Topic: A question about the release of Darkcoin/Dashcoin (Read 4039 times)

The official story about the instamine: https://dashdot.io/alpha/?page_id=118
Evan Duffield:“The instamine happened, there is no one disputing that fact. The crypto-community at large has no problem with this except a few who think it’s trying to be hidden in some way. In fact, I posted multiple times about the instamine, first in “The Birth Of Darkcoin” which is an account of the first few weeks of the launch and the mistakes that were made. Recently I also posted spoke about the Instamine in the video “Virtual Corporation”, which considers the concept that it might have been key to Dash’s success, which I believe now. It’s also important to note, I was working a very challenging day job while working on Dash in the first couple weeks. So I was putting out fires every night, keeping tabs on Dash during the day (while getting yelled at by my boss when he caught me a couple times). Eventually I quit when I got Dash stable enough to work on full time and decided I really wanted to explore what I could do with it. “

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The evidence shows that it was a planned instamine. This wasn't mentioned before launch.
The features of this coin were also not public at launch.
=> Nobody was really interested in the coin at launch, making this instamine more a kind of "stealth launched premine".
In my books, that's a scam.

Please don't ignore the facts:

2013-12-29: 2 guys from Hawk Financial Group, Evan & Kyle, are asking on the Bitcoin Dev mailing list for "1 or 2 really good C++ programmer that is familiar with the bitcoin internals to help with a for-profit startup". They are planning to build a unique coin that is "not just a clone of the original Bitcoin code" but in stead "a merge-mined altcoin that will provide a very useful service to the whole crypto-coin ecosystem". They claim to have "detailed plans on how to implement it".

2014-01-18 There were some issues at launch, so Evan said he would postpone the launch and would "definitely not" launch it in the next hours. But he did launch it a few hours later.

2014-01-19 Xcoin was launched.
This was the emission in the first 72 hours of the coins existence:

This was the emission of the first 100 days:

At the moment, there are about 6 million DASH in circulation. There would be 84 million Xcoins eventually.
Note that in the first hour, 500k Xcoins were mined. Due to the "quick fix" of the bug, not many people expected to launch a few hours after Evan said he would "definitely not" launch in the next hours.

2014-01-19 Right after the launch, there were problems with the windows binaries. Evan clearly was mining right from the start, as he offered 5000 Xcoin as a bounty for compiling the binaries.

2014-01-20 After the emission of almost 2 million coins, Evan said that "now that everything is stable, I'll be posting later about the vision of this project and milestones!". Up until this point, only the "X11 hashing algoritm" was a known feature. According to him, it was "time to move on to actually implementing what I set out to do".

2014-01-22 Evan releases his plans for XCoin. At this point, more than 2 million coins were mined.

Xcoin rebranded to Darkcoin and eventually to DASH later on.

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Later on, some contradictions surfaced:

* The emission schedule changed multiple times. The latest we heard is that the number of coins would be somewhere between 14 million and like 16 million DASH.
* Evan said that this project was just a hobby he started while working on a full time job and coded Xcoin in a weekend.
* Evan claims there were hundreds of miners if not thousands when Xcoin launched. Recent investigation showed that there were 124 IP addreses that were mining at the start. 115 of those addresses where Cloudhosting and Dedicated Servers, 9 of them seem to be private/users.106 of them were at Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud instances.
 
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Conclusions:
*Evan isn't acting alone, he had/has a team behind him right from the start. It wasn't a hobby. he had a plan to make a profit.
*Evan had plans for his coin right from the start, but didn't release them until after the instamine
*1.5 million coins were mined in the first 8 hours. Most of these coin ended up in his (and his friends) hands. It's very likely the 500k in the first hour were only mined by him with cloudhosting services.
*He lowered the emission later on, to make his relative share of coins bigger.

How can this be all an accident (like Evan is always saying) and NOT be intentional?

FACT:
>Evan was looking for c++ devs for a "for profit startup" at the end of 2013 for the launch of an altcoin.
QUESTION:
>How can you make a profit by launching an altcoin (and be sure to be able to pay your devs)?
ANSWER:
>by intentionally premining and/or instamining.

How he did it is pretty easy:
*telling people the release would definitely not be in the next couple of hours and after that do launch it a few hours later
*buggy windows binaries
*a "code error" creating 500k coins in the first hour, >1.5 million in the first 8 hours.

=> DASH was clearly a planned instamine (and thus a scam)

Doesn't add up.

Many dash proponents appear to think that


Profits > Honesty

let me add why honesty is important to any coin, honesty breeds trust, aside from technical mambo jumbos, trust is a major pillar in crypto currency because it isn't backed by any government, gold, or institution/s.

but that at some point in the future these events might impact negatively on Dash.

That is the reason many people do not touch Dash. Otherwise it could be a successful anonymous coin.

adhitthana is entitled to his own value system. All's fair in love and crypto is somewhat understandable. Even if he does think it was okay to lie about the launch, withhold the development plans until after instamining it, etc., he's being smart in recognizing that not everyone will see it that way, and that affects the prospects going forward.

Are you saying that Evan misleading people to think he would launch later than he actually did is okay?

Meaning he basically lied to people from the launch?

What you want to know? It's dead. Shitcoin 

Doesn't add up.

"I was working with Dash as a hobby"

smooth pointed it out...It was planned all along  


connected



Great indeeeeed $$$$$$$$$$

Evan Duffield eduffield82 at gmail.com
Sun Dec 29 18:53:19 UTC 2013
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Hello,

We’re a startup looking for 1 or 2 really good C++ programmer that is
familiar with the bitcoin internals to help with a for-profit startup.

