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10 Reasons to invest in Darkcoin

Nthelight

Nthelight

Member
Disclaimer: I'm not a crypto expert, I'm just a regular guy with a small amount of DRK coins, who is starting to care deeply about the Dark potential.

To provoke a discussion and to have my current understanding confirmed or rectified:

10 Reasons to invest in Darkcoin:
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DRK may be the culmination of what many (smarter/serious) people have been looking for in a cryptocurrency project.

#01 - A premise of technological innovation which has as objective the holy grail for internet users and businesses, namely 'anonimity' while transferring digital exchanges of value. A game changer, the potential to massively disrupt existing (crypto) markets. I suspect this is already ongoing. The potential to disrupt is what you need to look for as an investor, or so I have understood.

#02 - The architect and developer of the product has gone public with face and name. If you put this in perspective to altcoin business in 2013, this fact alone is enough to deserve all your attention (with the exception of Litecoin). It creates trust towards serious investors. This will change how the current crypto markets work. Finally, consolidation opportunities may even come from this approach alone. We are now at a time where people will realize that the crazyness of before will need to make room for more maturity and hence more support will go to serious projects who work in a more professional manner.

#03 - The creator and developer has a proven track record in regards to successfully bringing improvements to the crypto space, i.e. Dark Gravity Wave. The fact that this is reused by others should provide you with some additional confidence about the skills of the developer.

#04 - A dedicated developer which has gone on record that he will execute the project until 01/01/2016. We even know in which city he lives. This changes your attitude to 'hold' and look at the long term. It sucks you in and when you see the light, you are bound to stay.

#05 - There is consistent, regular and coherent communication coming from the DRK team regarding the technical aspects of the product. Evan reports regularly in a clear, honest and concise matter, not getting involved in the price (at least not that I'm aware of). I would appreciate more details however than bullet point communication.

#06 - The idea was and is presented through a white paper and shows a certain level of seriousness and the apparent academic background of the creator. This speaks to me like no other project has.

Note: Granted this is not open to many non-academic or non-technical people, but those who do understand can make it easier to grasp for those who find it challenging. Anyone with a deep understanding, please do continue to enlighten us about the innovation we intend to create.

#07 - Bitcoin's first implementations are flawed to some extent and have been wide-open to improvements and innovation for years. Nothing has ever come along to fill in any of the significant gaps which Bitcoin left open. The general mainstream person using Bitcoin, still has no clue about blockchains and how they work. It should indeed be transparent, but most people tend to think the coins are actually in their wallet and that they are anonymous using Bitcoin. So many things have been misrepresented about Bitcoin. Fact is, bitcoin provides full transparency on anyone's finances in the crypto world. This is a serious concern for both individuals and businesses. That's one of the reasons why Bitcoin isn't as successful as some hoped it would be (e.g. mainstream business adoption).That and the irreversibility of transactions.

#08 - The community seems to be willing to work together to make it a better product, with better features than other cryptos. Suggestions seem to be welcomed here. Evan is the architect with an open mind who listens. There's understanding of the meaning of 'lessons learned', 'subject for improvement' and 'continuous improvement' ;) I believe we will go way beyond 'anonimity' and can still see many innovative features coming to DRK. At least I'm sure they will be discussed in this community. This is great. Keeps you on the edge of innovation in the crypto space and eventually provides hard value to your customers.

#09 - Evan understands that some day there will be enough incentive to create X11 ASIC miners. There is no dubious message here from DRK. They claim to be ASIC resistant. In my honest opinion, that's already a bit of a stretch. Anyone needs to understand that this will be an essential technical upscaling. However, I like being part of a community that understands this point opposed to all the other projects claiming they can somehow prevent this and that it's noble to do so. Going to run a global financial network on GPUs? Of course not. General purpose machines for specialized operations? TCO needs to go down a lot. ASIC is the logical, technical and business-minded approach.

#10 - Provided the product delivers the intended value for its customers, the mathematical context of the eco-system will lead to a much higher price. It is clear that the current price is still on the low side and as such, based upon my current understanding, it seem to be a good speculative investment.

BONUS:
#11 - TanteStefana who sometimes brings a completely different tone to the testosterone filled hate threads on BTCT :)

Please add your PRO reasons not already listed above.

