to point me to it— ideally if it also comes with a high level design document so I don't have to extract all the behavior from the code (doing so is very time consuming).

As an aside, and apart from the privacy tech—

Whats with the claims here that the subsidy was changed after some millions of coins were created?  Thats pretty damning if true— shades of Solidcoin.

The whole too-low-initial-difficulty plus exponential distribution thing seems to be a trope now. Bitcoin's initial difficulty was high enough (relative to existing hardware and software) that it couldn't even keep up with its 10 minute target during the first year.  If I were crazy enough to launch an altcoin I'd set it so that the real mining didn't begin until it crossed some somewhat reasonable difficulty to reduce the land grab intensity, because it smells pretty fishy otherwise.

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[AlexGR]

The whole too-low-initial-difficulty plus exponential distribution thing seems to be a trope now. Bitcoin's initial difficulty was high enough (relative to existing hardware and software) that it couldn't even keep up with its 10 minute target during the first year.  If I were crazy enough to launch an altcoin I'd set it so that the real mining didn't begin until it crossed some somewhat reasonable difficulty to reduce the land grab intensity, because it smells pretty fishy otherwise.

Altcoins don't have the luxury of bitcoin. Not even litecoin has it (next year it'll produce another 10mn coins over the existing 29mn - requiring >100mn USD to buy these, so its price has only one way to go... DOWN)... In effect steady minting of coins leads to dead coins due to inflation.

People can't afford to have a coin that goes like 1mn coin this year, 2mn next year, 3mn the year after etc etc. It's guaranteed suicide in terms of investment. Especially in the first months, inflation can be like 2-3% per day, requiring hundreds of BTCs to keep prices steady.

Hence the fast-reward at the start / slower or even no reward (PoS/PoW) thereafter for modern coins.

(With DRK it was a case of too low diff at the launch and too slow diff retargeting which spewed coins like crazy.)

[Seldar]

If darkcoin is a pump and dump its the longest pump and dump coin in crypto history. If you noticed most coins do this in the first week or two.  I also know a lot of people made a lot of money with this coin.

So the dev made money? Good at least he is still around working on the coin. Not many coins can say that 6 months in.  Please learn what a pump and dump is before you throw around terms you don;t understand.

Premine? Maybe maybe not. Pump and Dump no lol just no.

I agree.

And what's new?
This instamine? Everebody know it since a long time.
Not a fully anonimity coin? Yes, devs always said that wasn't a real anonymous coin, but a compromise.
Closed source? It should become an open source when darksend will be fully operational.

Anyway, all answers will be given when the MN payments is working, and sources are realeased.

[Taurenchief]

1.Now I can see you are trying to argue without standing point. Did you see 1.75 million DRK sold in January?
Only a idiot will believe he sold all in january.
Suppose even if he sold all in january, is 42 btc bare no money? In January BTC worth more than 700 usd.

Only an idiot will believe he was only one who mined. Oh, that's you. 

2. Instantmine is that one or few person mine a ton of coin in the beginning of release, mostly because of low difficulty. Do you see in BC, Cinni or other POS coins case, one or few person mine a 40% of PoW coins?
In PoS coins, the developer make a ANN that everyone can mine from beginning, do you call this instantmine?

One or few persons did not mine 40% of DRK. There was an ANN, and there were HUGE number of people ready to mine the second it was released.

3. I cannot agree with you that most miners use linux, because according to what I know, majority of miners use windows.
Look at the discussion of cgminer, sgminer, etc, you will see most forum members are discussing how to use windows based miners.

Windows wallet was available 4 hours after the launch. And, a HUGE number of MINERS run Linux on their Windows computers via vmware or virtualbox anyway. So yea, cryptohunter and you were probably the only ones dumb enough not to.

Continue to fight back without standless point.
1. I will not responde, it is clear that the coin is instantmine and people can guess who mine them.
2. You are still trying to argue without ground. If you look at facts, suppose a huge number of miners jump on DRK in the first 15 hours, the difficulty change will not be as shown in the block chain.
3. That is not the wallet that majority of miners can run after 4 hours of release. You say the majority of miners as dumb, while you guys dont provide an equal opportunity for all the miners?
I question who you are and why your quality is so low

Now DRK is being manipulated, i would not be surprised that they are trying to cash out DRK before all the negative effects are revealed.

