Quote from: fluffypony on March 24, 2015, 10:23:18 PM

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

The way I see it there is no completely perfect solution to the problem of how to handle decentralised trustless value transfer systems.

Nobody's claiming they have a perfect system.

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

On one hand you have XMR and all the other countless cryptonote clone coins which while an interesting experiment into anonymity have proven over the last year or so to be unworkable as mass adoption value transfer systems.

By "countless" you mean 23, most of which have been abandoned?

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

the main stumbling blocks of the Cryptonote clones is is the blockchain bloat that completely rules out mass adoption. if XMR had BTC levels of usage the blockchain bloat would render it unusable overnight.

How many BTC users do you know that run a full node? Do *you* run a full node? No, you use Electrum or BreadWallet or Blockchain.info. Why would Monero be any different? Why would it be "unusable overnight" for all of the MyMonero.com users?

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

The second problem is that the ring signatures are exploitable under certain circumstances so the likelihood of serious development taking place to find a solution to the bloat issue is severely reduced.

Ring signatures are not "exploitable" on any level under the random oracle model. Given the level we're having this conversation on it's clear you aren't knowledgeable enough about cryptography to grok this, but I'll say it anyway: Monero has proof that the ring signatures are impossible to double-spend, are exculpable (ie. funds cannot be stolen by other members of a particular ring, including the "real" signatory), are unforgeable (cannot be faked), and are anonymous. Since you've made the accusation I won't take on the role of the common Darkcoin cultist and say "put up or shut up!", I'll instead show you what burden of proof means (and this is literally taken straight from the whitepaper) -

Proof of double-spend protection:

Proof of exculpability:

Proof of unforgeability:

Proof of anonymity:

The burden of proof is on Monero, and there is the proof. Now do the same for Darkcoin, please.

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

Why would any professional developer spend the required time to fix the bloat issue if there are other fundamental issues regarding the anonymity provided by the ring signature system?

Fixing the bloat "problem" isn't on our agenda right now. We can achieve linear reductions in blockchain size through various schemes, but none of them make a particularly large impact. If anything we will implement a lightweight wallet that uses a bloom-filter-like approach to tell full nodes which set of viewkeys its interested in, and then left those nodes do the heavy lifting. In fact, we can offer a lightweight pruned blockchain right now by only maintaining a limited set of blocks as well as the txoset and the key image set, which will give you a fully operational Monero node that needs less than 1/10th of the current blockchain space. That tooling is premature, though, as there are other priorities (eg. headers-first sync up) before we can focus on that.

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

the final nail in the coffin for mass adoption of cryptonote derived coins is the fact that merchant adoption is hampered significantly by the fact that the API is incompatible with platforms developed for BTC, this means that to implement XMR payments a whole new payment platform would have to developed and tested which a huge an potentially disastrous proposition.

Same goes for Ripple, and they seem to be doing just fine without BTC compatibility. Also you'd do well to check the Merchant Additions section of our Design and Development Goals: https://getmonero.org/design-goals/ - you'll notice something just for you.

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

DRK/DASH on the other hand has none of the above issues and has the huge benefit of the 2 tier masternode system which is already nearly a year old and provides Instant transactions world leading levels of anonimization and the potential to support future services.

Bitcoin already has a 2-tier system: full nodes, and SPV clients. Even better: full nodes can do anything MasterNodes do, and they can be incentivised through micropayment channels. A choice quote from that blog post is: "If were going to have a free market for services between nodes on the Bitcoin P2P network, we need a mechanism via which the nodes can pay each other. This mechanism exists in Bitcoin now, and its called micropayment channels. Any two nodes can connect and they have this mechanism via which, if they can agree on who owes what to whom, they can construct a payment and they can adjust that payment as rapidly as they need to and settle it infrequently on the Bitcoin block chain."

It boggles my mind that Evan didn't design the protocol around micropayment channels, where every full node could be incentivised to mix transactions or vote on InstantX transactions or whatever. It would make the anonymity set so much larger.

Quote from: alz on March 24, 2015, 08:27:37 PM

here is an over view of the utterly unique revolutionary DRK value transfer system.

It's easy to bander the term "unique" around until you sit down and think about it:

- Darksend: a poor implementation of CoinJoin. To quote the actual inventor of CoinJoin (gmaxwell) on the topic of Darkcoin: "That other stuff was initially "hey this coinjoin stuff is great, we put it in an altcoin!" to which my result was "hey, idiots, the whole point of coinjoin was that it already worked in bitcoin. If you're talking about something incompatible there are much better approaches" ... and they've since gone off to do other things, but uh.. seemingly without a lot of thought in advance."

- InstantX: a clone of the GreenAddress instant Bitcoin transaction system, or more accurately a clone of Natanael L's "Secure zero-confirmation payments using temporary notarized P2SH multi signature wallets".

- Sporks: turns the Bitcoin alert key system into a remote kill switch that one person can use to disrupt the network at will. Awesome.

I must admit i have not read that wall of text.
And im not a math guru, but just by reading the following i have big questionmarks over my head. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

the following text in the monero whitepaper:
"to succed in the attack, an event whose probability is considered to be neglible" - sry like said im not a math guru, perhaps im wrong, but how could that be something valid proven. dunno if it was you or smooth but someone of you moneroguys liked to say over and over again that the anonymity of darksend has not been proven.
But isn't that exactly the same like if calculations for example say that to deanomyze a darksend transaction the probability is 0.00000000x if you don't own x or all masternodes. So its probability of this is neglible also and so its proven as anonym?!