Topic: XMR vs DRK - page 57. (Read 69755 times)

I don't know...anyone?

what a silly post...how has a pump been orchestrated?

So after 14 pages of discussion, I think a conclusion can be drawn now. I'm a bitcoiner, and this is one of the few times I will have posted in the altsection(Yes this is a newbie because I don't want to be involved with such things on my main account). This thread and the "war" between the alts drk and xmr has caught my attention and below are my conclusions.

Monero: A coin with a pretty damn sophisticated dev team, they are practically geniuses. fair, and hardworking. The coin has drawn attention not just from other alternative cryptocurrenncy enthusiasts, but from those in the main bitcoin community and outside the crypto community as well. It offers the haven between transparency and anonymity with it's Ring Signatures, which is a time tested, highly secure way to send and receive anonymous transactions, and is one of the most practical cryptocurrencies to use for such reasons.

Monero gets 5/5 stars.

Dash/Darkcoin: A coin with a very disturbing instamine where those who mined within the very first few hours attained a absolutely massive amount of coins illegitimately. That issue has never been fixed even though the opportunity presented itself for Dash/Darkcoin's developer to simply "restart" the coin, leading to the conclusions that the instamine was done on purpose by the developer of Dash/Darckoin, or comes from extreme incompetence by the developer of Dash/Darkcoin. Instamine aside, the masternode scheme itself presents a new problem, where masternodes are PoS nodes that receive coins for hardly contributing to Dash/Darkcoin's network, unlike mining where miners verify transactions and secure the hashrate. Then there is the centralization issue from the developer of Dash/Darkcoin where he possesses a "switch" to revoke or implement forks without the community's consent should he ever wish to. Ultimately, Darkcoin is vaporware, it's implementation of gmaxwell's coinjoin is snotty at best and lacks the integrity through it's instamine and Masternodes to be considered a "decent" coin.

Dash/Darkcoin gets 2/5 stars(Would be 1/5 but I have to give credit for the coding that has been done so far).

For which real world cases is Darksend not secure enough?

I do have an XMR position, but only like 10% of my DRK holdings so barely a hedge.

What I'm questioning about XMR is time-to-market and the real-world necessity of the ultra-robust tech. If DRK is fit-for-purpose in the majority of real-world use cases and gets over the line first in terms of adoption and scalability, where does that leave XMR?

Not at all. Quantifying a threat model requires you have a model in the first place.

I have a reasonable idea of how Darksend works, both from what Kristov Atlas wrote when he was reviewing it and from subsequent replies and discussions. I have also read the whitepaper, although the current implementation is quite different from the whitepaper's. I have looked at the code in brief, but (again) I have neither the time nor the inclination to study and document the code, and from that produce a model that has quantifiable risk.

I'm not sure which words or phrases you're struggling with, but where a word has a specific meaning I do try and expound on it (eg. our discussion of cryptographic negligibleness earlier in this thread). I don't see a need to dumb down what I'm saying, unless you mean to imply that Darkcoin users are so dumb they can't understand what I'm saying...in which case I disagree with you, as thus far you're the only person to have an issue with it.

With regards to your final statement, I can only highlight some of the many instances where I've gone so far as to tell profit-seeking investors NOT to buy Monero: http://log.bitcoin-assets.com/?date=11-12-2014#951020 - it's not an investment vehicle, it's a cryptocurrency. Similarly, David Latapie and myself did a 3 hour, 45 minute, interview with Doged Radio, and even the host noticed that we didn't launch into a recommendation that anyone buy Monero. If you have some time it's worth a listen, even though it takes a little while to get going: https://www.mixcloud.com/dogedradio/monero-coin-interview/

I want to say my sincerest congratulations on drk community for orchestrating a massive pump. It was fast. Very good pick, man! However, the profits are not yours unless you do not succeed to sell at right time and buy something undervalued and build it up, too. I am suggesting Monero.

you admit xmr team is building rock solid stuff. I am suggesting for you now as drk prise has risen significiantly to cash some (not all) of your drk and diversifying into xmr. After all the crypto is like a raffle and it is good to have some variety in portfolio in case some coin rises significiantly.

i guess if we're talking 'right-now' utility, then the off-chain anon....some markets are accepting DRK and you can use Darksend to mix coins for whatever purpose.

instant transactions are working but need merchant adoption...depends how you define 'real-world' utility on that one. Instant TX obviously has plenty of utility, once adopted.

how do you see the features of DRK & XMR stacking up over time?

Can you send from a mobile phone with darksend? If not it's useless (the answer is: no). Meanwhile you can do that with Monero already.

So what are those real-world utility features?

Interesting responses, thank you.

It seems with XMR you are striving to build a super-robust anon coin, prioritising quality over time-to-market. Is that fair?

Meanwhile DRK seems to be focused on rapid development and implementation of headline-grabbing features with real-world utility. The privacy/anon falls short of XMR, but is it good enough? The masternode network presents an interesting attack surface, but are the security measures adequate versus realistic attacks?

Essentially, is DRK fit-for-purpose?

It's great if you can make a better coin, but if DRK gets over the line for the majority of real-world use-cases and gets to market first....know what I mean?

