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[Kuriso]

No, I simply disagree with the math and find that number implausible. I believe that most masternodes will ultimately be compromised, either directly or via VPS or other back doors.

You simply disagree?  Really?  You are sitting here arguing about something that you 'simply disagree' on?  Sounds like a waste and a feeble attempt at spreading the on going FUD.  Have you done any calculations that can plausibly prove/support why you simply disagree?  If so, I'd like to see it.  If you can't, beyond a reasonable doubt, prove that the math is wrong then you're just spreading FUD.  

I'll tell you right now that I haven't looked at the math.  I aint gots no time for that.

In other news... Google and your ISP is monitoring everything you do already.  Nothing you do is safe. AAHHH!!!!

That's exactly why if you want anonymity or even some modest degree of privacy on the Internet you better be doing it with strong cryptography and not trusting "nodes"

Look I get that DRK was created before the cryptonote technology was released and arguably at the time it was the best we had to try to make Bitcoin more anonymous. Building that out was an admirable goal. It isn't any more.

And yes, I do have some idea of the math. It works against a few bad apples but falls apart if many of the masternodes are dishonest or compromised (with or without their knowledge). I'll take a closer look at blinding when it is release but from what I've seen so far I expect much the same.

Whats 'many'?  5 nodes, 10 nodes, 1%, 10%, 20% of the nodes, more?  Based on your calculations, how many dishonest masternodes does it take for transactions to becomes less than 'even some modest degree of privacy'?

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[smooth]

Look I get that DRK was created before the cryptonote technology was released and arguably at the time it was the best we had to try to make Bitcoin more anonymous. Building that out was an admirable goal. It isn't any more.

Do you have a solution to replace DRK?? If so please tell the world

Please dont say Monero - Adoption is Zero (0%), the problems that the coin has are at this point are not marketable (No official Wallet, Bloat, Inflation etc etc) and will never gain adoption because who in their right mind as a business would try and maintain and secure two different code bases.

If you monkey with the code base at all, you are still inviting security issues and bugs. The masternode code isn't based directly on Bitcoin and had had issues as I understand it. (I mean this not as an attack on the code, which I can't do because I haven't personally reviewed it, but only to point out that if you want to do anything new you are going to have new code and have to develop, review, test, and debug carefully, and there will be bugs, etc. to be fixed.) Likewise for the non-Bitcoin parts of the DRK wallet, which include Darksend.

As far as Monero having a different codebase, so far the core of the cryptonote code (including Monero but really all of them) has held up reasonably well after almost a year. There was one major exploit, but other than that, just minor growing pains.

Bitcoin is having enough of a hard time trying to convince people to use it.

Fair point. Maybe DRK should just give up and DRK supporters should help get behind Bitcoin instead? Only partially serious here, but the fact is, again, if you are doing something different, whatever it is, you are going to have these issues.

Looka at directbet.eu - they Took DRK over Monero..Why is that I wonder?

Because it was easier and the market is somewhat bigger (they're both very small though, really, even compared to BTC). No question that integrating Bitcoin-based coins is easier for sites that already support BTC. The other side of that is you simply don't get the sort of strong cryptographic anonymity you get with something a little farther away from Bitcoin. If you think anonymity is important, that matters.

It certainly can be done. Several sites have integrated cryptonote coins and it's worked for them. That includes quite a few different exchanges, xmr.to, crypotcoins-dice, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Either way, there is no free lunch here.

[smooth]

Whats 'many'?  5 nodes, 10 nodes, 1%, 10%, 20% of the nodes, more?  Based on your calculations, how many dishonest masternodes does it take for transactions to becomes less than 'even some modest degree of privacy'?

There are different vectors of attack here. If we ignore inherent coinjoin-type issues (the sorts of things this thread was originally about, which may be a false alarm, but those sorts of issues still exist in general terms and may apply to DRK in some ways), then the numbers I'm talking about involve most of the masternodes being malicious or compromised for catastrophic failure to occur. I don't believe that is the case today; I think most masternodes are run by people who either support the DRK project or are just doing it for the money (the latter is fine, short term, as it means they aren't interested in compromising privacy).

