Comparing Anonymous Coins

[newjack]

Hi,
I'm new to the Alt Coin world. I would like to know: What is the best anonymous alt coin? I see Darkcoin and Monero have a lot of fans and detractors, but are there other noteworthy anonymous coins, and if so, why? Why are DRK and XMR the "top contenders?"

Ultimately what I hope to do is start an online shop and align it with one Alt Coin that I can really get behind and support. Also I would like to organize a community around said Alt Coin.
One of my concerns is the extreme inflation and deflation of the coins right now, and the fact that many people look at the coins as "investments" rather than a tool to do real transactions for goods and services. So, I guess I'm looking for a coin with a community that is more concerned with price stability as well.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

[1714830273]

1714830273

[1714830273]

1714830273

[1714830273]

1714830273

[AlexGR]

Use both to determine what's better for said purpose and then focus on the one you are doing best.

[poornamelessme]

People are simply going to state what coins they own, and that one is the 'best'. So to be honest, expect very few valid replies here.

One of the Cryptonote coins may be the strongest as far as anonymity goes, as ring signatures are pretty solid, but it does have some issues, primarily bloat.  Monero gets all the attention, but Boolberry probably is the better coin -- it has a gui wallet and I believe cut down on some of the bloat issues.

Drk, assuming it passes its audit, would also be considered worthwhile ... especially if they do that Dark Tor thing the dev talked about.

Then you have XC (someone  else would have to give an objective opinion on that one, as I haven't followed it).

There are other coins that claim anonymity, but haven't paid much attention to them ... Pinkcoin claimed it, Cloak sort of had a version working, until they failed their audit as far as it being trustless, and more or less have to start over from the beginning (assuming they even bother at this point). Not sure what other coins claimed anonymity or not, besides the simple mixer types of coins.

Anyway, you'd want a stable coin that people would spend, not worried about it as far as an investment goes. That will be tricky, as pretty much that seems all people do here is consider these things investments. You may wish to wait until Drk gets past RC5 and goes open source, or a cryptonote flavor truly fixes their bloated blockchain issue. And in Monero's case, gets a wallet that an average person would even bother using.

[nsimmons]

Just download both and try them, you will have your answer right away. Monero is impossible to use, at least an hour to sync one day and do a transfer, if it doesnt crash and corrupt the blockchain.

[fluffypony]

I'm one of the Monero Core Team members, so I'll only speak about Monero.

Price stability is not going to happen with Monero any time soon. It's a rapidly evolving space, and in spite of the current trade volume it's still relatively easy for a mid-sized trader to move the market. This is also possible with Bitcoin, so market manipulation shifting the price is something you're going to have to live with one way or another.

Monero also has a completely different RPC API to any of the Bitcoin-derived coins, so integrating it into an ecommerce system will require work, and you won't necessarily be able to just re-use a plugin written for Bitcoin.

Finally, for end users Monero has a high barrier to entry right now. Amazing usability is coming, but it will be a few months before we get to a point where general usability by non-crypto types is possible. You can see some of our efforts to date in the preview of the Monero GUI: http://imgur.com/a/ERheR

On the flipside, Monero is among the very few cryptocurrencies that truly do have cryptographically sound unlinkable and untraceable transactions. Even with a high mixin level (the level of ambiguity used to mix your transaction inputs with other random ones) of, say, 100, your transaction will go through in a minute or two. Our aim with Monero is to make it useful and usable as a medium of exchange and a store of value, not merely to provide an investment vehicle, so that fits in with your goals. Finally, you'll have the advantage of speaking to a technically proficient, generally intelligent community, so there is a marketing benefit.

[fluffypony]

Just download both and try them, you will have your answer right away. Monero is impossible to use, at least an hour to sync one day and do a transfer, if it doesnt crash and corrupt the blockchain.

Unless you're on a very entry-level VPS and the daemon is being killed by the host OS' oomkiller this is incorrect. The daemon is reasonably robust and does not just crash and corrupt the blockchain.

The issue with sync speed is because catch-up is done on an absolute consensus basis - it requires blocks to be received and confirmed from all peers to ensure that those peers are whitelisted (peers that fail to meet this consensus or serve bad blocks that do not verify are dropped and graylisted). This makes it an incredibly robust consensus network, but it also means catch-up is slow and chunky. Bitcoin's catch-up mechanism is based on the longest chain rule - pull blocks from only 1 peer that has the longest chain. The upside is that you'll eventually figure out which peer is honest, as the one that is feeding you bad blocks will eventually be dropped from your peer group when you reach the point where their PoW fails to verify. The downside is that you'll potentially go through huge blockchain reorganisations during this process. We are trying to play with a middle ground that is faster than our "absolute consensus" right now, but also reduces the amount of reorgs needed to catch-up.