"Unfortunately it's hard to quantify without a mathematical expression of the model, especially without a great deal of familiarity with the inner-workings of the system at present"

So that' s a flowery way of saying you have no idea because you don't know how DRK works LOL.

Q: Why don't you write in plain English

A: Monero investors like to be baffled with BS like this before being puckered into the Polo trollbox and subsequent XMR buy

Unfortunately it's hard to quantify without a mathematical expression of the model, especially without a great deal of familiarity with the inner-workings of the system at present. It also stands to reason that the level of analysis required to properly document and model the system would require a very motivated (money, inclination, whatever) cryptographer, which I am not (as in not really a cryptographer, nor particularly inclined:) )


Oh I totally get it now! Sure, as a stop-gap solution it presents a risk to a motivated attacker. To be honest, and this is not to be overly pragmatic, we haven't even implemented the changes recommended in MRL-0004 yet, so Monero isn't yet at a level where I would feel comfortable recommending it to someone who transactional privacy is a life-or-death scenario. Once we've implemented the MRL4 changes, and have our hybrid i2p/ip layer running, that will decrease the remaining risk areas (as we see them) to "negligible" levels. Although security and privacy is an ongoing process, so we're never going to stop researching and theorising attacks against Monero, and doing what is necessary to protect our users.

At some stage, when I get the time for it, I'm going to build a very aggressive and malicious Monero testnet node (ala Chaos Monkey), and permanently run an army of them on testnet, to force us to build more anti-fragility into Monero.

OK, people have been saying you'd need to control the entire network with blinding in place, or at least an unrealistic portion.

what weighting do you think is realistic to perform extrapolation and gain sufficient control?



OK, well we are frequently hearing 'no GUI wallet for XMR is no problem because we have mymonero' yet this is centralised and subject to attack. That's all really, and if this is a temporary issue then fair enough.

There is - blinding just changes the weight of the MN network you need to monitor. You don't need to be able to observe the entire MN network, just enough of it that extrapolation is possible. This is somewhat similar to the cascading privacy failure described in MRL-0001 - since you've got an ongoing observance of transactions going through the MasterNodes you control you will be able to infer more and more information. The attack MRL-0001 describes is a little different, as it requires sufficient control over outputs (there are currently 12.44 million mixable outputs on the Monero blockchain) vs. sufficient control of ~2000 MasterNodes, but the principle of it cascading forward is the same.


MyMonero is only used by a portion of users. The majority of the users will use Monero Core or one of the alternative wallets: https://getmonero.org/getting-started/choose

Forgive me, but I'm still not fully understanding the thread model you're trying to describe. If an attacker took MyMonero offline all the users would still be able to import their MyMonero wallets into simplewallet just be restoring it from their seed (this is recent functionality not merged into master until we've cleaned it up, but the interoperability is there and could be finalised and merged in a couple of hours if MyMonero disappeared). If an attacker compromised MyMonero they could serve up malformed JavaScript to compromise all of the users, but they'd only be able to game a portion of the network. As more clients are created and released for Monero (eg. other web-based alternatives to MyMonero, other GUI clients besides MoneroX / lightWallet / MoneroQT, service-centric clients such as rpcwallet and so on) the risk reduces.

The most important thing for a coin is a network-effect. Tech should work but it is kind of secondary. you can have a brilliant tech but without users it is pretty much worthless.
We have seen that many coins that are more sophisticated (for instance, worldcoin and other of those fast coins) than bitcoin have not been able to compete with btc because bitcoin has by far the largest userbase.
Bullish trendline helps creating the network effect.
On the other hand, if the trendline is too bullish, it might also distract some users who feel it is going to bubble. I am afraid Darkcoin has too high speed in rising. Look at Monero, it is rising much more steadily and it feels therefore it actually can last for years.
There is one altcoin that has also very slow rising trend and it very rarely dumps big time (Unobtanium). Sure the community is small but they are able to keep the coin price in bullish channel due to not pumping it too fast.
On the other hand, Monero is by no means not expensive coin - it is actually a bargain at this moment. Marketcap is only ~ 5 million usd and it is slowly rising (I remember it was close to 1.5-2 million usd at some point).

My advice for DRK holders is to diversify. Do not hold all eggs in the same basket. There are tons of risk factors in Dark (also Monero has risks). Be prudent and diversify. We welcome all the new guys from Dark Community to pariticipate Monero's community. Do it before it is too late and the dumping start - be smart.  

edit: whoops quoted wrong post!

thanks....it would be nice if all the trolls and fanboys could fall back and we just talk about the issues constructively...unfortunately there's money at stake, and money talks

i know i've been a bit angry/provocative in a few posts, but will leave that behind now to concentrate on reasonable discussion.

thanks for that explanation.

if i understand masternode blinding right, its more to protect IPs from darksend clients, so if you make a darksend it will be relayed trough the masternodes, and so the masternode couldn't tell which ip originally has participated.

So if you get access to the MN you can still spy the transactions.

at least thats how i understand it

@majamina:

Just wanted to thank you for keeping the debate alive and "representing" the Dash case so well!
Also thanks to all the civilized XMR people!
It`s an interesting debate!