Why the darkcoin/dash/dashpay instamine matters

[smooth]

That drk wasn't insta, fast or opportunistically mined. Do you really think if Evan and his friends weren't the ones who benefitted most that the coin would not be relaunched? Don't rename it, relaunch it if you won't to avoid the scam label.

There is no one trying to deny many coins were mined fast in the beginning.

It is not denied; that would be even insane than the current attempt to whitewash it. It is downplayed describing it as 48 hours (in fact most of the coins were mined in 8 hours), the unprovable claim that the coins were redistributed is presented as fact, and relevant information about the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding the instamine/premine orchestrated by the then and current developer are omitted (see above).

Regarding distribution:

[DISCLAIMER: see disclaimer of conflict of interest at the bottom]

Sigh, I'm a bit tired of seeing the same talking points from the DRK FAQ, etc., but just once I will respond because I think in general AlexGR you are pretty sincere.

You are missing the point.

Quote: "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud"
  -- Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Antifragile; credit to opennux for the quote).

First of all, on the matter of redistribution:

DRK/dash supporters frequently claim that the instamine happened but it "doesn't matter" any more because the coins have been redistributed. This is repeated in the DRK FAQ along with several other unsupported statements about who does or does not own certain quantities of coins. However, these statements are at best supposition, as it isn't possible whether it actually happened as claimed.

The problems is, you don't know 90% of what happens in the markets. You can say "coins traded at such a price" but you don't know who was on each side of that trade. If I were trying to legitimize my instamine, the first thing I would do is trade it around, move the coins between wallets, and generally create an appearance of redistribution. To contend that there are not pump groups, whale groups, shady coin developers and others who engage in manipulative and sham trading of altcoins is absurd to the point of ridiculous. This is not the New York Stock Exchange (even there, you probably shouldn't trust everything you see). There is simply no way to know that didn't happen or if it did how much of the activity it represents. This applies at both low prices and high prices.

I will grant that if the coins were traced to a theft at Mintpal and then dumped, that was probably actual redistribution; I don't think the Mintpal scammer was tied to the DRK instamine scam (but you never know with these things; scammers gonna scam). But at best that was a minority of the instamine (and wouldn't early instaminers and other adopters logically have had their in masternodes by then?)

Now I agree it is certainly fair to say that the coins might have been redistributed or could have been redistributed. I would not object to that at all.

But to continue to present this as fact (in the FAQ and frequently used as a talking point by dark supporters) is unsupportable and effectively fraudulent.

In addition, the DRK FAQ claims that the 2 million coin instamine happened over 48 hours, and this talking point is also frequently repeated by DRK supporters.  However, this grossly understates the severity of the instamine, and perhaps paints a picture of a short mining period over which outsiders could still realistically decide whether or not to participate.

In fact:

1. Within the very first hour over 500,000 coins were mined

2. Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mined, which is most of the instamine.

On the matter of the instamine itself, to focus on the amount of the instamine and the subsequent disposition of the coins is to ignore a whole host of extremely deceptive and arguably fraudulent practices that surrounded it:

3. That Evan misled people into thinking that the launch would not happen for days (and specifically "definitely" not in "hours"), then it happened in a few hours, late at night in the US and during the early morning hours in Europe. Considering the >500K coins mined in the very first hour alone, the effect of this "ambush" was enormous.

4. That the stated reason for delaying the launch for days was to do more testing and fix bugs. Yet when the coin was lunched it still had a "serious error." Why was the rushed ambush launch done in this manner?

5. That Evan withheld information about the purpose, features, and goals of he coin development until after the instamine was complete. It was absolutely impossible for you to have any reason to mine this coin unless your strategy was to mine 100% of new coins that were launched, you just happened to stumble into it, you were friends with Evan, or you were Evan. In effect it turns the instamine into a premine, because the coins were mined before the coin was properly announced.

6. That various changes have been made to rewards, etc. multiple times., always in the direction of reducing/restricting/locking up supply, to the benefit of existing holders. The latest version of this is masternode payments, which look very much like a HYIP (a form of financial fraud which attracts new investors by offering high yields to the benefit of earlier investors)

7. Renaming the coin has been proposed by Evan and then later later implemented to reduce attention on instamine, the previous withholding of information, the manipulation, and the misleading and deceptive statements that occurred in connection with the previous name(s).

Now it is possible all of this was an accident. If so, you are asking us to believe in a string of extraordinary coincidences all apparently (by sheer luck) benefiting the same party or parties.

If it is instead not all an "accident" then it is evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of the person or persons still involve with running the project. That is certainly relevant and troubling information, even if the nature of circumstantial evidence (even strong circumstantial evidence) is that it can't be 100% proven. Things might be different if there were a complete and transparent change of leadership (as for example with BitMonero->Monero, and probably some other coins). But that is not the case. The person (assuming, not necessarily with certainty, that he acted alone) responsible for everything reported above is still there.

None of this proves it was not an accident, but given the fairly strong circumstantial case, I'm going to not only stay away, but advise other people to stay away.

AlexGR further claims that the instamine was okay "because satoshi did it too" or that "satoshi solomined" (paraphrases), a frequent defense of various premine/instamine/fastmine/ninjamine scams. That is a fairly absurd justification, even if it were a valid equivalence in this particular case, but it is not. Let's review (using the numbers above):

1. The rate of Bitcoin mining followed the published schedule. There were no extra coins mined at the beginning (in fact I think some of the early blocks were quite slow). It took 2-3 months to mine 500K coins, not one hour

2. It took the better part of a year to mine 1.5 million BTC, not 8 hours.

3. The Bitcoin launch was announced well ahead of time, the code was reviewed by several people who help finish it, and it happened on schedule. No misleading statements were made about the time of the launch. "Many people" are reported to have mined during the first several thousand blocks. Certainly many mined over the following months as well.

4. There were indeed bugs in the code, and some mined coins were even lost to fix them, but none of this involved a "serious error" right after launch when an enormous number of coins were mined.

5. satoshi did not withhold information about the features and goals of the project. He engaged in a detailed and extended discussion about how it would work and what it was attempting to accomplish before it was launched.

