Cmq sono veramente belle quest monete Casascius!!! Mike Caldwell è veramente un artista 
 se fossero più utili ne comprerei qualcuna anche io...

I think that, as time goes on, evidence is beginning to demonstrate that the reverse is actually true.

The 2-tier masternode approach is succeeding in all the areas it was intended to - not just technically but commercially as well. In particular it has allowed for an immense amount of realworld experience to inform ongoing design priorities without disrupting the front end blockchain interface, nor the 'backend' commercial interface.

At the same time, successive revisions to the revenue regime for the masternode network have ensured that its population keeps growing. Darkcoin now has a worldwide network of over 1200 masternodes and growing. This 2-tier approach is going to be hugely powerful going forward because it allows the network to decouple and articulate advanced, consolidated actions not suited to being run on an ad-hoc basis by end-user nodes.

For example, it's this approach that enabled the huge leap to be made from realtime to pre-emptive anonymisation. What this means in practice is that no matter what crazy fantastic algo's any other coin comes up with, the Darkcoin network will always provide a level of service that is multiple orders of magnitude more secure due to the massive redundancy it now implements. You don't even have to be making a transaction anymore for your funds to be anonymised because the entire online money supply is in a continual state of mixing.

The so called "flaws" alluded to in this post are now turning out to be strengths. They are in fact revealing the true flaws in the competition, namely:

 - anon is done in realtime, saved funds are static until transacted
 - they are mostly non Bitcoin-compliant commercial interfaces which need to be handled as exceptions by exchanges and commercial adopters
 - given Bitcoin's trading resilience against the altcoin competition over the last 18 months, the 'stock value' of anon coins which take an integrated approach (e.g. cryptonote ones) has plummeted. Bitcoin has prevailed and therefore Bitcoin compliant technologies are more amenable to adoption