Busy day, no time to post, just as well since I 'killed the thread'

Anyway, you made a great point here. I guess the answer is that DASH is optionally fungible. You can mix balances if you want and nobody can prove there is any association between your mixed addresses and someone else's. I agree this means users could forget and end up with dodgy associations by accident or whatever.

I also agree that XMR is more fungible....pretty much totally fungible! However, I don't think that what you originally said is true - i.e. that all DASH ends up tainted. There would be too much ambiguity in the blockchain introduced by widespread mixing. Blockchain analysis tools would frequently hit 'dead-ends'.


Fair comment. The coin is still in development...will be interesting to see how these arguments stack up over time.

yep, ok fair comment

good luck with your investments and crypto dreams

ok let's summarise the convo:

critic: DASH isn't fungible, the coins will all end up tainted.
me: hang on, that's not true because of the mixing process?
you: DASH's code causes inevitable centralization and is not as fungible as ring signatures.

See the disconnect there? your answer is just a spurious technical claim and then 'my dad's bigger than your dad'

Johnny M actually gave a decent answer to this question last night, I'll respond to him once I've given it some more thought.


I'm just trying to be reasonable - there's no point having a mud-slinging match with you guys, you're too well rehearsed with the mud-slinging I figured I'd approach the discussion more as I might IRL.


So you say, but show me a code review with any detail. You keep going on about centralization without any solid technical arguments. You don't really know how Darksend or Masternodes work - none of the critics on here seem to, but will say they're broken anyway  



OK, well if you can pick a technial point that I've not followed up on then I'll gladly look at it, but I don't think that's the case. Where a reasonable point has been made against anything I've said I've accepted it. There's also been a lot of hot air, some of which I've ignored, unsurprisingly.


Vertoe essentially makes one point - Evan is key man for DRK and that makes it centralised. Hold the front page!

INSTAMINE! INSTAMINE! INSTAMINE! I look forward to you marching the streets with your INSTAMINE placard and DASH foundation effigies.

No, it doesn't, that's just you trying to sound clever.


yeah, and I think Monero is pretty cool y'know...


OK dude, nice going. I'm going to call it a night, got a big few days work on some 'fintech' IRL.  

Toodle-pip.

yep that's pretty much it....you have to bring the DASH wallet online to start the node, but otherwise it's 'cold'. Hopefully there will be a feature in the future where you can sign the 'start-node' command on an offline host and then start on an online host that doesn't contain the private keys, like how you can sign transactions offline in BTC wallets such as Armory.

But there are no coins, just balances on addresses. The darksend process removes any association between two given addresses. That's where the fungibility comes from and that's the question I asked. Where is the 'taint' you talk about?



OK that's a fair response. So it's down to an opinion on who your adversaries really are and what the future holds. If you think you can beat the NSA with Monero in the long game then fair enough.



For me, fit-for-purpose would mean working, useful services (instant transactions, privacy, 2FA etc) which are secure against any realistic attack (i.e. not guv/TLA).

Nice try, but if you look back, you'll see that I wrote 'perfect or mathematically proven'.

Ah so it's "fintech security" now not "fintech". Nice little mod there.

I'd love to know your fintech credentials...

I think the definition of 'cold storage' is somewhat ambiguous, but in general refers to storing keys offline except when it's necessary to use them online, which in the case of masternodes is when you need to start the node - typically following an upgrade.

But the point is that the basic coin is the same as BTC. The idea is you have some services on top that improve on what you can get from trusted third-parties with BTC. These services run on 2,400 servers in a random, trustless fashion - instead of a handful of servers owned by one anoymous dude who can steal your coins.

Forgetting any first-mover advantages or whatever....if this is an improvement over standard BTC then why not use it?

Hahaha, nope, it ain't.

The standard for real-world fintech is 'works' and 'makes money'. At least if you're talking about 'fintech' as in 'finance technology' used in 'finance companies' by 'finance professionals' like what i am.


