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Topic: 【Truth or FUD???】DarkCoin – The Next Big Thing, or Just Another Pump and Dump? - page 7. (Read 15524 times)

newbie
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During the first 15 hours, between

block 1  http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?000007d91d1254d60e2dd1ae580383070a4ddffa4c64c2eeb4a2f9ecc0414343.htm and

block 4000 http://chainz.cryptoid.info/drk/block.dws?00000000fc0ee07e47609bae8d5fe5d774193c71d518c56dfe8faaf7d780a03f.htm  



approximately 1.75m darkcoins were generated.
The result? Darkcoin is currently at 80,000 blocks, but there’s only 4.3m DRK out there. Five months later, the 1.75m generated during those first 4200 blocks still represents 40% of all DRK in existence.
full member
Activity: 322
Merit: 105
DarkSend does not use blind signing, and, if I remember correctly, the reason is that the implementation had DOS issues and the attacker could get away with it. So given that the node knows what it signs, the next alternative was
Right, this is a centralized approach... a central server can deanonymize people. There may be many of these servers, but you're still trusting them to not be bad.  It may be acceptable— it's probably better than nothing at all.  But things like this is precisely what Ozziecoin is slamming.  Ironically, because the CJ thread post 5 describes how you can deal with the dos attacks while actually being private for everyone:  If the transaction fails, everyone deanonymizes their attempt, and anyone who fails to deanonymize (or is directly shown to be the party refusing to sign) is banned. It's a PITA to actually implement, I agree.

I feel like I'm making semi-witty quips to myself here Sad.

PS, masternode centralization in the future doesn't cause any problems for darkcoin. I have 2 possible solutions to evaluate for V2 of darksend (ring signatures and encrypted system where the users themselves do the joining relayed through the masternodes.) . Both of these make the masternodes unaware of who is sending money to whom, so centralization isn't an issue at that point.

He's since announced that he's not implementing ring sigs due to bloat issues.  RC4 is slated to include significant improvements to anonymity, so take from that what you will.
staff
Activity: 4284
Merit: 8808
DarkSend does not use blind signing, and, if I remember correctly, the reason is that the implementation had DOS issues and the attacker could get away with it. So given that the node knows what it signs, the next alternative was
Right, this is a centralized approach... a central server can deanonymize people. There may be many of these servers, but you're still trusting them to not be bad.  It may be acceptable— it's probably better than nothing at all.  But things like this is precisely what Ozziecoin is slamming.  Ironically, because the CJ thread post 5 describes how you can deal with the dos attacks while actually being private for everyone:  If the transaction fails, everyone deanonymizes their attempt, and anyone who fails to deanonymize (or is directly shown to be the party refusing to sign) is banned. It's a PITA to actually implement, I agree.

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If it was part of Bitcoin, it wouldn't require Dark Wallet, would it?
Having something in the protocol doesn't mean that there is an interface to it. I was doing CoinJoins back in 2011-2012, in public too— https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/i-taint-rich-raw-txn-fun-and-disrupting-taint-analysis-51kbtc-linked-139581 ... no software was required for it once the raw transaction interface made it into a release. The point here being that none of this needs an altcoin, yes it may need all sorts of client software and such, but there is no need to invoke another currency except to Make Money Fast.

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What's the point of opensourcing it while the specifications are not yet finalized?[/quote[What the point of releasing it at all and hyping it up with a bunch of claims that no one can verify?

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How is a trusted solution (due to the accumulator) better?
I suspect you may be confusing zerocoin and zerocash there I suspect, since it was zerocoin with the accumulator with the trusted initialization.  ZeroCash is an entirely different design, though with its own trusted component— a ZKP, the only accumulator in zerocash is just a regular unspent txout tree.  In both cases the trust is unrelated to privacy, however, the privacy is perfect even if the tcrustfulness assumptions are violated.  (In ZeroCash compromise of the zero-knowledge proof CRS yields unbounded undetectable inflation for the attacker, in ZeroCoin it would let someone empty the accumulator). As I mentioned here, I'm not super fond of the security assumptions— I like the design used by the bytecoin things better, though the privacy is not quite as strong but they also have the benefit of being already deployed and involve no trust or novel cryptographic assumptions.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
Clearly this is about you feeling your IP has been exploited. I think it was a genuine error and no one is trying to use your name or CoinJoin to promote anything. The Darkcoin devs were merely trying to communicate that the coinmixing was done by a decentralised network of masternodes. If you want acknowledgement, then I'm sure they would be more than happy to acknowledge your valuable work.