But let's face it, what is going on now doesn't really matter at all. The whole point of this exercise is to build something secure for the hypothetical future where these technologies are very widely used and important. That is the point where I do not expect the current degree of masternode fidelity to continue, or at least I find the blind trust that it will irrational and unacceptable.

That said, even in the case where most (but not all) masternodes are honest, at least with the current system, some transactions will be vulnerable. With 3 rounds chosen randomly and 2% of masternodes being dishonest, it means one out 100 000 transactions will be completely unmixed (more will have reduced anonymity). That may sound great, unless you are that one. Still, this might be an acceptable degree of risk, if there weren't a better way.

There is simply no substitute for strong cryptography that does not rely on third parties for your privacy. If there is no feasible cryptographic way to do what needs to be done, sure build trusted third parties and try to minimize that trust by working through several of them. But there is a feasible way to do this without any third party trust at all, which makes the masternode approach unnecessarily dangerous.

This really applies only to anonymity and similar cryptographic applications though. If you want to use masternodes to validate instant payments or provide other services that don't have the same trust requirements as anonymity, that might make a lot more sense.

[stonehedge]

Look I get that DRK was created before the cryptonote technology was released and arguably at the time it was the best we had to try to make Bitcoin more anonymous. Building that out was an admirable goal. It isn't any more.

Do you have a solution to replace DRK?? If so please tell the world

Please dont say Monero - Adoption is Zero (0%), the problems that the coin has are at this point are not marketable (No official Wallet, Bloat, Inflation etc etc) and will never gain adoption because who in their right mind as a business would try and maintain and secure two different code bases. Bitcoin is having enough of a hard time trying to convince people to use it.

Looka at directbet.eu - they Took DRK over Monero..Why is that I wonder?

Directbet now take more bets in DRK than they do in BTC and indeed in any other currency, by value or volume.

Satoshibet adopted Darkcoin last week.

DRK adoption is happening.

[LongAndShort]

Look I get that DRK was created before the cryptonote technology was released and arguably at the time it was the best we had to try to make Bitcoin more anonymous. Building that out was an admirable goal. It isn't any more.

Do you have a solution to replace DRK?? If so please tell the world

Please dont say Monero - Adoption is Zero (0%), the problems that the coin has are at this point are not marketable (No official Wallet, Bloat, Inflation etc etc) and will never gain adoption because who in their right mind as a business would try and maintain and secure two different code bases. Bitcoin is having enough of a hard time trying to convince people to use it.

Looka at directbet.eu - they Took DRK over Monero..Why is that I wonder?

Directbet now take more bets in DRK than they do in BTC and indeed in any other currency, by value or volume.

Satoshibet adopted Darkcoin last week.

DRK adoption is happening.

Which makes it yet another, highly potential, negitive, media timebomb. Especially in regards to the mass adoption of CRYPTO related currency.

MN are not a viable option, in fact, i think its fair to say its a fools errand for both developers and investors. I predict that it will be busted wide open within the next 10 years with devastating effects to the anon space and CRYPTO trust in general.

The US Justice Department is trying to expand federal powers to search and seize digital data.  

These proposals are never going to stop and the uses for darkcoin are only ever going to strengthen their cases towards allowing such an act to take place by the US and any country. So why build something to compete with, and fuel that. Hence it being a fools errand and far from future proof. Thats my argument anyway.

[barwizi]

The US Justice Department is trying to expand federal powers to search and seize digital data.  

Less than 30% of crypto users are subject to american law. Then consider the massive exodus of crypto- related business to more viable nations.

Do keep in mind that America is pretty high on the majority of the globe's shit list on digital matters at the moment. They'll either meet very little compliance, or outright resistance.

