Re: The Pros and Cons to Cloakcoin and Darkcoin, lets discuss them.
Refreshing to read opinions of someone who actually has a clue instead of crypto noobs hyping their vapor buzzwords. I consider myself to be crypto noob as well, however:
What if the Darkcoin wallet was monitoring the state of the network, and if the running masternode count fell for example 50% in a short period of time, it would stop denominating funds (denomination is the anonymization process which runs in the background). This wouldn't affect people sending or receiving coins because they already have them denominated/anonymized. It would only prevent people from re-sending received funds during this ddos period.
Every other coin has to use nodes as well, and they can be ddos attacked which can halt the network for the duration of the attack. It's not only Darkcoin that is susceptible to ddos.
What if the Darkcoin wallet was monitoring the state of the network, and if the running masternode count fell for example 50% in a short period of time, it would stop denominating funds (denomination is the anonymization process which runs in the background). This wouldn't affect people sending or receiving coins because they already have them denominated/anonymized. It would only prevent people from re-sending received funds during this ddos period.
Every other coin has to use nodes as well, and they can be ddos attacked which can halt the network for the duration of the attack. It's not only Darkcoin that is susceptible to ddos.
The "monitoring the state of the network" thing is then a huge security risk AND a massive drain. This means that every single one of the (potentially tens or hundreds of thousands) have to reach out every single one of the (potentially several hundred) masternodes. This is a massive traffic burden, but it also means that a bad actor can setup (or compromise) just a single masternode in order to identify the IP address of every single node.
You are right that every coin has to use nodes, but bear in mind that 50% of nodes becoming unavailable in most cryptocurrencies isn't a showstopper. The rest will continue to operate and maintain consensus, and when those 50% come back online they'll just catch up to the network state.
I don't have deep enough understanding so I'm just throwing ideas around here. But there must be a way to distribute the count of the running nodes in trustless manner (similar to how the blockchain is distributed) without every wallet having to go and ping every masternode. This would obviously mean that the implementation wouldn't be so straightforward anymore.
And, the count is needed only before doing the denomination, which could be once a day, or once a week for most users.