[stealth923]

gmaxwell, I think it would be great if you could spare some of your time to review Darkcoin's code once Evan has completed it.
I have no doubt that you would be able to provide valuable constructive feedback to Evan. Collaboration I see is the key to evolution and advancing ourselves in the crypto technology space - I am sure with both of your minds together something great could happen!

I will, if someone remembers to point me to it— ideally if it also comes with a high level design document so I don't have to extract all the behavior from the code (doing so is very time consuming).

As an aside, and apart from the privacy tech—

Whats with the claims here that the subsidy was changed after some millions of coins were created?  Thats pretty damning if true— shades of Solidcoin.

The whole too-low-initial-difficulty plus exponential distribution thing seems to be a trope now. Bitcoin's initial difficulty was high enough (relative to existing hardware and software) that it couldn't even keep up with its 10 minute target during the first year.  If I were crazy enough to launch an altcoin I'd set it so that the real mining didn't begin until it crossed some somewhat reasonable difficulty to reduce the land grab intensity, because it smells pretty fishy otherwise.

Thank you - Will let Evan know!

I guess something positive did come out of all this!

To the OP - your intentions were clearly bad - but there's a silver lining in every cloud haha

[Ozziecoin]

Btw, this is my alleged pumping link that Greg took exception to: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg7159773#msg7159773

[AlexGR]

Continue to fight back without standless point.
1. I will not responde, it is clear that the coin is instantmine and people can guess who mine them.

Yeah well and I can guess satoshi and his friends mined the first million bitcoins. There was no announcement, and of course you weren't notified of its future success... So by your rationale bitcoin is a 10bn $ scam.

DRK was preannounced. Its success wasn't though (and that's why people were selling 100k DRKs for 2.5BTC). Now a lot of people are butthurt because either they lost the train, or their own anonymous coin sucks so bad that it's not even funny.

Now go open some threads about why NXT is a huge scam since nobody mined anything but were given the stakes. Or Ripple. Or IPO'ed coins and would be IPO'ed coins like ethereum... Or Counterparty with the burned bitcoins... or all the POS and PoW/PoS hybrids with the 100% instamines... yeah much fairness for future miners in all those. But DRK gets all the attention. No surprises there though.

2. You are still trying to argue without ground. If you look at facts, suppose a huge number of miners jump on DRK in the first 15 hours, the difficulty change will not be as shown in the block chain.

And? We know the totals in terms of coins.

3. That is not the wallet that majority of miners can run after 4 hours of release. You say the majority of miners as dumb, while you guys dont provide an equal opportunity for all the miners?

There is no such thing as "equal opportunity". Early miners always have the advantage. Especially in the PoW/PoS hybrids that you don't see a problem with their instamine... what can the future miners mine in these coins? And you care about "equal opportunity"? Yeah, right.

[AizenSou]

This Hazard guy who wrote this article is pretty well known in the community and his prediction is usually correct. Normally I enjoy his writing and respect him, but to be honest I feel some of his hostiles to a lot of coins. Of course he has some reasons to feel like this, and I understand why some devs who are very passionate about their creative child sometimes see others children as fatal virus / bacteria to their own child.

Hazard has written another article about NXT and call it scam. That's the reason I don't invest in NXT when it was at its lowest and now you all can see how NXT performs.
I mean every coin has its own weakness, but the most important thing is how it evolves later. You can hate DRK and avoid it, nobody forces you to invest in DRK if you don't want to. Everyone has his/her own opinion. So invest your time and money in what you believe, research about it. If you choose some coins to invest because you want to make fast money, you're in the wrong place. The same even for BTC, DRK or NXT.

Just my 2 DRKs.

Regards,

[platorin]

I seriously doubt this will achive anything in a future.

[gmaxwell]

Btw, this is my alleged pumping link that Greg took exception to: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.msg7159773#msg7159773

Not including the two (IIRC) other OT posts of yours that I outright deleted.

