Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 188. (Read 387493 times)

My hypothesis on the decline of darkcoin is the following.  (Not that I care much, but I'll watch it attentively for the fun).

The hype is already partly over, and will keep declining, this is inherent to the life cycle of "hype" alts. Add to this the better cryptonote technology, recently instantiated in a fair-launch coin with monero, whose high-quality community keeps growing and will quickly attract part of the darkcoin one.
So the decline seems unavoidable, but noting unusual at this stage.

But, unlike other alts, darkcoin is relying on master nodes that require at least 1000 coins. Running a masternode earns the owner some interest. What I think will happen is that once the first masternode owners realize they will make better profit by selling their +1000 coins now rather than earning interest on a coin which is loosing value, well they will sell! This will be a catalyst to lowering even more the price, making more masternode owners realize that they'd better do the same as soon as possible, etc.
So the decline might be faster than "usual", due to this domino effect, waiting to trigger.

Here is the post I referrenced earlier. It's quite a long post, but the part concerning CN is near the middle. And please don't bring up where he says Darkcoin is simple coinjoin (older post) , he acknowledges that it isn't further down.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7513123

I'm just throwing out ideas here since I can't think of another good use case for FantomCoin

Btc Mike, that's not it. I'll link it when I get home.

FantomCoin is just another CryptoNote coin. What do you mean here?

Zerocash will be announced soon (May 18 in Oakland? but open source may not be ready then?).

Here is a synopsis of the tradeoffs compared to CyptoNote:

1. Zerocash hides everything, even the money supply so if the master key was compromised or if the highly complex bleeding edge crypto is cracked, no one will know.

2. They will claim to generate the master key at a ceremony or devise a way to compute in parts, but nothing they can do will insure it isn't compromised. CPUs even have special firmware that allows the NSA to reprogram them remotely, and even computation can be intercepted wireless with RF signals. Whereas we have to place all trust in a single party with Zerocash, with CN the trusted parties are changing on each transaction. Compromising the master key doesn't compromise the anonymity, but does compromise the money supply which could be expanded invisibly. Cracking the highly complex bleeding edge crypto which has not been sufficiently vetted over years, could compromise the anonymity ex post facto (it is all on the block chain).

3. Both CN and Zerocash use a form of cryptography which is not immune to quantum computation attack, if that becomes a reality in the future.

4. Zerocash transactions add up to 3 minutes of additional transaction delay which is much worse than Zerocoin. Zerocash (full node computation and block chain) resource requirements are centralizing but much improved over Zerocoin.

5. Zerocash hides everything so it is not necessary to obscure your IP address.



Thus on balance I prefer CN, but I like to see it altered to use a quantum computer resistant algorithm. And then we need to add IP address obfuscation as well that is superior to Tor and I2P.

Darkcoin (CoinJoin innovation) is really not at the level of the two above. You can review my comments in the Darkcoin thread to see why.

Ozziecoin, Your pump and dump dance would probably be more effective if you were less transparently dishonest in your approach.  I'm normally happy to ignore the nonsense in the altcoin subform, but since you saw fit to go distrupt the coinjoin thread with some offtopic insult hurling I thought I'd bring the extensive response back here where its topical.

CoinJoin is trustless— which is orthogonal with centralized or decentralized, it could be implemented several ways (though trustlessness is usually a prerequisite to a decenteralized implementation). Post 5 in the CoinJoin thread writes in depth about implementing it in a decenteralized way, none of which appears to have been implemented by the darkcoin developers as far as I can tell— from what I've heard it seems that they're not even able to understand it. (This is a disappointment to me, since I was trying to describe these ideas clearly so others could understand them.)

More amusingly, what DarkCoin does is highly centralized because the software is closed— you can't get more centralized than closed source. What the actual behavior is, is anyone's guess— it's impossible to review due to it being closed— though "masternodes" does not sound like something decenteralized, it sounds like something that creates a small chokepoint which could be used to deanonymize its users.

As I've said before CoinJoin is interesting because it's inherently part of Bitcoin already— it just needed better tools (and now there are some, e.g. darkwallet) to make it available to people.  It's a privacy improvement over not having it, but it isn't perfect, but it also didn't require any changes to Bitcoin (much less a whole altcoin) to deploy it.  In an incompatible system much better is possible as is proposed by ZeroCash and much better is actually _realized_ by Bytecoin (and its forks... Monero, Fantomcoin, etc.), the later are actually working (if immature, due reinventing many wheels) implementations of much stronger privacy, decenteralized in their implementation, all released under a good open source license.

For those interested, here is Anonymint's post

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6662938

Look through his posts, there's a recent one (about 1-2 weeks old) where he talks mainly about Zerocash, but mentions CryptoNote towards the end. There's also an older discussion in the Monero thread.

If CryptoNote has scaling issues with it's anon technology, is that a potential use case for FantomCoin? First use case I can really think of for a merge mined CN coin, but it sounds like it's plausible. It could take some pressure off XMR or BBL or whatever emerges as the main coin.