Look, we can keep going but it's pretty clear to me what is happening here. You feel pissed. Perhaps rightly so but this could've been handled very differently. I'm not going to waste more energy on this negative stuff.
full member
Activity: 322
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Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based
I've seen no concrete evidence to support this. Can you point me to some?  I'd certantly be happy to find that I was incorrect, I think privacy technology is interesting and important and while I think creating an 'altcoin' for it is counterproductive (immediate loss of anonymity set) and pointless, if something good is developed I'd welcome it.  But after sitting quietly for some time the indications that darkcoin is largely substance-less vaporware and hype have grown stronger, not weaker.

It's interesting that you lash out at others for making claims about closed source (for now) code, then turn around and do the exact same thing, just with a different slant.

The last sentence makes the rest of the paragraph feel more than a little bit disingenuous.
sr. member
Activity: 280
Merit: 250


  My clearly biased opinion of altcoins and dark in paticular atm is clearly biased




Fixed.
staff
Activity: 4284
Merit: 8808
Yes you have. You have promoted Cryptonote, Bytecoin, Monero, Bitcoin and your CoinJoin service.
CoinJoin isn't a service, ... I guess you've pretty conclusively shown you have no clue what you're talking about.

Nor have I promoted Bitcoin here— I haven't said anything positive about it at all.  WRT the Bytecoin & forks I don't really believe that I'm promoting them, they suck in a number of ways unrelated to their privacy features, and the decision to make an altcoin out of it seems shameful and greedy to me... but the privacy part is really quite brilliant, and thats just my opinion as someone who has been working on privacy in this space for a long time.

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Doesn't Gmaxwell own large amounts of cryptonote coins he's trying to hype
Nope. I have a bit so I could try them out, and some people have made use of my monero tip address, but its all trivial amounts. I think altcoins are generally inadvisable, and in the long term I have plans that should remove all reasons for having them. I think the promotion or opposition to these things based on profit motives is incredibly sleazy.

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Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based
I've seen no concrete evidence to support this. Can you point me to some?  I'd certantly be happy to find that I was incorrect, I think privacy technology is interesting and important and while I think creating an 'altcoin' for it is counterproductive (immediate loss of anonymity set) and pointless, if something good is developed I'd welcome it.  But after sitting quietly for some time the indications that darkcoin is largely substance-less vaporware and hype have grown stronger, not weaker.
full member
Activity: 322
Merit: 105
Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work
I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

"CoinJoin was invented by Gmaxwell" = "quite liberally".  Hmm.

Smiley

PS, masternode centralization in the future doesn't cause any problems for darkcoin. I have 2 possible solutions to evaluate for V2 of darksend (ring signatures and encrypted system where the users themselves do the joining relayed through the masternodes.) . Both of these make the masternodes unaware of who is sending money to whom, so centralization isn't an issue at that point.

Well, we know that ring signatures are out.  Maybe if you'd stop pretending that Darksend in its current iteration is the final product...
legendary
Activity: 1708
Merit: 1049
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, like a server based CoinJoin but worse since you have to hold a huge pile of coins to run a server.

1) Masternodes are just a term. They could be called "decentralized nodes". With 500 nodes on the network, it's hardly "centralized". The number of desktop wallets running will probably be less than the nodes themselves.

2) The argument about centralization and closed source, is invalid. There is no intention for DarkSend to be ...trusted by its users. The open sourcing has been decided and will be done once the code is finished. What's the point of opensourcing it while the specifications are not yet finalized?

3) The coins required for the masternode are in order to prevent bad actors through a cost disincentive that escalates as one tries to accumulate more nodes (less coins in the market, price spikes, accumulation of extra nodes = problematic). DarkSend does not use blind signing, and, if I remember correctly, the reason is that the implementation had DOS issues and the attacker could get away with it. So given that the node knows what it signs, the next alternative was to do multiple darksends through the nodes. That, along with the cost disincentive, would reduce the statistic probability of the bad actor controlling all the nodes of a transaction and hence knowing the money flow. I am not aware of plans to implement blind signing (they could exist, or not - it's up to the dev of darkcoin).

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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.

If it was part of Bitcoin, it wouldn't require Dark Wallet, would it?