I wouldn't say Monero is impossible to use. Download the blockchain from the Bitcointalk OP (which is never more than 8 hours behind), start the daemon, and then use simplewallet to create and transact with your wallet. When a new wallet is created you're given a 24 word seed that you can write down and store somewhere - that's all you need to backup your wallet. No more "just backup your wallet.dat" nonsense:)

[nsimmons]

Just download both and try them, you will have your answer right away. Monero is impossible to use, at least an hour to sync one day and do a transfer, if it doesnt crash and corrupt the blockchain.

Unless you're on a very entry-level VPS and the daemon is being killed by the host OS' oomkiller this is incorrect. The daemon is reasonably robust and does not just crash and corrupt the blockchain.

The issue with sync speed is because catch-up is done on an absolute consensus basis - it requires blocks to be received and confirmed from all peers to ensure that those peers are whitelisted (peers that fail to meet this consensus or serve bad blocks that do not verify are dropped and graylisted). This makes it an incredibly robust consensus network, but it also means catch-up is slow and chunky. Bitcoin's catch-up mechanism is based on the longest chain rule - pull blocks from only 1 peer that has the longest chain. The upside is that you'll eventually figure out which peer is honest, as the one that is feeding you bad blocks will eventually be dropped from your peer group when you reach the point where their PoW fails to verify. The downside is that you'll potentially go through huge blockchain reorganisations during this process. We are trying to play with a middle ground that is faster than our "absolute consensus" right now, but also reduces the amount of reorgs needed to catch-up.

I wouldn't say Monero is impossible to use. Download the blockchain from the Bitcointalk OP (which is never more than 8 hours behind), start the daemon, and then use simplewallet to create and transact with your wallet. When a new wallet is created you're given a 24 word seed that you can write down and store somewhere - that's all you need to backup your wallet. No more "just backup your wallet.dat" nonsense:)

ive been mining monero with my farm for 3 weeks, it is impossible to use. Today bitmonerd crashed, corrupted the blockchain, i downloaded a blockchain 19 days old, 4 hours to sync on a 10mps connection.

my quad core is flatlined while im trying to sync, i have to set firefox to high priority just so its somewhat usuable, 2.6gb of ram lost to updating.

drkcoin, open, sync transfer in 2 min tops.

[amy4to]

in my opnioin  Anonymous Coins is meaningless.When people say something about Anonymous it may illegal or something.And the government won't let any Anonymous coins survive.If we have a choice,i'd rather choose some more reality feature.

[fluffypony]

ive been mining monero with my farm for 3 weeks, it is impossible to use. Today bitmonerd crashed, corrupted the blockchain, i downloaded a blockchain 19 days old, 4 hours to sync on a 10mps connection.

Are you running a private pool? That's a complete edge-case for a normal user - there are issues with getwork and it not obeying OS limits. You have to ramp your ulimits up at the very least, and to the best of my knowledge most pool operators have a scripted daemon shut down and restart every few days. I find it odd that your blockchain is corrupting - the daemon only writes to disk every 8 hours, so unless it is crashing during write a crash wouldn't inherently corrupt the blockchain.

my quad core is flatlined while im trying to sync, i have to set firefox to high priority just so its somewhat usuable, 2.6gb of ram lost to updating.

The whole blockchain is loaded in RAM, so that's understandable. We are working on moving to an embedded database, you can follow the progress on tewinget's branch: https://github.com/tewinget/bitmonero/tree/bc2

drkcoin, open, sync transfer in 2 min tops.

Ah yes - the benefit of inheriting 5.5 years of amazing development in improving and tuning the Bitcoin protocol. I'm pretty sure that in 5 years time Monero will meet or exceed that level of functionality whilst providing cryptographically unlinkable and untraceable transactions.

[BitcoinBadger]

Darkcoins, I think. LTC is struggling hard now. I have read about Capt and it sucks too. Very low rates.

[sgk]

I see Darkcoin and Monero have a lot of fans and detractors, but are there other noteworthy anonymous coins, and if so, why? Why are DRK and XMR the "top contenders?"

DarkCoin was the first X11 algo coin and also the first anonymous coin featuring Coin Join technology. That's why it got momentum.

