Again, just to reiterate on the piece of my post you didn't address, I do not like the centralized nature of the Masternode setup at Darkcoin, BUT , many coins have a centralized aspect, such as checkpointing servers in some POS coins. the way i see it, masternodes and checkpoint servers may be a necessary evil. So all in all i guess the Masternode setup isn't a big deal, so long as it offers no unfair disadvantage to common miners.
The concept of center, is that it is singular. It is a single point where all the other things revolve around / are based upon etc.
Checkpointing is centralization because there is one point where the network uses to align itself.
Masternodes are like ...500.
500 is not a single point / a center. There is no "center". There are 500 masternodes all over the globe.
If there was one masternode that did the mixing, it would be centralized mixing.
If there are 500-1000 nodes all over the world that operate in a p2p fashion, it is not centralization.
If the government can go to one place (center) and take down the system = centralization / client-server model - with the server-mixer being the single point of reliance.
If the government can't do that because it has to shut 500 nodes all over the world = decentralization / p2p model - with every node adding to network resilience.
congratulations you've successfully split a cunt hair.
the master node setup is still a centralized structure reliant upon trust. The current abundance of nodes strengthens your argument in favor of dark send but this goes against the entire concept of trusless regulatory consensus algorithms. Which is the key point I want to make here. Dark send is the appliance of provably corruptible centralized regulatory coin mixing services on top of a brilliant trustless decentralized regulatory consensus algorithm. Zerocoin is the future, not dark send. The transaction mixing needs to become apart of the algorithm its self not on centralized masternode servers.
I understand the technical challenge this presents. Maybe at some point in the future the developer will understand the reason why the system must
remain completely decentralized and discover how to make the mixer built into the client instead of depenc on centralized middle ware.