I think I'm in favor of hard-forking the network to make Darksend transactions completely free. So there will be no fees to track at all. Instead of the miners, they could pay either the masternode network (the one you connected to even), the development fund, foundation fund, etc. These payments would be passed to the masternode and could be cashed later to avoid timing analysis. Another upside to this is it's impossible to do in Bitcoin and the fees could be MUCH lower than 0.0125. Thoughts?
Posted this over at DCT as well, but...
Three thoughts/questions:
1. How exactly would this new fee --say, to the masternodes -- be enforced?
2. I thought the DS transaction fee was there not just to prevent Sybil attacks but also to ensure DS blocks get processed immediately by miners. I remember the days of 0.001 fees when RC4 was released and DS rounds >1 not working because of this issue.
3. This seems like a lot more work compared to adding a fees mixing phase. Is there some technical reason why the fee mixing phase can't be done or is a bad idea?
1. I'm thinking the user will pay for Darksend access for a period of time. For example, you do one transaction for 0.1 to the Darksend access address, this is the very first thing you do when Darksend starts. Then you send that transaction ID, and a signature proving you own the input. That gives you access to darksend for 1 day or something.
2. You're correct. That's what the hard fork is for.
3. I think there's a problem with the fee mixing phase. That would be much easier, but every round of a darksend would still go back to 1 Darksend fee mixing transaction. So you could follow a transaction from round 8,7...1. If you control the last masternode, you could tell who owns the final Darkcoin.