Then Bytecoin BCN surfaced, with a completely different 'Cryptonote' anonymous technology. Superior than Coin Join indeed (featuring ring signatures), but there were talks about 80% of the coin having been mined during 2 years of development before the coin surfaced to general public. So everyone thought the BCN was a missed opportunity. So someone cloned it and called it XMR Monero. Everyone jumped on the XMR wagon in the name of 'fair distribution' BS.

Now you decide what is right. DarkCoin and Bytecoin are 'original', Monero is a clone of Bytecoin. There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

If you're not sure, divide your investment among DRK, BCN & CLOAK

[newjack]

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the great info, it's helping me get my head around all this.

There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

Kind of a noob question here, but what does "POS" mean in this context?

Also, I don't understand the "instamine" controversy with DarkCoin and how it effects things in the future. Or if it's even a concern at this point.

[poornamelessme]

Hi Everyone,
Thanks for all the great info, it's helping me get my head around all this.

There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

Kind of a noob question here, but what does "POS" mean in this context?

Also, I don't understand the "instamine" controversy with DarkCoin and how it effects things in the future. Or if it's even a concern at this point.

Proof of stake.

Problem with Cloak is, their anonymity solution isn't what they claimed it would be. It's supposed to be trustless, yet isn't. Their audit failed, and now the devs are scrambling to start all over again. I think they are on v3 or something with PoSA.... or in other words, there is no way you should consider that coin currently. Not only is it not at a stable price (it got dumped to smithereens), they don't even have a trustless anonymity solution in place yet.

The instamine issue with Drk makes great fud food, but I expect isn't a real issue at this point. Folks have done blockchain analysis and the early coins have been mostly redistributed by now. Not saying there aren't giant whales still, just that whether the coin had that instamine issue or not, it may not have mattered.

Again, if I was you, I wouldn't choose any anonymous coin right now for what you want to do with your online store. Wait a month or two, see how RC5 does... see if a cryptonote coin fixes their issues... or Boolberry gets more attention (terrible, terrible name).

[Lauda]

Proof of stake.

Problem with Cloak is, their anonymity solution isn't what they claimed it would be. It's supposed to be trustless, yet isn't. Their audit failed, and now the devs are scrambling to start over all over again. I think they are on v3 or something with PoSA.... or in other words, there is no way you should consider that coin currently. Not only is it not at a stable price (it got dumped to smithereens), they don't even have a trustless anonymity solution in place yet.

The instamine issue with Drk makes great fud food, but I expect isn't a real issue at this point. Folks have done blockchain analysis and the early coins have been mostly redistributed by now. Not saying there aren't giant whales still, just that whether the coin had that instamine issue or not, it may not have mattered.

Again, if I was you, I wouldn't choose any anonymous coin right now. Wait a month or two, see how RC5 does... see if a cryptonote coin fixes their issues... or Boolberry gets more attention (terrible, terrible name).

I'm going to say that OP should stay away from Cloak.
XMR and DRK are the way to go. Both have proven anonymity. The 'instamine' related to DRK should not be an issue. Even if DRK succeeds trolls will call upon it again in the future.
As far as DRK goes one should wait for Kristov A. to finish his audit and the coin goes open source (if anyone has his doubts).
I think that RC5 comes in 2-3 months at most.
Dark ToR is also a very interesting concept, you should read about it.

[Joshuar]

I see Darkcoin and Monero have a lot of fans and detractors, but are there other noteworthy anonymous coins, and if so, why? Why are DRK and XMR the "top contenders?"

DarkCoin was the first X11 algo coin and also the first anonymous coin featuring Coin Join technology. That's why it got momentum.

Then Bytecoin BCN surfaced, with a completely different 'Cryptonote' anonymous technology. Superior than Coin Join indeed (featuring ring signatures), but there were talks about 80% of the coin having been mined during 2 years of development before the coin surfaced to general public. So everyone thought the BCN was a missed opportunity. So someone cloned it and called it XMR Monero. Everyone jumped on the XMR wagon in the name of 'fair distribution' BS.

Now you decide what is right. DarkCoin and Bytecoin are 'original', Monero is a clone of Bytecoin. There's also a new anonymous POS coin called 'CLOAK'

If you're not sure, divide your investment among DRK, BCN & CLOAK

I sincerely hope no one listens to this guy..Bytecoin has a 80% premine, and was kept in secret for 2 years, anyone who actually buys bytecoin has got to be the dumbest person on the planet.

