I've had some substantial progress on DarkSend and have figured out how to make our existing system as secure as ring signatures. Vastly improved security, no bloat (from the ring signatures) and without actually having to trust new cryptography (it hasn't been extensively tested like what DarkSend uses) . So I think it'll give us a HUGE advantage in the coming months. More to come soon, I'm going to start implementing this tomorrow.
Looks like Darkcoin won't be implementing ring signatures, awesome! Monero will remain a unique competitor.
My bet is that the devs looked at it, realized they were in way too deep, and then put out some PR bullshit.
Too obvious.
By the way, as pointed out by gmaxwell, CoinJoin is already available in Bitcoin. The only difference is that this CoinJoin is run by Amazon instead of blockchain.info.
I doubt he's just making this up.
No but at the same time he appears somewhat jaundiced with anything not Bitcoin. Apparently he had not heard of Monero which is very strange and then goes on to call QCN as a fairer fork. Come on, we all saw and know that is a big bag of BS
The fork also can't claim to be roses and sunshine wrt fairness: As someone very interested in privacy technology and as someone who is usually near the hub of technical discussion in the Bitcoin system, I'd never heard of that fork until just recently— nearly a month after it's start. And… has a very fast coin distribution, and was started with a difficulty much lower than the network could support. A lot could have been done to improve fairness (e.g. fixing the subsidy to a low level at least until the difficulty crossed the level where the prior system was, or setting the minimum difficulty to a good fraction of the achieved rate), promoting it outside of pools of altcoin speculators (e.g. why do I hear about zerocash 100,000 times for every time I hear about this stuff?), etc. Not that I think that any of the altcoin stuff is advisable, but if you're going to make a fork on the virtue of fairness wouldn't it behoove you to actually be fair?
And, of course, the fork has now also been forked. That one at least tames the insanely fast distribution somewhat... but it too doesn't fix any of the worse parts... I can only imagine that we're going to continue to see once a month forks of that stuff— suits me fine, while the technology is interesting and useful, the speculative churn is not.
He someone manages to criticize the MRO distribution curve as "insanely fast" but ignores that BCN, which he is running around praising, is twice as fast as MRO (in addition to the two year premine head start). Honestly I don't think he's paying that much attention to the details, just sees some good ideas. The general view of anything not-bitcoin among the most of the bitcoin crowd is that they are all shitcoins. Most of the time they are right, so you can't entirely blame them.