Over on the XMR vs DRK thread I'm having a nice civilised debate with fluffypony, XMR dev - seems like a nice guy and argues very well for the technical merits of his coin.
We covered the point of blockchain bloat, an oft cited weakness in Monero vs Darkcoin. He had this response:
"Darkcoin has a ton of bloat. In fact, if you compare a set of DarkSend transactions with a Monero transaction at a high mixin of, say, 20 you will notice that Monero's reduced scripting size makes it quite a bit smaller. If Darkcoin users start using DarkSend all the time instead of just occasionally you will experience phenomenal bloat."
Can anyone comment on this?
Evan has already talked about a way to reduce the size of the blockchain by abbreviating transactions. You can listen his explanation in the last interview he gave in Let's Talk Bitcoin:
https://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-196-distortions-towards-privacy-or-many-hands-makes-light-workBrief explanation:
Let's say you have an input that was sent from A to B, then from B to C, and finally from C to D. That is three transactions that get into the blockchain, but the only relevant thing to check for the validity of any subsequent transaction is to know that the funds are in D, so the three transactions could be summarized to from A to D. Than can be done in the masternodes, that would host a pruned version of the blockchain and a full one, to avoid losing history in case it is needed. Clients will likely be able to chose which one to use, but the specifics still need to be worked out.
Btw, that comparison was not very fair to start with. Right now, Darkcoin users don't always use Darksend, so that IF at the beginning of the sentence is very important. In the future that may change, but by then we will have the pruning mechanism, so it should not be a big deal.
yep i know about the planned features, but a lot of the XMR bashing is on today's implementation, not some future hypothetical implementation....
OK, so the reality is that if DRK is used as a fully anon coin it has the same/worse bloat problems as XMR, but because the anon is optional and hardly anyone's using it there isn't a bloat problem today.
this being the case it seems unfair to bash XMR for bloat, although maybe i'm missing something.
either way I hope the planned solution resolves the issue for DRK.