Altcoins don't have the luxury of bitcoin. Not even litecoin has it (next year it'll produce another 10mn coins over the existing 29mn - requiring >100mn USD to buy these, so its price has only one way to go... DOWN)... In effect steady minting of coins leads to dead coins due to inflation.
People can't afford to have a coin that goes like 1mn coin this year, 2mn next year, 3mn the year after etc etc. It's guaranteed suicide in terms of investment. Especially in the first months, inflation can be like 2-3% per day, requiring hundreds of BTCs to keep prices steady.

Uh, yea when the coin has no real value to folks and is just a speculative bubble or a speculative hedge... thats what happens. Not my cup of tea at least. As I've said, I normally leave the altcoin stuff alone— except for the rare novel idea, or someone pulling me in for an opinion in one way or another.

[phosphorush]

gmaxwell what about XC?

[cryptohunter]

1.Now I can see you are trying to argue without standing point. Did you see 1.75 million DRK sold in January?
Only a idiot will believe he sold all in january.
Suppose even if he sold all in january, is 42 btc bare no money? In January BTC worth more than 700 usd.

Only an idiot will believe he was only one who mined. Oh, that's you.  

2. Instantmine is that one or few person mine a ton of coin in the beginning of release, mostly because of low difficulty. Do you see in BC, Cinni or other POS coins case, one or few person mine a 40% of PoW coins?
In PoS coins, the developer make a ANN that everyone can mine from beginning, do you call this instantmine?

One or few persons did not mine 40% of DRK. There was an ANN, and there were HUGE number of people ready to mine the second it was released.

3. I cannot agree with you that most miners use linux, because according to what I know, majority of miners use windows.
Look at the discussion of cgminer, sgminer, etc, you will see most forum members are discussing how to use windows based miners.

Windows wallet was available 4 hours after the launch. And, a HUGE number of MINERS run Linux on their Windows computers via vmware or virtualbox anyway. So yea, cryptohunter and you were probably the only ones dumb enough not to.

^^^^^^^^^^ ignore every lie this person says.^^^^^^^^^^

this same moron is clearly there at the top of page5 of the drk thread accusing the dev of instamining ... his very comments were

"wut.. no premine but you have 5k to throw?"


this below was posted before the first windows qt and there were no pools either..




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Re: [ANN][XCO] XCoin | CPU - Fast, Easy Mine, * NO PREMINE * | Official Thread
19-01-2014, 09:07:36
Reply with quote  #103
{
    "blocks" : 2983,
    "currentblocksize" : 0,
    "currentblocktx" : 0,
    "difficulty" : 0.25000000,
    "errors" : "",
    "generate" : false,
    "genproclimit" : -1,
    "hashespersec" : 0,
    "networkhashps" : 87061476,
    "pooledtx" : 1,
    "testnet" : false
}

by the time the first windows wallet was released 2983 x500 + another 30mins of 500coin blocks coming in every second coins had been mined. We've been over all of this before, but this person keeps spouting the same stupid lies. That first windows qt was compiled by an unofficial source and only the most daring would have used it anyway.

So yeah after nearly 2M coins mined in  a few hours some other person put out an unofficial windows QT.

The block explorer clearly shows only a handful of wallets sucked up all of those early coins.


But even better than this part of the scam was the part where they reduced the final minting by 75%.


That was a brilliant idea to turn their 12.5% of current minting to 50%




No point arguing with fools like this turd because he is telling the dev he is a scammer at the top of page 5 but now he got in on the scam is defending it.

What a scum bag, just put that tool on ignore because he addes nothing to the debate but LIES.
He makes dark a laughing stock.

Funny thing is lately, i was taking down some rigs because the fans stopped spinning due to them being shitty msi and i was backing up all the wallets since i though i may as well clean the mobos as well and cpus. My cousin and a couple of his pals had been having a go at mining on my rigs before buying their own just to get the hang of it.

I don't know where they had stored the qt or perhaps they even deleted it. However in the roaming folder i found a darkcoin folder. So i got a new qt and found a nice stash of drk lol. I'm now wishing i had found it at the very peak. However it is a generous stash. YUMMY. Nice to have a little bag of drk scam coins to cash out.