 
And the other side:

10 Reasons to question investing in Darkcoin:
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#01 - The branding provides, in my humble opinion, challenges towards large market adoption. Merchants are not likely to readily accept darkcoin due to its associations with illicit activities, whether it's justified or not. The least you could say is that it's not mainstream and is effectively somewhat branded to end up in a niche market. When customers and businesses buy or accept darkcoins, they will reconsider or get rid off it when the image of illegality is omnipresent. You bought darkcoins? So, you're a criminal? What do you have to hide? Anyone, including the believers, will continue to associate dark technology with illicit activities, because it may briefly make the price go up. If you do not understand how damaging this will be to the image and value of the product, then you need to stop for a minute and try to think about the longer term and the big picture. Soon there may be no difference in people's mind between darkcoin, dark network and the infamous dark web. I find this the quintessential reason why Darkcoin MAY fail entirely, despite it's innovation.

Vultures are flying over the DRK thread to steal the innovation once it's open source and spin it differently. Don't be too surprised if they then beat the now infamous DARKCOIN in market share, because they have the same tech, but with a positive spin. I'm not investing in darkcoin for it to become a niche.

#02 - The proposed technological innovation, is not really innovation, but more improvement on existing idea's. I'm perfectly fine with that, but these idea's have not been proofed in real world situations or on a large scale with many participants involved. Early adopters will have to accept the inherent risk involved and that issues will come from it. This is normal, but the smart approach is not to hype the product or prematurely promote undeveloped features of it. The DRK team could provide more transparancy on the scale and quality of their testing procedures. The testing of the product is perhaps done by a very small group of people.

#03 - The masternodes may proof to be the achilles heel of the darkcoin network. These masternodes could become the target of hackers and mayhem could come from it in ways nobody can foresee at this time. I have no confidence in the security hardening skills (on system and network level) of people quickly setting up a masternode to make money. I never had any confidence in the security skills of one person. Any security matter in my professional situation was validated by at least 2 other experts internally and followed by an extensive security audit performed by an independent party. This is not happening here or it's not clear to me. DRK is implicitly asking everyone to provide a lot of trust towards this solution. No-one should ignore the huge risk involved. A genuine worry.

#04 - The implementation of masternodes create various new trust based challenges from within the system or I simply do not understand well. Masternode owners may have the opportunity to manipulate. Especially if there would be collaboration between these operators. Especially if one large holder has many masternodes under his or her control. Why should I trust a masternode? Why should I trust a masternode owner? The incentive to set up a masternode is about profit and hence it will also attract the wrong people. Anyone who created a tutorial 'how to setup a masternode for dummies' may be effectively making this layer the weakest link, despite having good intentions. I can't be confident about the security, because they managed to install and setup a masternode, using a tutorial. The entry level should have been kept very high and only masterfull system engineers with deep knowledge of security should be involved. I understand it's somewhat of a contradiction, because probably the safest approach is just to have a lot of of masternodes? But who has 1000 DRK coins? I haven't seen any number of masternodes set up that makes me feel confident.

#05 - I'm unable to fully grasp the risk involved when we're running with 50 or 100? masternodes, of which many in the same location. What will be the impact when a handful of masternodes will be DDOS'd? Is it feasible? How difficult would that be? Can you directly target a masternode? This isn't clear to me.

#06 - There is only one developer? This is one person. Believers seem to hype both the capabilities of Evan and the product, to their own benefit? I'm not a fan of this type of behaviour. Probably they don't know the complexity of software engineering especially on a 'low level' in the context of security and networks. Perhaps, they are simply young and very impatient and do not know what it takes to 'create'. Where are all the people implying ring signatures would be a great leap forward? I've been silent about this, because it takes quite a bit of time to understand the proposed technology and the implications thereof when implementing such novelties. My professional experience has made me very weary about claims made by new technologies. Usually there is a lot of air, too theoretical and little actual value in practice or there are simply a new set of challenges to overcome. How many people here are actually deeply investigating what the technological solution is that Evan is building? Great to see that Evan reconsidered the 'ring signatures'. I have now even more confidence in his skill, but hyping is like asking for trouble. I wish a more mature behaviour would be followed.

#07 - X11 is a combination of hashing algorithms which has not been proofed in terms of encryption strength, right? Claiming this to be valuable because it uses 11 hashing algorithms, implies one may have no idea how difficult it is to proof the gained assymetric encryption strength by combining algorithms. Although unlikely, mathematical gateways may one day proof this is not a secure mix of algorithms at all, while SHA-256 has been proofed extensively. Just the fact that you're combining them may lead to unforeseen security issues. There is just no truthful way to support X11 as a technological innovation which provides additional, yet efficient, cryptographic (security) strength. I don't have a clear picture on this yet, but I would not be surprised if some day it is claimed to be irrelevant. I could be wrong, but this aspect of a crypto currency is clearly subject for discussion. Please enlighten me if you know more, but don't simply state "lower temps and power consumption" as this is not objectively represented? Plus, this is just cause the miners aren't fully optimized for X11, right? Otherwise GPUs would operate just as well at full power, high temps and high noise, but at higher hashrates. If it's a strong selling point, please enlighten me. As an investor i care least about this technical aspect. What am I missing?

