BTW (hypothetical) What happens if one group runs a good chunk of masternodes, say 51%. Would they have any advantage in breaking darksend anon (like running lots of tor nodes breaks tor anon)?
thx
At the actual rate owning the 51% of the MNs require an investmen of almost 1.5M$.
2250 MNs and DRK value being 3$ it would cost 3.3M$.
You see it gets harder and harder as the network keeps growning.
That is interesting point ... food for though; if you where the feds what would you do:
1. Buy 50%+ MN @ $2 million
2. Try and crack the encryption and spend $100+ millions and countless years if not decades?
First, to own 50% of the masternodes currently you'd have to buy another 1240 nodes. If you got those at spot price it would be $3MM. But you won't, so you'd probably spend closer to $30MM. And when/if DRK is at a point where national agencies start getting interested, it's not going to be $2.39/DRK anymore.
Second, 50% is not some magic number wrt owning masternodes. Actually, 50% is not nearly enough to give any meaningful chance of deanonymizing anything. And even if you had 100% of the nodes, you couldn't deanonymize the transactions that have already happened, nor the future transactions that use funds that have been premixed earlier. Trying to corner the masternode network just requires a lot of effort and resources for questionable gains.