I really don't enjoy that drk-bashing recently. It reminds me of the smear-campaign against Monero last year. All those threads appearing at the same time against drk code, insta-mine, community and what not... doesn't really look like an organic debate but a coordinated FUD rush.
Best technology will win the game in the long run, I don't see the point of all that trollrama. There's no dignity in that.
(Disclaimer: I don't own any darkcoin)
I don't think its a coordinated FUD rush - I think people just have opinions, and they happen to get excited about them at the same time, and they happen to feel motivated if they see others in their immediate community showing up and adding to the conversation. At least thats on the monero side. I have no idea about the anti-monero stuff that happened before. I mean, I can tell you there's no chatter on monero IRC like "hey, lets all FUD DRK! Yeah!" and then tippero rains coins on everyone.
Regardless, it makes for boring reads when following a thread.
I've read the rationale for the continued "trollrama", as you put it - and my take was that its really to make sure there is content for denizens of the internet to come across when they decide to enter into cryptocurrencies such that they can make an educated decision regarding where their efforts will go. I mean, if one ends up in the darkcoinforum (
https://darkcointalk.org/), there's 1 narrative there.
Whereas if they end up in bitcointalk, there are a lot of narratives.
For me, thats the reason behind the "trollrama". If new people come into this space, how do they know if they're in a hype echo chamber or not? The answer, of course, is that people are engaged in critical conversation. I came into this space not long ago, and with DRK I read about the instamine (or whatever DRK supporters call it to pacify themselves) and the privacy technology. I read about Monero's community takeover, the de-optimized miner (which, by the way, was implemented by the bytecoin / cryptonote greed team, and thus was inherited by all early cryptonote coins, not just monero, as detailed by the one that found the problem here:
http://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html)
My strong belief is that the skepticism was warranted: Here's the original slow-hash from bytecoin as it was copied into Bitmonero. It has some doozies. For example, on line 100, you might note that for every iteration through an inner loop repeated tens of thousands of times, the AES key is re-imported into the library. The later loop, starting on line 113, is repeated half a million times, and is so abstracted through lots of memcpys and pointer manipulation it's hard to tell that all it really does is one round of AES encryption, a pointer dereference into a random scratchpad, a 64 bit multiplication, and another pointer dereference. Phew. This original code was roughly 50x slower than my final optimized code, and could have easily been used to fake two years of blockchain data on a single computer or a small cluster. I'm pretty sure that's what happened.
Bitmonero was a fork of Bytecoin designed to not have the 80% premine. But its initial developer either didn't know, didn't care, or wanted to profit from the de-optimized hashing. That initial developer was pretty quickly given the boot by the community, and in came an unrelated group of developers who took it over---who were, as far as I can tell, completely unaware of the deoptimization. So things sat there for a few weeks in the same state as Bytecoin.
I read about ringsignatures (even though still don't fully understand cryptography, understood the concept enough to go "huh, thats totally different than bitcoin).
Do call it trollroma or whatever, but in my mind its just a public service to prevent pages upon pages of one side of the story. Now, I hope that Evil-K comes back with any progress on that de-anonymizing DRK blockchain explorer (and I hope he targets this blinded masternode thing on their testnet), but like all things bitcoin, it will probably take him a while because, yah know, this aint his job.