[toknormal]

That said, even in the case where most (but not all) masternodes are honest, at least with the current system, some truncations will be vulnerable

This whole line of argument is largely hypothetical and falls apart for 3 reasons:

[1] - whatever other 'technologies' and cryptocurrencies exist, monetarily speaking the highest value proposition is a successful bitcoin clone that supports private transactions and maximum fungibility. That means some kind of optimal compromise between bitcoin and and anonymous network layer = Darkcoin's design priorities. Sure, have your "high tech" but don't expect "high cap".

[2] - the subtext of smooth's line of propaganda is that the masternode network is some kind of 'static' network that represents a fixed target which can be progressively 'bought'. It isn't. Masternodes are simply wallet daemons. They are as decentralised as any other wallet daemon in that *every* part of the coin supply supports them. Any wallet can operate in 'masternode' mode and new ones can and are set up continuously.

[3] - the technology's now a year into development. Despite being open sourced and probably one of the most investigated , attacked and 'fudded' out there, it's never yet been compromised. Meanwhile all these attacks only serve to harden the architecture with every successive code release. Add to that the fact that the blockchain itself inherits Bitcoin's full confidence value and you have a much more optimal balance of anonymity, value proposition, adoption and financial security than you do with any cryptonote coin

[LongAndShort]

The US Justice Department is trying to expand federal powers to search and seize digital data.  

Less than 30% of crypto users are subject to american law. Then consider the massive exodus of crypto- related business to more viable nations.

Do keep in mind that America is pretty high on the majority of the globe's shit list on digital matters at the moment. They'll either meet very little compliance, or outright resistance.

I'm not comfortable betting on that though. Mainly because i don't have a crystal ball.
I can only go on what i can see happening here. US has strong alliance and influence with a lot more of the world then you are making out.
And its also, believe it or not, in many ways, a template for many developing countries.

But i'm sure you are smart enough to realise this is not just the US moving to do things like this and i think you will find a fair chunk of the MN in US territory and or influenced countries.
In case you missed the headline on that and the other 40+ articles on the subject "Google warns of US government 'hacking any facility' in the world"
--------------

To get back on topic, Evil-Knievel, can you please give an update into your findings.

I find his proposed de-anonymisation plausible. Is there any resource from the DRK community to fund his research time?

[smooth]

[1] - whatever other 'technologies' and cryptocurrencies exist, monetarily speaking the highest value proposition is a successful bitcoin clone that supports private transactions and maximum fungibility. That means some kind of optimal compromise between bitcoin and and anonymous network layer = Darkcoin's design priorities. Sure, have your "high tech" but don't expect "high cap".

Im pretty sure that remains very much to be seen. The current market cap of any of these coins is approximately zero.

[2] - the subtext of smooth's line of propaganda is that the masternode network is some kind of 'static' network that represents a fixed target which can be progressively 'bought'. It isn't. Masternodes are simply wallet daemons. They are as decentralised as any other wallet daemon in that *every* part of the coin supply supports them. Any wallet can operate in 'masternode' mode and new ones can and are set up continuously.

Well no. Masternodes have a significant cost (they have to, in order to prevent sybil attacks), will likely generate significant income from fees in a successful system, and are important infrastructure that won't work just running some random wallet on a cell phone. They are and will be running predominantly in data centers or possibly by a few amateurs with unusually good facilities to do it, though frankly I consider the latter rather unlikely in a scaled-up system.

If you want to design a system that is fully peer-to-peer where workload is shared among arbitrarily many wallets in a highly fault tolerant manner, without the possibility of sybil attacks or other attacks, have at it, but that's not masternodes (it's somewhat closer to what Dark Wallet is trying to build). This all seems rather pointless for anonymity though, now that we know how to do anonymity using cryptography in a completely trustless manner. You seem to want to put that technolgoical genie back in the bottle and go back to the days of "coinjoin is the best we've got", but that wishful thinking won't work.

Technologically, you've been leapfrogged here. In terms of market adoption, we will see. That remains to be seen.

[3] - the technology's now a year into development. Despite being open sourced and probably one of the most investigated , attacked and 'fudded' out there, it's never yet been compromised.

wat?!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg9121343#msg9121343

You don't inherit magic bug-freeness by forking Bitcoin. Once you start messing with the code you give up the proven reliability and start introducing new vulnerabilities.