#08 - Is there a need of management and coordination? Maybe it's a good idea to start considering both management & marketing as an essential layer of DRK. There should be a Dark foundation that steers and coordinates and provides clear messages to the community, all aligned with Evan's vision. I'm under the impression that someone is just writing software and then the big holders promote it ad hoc and in whatever way they see fit. I'm not sure to what extent it really helps Evan when so much pressure is put on him to deliver. I'm sure he can handle it, but still, some coordination please? Promotion seems uncoordinated. There is no clear message on how darkcoin should be presented and promoted, creating unwanted, incoherent and dubious references to darkcoin.

#09 - It's cryptocurrency and the value thereof has been determined through speculation. The DRK market is just as well manipulated. I've been watching in awe how the big dogs play around (although with less effectivity perhaps than in other markets). Truth is, one Dark coin buys you nothing at this time, but it's already worth +10$ based mainly on speculation. People referring to the 'to be' implemented features to determine value are misleading to some extent, to say the least. In my opinion they don't grasp the big picture or are only doing this for short term profit or are blind believers. A steady normal (market natural) price increase is not in their short-term interest. Shady market for sure, but less shady than the other altcoins!

#10 - FUD: Reaction by governmental institutions or other on the 'darkness'. Perhaps this is drama, but this coin will facilitate "some of the worst things in the world". You just know they'll spin it like that. As a serious investor, I can not yet see a bright future. The way I see it is that this coin may some day be *too hot to handle* for most people, especially because there is no clear communication on this. It may turn ugly, when various illegal market places are operating using Darkcoin technology. Some people are actually hoping for this to happen. A foundation could do so much to spread a clear message on this: "Anonimity is the right of every human being. We do not condone any illegal activity.". Make this perfectly clear please. Quoting Evan isn't really going to put my mind at ease. Creating clarity in regards to this aspect would be appreciated by serious investors. You may need to implement a communication strategy before it becomes an issue. Be prepared.
 
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In my opinion, we should start thinking about DRK as a product with a consumer market in real life, or at least take this approach instead of the narrowminded crypto approach. So what is our market? What are our targeted consumers? How should we brand our product? It's kind of unclear right now due to a lack of strategy or foundation, while overfocussing on the technical aspect and price ;). It's already somewhat taking the wrong direction? If the marketing issue could be solved, and the product works as advertised, this would effectively be Bitcoin's first prominent successor aka the first true altcoin. I can really see this. Fact is that I'm aware that few people will want to change the branding because of the 'good will' that has already been created around the name "darkcoin". If so, it will always make serious investors think twice about investing in this product.

In my opinion, the PRO's still far outweigh the CON's. If you stay within the tiny box of the cryptoworld and you put it in perspective versus regular altcoins, then you just know this could be a winner. I have no problem sharing with everyone that Darkcoin is the most promissing altcoin there is. Nothing comes close.

Could be much bigger if the community opened their eyes...
 
Wow, Nthelight, I've been creating my own list of scenario 'risks' similar to what would be in a mutual fund or ETF prospectus. We have very similar 'risks'. And we're actually witnessing risk #10 'Exchange Risk' right now with MintPal down.
Anyhow, I'm always open to edits on this as it's always a work in progress.
Darkcoin’s Risks:

1)Key Man Risk: Something could happen to Evan Duffield, the developer. Imagine if Bitcoin had emerged in this kind of environment where the government(s) now knows what a Bitcoin is, and where there is a growing public knowledge of Bitcoin’s huge rise to wealth. It is essentially the Oklahoma land rush or the California gold rush all over again but at lightning speed, complete with an unregulated Wild West-type feel to it . The fact that Evan is public with who he is marks him as a target for anyone (government, organized criminals, large angry Bitcoin/dogecoin holders, who knows). Additionally, since the coin is tied to Evan’s mind and his personal well-being it is also tied to the well-being of Evan’s support network. Basically if something happens to Evan or in Evan’s personal life that causes Evan to not focus on Darkcoin in any way, it is a risk worth listing here similar to if something happened to the CEO of a major corporation. The same can be said for Kyle.

