[1] - whatever other 'technologies' and cryptocurrencies exist, monetarily speaking the highest value proposition is a successful bitcoin clone that supports private transactions and maximum fungibility. That means some kind of optimal compromise between bitcoin and and anonymous network layer = Darkcoin's design priorities. Sure, have your "high tech" but don't expect "high cap".
Im pretty sure that remains very much to be seen. The current market cap of any of these coins is approximately zero.
[2] - the subtext of smooth's line of propaganda is that the masternode network is some kind of 'static' network that represents a fixed target which can be progressively 'bought'. It isn't. Masternodes are simply wallet daemons. They are as decentralised as any other wallet daemon in that *every* part of the coin supply supports them. Any wallet can operate in 'masternode' mode and new ones can and are set up continuously.
Well no. Masternodes have a significant cost (they have to, in order to prevent sybil attacks), will likely generate significant income from fees in a successful system, and are important infrastructure that won't work just running some random wallet on a cell phone. They are and will be running predominantly in data centers or possibly by a few amateurs with unusually good facilities to do it, though frankly I consider the latter rather unlikely in a scaled-up system.
If you want to design a system that is fully peer-to-peer where workload is shared among arbitrarily many wallets in a highly fault tolerant manner, without the possibility of sybil attacks or other attacks, have at it, but that's not masternodes (it's somewhat closer to what Dark Wallet is trying to build). This all seems rather pointless for anonymity though, now that we know how to do anonymity using cryptography in a completely trustless manner. You seem to want to put that technolgoical genie back in the bottle and go back to the days of "coinjoin is the best we've got", but that wishful thinking won't work.
Technologically, you've been leapfrogged here. In terms of market adoption, we will see. That remains to be seen.
[3] - the technology's now a year into development. Despite being open sourced and probably one of the most investigated , attacked and 'fudded' out there, it's never yet been compromised.
wat?!
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9121343You don't inherit magic bug-freeness by forking Bitcoin. Once you start messing with the code you give up the proven reliability and start introducing new vulnerabilities.