I want to clear up some facts which I'm seeing propagated around this community about the CoinJoin trustless mixing used in Dark Wallet.
Dark Wallet coinjoin goes through a server, but the server cannot see any details of your transaction nor can they steal your coins. All details are encrypted for the counterparty, and all signing happens in the client.
The only weakness here is that a server gets taken down stopping the service in which case you switch to another service. Even if the NSA controlled the server, they wouldn't be able to steal your coins or observe your transaction at all.
Lastly the server is sharing messages with other servers (we are improving this too), so it isn't really centralised. It is federated kind of like how different email providers inter-operate with each other. The decentralised aspect will only improve over time as we develop standards and deploy technology.
More info:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6526623DW dev
It is centralized or it is not. Like being pregnant. You cannot be a little bit pregnant. Dark Wallet, although I believe it can be a great tool, is still centralized. You have to trust a 3rd party somehow. DarkCoin is decentralized.
Well, I don't know .... I mean, if I had twins or triplets, I think I'd start seeing singles as being a little bit pregos.....
Is this all the techies around here have to say about that? As an investor, I`d like to know more about it (true, not true, partially true etc), because it adresses the supposed "unique selling proposition" of Darkcoin.
Dark Wallet’s developers admit it’s still at an early stage, and that, like any cryptography project, it will only prove itself and patch its bugs over time. Taaki says, for instance, that the software will eventually combine more than two users’ payments in every CoinJoin transaction, and also integrate the anonymity software Tor to better protect users’ IP addresses. In its current form, Taaki says Dark Wallet protects IPs only by obscuring them behind the server that negotiates CoinJoin transactions, which may still leave users vulnerable to identification by sophisticated traffic analysis. “It’s not foolproof, but it’s a strong tool,” says Taaki. “And it’s going to get better.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/dark-wallet/The DarkWallet alpha release is our first release, aimed at showing and validating the different features with the community, before we have to settle it as finished and stable.
You can Create an identity in testnet to avoid risking real money with this alpha software.
https://wiki.unsystem.net/index.php/DarkWallet/AlphaIts still a work in progress, it has problems, its using a central routing system (them), it's a browser plugin (might be risky), to get better anonymity you have to do some active work to get stealth addresses - it looks good as a third party service for bitcoin, but its not there yet or proven; which is straight from the horses mouth.
The USP of darkcoin is this: every wallet is set by default to mix transactions so its decentralised from the source. The mixing takes places through distributed master nodes which anyone can set-up provided they pay x DRK to prevent anyone from setting up rouge nodes with very little cost. So the start of the mixing is decentralised and the mixing is decentralised. The blockchain is useless.
As a user you don't have to do much, so the hurdle to participate is downloading a wallet. From then on, you have access to electronic cash.
