As far as I can tell, DASH has less anonymity than Monero because DASH mixes in masternodes.
As long as the mixing isn't decentralized at protocol level (as promised), this will be the case.

On the other hand, DASH offers way more than only anonymity and has at the moment a better exposure. 

So I decided to invest in both and watch it play out for the moment.

There is no "key to encryption", you are confusing monero with zerocash.

Some of them have some valid points.

But I don't really let me influence by them. I try to look at the tech. That is the most important thing.

I did study monero a bit and I don't see an issue with the 'obscure blockchain'...
The ring signatures are based on tested crypto, this ensures that all outputs are valid and the network has a mechanism that is double spend proof.

The mixing on masternodes is a weak point in my opinion. It is just bad for anonymity.

Currently I own 200 DASH and 1000 XMR.
Still not sure what to do:

*DASH has better market cap and support, but I don't really like the mixing system.
Also additional features I think are interesting like instantX I like, although I would like to see some external crypto-expert checking if it's safe and can scale.
*XMR has better mixing tech, but I have no clue why the community and market cap seems so small.
I also like the stealth addresses... You only need one account. It's better than a HD wallet because change transactions can't be linked.

My initial plan to buy a masternode is postponed until I see some external validation of DASH tech and the details of Evolution.
If DASH would go sub 0.005 BTC, I'll probably double down on my current position.
This will also happen for XMR if it drops below 0.001 BTC.

I'll probably bet on both for now. If one or the other clearly becomes the leading anonymous currency, I'll sell the one and buy the other.

So masternodes will still be used for mixing?
This is a disappointment, I must admit 

I am a bit out of the loop.

Is there any news on the Evolution front? Any details about how the mixing without masternodes will be implemented?
Any news on which other improvements Evolution will bring?

Still not bought a full masternode. It seems the price is a bit weak :/ (I lost 0.6 BTC on my 200 DASH)
I want to wait a bit until Evolution is implemented I think.  

As for as I understand, with  cryptonote mixing you also can't determine which input is the real one. It seems that every transaction is mixed by default without needing a masternode. It's another approach, but I think in the end, DASH should try to incentivise every node to mix. seems like a better approach because every input will be fungible.
Having non-fungible coins on a network makes it vulnerable to blacklisting: some service could refuse mixed coins...

Did someone already answer my question about the possibility of idle masternodes? I asked if it is theoretically possible to have a masternode online that doesn't do the required work (intantX confirmations and mixing) but still receiving masternode rewards. There was so much trolling I probably missed the answer...

question:

What % of the number of transactions are darksend transactions?

I want to know this, because fungibility depends on it... I learned that monero has mixing by default. What's more, mixing can be done client side (and even offline). So I want to know how DASH compares...

I mean, XMR tech seems to be solid, but DASh clearly has the first mover advantage and also offers other things like InstantX and a GUI. So for now I'll stick to DASh as long as the tech is usable and not flawed

So you are saying Evan got > 500000 DASH? that is still quite a lot  
I mean, that's almost 10%.

I already said that I hope DASH can overcome this issue, but it's not looking good at the moment...
I guess i'll delay that 800 DASH buy a bit. I want to get a total of 1000 to get my masternode.

ok, so basically we need the liquidity providers because the mixing in the nodes isn't very efficient? Why not just give every node the possibility to have mixing transactions pass through his node? that would make mixing faster I guess?

Hmmmm.... Isn't it dangerous to have to rely on only 6 people who are available for mixing all the time?
I guess that these people have the logs of the mixing. If they collude, they can know which mixing input is associated with a certain mixing output.

yeah well, I only had 2 DASH in the wallet, so that's probably the issue.
What do these liquidity providers do exactly?

Well, that's why I asked before how the network knows if the masternodes are doing their job or are just idling and pretending to be an active masternode. They get the masternode rewards while processing transactions, so it needs to be checked if they are active or not

PS: I tried the monero wallet today and after a half day I needed to close it. My laptop became very slow. I don't know if there is a fix or not.
It seems there are still developers though, so if it isn't fixed yet, I think they will. But I wasn't able to compare DASH mixing with monero mixing.
So for now, it seems that DASH is at least a usable system.