2)Key Man Risk Continued: And somewhat along the same lines, since it is just Evan Duffield and Kyle Hagan, something could happen to the network whilst one or both are unable to attend to a computer. This isn’t a global team of developers who have constant watching vigil over the Darkcoin network, this is two guys who are human and I assume Kyle also lives in the U.S., like Evan, and they both work/live/sleep on a typical U.S. life schedule.

3)Security risk: Hackers might (?) be able to compromise the masternode or mining network (or who knows what else). Since what Evan and Kyle are doing is such a new and relatively untested concept in the crypto-currency world, and since it is essentially Evan versus the entire hacking ‘community’ in China, Russia, NSA, etc, there is a chance that those out there could exploit and bring down one of these networks which would also bring down the coin. We have seen cryptocoins get attacked by double-spends, 51% attacks, as well as DDOS attacks galore.

4)Fraud Risk: Darkcoin’s entire existence could be a huge elaborate scam made by “Evan Duffield”.

5)Technology Risk: Somehow the system just does not work right. So either the masternodes don’t talk to each other or there are many bugs that pop up that somehow hold back mass adoption by causing worry, or users’ DRK coins disappear or some other overall cataclysmic event(s) happens to the Darksend/masternode system.

6)Political Risk: The government might eventually realize that Darkcoin is Bitcoin, minus the ability to see transaction histories like the Bitcoin blockchain allows, and they focus on potential illegal activities that could develop and they force Evan to shut down using whatever bogus legal means they can (money laundering laws, terrorist funding, etc).

7)Education/PR Risk: It could take awhile for mass-adoption by the Bitcoin community, who have seen firsthand the largest crypto-currency scams (Mt. Gox) unfold and destroy lives and well-being. And any negative PR caused by hacker attacks or internal bugs or even overall FUD could possibly pause mass-adoption. Furthermore, the general public, who right now have no clue what DarkCoin is and barely know what a Bitcoin is, could take a longer time to convince if there are any ‘PR nightmares’.

8)Business Risk: A worthy competitor(s) could pop up and contest DarkCoin’s head-start on anonymous transactions using an even better technology or concept or use a team of developers with a better reputation or team of global developers with serious money to back it up.

9)Exchange Rate Risk: Until more DRK/USD legitimate exchanges come to fruition, the vast majority of Darkcoin’s price discovery happens using Bitcoin conversion. This means that most of the time what happens to the BTC/USD price is happening to DRK/BTC as well, unless a strong negative correlation between DRK/BTC and BTC/USD develops.

10)Exchange Risk: Darkcoin is tied to the well-being of MintPal, Cryptsy and Poloniex exchanges for now. Any kind of attacks, fraud or bugs on those exchanges that affect Darkcoin holders will also affect the DRK/BTC price.

11)Expectations Risk: After such a powerful rally this past month without a working product for the Average Joe to use, nor any masternode payments available yet, there is definitely a hype factor here that could turn on the coin if the product (anonymous transactions) or the payments to masternodes don’t meet expectations.

12)Mass-Adoption Risk: Bitcoin is facing an uphill battle in getting retailers/consumers to use Bitcoin. Darkcoin faces a much steeper climb due to being more unknown.

Answers to those risks so far (this is an ongoing work in progress):

1)Key Man Risk: Maybe eventually more ‘key men’ will be brought onboard and Evan’s role will not be as vital, somewhat akin to how Satoshi was able to "vanish” and yet BTC still thrives.

2)Key Man Risk: Luckily any ‘issues’ that result from this would likely only be temporary. Plus, given time to succeed and build a reputation, Darkcoin could easily hire or get more developers to join in from across the globe to help squash this risk.

3)Security Risk: Correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not in the know as well as others here as to what attacks have already taken place on Darkcoin, but besides some minor DDOS attacks on the mining pools it doesn’t seem like hackers have really tried to ‘test’ or mess with Darkcoin (perhaps they see an actual use in Darkcoin?).

4)Fraud Risk: Though not impossible, this is quite unlikely because Evan has put his name publicly to it and stated that he was series 65-registered (which indeed, there was an Evan Duffield who was registered in Mesa, AZ with Hawk Financial according to a recent FINRA Broker Check). You cannot get around that as proof of identity since it typically requires fingerprinting, third-party verifications and FBI background checks to get FINRA-registered.

5)Technology Risk: Evan and Kyle and those ‘techies’ from the DarkCoinTalk community have been beta-testing this on darkcointalk.org for a couple weeks/months to get rid of these issues. And we are still on par with the launch dates that Evan set out months ago.

6)Political Risk: Hire lobbyists eventually; reach out to media, politicians, etc.