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In an incompatible system much better is possible as is proposed by ZeroCash

How is a trusted solution (due to the accumulator) better?
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
So the biggest worry is the source being closed. The source is not released while it's in release candidate phase. This was decided months ago, and the community was strongly behind it.

This was the only correct choice:

Imagine DarkSend source being open from the RC1. There would already be coins that had copy-pasted the RC1 code and their devs and supporters hyping it up, and people throwing their monies into it. And some or even most of those coins would've already ran into a lot of problems because they couldn't have been able to keep up with the constant development speed by Darkcoin team, and finally abandoned because they couldn't copy-paste masternodes or whatever functionality or solve unwanted forks correctly without breaking their own coin and people losing their monies. After all this mess, who would they blame? Well Darkcoin of course. Even though the real reason would've been their own greed and inability to cope with non-finalized release candidate level source.

The idea of how Darksend works has been discussed in the forums extensively, so if anyone wants more information, it's out there.

It's exactly this. No one is forcing you to use Darkcoin right now while Darksend is still closed source, even Bitfinex said that they won't run closed source code and are only running the open source version of the client for their exchange. And yet they still added Darkcoin as a top 3 coin in the world. Shitcoins would have copy pasted it from day 1 and complained, there's no doubt about it. Darkcoin wouldn't be where it is, where it deserves to be, without having the code be closed source at first, there's simply no other way to do it in a highly competitive world such as this one.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250

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It seems to me you are prejudiced against Darkcoin.  Why? I cannot fathom nor am I interested.
Why do you ask why and then claim disinterest? I am prejudiced against vaporware, closed source, and pump and dump nonsense. I am prejudice against things which exploit the technical work I've done, trade on it's name (as Darkcoin did at first, until I started blasting it it), to the apparent purpose of extracting funds from people who are less technically sophisticated. Beyond the basic immorality of it, I worry that this fundraising style will remove people's willingness to support real improvements that aren't scams, since its hard for them to tell them apart.

And there we have it folks. The reason why GMaxwell is upset. Can you not just have said to Evan: "Please acknowledge the work that I did on CoinJoin" Instead of this BS about masternodes being centralised and pointless? 
hero member
Activity: 966
Merit: 1003
So the biggest worry is the source being closed. The source is not released while it's in release candidate phase. This was decided months ago, and the community was strongly behind it.

This was the only correct choice:

Imagine DarkSend source being open from the RC1. There would already be coins that had copy-pasted the RC1 code and their devs and supporters hyping it up, and people throwing their monies into it. And some or even most of those coins would've already ran into a lot of problems because they couldn't have been able to keep up with the constant development speed by Darkcoin team, and finally abandoned because they couldn't copy-paste masternodes or whatever functionality or solve unwanted forks correctly without breaking their own coin and people losing their monies. After all this mess, who would they blame? Well Darkcoin of course. Even though the real reason would've been their own greed and inability to cope with non-finalized release candidate level source.

The idea of how Darksend works has been discussed in the forums extensively, so if anyone wants more information, it's out there.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
Now who is doing the pumping for his coin?I haven't promoted anything here, except arguably the Bytecoin/etc. ones which aren't mine by any means.



Yes you have. You have promoted Cryptonote, Bytecoin, Monero, Bitcoin and your CoinJoin service.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work
I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

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It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random.
Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.
And how would you know that?
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
Doesn't Gmaxwell own large amounts of cryptonote coins he's trying to hype? Darksend in its current state is more advanced than the coinjoin on which it is based, the anonimity upgrade coming in RC3 will distance it even further from the basic implementation. Evan has been working towards one goal for months now and it has paid off so far. People are crying out about not getting perfect anonimity but every moment the implementation is getting better and the main goal is giving you privacy as a default, not an option like darkwallet. Cryptonote has flaws, Zerocash has problems to solve before release as well, Darkcoin has flaws too.

The energy invested in trying to bring down Darkcoin is simply amazing. The entire crypto community gets regularly fucked in the ass by scams and begs for more but when you have a developer put his face behind his creation and work for months to bring a quality result to the market, he is attacked by everyone and worse than the scammers who we quickly forget. Fuck this forum and everyone in this thread too.
staff
Activity: 4284
Merit: 8808
Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work
I haven't done any "coinmixing work"— if you're talking about CoinJoin, darkcoin threw around my name quite liberally initially until people warned them not to. I don't want my name anywhere near this thing.