6. No changes were made as satoshi made it clear that to have legitimacy as a decentralized system, the parameters needed to be "set in stone"

Furthermore it isn't even true that satoshi was the only one or one of only a few mining in the early days of Bitcoin. "Many other people" were mining in the first several thousand blocks, according to gmaxwell.

One more thing to add. The part of this that is (probably) fraudulent is not that Evan got a lot of coins, its that it was held out (and in many ways continues to be held out) as a public open distribution process, when in reality what happened was in effect more of a premine (see items above esp. #6), and I believe at this point that was very likely the intent. If he had forthrightly presented it as a premined coin, one might think that was a bad idea, but there would be no claim of probable fraud, at least not by me. I've never claimed that an openly premined coin was a fraud (maybe a bad idea, maybe something that should be relaunched sans premime, but not a fraud if done honestly).

DISCLAIMER: I am a Monero core team member and I do not deny a conflict of interest. Nevertheless I endeavor to be factual and I suggest that readers consider the facts, check the facts, reach your own conclusions about what happened and how it matters today, and finally to avoid the temptation to attack the person stating the facts or the coin(s) with which he might be associated]

EDIT: add disclaimer, various typos, writing cleanups, reformatting, add references.



References

Ok now it insta crashes when I type "setgenerate true".

Time to go to bed and try again next week?

Yeah, let's do that. I obviously need to do some more testing. Thanks everyone!

Best thing to do I guess. Please, confirm you won't be launching after some minutes/hours even if you fix it, and the sooner would be tomorrow, thanks.

Definitely not. I'll also follow up with this post when I do set a time.

Launch is being moved to 11PM EST!

Everyone please update to the new version on the git repo, there was a serious error that I just fixed:

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  CreateNewBlock() : ConnectBlock failed
Aborted (core dumped)

I compiled the exe for Windows... no blocks yet, just a bazillion rejects.

Any chance you could upload that windows client exe? I'd be willing to throw 5k XCO at you. Just make sure it's the latest source from github

Ok now it insta crashes when I type "setgenerate true".

Time to go to bed and try again next week?

Yeah, let's do that. I obviously need to do some more testing. Thanks everyone!

Best thing to do I guess. Please, confirm you won't be launching after some minutes/hours even if you fix it, and the sooner would be tomorrow, thanks.

Definitely not. I'll also follow up with this post when I do set a time.

Launch is being moved to 11PM EST!

... seriously?

Just woke up to this How many hours have I lost? Oh, well.  Time to git pull and launch it again.

Did Darkcoin have a fair launch?
Yes and it was publicly preannounced.

Was Darkcoin Instamined?
~2mn coins were issued in the first 48 hours due to problems with the difficulty readjustment. That represents approximately 10-15% of the total money supply that will ever be issued.

The majority of these coins were distributed through the market in the following weeks and months at very low price levels* (0.0000x BTC per DRK to 0.000x BTC per DRK) and a lot of them were also absorbed in the April/May 2014 price increase.

• Examples of prices and selling action almost two weeks after launch:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4861558#msg4861558

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg4889177#msg4889177

• Forum member coins101 did a blockchain analysis of Darkcoins distribution as of September 2014:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=778616.0

I read somone who wrote that 50% of the coins in circulation are owned by the devs
No. This is a classic case of spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) by supporters of other cryptocurrencies who perceive Darkcoin as a threat to the coin they support.

The coin has been well distributed through exchanges since early February 2014 – almost 15-20 days after the coin's launch. One could buy as many cheap DRKs as they wanted, with prices of 0.0000x per DRK or 0.0001x per DRK. This can be verified by historic charts of c-cex.com and poloniex.com of early Feb 2014. These two exchanges were the first that adopted DRK. Huge buy orders of 20-30-50k DRKs were being filled by early miners who were dumping their coins for pennies, not really appreciating the coin they had in their possession due to the “abundant” way in which they mined it as people do not really appreciate what they are given in ample quantity.

Miners who “instamined” large quantities never foresaw the huge price increase and as such sold over a million coins at prices from 0.0000x up to 0.002 – with the first large batch being sold after DRK hit the exchanges and the next large batches being sold from February 2014 to April 2014 @ 0.0015 BTC price levels. In fact, many coin holders were complaining* of all the “dumping” by those who held cheap coins from the start that kept the price at artificially low levels for 2 months straight.

The dumping ended, due to tremendous market demand, when a “pump” was initiated by “whale” buyers that swallowed millions of USD (in DRKs), raising the price from 0.0012 to 0.017 within a few weeks.

• During this dumping period there were certain individuals who spread FUD about how the coin will never rise in price due to the instaminers dumping continuously. These are typically the same people who are claiming that the 50% instamine distribution affects the coin distribution today. However it is impossible to simultaneously claim that the coins were being dumped and that the 50% instamine holds true today. It's either one or the other. Since the coins were being dumped, the 50% instamine distribution was gradually reduced with each dumping wave. Blockchain analysis indicates a well distributed coin, reflecting the fact that the dumped coins were evenly distributed through the market. Early distribution is not currently an issue as huge buyers have been reshuffling the "rich-list" in their favor, buying millions of dollars in Darkcoins during May 2014. Late distribution through aggressive buying is currently more of a concern than early distribution.

1. Satoshi mined almost alone from 1/3/2009 to 1/25/2010 (block 0 to block 36288).

He did not. I mined during that time— so did many other people I've talked to. As you're probably aware the original software mined _very_ slowly, and contemporary hardware was slow. Heck even a fairly current machine with state of the art software can just barely do enough hashrate for difficulty 1. (and god, before more handout requests come: Bitcoin was worthless then, the software was annoying windows-gui only— I ran it in wine+vncserver, and I didn't keep my original wallet)

A sister coin would wipe out Darkcoin, especially if we did it. So it's not a good idea.

Other options are:

1.) Renaming the coin. It keeps coming up over and over, maybe we should really consider it. Everyone start coming up with names and I'll make a voting page to gauge if our user base even wants this.
2.) The first 24 hours of the coins existence keep causing us problems, an "airdrop" could be a solution to this. We could airdrop all holders (uniquely verified) with a equal portion of coin. This coin would come from a block in the future that paid 2.4million+ coins to a specific address that I hold. We could use some kind of verification system like mastercoin (http://mastercoin-faucet.com/github-intro)
The airdrop would be a month or so into the future, so it would give users time to buy coins and become holders creating some demand. Also, we'd have a much larger market cap and the argument about the first 24 hours would become invalid.