7)Education/PR Risk: We have seen many FUD attacks on bitcointalk and yet DRK/BTC keeps going up. Furthermore, with more and more articles on Evan and Darkcoin coming out, the knowledge of Darkcoin will spread and we will hopefully start seeing those first steps (in the form of more and more DarkSends) being taken by more and more.

8)Business Risk: DRK/BTC has been on fire for over a month now and no worthy competitors have even come close to emerging. More time is needed?

9)Exchange Risk: On the positive side, if BTC/USD goes up and DRK/BTC goes sideways that means DRK/USD went up in $ value too. Furthermore, if BTC/USD is emerging from it’s minor bear market then DRK/BTC will be going along for the ride as long as it doesn’t go down.

10)Exchange Rate Risk: Either keep Darkcoins in cold storage and far away from exchanges or maybe, hopefully MintPal (forget about Cryptsy) realizes the mistakes that Mt. Gox made and learns from them.

11)Expectations Risk: DarkSend works so far (with correctly-updated version of the software) and there’s no reason yet to believe that masternode payments shouldn’t work. So as long as masternode payment profitability formula remains greater than the benefits of mining, I believe the product very well might meet expectations.

12)Mass-Adoption Risk: Give it time.
 
Nthelight said:
In my opinion, we should start thinking about DRK as a product with a consumer market in real life, or at least take this approach instead of the narrowminded crypto approach. So what is our market? What are our targeted consumers? How should we brand our product? It's kind of unclear right now due to a lack of strategy or foundation, while overfocussing on the technical aspect and price ;). It's already somewhat taking the wrong direction? If the marketing issue could be solved, and the product works as advertised, this would effectively be Bitcoin's first prominent successor aka the first true altcoin. I can really see this. Fact is that I'm aware that few people will want to change the branding because of the 'good will' that has already been created around the name "darkcoin". If so, it will always make serious investors think twice about investing in this product.

In my opinion, the PRO's still far outweigh the CON's. If you stay within the tiny box of the cryptoworld and you put it in perspective versus regular altcoins, then you just know this could be a winner. I have no problem sharing with everyone that Darkcoin is the most promissing altcoin there is. Nothing comes close.

Could be much bigger if the community opened their eyes...
Click to expand...

And I think our target market is definitely the consumer market...eventually. Bitcoin is in the process now of getting the mass-education and mass-adoption networking effect going. They may succeed in getting people to try it however it won't take long for the Average Joe to realize that anyone can track how and where he's spending his Bitcoins. And with a steady stream of news releases about how Darkcoin solves that problem I think we will eventually work towards building reliability and credibility.
I like the recent article on Wired that started with saying Darkcoin basically solves this problem, of course they then go on to mention how it could be used on the black market and how the price is manipulated yada yada yada. However this is a good start, and swaying the crypto-community and overall techies first and foremost seems to be the obvious route before the consumer market can get to it since it is this community which basically allows anything to move on to the 'next level'. I think the overall techie world will be watching to see how the masternodes perform and will likely hold final judgement when it all goes open source (next month?) before they truly let it proceed on to 'tech community mass adoption'.
JL
 
I think this is revolutionary. Fiat is a fraud with controlled inflation or deflation. With that kind of thing the Gov. can steal money right out of your account whenever they want and give it to whoever they want. Its control and greed. I should be able to spend my money with and whoever I want without being watched and regulated and without a third party getting there 10%. This is the direction that the world has to go if they want to keep true freedom.
 
For the branding reason, When I first heard of Bitcoin(2012), by the name and logo alone I thought it was play money, or a joke as you would have it. However, after simply reading more up on it and opening my mind, I understood the advantages of it over any other form of currency.
The point I'm trying to make is, people may categorize the name, Darkcoin, with other things, but a little read up would change their mind quickly, as mines was changed after I understood Bitcoin a little better.
Darkcoin is the future," The Anonymous Solution"
 
I think too the name might not be optimal... Althought i personally like it goes to much into the illegal direction... May be we can come up with a few ideas of other namens... How about PrivateCoin, PrivacyCoin, MyCoin
 
To the dev's. Can I offer some advice that you need to start making your plans a lot more public and clear. I know market price is not a primary concern for you right now, but it's important to maintain a balance. You need to keep a constant flow of information going out to the public on new developments & plans to help ease there confidence. Ideally you need a PR guy.
 
Updated to remove flawed reasoning, errors, incomplete statements and the transformation of the design, et cetera. These statements are marked in red. I do not want to mislead anyone reading the original post(s), so I've updated it in below posts. Feel free to correct or add anything you feel like.

