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Darkcoin suffers from a bad methodology to achieve anonymity and it's put everything into this one basket.
Sorry to hear you lost faith in the project. Also, sorry you're going to be getting out at a horrible time (right before I announce I have EVERYTHING figured out to make Darkcoin mainstream?).
Over the past couple of days, I've made huge leaps in the Darksend technology. In fact, RC4 will be the final solution to Darkcoin's anonymity. The client will automatically look at all of your funds and it will be able to tell which funds are not anonymized, if it finds non-anonymous outputs it will run them through a darksend with other clients.
After that process, users can send without Darksend using the anonymous outputs for instant transactions without waiting for other nodes (with no upper limit on transaction sizes). The other thing you're missing is that there is a reason I forked Bitcoin. Adoption for Darkcoin will be MUCH faster and easier for vendors, because all of the APIs are the same.
Expect more news in a few days. I have lots of work to do, but soon we can start testing all of this new functionality.
This seems great at first blush, but won't there will be an issue with Darksend transaction liquidity over time? I mean, all transactions should be Darksent even if they don't need it so that there is the highest Darksend related activity on the blockchain. You want to maximize those confusing redenominated transactions flying around to make things as foggy as possible. Enabling a one-time sterilization process is bad because it makes it harder from a liquidity perspective for other (especially larger) transactions to be anonymized. The proposed RC4 diagrams from a few days back (i.e. two stage masternode transactions) seemed dialed in just right. Am I missing something?
If your money is already on multiple anonymous addresses... It's pre-privatised. Essentially it's dark sent before darksending it.
But you don't want to make Darksend a rare, one-time event for your money. You want it mixed with others money always to enable anonymization of new money. Otherwise you get a chicken and egg scenario (i.e. awesome Darksend network build out with nobody feeling like they need to Darksend because they sterilized already, so new money has to wait a long time to be Darksent). Everybody should be using the Darksend format to keep liquidity up.
I think the point is that you don't need to 'use darksend' - the masternodes will be kept busy anonymising everyone's coin as an ongoing process, so you'll only ever be sending already untraceable coin.
He still has valid points, and I return to my earlier statement: anonymity has caveats. What we basically have here is the graphic that went up a few days ago, but Evan said, "Wait a minute! The funds are already anonymous after step one! Why do we need step two??"
There are still things that need addressed:
1. The client is going to attempt to re-denominate incoming funds; what flag is needed to stop my masternode from doing that to itself?
2. What if I need to send an amount larger than average? This can get messy.
3. What size and how many participants need to be involved in the anonymizing transaction to make it "good enough"? (again, it's the large holders that potentially want to spend a larger amount at once that causes the risk)
4. What about exchange wallets? Will they become a hot steaming mess of addresses due to their holding potentially huge amounts of coins? Is this acceptable? Something we want? Not relevant?
All I got for now.