Multipools hop between coins and mine the most profitable one at any given time. The idea is to sell for BTC.

The trouble comes about because they're huge (10+ GH/s) and when they hop onto a tiny coin, the difficulty spikes for that coin. Difficulty is how long it takes to solve blocks, i.e. make the network progress over time. Eventually the multipool hops to another coin and leaves the old coin with a huge difficulty. The small mining community has a hard time progressing and is basically "stuck".

All in ! Except for a bit of BTC all is DRK around me now. This one is a keeper. I think.....

I created a small wiki for french speaking community explaining Darkcoin.
It still need work but I think we can spread the coin knowledge with it.

http://wiki.darkcoin.fr

I will try to have the Linux part done today.

Hate to bring this up again but I don't think the name really matters in the long run. General users will probably call all cryptocurrencies Bitcoin if they ever bring up a transaction in conversation. It will be the Hoover or Kleenex of crypto. They'll say, "I paid with Bitcoin" even if they used DarkCoin or LiteCoin.

It will just be a brand name to them and they'll use the one that best suits their needs. If they don't like their transactions being public knowledge, I think they'll use DarkCoin, otherwise they'll use Bitcoin.

Quote from email:


Lotterymining.com is ddos protected, stop wasting your time again!

can we please change the coin name to rainbowcoin?

and we could call the sgminer mylittleponyminer

I'm glad this is being discussed, because I agree with others that it's a genuine drawback of the coin and will limit its use. If it's going to be rebranded, better sooner than later.

I think both sides have good points. For some products, branding really doesn't matter in the long run because once the product is ingrained into public consciousness, the name becomes irrelevant. Facebook is a crappy name, but that doesn't matter a bit now that it's everywhere.

Darkcoin's case is a little different. We're going to face an uphill battle for public acceptance. We're going to be smeared by the media. People are not going to be generous and look for positive interpretations of the name. Every other news article is going to mention the possibility reality of illicit activities conducted under the cloak of darksend. The public will form their opinion on us based on the name alone. Essentially, anything ambiguously dark & shady in our branding puts us on the back foot with these challenges.

I'm thinking long term here. What will a large retailer feel that a "darkcoin accepted here" logo on their site will do to their image? What are our devs going to have to deal with from the media?

I think the key point is that much of this is largely avoidable simply by creating appropriate branding. As distasteful as it is for us (given that we obviously aren't judging the coin by superficial word associations), marketing for the public is still important if we care about the future of the coin. We don't want to needlessly limit darkcoin to a niche of cryptocurrency geeks and anti-authoritarian types.

My 2 satoshis.

Well spotted. Eduffield has said the encrypted blockchain was an originally planned feature, but it may or may not be implemented. Since it's not a definite part of the spec I suggested we take it off the OP. DarkSend is a separate feature and doesn't rely on it.