Monero is the first ever cryptonote coin with a fair distribution and release.

Besides darkcoin and monero, I consider all the other anonymous coins worthless.

[poornamelessme]

I'm going to say that OP should stay away from Cloak.
XMR and DRK are the way to go. Both have proven anonymity. The 'instamine' related to DRK should not be an issue. Even if DRK succeeds trolls will call upon it again in the future.
As far as DRK goes one should wait for Kristov A. to finish his audit and the coin goes open source (if anyone has his doubts).
I think that RC5 comes in 2-3 months at most.
Dark ToR is also a very interesting concept, you should read about it.

Dark ToR is interesting and if they pull it off, could save Drk from just being 'one of the crowd' of other anonymous coins.

As a disclaimer, since I stated from the start that people would simply state coins they hold are the best, I still hold some Drk ... I held some Cloak but sold it before the audit came out (saw giant red flags with that coin from the start)... and hold no cryptonote coins.

The thing I dislike about Drk however are the price fluctuations... or another way to say it is what appears to be price manipulation. After several months of calm at the beginning, it basically went to full blown whale/manipulation territory, with pumps, flash dumps, pumps again... repeat as necessary... etc. All the release candidates made great checkpoints for pumps/dumps. After RC5, hopefully things stabilize a bit. Until that Dark ToR stuff comes, anyway.

From a purely technical standpoint, ring signatures may be a stronger form of anonymity. Just, they come at a price. I also am not sure why Monero gets all the attention it does, when Boolberry has a gui wallet + pruned their blockchain issues a bit -- yet it's only valued at a small percentage of what Monero goes for. I half expect a new cryptonote coin to waltz in one day, with an all-singing/dancing gui wallet, fixed bloat issues, and beat both of them.

[CoinHoarder]

Whenever Zerocash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

[poornamelessme]

Whenever Zerocash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Is there more to zerocash than a technical paper at this point? Due to the timeframe they used with that whole zerocoin thing, we may be looking at like 2016+ at the rate they seem to go.

The biggest competitor anonymity-wise may be DarkWallet, assuming they get decentralized anonymity going there. And if so, they basically wipe out the advantage any anonymous alt has over btc. That's probably why Drk has swung to the DarkTor talk after they finish up the release candidates.

[Lauda]

Whenever ZeroCash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Finally someone that isn't complaining/trolling both of these options.
Indeed ZeroCash is very good but we have yet to wait and see if they will deliver what they've promised.
For anyone that doubts Darkcoin they should do 8 rounds of anonymizing and see what happens.

[CoinHoarder]

Whenever Zerocash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Is there more to zerocash than a technical paper at this point? Due to the timeframe they used with that whole zerocoin thing, we may be looking at like 2016+ at the rate they seem to go.

The biggest competitor anonymity-wise may be DarkWallet, assuming they get decentralized anonymity going there. And if so, they basically wipe out the advantage any anonymous alt has over btc. That's probably why Drk has swung to the DarkTor talk after they finish up the release candidates.

I believe it is just a white paper at this point, but some development work has been done on Zerocoin, so some of the code may be usable in Zerocash. Honestly, they have been really slow with ZeroCoin (abandoned) and Zerocash, so it may take a long time to come into existence.

I do not think that DarkWallet would be nearly as anonymous as Zerocash, as Zerocash uses much more complicated cryptography to mask who sends what where & the amount that people send and receive.

Isn't DarkWallet a coin join implementation? If that is correct then I think my assertation that Zerocash will be more anonymous than that is correct.

[poornamelessme]

Isn't DarkWallet a coin join implementation? If that is correct then I think my assertation that Zerocash will be more anonymous than that is correct.

I haven't kept track of DarkWallet, but don't believe it's trustless at this point. Just saying if they do get it all fancy and trustless down the road, it'd make anonymous alts sort of pointless.

The only problem I have with Zerocash is that its devs seem to use a different timeframe than most in the cryptoworld use. By the time they actually make the thing, it may be too late.

[CoinHoarder]

Whenever ZeroCash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Finally someone that isn't complaining/trolling both of these options.
Indeed ZeroCash is very good but we have yet to wait and see if they will deliver what they've promised.
For anyone that doubts Darkcoin they should do 8 rounds of anonymizing and see what happens.

I don't believe in the "one coin to rule them all" mentality. I think there are benefits of competing crypto currencies and cooperating crypto currencies with the same goals. Such as the Nxt/Bitshares rivalry and the Storj/Maidsafe cooperation.

