On Monday Darkcoin was finally open sourced and its value plunged. This isn't the first sense defying price movement in Darkcoin's history, the coin rallied on the eve of a hard fork that introduced "master nodes" onto their not entirely open sourced coin's network. Completely befuddling phenomena surrounding DarkCoin include important questions such as:
- Why are people assigning value to a cryptographic anything whose function depends on components without source available for people to at least pretend they have audited and read?
- Darkcoin exists as an altcoin, which underwent an elective hardfork and has potential future hardforks in the future yet… The thing is still being traded for values other than bulk excrement which at least contains nitrogen and phosphorous suitable for agricultural use.
- There's still an awful lot of malefactors with fat bags of coin looking to create Buterin's Waterfalls aren't there?
The crew behind Darkcoin does nothing but advance these concern. Consider the first and most prominent block of text on their homepage http://darkcoin.io at the time of this writing:
Mandatory Update to RC5
-Enforcement of masternode payments to be turned on when 90% of network updates or in 3 weeks
-Perfected Darksend with feedback from security review
-Code ready for open source
-Next steps
Or consider their non-description of a "Master Node"
In addition to traditional Proof of Work rewards for mining Darkcoin, users are also rewarded for running and maintaining special servers called “Masternodes”.
Though future plans envision several roles for Masternodes, their primary function is to carry out the anonymization phase of the Darksend protocol. The service that Masternodes provide to the network is the beating heart of Darksend, which, in turn, is the defining feature of Darkcoin.
In return for providing this service, one Masternode is randomly selected by the network to receive 20% of the payout from each block mined.
In order to run a Masternode, a user must put up 1000 DRK as something akin to collateral, though unlike traditional collateral, the DRK never leaves the user’s possession. It can be moved or spent at any time by the user – doing so simply removes the Masternode from service and makes it ineligible to receive rewards.
While Bitcoin offers nothing resembling anonymity to persons who do not care to work in the betterment of their interests, Bitcoin offers opportunities to get great anonymity and protection in accordance to the quality of their effort. Anonymity is like censorship. You can get anonymity through the expenditure of work and resources. You can avoid censorship by expending work and resources.
Darkcoin instead promises anonymity without work so long as you merely trust. Trust that these Master nodes actual provide the service promised. Trust that this protocol which is still being built is actually capable of fulfilling its promises. Trust that the developers are not merely rats or stool pigeons offering a honey pot in the hope that by entrapping others they might find absolution for their own sins. Trust that the people behind Darkcoin even intend that the system can work in such a way as they promise instead of merely supposing the project as a cash grab before rising off into the sunset.
The OpenSSL behavior behind HeartBleed spent two years in the wild. The Bash behavior behind "Shell Shock" is an artifact of last century. What kind of serious project would forsake the eyes, resources, and brutal mathematics behind the success of Bitcoin's engineering simplicity while introducing complexity and fragility under the banner of usability?
IIRC Darkjoin just repackages CoinJoin, which doesn't require trust. But there's no reason to use Darkcoin over Bitcoin+CoinJoin.
As for trusting a closed source program for things that actually have a cost… that's just plain dumb.