need some help, please.
I read read up on the darkcoin dev history threads that the master nodes are useful to provide random mixing. the price of having a node is to make it costly to game the network. the anonymity is not native, that is a given.
They also have ring signatures, I2P and IP obfuscation planned. Not sure that some of this will actually work with the master node network.
Before I put any more into MRO, will MRO be able to convince people invested in darkcoin to switch away or attract new investors given the exposure darkcoin is having?
The perception of "costly" is very different for you and me vs. a large entity (a company or a government). If they want to game it, they can and will. Altcoin markets are so tiny in the grand scheme of things that even rich individuals can game it. Another thing to note is that the vast majority of masternodes are in various VPS services (http://drk.poolhash.org/darksend.html). Amazon by itself is over 40% of all masternodes and another called OVH is about 25%. We already know tech companies give data to governments without notifying us. So even an honest individual might be running a masternode keeping logs.
Also, promising ring signatures is very different from delivering it. Darkcoin developers aren't professional cryptographers. Copy-pasting CryptoNote code into the BTC code and trying to fix it is probably a hopeless endeavor. If they ever did manage to get their own implementation, my concern is that the market will crash when several hundred thousand DRK locked up in masternodes enters the supply. Hopefully they'll find a way out of this (if they try to go down this path).
There's definitely scope for marketplace competition between multiple implementations in the privacy sphere. It would be pretty boring if everyone adopted ring signatures.
Though we still need a nice GUI and pools.
