Topic: XMR vs DRK (Read 69755 times)

Monero uses a combination of ring signatures and stealth address which is provably anonymous, unlinkable, and private.

Dark uses a broken version of CoinJoin disavowed by gmaxwell (inventor of CoinJoin).


Monero has never changed its emission schedule/block reward, even under pressure from some important people in the community.

Dark's actual early emission doesn't match any of its several purported reward schemes, which implies incompetence, malfeasance, or some combination thereof.

Can you (or Tok) point to a part of a cryptocurrency which isn't cryptography?

It would seem that you actually do not understand what cryptography is in the modern sense.

A fundamental nature of information is that it wants to be freely copied everywhere to everyone. That any bit is equal and indistinguishable from any other bit of the same value and that any bit is eventually known to all who care.  Cryptography is all that technology by which we hope to confine and constrain the nature of information, to put up fences and direct it to our exclusive purposes, against all attacks and in defiance of the seemingly (and perhaps actually) impossible.  Digital signatures are cryptography by any modern definition and utilize the same tools and techniques (for example, a DSA signature is a linear equation encrypted with an additively homorphic encryption), and suffer from most of the same challenges as the message encryption systems to which you seem to be incorrectly defining cryptography as equivalent.  Moreover, the use of digital signatures isn't the only (or even most relevant) aspect of cryptography in cryptocurrencies-- e.g. the prevention of double spending of otherwise perfectly copyable and indistinguishable information in a decentralized system is a cryptographic problem which we address using cryptographic tools, and-- like all other practical cryptography-- achieve far less than perfect confidence in our solution. As are more modest ends like interacting with strangers but not being subject to resource exhaustion from them.

Far more so than other sub-fields of engineering, cryptographic systems are doing something which is fundamentally at odds with nature and share an incredible fragility and subtly as a result (and perhaps all are failures, we have no proof otherwise).

A failure to understand and respect these considerations has resulted in a lot of harmful garbage and dysfunctional software.

@OP

I would be interested in adding to the discussion thread header:

XMR vs DRK vs Zerocash

I appreciate that this is a self moderated thread. I also appreciate the risk that there might be a bias towards XMR.

However, Zerocash, while currently not alive, adds an interesting dimension to all existing anon projects.

I am obviously inviting a critique of DRKs anon credentials from XMR supporters by using the words 'anon', but I hope we can see past that for a second to discuss the implications of a valid launch of Zerocash and what that would mean for XMR, DASH and all anon projects.

It may mean nothing, or might be significant.

My wish to introduce Zerocash into the equation is that it poses, in theory, a credible threat to both projects. So a discussion about XMR vs. DRK might be irrelevant in the not too distant future.

If there is no desire to discuss it here, perhaps I might start another thread at some point.