In fact more than cringe, I start thinking "forget it, if that's the main driver of Darkcoin, count me out".
Completely fungible money is a unversal right for everyone which should never be taken away. You should be very proud of the fact that you are actively contributing in a community that is gifting something to the world which will benefit 100% of society by improving productivity. 100% is one-hundred-percent, good and bad. What they choose to do with it is up to them. If you can decide WHO uses it and for WHAT, then you are back to square one with an opportunity for centralized authoritarian control, social engineering, and worse.
let me ask you this: If Darkcoin's unversal fungibility spurs economic growth that eventually amounts to us becoming a space-faring race with 25 colonized planets and 500 billion humans, but the same 10~15% of that population uses drugs or does nefarious things, is that still unacceptable to you?
What I'm wanting us to be consciously aware of is that if people post on these forums along the lines of "Yeah, cool.....it's Silk Road Relaunched and SR version 3, 4 and 5 where we're gonna shine....once the dark markets get hold of DRK this thing's going to the moon!" it will eventually be picked up by someone on FOX or CBS or NBC as their pet "exposing the drug financiers" feature series and a ridiculous leap of ignorance will result in some outlandish mainstream reports tarnishing us with a brush of untruthful notions such as "Apparently they built this anonymity specifically for the drug market..." The result will be all of us will end up under enormous scrutiny. Evan will be hit from all angles and pilloried as "the drug coin crypto king" and all manner of "PR crisis" style attack activity will eventuate (this may sound alarmist but I can clearly see it happening).
So when I said about "I'm standing by for a barrage of libertarian rhetoric" what I'm talking about is the "libertarian purest" style of argument that happens again and again on forums like this (which I'm not suggesting for a moment you're engaged in) that upholds valid points about the technology and "freedom" but forgets about the practicalities of finding a measured pathway through all of this that offers the least amount of compromise while ensuring we don't get hammered and "taken-out" before we've had the chance for the mainstream to even be introduced to the notions of "privacy as a right" and fungability being probably the most important attribute of sound money. I'm wanting us (and Evan and the Darkcoin Foundation need to weigh in on this to establish a modus operandi of sorts) to all think about how, as a community we can prevent the fanboy excitement from seeping out everywhere if DRK gets picked up by the dark markets in a big way and how we can stay "on message" as to what's really important about DRK's anonymous attributes and why they're fundamentally good for all.
There's a battle looming and we need to be savvy and very aware of how all the good that's been done here will get twisted and abused in an attempt to sully the good names and reputations of the very fine people involved. It's going to require commitment to a series of clarifying messages to help keep us from being seen as the facilitator of an even worse drug market than what already existed via the original SR and an avoidance of constant suggestions of things being "really great" because we're being adopted by dark markets.
Great discussion.
I've been often accused by my friends as someone who sees the world in black and white terms, neglecting all the shades of gray in between, but the big picture to me seems to be crystal clear as black and white indeed. We are the Overlords' enemies. If one would read / listen one of the rare renegades from their world, Gore Vidal, one will have gotten the scope of "their" sheer hatred for the "common man".
After all, this is why "they" kill all over the world and send "our heroes" to kill and die for their profit. But this is an old adagio about the psychopaths on power; so you are either "with me our against me" regarding that notion. What I truly believe in is that "they" would kill Jesus H. Christ should he dared to return and, say, run for the U.S. president, because peace, freedom, privacy, democracy, all that bullshit the people all over the world had been dying for for ages means nothing to them - everything we do, including posting in some forum, is an act of an "enemy", us, their enslaved citizenry whose ONLY purpose is to serve as consumers of their shit and cannon fodder for their wars.
So, Darkcoin - in its core, a cryptographic protocol and as an asset it is also our property. And "they" are known for having gazillion ways to take away our properties (through inflation or confiscation, for example) as well as our freedoms. We have foundations to defend ourselves in the very Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), a declaration adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot, Paris that, in its Aritcle 17. Proclaims:
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
Herein lies our defense, not in our paranoia or real, founded fear from "them" and their future actions.
Darkcoin - and what it represents - should, IMHO, exist in a parallel world we are creating, along the side of "their" fiat, "their" media etc., and if it would offer a better solution, the people will accept it. If not, it is doomed. But as much as a private, "organic" farm can live in the middle of nowhere, unmolested by Monsanto, the Darkcoin might end up living in its own niche, among us who'd in what might not be such a distant future, exchange it for our good, services etc.
We will co-exist, in these two worlds, peacefully I hope. And if the police has right to compound a car used for drug dealing it would have the same right to seize Darkcoins used for the same purpose. But, they will not close the Ford Corporation down, so they should not be able to close The Darkcoin Foundation, or to go all over the world to seize 2100 ++ Masternodes because some criminal had used its asset.
Our message should be clear, granted, but if some "funboys" as you call them hopes to get a financial boost out of their DRK investments, why would we worry about it too much? The Darkcoin inventor and The Darkcoin Foundations (I am a proud member of it) have clearly stated the Darkcoin is NOT meant for the illegal purposes and no one of us would be supporting any illegal use of it. But if someone wants to fight to legalize drugs and pays for the promotion with Darkcoins, it is their right as much it is their right to use the U.S. dollar, BTC, DRK or an used Vespa to buy (illegally) their own drugs.
None of my business.
Come to testnet and help us out, goto your roaming folder (for windows) and make a text file called darkcoin.txt and put the flag testnet=1 inside, and then rename with extension to darkcoin.conf and paste into the (hidden) darkcoin roaming folder . A new folder called testnet3 is created as a subfolder. Now run your normal latest test darkcoin-qt.exe version of the wallet downloadable from here currently (with instantX unshaded!)