[toknormal]

Technologically, you've been leapfrogged here. In terms of market adoption, we will see. That remains to be seen.

About a year ago, I was much more open minded about this.

Things were not at all clear about where the market was going. Everyone was waiting and debating about what was going to "overtake bitcoin" - largely because it was being 'technologically leapfrogged' left right and centre. New algos were appearing, POS, Bitcoin 2.0, 'shares' you name it.

A year later, after all that flotilla of 'technological prowess' it turns out that none of it even made a dent in bitcoin's market cap.

For me, that changes everything in terms of investment priorities. I have no problem with you pursuing the latest and greatest' tech - in fact I positively support it. What is a bit miserable - specially coming from project staff members - is the levels of adverse petty propagandising you do about competitors while trying to dress it up as 'technical critiques'.

Any technical project is going to have its share of strengths and weaknesses. What matters is that those are consistent with the design specifications which in turn should have a high relevance to the market's priorities. Anyone can come along after the fact and give themselves a 'clean sheet' to rewrite history as long as they don't expect much adoption - as I said, the market's now littered with 'technological leapfroggers' including 14 dirt cheap cryptonotes. But there's only 1 original. That goes for almost every cryptocurrency sector without exception - Bitcoin 1, asset trading, shares, pop-coins, anonymity and 'fiat-friendly'.

[illodin]

To get back on topic, Evil-Knievel, can you please give an update into your findings.

I find his proposed de-anonymisation plausible. Is there any resource from the DRK community to fund his research time?

I don't think it would be productive use of funds to support researching something that's gonna be obsolete soon anyway. If he wants to research the system based on masternode blinding currently on testnet then that is a fund that could be supported.

[illodin]

blatant manipulation of supply

Who was manipulated when the reward formula was changed? Were you manipulated into not mining and buying early on because you thought the formula would remain the same and it would for some reason be better for you to buy or mine later on? And then when the formula was changed, and people voted for it by downloading the new client, that was the moment when you got scammed and manipulated?

When a coin is still new (as it was just a couple of months old), that's the time when you can still make changes to the parameters of the coin if deemed necessary to prevent a problem imo.

If we would adopt your puristic view, all coin's features would have to be carved in stone at the launch. If later on you come up with a new feature or a service for the coin that will be very valuable and increase the price, there would be people screaming manipulation and scam because adding value to the coin would unfairly benefit those who were early and got their coins cheaper.

[illodin]

If it were peer-to-peer like bitcoin that could be enough. But it isn't. It is peer-to-masternode(s)-to-peer.

You can't and never will be able to verify what masternodes are doing, as long as they appear to be doing what they are supposed to. But what else they are doing you have no idea. At all.

That's why there is the 1000 DRK requirement for a wallet to function as a masternode. To prevent and deter bad actors from just simply launching millions of nodes for free. Darkcoin is still being developed, and is moving to a direction where the masternodes know less and less about the details - the latest step in the evolution being masternode blinding. By the time NSA gets interested enough DRK might be running totally hidden under TOR or I2P on raspberry pi 3's or custom made Darkcoin hardware.

It is though quite possible NSA proof anonymity simply cannot be achieved if you ever want to use a computer or a phone, or IoT in the future.

What can be achieved though, is keeping your finances private from your neighbors, friends, relatives, employers, competitors, insurance company, bank, police, local authorities, irs, etc, and to keep your coins actually fungible. This is the flaw of Bitcoin that Darkcoin aims to fix.

[smooth]

all coin's features would have to be carved in stone at the launch.

What kind of idiot would suggest such a thing

The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.

Satoshi clearly got it all wrong, and Evan fixed it. Thank you for clearing that up.

Either that, or DRK is being run more like a penny stock and will likely end the same way. I'm going to go with B, I think.

[smooth]

What can be achieved though, is keeping your finances private from your neighbors, friends, relatives, employers, competitors, insurance company, bank, police, local authorities, irs, etc, and to keep your coins actually fungible. This is the flaw of Bitcoin that Darkcoin aims to fix.

