And beyond that, what laws are the devs expected to follow? Drugs are illegal in some countries, Bibles illegal in other countries. Many countries around the world are human rights violators and their laws should be broken. It disgusts me to see commercial outfits in free countries stifling free speech and trade at the request of dictatorial governments in other countries and decentralized services are a good way to avoid that, no matter what else they might facilitate.

What advantage does a centralized DNM have over the Shadow market?

You might be misunderstanding the structure of the Shadow market. The devs do not "allow" anything on there. They write code. They release the code, and what we buy and sell there is what we buy and sell, they can't control any of it.

If you were Bitmain you could get that many miners, and they mine too. A PoW attacker has the advantage of not actually holding the coin, so if he destroys it he loses only his investment, which he can then use to mine something else or he can hold the blockchain hostage and make demands. A website hacker could attack PoS much more cheaply, but he would also make more money selling the coins than trashing the blockchain and ending up holding something he can't sell.

Also the community can do their part to prevent PoS attacks by staking their coins and not using the exchanges for storage. When the use of SDC exceeds the trading of SDC that will happen and there won't be enough coins in any one place to do what you are  talking about.

That's true, but if a person had control of that many PoS coins and corrupted the blockchain he would instantly make his own holdings worthless because nobody would want the coin anymore. Once a hack of that size was announced he wouldn't even have to attack the chain, people would be dumping like crazy until it's dead once they realized it was possible. if he were to buy enough coins to do this he would drive the price to the moon with his demand, very expensive for him and then what, turn it all into a shitcoin with forged blocks? Yes he could destroy the coin but he would destroy himself too, only someone very rich and insane could do it and everyone else who sold to him would profit from his loss before it happened. So I don't think that would ever happen.

Meanwhile you can get control of 50% of the BTC hash with 864165 TH. Miners are about $125/TH now, so for $108M you can control a network with a market cap of $10B. That's a 100:1 leverage, I like the odds of that happening a lot better.

All in agreement. While they say PoS creates inequality of access, there is also inequality of access to mining equipment and cheap electricity. Although a CPU mine eliminates a lot of that, if Monero were to get big enough how long do you think it would take to make ASICs to mine that too starting the arms race all over again?

Interesting thing about SDC PoSv3 is that not every coin gets the stake so it is inflation for some uses, interest for others. The people who leave their coins on exchanges for rapid trading are paying interest to those who hold on their own machines, as are the people who hold them as SDT or actively spend them. Seems fair to me, the coin has value and value doesn't come without a price. It's about 7.5% overall return on staked coins now, subtract the SDC 2% inflation and you get 5.5% return before fiat inflation, not a bad investment even if SDC doesn't rise at all relative to fiat.

A few reasons, none of them really good. One is just tradition, Bitcoin is a pure PoW coin and I suppose in the days of CPU mining it was believed to be a perfect system, but now that every CPU in the world couldn't keep up with one big ASIC farm the imperfection of it is apparent.

Another is certain alternative political and social beliefs where interest/inflation are the root of all evil, it's all controlled by the you-know-whats and the rich get richer, all of that stuff.

Another is that there is less distribution of the coin when people can't mine, but I think that's a carryover also from the old days of CPU mining. Although another popular anon coin is CPU mined, we don't know how much of that is being mined by malware and distributed to just a few bad actors. It's happened to other good coins.

Another is a perceived risk of forged blocks, but I don't think that would ever happen being to do it you would need to buy an enormous amount of coin, only to summarily make your coins worthless by corrupting the blockchain and destroying the reputation of the coin.

I agree, if a coin can be rolled back who knows what that will open the door to? Defeats decentralization.

As I understand it the devs had an even bigger loss from a tip jar, not clear whether it was theft or a mishandled wallet, but they didn't even attempt it when it was their own money.

Absolutely! The biggest personal theft I'm aware of involved a fake wallet downloaded from a corrupted link.

Machines are cheap, most of us probably own several coins so you can dedicate a machine to all of them, get rid of the browsers and e-mail, lock it down, back it up, etc. Even if someone steals the machine, as long as you are backed up and encrypted you can be up and running with the coins moved to new addresses before they figure out how to turn the damned thing on. Don't let the bastards win!

Are you planning on putting in your recommendation the fact that you were paid to make the recommendation?

That's what it would take, with this crew. No phony stuff here, that's for the crapcoins.

I think the devs are safe, being they have not a bit of control over what we do with our wallets or coins. This is why it's imperative that the wallets be uncensored, for once the the devs have the power to control what we do there will be a demand that this power be used. And being it's open source it would be easy enough for anyone who knows code to remove whatever they were forced to do.

