Quote from: eltito on June 06, 2014, 08:11:36 AM

Well now that's not what I said at all, is it?

I couldn't figure out what you were saying, thats why I asked.

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You stated that indications were pointing more and more to the fact that Darksend is "substance-less vaporware", which I found odd in that the status of its code availability hasn't changed from the beginning. Which indications, exactly? Has it somehow become "more" closed source since the beginning?

Because not being open on (or even before, at least in the form of a clear technical whitepaper) day one is bad, but it only gets worse the longer it goes on.

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You said yourself that alt-coin land is a hive of scum and villainy (or something like that). What, exactly, do you think would have happened if Darksend had ben open source since day 1?

If it were open source and usable then presumably it would have been adopted. Even as an altcoin, if it were something good I'd speak positively of it... even if the system itself weren't open a clear description of the techniques it was using (like zerocash has) in a whitepaper would allow peer review and analysis of the techniques without the crappy competitive landscape of the altcoin ecosystem coming to play. Keep in mind though, 99% of the design of these things in 99% of the cases is straight up copied from Bitcoin. Before anyone is too territorial about their own precious inventions, they should keep in mind that they're just variations of a tune created by giants whos shoulders they're standing on something only possible because those people released their code and their designs instead of keeping them secret.

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Also, why must everything good (in your estimation, it would seem) come through Bitcoin?

Must wouldn't be the right word should would be more correct. In systems of money Metcalf's law applies much more strongly than in other things because the value of a money is derived exclusively from its liquidity and from people being willing to accept it. If our hope is that trustless cryptocurrencies are broadly successful, we undermine that effort if we disrupt their network effect over and over again by starting a brand new currency for this feature or that. It's like having to build a separate internet per program, madness. There is no technical justification for it... and it endangers the success of the entire field, at least to some extent. Some starry eyed folks think this is a revolution which cannot fail, I am more cynical than that. Doubly so when the frequent outright scams and failures discourage people from investing in infrastructure in the space.

If there are actual good things developed outside of Bitcoin, I'm happy to see them.

As an aside the "so and so has XYZ foocoin" assumptions might be pretty spurious, its completely reasonable for people to sell off large amounts of coins they have while they're nearly valueless if you have a lot and who knows what the future holds. I know this is true for most people who were involved in Bitcoin early on, it may well be true for other things. Or not.

Quote from: Bitcycle on June 06, 2014, 08:26:52 AM

Gmaxwell has made it very plain he does not like altcoins. He's stated it directly. I disagree with him on this point, and in fact I think it's quite dangerous to centralize on one coin with one set of developers.

Bitcoin does not have only one set of developers. There are several complete re-implementations, some with active development bases something you can't say about (AFAIK) any of the altcoins. Moreover, the permissive licensing of Bitcoin means that you aren't, and shouldn't be, dependent on any particular developers... you can freely fork the code at any point for any reason, and many people have. For similar reasons, people working on Bitcoin generally don't make incompatible changes in the software (with a protocol gateway, Bitcoin is compatible with the very first release, and without a gateway, 0.2.10 from 2010 will still happily synchronize with the network, though old versions are not very reliable anymore).

If you're depending on developers to take an active role in the real operation of you decentralized cryptocurrency then it's not really all that decentralized, it's still controlled by the politics of men instead of math. Having a choice of one master out of many is not really freedom.

Quote from: instacash on June 06, 2014, 08:08:23 AM

I'm not sure whether you are just completely ignorant right now or intentionally overlooking major projects such as NXT which are clearly full of innovation.

Another coin heavy with closedness, its hard to analyze and so you won't see much if any serious review. The initial snippits of code they published had a clear and obvious nothing-at-stake vulnerability, and so far I've not seen any explanation as to how its actually viable at all. Perhaps none of the people who actually understand it speak english, but the people who've recently posted about it in the tech subforum didn't give a positive impression at all to others who are clueful about distributed consensus systems.... but this is totally offtopic here.

Quote from: benthach on June 06, 2014, 08:13:57 AM

is the anonymous transaction ever possible? and when do you think Bitcoin would have this implement or addon?

Anonymity isn't a binary state, there are degrees. Really strong anonymity is very hard to achieve, and needs more than just some features it's a lifestyle, even a state of mind. I think perfect anonymity is generally beyond human capability except in very limited circumstances. _Better_ anonymity, or perhaps more correctly stated as "better privacy" is possible... and things like the darkwallet and the other tools that implement coinjoin in Bitcoin let people get better privacy today. Even stronger privacy is possible, but it comes with tradeoffs, which is why it might not be desirable to implement the stronger systems in Bitcoin even though we know how to create them.

Quote from: dotnetmin on June 06, 2014, 08:23:02 AM

BTC core dev is fighting against a shitcoin. Why is he spending time on shit DRK ?

Because some darkcoin pumpers showed up in an entirely unrelated thread and started crapping on other people's efforts in order to promote DarkCoin. I certantly wasn't interested in seeking out this discussion, but since it came to me I don't have any problem in responding to it.