And that's important of course. Having a lot of theoretical ideas (recently they are talking about "confidential transactions" ) is cool, but if you can't make it work, it's useless...

I tried to find some things out about monero today, and I think they launched that coin because bytecoin had interesting tech, but was 80% premined.
I'm not a crypto-expert, so I can't verify their claims. Still need to research it a bit more though.

What would be helpful if there are people who are smarter than me that already commented on DASH tech and/or Monero tech.
Are there some bitcoin devs interested in DASH and/or Monero?

I tested darksend today!

I must say, I like it that you can premix your coins and then use that "dark balance" for sending anonymous transactions  
Pretty impressed by the GUI as well.

My only remark (also related to the thing below) is that it took nearly 3 hours to mix 2 DASH... That seems a bit slow, but hopefully if we get more masternodes online, that won't be an issue anymore. But I'm willing to wait a bit. Privacy has a price, in this case it's waiting time.


Another thing I want to mention: when testing a transaction, it costed me 0.1 DASH as a fee. I know that with transactions, fees are involved, but 0.1 DASH (around 0.001 BTC or 0.25 USD) is pretty hefty. Will fees be lowered someday?

DASH seems to have a pretty good track record. it shows confidence if you just release your plans. Which altcoin could build the same network effect around an anonymous cryptocurrency AND build the same features in a shorter time frame?
I think this is almost impossible...

So if you ask me, just release the whitepapers so everybody in the community can review them, suggest improvements, and maybe help to build it!

I still think that dash could be it, seems to have a big community and a lot of software (smartphone wallet, GUI, ...)
Also, a bigger market cap. So it has a better chance than cryptonote.

But I need to investigate it a bit more. I'm now syncing my DASH client to test it out. I'll try to do some darksend and instantX tomorrow
I also got some answers on the questions I asked in the monero topic, will also try to test that out in one of the next days, so I can compare.

I still don't really understand how monero works. Thanks to the explanation by Evan, I think most of my concerns are gone, although I need to look at it a bit more:


1) so the transaction locks are part of the consensus rules? That indeed makes sense. Still strange to wrap my head around it, because in bitcoin miners "lock" transactions in blocks
2) a - doesn't really seems safe to accept InstantX transactions  
b - so what happens in case there are 3 different inputs? Transaction 1  has input A and B, transaction 2 has input A and C. A is being double spend.  are the oracles for the first transaction different from the second one, or is there an overlap?
c - timestamps aren't 100% right all the time and can be manipulated.
3) you didn't answer the question on how the network knows that a masternode isn't idling and doing his job. This seems pretty important!
4) so we need to wait... I hope we know more when the amsterdam vid is online



edit: this is the main reason I still believe that the DASH network effect is just bigger and dash probably has more chances to succeed:

Sorry for the late response, I was researching cryptonote a little bit today. It's confusing, but i think I know the basics now.

I give you that. it wasn't really a good example indeed. But I still fail to see how a private blockchain results in fiat...

The fact that the owner's name isn't stamped on it makes it fungible, not anonymous. Anonymous is something a person can be, not an object.


I agree, when the balance is not publicly known, we are talking about privacy. No one can see how much money I hold, how much i'm sending or receiving.

But is that a bad thing? i think we need privacy when handling our money. This doesn't necessarily  result in credit (fiat) money.
Credit money can probably only function as long as it has private accounting, otherwise the "fractional reserve" is exposed. Banks can print money by lending it out, central banks can print money to buy assets or give loans to banks.

But money with private balances doesn't need to always result in fiat, as long as the emission is public. I already pointed out that monero has apparently a public emission.

[1] As far as I understand (I didn't actually test monero yet) you can see your balance, and this balance are 'real coins', because the emission is public. It's an asset. Claiming a cryptocurrency isn't an asset, while it has a public emission, seems illogical
[2] I agree that people will associate themselves with monero accounts, but there is inherently no difference with this if you compare it with DASH or BTC. The only difference is that you need only one address because the balances are apparently private. This seems to be a convenience, not some sort of problem.

you can always have multiple 'accounts' I guess, so I really don't get your point.

that's good news!
But why not build it publicly, so other developers/volunteers can help?

Also, now that you are online, can you please answer my newb questions: