I've been somewhat offline but my understanding is that the current plan is to use one of the leveldb forks. The last estimate I saw was at least several months at current usage (after pool fix) to even reach the BCN blockchain size so no immediate urgency to deploy a database but there is urgency to work on it and that work is proceeding.

Most computers cannot use XMR without a database, because the chain doesn't fit in memory.  I'd consider that urgent.  Not urgent enough to do it wrong, however.

I repeat:

You just admitted that DRK is centralized and Masternodes are vulnerable to attack. Trustless CryptoNote protocol makes DRK tech obsolete.

That's after the market discovered Dark.

Growing marketcap => media attention.

The sequence of your argument is wrong.

It didn't go "let's hype DRK" as some kind of marketing strategy => sites/media attention.

It went "whale buyers" => growing marketcap => market attention => media attention.

By the time the media had taken notice, the action had already taken place. The premise that DRK was based on hype is false. The other premise that DRK was pumped by its community is false. There are even accusations that DRK was pumped (in terms of market) by the DRK community with ...fake buys and sells. Anything imaginable has been said about DRK by the wannabe-DRKs.


Lying? Lol.

The argument here is simple. If the "privacy" is good for all cases except an adversary like the NSA, and this applies for both DRK and BCN-clones, then what difference does it make to the average joe who wants to conceal his transactions? The NSA can still find him but all the rest can't. So the "superior anonymity" is of little tangible benefit if it can't take it up past the final barrier.

Imagine the following scenario where a table is presented with something like the following:

DRK vs BCN:

Are transactions transparent to ordinary people? [no] [no]
Are transactions transparent to advanced analysis by knowledgeable people? [no] [no]
Are transactions transparent to pattern recognition? [no] [no]
Are transactions transparent to 99% of the governments out there? [no] [no]
Are transactions transparent to the NSA? [yes] [yes]

So the "superior anonymity" issue goes out the window in this case.

The game changing aspect is if you lock NSA out of the game, changing the last answer to [yes] for DRK and [no] for the other coin. And it'll be even better if one manages to make the transactions NSA-proof for the equipment that NSA will have in the next 10-20-30 years - instead of the current one. Kind of like

Will the current transactions be transparent to the NSA in a few decades? [no]

As for the "easily buy all nodes" part, there's a tremendous price increase as liquidity dries up in the market. It's not that easy as you make it sound. There's a different price per node for 100 masternodes, 1000 masternodes and 4400 masternodes (4.4mn DRKs in circulation). The acquisition of an increasing percentage will make the marketcap skyrocket to billions pretty fast. From a game theory perspective that won't work for the NSA as it would also have to do it for all coins which then adopt and implement DarkSend nodes. This means they can't afford billions per coin to buy nodes. They need a different game plan.


The scaling issue is inherent in the design.

In my assessment of the market segments, the claim of superior anonymity does not translate to real-world adoption due to the list of [no] and [yes] I mentioned earlier.

Unless a coin can actually provide NSA-proof anonymity for the more paranoid anti-government type people, the real-world advantage of CN coins is non-existant. If one is private for all intents and purposes except for an adversary like NSA (whether using DRK or CN-tech) then the choice will depend on other factors like usability, compatibility, etc. That's my conclusion anyway.

CN must push to NSA-proof levels of anonymity to take the edge. But to do that, they'll also have to implement an NSA-proof IP obfuscation tool, which is easier said than done.


If the CN protocol can't scale, it's technological superiority is DoA. We need a scaling assessment with an excel sheet that portrays network behavior of various CN-based coins under 10-100-1000 transactions per specified time segment, instead of speculation. We also need to measure the impact in terms of GBs bloat and extrapolate future scaling issues with various adoption % scenarios.


Traders are always in and out all the time anyway. That's of no concern. Holders are the main concern... Why would holders "jump" when they get very high ROI for their coins through masternodes?

Tell it to coiledcoin.

Don't you understand that growing 2:1 with virtually no tx's compared to BTC (100-1000tx per block) is a problem?

For starters - Bytecoin is a scam via it's famous pre-mine/instamine. It doesn't take much digging to find that.