I don't believe it can have any confidence of even doing that, because there is a reasonable probability that masternodes will ultimately be owned by corporations in the business of mining data for profit. The whole internet tracking and tracing industry didn't start out that way either, it happened over time because it was profitable. Many early pioneers on the internet were advocates for privacy and individual empowerment, but in reality the internet turned into a massive surveillance machine, not only for the NSA, but for business too. Masternodes are the same.

What you want to achieve can be done trustlessly with cryptography. It can't be done by pretending that nodes operating a for-profit service on the internet are going to remain in the hands of enthusiasts and idealists.

[toknormal]

There are at least 5 usable wallets.

P.S. This may be your idea of 'useable' but it isn't most people's.

[smooth]

There are at least 5 usable wallets.

P.S. This may be your idea of 'useable' but it isn't most people's.

I was not even including the command line wallet, though it is certainly usable by many. There are five graphical wallets listed here, and I think the list is missing one or two:

https://moneroeconomy.com/news/choose-your-wallet

[toknormal]

I was not even including the command line wallet, though it is certainly usable by many. There are five graphical wallets listed here, and I think the list is missing one or two:

https://moneroeconomy.com/news/choose-your-wallet

The only Mac wallet available appears to be mymonero.com which seems to be a hot web wallet.

ok, I won't nitpick over wallets, your perfectly entitled to de-prioritise that and delegate it to 3rd parties if you have genuine reason for doing so which you appear to have. I also don't wish the project ill - as I've stated before I'm a fan of diversity and technical creativity.

I just think you should change your style and quit the unnecessary flamewar mud slinging that you get engaged in.

[bitcreditscc]

And monero people wonder why there is dying interest. You have become like door to door salesmen who double up with being Jehovah's witness. This thread is about DRK, where is there an invitation to discuss your coin? Some of us were looking forward to continued technical discussion on the subject matter but you have to bring in your agenda where it is non-applicable and unwanted. I swear a lot more people would pay attention to monero if you didn't always try to force it down their throats and/or mention it in places it has no business. It gets seriously annoying, and the moment people are annoyed by a community, the less likely they are to take what you say seriously, let alone become interested in what you are selling.

[smooth]

I was not even including the command line wallet, though it is certainly usable by many. There are five graphical wallets listed here, and I think the list is missing one or two:

https://moneroeconomy.com/news/choose-your-wallet

The only Mac wallet available appears to be mymonero.com which seems to be a hot web wallet.

I don't know what you mean by "hot" but MyMonero doesn't store private keys.

I just think you should change your style and quit the unnecessary flamewar mud slinging that you get engaged in.

I disagree that technical criticism of what I see as a dead end approach is "flamewar mud slinging"

I'm all for technical diversity too. I'm just increasingly convinced you DRK guys are wasting your time with what you are doing, for this reason:

None of these coins is going much of anywhere anytime soon in terms of having any real impact on the world or achieving a really significant value by fiat standards, with the possible exception of Bitcoin and even that is at this moment quite a long shot. Everything about crypto and especially non-BTC crypto given today's reality is a very long term endeavor.

Pragmatic and expedient solutions like building fragile (but somewhat better than BTC) anonymity on top of a Bitcoin codebase make sense in some cases, like when trying to address a large and/or very rapidly growing market. It may have seemed like that was going to happen when anon was "hot" but its just not happening now, so there is really no point to it. If you're going to work on this stuff you might as well build technology that is actually game changing in some way. Sure you might have a somewhat higher market cap and somewhat higher number of users with the current approach, but really its still a flea on a dog's ass in terms of actual impact, if perhaps a slightly bigger flea.

This thread is about DRK, where is there an invitation to discuss your coin?

I agree, and I've called out people for bringing up Monero, and tried to stop it. My comments have for the most part been focused on DRK's fundamentally and fatally flawed approach to anonymity (whether or not the OP exploit is real). The response from DRK supporters to any criticism of DRK is to bring up Monero.