[super3]

Whenever ZeroCash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Finally someone that isn't complaining/trolling both of these options.
Indeed ZeroCash is very good but we have yet to wait and see if they will deliver what they've promised.
For anyone that doubts Darkcoin they should do 8 rounds of anonymizing and see what happens.

I don't believe in the "one coin to rule them all" mentality. I think there are benefits of competing crypto currencies and cooperating crypto currencies with the same goals. Such as the Nxt/Bitshares rivalry and the Storj/Maidsafe cooperation.

Storj dev here. Just trust me when I say cooperation is way better than competition.

[CoinHoarder]

Whenever ZeroCash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Finally someone that isn't complaining/trolling both of these options.
Indeed ZeroCash is very good but we have yet to wait and see if they will deliver what they've promised.
For anyone that doubts Darkcoin they should do 8 rounds of anonymizing and see what happens.

I don't believe in the "one coin to rule them all" mentality. I think there are benefits of competing crypto currencies and cooperating crypto currencies with the same goals. Such as the Nxt/Bitshares rivalry and the Storj/Maidsafe cooperation.

Storj dev here. Just trust me when I say cooperation is way better than competition.

I agree, but some people just can't play together... it is sad to see all the fighting between Nxt and Bitshares.  

Honestly, it seems to be mostly Nxt attacking Bitshares, they have attacked Ethereum a lot in the past as well. Anyways... I think competition is better than no competition and no cooperation.

Isn't DarkWallet a coin join implementation? If that is correct then I think my assertation that Zerocash will be more anonymous than that is correct.

I haven't kept track of DarkWallet, but don't believe it's trustless at this point. Just saying if they do get it all fancy and trustless down the road, it'd make anonymous alts sort of pointless.

The only problem I have with Zerocash is that its devs seem to use a different timeframe than most in the cryptoworld use. By the time they actually make the thing, it may be too late.

I pretty much agree with you here. I mentioned this in another thread about anonymity, but I think for anon coins to survive in the long haul they need to have other features and/or advantages rather than simply just being anonymous. Otherwise the anon crypto currency's user base will be narrowed down to people that use it for nefarious purposes and people that understand the value of financial privacy, which will deeply affect volume and liquidity.

[Joshuar]

Whenever ZeroCash is released I think it could be the best option as far as anonymity goes.

Otherwise, currently Darkcoin or Monero are probably your best bets.

Finally someone that isn't complaining/trolling both of these options.
Indeed ZeroCash is very good but we have yet to wait and see if they will deliver what they've promised.
For anyone that doubts Darkcoin they should do 8 rounds of anonymizing and see what happens.

I don't believe in the "one coin to rule them all" mentality. I think there are benefits of competing crypto currencies and cooperating crypto currencies with the same goals. Such as the Nxt/Bitshares rivalry and the Storj/Maidsafe cooperation.

Storj dev here. Just trust me when I say cooperation is way better than competition.

I agree, but some people just can't play together... it is sad to see all the fighting between Nxt and Bitshares.  

Honestly, it seems to be mostly Nxt attacking Bitshares, they have attacked Ethereum a lot in the past as well. Anyways... I think competition is better than no competition and no cooperation.

Isn't DarkWallet a coin join implementation? If that is correct then I think my assertation that Zerocash will be more anonymous than that is correct.

I haven't kept track of DarkWallet, but don't believe it's trustless at this point. Just saying if they do get it all fancy and trustless down the road, it'd make anonymous alts sort of pointless.

The only problem I have with Zerocash is that its devs seem to use a different timeframe than most in the cryptoworld use. By the time they actually make the thing, it may be too late.

I pretty much agree with you here. I mentioned this in another thread about anonymity, but I think for anon coins to survive in the long haul they need to have other features and/or advantages rather than simply just being anonymous. Otherwise the anon crypto currency's user base will be narrowed down to people that use it for nefarious purposes and people that understand the value of financial privacy, which will deeply affect volume and liquidity.

Agreed, but out of all the features that some altcoins have, Privacy is the most important for obvious reasons. I believe once these anon coins(Monero and Dark) have the anon/privacy features down pat, then other things could/should be incorporated in based around making the coin as secure as possible/improving/making it user friendly, etc.

[CoinHoarder]

Agreed, but out of all the features that some altcoins have, Privacy is the most important for obvious reasons. I believe once these anon coins(Monero and Dark) have the anon/privacy features down pat, then other things could/should be incorporated in based around making the coin as secure as possible/improving/making it user friendly, etc.

