I'm not really sure about the Darknote defenders, it's a fact of life that new technology comes out often decimating the old.
This is that time.
Bytecoin could of had it sure, but greed ruined them, greed unravels all.
Monero's based on a technology that makes Darkcoin look like a toy, even the creator of CoinJoin (the tech Darkcoin is based on) has admitted this CryptoNote tech is far stronger than CoinJoin and works. [1]
The creator of the fundamental tech of Darkcoin admits the tech in Monero is superior.
I am unsure why there is even an argument in favour of Darkcoin at this point, except it's got great "pumping" power.
Yeah, let us build a future on top of it's ability to pump and pump.
Give me a break.
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Both Darkcoin and Bytecoin need work to become totally anonymous.
CryptoNote / Monero et al
CryptoNote's one-time ring signature as a way of obfuscating who is the payer (the spender), is optional and can only be used when there are other payees who have matching input amounts. In other words, it can't do any obfuscation for you on spending unless there are other coins that have the same balance as yours.
That very infrequent opportunity for use is coupled with constant use of elliptical curve cryptography which is known to be broken under quantum computing, as well is suspect to broken by the NSA[1] or could be broken since it is number theoretic public key cryptography.
And the use of one-time ring signatures mucks up the pruning of the block chain of spent addresses. There is a tweak to improve this over the current CryptoNote (one of the tweaks I alluded to upthread).
Bottom line is most of your anonymity will come from obfuscating your IP address with something more reliable than Tor and I2P, not from the block chain mixing of CryptoNote or Zerocash/coin, i.e. if your IP is correlated to your identity, then the one-time ring signature doesn't obscure your identity when you spend.
The case where the one-time ring signature is really useful is a transaction with multiple inputs wherein the spender is merging his coins, thus enabling tracing of those coins to the same entity (the current spender). And it is very unfortunate the one-time ring signature is optional in this case, because it is the identity of the upchain spenders who suffer from this action by the current spender, thus the motivation is not there.
So we can see as it is currently structured, CryptoNote doesn't really support anonymity much.
Sorry to blow holes in your enthusiasm. Reality sucks if you haven't taken the time to do some serious work before launching.
Note that the use of a separate payee address for each transaction is a very useful strategy. This is a positive aspect of CryptoNote that adds anonymity, but again it is not so effective without reliable IP obfuscation, as the payee will reveal himself on spending.
...competition is good. We'll get the best bang for our buck if bcn and drk devs make the best anon coin available.
