It's like those on the monero team are the 160 IQ nerds and those on the darkcoin team are the half retarded bill boos.

When reading the posts, Fluffypony comes off as someone who is giving both sides of the story simultaneously. Doesn't seem one sided at all to me. It's just that Darkcoin has no attributes and nothing going for it tech wise, so it's getting destroyed that way in conversation. It's like those on the monero team are the 160 IQ nerds and those on the darkcoin team are the half retarded bill boos.

What a silly post.

Nobody from the DRK team has posted AFAIK, so your point is invalid.

Fluffypony is clearly a very smart guy and has made some great contributions to the discussion. However, he was highly critical of Darksend based on a flawed understanding and also made some rather odd claims about masternode security requirements. His core argument around compromising the masternode network was based on gaining control of a number of nodes that he couldn't quantify, meaning he couldn't demonstrate whether such an attack would be practical.

What a silly post.

Nobody from the DRK team has posted AFAIK, so your point is invalid.

Fluffypony is clearly a very smart guy and has made some great contributions to the discussion. However, he was highly critical of Darksend based on a flawed understanding and also made some rather odd claims about masternode security requirements. His core argument around compromising the masternode network was based on gaining control of a number of nodes that he couldn't quantify, meaning he couldn't demonstrate whether such an attack would be practical.

because if it's impractical to mount such an attack, it won't be mounted...

The mere existence of an attack vector is a concern if you're attempting to build a robust system to defend against motivated and deep pocketed attackers.

Even though I believe XMR's privacy implementation to be an order of magnitude more secure than DRK's, I still wouldn't trust XMR against an NSA-level adversary. At least not yet.

Last year the Monero network was hit by one of the most sophisticated attacks ever seen in crypto (at least according to TacoTime). The idea that an NSA-level adversary could not silently compromise masternodes or defeat darksend through statistical analysis is just absurd.

If you're trying to protect your privacy from your neighbor, sure. Darksend is probably sufficient. However, If you're concerned about illegal activity or government level adversaries, no anon tech is ready for that (yet).

TLDR: "good enough" is never good enough when it comes to three-letter agencies. It's gotta be air tight.

So I guess I'll get this thing started.

The problem that i see with dark is not necessarily whether it works or not. This criticism applies even if it does work. My big problem, and the reason I didn't buy it a long time ago even though I was shopping for anonymity focused projects, is that its just so god damn inelegant. Its like instead of approaching the problem from a fresh perspective and inventing something novel and clever, the devs decided to take the whack a mole approach. You whack the first problem over the head with a blunt instrument, this creates more problems, and you whack those over the head with another bunt instrument, thus creating more problems. The way i picture it in my head, and we see this in cartoons sometimes, someone is trying to stop a hose from spraying so they stick their thumb in the hole, the pressure builds up and water sprays out of another hole somewhere, and they stick their toe in that hole, then water erupts from somewhere else and they stick their other thumb in that hole. This is all I could picture in my head while hearing a description of dark for the first time.

Its just so god damned ugly. Maybe it works, but even if it does it's a vulgar solution to the problem, where as ring signatures and unlikable deterministic addresses is so beautiful and elegant and simple. Reading the white paper for the first time I was just struck with the beauty and elegance of the approach.

That's really all I have to say. Also I just want to put this here. My nomination for dark mascot.



Successfully keeping the juice contained since 2014, one eye patch and glass eye at a time.

*edit* let me add a better explanation of why i made this comment so people dont think im just name calling.

Coins need to be mixed so you guys implement coinjoin at the protocol level. But then you cant just have every random user hosting coinjoin sessions because then you would open an attack vector for troll coinjoin hosts so you make master nodes. But then you cant just have anyone joining in the coinjoin because you could dos by requesting transactions but not signing so you implement the idea of collateral to be part of the session. But then now you have no incentive for the masternodes to form so you give them part of the collateral. It wouldnt be mixed enough if you did this at the transaction level so you have the blockchain tumbling peoples coins all the time. This is ridiculously expensive so you greatly subsidize the darksend transactions inorder to hide the huge cost of anonymity in your system. Now you have to worry about people trying to send transactions to each other through darksend so you have to try to come up with some clever mechanism to avoid this problem.

so what do you think guys. this thread will be a success if it managed to redirect some of the debate in our respective threads. is it a success? have you dark boys noticed a reduction in anti dark coin rhetoric in your thread since the creation of this thread? monero boys, have you noticed a reduction in anti monero rhetoric in your thread? just curious.

- Online as in hosted online, not necessarily on an external server, used the wrong words there

- Taking control of 100% of nodes online, especially since most of them are hosted on places like Amazon, would be an extremely easy task, it wouldn't even cost the government any money

You're acting as if it's secure to host nodes online that deliver something as crucial to the network as darkcoins coinjoin "anon feature". Heads up, it's not. I'm even actually having a hard time thinking of a "decentralized system" less secure than darkcoins masternodes.