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It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random.
Maybe it is— how would you know?  ... in any case, randomly selecting a server is distributed but not decenteralized. The "random" servers are well positioned to track every user using them.  A well implemented coinjoin would combine users with multiple other users in a way that _no one_ knows what the input/output correspondence is beyond each user knowing his own inputs and outputs.
full member
Activity: 322
Merit: 105
From Evan (of DRK) himself: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7060893
So with DRK, we have an UNFINISHED product


Let me help you: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/50384/release-candidate

Darksend isn't finished yet and was never promised to be 100% anonymous unless you use great care.

I can play games with bolded text too!  Smiley
staff
Activity: 4284
Merit: 8808
Now who is doing the pumping for his coin?
I haven't promoted anything here, except arguably the Bytecoin/etc. ones which aren't mine by any means.

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As I see it coinjoin as it stands is highly centralised and subject to being co-opted.
You're asserting this but you haven't justified it. I can't counter an assertion because I don't even know what you're saying is centeralized or how you believe it could be co-opted.

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Why would you attack Darkcoin?
Because it's closed source stuff of dubious quality which appears to being deceptively marketed.

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Afterall, the devs themselves have said they will make the code available soon.
This isn't how cryptosystem development works. History supports taking the position that is closed should be automatically assumed to be snake-oil if not an outright trojan until proven otherwise. It's highly suspect. Systems which are good do not need to hide their operation, not if you're going to ask other people to use it.

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It seems to me you are prejudiced against Darkcoin.  Why? I cannot fathom nor am I interested.
Why do you ask why and then claim disinterest? I am prejudiced against vaporware, closed source, and pump and dump nonsense. I am prejudice against things which exploit the technical work I've done, trade on it's name (as Darkcoin did at first, until I started blasting it it), to the apparent purpose of extracting funds from people who are less technically sophisticated. Beyond the basic immorality of it, I worry that this fundraising style will remove people's willingness to support real improvements that aren't scams, since its hard for them to tell them apart.

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than your 1 centralised coinmixing server.
What are you talking about here?  Nothing I've ever described involved a singular "coinmixing" server.

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As for you saying that CoinJoin is inherently part of Bitcoin; how so? It is not part of the protocol.  I do not see many people use it on a day to day basis. It is not part of computer wallets. Which part of it is actually "inherent".  Why cannot Litecoin use it "inherently" tomorrow if they wanted to? I see nothing inherent about it at all.
I'm now suspecting that you've never read the CoinJoin post at all— pointing out that it was part of the protocol was the point. It's also inherently a part of Litecoin or anything else that copied the bitcoin code slavishly. It's a result of how signatures work in Bitcoin. Getting wallet interfaces and such developed for it was the motivation for the CoinJoin post, and now there has been good movement on that front.

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Please, Zerocash is totally closed source right now so how would you know it is better?
Closed source? It's not actually implemented yet, but unlike "DarkCoin" they've extensively described their approach in their academic publications and subjected it to extensive peer review. I'm not a fan of the security assumptions it makes, but the privacy properties the system should achieve are basically perfect.

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And bytecoin and its various forks have problems with blockchain bloat.
All cryptographically strongly-private decenteralized cryptocurrencies are going to be unprunable to some degree, which is an unfortunate scalability tradeoff— but considering that no Bitcoin implementation in production today implements pruning anyways, it's hardly a fatal one— at least in the medium term. The tradeoff here is fundamental: if you don't know what coin has been spent, you can't forget any of them.  Of course, a system could have less privacy and things forever out of the anonymity set could be forgotten but thats the tradeoff you get.

legendary
Activity: 3808
Merit: 1723
Nicely written article. Thanks for the post.

I will stay clear or DRK for the next while.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
The true position of GMaxwell and his dislike of Darkcoin is as follows:

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Yea, well the darkcoin thing was pretty offensive to me in general, I feel that it commercially exploited my work promoting coinjoin— itself not so bad, but it was frustrating that it was also stupid: the attraction of coinjoin— for all its limitations— is that you don't need a new coin, it's already just part of Bitcoin.  I've been continually disappointed by the level of hype around Zero*, especially when it comes at the expense of attention to other techniques which are very interesting themselves.

Obviously, Gmaxwell feels he wasn't properly acknowledged for his coinmixing work and he defends it by saying that CoinJoin is already part of Bitcoin. I beg to differ. CoinJoin is an add on.  Moreover, masternodes perform coin mixing via a decentralised network of hundreds of masternodes, chosen at random.

It is CoinJoin but using a server chosen at random. 
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