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.
Fair point (other than the assumption that they do not already run a % of current MNs; which they could quite easily or equally not) what I am trying to understand is how we came to the conclusion that it is cheaper to crack encryption algos v.s. buying up enough MN to decrypt x% of TXs.
You cannot buy enough darkcoin to jeopardize the network.
1200ish MN's exist, if you wanted 50% of the MN network you'd need another 1,200,000 Darkcoins!
Buying this amount over any time period will have significant effect on the spot price.
As the buyer is clearly buying, sell walls would be removed and people become bullish. The price of Darkcoin would go so high the incentive for investors to set up new masternodes becomes more attractive, bringing more masternodes to the network that are not "Gov" owned.
If the government wanted to buy 1,200,000 darkcoin, it would send the market cap into the billions.
1) Would it be necessary for all MN's in the mixing rounds to be bad actors? Maybe just the "entry" and "exit" MN? Plus one in the middle?
2) Three-letter organizations don't necessarily have to pay for DRK (hacks, seizures etc)
3) Even if there was only a 1% chance of your anon transaction getting de-anonymized by bad actors would you really take that chance? And if it were a 3% chance?
You take my point I'm sure.