So the guy who sold celeb photos for bitcoin, he should really have used darkcoin...
Why? Bitcoin is as secure as Darkcoin, if he wanted real anonymity he would have used Monero.
I can't imagine someone with your amount of history would be so ill informed? Darkcoin is quite anonymous. Have you even read how it works? It's my own implementation of coinjoin that is much more anonymous than anything offered on the bitcoin network, plus it's not vulnerable to any of the coinjoin attacks (coinjoin sudoku). It's decentralized, secure, timing-attack resistant and it works on mainnet, right now.
I'm going to just guess that you haven't actually done any reading about Darksend and show you how it works:
http://blog.anonymousbitcoinbook.com/2014/08/visualizing-one-round-of-darkcoins-darksend/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.0Here's an example transaction:
http://test.explorer.darkcoin.fr/tx/6f52d97497c6f6ff2d866de53a1dcd8b3d3b74c8feb16e2e91624fda0985a917So the gist is if you put 550DRK into the pool, it'll be broken down into 100DRK*5, 10DRK*5 and paired with the same denominations from another user. So after that transaction, no one can tell who is paying for what.
It's also very low bloat compared to monero /bytecoin because it only happens when it's needed. The whole blockchain is 346MB right now. Monero is not even close to as old and already is many times that size.
Isn't the issue here that Dark is an active coin? What I mean is that the user has to actively want to mix their coins and this can create a low anonymity set. (hence the small blockchain)
As I understand it, the Monero chain is larger because every single payment is passively anonymous. (There are exceptions right now due to 0 mixin, but this will be removed soon)
The strength of the anonymity set in Monero is so grand that it makes no sense to use something inferior if you actually need an anonymous currency.