I told Evan to reconsider the use of ring signature due to their scaling / bloat issue a bit prior to his post:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.6862900If he can do it without ring signatures+bloat, we're great.
What we are actually discussing right now is this:
99.99% of transactions are already private/anonymous to all but a bad actor that has access to all the network. Otherwise if someone sees a DarkSend they don't know who sent what to who. (provided they'll also have IP obfuscation / TOR etc)
So, we are not talking about achieving privacy or anonymity right now. We're trying to be NSA-proof, or close to that so that the theoretical event of someone knowing what goes on is eradicated. As far as I understand, Evan has an idea on how to improve the way masternodes conduct their transactions so that even the nodes don't know what they are transacting. When that happens, even controlling all the nodes will be futile as an attack vector and almost total anonymity can be achieved - at least as far as coin mixing goes (Bytecoin is also coin-mixing, Zerocoin is in another league but has other drawbacks).
Bytecoin will also have to fix it's own issues to become NSA-proof. As it is right now, it is not. And the extremely low transaction volume in its network doesn't allow for much mixing (same applies for clones). Mixing without volume = problem. Darkcoin has a tremendous advantage in that department.
Masternodes are such a blatantly broken idea I cannot imagine someone encourages it in good faith. How do masternodes/miners/whoever verify if a coin is not double spent and originates from a wallet with sufficient balance if they don't know what they are transacting? There are three options:
1. Zero-knowledge proofs, but that is Zerocoin at the moment and the drawbacks are catastrophic.
2. Ring signatures and similar mixing constructs that hide the sender in a subset of the network.
3. Some other information leak that is not documented.
Do you understand why there is no other way?
If the New and Improved DRK implements 2, then it has at most the same strength as MRO and possibly less, with the added bonus(?) of more, unnecessary centralization. If it implements 3, then it is a failed anonymity solution. The short answer is that ring signatures are cryptographically near-perfect
mixing and no Bitcoin fork can ever natively support them.
As for your last paragraph, it is factually wrong. MRO does
not need high volume because it doesn't mix transactions but outputs (even spent ones from the past). This is a tremendous advantage that MRO has and DRK doesn't, contrary to your assertion. And even gmaxwell, author of CoinJoin, sees no point in DRK.
