Quote from: stonehedge on January 28, 2015, 04:23:14 PM

Quote from: kazuki49 on January 28, 2015, 03:49:04 PM

XMR.
- OK, now we're getting to something different. Completely anonymous, untracable transactions. This is worth a lot. This is what people think bitcoin has but it doesn't. If bitcoin had this, it would be worth a lot more.

DRK.
- Anonymity Does not work.

Fixed it for you OP.

Good bounties paid for exploits/vulnerabilities found in DRK. Prove yourself and contact the lead dev and explain how the anonymity doesn't work. If you're right, you'll make some money.

It uses a fundamentally broken architecture, and there is no way to fix that except abandon the architecture. Here's a quote from a post I made the other day:

Quote from: fluffypony on January 27, 2015, 09:52:19 AM

1. We don't even need an attacker with the NSA's scope. Law enforcement like the FBI can easily get the legal right to wiretap masternodes. Many of these masternodes run on virtualised machines, which means the hosting provider can snoop the OS status and memory. Virtually all of them could be under the purview of LEA, and thus long-term monitoring would be invisible.

2. Over and above that, there's massive incentive for masternode operators to make extra money by selling access to their logs. Not every operator is a rational actor, not every operator is a libertarian.

3. As long as operators earn based on what they process there will be an incentive for masternode operators to attack each other. This is a classic case of Prisoner's Dilemma.

The most concerning is 3, as there really is little that can be done to fix that. You can't evenly split rewards, as then there's no longer an incentive for a masternode to be honest (not that there's much incentive for that right now). When this has been mentioned before the knee-jerk reaction is "they'll never do that!" However, one need only take a look at how Bitcoin mining pools operate to see that this is a very real problem. Two references that make for good reading are: Ittay Eyal's "The Miner's Dilemma", and the paper "When Bitcoin Mining Pools Run Dry" by Aron Laszka et. al. This is, of course, quite a well-known issue amongst those in the know: 1, 2, 3

Those #bitcoin-wizards logs are particularly telling. If cryptocurrency researchers can even see the gaping flaws in the architecture then you have a "looks like a duck" scenario. No amount of talking around it will make the fundamentally flawed architecture disappear, and layering complexity on top of the architecture is just going to create a false sense of security, "security through obscurity" as it were.

The Darkcoin developer may be a real nice guy, but he's obviously not a cryptographer. Finding flaws in the actual code is largely irrelevant when the architecture is fundamentally flawed. And if any masternode operator thinks they're somehow impervious, need I point to yesterday's GHOST bug as revealed by Qualys Labs. To quote: "During our testing, we developed a proof-of-concept in which we send a specially created e-mail to a mail server and can get a remote shell to the Linux machine. This bypasses all existing protections (like ASLR, PIE and NX) on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems." Incidentally, this bug has existed since 2000! So we have to start at the assumption that all masternodes are trivially compromised or knocked offline, which means that the architecture is fundamentally broken.

Monero, on the other hand, needs no peers to be online to be able to obscure your transaction. You can completely disconnect from the Internet, and you'll have a utxoset that you can use for mixing the inputs on your transaction. This is apples and pears we're talking about, and I mean that without being disrespectful to the work that has gone in to Darkcoin.