#02 - The proposed technological innovation, is not really innovation, but more improvement on existing idea's. I'm perfectly fine with that, but these idea's have not been proofed in real world situations or on a large scale with many participants involved. Early adopters will have to accept the inherent risk involved and that issues will come from it. This is normal, but the smart approach is not to hype the product or prematurely promote undeveloped features of it. The DRK team could provide more transparancy on the scale and quality of their testing procedures. The testing of the product is perhaps done by a very small group of people.

Update 28/07/2014: the testing is (now) as transparant as you can expect for a project of this size and environment. See specific IRC channel, but currently mostly here at darkcointalk.org in the test thread(s). Anyone can follow the progress they're making. Great.

#04 - The implementation of masternodes create various new trust based challenges from within the system or I simply do not understand well...<text removed>...I haven't seen any number of masternodes set up that makes me feel confident.

#05 - I'm unable to fully grasp the risk involved when we're running with 50 or 100? masternodes, of which many in the same location. What will be the impact when a handful of masternodes will be DDOS'd? Is it feasible? How difficult would that be? Can you directly target a masternode? This isn't clear to me.

Update 28/07/2014: masternode public IPs have obviously been on display since the beginning and can easily be targetted by hackers. Chaeplin made it easy by making a nice web page with info :) I was too careful in my previous (above) statement. However, the new design (MN chaining for DS+) and the current amount of MNs make the incentive very low to DDOS MNs, even it were to just disrupt the Darksend functionality. Later implementations may even hide the public IPs of MNs through obfuscation or other techniques? It's probably safe to consider this now a much lower risk.

#07 - X11 is a combination of hashing algorithms which has not been proofed in terms of encryption strength, right? Claiming this to be valuable because it uses 11 hashing algorithms, implies one may have no idea how difficult it is to proof the gained assymetric encryption strength by combining algorithms. Although unlikely, mathematical gateways may one day proof this is not a secure mix of algorithms at all, while SHA-256 has been proofed extensively. Just the fact that you're combining them may lead to unforeseen security issues. There is just no truthful way to support X11 as a technological innovation which provides additional, yet efficient, cryptographic (security) strength. I don't have a clear picture on this yet, but I would not be surprised if some day it is claimed to be irrelevant. I could be wrong, but this aspect of a crypto currency is clearly subject for discussion.

Update 28/07/2014: Meanwhile I've had the time to go through the C++ source code in regards to the X11 algorithm and have investigated and found where these hashing algorithms come from. I wasn't aware of Darkcoin until end of March and it took some time to put it all together. I've also been able to assess that, provided this is done correctly, that chaining the hashing algorithms does effectively provide a lot of additional security to the network. The idea is that if one of the SHA-3 candidates ever proves to be unsecure and is compromised, the network would still not be compromised as there are x other algorithms still providing strength to the network security. This wasn't clear to me, but it's similar as to how Truecrypt works by combining (stacking) different encryption algorithms.
The innovation however is combining the SHA-3 candidate hashing algorithms for a cryptocurrency, not the used algorithms themselves obviously as the source code (correctly) reveals the C++ code for the SHA-3 candidates. These algorithms were (obviously) readily available online and "only" had to be combined and integrated in the Litecoin source code. Evan respected the authors and the names are still in there.
Despite this being a great move forward, it's not clear how sustainable this would be in the (very) long term. It would be great if Evan gives more information on X11 and how he may see this evolve in the coming 15 years.

Please enlighten me if you know more, but don't simply state "lower temps and power consumption" as this is not objectively represented? Plus, this is just cause the miners aren't fully optimized for X11, right? Otherwise GPUs would operate just as well at full power, high temps and high noise, but at higher hashrates. If it's a strong selling point, please enlighten me. As an investor i care least about this technical aspect. What am I missing?

Update 28/07/2014: Meanwhile every X11 miner out there knows that there has been a significant optimization leading to higher hashrates, but also higher power usage, temperature and noise. The increase however is not spectacular or equal to what we're used to with SCRYPT coins. At this point it's becoming clear that there is no comparison feasible with SCRYPT. Litecoin has implemented a minor ASIC resistance feature (memory hardening 128kb), while Darkcoin has not. This is probably the reason why we have much higher hashrates and lower power consumption with X11 (although it's 11 algos) than with SCRYPT (SHA-256 double). This is not a final statement and further optimizations may still increase hashrate and power consumption, but I suspect we'll never see SCRYPT alike mining with X11. Better network security, but not ASIC resistant other than the additional complexity of combining 11 algorithms. It's probably also true that the increased benefit by ASICs versus GPU versus CPU is going to be less than with other "singular" algorithm cryptocurrencies, which is great.
 
