You people realize that when you make a purchase with your anon coins, if you are buying something that has to be shipped, which would be most of your online purchases, they have your fucking address! Unless you are doing face to face transactions with no personal information exchanged AND you are wearing a mask while doing it, you're not going to be anonymous....
Totally.
It’s significant to this debate that Darkcoin had ring signatures on its roadmap and decided against implementing them (for now) because of adverse practical issues associated with their use - in particular the bloat problem.
Cryptonote fanatics (In particular, Monero devs) have their heads stuck so far down the cryptography manhole that they’ve lost sight of all monetary objectives other than “hiding from the NSA”, which isn’t even a monetary objective. A bit like a formula 1 car designer that becomes so obsessed with the tyre tread that they forget to make the car light and get lapped in the first round (as Monero has been by Darkcoin).
We’re talking about money here. The goal is to address a particular monetary property - fungibility, the only property in which Bitcoin is deficient - as well as financial privacy and to do that at least as well as the current fiat banking system (which is not the least bit opaque as far as NSA et al are concerned).
At this moment, Darkcoin’s implementation of anonymity suits a cryptocurrency far better than cryptonote does because it supports all immediate commercial design objectives and leaves options open for the future. In addition to that, it supports the oldest boost to reliability known to man -
multiple redundancy. If you want commercial privacy, use a standard number of rounds. If you want super anonymity just put it through the full 16 rounds.
Contrary to what highly conflicted Monero coin developers would have you believe, useful modern cryptography was not invented 4 years ago, it was invented about 70 years ago and a myriad of successful implementations of every conceivable type have been in use ever since. More specific monetary-oriented cryptographic algorithms came along in the eighties so even those have been around for 30 years. Also contrary to what conflicted Monero devs would have you believe, there is more than 1 solution that satisfies the design objectives of a bitcoin-based currency which addresses the fungibility and privacy issue. Success will not go to the solution that has the most modern cryptography - or even the most secure - but the one that best addresses all of the priorities across the board.
For me, that is Darkcoin by a mile right now.
Whatever amounts of sand get thrown in its devs’ and its community’s face over hypothetical security scenarios it still has way more forethought and relevance across the whole offering. In addition, having read all of the challenges in this thread I think its security model is well in excess of what’s needed for the role it has to fulfil. A far more realistic weakness than ‘NSA tracing your transactions’ for example is simply some 3rd party buying up the coin supply and that’s something that applies to all coins / mining power / you name it.
Cryptographic priorities aren’t the biggest issue here -
monetary ones are. So before deciding what’s the optimal design cryptographically you need to decide what’s the optimal one monetarily and how much difference a legacy compliant blockchain makes because everything else flows from there.
What's it Worth ?Monero staff have made a clusterfuck of a PR job for their coin in this thread by attacking Darkcoin’s anonymity approach because it’s a straw man. The real question is not Darkcoin’s anonymity approach, it’s its legacy compliance approach and how much that’s worth. A year ago that wasn’t clear but now it’s crystal clear - Bitcoin’s marketcap has continued to prevail over all alts. Darkcoin’s cap was sustained, Monero’s tanked. None of the alts have made a dent in Bitcoin’s cap despite being more advanced technically. So legacy compliance IS worth something big according to the market and in that regard it will accept the optimal anonymity solution if it wants a high-privacy version of it.
So critics can keep on pulling on that (it’s not secure !!) chain - it won’t matter because Darkcoin has the right solution for what it’s trying to do at the moment and it’s only likely to consolidate from here according to the conclusions of last year’s alt-coin arms race.