As always, we listen to the community. If enough people complain, we'll do something...

1) The name is fine - "the general public" is never going to use darkcoin, it will be used by people who care about ANONYMITY - The general public will just stick with bitcoin, because it is "anonymous enough" for 95% of folks, and has tons of other advantages (wide retail acceptance etc)
2) The first 24 hours became a larger problem when the # of coins decreased from 84million to 22million, In retrospect this was probably a mistake... but we can't take that back now without killing the price and shaking investor confidence. The airdrop idea sounds super shady, even if it isn't.

Major changes like this should not be taken lightly.  Investors want specs that are written in stone. Major changes should ONLY happen if it's crucial for the success of the coin.  Neither of these issues meet that requirement and therefore I think should be left as-is.

eduffield
Darkcoin airdrop (cancelled)
2014-04-07, 04:49:41

The first 24 hours of the coins existence keep causing us problems, an "airdrop" could be a solution to this. We could airdrop all holders (uniquely verified) with a equal portion of coin. This coin would come from a block in the future that paid 2 million+ coins to a specific address that I hold. We could use some kind of verification system like mastercoin (http://mastercoin-faucet.com/github-intro)
The airdrop would be a month or so into the future, so it would give users time to buy coins and become holders creating some demand. Also, we'd have a much larger market cap and the argument about the first 24 hours would become invalid.

How would you get a part of the airdrop?

- You must own 100DRK ( if you're new to Darkcoin but want to be part of the drop, you would need to purchase 100DRK ).

One of the following:
- Github: To redeem this reward, you need either at least three public repositories and your account must be older than August 1, 2013
- Reddit: To redeem this reward, you need a Reddit account with more than 100 karma.
- Bitcointalk: To redeem this reward you need an activity score above 10 as well as at least 10 posts

Any of these accounts would need to be created before April 1, 2014.


Vote!

Sorry, this was a terrible idea.

Someone asked me this via email, I thought I'd post the answer for everyone:

I'm looking for some clarity on the amount of Darkcoins that will be minted.  I've read some where that it is something quite large.  I'm looking to invest founds into emerging crypto's that have a possibility of longevity.  I'm very concerned thought with the total number of coins that will be minted.  Please advise. thanks.

--------------------------------

DarkCoin is unique in the since that it has a variable block reward that is based on difficulty. This means that while currently the block reward is 120, when difficulty rises the block reward will fall. Eventually the block reward will be driven down to it's lowest amount which is 15DRK. After that, every 2 years the block reward is halved again. So in 2 years, 7.5DRK, in 4 years, 3.75DRK, etc.

So, we don't know how many there will be, but it definitely won't reach anywhere near 84 million. It mostly depends on how long it takes us to reach the lower block reward cap. At this of rate of growth that should happen this month (it happens at about 100 difficulty).  

I've read that variable block rewards are exploitable from "dishonest miners" in coins like dogecoin who switchover when the rewards are low. Could that happen to Darkcoin also? If yes then it is tempting for someone to take Darkcoin code, clone it and say "a better and improved Darkcoin, safe from dishonest mining tacticts" etc.

So, without getting insanely technical, Doge and DarkCoin are setup differently. The block reward function in DarkCoin is set on a very even curve and reward is higher toward the beginning. Later on people will forget that it was ever not fixed and they'll just talk about the halving. So there's not anything to really take advantage of, right? After a difficulty of 100, no matter what the blocks will return 15 DRK.

When I wrote the reply to the email earlier, I was thinking we'd hit 100 difficulty in a few weeks, but we're already at 600Mh/s for the network (up from 200 yesterday). If this keeps up we'll have a difficulty of 21 tomorrow and we only need 5x the growth of the network to reach that lower cap.

So I guess it's a question of incentives, knowing that we're going to cap at some point who wouldn't mine right now? From an economics point of view it's a feedback loop and it should actually make the growth exponential.

Great, now that everything is stable, I'll be posting later about the vision of this project and milestones! Time to move on to actually implementing what I set out to do.

As promised, here is our vision and future plans for XCoin!

http://xcoin.co/XCoinVision.pdf

TL;DR: We're building XCoin into a moderately-anonymous network, where the transactions are sent encrypted and only able to be read the party who is receiving the funds. Blocks will be published via CoinJoin as to ensure some amount of anonymity. This is being built in such a way to compete with the other top alt-coins and maybe even Bitcoin.  

I compiled the exe for Windows... no blocks yet, just a bazillion rejects.

Any chance you could upload that windows client exe? I'd be willing to throw 5k XCO at you. Just make sure it's the latest source from github

who want windows binary
https://mega.co.nz/#!2VwmnA6S!amlj-hUJvfIIDJe5QWkesiIquDMixXMHA_MPhUojSjc

https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/78a11fbc446c2f5d682cd88037d568b4f545139514480bead8f83993f1d09625/analysis/1390121132/

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[WealthyBastard]

That drk wasn't insta, fast or opportunistically mined. Do you really think if Evan and his friends weren't the ones who benefitted most that the coin would not be relaunched? Don't rename it, relaunch it if you won't to avoid the scam label.

There is no one trying to deny many coins were mined fast in the beginning.

It is not denied; that would be even insane than the current attempt to whitewash it. It is downplayed describing it as 48 hours (in fact most of the coins were mined in 8 hours), the unprovable claim that the coins were redistributed is presented as fact, and relevant information about the highly suspicious circumstances surrounding the instamine/premine orchestrated by the then and current developer are omitted (see above).

Regarding distribution:

Sigh, I'm a bit tired of seeing the same talking points from the DRK FAQ, etc., but just once I will respond because I think in general AlexGR you are pretty sincere.

You are missing the point.