JesseLivermore said:
3)Security Risk: Correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not in the know as well as others here as to what attacks have already taken place on Darkcoin, but besides some minor DDOS attacks on the mining pools it doesn’t seem like hackers have really tried to ‘test’ or mess with Darkcoin (perhaps they see an actual use in Darkcoin?).

8)Business Risk: DRK/BTC has been on fire for over a month now and no worthy competitors have even come close to emerging. More time is needed?

10)Exchange Rate Risk: Either keep Darkcoins in cold storage and far away from exchanges or maybe, hopefully MintPal (forget about Cryptsy) realizes the mistakes that Mt. Gox made and learns from them.

12)Mass-Adoption Risk: Give it time.
Click to expand...

3) C-Cex got hacked and is now virtually broke, darkcoin.io got repetitive DDOS attacks, drkpool.com got hacked and had to shut down, ... but I do not consider this part of the Darkcoin core network, except for the darkcoin.io domain maybe. They are essentially third party services attached to the core network. This is thus not disastrous to the core network per se. This only seems to hurt the price from where I'm standing.

8) Although I'm somewhat surprised, needless to say price-wise the fire is gone or has decreased significantly. Good lesson for me too as I have bought in *way too high* believing everyone would consider Darkcoin a top-tier cryptocurrency and more demand would still come when prices were above 0.02+. We can now clearly see where the bottom support is (approximately) or so I suspect (I don't trade).
Lastly, imho at least one competitor is out there which I've been following since the beginning.

10) Most importantly people continue to hold enormous amounts of wealth on illegitimate crypto exchanges, waiting for a disaster to happen. Mintpal got hacked (SQL injection was the rumour) and yet people continue to happily keep DRK on there, because only VRC got impacted. Greed and ignorance obviously blinds most people from doing the right thing. There was not even a message from the community leader(s) to caution investors and question the safety of keeping massive volumes of DRK on there (for a long time). Today this is still true. Check the richlist for how many DRK coins are at Mintpal. Incredible. A coherent call to move towards a legitimate exchange could be organized, but it's crypto and I suspect that would be a very challenging task. At least some advise could be given?

12) Time is not enough. It's difficult to promote 'Darkcoin' to people who are not in cryptocurrency. Marketing & PR is still a major issue here hindering mass adoption. If the name remains, it will always need to be clarified over and over that it has nothing to do with illegal stuff. Makes the climb upwards even more difficult.
 
Since it's been 2+ months, I figure now is a good time to edit this (in red).

JesseLivermore said:
Wow, Nthelight, I've been creating my own list of scenario 'risks' similar to what would be in a mutual fund or ETF prospectus. We have very similar 'risks'. And we're actually witnessing risk #10 'Exchange Risk' right now with MintPal down.
Anyhow, I'm always open to edits on this as it's always a work in progress.
Darkcoin’s Risks:

1)Key Man Risk: Something could happen to Evan Duffield, the developer. Imagine if Bitcoin had emerged in this kind of environment where the government(s) now knows what a Bitcoin is, and where there is a growing public knowledge of Bitcoin’s huge rise to wealth. It is essentially the Oklahoma land rush or the California gold rush all over again but at lightning speed, complete with an unregulated Wild West-type feel to it . The fact that Evan is public with who he is marks him as a target for anyone (government, organized criminals, large angry Bitcoin/dogecoin holders, who knows). Additionally, since the coin is tied to Evan’s mind and his personal well-being it is also tied to the well-being of Evan’s support network. Basically if something happens to Evan or in Evan’s personal life that causes Evan to not focus on Darkcoin in any way, it is a risk worth listing here similar to if something happened to the CEO of a major corporation. The same can be said for Kyle.
2)Key Man Risk Continued: And somewhat along the same lines, since it is just Evan Duffield and Kyle Hagan, something could happen to the network whilst one or both are unable to attend to a computer. This isn’t a global team of developers who have constant watching vigil over the Darkcoin network, this is two guys who are human and I assume Kyle also lives in the U.S., like Evan, and they both work/live/sleep on a typical U.S. life schedule.

3)Security risk: Hackers might (?) be able to compromise the masternode or mining network (or who knows what else). Since what Evan and Kyle are doing is such a new and relatively untested concept in the crypto-currency world, and since it is essentially Evan versus the entire hacking ‘community’ in China, Russia, NSA, etc, there is a chance that those out there could exploit and bring down one of these networks which would also bring down the coin. We have seen cryptocoins get attacked by double-spends, 51% attacks, as well as DDOS attacks galore.
We've now seen hackers go after weak master nodes however the DarkCoin network remains solid.

