Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 190. (Read 387552 times)

Don't you understand that growing 2:1 with virtually no tx's compared to BTC (100-1000tx per block) is a problem?

Never heard of it.

Tell it to coiledcoin.

AlexGR, what are you talking about? Monero is currently 2:1 size wise, growing less than twice the rate of Bitcoin.

You're trying too hard here, your bias is obvious.

In my assessment of the market segments, the claim of superior anonymity does not translate to real-world adoption due to the list of [no] and [yes] I mentioned earlier.

Unless a coin can actually provide NSA-proof anonymity for the more paranoid / anti-government type people, the real-world advantage of CN coins is non-existant. If one is private for all intents and purposes except for an adversary like NSA (whether using DRK or CN-tech) then the choice will depend on other factors like usability, compatibility, etc. That's my conclusion anyway.

CN must push to NSA-proof levels of anonymity to take the edge. But to do that, they'll also have to implement an NSA-proof IP obfuscation tool, which is easier said than done.


If the CN protocol can't scale, it's technological superiority is DoA. We need a scaling assessment with an excel sheet that portrays network behavior of various CN-based coins under 10-100-1000 transactions per specified time segment, instead of speculation. We also need to measure the impact in terms of GBs bloat and extrapolate future scaling issues with various adoption % scenarios.


Traders are always in and out all the time anyway. That's of no concern. Holders are the main concern... Why would holders "jump" when they get very high ROI for their coins through masternodes?

DRK design is insecure at any use base: small or big
CryptoNote-based coins like XMR or BBR has scaling issues as side effects for proper anonymity when they have massive user base

Also DRK's security issues are much harder to fix than XMR's bandwidth and storage space (which can be compressed). The separation between wallet and daemon software makes it easier to implement light weight clients where end users do not need to download the whole blockchain. BBR dev also reduce computing resources when verifying blocks by changing PoW algo which making synchronization much faster. One of scaling issues has been solved.

Basically, DRK technology is obsolete because of CryptoNote protocol
However, in short term, DRK's buy support is much better than XMR. It is a huge advantage for day traders. I believe that DRK traders will jump out in time

That's after the market discovered Dark.

Growing marketcap => media attention.

The sequence of your argument is wrong.

It didn't go "let's hype DRK" as some kind of marketing strategy => sites/media attention.

It went "whale buyers" => growing marketcap => market attention => media attention.

By the time the media had taken notice, the action had already taken place. The premise that DRK was based on hype is false. The other premise that DRK was pumped by its community is false. There are even accusations that DRK was pumped (in terms of market) by the DRK community with ...fake buys and sells. Anything imaginable has been said about DRK by the wannabe-DRKs.


Lying? Lol.

The argument here is simple. If the "privacy" is good for all cases except an adversary like the NSA, and this applies for both DRK and BCN-clones, then what difference does it make to the average joe who wants to conceal his transactions? The NSA can still find him but all the rest can't. So the "superior anonymity" is of little tangible benefit if it can't take it up past the final barrier.

Imagine the following scenario where a table is presented with something like the following:

DRK vs BCN:

Are transactions transparent to ordinary people? [no] / [no]
Are transactions transparent to advanced analysis by knowledgeable people? [no] / [no]
Are transactions transparent to pattern recognition? [no] / [no]
Are transactions transparent to 99% of the governments out there? [no] / [no]
Are transactions transparent to the NSA? [yes] / [yes]

So the "superior anonymity" issue goes out the window in this case.

The game changing aspect is if you lock NSA out of the game, changing the last answer to [yes] for DRK and [no] for the other coin. And it'll be even better if one manages to make the transactions NSA-proof for the equipment that NSA will have in the next 10-20-30 years - instead of the current one. Kind of like

Will the current transactions be transparent to the NSA in a few decades? [no]

As for the "easily buy all nodes" part, there's a tremendous price increase as liquidity dries up in the market. It's not that easy as you make it sound. There's a different price per node for 100 masternodes, 1000 masternodes and 4400 masternodes (4.4mn DRKs in circulation). The acquisition of an increasing percentage will make the marketcap skyrocket to billions pretty fast. From a game theory perspective that won't work for the NSA as it would also have to do it for all coins which then adopt and implement DarkSend / nodes. This means they can't afford billions per coin to buy nodes. They need a different game plan.


The scaling issue is inherent in the design.

Yeah. If someone needs to attack Monero, they should at least use other CN coins as arguments, like Fantomcoin that can merge-mine with others and thus can survive better than others

You just admitted that DRK is centralized and Masternodes are vulnerable to attack. Trustless CryptoNote protocol makes DRK tech obsolete.

What good would only half the information do? A powerful, malicious entity could potentially purchase a large # of masternodes and try to match transactions, but no (currently public) technology would do any better in the end.

I repeat:

Only double? With 1/100th of transactions?



Hello Darksend+, where an individual masternode doesn't know both the sender and the receiver:
https://darkcointalk.org/threads/development-updates-july-7th.1735/

Most computers cannot use XMR without a database, because the chain doesn't fit in memory.  I'd consider that urgent.  Not urgent enough to do it wrong, however.