We will be able to provide more information about the project after signing
a non-compete/non-disclosure agreement. Our coin will be one of the truly
unique coins that are not just a clone of the original Bitcoin code. In
short the project will be a merge-mined altcoin that will provide a very
useful service to the whole crypto-coin ecosystem.

If you have added any features to Bitcoin or related technologies this is a
definite bonus. Please include information about the work you’re done in
the space.

We have detailed plans on how to implement it and the roles we are looking
to fill. If interested please email eduffield82 at gmail.com with a
description of your work experience and we’ll vett the applications and
share our plans to see if you’re interested.

Thanks,

Evan & Kyle
Hawk Financial Group, LLC

Are you saying that Evan misleading people to think he would launch later than he actually did is okay?

Meaning he basically lied to people from the launch?

Just to be clear. If Evan released early so he or others could instamine or just mine early and some people missed out, I don't necessarily think Evan did anything wrong. What I'm concerned about is that it may come up as an issue at some point in the future and negatively impact the project

Obviously it's good for them, but is it good for me?

Why like 99% who talks about Dash are guys from Monero including a developer? (҂⌣̀_⌣́)

I never cared why Monero developers did a shady launch either and somehow the old crew just left and we have a new group who did not do much since Monero came beside bug fixing. (•̀o•́)ง

It just makes you all look like a certified A class haters really; because you are not competing with technology nor innovation...you are really just hating here on forums on the project and Evan himself.

Go fill Monero Ann thread with new updates at least the developers who are like everywhere " one is a gambler, one is hating on forums about another developer, another is in France with some issue....NO SYNC between all of them" None is working on Monero project it seems that is why it's taking you over a year man. Get things done please I already invested on Monero as well but man should I sell while it makes sense to me to just sell now?

Anyway, I came here like a month ago and I already regretting it, can't handle to much hate feels like internet drama here is getting on a personal level. (҂⌣̀_⌣́)

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.

it is only a month but eduffield already have plans for his instamine

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.

If Dash really is flawed and vulnerable, it should be easy to raise the funds to attack it while it is, by all accounts, young. Why wait for a juggernaut to get even larger... if anything, prove the flaws and in theory, crush the desire to hold it. There are countless rehashed arguments about the launch and masternodes and this and that. If you don't like the history, don't buy the coins. If you just heard about the launch (which is impressive given that it's now nearly 2 years old) and are displeased or feel betrayed, sell your coins. It's exhausting hearing the same shit over and over again. Masternodes, IX, blockchain voting, DS, etc all didn't exist for months after the initial launch.

In reply to: http://www.reddit.com/r/DRKCoin/comments/1yit1a/using_coinjoin_for_anonymity_is_errorprone/

I'm posting this here, for everyone's benefit. Thanks!


First off, these are fantastic questions. The answer to implementing this in such a way where it is very difficulty to exploit is by adding cost and verification.

Here’s the gist of how I envision DarkSend to work in the long run. Some of what I’m going to mention is done, some of it I’m working on currently. I’d love some ideas on possible attack vectors on my implementation, so we can make it as bulletproof as possible.

Pools

DarkSend adds various extensions to the Bitcoin protocol for implementing transaction pooling. Like normal Coinjoin the pools take transactions in stages. The stages currently are:

POOL_STATUS_IDLE
POOL_STATUS_ACCEPTING_INPUTS
POOL_STATUS_ACCEPTING_OUTPUTS
POOL_STATUS_SIGNING
POOL_STATUS_TRANSMISSION

So the users relay these items throughout the network as the stages happen. After all items are gathered into the pool, the transactions are merged together into one, remotely signed and then broadcasted.

Masters

To defeat propagation problems, master nodes are elected each new block. They are responsible for being the authority of what goes into the joined transaction each session. This is done in a tamperproof way, but I think it’s not important to the discussion.

So what is the cost?

There must be a cost to using this anonymous network, otherwise like you say there will be issues with millions of accounts popping up. I’m not dead set on which solution(s) to implement, but here’s a couple ideas:

Burnt Identities

Higher difficulty shares to the current block would be mined and then stored in the blockchain permanently. Multiple of these would be used for each transaction and would be “burnt” when misused, causing the attacker to have to mine them again.  

Verification?

To use the pools it will require unique unspend outputs, someone that wants to mess with the system would have to have a large pool of funds in many addresses. So to attack a pool with 100 slots, you would require funds dispersed to 99 addresses, on 99 nodes working in common.

Other possible fee-less solutions?

There is interesting research on protecting against sybil attacks that lends itself really well to a decentralized ledger, such as this paper:

http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/InformationSecurity/slides/gamesandreputation.pdf

The idea is to build a social graph of the inputs and outputs of each entry and they should all know different people. If 99 of them all have the same “friends” that they associate with, then they’ll have to enter a different pool. Which will ensure the pool is not full of the nodes belonging to the attacker.

An application for machine learning?

I’m been making models for trading equities for over 7 years now. I ran a financial firm that sold the signals for a few years and I have experience with natural language processing using classifiers. So, I could make a classifier and actually embed it into Darkcoin to determine which pool a node should use, to separate out nodes that seem to be in common.

Other ideas?

I’m open to ideas on how to provide the best security to the network. I would love to hear what people have in mind.

I’ve been working on DarkSend about a month and we’ve already fixed the decentralization and propagation issues, this is just another bridge to cross in the future.

Thanks!