Faucet Referral Program
You get 0.00010000 FTC for every unique valid user referral request using your wallet address. You must have a valid address that has already been used in the faucet as the referral amount is added to your faucet balance automatically and immediately .
WizSec has been investigating the MtGox crash since soon after it occurred, making us probably the longest running non-official investigation.
In this time, as we slowly discover more things, it has become more and more important to be careful in what we disclose, both in order not to jeopardize other investigations and also not to needlessly get any of our sources into trouble. In line with our intent to investigate responsibly, we have also signed several non-disclosure agreements.
However, it has now been a full year since MtGox, and the then customers, now creditors still don’t have much to go on. There was the release of The Willy Report last May, then there was the encouraging news that Kraken was appointed as an additional official investigator in November (but as such they will also have to work mostly in silence), and later we heard speculations of MtGox involvement being tossed around in the Silk Road trial.
We wanted to share at least something publicly to help keep attention on MtGox alive, and after some consideration we think the following information is “safe” without betraying any trust or causing any trouble. This is an adaptation of a report we prepared last summer, documenting one of the things we focused on early in the investigation: a deeper look into the activities of the Willy trading bot. This is information we’ve already shared with official investigators and is not too sensitive, as it represents an early stage of our investigation.
Note that the report was intended as an introduction of our work at the time to other people like the MtGox trustee, police or other investigators, so while it isn’t too technical it does assume some prior knowledge of bitcoin and the MtGox case. We hope to in the future be able to share more through blog posts like this one, though cooperating with official investigators will always take priority.
Background
Following the collapse of MtGox in early 2014, parts of its database were leaked onto the Internet. This data included trading logs, account balances and withdrawal/deposit logs, but was incomplete and the different data covered different time periods. Despite the limited nature of the data, a lot of people tried to analyze it to gain clues as to what had happened at MtGox, and probably the deepest analysis at the time was The Willy Report, published online in late May 2014.
The Willy Report identified suspicious trading activity happening at MtGox, with certain user accounts being used to seemingly fraudulently buy large amounts of bitcoins in an automated fashion. For our preliminary analysis and demonstration we have focused on this activity and attempt to follow up on the Willy Report. Given better access to more MtGox data, we could examine other aspects equally carefully.
Summary of the Willy Report
The suspicious user accounts identified by the Willy Report all followed a particular pattern:
Each account was active for a single time period, and only one account was active at a time.
Each account bought 10-20 bitcoins every 5-10 minutes.
Each account only bought bitcoin with USD, and never sold any coins.
Each account bought bitcoin up to a very specific total USD amount (e.g. 2,500,000 USD).
After each account was “finished”, another account would shortly become active and continue buying.
These accounts were seemingly able to trade even when MtGox was inaccessible to the world.
All trades by these accounts had unusual data in the trade log files.
This automated trading began on September 27, 2013 and continued at least until the end of the leaked log data (at the end of November 2013). After this point there is no trade data available publicly, but people claim to have observed this behavior continue into 2014, and supposedly at some point after that, the reverse started happening; automated selling of bitcoin at regular intervals.
The second half of the Willy Report investigates another suspicious account in the leaked trade logs, with seemingly incorrect fiat amounts recorded for its trades. This account exhibited different behavior but like Willy it seemed to buy a lot of bitcoin during 2013 (February through September) only to suddenly stop, mere hours before the first Willy account began trading. The report dubbed this user “Markus”, and later concluded that it was using the MtGox trading account of CEO Mark Karpelès, though the log data was inconsistent and may have been intentionally manipulated specifically to conceal or obfuscate this account activity. Ultimately the relationship between Markus and Willy remains unclear.
Impact on the MtGox market
Willy bought a very large amount of bitcoin on MtGox during the period of September 27 – November 30 during 2013 (and later, though the leaked logs end on this date), a total of over 250,000 BTC. There is a very high probability that this had a large effect on the price of bitcoin, opening up the possibility that this may have been a plan to manipulate the market rather than (or in addition to) fraudulently acquiring bitcoins. Another speculation has been that MtGox for some reason had a shortage of bitcoins and used their own exchange to acquire more, trading BTC shortage for USD shortage.