Who cares i guess now, it was a scam, yes one of the largest scams. However there are tons of scams on here and the drk scam is well known by everyone, i guess they can choose to invest or not. Up until now it seems ED is the ONLY  dev that can make an anon coin? yes of course he won't make it open source but then again if other devs can't create a working anon coin, that is their issue. The scam i think went wrong for evans in a way. He didn't launch with a windows qt and grabbed a lot more coins than if the hoards of windows miners and pools were there. HOwever other big miners with 1000's of cores on launches are linux based anyway. I bet lamb took a ton of it and others. Now evans is left working his ass of for perhaps a couple of mill when really he could have been looking at a coin with a huge market cap and potentially tens or 100s of millions if it was not tainted with the launch and a wider base of people behind it. There are only a handful of hardcore supporters on this board, you notice the same names over and over defending it. This coin could have had a cap of 200M if it had started better and the minting not slashed.

XC (which i now discover i have less financial steak in that drk) seems to be having a crack at it along with the devs from cinni, cry, and another 20 coins. I have said weeks ago we will see a host of anon coins now. It will soon be standard. However whales please pump drk again to another peak because with my newly discovered wealth i have my eye on a few nice things.

Surely we are all getting bored of the dark scam coin threads. It was a scam no doubt, then again everyone could have grabbed up some cheap scam coins before it went crazy in price. I didn't and was real upset, more upset because i wanted to mine and was prevented from doing so because of no pools and no windows qt. However since finding a bag of it i had not noticed before has smoothed over the fact i'm not making millions with the other instaminers a few k is better than nothing.

I blame the scam defenders for keeping this going? i mean if they just stfu and said ...yeah was a scam, we got in on it you could have got in on it but didn't. Let that be the end of it then it would die out. HOwever their stupid insistance that it was all an accident and not a scam, and reducing the minting by 75% was good for everyone, and making it 1000 drk for a masternode was in no way meant to make the price go crazy....bla bla  is dragging these threads on and on and on.

The dev was really going to do the air drop, this was enough for me to believe he regrets the launch and the slashing of the minting. The other instaminer greedy slags are to blame here, they probably have more than evans and he is doing all of the work.

The lesson to future devs with some coding skills, launch fair take a bunch of coins for yourself but don't say no premine then try to instamine a ton. Don't change the rules after launch. Build a wide base of support and good will, give no reasons for negativity at all.

[AlexGR]

Uh, yea when the coin has no real value to folks and is just a speculative bubble or a speculative hedge... thats what happens. Not my cup of tea at least. As I've said, I normally leave the altcoin stuff alone— except for the rare novel idea, or someone pulling me in for an opinion in one way or another.

What happened with bitcoin was unique and non-replicable because it started its coin minting by generating zero-priced coins. So from zero price it could only go upwards, despite new coins being added to the monetary base (inflationary effect).

Bitcoin's inflation has hampered it much later in its life, like what's happening right now (3600 BTC x 650$ = 2.34mn USD required every day to keep price steady). This is the only barrier to the price getting to five digits right now.

Altcoins are different because they start with some expectation from the start. They have an initial value per coin that can't be kept steady. For example, we launch a coin today, 1000 coins are mined and it is listed in the exchange for 0.01... Second day we get to 2000 coins... so with the price being steady at 0.01, there is a +10 BTC requirement to absorb the new +1000 coins. Otherwise the price of all 2000 coins crumbles.

Even cryptonote-based coins have extremely bad inflation right now. Their price went up too fast and it wasn't sustainable given the inflation rate (so they crashed back down). Hundreds of BTCs per day are required just to keep CN-based coin prices steady. So real-life value and application cannot overcome the inflation issue. Investors simply don't have that type of money to throw in, every day. Nor can one wait 3-4 years for the inflation to get better and then buy. By that time the coin will be perceived as dead so there's no way one would seriously consider it. So it's a problem for altcoins on how to distribute the monetary base in a way that is fair, that does not kill the price (and the coin) through inflation and also preserves the PoW to future-proof levels.

[AizenSou]

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.

+1
Some harsh words but I feel pissed too.
I meet some nice people in crypto but most of others are truly unbearable. They just simply pissed off because they missed the opportunity to make good investment or their coin is become less famous / get less attention than one coin. It is like your neighbour bought a new nice car and you pissed off because you can't afford this, but you still say nice thing to him like congratulation, blah blah. And your inner swine is angry. In cryptoland you just don't care about that and let's your inner swine goes wild. That's sick.

