Does this really set Monero apart from other anon cryptocurrencies though? Both Monero and other anon cryptocurrencies ultimately do the same thing, transfer value anonymously, unless I'm mistaken. Also, Monero wasn't the first to do this so it doesn't get the advantage of being first like Bitcoin does.
I'm unaware of every technicality of every implementation of a privacy-centric cryptocurrency, but I'm definitely aware of a few. Darkcoin utilizes masternodes in a network that has become a PoW/PoS system to handle your transactions. I view this as an interesting concept for pretty much everything other than securing anonymity. While I feel it has a decent implementation of privacy, it offers the least amount of privacy subject to the most trade offs compared to the competition. For one, people need to have large amounts of the currency remain absoultely immobile in order to provide their anonymity. What happens when they want to use this money, while getting the MN reward? I see promise notes taking root relatively quickly if Darkcoin were to gain any significant market cap.
Last I saw they had ~1k nodes, of 1000 DRK each. That's about 20% of their current money supply out of usage for transacting. Their goal of (IIRC) 3k - 5k nodes will be 3 million out of production out of ~22M total coins, so it looks like they want to keep it at about 20% for the entire time. While this is nice, their reward structure has not been defined completely yet (If I'm wrong please let me know). With their goal is 22M total coins, I haven't seen an answer as to what will happen to the 20% block reward going to the master nodes when the block reward runs out. Seeing as their structure right now is a minimum of 1 DRK/block going to all masternodes, I think they'll see some trouble in figuring out what to do when that 22M max coins is hit.
So, for the nodes to always receive this minimum payment, the same nodes on which their entire premise of anonymity rests, they'll have to settle on a permanent block reward of at least 1 DRK/block and a PoS system that rewards only masternodes, if they were to completely cut out the hardware miners. If they stick with PoW, then what would the block reward have to be to keep the network secure? Let's say 1 DRK to MN's and 1 DRK to miners. So a minimum of 2 DRK/block. At 22M max coins, and a block time of 2.5 minutes, this is an annual debasement of 420k/year, or about a 2% yearly inflation. Understand that at this point, 50% of DRK is already accounted for by 100 wallets. So, we can reasonably assume that most of the MN reward will go to these peoples wallets. So, even without hardware, we're likely going to see < 100 people with ~2.1 million DRK catch most of 20% of the block reward forever, so these 100 wallets will likely catch an easy 2.6 million more DRK while doing
absolutely no work other than running a server and keeping it on. I don't think that's representative of them paying the market price, and believe that it's stealing, equivalent to a premine (ADD: by non-developers). ADD: I say this because, simply by using cryptonote, I have the ability to offer anyone using cryponote anonymity for what is right now only transaction fees. As drk already had an instamine, it would be pretty awkward to see that instamine coupled with a premine by likely the same people.
Alternatively, they can leave the masternodes and miners with transaction fees. Bitcoin right now, for a 1335 tx block collects .18036 BTC in transaction fees. If this was Darkcoin at max coins, then .0360 DRK/block would go to MN's. If they have ~4k MN's online at this point, each node will collect an average of about 902 satoshi's per block. With 17568 blocks/month this is .1584 DRK/month per masternode. If DRK had the same
marketcapcost per coin as Bitcoin right now, this would be about $55 USD/month. Is that worth it for you to have something with a value of $346,000 sitting around? Highly doubtful - if you have over a quarter million dollars in value sitting around and all you can do is pull $55 USD/month with is that's a damn joke (ADD: on average, of course, within a timeframe that one can afford - this isn't an investment discussion, this is a service for a fee discussion). So what will they do? (add: this $55 number does not account for the fact that bitcoin block time is 10 mins, drk is 2.5, so this number reflects a higher usage and same marketcap scenario.)
It's placed me at a serious economic disadvantage, and I'm not okay with it; however, all the choices can ever do is limit the penetration into society, so I don't spend my days criticizing their efforts and continue to support their innovation, I even own myself a whopping 5 DRK. I haven't addressed the technical basis of masternodes at all here though, so keep that in mind.
There's other coins that other people have a better understanding of like zerocoin, bitcoindark, or even other cryptonote forks .. I'm sure they can give a better answer than I can .. but just like my above paragraphs - there's volumes to be said, so it's not really a quick conversation.
I think most people do this. Other than the DSH/XMR etc markets on Poloniex, there isn't much else reason to buy Monero. Just because you believe in Monero you don't have to buy it.
I agree, and repeat that if you find things to believe in then surely you can find a reason to hold onto at least a couple
Personally, I'm looking forward to trying out Risto's game, and have set aside a few XMR to do so. The initial buy in is too costly for me, but I await to see what he's come up with. While I already owned XMR, even if I didn't I would be interested in purchasing at least 5-10 to play the game, depending on whether or not I wanted to play the game. It's a choice that wasn't there a month ago. That same kind of utility has brought me to buy a few huntercoin, and darknote, because I wanted to try out huntercoins blockchain game, and darknotes messaging system. The values were small enough that I don't care to run to the market and dump them on a downtrend, but large enough to afford myself the utility these things provide. Also, large enough that if either one ever got the same marketcap as bitcoin, I would feel very happy, as a simple $5-$10 investment could yield 10k-100k gains. While I don't know if that's ever possible with either of them, I have to also admit that it's not impossible.
I do agree that people are concerned to an extent, but I think the large majority of people would be content with the psuedo anonymity of Bitcoin. Especially when using Bitcoin is just easier. Monero does really lack ease of use and there is quite a steep learning curve.
They are satisfied for now. Just this year, coinbase has been taking advantage of the linkability of transactions to deny some people their services. How long that can go on for and to what extent it can be taken to remains to be fully observed, but speculation says that it can go pretty far. Regardless of the pseudo anonymity, if your money is worthless to some people regardless of who you are and relies entirely on its recent history then I don't really see much good coming out of it.
As far as easier - Bitcoin has had 5 years of development. This has had 5 months. I can accept that an order of magnitude in lifetime will result in an order of magnitude in usability, comparably. I don't think it will take 4.5 more years to get to the same type of usability though, likely much much less time, as we have tens of thousands of more people who are capable of developing cryptocurrencies now than we did 5 years ago.