First of all, on the matter of redistribution:

You don't know 90% of what happens in the markets. You can say "coins traded at such a price" but you don't know who was on each side of that trade. If I were trying to legitimize my instamine, the first thing I would do is trade it around, move the coins between wallets, and generally create an appearance of distribution. To contend that there are not pump groups, whale groups, shady coin developers and others who engage in manipulative and sham trading of altcoins is absurd to the point of ridiculous. This is not the New York Stock Exchange (even there, you probably shouldn't trust everything you see). There is simply no way to know that didn't happen or if it did how much of the activity it represents. This applies at both low prices and high prices.

I will grant that if the coins were traced a theft at Mintpal and then dumped, that was probably legit distribution; I don't think the Mintpal scammer was tied to the DRK instamine scam (but you never know with these things; scammers gonna scam). But best that was a minority of the instamine (and wouldn't early instaminers and other adopters logically have had their in masternodes by then?)

Now I agree it is certainly fair to say that the coins might have been redistributed or could have been redistributed. I would not object to that at all. But to present this as fact is unsupportable and effectively fraudulent.

Second why is the instamine described as happening over 48 hours when in fact:

1. Within the very first hour over 500,000 coins were mined

2. Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mind, which is most of the instamine.

On the matter of the instamine itself, you are ignoring a whole host of extremely shady practices that surrounded the instamine.

3. The Evan misled people into thinking that the launch would not happen for days (and specifically not in hours), then it happened in a few hours. Considering the 500K number in the first item above, the effect of this "ambush" was enormous.

4. The stated reason for delaying the launch for days was to do more testing and fix bugs. Yet when the coin was lunched it still had a "major problem." Why was the rushed ambush launch done in this manner, at a time that corresponded to late night in the US and very early morning in Europe?

5. Evan withheld information about the purpose, features, and goals of he coin development until after the instamine was complete. It was absolutely impossible for you to have any reason to mine this coin unless your strategy was to mine 100% of new coins that were launched, you just happened to stumble into it, you were friends with Evan, or you were Evan. In effect it turns the instamine into a premise, because the coins were mined before the coin was properly announced.

6. Various changes have been made to rewards, etc. multiple times., always in the direction of reducing/restricting/locking up supply, to the benefit of existing holders. The latest version of this is masternode payments, which look very much like a HYIP.

Now it is possible all of this was an accident. If so, you are asking us to believe in a string of extraordinary coincidences all apparently (by sheer luck) benefiting the same party or parties.

If it is not an accident then it is evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of the person or persons still involve with running the project. That is certainly relevant and troubling information, even if the nature of circumstantial evidence (even strong circumstantial evidence) is that it can't be 100% proven. Things might be different if there were a complete and transparent change of leadership (as for example with BitMonero->Monero, and probably some other coins). But that is not the case. The person who did all this is still there.

None of this proves it was not an accident, but given the fairly strong circumstantial case, I'm going to not only stay away, but advise other people to stay away. Quoting Nassim Taleb (author or Black Swan and Anti-fragility): "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud" (credit to opennux for the quote). I'm shouting (at least potential) fraud.

As for the satoshi comparison, it's fairly absurd. Let's review (using the numbers above):

1. The rate of Bitcoin mining followed the published schedule. There were no extra coins mined at the beginning (in fact I think some of the early blocks were quite slow). It took 2-3 months to mine 500K coins, not one hour

2. It took the better part of a year to mine 1.5 million BTC, not 8 hours.

3. The Bitcoin launch was announced well ahead of time, the code was reviewed by several people who help finish it, and it happened on schedule. No misleading statements were made about the time of the launch.

4. There were indeed bugs in the code, and some mined coins were even lost to fix them, but none of this involved a "major problem" right after launch when an enormous number of coins were mined.

5. satoshi did not withhold information about the features and goals of the project. He engaged in a detailed and extended discussion about how it would work and what it was attempting to accomplish before it was launched.

6. No changes were made as satoshi made it clear that to have legitimacy as a decentralized system, the parameters needed to be "set in stone"

One more thing to add. The part of this that is (probably) fraudulent is not that Evan got a lot of coins, its that it was held out (and in many ways continues to be held out) as a public open distribution process, when in reality what happened was in effect more of a premine (see items above esp. #6), and I believe at this point that was very likely the intent. If he had forthrightly presented it as a premined coin, one might think that was a bad idea, but there would be no claim of fraud, at least not by me. I've never claimed that an openly premined coin was a fraud.

I see you took a break moderating your shitty mooning topic "Monero speculation".

Hope you're enjoying this, it must be hard for you to remove every comment you don't like

[smooth]

Hope you're enjoying this, it must be hard for you to remove every comment you don't like

Just so you know, zero comments on this topic have been removed from the Monero Speculation thread (forum mods are welcome to confirm), and in fact very few posts have been removed ever; every single one has been noted with a moderator comment. I strive for 100% transparency and open debate. Thank you for asking.

BTW, the decision not to moderate this thread was deliberate. Opposing views welcome (and expected).

[bitwho]

But why an other one of this topic?

i guess this is broken down better and pin points the many times discussed topic.

also it would be nice if you could link up some of the sources or post that could speculate them

[smooth]

also it would be nice if you could link up some of the sources or post that could speculate them

Yes good point I will work on that. There is nothing on my post that is speculation except what I label as such afaik.

[smooth]

Some of us who follow DRK closely know who the DRK whales are / were and we know their stories. Personally I've talked with most of them (or if I haven't, I've read their stories). I know how they got their DRKs and this pretty much narrows down what Evan has. It's not two million and it's not one million either. If my assessment is correct it should be closer to 300k coins - some of which he probably bought for 0.25btc/10k DRK. I believe he must have suffered serious losses with the Mintpal "confiscation" and consequent dumping at market prices.

I was also there while wave, after wave, after wave of dumping was happening every day at Cryptsy near the 0.0012-0.0016 range. Every day the same bitching "ohhh the dumping". We're talking quantities that were multiple the daily production. How can the instamine be ...intact if all this dumping had occurred? But now we are >10x that price with 0.017, so, in retrospect, it was very cheap distribution.

Same with thousands of coins during the first exchange days. Quite a big volume in DRKs (not so much in BTCs) at insanely low prices (0.000020-0.000080 then 0.000180, then 0.000500, then it got to 0.002 before the c-cex hack of 330 btc which brought huge reshuffling in the market). Hacker bought DRKs up to 0.008, moved them to the poloniex and was selling/dumping them for 0.0008-0.0012... again, significant re-distribution of coins.