Nice thing about the Aphrodite wallet is that it alone will make both dark markets and the eventual Shadow market unnecessary for some. Sellers can set up shop right in a chat room like they have been doing in IRC channels for years, with the advantage of a secure currency built in.

That said, I don't think acceptance by dark markets is something to seek. Most of the DNM stories have been tragedies, leaving confiscated coins and ruined lives in their wake, and I predict the next major dump of XMR will be thanks to a FBI seized assets auction. Too centralized and too big a target, plus the cumbersomeness that comes with operating and using a dark site. It may be obsolete tech now.

To clarify- the stake reward is always the same, about 0.268 SDC now. The larger your staking balance, the more often you will get that reward. If you have 1 SDC it will take on average about 3 years to get a reward. If you have 20K SDC it will take a couple of hours.

New SDC holders, please keep your coins safe, coin thefts hurt the reputation of the coin and of crypto in general-

Use only the wallet provided by the official site in the the first post of this topic, don't trust anything else.

Be aware of what is running on the machine where your wallet is running- don't use your porn machine or anything crazy like that. Dedicated machine is good, tor is good, locked down encrypted disk, back up your wallet to stick and/or CD and lock it away, you know the drill.

Don't leave coins on exchanges, they get robbed, same story every time.

Well of course it's a clever idea- it's yours! Because I'm really talking about Shadow, but with some features added to make it run like a tor service and connect machines through the Shadow network. The part where it's monetized is already there.

TorCoin. You proof of work is throughput on the network, a little for a bridge or middle node and a lot for an exit. Your Tor service is also a wallet and either the sender or the receiver has to spend to transmit data, and the spend is distributed among the nodes that handle it.

Somebody needs to invent something like this! Maybe they could start with a cryptocurrency with zero-knowledge proofs, and then add distributed public key messaging, then other features after that.

I had a crazy idea last night about how to make Shadowsend messages invulnerable to future decryption by other than the recipient.

The weakness is that all nodes on the network receive all messages. So the spy could be receiving and recording all of them, unable to decrypt them now, but in 10 or 1000 years from now, maybe.

A one-time pad is a very old, low-tech, and unbreakable for of encryption, unbreakable because the key is longer than the message and using any of the possible pads can make the coded message decrypt to any clear message you want. The weakness there is that the OTP is a private key and both parties have to have prior contact to exchange the key.

So what if... when one wallet sends a Shadowsend message to another, it also send a OTP (also encrypted with Shadowsend), to the recipient along with a few hundred other random nodes, and the OTP is used in addition to the public-key encryption to encrypt and decrypt the message? Nodes other than the intended recipient would ignore it just like any other Shadowsend message. The chances of the spy intercepting both the message and the OTP are low, and he would need to defeat the public-key encryption on both to read the message.

In addition to this, all online wallets would randomly send out random OTP's to random nodes on the network, so most of the pads the spy would be intercepting would be garbage but he would have to decrypt them all anyway, not knowing which ones are garbage and which can be used to decrypt a real message.

Of course users exchanging very sensitive information are already able to send each other a pad ahead of time using Shadowsend, but having random wallets also doing it randomly would add a twist that makes it much more complicated to defeat.

The communication through the wallet is very important. I consider one of the biggest flaws of Bitcoin to be the inability to communicate with your trading partner or attach information to a transaction. It makes retail use cumbersome.

Of course we are going to have to wait to see Aphrodite to determine what it can actually do, and then there is the process of testing it in the real world, lots of independent observers who can see how powerful the anonymity really is, just like what we went through with the coin itself. But if the API is there, I foresee a lot of people writing their own applications to do their own thing with it.

This is not a day trading project. The coin is intended for a future where SDC is the standard for confidential transactions, with a market built into the wallet which uses only SDC and allows users to bypass standalone dark markets, which have put a few people in prison.

I assume the devs have as much holdings as anyone and want as much as anyone to realize that future. I'll ride with them, in the back seat, and we get there when we get there.

I don't believe you own even 1 SDC.

OK so you are an anonymous poster on a forum who may or may not have once owned coins, may or may not currently own coins, and has an opinion.

Devs- WAIT! STOP WORKING AND LISTEN TO THIS GUY'S OPINION!

There, just doing my part. 

Seriously, if you want to make any kind of engineer or developer work on a schedule, you need to give him a contract or a salaried position. Then you get to tell him what to do and when to do it.

I've seen that too, might have been related to malware that forced infected computers to mine for someone else. Also employees using their company equipment for mining; security people used to find computers stuffed full of GPU's and hashing away overnight.