Topic: This message was too old and has been purged - page 10. (Read 26053 times)

Which makes it yet another, highly potential, negitive, media timebomb. Especially in regards to the mass adoption of CRYPTO related currency.

MN are not a viable option, in fact, i think its fair to say its a fools errand for both developers and investors. I predict that it will be busted wide open within the next 10 years with devastating effects to the anon space and CRYPTO trust in general.

The US Justice Department is trying to expand federal powers to search and seize digital data.  

These proposals are never going to stop and the uses for darkcoin are only ever going to strengthen their cases towards allowing such an act to take place by the US and any country. So why build something to compete with, and fuel that. Hence it being a fools errand and far from future proof. Thats my argument anyway.

Directbet now take more bets in DRK than they do in BTC and indeed in any other currency, by value or volume.

Satoshibet adopted Darkcoin last week.

DRK adoption is happening.

There are different vectors of attack here. If we ignore inherent coinjoin-type issues (the sorts of things this thread was originally about, which may be a false alarm, but those sorts of issues still exist in general terms and may apply to DRK in some ways), then the numbers I'm talking about involve most of the masternodes being malicious or compromised for catastrophic failure to occur. I don't believe that is the case today; I think most masternodes are run by people who either support the DRK project or are just doing it for the money (the latter is fine, short term, as it means they aren't interested in compromising privacy).

But let's face it, what is going on now doesn't really matter at all. The whole point of this exercise is to build something secure for the hypothetical future where these technologies are very widely used and important. That is the point where I do not expect the current degree of masternode fidelity to continue, or at least I find the blind trust that it will irrational and unacceptable.

That said, even in the case where most (but not all) masternodes are honest, at least with the current system, some transactions will be vulnerable. With 3 rounds chosen randomly and 2% of masternodes being dishonest, it means one out 100 000 transactions will be completely unmixed (more will have reduced anonymity). That may sound great, unless you are that one. Still, this might be an acceptable degree of risk, if there weren't a better way.

There is simply no substitute for strong cryptography that does not rely on third parties for your privacy. If there is no feasible cryptographic way to do what needs to be done, sure build trusted third parties and try to minimize that trust by working through several of them. But there is a feasible way to do this without any third party trust at all, which makes the masternode approach unnecessarily dangerous.

This really applies only to anonymity and similar cryptographic applications though. If you want to use masternodes to validate instant payments or provide other services that don't have the same trust requirements as anonymity, that might make a lot more sense.

If you monkey with the code base at all, you are still inviting security issues and bugs. The masternode code isn't based directly on Bitcoin and had had issues as I understand it. (I mean this not as an attack on the code, which I can't do because I haven't personally reviewed it, but only to point out that if you want to do anything new you are going to have new code and have to develop, review, test, and debug carefully, and there will be bugs, etc. to be fixed.) Likewise for the non-Bitcoin parts of the DRK wallet, which include Darksend.

As far as Monero having a different codebase, so far the core of the cryptonote code (including Monero but really all of them) has held up reasonably well after almost a year. There was one major exploit, but other than that, just minor growing pains.


Fair point. Maybe DRK should just give up and DRK supporters should help get behind Bitcoin instead? Only partially serious here, but the fact is, again, if you are doing something different, whatever it is, you are going to have these issues.


Because it was easier and the market is somewhat bigger (they're both very small though, really, even compared to BTC). No question that integrating Bitcoin-based coins is easier for sites that already support BTC. The other side of that is you simply don't get the sort of strong cryptographic anonymity you get with something a little farther away from Bitcoin. If you think anonymity is important, that matters.

It certainly can be done. Several sites have integrated cryptonote coins and it's worked for them. That includes quite a few different exchanges, xmr.to, crypotcoins-dice, and probably some others I'm forgetting.

Either way, there is no free lunch here.

Whats 'many'?  5 nodes, 10 nodes, 1%, 10%, 20% of the nodes, more?  Based on your calculations, how many dishonest masternodes does it take for transactions to becomes less than 'even some modest degree of privacy'?

Do you have a solution to replace DRK?? If so please tell the world

Please dont say Monero - Adoption is Zero (0%), the problems that the coin has are at this point are not marketable (No official Wallet, Bloat, Inflation etc etc) and will never gain adoption because who in their right mind as a business would try and maintain and secure two different code bases. Bitcoin is having enough of a hard time trying to convince people to use it.

Looka at directbet.eu - they Took DRK over Monero..Why is that I wonder?

That's exactly why if you want anonymity or even some modest degree of privacy on the Internet you better be doing it with strong cryptography and not trusting "nodes"

Look I get that DRK was created before the cryptonote technology was released and arguably at the time it was the best we had to try to make Bitcoin more anonymous. Building that out was an admirable goal. It isn't any more.

And yes, I do have some idea of the math. It works against a few bad apples but falls apart if many of the masternodes are dishonest or compromised (with or without their knowledge). I'll take a closer look at blinding when it is release but from what I've seen so far I expect much the same.

You simply disagree?  Really?  You are sitting here arguing about something that you 'simply disagree' on?  Sounds like a waste and a feeble attempt at spreading the on going FUD.  Have you done any calculations that can plausibly prove/support why you simply disagree?  If so, I'd like to see it.  If you can't, beyond a reasonable doubt, prove that the math is wrong then you're just spreading FUD.  