Then you have the May pump... you have coins that you have acquired at 0.000025 up to 0.001x and the price goes 0.028 by the massive whale, which IMO was probably a stolen-BTCs-whale playing with various altcoins and having DRK as his "pet"... so at that point, the market took over the redistribution.

The problem is, as I explained above, this is all conjecture. It certainly could be true, and it could also be false. There is simply no way to ever know, so the present this as fact in the DRK FAQ or here is misleading, ultimately overstating the facts, and therefore fraudulent.

I don't even think the distribution necessarily matters as long as the same people are in charge. They are personally accountable for what happened under their watch, even if (it is a big if because I don't necessarily believe it) "the coins have been redistributed."

With a clean break, new leadership, etc. maybe. Otherwise all this talk about "redistribution" is just smoke and mirrors to obfuscate and minimize the scam (and it therefore becomes part of an ongoing scam)

It already had a failed launch and relaunch. Twice might be perceived as a joke.

That doesn't explain the ambush launch when he promised to test more (which it clearly needed) and then launch in a few days. Actual launch: with bugs, three hours later

Again, there are possible innocent explanations for all of this, but you really have to ask yourself whether it is more likely all these "good reasons" or "mistakes" or "misjudgments" that just happened to benefit the instaminers might have not been just a crazy coincidence after all. To me there is enough of a question here to raise serious alarms.

DRK's instamine today is worth 34.000 BTC. That's its current market value. That's not even a week of solomining BTC with 7200BTC/day. And yet DRK wasn't solo'ed,

The whole equivalence with Bitcoin is absurd for so many reasons, some of which I've already covered, but just factually Evan was solo mining DRK in the first hour. There was no pool mining at all, everyone mining (though it seems likely it was pretty much just him and maybe a few friends) was solo mining. Within minutes he offered someone 5000 DRK to compile it for Windows.

[AlexGR]

You are missing the point.

Quote: "If you see fraud and don't shout fraud, you are a fraud"
  -- Nassim Taleb (author or Black Swan and Anti-fragility; credit to opennux for the quote).

I think there is a large color spectrum that involves "fraud" and "illegitimacy".

The classic form of scam/fraud is a scheme were people put their money and then lose it.

Does DRK have these characteristics? Are people losing money here? Or have they multiplied their bitcoins 10-100-1000x depending their point of entry?

Year to year performance (and March 23 of 2014 was over two months after the launch of Darkcoin) is something like 12-14x. Month-to-month is also exceptional (1.7x)

First of all, on the matter of redistribution:

You don't know 90% of what happens in the markets. You can say "coins traded at such a price" but you don't know who was on each side of that trade.

Some times, you do.

Now I agree it is certainly fair to say that the coins might have been redistributed or could have been redistributed. I would not object to that at all. But to present this as fact is unsupportable and effectively fraudulent.

I've addressed the distribution part on the reply to Joshuar which I'll repeat here:

---
Some of us who follow DRK closely know who the DRK whales are / were and we know their stories. Personally I've talked with most of them (or if I haven't, I've read their stories). I know how they got their DRKs and this pretty much narrows down what Evan has. It's not two million and it's not one million either. If my assessment is correct it should be closer to 300k coins - some of which he probably bought for 0.25btc/10k DRK. I believe he must have suffered serious losses with the Mintpal "confiscation" and consequent dumping at market prices.

I was also there while wave, after wave, after wave of dumping was happening every day at Cryptsy near the 0.0012-0.0016 range. Every day the same bitching "ohhh the dumping". We're talking quantities that were multiple the daily production. How can the instamine be ...intact if all this dumping had occurred? But now we are >10x that price with 0.017, so, in retrospect, it was very cheap distribution.

Same with thousands of coins during the first exchange days. Quite a big volume in DRKs (not so much in BTCs) at insanely low prices (0.000020-0.000080 then 0.000180, then 0.000500, then it got to 0.002 before the c-cex hack of 330 btc which brought huge reshuffling in the market). Hacker bought DRKs up to 0.008, moved them to the poloniex and was selling/dumping them for 0.0008-0.0012... again, significant re-distribution of coins.

Then you have the May pump... you have coins that you have acquired at 0.000025 up to 0.001x and the price goes 0.028 by the massive whale, which IMO was probably a stolen-BTCs-whale playing with various altcoins and having DRK as his "pet"... so at that point, the market took over the redistribution.
---

Second why is the instamine described as happening over 48 hours when in fact:

The "48 hours" is the usual trolling floating around.

1. Within the very first hour over 500,000 coins were mined

2. Within 8 hours over 1.5 million coins were mind, which is most of the instamine.

On the matter of the instamine itself, you are ignoring a whole host of extremely shady practices that surrounded it.

3. That Evan misled people into thinking that the launch would not happen for days (and specifically not in hours), then it happened in a few hours. Considering the 500K number in the first item above, the effect of this "ambush" was enormous.

The effect is not "enormous". It is as much as the market decides it is.

You can make Smoothcoin and you can mine it to 100% of coin supply (and there are PoS coins out there that were 100% premined and distributed) but it will not be worth anything until you somehow give it value, and people value it. The scam-way to do that is with promising the world, pumping, then dumping on the new owners without delivering anything. It's a win-lose scenario that tens of scamcoins have followed. The scammer / dumper wins at the expense of the naive buyer.

The DRK scenario is a win-win for developer and DRK-owners. Developer has a vested interest in assigning value to the coin he initially made as a worthless coin, and after working and working on it for months and years, and expanding its feature set and adoption, price rises and all participants gain.

Personally I dislike Evan's tactic* on how he went about it, but on the other hand, I have to be a realist on the aspect of fairness. How would it be "fair" if everyone mining Darkcoin became 10-100-1000x richer and Evan, who made it all happen for them, was doing it as a ...hobby, getting peanuts? Likewise, how would it be "fair" if BTC whales and hackers and scammers, had more Bitcoins than Satoshi who actually invented Bitcoin?

* Although I also have to point out that Evan offered an airdrop of a couple million extra coins, I think it was 2-3 months later. It was voted down by the community. People had already seen too much dumping happening and the consensus was that initial distribution was not an issue. But diluting the coin supply would be a greater issue (lose-lose for most parties involved).

