This is a monumental step in getting Darkcoin accepted into the bitcoin community as the de facto standard for anonymity. This puts DRK on a level playing field with BTC and states that Darkcoin provides something Bitcoin cannot.
Plus thinking further ahead, this will open Wall Street's eyes to Darkcoin after Bitcoin has it's ridiculously successful ETF and everyone will be going 'I need to diversify the cryptocurrency portion of my portfolio...what other legitimate coins can we bring to market?'
Re: Bitfinex
I'm re-posting this from a couple days ago and adding this additional part below...
What does Bitfinex, Bitcoin's future ETF(s) and GLD have to do with Darkcoin? Legitimacy.
Bitfinex allows you to short Bitcoin and Litecoin, as well as buy them on margin (as well as a bunch of more sophisticated products). Here's a good primer on shorting and margin-trading though:
http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/marginaccountshortsell.asp Basically, if you want to short or margin-buy Bitcoin or Litecoin from Bitfinex you are borrowing coins or money from Bitfinex. Bitfinex lends out coins/money because they have a business interest in making a market. And since they have a business interest, Bitfinex isn't going to add every scamcoin under the sun to their exchange (like Cryptsy/MintPal have done) because 99% of those scamcoins would be dominated by short-sellers and margin-calls. In other words, there would be many fools that would buy the scamcoins on margin and they would more than likely would get margin-called left and right and eventually crushed by plummeting prices. I, personally, would short every single coin outside of DRK on MintPal if they allowed shorting. Bitfinex knows this and they know that 1)they would be on the line for these fools' margin buys and 2)there would be no markets because everyone would be trying to short.
So Bitfinex opening up Darkcoin markets is Bitfinex saying "we see Darkcoin as legitimate and are willing to take on major business risk tied to Darkcoin because we believe there is an actual market there."
I believe Secondmarket's (and maybe the Winklevoss twins') Bitcoin ETF's will be huge. And by huge, I mean the price of Bitcoin will likely run-up hugely beforehand and I'm guessing the Bitcoin ETF will likely skyrocket. Overall I think last fall's Bitcoin rally will look like a blip on the charts due to the ETF.
Why? Because Wall Street institutions, mutual funds, investment advisers, large traders and small traders
want to buy Bitcoin
legitimately and easily . Very few on Wall Street, myself included, had the cojones to wire money to Mt. Gox 2 years ago because it was shady as f*ck, and none of us knew how to mine BTC. So we all watched Bitcoin explode in value and we've been kicking ourselves for it ever since.
The result though is there is now ridiculous demand for anything related to getting Bitcoin easily.
Same thing happened with the offering of GLD in 2005 (
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GLD&t=my&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=). There was huge demand to buy gold easily. And, outside of buying gold futures, it was nearly impossible to get 100% exposure to the gold market. So GLD came along and at it's max in 2011, the thing held $80 billion worth of gold. Just about every investor on Wall Street wanted to diversify into it. GLD, however, was/is only a market risk diversification tool / value-storing tool. It doesn't have the actual usefulness that Bitcoin and crypto-currencies do. In other words, you cannot buy a pizza for gold like you can with cryptocurrencies. Hence, I think a Bitcoin ETF will be huger than GLD was at it's peak.
Tying this back to Darkcoin... immediately after the Bitcoin ETF's likely successful launch, every major Wall Street bank is going to want to create their own products around Bitcoin and other crypto's. The GLD ETF launch immediately saw the launch of dozens of other gold-related, silver-related and metals-related ETF's. Wall Street is going to research the shit out of other crypto's following Bitcoin ETF's launch. They will quickly see that 99.9% of them are either scamcoins or have no real added benefits above and beyond Bitcoin. They will also see what crypto's are on what exchanges and obviously they'll discover that MintPal/Cryptsy/Poloniex have many coins but are not truly legitimate exchanges due to their markets being long-only/one-sided markets (no ability to short). So they will give more weight to coins which have thrived under the pressure of true market conditions, similar to the stock market, where traders can go long or short the coin and use margin, similar to Bitfinex. The fact that Bitfinex may also allow Dark swaps and volatility products will be icing on the cake.
Anyhow, sorry to ramble on...
But this is a monumental step.JL
Allowing pension funds to trade bitcoin and other alts is a real game changer. They don't do $100 here or there, they do $10m to $100m here or there.
If you have a master nodes worth of DRK, you could be looking at $50,000 to $100,000 worth of value in each node come 2015.