How True Anonymity Made Darkcoin King of the Altcoins

Enthusiasm for the digital currency has been fueled by darkcoin's price gains in recent weeks, as the coin has seemingly successfully appealed to many buyers who once turned to bitcoin for its supposed anonymity.

One of the major components of darkcoin is DarkSend, a peer-to-peer framework that bundles small transactions into larger anonymous ones.

There is a masternode election system that randomly assigns which masternode will process a bundle of darkcoin transactions.

This, Duffield explains, ensures that only those who get involved in running the network have a vested interest in participating, as well as prevent bad actors from spying on the transactions taking place in the darkcoin network.

A more detailed explanation of the masternode framework and election system can be found in the original darkcoin whitepaper written by Duffield and developer Kyle Hagan.

Duffield told CoinDesk that, in part, darkcoin also seeks to solve some of the problems associated with proof-of-work mining, namely energy costs.

This factor, Duffield suggested, has lent itself to the greatly expanded hashing power in the darkcoin network and provided a boon to hobby miners who can't afford large-scale cooling infrastructure.

Darkcoin addresses a problem associated with the multipool ecosystem, by which large mining pools disrupt a coin network by dramatically expanding the overall hashrate.

Notably, Duffield is seeking to implement a system for building services on the darkcoin network.

Ultimately, darkcoin is taking the idea of anonymous financial transactions pioneered by bitcoin and pushing it to the next level.