4)Fraud Risk: Darkcoin’s entire existence could be a huge elaborate scam made by “Evan Duffield”.
This risk goes down dramatically with time. So while it was huge when DarkCoin was launched, now it is pretty much nonexistent and laughable given the amount of time Evan has poured into DarkCoin.

5)Technology Risk: Somehow the system just does not work right. So either the masternodes don’t talk to each other or there are many bugs that pop up that somehow hold back mass adoption by causing worry, or users’ DRK coins disappear or some other overall cataclysmic event(s) happens to the Darksend/masternode system.
We already saw this with the initial MN payment launch causing forking. With the advent of the 'spork', as well as thorough testnet testing, this risk has now dissipated dramatically.

6)Political Risk: The government might eventually realize that Darkcoin is Bitcoin, minus the ability to see transaction histories like the Bitcoin blockchain allows, and they focus on potential illegal activities that could develop and they force Evan to shut down using whatever bogus legal means they can (money laundering laws, terrorist funding, etc).
IMO, this risk becomes the #1 risk assuming RC4 goes live and works.

7)Education/PR Risk: It could take awhile for mass-adoption by the Bitcoin community, who have seen firsthand the largest crypto-currency scams (Mt. Gox) unfold and destroy lives and well-being. And any negative PR caused by hacker attacks or internal bugs or even overall FUD could possibly pause mass-adoption. Furthermore, the general public, who right now have no clue what DarkCoin is and barely know what a Bitcoin is, could take a longer time to convince if there are any ‘PR nightmares’.
FUD is now an everyday phenomenon on BitcoinTalk but at this price point doesn't seem to have any adverse effect on price. As DarkCoin's anonymity product matures the education/PR side of DarkCoin will have to takeover to help spread adoption. If education/PR fails in spreading the word to the masses, or if some other 'anon' product or coin has better education/PR, this could be a big risk to DarkCoin's adoption. Having Evan do interviews again (like he did many months ago for Wired) will help.

8)Business Risk: A worthy competitor(s) could pop up and contest DarkCoin’s head-start on anonymous transactions using an even better technology or concept or use a team of developers with a better reputation or team of global developers with serious money to back it up.
We've seen Dark Wallet, X-Coin, Monero, Cloak, etc etc etc pop up as competitors. Some of them have had a short-term adverse effect on price due to pump and dumpers, but overall they have all been more talk than substance, unlike DarkCoin. There could of course still be a team of superstar developers who decide to join the 'anon' game if DarkCoin succeeds in creating and leading the crypto-anonymous-coin niche, so this will forever be a legit risk to DarkCoin.

9)Exchange Rate Risk: Until more DRK/USD legitimate exchanges come to fruition, the vast majority of Darkcoin’s price discovery happens using Bitcoin conversion. This means that most of the time what happens to the BTC/USD price is happening to DRK/BTC as well, unless a strong negative correlation between DRK/BTC and BTC/USD develops.
BitFinex's DRK/USD seems to get pretty decent volume and is very legit. This dependence on Bitcoin conversions is now nearly nil assuming a hypothetical situation whereby DRK/BTC exchange rate is not possible.

10)Exchange Risk: Darkcoin is tied to the well-being of MintPal, Cryptsy and Poloniex exchanges for now. Any kind of attacks, fraud or bugs on those exchanges that affect Darkcoin holders will also affect the DRK/BTC price.
We've seen numerous attacks on MintPal now, and this does remain a large risk since the exchanges are still huge holders. The spreading out of exchanges (to BitFinex, Bittrex, etc) will help mitigate this risk.

11)Expectations Risk: After such a powerful rally this past month without a working product for the Average Joe to use, nor any masternode payments available yet, there is definitely a hype factor here that could turn on the coin if the product (anonymous transactions) or the payments to masternodes don’t meet expectations.
The price crashed after RC3 forks so expectations were definitely sky-high and hard to meet. Expectations have now calmed back down it seems and there's definitely less of a hype factor. This risk overall seems to be cyclical and will likely always be prevalent.

12)Mass-Adoption Risk: Bitcoin is facing an uphill battle in getting retailers/consumers to use Bitcoin. Darkcoin faces a much steeper climb due to being more unknown.
This goes along with Education/PR risk and will likely exist for many years to come.
Click to expand...
 
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