Thanks for sharing this.  I played around with Amazon mining back in 2014 and this brings back memories.  Was never willing to spend thousands of USD on it in a single month though.  In hindsight...I probably should have!

Having read the works of Isaac Asimov, I'm fairly sure you're not supposed to let the first foundation become aware of the Second Foundation for this to work.

Just to be clear, I did not say Monero has an actual bloat problem, from a technical perspective.  I'm saying, whether or not the "bloat" thing has any merit to it whatsoever, this perception has managed to get out there -- perhaps through a misunderstanding, or through the intentional work of Monero's detractors, I don't know.  I guess it is a communications/PR issue at this point.  I just know the perception is out there, and that it sometimes turns people off to Monero when they don't look very deeply.   Such people -- "new money", if you will -- are not each going to individually contact Fluffy for numbers to address their concerns.

The problem is precisely that "[p]eople are getting this wrong."

I think Monero has two obstacles to overcome before it permanently moves up into a higher price bracket, relative to Bitcoin.

First, Monero will need to definitively put to rest the perception -- whether accurate or not -- that Monero may have a bloat problem, in terms of blockchain size and/or memory usage.  This perception has dogged Monero from the beginning and it does Monero no favors. 

Second, Monero will need a no frills GUI -- something simple and easy, friendlier than the command line interface.  I love me a good CLI.  Many don't.

I am confident both of these issues will get addressed.   All in good time.

I do have concerns about viability of the DarkTor concept.  TOR exit nodes face some challenging liability issues because of the statistical likelihood they will output illegal content at some point (see discussion at https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq).  For that reason many TOR node operators choose to only operate relay nodes. 

If the proposal here is to essentially turn every masternode into a potential TOR exit node (when its turn comes up in some deterministic algorithm), I think that could present new and challenging new legal risks for DRK's masternode operators AND the providers that host them, at least in many jurisdictions.

This is a great write-up.   Very accessible, well-illustrated.  Thank you Tante. 

For me (on the road, unable to tinker with DarkSend yet), Reading Tante's article did a remarkable job of slicing through all the gloomy market noise and renewing my sense of marvel at just how innovative DRK continues to be.   

Thanks for your responses.  I'm probably not conveying my concern very well.

I'm a big fan of Darkcoin's anonymity features and I agree with Minotaur26 that even after RC4, a blockchain explorer can still be used to confirm a specific payment took place.  My worry is that, if there is no way to shield certain coins in your wallet from automatic premixing, RC4 will actually go a step too far in removing the benefits of a public accounting ledger from the coin's features.  There are many common everyday uses of the blockchain explorer to prove to others the history of coins that you currently control, and these are sometimes quite useful in the real world.  Pre-RC4 (if I am not mistaken) these were all available to Darkcoin, since using Darksend was just an optional choice -- as an individual user you COULD mix your coins, but you didn't HAVE to.  

Thus, pre-RC4, Darkcoin let you keep certain coins entirely outside the mixing process, and you could use a blockchain explorer to, say, prove the date you mined or acquired your coins for tax purposes (e.g. U.S. long-term capital gains), or prove that you haven't moved or spent coins you are holding on behalf of someone else (e.g., escrow), or prove how coins sent to a donation address were spent (i.e., allow an audit).  My concern is that, if RC4 forces pre-mixing of all coins, these uses of the blockchain as an accounting ledger become harder, and the paths to Darkcoin adoption narrow.   I see this as a bad outcome -- while I want Darkcoin to be a form of anonymous ecash, I also want it to be able to function as a full-fledged cryptocurrency.  Perhaps your vision is different.

TLDR: Should background mixing be opt-out so Darkcoin can still function as a full-fledged cryptocurrency even while providing anonymous transactions?

From the update:


Can a user opt-out of this background anonymization for some or all of his or her coins, or is Darkcoin moving to a model where it is essentially mandatory that all coins be mixed in this way even if they are just sitting in wallets?

I ask because it seems like there are use cases where being able to trace the history of your own coins -- or proving that history to others, by pointing them to a neutral third party block explorer -- is a desired feature.  Scrambling the ability to trace and document that history (when the ability to document that history is actually desired, of course) by mixing coins in the background introduces some new wrinkles, especially for business use cases.

Is there a place to find historical price data on Asicminer shares older than its listing on Havelock, for example, old btct.co data or even forum auction trades?  Has that been charted or graphed anywhere?

Is there a thread other than this one where the details of Swarm are being discussed?  (Things like...percentage of newly-issued coins that would ultimately trickle back to SWARMCOIN holders...when we can expect to see an alpha client).  I can't find such a thread.  Their website itself is light on details.  Thanks.

Just a reminder not to get misled by the intermediary DRK/BTC ratio if what you ultimately care to measure is the absolute dollar value.  The recent local maximum at 0.025 is actual a higher valuation per DRK and higher market cap, in dollars, than the "all-time high" in terms of the DRK/BTC ratio of 0.0275 ten days ago.  This is because bitcoin itself rose roughly $100 in the intervening time period.

Back of the envelope math:

ten days ago: 1 DRK * 0.0275 BTC/DRK * $535/BTC = $14.71 per DRK.
earlier today:   1 DRK * 0.025 BTC/DRK * $630/BTC =  $ 15.75 per DRK.

(I grabbed these BTC values by eyeballing bitcoinwisdom very roughly, so they are imprecise.)

One nice thing about the addition of DRK to to Bitfinex is that it should end up making graphs and stats about DRK/USD trends more accessible, since they've created a direct market for it.

Uh, your math is off.  Even this would be ten cents less than $100 million.  Still just a multi-millionaire.

Thank you.  That worked. 

Without AES-NI available to me on this machine, I get a slower hash rate with your miner compared to the Lucas Jones miner.  I'm sure this comes as no surprise, since you have been optimizing for AES-NI.  Inside my virtual machine, per core, I get about 11 H/s with yours, and about 18.5 H/s with Lucas Jones.

If I compile from source should I be able to run it on a processor without AES-NI then?  I compiled it successfully in an Virtualbox Ubuntu 13.04 virtual machine (on a Win 7 host without AES-NI), but get:


upon starting up the miner.

And now a brief PSA:

Please always check the primary source where the donation address was originally posted before donating to this or any other cryptocurrency address.  Why?  Even if an address is accurately quoted at first (I haven't checked), it can always be edited maliciously later down the line, or it can fail to be updated even if Evan abandons the donation address/wallet.

I believe the original can be found here, but doublecheck for yourself:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg6982496#msg6982496

I do not mean to impugn StefanJ's honor or reputation in any way.  He may be the most trustworthy man on the planet.  Just a PSA.

Yep.  A lot of assumptions being made here.  While this is an exciting prospect if DRK does go live on Bitfinex, we don't have actual confirmation right now.  I would hate to see everyone treat this as a done deal only to have Bitfinex say "oh, we were just testing the possibility of a third coin but haven't decided which one" or something like that.

NO.  Don't jump the gun.  Not unless and until Bitfinex confirms it first. 

I'm having the same problem looking under the hood.  I've been digging through the posts of the XC dev but the technical implementation of XC's anonymity features remain opaque to me so far.

I have the same confusion as janos666 over why it would not require another hardfork to restart masternode payments and/or to increase the amount of the mining reward that is allocated to masternodes.

Since you are able to extract it, adding search functionality for the payment_id field would be immensely helpful.  Given the anonymous nature of Monero, payment_id's are basically the means by which the payer can prove to the buyer that the payment was actually sent over the network -- but to do so, they need to be able point to a neutral third party source (the block explorer) as proof.