No. I am not going to seek this clarification precisely because of my investment in XMR. It would be very wrong on ethical and possibly legal grounds. No this clarification should be sought by someone who is invested in DRK and can make a good case that the masternodes are not MSBs

One critical difference is the minimum capital requirement to set up a DRK masternode. This is fundamentally different from the XBT, XMR LTC etc cases. To a regulator this smacks of the minimum capital requirement to set up a bank.

Yet said capital isn't used other than allowing one to setup a masternode. Those funds serve no other purpose then reserving your right to run a node. You're not posting capital in order to collateralize funds through your "business".

IHMO sooner or later the minimum capital requirement will be droped anyway(, if DarkCoin goes big).

And while running a node you qualify for MN reward portion of block reward, but if you go under 1000 DRK you no longer are eligible for that block reward..... so you're kinda posting capital in order to collateralize funds.

indeed, from https://www.darkcoin.io/about/what-is-darkcoin/masternodes-and-proof-of-service/

"In order to run a Masternode, a user must put up 1000 DRK as something akin to collateral, though unlike traditional collateral, the DRK never leaves the user’s possession. It can be moved or spent at any time by the user – doing so simply removes the Masternode from service and makes it ineligible to receive rewards."

but here we are in a monero thread devolving into a DRK thread.

( FYI, psychedelik.com dark channel is hittin it right now. No connection to DRK. )

DRK is not money. BTC is at best a commodity.

Case (unfortunately) closed?

No. Crypto-currencies starting with XMR are money. There is already a legal precedent in the United States when Trendon Shavers aka Pirateat40 argued that very point in court against the US Government and lost. I for one would argue that XMR is money in Canada for the purposes of the Excise Tax Act. http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-15/. Why because of this:


Bold my emphasis. The implication is that there is no GST payable on XMR. The same argument can be made for any crypto- currency. By the way this legislation dates from the late 1980's but unlike the Australian case it was drafted properly. In the EU we see how more and more jurisdictions are coming to the sensible conclusion of treating crypto-currecncy as money for the purposes of VAT. So regulating DRK masternodes as MSBs is a small price to pay to avoid paying GST or VAT on XMR, XBT or DRK for that matter.

Edit: Treating crypto-currencies a money has a profound consequence in any jurisdiction that has a GST or VAT. With the notable exception of the United States that is the world's strongest economies.

Maybe, but there are many examples where the superior technology simply lost. The current reality is that DRK has over 7x the capitalization and 20x the volume. So unless the message of the superior XMR privacy technology gets out it could be to late. The reality is that XMR has many advantages over DRK including:

1) No regulatory risk over the centralized masternodes.
 
2) No 1 MB blocksize limit. DRK to my knowledge has not addressed the issue of the 1 MB blocksize limit that is currently plaguing XBT.

3) No Proof of Stake attack vector. Many think of DRK as a Proof of Work coin. This is true as far as transactions but not privacy. Privacy is secured by what amounts to a form of Proof of Stake. There is a reason for the 1000 DRK capital requirements for masternodes. So yes the "Second Pirate Savings and Trust" attack on proof of stake I describe in this post https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/897488.msg10182752#msg10182752 is actually possible against DRK. Where the attacker uses borrowed stake to create a large number of malicious masternodes.

For 1 and 3 above XMR wins because of the use of ring signatures and a single user level set of nodes
For 2 XMR again wins because of adaptive limits.

The technical superiority of XMR is clear; however the market on the other hand is currently sending a different message. One interesting aspect here is that DRK requires a significant percentage of DRK to be tied up in the masternodes, These coins are not available to the market. This of course is not the case with XMR.

You have no idea how hard it will be to borrow coins and/or trade derivatives in a more mature market where ownership is distributed and investors are shopping for yield. Right now you have a relatively small number of early adopters hoarding coins and stashing them in masternodes for yield, but as the market matures that won't be the case.

The technical superiority of Monero isn't really in question. Here's what the inventor of CoinJoin had to say about it (Monero is a fork/fair-relaunch of Bytecoin):

"The privacy achieved by Bytecoin is better than any existing-in-production privacy tools (e.g. CoinJoin) and also as good as or better than every theoretical system I've heard proposed except for Zerocash."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7766161

Nevertheless ArticMine makes a good point that technical superiority doesn't always prevail.

20x the volume is not typical, there was just unusually high volume in the past 24 hours for DRK, but the same has happened with XMR on occasion. According to btcwisdom the 30 day numbers are currently 6251 and 1360, which is <5x.