That sounds like a good plan, I guess we are on the same page.

I think most people don't understand how big a problem privacy is in the larger crypto currencies, and the privacy implications that come along with that. It is nice to see that some people "get it", as there are many non nefarious reasons to want to protect your privacy!! This (making anonymous crypto currencies or crypto currencies more anonymous) is not only about protecting our privacy, but also about protecting the people that don't understand that.

I can't really keep up with all the various projects as I'm interested in too many. There are a lot of great projects going nowadays, it is pretty exciting!

[Lauda]

I pretty much agree with you here. I mentioned this in another thread about anonymity, but I think for anon coins to survive in the long haul they need to have other features and/or advantages rather than simply just being anonymous. Otherwise the anon crypto currency's user base will be narrowed down to people that use it for nefarious purposes and people that understand the value of financial privacy, which will deeply affect volume and liquidity.

Indeed I guess that's why DRK has Dark Tor planned. I'm sure that if they came up with such an idea that they can come up with much more.
Anonymity can not at any time be the only feature that a coin has to provide. That can't hold out for long just like you've said.
It will be interesting what happens after RC5 and one day after Dark Tor (hopefully) gets released.

[CoinHoarder]

I pretty much agree with you here. I mentioned this in another thread about anonymity, but I think for anon coins to survive in the long haul they need to have other features and/or advantages rather than simply just being anonymous. Otherwise the anon crypto currency's user base will be narrowed down to people that use it for nefarious purposes and people that understand the value of financial privacy, which will deeply affect volume and liquidity.

Indeed I guess that's why DRK has Dark Tor planned. I'm sure that if they came up with such an idea that they can come up with much more.
Anonymity can not at any time be the only feature that a coin has to provide. That can't hold out for long just like you've said.
It will be interesting what happens after RC5 and one day after Dark Tor (hopefully) gets released.

I agree Dark Tor sounds pretty neat. One thing has me worried though... Are they planning on charging people to use it? I'm not sure that's going to work out too well considering TOR is free. I think I saw a poll about this yesterday.. Something like "how much would you pay for it?" I voted for nothing, and it was well in the lead, I imagine that option beat out all the others by a large margin.

RC5 is a newer iteration of Dark Send or what??

[Lauda]

I agree Dark Tor sounds pretty neat. One thing has me worried though... Are they planning on charging people to use it? I'm not sure that's going to work out too well considering TOR is free. I think I saw a poll about this yesterday.. Something like "how much would you pay for it?" I voted for nothing, and it was well in the lead, I imagine that option beat out all the others by a large margin.

RC5 is a newer iteration of Dark Send or what??

Well they were discussing it because the costs would be higher for MN owners than they are now. I mean people could be using a ton of bandwidth for free. RC5 is the upcoming 'major' update to DRK. It will consist mostly out of fixes and upgrades to the anonymity from what I know. Maybe even Kristov Atlas will be finished with his audit after which soon DRK will be going open source.

[CoinHoarder]

I agree Dark Tor sounds pretty neat. One thing has me worried though... Are they planning on charging people to use it? I'm not sure that's going to work out too well considering TOR is free. I think I saw a poll about this yesterday.. Something like "how much would you pay for it?" I voted for nothing, and it was well in the lead, I imagine that option beat out all the others by a large margin.

RC5 is a newer iteration of Dark Send or what??

Well they were discussing it because the costs would be higher for MN owners than they are now. I mean people could be using a ton of bandwidth for free. RC5 is the upcoming 'major' update to DRK. It will consist mostly out of fixes and upgrades to the anonymity from what I know. Maybe even Kristov Atlas will be finished with his audit after which soon DRK will be going open source.

Cool, I need to go do some research on RC5.

I agree it could use a lot of bandwidth and cost users that support the network, but TOR is supported by volunteers... it is hard to compete with free if your service is not free itself. I just can't imagine it taking market share from TOR if you need to pay to use it. I guess that is just my opinion/speculation though.

[Joshuar]

I agree Dark Tor sounds pretty neat. One thing has me worried though... Are they planning on charging people to use it? I'm not sure that's going to work out too well considering TOR is free. I think I saw a poll about this yesterday.. Something like "how much would you pay for it?" I voted for nothing, and it was well in the lead, I imagine that option beat out all the others by a large margin.

RC5 is a newer iteration of Dark Send or what??