I'll tell you right now that I haven't looked at the math.  I aint gots no time for that.

In other news... Google and your ISP is monitoring everything you do already.  Nothing you do is safe. AAHHH!!!!

^ Astronomical increase in nodes needed. You are still sad by the way

That's not how 'blinding' works. It just breaks up the transaction into more pieces so data from more nodes is needed to reconstruct it.

If the nodes know not what they transact, what advantage does it give you to control the hosting company or the nodes?

You're incorrect. Even full (as in 100%) network flow for example, does not deanonomize Monero transactions. It does identify Monero users (which is why we are adding i2p to obscure it) but not the flow of coins.

As long as there is some piece of hardware, under your own control that you can use to sign transactions properly, the rest need not be trusted. That's a much lower and more plausible expectation of trust than some nodes operating mostly in VPS hosting centers.

When you deal with entire eco-systems, then you simply have to try your best at the area of your expertise.

Our own PCs might be compromised. HDD firmware, processors, network equipment firmware, software backdoors, RNG fixing, etc etc. And then the entire Internet might be controlled, thus someone like NSA can see the whole network flow in a "transparent" way. If we take such hypotheses as somewhat probable, then no coin will ever be private or anonymous. We (all people involved in anon projects) might as well throw the towel and go home.

yes, we all want to see evil-k break the blinded testnet masternode thing.

a looooooooot of money. Aren't we in a world.... where.... the governments.... can just print money..... to buy.... masternodes?


I was hoping the DRK dev's ventures to bitcointalk would get him to comment on the intrinsic connection between network privacy and currency valuation that I discuss in the XMR v DRK thread, but I guess that concern still sits there, waiting.

Anyhoo, for those that are still interested in the original post subject (and are just coming into the conversation because this has been bumped like cah razy). I've compiled it here:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/drk-copy-of-evil-knievels-darkcoin-is-not-anonymous-moderated-for-clarity-979315

No, I simply disagree with the math and find that number implausible. I believe that most masternodes will ultimately be compromised, either directly or via VPS or other back doors. If you have one or a few out of 2000 masternodes compromised, yes multiple rounds reduces the risk to nearly nothing. But if you have say 80-90% of masternodes compromised, the number of rounds and the cost of the system to achieve high confidence becomes costly and impractical. And for that matter you can't rationally rule out 99% or even 100% being compromised eventually. I expect that in fact.


That's false an assumes only that someone attempts to buy all the nodes very quickly and drives up the price. In fact what is more plausible is for someone buy the nodes slowly and/or attack competing nodes to make them less profitable to encourage node abandonment.

Furthermore I don't really expect nodes being bought to be the primary mode attack, thought that could certainly happen over time too. It will be a combination of legal and quasi-legal attacks (i.e. PRISM) against the node operators themselves and/or VPS operators, and/or flat out compromises via VPS and other back doors. The NSA didn't have to buy all the IT companies, they just got them do the work of collecting the data.

The elegance of DRK (prior to MN blinding) is that it assumes the worst of the nodes (=that they are corrupt in a high percentage) and works around the issue by multiple rounds of mixing, thus getting very low probabilities of identification even with controlled nodes. You know someone has a FUD vector when he cites the 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000x % probability as a definite loss of privacy or "real danger" or "not anonymous" etc etc.

The fact that it also takes a loooot of money to buy all the nodes, which would make the price reach astronomical levels if done by a single entity like the NSA, also helps from a Game Theory perspective so that it can't really happen as the acquisition cost multiplies while an NSA-like player tries tries to obtain the remaining percentages of the MN network.

I think it's about time all the FUDstorm is buried with the masternode blinding where the MNs don't even know what they transact.

No that is not true at all. You as a user can verify that you are using Bitcoin code or whatever code you want to use. If it were peer-to-peer like bitcoin that could be enough. But it isn't. It is peer-to-masternode(s)-to-peer.

You can't and never will be able to verify what masternodes are doing, as long as they appear to be doing what they are supposed to. But what else they are doing you have no idea. At all.

Its quite sad when one of the Monero team is considered one of the biggest trolls - NSA Prism = LOL

Re-launch Darkcoin LOL

DRK Marketcap fake LOL

Regarding "blatant manipulation" see what I wrote above to celestio.

Regarding market caps, high marketcaps tend to spread coin ownership. Darkcoins costing 17$ each at its high, do not leave much space for the instamine argument. People who get coins for nothing do not usually appreciate them. That's what happened at the launch and why people were selling batches of 10k DRKs for 0.25 BTC. A few months later, why would an instaminer ...hold at 17$ a coin? Market dynamics and market behavior indicates that he would sell a lot of his coins as the price rose. And that's precisely what happened all the way from 0.0000x BTC per DRK, to 0.000x BTC per DRK, to 0.002 BTC per DRK, to 0.028 BTC per DRK, with waves of market reshuffling.

Things like mintpal going down and scammers getting wallets like 400k DRKs and then dumping them at frequent batches were more of an actual factor compared to the instamine non-issue (for the last year or so and in relation to the market). The instamine is only brought up to increase the FUD-vector... "DRK instamine... DRK not secure... DRK forks... blah blah blah" etc.

As for DRK / NSA PRISM 2.0 analogy, I mean please... it's Bitcoin code with mixing on top. Open source stuff. Too much FUD

Not that I know of but that is a good suggestion, I will pass it on.