OK dude, let's keep it civilised....good luck with your mission

but everything that makes it a cryptocurrency is proven - it's a fork of bitcoin core.

the additional services provided by masternodes are just that; additional services....like what you can get with BTC from trusted third parties, but instead native to the coin and trustless.

What DASH is doing is not hyper-complex. The code has been reviewed once by K Atlas, is open source and will no doubt be subject to further review. At no point have I said DASH is perfect or 'mathematically proven' - it's about real-world utility and whether it's fit for purpose.


Well, in the comments posted from him on this thread he was saying there are better approaches, but doesn't say it's broken. I can see he doesn't like DASH though....fair enough.



Sure, but I don't really see where the trust is. Masternode owners is all anyone says, but there's no clear demonstration of _why_ they are trusted.



I could take you a lot more seriously if you dropped all this BS, but I guess you gotta do what you gotta do...

The nodes create a 2-tier architecture allowing additional services to be deployed on top of the standard PoW currency. Whether this is unnecessary depends on your point of view about the features and their utility.

From the perspective of running a masternode, it's just the regular wallet/daemon running on a host with a static IP and collateral of 1000 DASH, normally stored off the node in a cold wallet. There is a key in the config file that identifies the node so you can start it remotely from the cold wallet.

The DASH wallet/daemon is forked off bitcoin core with a load of additional code written by the DASH devs. From a networking standpoint everything sits behind TCP/9999 so this is typically the only port listening to the internet.

Presently the masternodes provide privacy functions (Darksend) and instant transactions (InstantX), with more features in the pipeline (e.g two-factor auth).

Whitepaper here:

https://www.dashpay.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/DarkcoinWhitepaper.pdf

InstantX white paper here:

https://www.dashpay.io/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/InstantTX.pdf

Review by Kristov Atlas here:

http://blog.anonymousbitcoinbook.com/2014/09/darksend-paper-version-2/

OK just one last time, for the record:

- Nobody has answered the question about DRK fungibility

- Nobody has answered the question about Masternodes being 'compromised' by anyone other than NSA

- Nobody has responded to Illodin regarding what an attacker would actually get if they compromised a masternode

- Nobody has demonstrated how DASH is not fit-for-purpose


No, it's not just the anonymity tech. Critics are saying that Masternodes are flawed but nobody can say why. Masternodes provide Privacy, InstantX and more features to come. This is what makes DASH different - if they're broken then show me and anyone else who's interested in these coins why they're broken.

What I'm trying to accomplish, by this point, is to show that the critics of DASH are persistently failing to follow through their claims with anything conclusive. I'm more than happy to be 'pwned' by any of you on this and will then dump my DASH holdings. Go for it!


don't be sad for me, I'm old enough to look after myself  

Signal to noise ratio seriously dropping...I'll leave you guys to play with yourselves

Will check back later to see if there's new information of any substance. Hope so.

Just about says it all really.

Will look forward to you linking my post in 6 months when I've lost all my holdings.

But I wasn't answered, that's the point.

Smooth has been responding, up until last night.

Fluffypony was responding earlier. He got it wrong about Darksend and for DASH in general he basically said 'I know it's flaky' but wasn't prepared to define exactly why, saying he can't devote time to it unless he gets paid. Fair enough, but hardly convincing.

Smart as these guys are I don't think they completely understand how DASH works, they just dismiss it out-of-hand because of an elitist opinion of the general architecture.



I agree with you, but when we've got down to the detail nobody has been able to say how masternodes present a realistic risk due to the 'human element'. A recent post from illodin asking what data an attacker would hope to get from a compromised node hasn't been answered.

I may have been defending DASH and demonstrating a certain bias on this thread, but that's because I'm invested in the coin based on my own time-consuming assessment of the technology and team.

I don't think anyone could say I've been unreasonable in that defence. I just want to see if these criticisms, mainly the technical ones, have any basis in reality. If DASH is fatally flawed as you all make out I'll dump the lot.

Nobody has been able to persuade me, in fact quite the opposite.