4. The stated reason for delaying the launch for days was to do more testing and fix bugs. Yet when the coin was lunched it still had a "major problem." Why was the rushed ambush launch done in this manner, at a time that corresponded to late night in the US and very early morning in Europe?

I cannot answer this for Evan, but IT people do tend to have strange hours. BTW, even fork decisions have been questioned for the days they were introduced by Evan.

Btw, I've also seen the opposite argument for fairness, which is like this: "If we launched at a predetermined hour, instead of doing a ninja-launch, then all the cpu farms would flood the coin at that instant, with PC users getting nothing - so it's fairer to the average miner".

5. Evan withheld information about the purpose, features, and goals of he coin development until after the instamine was complete. It was absolutely impossible for you to have any reason to mine this coin unless your strategy was to mine 100% of new coins that were launched, you just happened to stumble into it, you were friends with Evan, or you were Evan. In effect it turns the instamine into a premine, because the coins were mined before the coin was properly announced.

You are pretty off here.

1) There was enormous incentive to mine it due to being a cpu-mining only coin suitable to cpu farms and desktops that desire more profitable coins to mine compared to GPU-saturated algorithms. Just the fact of having a different algo (x11) was in itself a serious "magnet" of interest, even without knowing the upcoming feature set. The reason is that there was serious saturation of GPU algorithms and CPU raping by botnets and server instances (for other cpu coins).

2) The announcement of the future directions did not change the price. 10k DRKs still cost 0.25btc to buy. Actually when it hit the ccex echange in early february there were even lower prices (0.000020btc/DRK). So, objectively speaking, did the revelation of Evan's vision for what DRK will some day become, change the price or the desirability? And even if Evan had announced his vision, along with the launch, at the times you mention (late-US / early-EU times),  wouldn't you still hold it against him as it would be "irrelevant"?

6. Various changes have been made to rewards, etc. multiple times., always in the direction of reducing/restricting/locking up supply, to the benefit of existing holders. The latest version of this is masternode payments, which look very much like a HYIP.

Now it is possible all of this was an accident. If so, you are asking us to believe in a string of extraordinary coincidences all apparently (by sheer luck) benefiting the same party or parties.

If it is not an accident then it is evidence of deliberate fraud on the part of the person or persons still involve with running the project.

The changes have been made, indeed, but if it is of benefit to existing holders, it is also of benefit to a buyer that decides to buy NOW. If a deflationary change is made that preserves one's wealth better, or an economic incentive is placed that will increase value in the long term, why would a buyer that buys NOW, not get the same benefit that the current holder has? They will gain equally.

Ensuring that the coin does good is also ensuring the interests of the participants. This does not constitute a fraud / scam. You can argue that future buyers will buy at an increased price, but they will still buy because of that specific feature set that will give them even greater price at a later point of time.

On the other hand, if, say, you tuned a coin to be more inflationary (with current holders losing), this is also something that will impact current and future buyers 6 months from now. They will be thinking "why buy this over-inflationary coin if it can't preserve my BTCs?".

As for the satoshi comparison, it's fairly absurd. Let's review (using the numbers above):

1. The rate of Bitcoin mining followed the published schedule. There were no extra coins mined at the beginning (in fact I think some of the early blocks were quite slow). It took 2-3 months to mine 500K coins, not one hour

2. It took the better part of a year to mine 1.5 million BTC, not 8 hours.

Yes, but it only took 1 block to get 50 BTCs and less than a week to get 34.000 BTCs (the entire worth of DRK's instamine right now).

If DRK is a scam, the scam has an economic value. Say you are a reporter and you have to make an article on how big a scam DRK is. You'll either use Jan 2014 valuation of the 2mn DRKs, or current valuation of the 2mn DRKs.

The 2 prices you will come up is 50 BTCs (0.000025 x 2mn coins) or 34.000 BTCs (0.017 x 2mn coins).

And, again, 50 BTC was just the initial block of Bitcoin and 34.000 BTCs are like what? 4 days of solo-mining it?

4. There were indeed bugs in the code, and some mined coins were even lost to fix them, but none of this involved a "major problem" right after launch when an enormous number of coins were mined.

Problems at launch happen with a lot of altcoins. IIRC even LTC has an instamine issue due to problems with the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DRK was forked by LTC btw).

5. satoshi did not withhold information about the features and goals of the project. He engaged in a detailed and extended discussion about how it would work and what it was attempting to accomplish before it was launched.

Yes, but the concept was too alien at the time for people to relate, resulting in a solo-mine. Now, if we are negatively biased toward Satoshi we could say that the solo-mine is "evidence" that he didn't really try to market it well enough, on purpose, so that he could solo-mine his coin and then retroactively call him the 300mn dollar scammer or something, using today's valuation for his then worthless coins.

If you really look hard, you can find a negative spin for everything.

6. No changes were made as satoshi made it clear that to have legitimacy as a decentralized system, the parameters needed to be "set in stone"

That's were DRK's DNA is different, in that it is not a fixed coin. It's like a development platform with new features added. For example there were no DarkSend or masternodes to begin with to get masternode payments. And DRK is also responsive to economic circumstances. What good would it be if it had top notch tech and died due to inflation?

Unlike Bitcoin which has the 5-6 year advantage, the steady inflationary curve doesn't work for altcoins that start now. If I launch today and know that tomorrow the coins will double and in four days they will double again, why would I want to ...hold? You have to apply new economic strategies that work for the new field (altcoins) and ensure that people get the most for their money.

One more thing to add. The part of this that is (probably) fraudulent is not that Evan got a lot of coins, its that it was held out (and in many ways continues to be held out) as a public open distribution process, when in reality what happened was in effect more of a premine (see items above esp. #6), and I believe at this point that was very likely the intent. If he had forthrightly presented it as a premined coin, one might think that was a bad idea, but there would be no claim of fraud, at least not by me. I've never claimed that an openly premined coin was a fraud.

The problem was publicly admitted and remember that he offered an airdrop solution that was voted down from the community. Evan knew that the instamine issue will be brought up again and again and that's why he wanted it solved. It's not his fault that people voted down the airdrop. At that point Evan's responsibility and blame ends, and it becomes a community responsibility. And the community had its reasons to say no.

