How safe are instant transactions? Current limits and its potential

Haha, that's funny. yeah, sadly there's not a whole lot of money in investigative journalism, unless you get a huge story. But than again, if money was my main goal I wouldn't be a journalist. :) it also requires a level of technical knowledge that other journalists might be lacking, and one which I'm personally trying to get more balanced on.
 
The term "Darksend" is a bit misleading, because the coins are anonymized before they can be sent anonymously. You can anonymize Darkcoins that you have in your wallet. After you have finished the anonymization process, you will have for example 100 anonymous coins and 100 standard coins. And after that, it's just a matter of choosing which coins to send, the standard coins or the anonymous ones.

If you send an anonymous coin with or without InstantX feature, the result will be the same - a transaction is broadcasted and eventually recorded into the blockchain. But because the sent coin was anonymous, no one will be able to tie the transacted coin to you. All they can tell is that a coin was sent from A to B, but the A is just an address that is not connected to anything.

So InstantX and "Darksend" are two different and independent features.
 
Hey Juan, just wanted to throw in that i saw you on Anarchast with Jeff Berwick, really interesting interview! :)

I would love to visit Acapulco some time 8)
 
Hah, glad you liked it startale. looking forward to Anarchapulco. Will be blogging and tweeting about it (at)juansgalt , :)

illodin, thank you for the clarification! That makes more sense as to how the features can work together.

The next question in my mind is about protecting users from IP correlations with their transactions. Here's a statement that puts the problems of IP leaking in perspective.

"The most basic privacy required by users is the ability to keep their IP address from being discovered. Any efforts to ensure the privacy of crypto-currency transactions can be rendered useless by allowing third parties to trace this.

For example, if a private crypto-currency payment is sent to an online store but the user’s IP address is visible, all payments received around that time are probabilistically linked to that computer. Information gleaned from the shipping address and any other personal details submitted can quickly be pieced together to discover the customer’s identity."

Is Darkcoin doing anything to try and separate those associations or is that considered a separate problem for VPNs or other projects like tor or i2p to solve?

If not, are there maybe any plans for features that will help break that association?
 
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JuanSGalt said:
Is Darkcoin doing anything to try and separate those associations or is that considered a separate problem for VPNs or other projects like tor or i2p to solve?

If not, are there maybe any plans for features that will help break that association?
Click to expand...

Darkcoin is not doing anything to hide IP addresses yet - but it is planned. It is an essential feature to have in a privacy oriented coin. Here is a little description of the plans the devs have from a few months ago: https://www.darkcoin.io/news/development-update-october-1-2014/
 
JuanSGalt said:
Is Darkcoin doing anything to try and separate those associations or is that considered a separate problem for VPNs or other projects like tor or i2p to solve?

If not, are there maybe any plans for features that will help break that association?
Click to expand...

You can simply use Darkcoin through TOR.

If you have a TOR proxy running, start the wallet with ...
Code: 
darkcoin-qt -onion=127.0.0.1:9050 -listen=0
... and you are hiding your IP address and the network will only see the IP of the exit node you are using.

In addition, if you run it with ...
Code: 
darkcoin-qt -onion=127.0.0.1:9050 -listen=0 -onlynet=tor
... you will only connect to other TOR nodes running a darkcoin daemon. [I'm currently testing this, there are not many tor nodes for darkcoin yet.]

What you are asking for is an IP obfuscation on network protocol level and I can tell you this is complex and wont happen soon. The only thing on the Darkcoin roadmap is blinding masternode IPs, but that's another subject.
 
vertoe said:
You can simply use Darkcoin through TOR.

If you have a TOR proxy running, start the wallet with ...
Code: 
darkcoin-qt -onion=127.0.0.1:9050 -listen=0
... and you are hiding your IP address and the network will only see the IP of the exit node you are using.

In addition, if you run it with ...
Code: 
darkcoin-qt -onion=127.0.0.1:9050 -listen=0 -onlynet=tor
... you will only connect to other TOR nodes running a darkcoin daemon. [I'm currently testing this, there are not many tor nodes for darkcoin yet.]

What you are asking for is an IP obfuscation on network protocol level and I can tell you this is complex and wont happen soon. The only thing on the Darkcoin roadmap is blinding masternode IPs, but that's another subject.
Click to expand...

Don't you also have to specify external IP? Like here: https://github.com/darkcoin/darkcoin/commit/b6ac14c5c1b749ec547622baa45f943d44b3731b

user would have to create a hidden service.
 
vertoe said:
you dont need an external ip, you can run the client through tor with a random ip address identity of your tor proxy. what you linked is running a darkcoin server with .onion land address exposed. that's not required for using the client.
Click to expand...
Will the next DRK wallet qt have the network setup features to connect to Tor like Hexchat IRC client?
 
vertoe said:
you dont need an external ip, you can run the client through tor with a random ip address identity of your tor proxy. what you linked is running a darkcoin server with .onion land address exposed. that's not required for using the client.
Click to expand...

I know. But look at the -externalip parameter. You specify your hidden service address so you can become a full node anonymously.
 
darkstrike420 said:
I know. But look at the -externalip parameter. You specify your hidden service address so you can become a full node anonymously.
Click to expand...
Did you try that btw? I just tried and it still wont use the external address of the hiddenservice i created.

Could anyone try to connect to drkcoinooditvool.onion or darkcoxbtzggpmcc.onion with the client?
 
vertoe said:
Did you try that btw? I just tried and it still wont use the external address of the hiddenservice i created.

Could anyone try to connect to drkcoinooditvool.onion or darkcoxbtzggpmcc.onion with the client?
Click to expand...

I didn't. I don't even have Darkcoin installed at the moment. I only install it when there is new features to test on testnet.
 
Great info folks. What about mobile wallets. Is there a mobile wallet right now that supports either or Darksend and iX?

Its obvious to me Darkcoin is an amazing tool for retail commerce, and its too good for that purpose to not have been arrived at consciously. However, a solid mobile client is needed for that, and the one I saw seems to be missing iX or Darksend.

What is the roadmap for this?
 
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