I'm not qualified to address (1), because I don't know or care about Dark.  But:

(2) is incorrect.  There are many, many degrees of anonymity, and they depend strongly upon what you assume your adversary is capable of doing, and what kind of transactions you want to issue are.  For example - if your adversary is *only* capable of looking at the blockchain, what you get from a simple transaction mixer may be adequate for small-volume transactions.  On the other hand, if your adversary runs one or many well-connected nodes in the network, or is capable of sniffing on some network traffic, things start to become very different.  If they're willing to send small transactions to trace coins through mixers or wallets, the game changes a little more.

"anonymity" is meaningless without being more precise about what information you're trying to hold anonymous and against whom.

This is actually important, because some of CryptoNotes innovations in the combination of the modified Diffie-Hellman protocol together with ring signatures and high mixin counts are strongest against more powerful adversaries - perhaps small nation states, assuming the protocols are shown to be strong and the implementations up to par.  This is an area where the stronger out anonymity of Boolberry vs. BCN/XMR will come into play as well, and deserves more serious analysis.

For an ordinary "home" user who wants to protect against his or her dentist bill, the DH aspects of the protocol alone may be just about enough.  But if we're going to pick one strongly anonymous currency, it should work for journalists, whistleblowers, and dissidents as well.

(3) This is not in the slightest bit true.  Cryptonote does not yet scale anywhere near as well as Bitcoin, and Bitcoin itself does not yet scale as much as it needs to to take over the world.  Again, more work is needed here in several areas, as I outlined earlier.  Again, both BCN and BBR have done work along these lines, and XMR is going to as well - coming up with a best-of-breed solution is important for the entire cryptonote family.

Let's not deceive ourselves or others about either the benefits or the current technical limitations of cryptonote.  It's a lot stronger than a trivial transaction mixer.  It's not all roses and unicorns from a scaling perspective.

I think that scaling is easier to fix than retrofitting anonymity.

I've been somewhat offline but my understanding is that the current plan is to use one of the leveldb forks. The last estimate I saw was at least several months at current usage (after pool fix) to even reach the BCN blockchain size so no immediate urgency to deploy a database but there is urgency to work on it and that work is proceeding.

There's absolutely no point in Darkcoin fanboys bashing other coins, when Darkcoin itself has to be one of the most scam-riddled, over hyped, coins there ever was. It's 50% instamine by it's own dev team is a fact, along with it's trivial coinjoin-centralized-masternode based "anonymity", along with it's continuous failed RC3 launches that resulted in widespread forking of the network, and furthmore with it's name Darkcoin, will never be accepted at any legitimate stores.

1)No hype? Are you kidding? Darkcoin's proposed "anonymity" feature was released in articles on several websites

2) Why do you refer to plain out Lying? I don't get why you try and lie to present your views. There's no such thing as "moderate anonymity", it's either anonymity or not. Cryptonote coins so far, are the only coins in the crypto world to have anonymous sending.."NSA-proof" anonymity huh, if you want to go that road, the NSA could easily buy up all the darkcoin nodes, and undo Darkcoins coinjoin mixing "anonymity".

3) The scaling issue has been largely addressed with the pool software being updated to stop dust transactions. Of course a lot more work can be done in that area.

Moreso, your first 2 points are complete lies, the only "point" you've made is the 3rd, which has largely been addressed in the top two Cryptonote coins, Monero and Boolberry. It's funny to see that you resort to lies to try and make your views seem valid. I know you're a darkcoin bagholder and you try to protect your asset, but lying is not the way to go. Better to not just engage at all, Darkcoin has too many flaws in itself(50% instamine by developers, lack of anonymity, failed RC3 launches, Drug-affiliated name, etc etc) or would you like me to present them to you again?

1. There was no hype with DRK. The promotional plan was to deliver and the market will discover it. The market discovered it in an earlier phase (late beta / RCs) than what was desired, putting unnecessary pressure in development.

2. No coin currently delivers anonymity, in the sense of NSA-proof anonymity. Privacy / moderate anonymity, yes.

3. The scaling issue of CNs is a valid concern, so instead of deflecting this to DRK, maybe you should ask CN-coin devs to do something about it. It will not hurt your investment to do so. I've personally asked for a scaling test with hundreds/thousands of transactions to assess what the various CN coins do when stressed / loaded. My request has gone to deaf ears, leaving wide open the future FUD vector of someone doing it independently and declaring them as DoA coins for mass use / proof of concept only.

I don't get, cryptonotefoundation.org...

Does that mean the maker of scrypt, charlie lee, should make a scryptfoundation.org?

or the maker of SHA256, should make a sha256foundation.org?

Lol.

(I know cryptonote isnt a algo, cryptonight is, but im just comparing it with other algos)

To me, this really looks like these guys are suddenly like "Oh shit! We're not going to make money from this tech". "Well, before launching our own stuff, let's start by trying to undermine the current coins, scam and fair ones all together, with a shit like http://www.coingen.io".

Emphasis on "trying".