Well they were discussing it because the costs would be higher for MN owners than they are now. I mean people could be using a ton of bandwidth for free. RC5 is the upcoming 'major' update to DRK. It will consist mostly out of fixes and upgrades to the anonymity from what I know. Maybe even Kristov Atlas will be finished with his audit after which soon DRK will be going open source.

Cool, I need to go do some research on RC5.

I agree it could use a lot of bandwidth and cost users that support the network, but TOR is supported by volunteers... it is hard to compete with free if your service is not free itself. I just can't imagine it taking market share from TOR if you need to pay to use it. I guess that is just my opinion/speculation though.

I suppose masternodes could pay to support the network.

I could definitely imagine it taking some users from TOR, paid or not, especially that TOR is partly funded by the U.S Government..

[CoinHoarder]

I suppose masternodes could pay to support the network.

I could definitely imagine it taking some users from TOR, paid or not, especially that TOR is partly funded by the U.S Government..

You have a point there. It may work as a paid service, and some fear that TOR has already been compromised by the NSA. I don't personally believe this.. I think they can compromise a small amount of traffic but for the most part they can't. However, DarkTOR can suffer from the same, no? By the government setting up DarkTOR nodes themselves?

Another way to look at it being free would be as a marketing strategy... Having free DarkTOR can be a way of stealing the black market business from Bitcoin. As of now most of the deep web is largely still using Bitcoins, so you could look at it as a marketing strategy. It would create perhaps more of a demand and reason to use Darkcoin over Bitcoin, as they don't seem to be too particularly worried about it at the moment.

Kind of like Dropbox offers free service up to a certain amount of Mb, or Teamviewer offers free personal use and charges for business use. It is good to introduce people to the technology/company and purchase other services.

[Lauda]

Cool, I need to go do some research on RC5.

I agree it could use a lot of bandwidth and cost users that support the network, but TOR is supported by volunteers... it is hard to compete with free if your service is not free itself. I just can't imagine it taking market share from TOR if you need to pay to use it. I guess that is just my opinion/speculation though.

If you read up on the recent news regarding TOR, there isn't that much trust in it anymore. Yeah it's good that it is free, but seems like it has flaws.
Is it really much to pay 10 or 20 cents a day for something as Dark Tor. Go over to the forums of DRK and start reading then.

[Joshuar]

I suppose masternodes could pay to support the network.

I could definitely imagine it taking some users from TOR, paid or not, especially that TOR is partly funded by the U.S Government..

You have a point there. It may work as a paid service, and some fear that TOR has already been compromised by the NSA. I don't personally believe this.. I think they can compromise a small amount of traffic but for the most part they can't. However, DarkTOR can suffer from the same, no? By the government setting up DarkTOR nodes themselves?

Another way to look at it being free would be as a marketing strategy... Having free DarkTOR can be a way of stealing the black market business from Bitcoin. As of now most of the deep web is largely still using Bitcoins, so you could look at it as a marketing strategy. It would create perhaps more of a demand and reason to use Darkcoin over Bitcoin, as they don't seem to be too particularly worried about it at the moment.

Kind of like Dropbox offers free service up to a certain amount of Mb, or Teamviewer offers free personal use and charges for business use. It is good to introduce people to the technology/company and purchase other services.

To think of it, that would be a very good marketing strategy. It's true that the deep web mostly uses Bitcoins, but with a service like DarkTOR or Iris(that seems to be a popular name on the drk thread), it's likely that sites on the deep web would migrate to darkcoin's version of TOR, especially since Darkcoin has anonymous sending, with that altogether creating large demand for Darkcoin.

[rikkejohn]

anonymity is only desirable if you need to be anonymous.

However, the coins we are discussing are really just schemes to make money. I'd be surprised if much money was spent on them to launder or pay for assassins.

In truth, they are a fad, and the technology behind them is only interesting insofar as it is the best that people could come up with.

I don't think any will survive, with the possible exception of DRK. However, DRK seems to be following in the footsteps of Doge.

So we're left with BTC and LTC.

Actually, I'm surprised the SHA3 coins don't get more interest. Like the X coins, they are multi-algo, they just don't pretend to be made for James Bond or the criminal underworld.

Laughable.

[Lauda]

-snip-
I don't think any will survive, with the possible exception of DRK. However, DRK seems to be following in the footsteps of Doge.

Following the footsteps of Doge? Let's examine this.
Doge was based on a meme and didn't offer any real features and had a ridiculous supply.
DRK is not based on a meme nor does it have such a supply. DRK promised and delivered anonymity (Darksend+).
Exactly why is it following the footsteps of Doge? Because the price is down? Because the market was manipulated?

