without encryption, a determined attacker can extract at least partial information from every darksend. Even with encryption you still have to worry about timing attacks and knapsacking attacks. Over time higher and higher probabilities will be obtained. However, this is not something an ordinary person would have to worry about.
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DRK is the coin that provides anonymity for the ordinary people. So you dont have to worry about your neighbors snooping on your finances. So people wont find out about stuff they have no business finding out about!
Anything that can be done manually can also be automated if it doesn't involve too much human judgement. What I mean by that is that if a determined attacker has a way to tell that A went to B after thorough "investigation" into a transaction, you can't be really certain that this is good enough for the average Joe either. It would seem that it is (using the rationale "
ok, who will do this kind of thorough investigation, time after time, for every transaction") but it is not.
As I see it, if the analysis process can be done with a relative degree of confidence, then it's simply a matter of scripting to automate the procedure of understanding one transaction and do it with other transactions. And that will be done without the manual-effort cost concern which would otherwise protect most people, since it will be done automatically.
Once this is done, you'll have the obfuscated blockchain and another site which is running a script and analyzes, in somewhat-realtime (perhaps lagging a few blocks to allow for the mixing to occur), the blockchain transactions for what they really are, rather than their mixing or noise. Imagine the scenario of an alternative block explorer which is de-obfuscating stuff and then assigning a probability percentage for each transaction. If DRK is a smash and it has many transactions, I bet someone will make this kind of "service".
I have to disagree...
The level of anonymity that DRK can achieve, especially if combined with some of my upcoming NXT based services, will require MORE data than is available in the public blockchains.
I'm just throwing ideas around, you can see them more as a thought experiment*, in order to bulletproof the coin.
I am neither a programming expert, nor a cryptography expert and I'm really at a handicap to properly analyze what is going on under the hood. I'm just using algorithmic logic to check whether hints can be assembled to show input/output and pin it down to addresses/individual.
* A coin designer who is more familiar with their coin should ask themselves: If I wanted to track the transactions that go through DarkSend, what would I do? What hints would I use? What automation would I use to sort through all of those hints and make them transparent? If they want to make it NSA-proof like, then they'd have to ask a whole different set of questions, regarding pattern recognition, ip tracking, mass surveillance capabilities etc etc.
Also keep in mind that NXT has no txouts -> txins that creates a lifetime historical chain. That is really the fundamental reason why bitcoin is so transparent.
I think the reason why bitcoin is so transparent is elusive to pretty much everyone in the bitcoin world but I'll give it a go - with a warning attached that what you will read may be near impossible to believe.
Just like the ape evolved to the human by integrating a higher intellect, human will evolve into a new and better species (we are not the end of evolution - we are still evolving). Some say humans will evolve to a techno-organic hybrid (Kurzweil) like Borg but the reality is that humans will integrate their "soul" to become god-humans, making cyborg humans obsolete.
This is "destined" to happen near the end of this century. I say destined because the future is like a gravity center that "pulls" the past to itself (rather than the past building upon itself step-by-step to reach the future - which is how we view it in linear time). At the end (timeline-wise) of that gravity center is the "soul Internet". It is when humans will discover that they are all connected on a soul level where every human soul is a node and that their souls make up an internet, which is what we'd call God.
In order for humans to scientifically discover that internet, there must be some things, like concepts, that they can build upon. The order is something like that: Telegraph => Telephone => Modems => Technological Internet (what we have now) => Mental Internet (where we discover that our minds are interconnected) => Soul Internet (where we discover that our souls are interconnected).
For example, you have the telegraph and you say I discovered the phone,
which is like the telegraph, but instead of signals it transmits voice. Then you have the modem
which is like the phone but instead of voice, transmits data - and you've reached the internet. And then you'll say "humans are connected in their minds,
just like the internet nodes". And when this is "known science" it will be easy to make the next step in understanding that humans are connected at a deeper level - comprising the ultimate network (which is the All-that-is-One). But it always requires prior concepts to build upon.
Every direction of society is building new concepts, in incremental steps, that are going towards this final realization. This includes entertainment, technology, economy, sciences, etc. In our case (Bitcoin) the decentralized/P2P model is the precise model for making people understand how the mental and soul network operate with everyone being a node. Decentralization and networks built through an equality of nodes that make up the "larger entity" is a key element. On the other hand, hierarchy/authority is against the protocol of equality which is necessary for people to understand what's coming next.
Transparency is another key element because there are no "secrets" in the "higher" networks that exist beyond the technological internet. So Bitcoin has been created as a conceptual platform / a reference for discovering things that operate based on the same "protocols" (p2p - power to the people / transparency).
Going against these protocols (in our case transparency) that build up our higher realizations as a species will be tricky. It's like trying to sail against the wind - and that ensures a hell of a bumpy raid for anyone who'll try to give it a shot in anonymity given that it is a fundamental rule of this reality that there is nothing hidden under the sun.
/"sci-fi mode" off
Reaching 100% Anonymity is like reaching the speed of light. The closer you get, the harder it gets to get closer.
My assessment is that with current and near future incarnations, DRK will be anonymous enough for personal privacy use.
I like the speed of light analogy...
However, it will be a mere annoyance to a determined attacker with globally positioned packet sniffers and a large server farm to crunch trillions of calculations to unravel all payment paths.
Yep... and that's why you can't have a "fund-Snowden"campaign, because if you don't have an NSA-proof anonymous solution, Snowden will laugh and decline your offer.
P.S. Please dont feel that I am an anonymity competitor, in the anonymity biz we are all friends as we can help each other achieve better anonymity. Plus I did manage to get a decent amount of DRK mined with my mini server farm before the GPU era
No such feeling of "anonymity competition" - don't worry.