[count_cyrpto]

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.

While the reason behind ignoring the altcoin subform makes sense, I wish individuals like yourself would come out and speak up more often. It's refreshing to hear the truth, but it's extremely difficult to know who to trust.

So, for that, I thank you.

[illodin]

What you need to know about cryptohunter to understand where he is coming from, is that he was on _every_ coin launch with his (windows) rigs ready wanting to instamine and complaining about every little detail that didn't favor him, such sense of entitlement. And when everything wasn't set just right for his preferences, he would blow up and start throwing scam accusations left and right.

So you can imagine his feelings when something as outrageous as a launch without immediate access to windows wallet happens, and the coin later gains some value. When all he would've needed was to install free Linux running on free VirtualBox on his computer. Or, buy thousands of coins for basically free in the first weeks. But no, all he wanted was to instamine more than anyone else and dump as soon as possible, because that's the mindset of those launch sharks.

And btw, I'm also soooo jelly for the dude who had sooo many bitcoins that he could pay 10,000 for a pizza, but I don't stalk every bitcoin thread crying about it.

[cryptohunter]

What you need to know about cryptohunter to understand where he is coming from, is that he was on _every_ coin launch with his (windows) rigs ready wanting to instamine and complaining about every little detail that didn't favor him, such sense of entitlement. And when everything wasn't set just right for his preferences, he would blow up and start throwing scam accusations left and right.

So you can imagine his feelings when something as outrageous as a launch without immediate access to windows wallet happens, and the coin later gains some value. When all he would've needed was to install free Linux running on free VirtualBox on his computer. Or, buy thousands of coins for basically free in the first weeks. But no, all he wanted was to instamine more than anyone else and dump as soon as possible, because that's the mindset of those launch sharks.

And btw, I'm also soooo jelly for the dude who had sooo many bitcoins that he could pay 10,000 for a pizza, but I don't stalk every bitcoin thread crying about it.

But wait you were crying on page 5 of the drk thread....and accusing the dev of instamining

The simple fact of the matter is this.

1. you can't say no premine in big letters suggesting fair distribution and then stop 80% of the board that uses windows or pools to mine from mining, whilst you and your buddies mine blocks of 500coins every second.

2. you can't after mining 2m coins release a windows qt and fix the diff up so that they can't mine 500 coin blocks on low diff like you did.

3. you can't also say to everyone else, we have mined 12.5% of all the current coins, but now we want that to be 50%


this is not on.

Stop saying anyone objecting to this behaviour is crying. Stop telling lies also.

If you believe this is a good way to launch coins then make a thread and take a vote. You will see many will not agree with you.

Funny thing is i now have a nice bunch of drk too. I still say it had a VERY BAD start though.

Please stop defending the start, you can't change the facts. Spend your time doing something constructive for drk and get the price back up to peak because i will not be happy if i missed the top of the bubble.

[AlexGR]

3. you can't also say to everyone else, we have mined 12.5% of all the current coins, but now we want that to be 50%

The initial 84mn formula with moore's law difficulty adjustment + annual reward halving, would produce no more than 10mn coins. 84mn was the theoretical maximum. The practical maximum of the initial formula was 10-11mn, not 84.

This was then altered (after community consultation) to 84mn (due to the formula being too restrictive) which, again, after discussion and a poll took the final form of 22mn with 7% annual reduction.

[illodin]

I don't believe the launch was perfect, far from it. But it happened, and I've stopped crying about it. And I don't think it really even matters. Those who suffered from the launch the most are those who instamine every launch with windows only (!) intending to dump as soon as someone is willing to pay something for their mined coins because they are busy mining the next 10 launches. Those who see the value in the coin could've easily bought thousands of coins basically for free from the previously mentioned launch sharks. Let's say there was a windows wallet immediately at launch. You would've probably instamined as much as possible and then sold all for 0.5 BTC and be just as pissed about it as you are now.

[count_cyrpto]

I don't believe the launch was perfect, far from it. But it happened, and I've stopped crying about it. And I don't think it really even matters.

Um, of course it does.