As clearly seen, for a lot of the time (especially when the market was otherwise quiet), Willy had a significant presence, and it is hard to think that this would not have an effect on the market and in turn the exchange price, through its added buying pressure. There are even some suspicious incidents where Willy becomes absent and soon afterwards the market “corrects” itself to a lower price level.
A question we cannot answer without more data is what continued influence Willy had after November 30. Certainly there were additional strong price climbs later that in the light of this might now appear suspicious, but it is also a fact that the price never peaked past its high point at the end of November. Did Willy stop trading, or was the amount of bitcoins it bought no longer large enough to keep pushing the price even higher? Did Willy or similar fraudulent trading play any role in the massive price crash that began in early February? And finally, what happened to all the bitcoins that Willy seemingly amassed?
Investigation
Retracing the steps of the Willy Report, we followed up on several areas and attempted to perform a deeper analysis. The first step meant documenting the behavior of the Willy bot over time, beginning by reconstructing the trade orders it issued. The leaked trade logs contain the individual transactions used to fulfill trade orders, but not the original order amounts input by the users. Fortunately, since Willy appeared to exclusively buy bitcoins using market orders (i.e. buying regardless of price), reconstructing the original order amounts can be done mostly automatically by grouping trades that happened very closely together (e.g. within a few seconds of each other).
Grouping Willy’s trades into orders reduced the amount of data from about 100,000 trades (performed by accounts associated with Willy) down to about 7,000 buy orders.
Our first observation is that Willy clearly operated within strict parameters for how much bitcoin to buy with each order, and that this range was altered several times, sometimes even during the run of an account. Early on it used large ranges like 0 – 150 BTC or 0 – 50 BTC, but later decreased to 10 – 30 BTC or 10 – 20 BTC towards the end of the leaked logs. Our interpretation is that as the price of bitcoin kept going higher, Willy was reconfigured to buy lower amounts in order not to drain each account’s “deposit” of USD funds too quickly. Even with these changes, the later accounts have significantly shorter “lifetimes” than the early ones, requiring Willy to switch accounts more frequently.
The graph also reveals that there were gaps between some of the periods in which Willy operated; but almost never within the span of a single account. We interpret this to mean that each Willy account was automatic once started and ran until its USD “funds” were depleted, but needed to be restarted for each new account.
One notable property of these high orders is that they early on are for very even amounts, such as exactly 2,000 BTC. Later the amounts change to more random-looking values. Our interpretation here is that these are manually issued buy orders (in addition to the automatic trading on each account), and that at a later point the user behind Willy perhaps altered their strategy to use random-looking values so as not to draw too much attention to these big orders. (With an even amount, there would be a risk that someone observing the trades live would spot the nice and even totals, making it more obvious that these were single big trades rather than spontaneous market rushes.)
Although this time there is a bit more noise, just like with the buy order sizes the pattern is still fairly clear and tells us that the cool-down time was another configurable parameter of Willy that was at times changed.
The increased noise at the end is not something we can readily explain; either the cool-down parameter was changed very frequently, or there were circumstances where Willy could issue additional trades with a shorter, often nearly non-existent delay. Possibly this was manually triggered (like some type of temporary “turbo mode”), triggered by some kind of market condition, or it could have been a bug.
In summary, Willy was a computer program which at its core likely obeyed the following logic:
parameters: MIN_AMOUNT, MAX_AMOUNT, MIN_DELAY, MAX_DELAY,
SOURCE_CURRENCY = USD, TARGET_CURRENCY = BTC, INITIAL_DEPOSIT
deposit INITIAL_DEPOSIT into SOURCE_CURRENCY account
loop
if SOURCE_CURRENCY account is empty, abort.
let AMOUNT := random number between MIN_AMOUNT and MAX_AMOUNT
issue market order for AMOUNT of TARGET_CURRENCY
let DELAY := random number between MIN_DELAY and MAX_DELAY
sleep for DELAY
Profiling Willy
At this point, we had strong indications that Willy was an automatic bot which was at times controlled by its operator, and had already identified multiple instances of likely such interactions by this user:
Starting each new Willy account
Changing the buy range
Changing the cool-down range
Issuing a manual, high-volume buy order
(Possibly issuing additional buy orders in the normal range, but sooner than scheduled)
All in all we gathered around 200 such user events. The next logical step was to analyze and compare the exact timestamps of each of these interactions, trying to get clues about the user. For example, regular absence of any activity during certain hours of the day would be a possible indication of the user’s sleep cycle, which in turn could be a clue as to in which part of the world they were located (based on the time zone).
