If a dev mines years in secret isn't it a pre-mine?
Anyways, I have a question about the technology itself.
I'm a fan of ring signatures and am not a fan of these "masternodes" that Darkcoin uses.
But a lot of the masternode supporters say that ring signature blockchains will become so bloated that they'll never be useful. Can someone calculate how bloated they would be? Like if Bytecoin or Monero had the same transaction volume as Bitcoin, how much larger would the chain be?
I would estimate roughly a factor of 10, based on the product of average ring signature ambiguity (~3, including all the 0's) and the additional ouputs due to amounts being broken up (also ~3, since many transactions are for whole numbers that can easily be constructed with just a few outputs).
Regarding Darkcoin: The increase in the number of outputs also occurs here because of amount breakdown and pooling, so that factor is about the same. So it's a contest between the linear scaling of ring signatures and the linear scaling of cascading through several masternodes. Cascading is mandatory since any individual masternode knows the sender-receiver mapping and can keep logs. While the anonymity of ring signatures is provably guaranteed, the masternode cascading needs to be done many, many times for anyone to realistically trust the anonymity. My guess is that Darkcoin is
more bloated if it chooses to actually be anonymous (using >10 stage cascading).