As for the "fraud", remember what I said earlier. If people are getting massive ROI, they aren't really "scammed". A quote that brings a smile to my face is some forum members who were writing (as they watched their DRK worth multiply) "Evan scam us some more"...  

[AlexGR]

That doesn't explain the ambush launch when he promised to test more (which it clearly needed) and then launch in a few days. Actual launch: with bugs, three hours later

Evan's modus operandi is like that. He can have 5 versions of the wallet out in the same day, with >1 being ...a mandatory update.

There are other cases where decisions were announced they would go one way and then were rushed to other directions, with fast patches that did something else. Not in the launch period, but during June-August, forks, etc. One day the solution would be this, the next hour it would be something else. Evan is getting "excited" pretty easily with coding and some times the ideas he comes up with to fix things in a hurried way are not always the best. That's just the way he is - and you'd know it if you followed DRK's evolution (which I have).

The whole equivalence with Bitcoin is absurd for so many reasons, some of which I've already covered, but just factually Evan was solo mining DRK in the first hour. There was no pool mining at all, everyone mining (though it seems likely it was pretty much just him and maybe a few friends) was solo mining. Within minutes he offered someone 5000 DRK to compile it for Windows.

The equivalence is in terms of economic impact.

What's the size of the scam we are talking about?

50 btc? Or 34.000 btc?

50 btc = first bitcoin block
34.000 btc = first few days of solomining bitcoin (which probably ended up with >1mn coins)

And then there is the question: Who lost these 50 or 34.000 btcs exactly? Who is the victim of this scam?

[GingerAle]

thank you guys for taking this off-line.  (as in, out of a general cryptocurrency thread).

For me, ultimately, the instamine (and many other aspects of darkcoin) hinted at financial incentive. And sure, you can present the whole "well people should be rewarded for their work" yeah, but that shouldn't be the main motivating factor. From what I can tell, the original bitcoin developers made bitcoin because they thought it would be fascinating. Not because it would make them rich.

So for me, instamine + masternodes were enough for me to ignore darkcoin.

And, to some extent, I think people are just different. Some people are going to look at these aspects (instamine) of the coin and go "yeah, so what".

you can lead a horse to water.

[Joshuar]

When you think about it, it's impossible to justify the instamine with the statement that it gives "incentive to developer". Yea, that's awesome for the developer, but basically ruins the point of crypocurrencies in the first place where you're not supposed to have things like that happening. It's outright dishonest. It's basically the block reward and max coin supply being sliced and diced that ruins it, that made what turned out as just a high output of coins into a outright dishonest instamine.

June 17, 2010: 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 Nakamoto

[AlexGR]

When you think about it, it's impossible to justify the instamine with the statement that it gives "incentive to developer". Yea, that's awesome for the developer, but basically ruins the point of crypocurrencies in the first place where you're not supposed to have things like that happening. It's outright dishonest.

Yet Satoshi has 300mn worth in bitcoins.

[smooth]

That doesn't explain the ambush launch when he promised to test more (which it clearly needed) and then launch in a few days. Actual launch: with bugs, three hours later

Evan's modus operandi is like that. He can have 5 versions of the wallet out in the same day, with >1 being ...a mandatory update.
There are other cases where decisions were announced they would go one way and then were rushed to other directions, with fast patches that did something else. Not in the launch period, but during June-August, forks, etc. One day the solution would be this, the next hour it would be something else. Evan is getting "excited" pretty easily with coding and some times the ideas he comes up with to fix things in a hurried way are not always the best. That's just the way he is - and you'd know it if you followed DRK's evolution (which I have).

Look people can be unintentional scammers. I've known people like that IRL, having nothing to do with crypto at all. Maybe they don't plot and scheme to deliberately scam, but they're careless with their promises, forget to mention things, and somehow, someway, everything always ends up being a "mistake" in their favor (almost never the other way). In general you learn to recognize the difference between these people and ones who are merely spontaneous and a bit scatterbrained, and just not to deal with the former people (I happen to adore the latter, however), or at least I have learned that.

Look we're playing with millions of dollars here and ultimately people are very likely to lose money (because all alts are very likely to go to zero objectively speaking). If it happens because they took a risk and lost, that's all fair and I have no issue with it. But if it happens because someone is lying to them, or is the type of person who maybe isn't deliberately lying but has a problem with ethics or candor or honoring his own promises, then I'm going to speak up about it.

And then there is the question: Who lost these 50 or 34.000 btcs exactly? Who is the victim of this scam?

If you want one specific victim (and that's all that's really needed in most criminal fraud cases), it could be the miner Evan told to go sleep because it "definitely" wouldn't be launched for a few days. So he foolishly believed Evan and by the time that guy woke up a million coins or so had already been mined!

But the more significant victims are people who do not realize the kind of slippery and profiteering character they are dealing with, and decide to invest in a scheme that somehow, some way, may well end up with a "mistake" or an "accident" where Evan has money in his pocket and others don't.

I'm going to speak up about that possibility, because I think he evidence suggests it is quite likely.

[Joshuar]

When you think about it, it's impossible to justify the instamine with the statement that it gives "incentive to developer". Yea, that's awesome for the developer, but basically ruins the point of crypocurrencies in the first place where you're not supposed to have things like that happening. It's outright dishonest.

Yet Satoshi has 300mn worth in bitcoins.

He didnt change Bitcoins block reward or coin supply at all like what happened to darkcoin. So he mined those bitcoins fairly. Also bitcoin is the first cryptocoin and kind of immune from that, even if you consider Satoshi mining bitcoin a mistake, you shouldve learned from that mistake, not do the same thing and make it 10x worse.

[AlexGR]

When you think about it, it's impossible to justify the instamine with the statement that it gives "incentive to developer". Yea, that's awesome for the developer, but basically ruins the point of crypocurrencies in the first place where you're not supposed to have things like that happening. It's outright dishonest.

Yet Satoshi has 300mn worth in bitcoins.