[Joshuar]

-snip-
I don't think any will survive, with the possible exception of DRK. However, DRK seems to be following in the footsteps of Doge.

Following the footsteps of Doge? Let's examine this.
Doge was based on a meme and didn't offer any real features and had a ridiculous supply.
DRK is not based on a meme nor does it have such a supply. DRK promised and delivered anonymity (Darksend+).
Exactly why is it following the footsteps of Doge? Because the price is down? Because the market was manipulated?

I would just ignore him. Recently I've seen a bunch of troll posts by rikkiejohn....


Bitcoin's privacy is low-level compared to even a credit card's...Once you are connected to an address, or series of address, your entire transaction history in in the open for All to see. Altcoins like Monero and Darkcoin that are serious contenders for privacy is a Need, not a want.

[rikkejohn]

-snip-
I don't think any will survive, with the possible exception of DRK. However, DRK seems to be following in the footsteps of Doge.

Following the footsteps of Doge? Let's examine this.
Doge was based on a meme and didn't offer any real features and had a ridiculous supply.
DRK is not based on a meme nor does it have such a supply. DRK promised and delivered anonymity (Darksend+).
Exactly why is it following the footsteps of Doge? Because the price is down? Because the market was manipulated?

to answer your questions, it is following Doge in terms that it was a high performer for a number of months, and is now starting to look like a coin being slowly dumped.

And the supply of coins is irrelevant, given there is no law stating you must buy 1 minimum.

All that matters is interest. If there is interest the coin will be a success for a short period of time before it nosedives, in common with every other altcoin.

There are possibly two ways out of that predicament:

1. The coin becomes adopted by the public to some degree (like BTC has just about achieved and LTC appeared to be achieving only to fall back)
2. The coin is technologically so advanced or the idea is incredibly marketable outside of the cryptoworld that a venture capitalist grabs all rights to it, and pays the developer some money.

I don't see any coins out there that come close. The possible exception was Ripple, but it was badly managed and the team involved was not equipped to take it to the big league.

The rest are just ... waiting  ... to ...die

[CoinHoarder]

This thread went downhill fast.. we were having such a good conversation before.

[newjack]

Well, I've found this thread incredibly helpful, and the DarkTor thing everyone is intrigued by does seem pretty cool. I must admit at one point I was attracted by the possibility of "investing" in the various coins, but the more I thought about it the less concerned I was. I have a bit of a background in gold and silver. There are a lot of scams in that field I admit, however, having an alternative currency that arguably is a buffer to inflation or just creates an alternative commerce route is the real potential gift of altcoins it seems to me. And frankly the more mainstream acceptance BitCoin gets, the less able it is to do the things that I need it to do.

[btcxyzzz]

in my opnioin  Anonymous Coins is meaningless.When people say something about Anonymous it may illegal or something.And the government won't let any Anonymous coins survive.If we have a choice,i'd rather choose some more reality feature.

...another sheep among us. go away, idiot.

[Lauda]

This thread went downhill fast.. we were having such a good conversation before.

Well you can't have it for too long. The forums aren't moderated and there isn't something that you can do about it.
You will have ignorant fools here who will make just about any argument versus DRK because of various reasons (invested in other coins, lost money trading).
Anonymity was one of the major selling points of Bitcoins (although it is only semi-anonymous).
After that, how can one say something like:

in my opnioin  Anonymous Coins is meaningless.When people say something about Anonymous it may illegal or something.And the government won't let any Anonymous coins survive.If we have a choice,i'd rather choose some more reality feature.

The government can't even do anything about it, this is pure nonsense. 'A more reality feature' 

[DogTheHunter]

only bother with Darkcoin and Monero (which is not yet ready for normal guys and girls)

i got a bunch of stuff to see what happens. but only these two atm are transaction ready.

[Apraksin]

I believe it is just a white paper at this point, but some development work has been done on Zerocoin, so some of the code may be usable in Zerocash. Honestly, they have been really slow with ZeroCoin (abandoned) and Zerocash, so it may take a long time to come into existence.

Zerocoin is by no means abandoned, Anoncoin is working steadily on the trustless implementation of zerocoin. Granted, it could still take a while though.

https://sigterm.no/blog/112/

Also, zerocoin would be superior to zerocash since Zerocash can not be Made trustless. Both of them are a vast improvement over coinjoin.