He didnt change Bitcoins block reward or coin supply at all like what happened to darkcoin. So he mined those bitcoins fairly. Also bitcoin is the first cryptocoin and kind of immune from that, even if you consider Satoshi mining bitcoin a mistake, you shouldve learned from that mistake, not do the same thing and make it 10x worse.

How can it be 10x worse, when Satoshi's coins alone are worth 10x the entire DRK marketcap? Anyway.

[smooth]

In addition to what Joshuar said above, the situation was completely and utterly different. There were no crypto exchanges, the coins satoshi was mining had no realistic short or even intermediate term prospects for being monetized. He made all of his plans public before launch. The launch was scheduled well ahead of time. The code actually worked properly for other people during the period the coins were being mined. None of these things were true for DRK.

Once crypto turned into a money game the rules change completely. Fair that satoshi mined a lot? Maybe not, but he didn't mislead, rely on "mistakes","accidents", or selective disclosure to get a leap in a crowded and competitive altcoin market (there was no market). He just took a leap of faith and it paid off.

The only real similarity is that satoshi and Evan both made money from mining. Other than that, 100% is different.

EDIT: AlexGR the way it can be 10x worse as that we aren't measuring the ethics or propriety of what happened based on the number of BTC/dollars/whatever that were made. They are judged based on the actions of the actors and the situations they are in, which were completely different.

[Joshuar]

When you think about it, it's impossible to justify the instamine with the statement that it gives "incentive to developer". Yea, that's awesome for the developer, but basically ruins the point of crypocurrencies in the first place where you're not supposed to have things like that happening. It's outright dishonest.

Yet Satoshi has 300mn worth in bitcoins.

He didnt change Bitcoins block reward or coin supply at all like what happened to darkcoin. So he mined those bitcoins fairly. Also bitcoin is the first cryptocoin and kind of immune from that, even if you consider Satoshi mining bitcoin a mistake, you shouldve learned from that mistake, not do the same thing and make it 10x worse.

How can it be 10x worse, when Satoshi's coins alone are worth 10x the entire DRK marketcap? Anyway.

? I'm not talking about prices of the coins, Marketcap is irrelevant in this discussion.

[AlexGR]

If you want one specific victim (and that's all that's really needed in most criminal fraud cases), it could be the miner Evan told to go sleep because it "definitely" wouldn't be launched for a few days. So he foolishly believed Evan and by the time that guy woke up a million coins or so had already been mined!

It's not money that he actually lost, unlike real scamcoins where they say "buy into this ICO/IPO" and then ...pooof. Your money is gone.

And even if that specific "victim" was mining and lost half a million coins (supposing he solomined that half a million - which would be impossible if the announcement was spread wide, so he'd definitely get a very thin slice with many miners), that would be ...12.5btc worth with the prices of then....

Or should he ask for compensating losses for future profits? And if he asks for future profits, implying he expected the rise, why didn't he buy when it was 0.000025btc/DRK to gain 1100x profits? All sorts of questions can be raised.

But the more significant victims are people who do not realize the kind of slippery and profiteering character they are dealing with, and decide to invest in a scheme that somehow, some way, may well end up with a "mistake" or an "accident" where Evan has money in his pocket and others don't.

Well that's quite vague, isn't it... "Somehow", "some way"... well... with somehows and some ways, some BTC people are already at 20% of their initial investment. Some LTC people are even worse in this regard. And I haven't even mentioned the dozens of actual scamcoins with "total loss" status for investors, or the dozens of 100% instamined PoW/PoS coins (with very expensive initial distribution through the market that led to huge economic losses in most cases).

[AlexGR]

In addition to what Joshuar said above, the situation was completely and utterly different. There were no crypto exchanges, the coins satoshi was mining had no realistic short or even intermediate term prospects for being monetized. He made all of his plans public before launch. The launch was scheduled well ahead of time. The code actually worked properly for other people during the period the coins were being mined. None of these things were true for DRK.

Once crypto turned into a money game the rules change completely. Fair that satoshi mined a lot? Maybe not, but he didn't mislead, rely on "mistakes","accidents", or selective disclosure to get a leap in a crowded and competitive altcoin market (there was no market). He just took a leap of faith and it paid off.

The only real similarity is that satoshi and Evan both made money from mining. Other than that, 100% is different.

EDIT: AlexGR the way it can be 10x worse as that we aren't measuring the ethics or propriety of what happened based on the number of BTC/dollars/whatever that were made. They are judged based on the actions of the actors and the situations they are in, which were completely different.

Well... Evan offered to airdrop millions of new coins to fix the distribution. The community almost lynched him at the idea.

-If he didn't propose it: He would be truly unethical for not wanting to fix the issue
-If he went ahead and airdropped coins regardless of what the community said: "He would be the dictator"
-He listened to the community and didn't airdrop new coins: "He is still a scammer..." Why? Because he should have invented time travel to go back in time and re-perform the launch as the only acceptable solution.

It's an impossible argument to win.

[nsimmons]

Jesus Christ, go do some work DEV! You sound like a whiny teenage bitch.

Are you threatened? Do you see Evan in here slumming?

[smooth]

Well... Evan offered to airdrop millions of new coins to fix the distribution. The community almost lynched him at the idea.

So again, we have a situation where it "wasn't his fault" but somehow the coins ended up staying in his pocket?

Don't you find that a tad bit convenient?

Question: Why did he ask the community about this? They were his coins, right, don't you think he could have just given them away if that's what he wanted to do?

It's an impossible argument to win.

This is the problem with forums in a way. Everything turns into an argument one way or another is supposed to "win."

Sometimes when you screw up (deliberately or otherwise), there is now way to unscramble that egg, and you just live with. He fucked up the launch, deliberately or accidentally, I can't which at this point, but you know I'm skeptical of the convenient-series-of-cosmic-accidents story. There doesn't necessarily have to be a way to fix that, aside from simply recognizing that it is a crooked instamiened/premined scam coin and moving on. It's not like there is some shortage of other coins to choose from.

I know, I know, you probably like DRK and all that. Evan seems like a friendly likable guy, and that's part of it (nearly universally true of scammers btw), but get real, DRK not a puppy or sports team, its a crypto coin in a nasty, ugly world filled with scoundrels, scammers, and whales waiting to dump their bag on your ass. A little detachment is helpful.