While the data is scarcely sufficient for conclusions, there is one notable gap with no user activity, between 17:00 and 20:00 UTC. The time zones for which this range falls within “normal” sleeping hours cover much of Australasia; in Japan, for example, these hours correspond to 02:00 – 05:00 JST, though the data can be interpreted to plausibly fit any timezone from UTC+8 through UTC+12. We’ll use Japan Standard Time as a frame of reference in this report.
The relatively short period of inactivity increases the margin for error and raises questions; while the average rest is longer than the three-hour “common” range (i.e. the rest time frame varies), it is often shorter than six hours and rarely longer than seven, shorter than an average person sleeps each night. The shortest observed rest period is only about four hours.
Speculating, this kind of sleep pattern could mean that this person sleeps somewhat irregularly (e.g. does the occasional all-nighter etc.), or alternatively that there are two or more users, covering more of the day by working together.
We note that nearly all activity happens on weekdays (as opposed to weekends), which leads us to suspect that it’s more specifically related to workdays. We speculate that days with low activity may have been times when this person was off or occupied with something else.
We also note that activity is spread out through most of the day, including any possible work hours, from which we surmise that this person was able to control Willy from his work environment as well as from home. There is also a possibility the person did not have a job at the time, though the workday pattern would seem to indicate a regular work schedule.
After the leaked data
Since the leaked trade logs end on November 30, 2013, we cannot directly trace any continued activity past this date without access to more data. However, based on what we learned so far of Willy’s behavior, we attempted to find traces of Willy in the public MtGox trade ticker. This was a web service offered by MtGox that provided a live feed of trades happening, however the reported data was limited to just the time of the trade, the exchange rate and the amount of bitcoins bought/sold; no account information is present.
Since we knew Willy operated exclusively with market orders, we performed the same type of analysis as earlier, attempting to reconstruct trade orders from individual trades by combining trades that happened close together. (We used a threshold of two seconds to separate different trade orders.) Further, for the resulting recombined orders, we tried to detect if the driving market order was a buy order or a sell order by observing if the exchange rate climbed or fell as the individual trades were being executed.
The vertical bars of bitcoin purchases for amounts in specified ranges show up clearly, and match the pattern in the earlier graph of Willy account activity, and as expected they show up as buy market orders (blue) by driving the market price upwards. The graph tells us with fairly high certainty that Willy kept operating through-out December and January, though with longer gaps between accounts – there are notable absences of activity around Christmas and in the middle of January.
More importantly, around January 28 the pattern suddenly reverses and now appears to be driving the market price downwards by issuing sell market orders (orange) rather than buying. This confirms eye-witness accounts in the Willy Report of Willy operating in reverse in February, and casts a strong suspicion that Willy had a hand in the large price crash on MtGox in February.
Questions to investigate further
Willy spent a large amount of USD buying bitcoins. If this money was legitimate, how did such large amounts of currency flow into a few accounts without raising suspicion? If instead the account balances were faked, how was this done?
What happened to the bitcoins Willy bought? No Willy accounts appear in the leaked account balances, meaning the accounts were either completely emptied, wiped from the logs, wiped from the database itself, or somehow the entire accounts themselves were faked.
When Willy switched to selling bitcoin, did it sell the coins previously bought from other accounts, or did it again use fake balances, “selling” non-existent coins?
Similarly, what happened to the USD that “reverse Willy” accumulated in February? Was it withdrawn?
What was the purpose of Willy? Was it to buy and sell bitcoin (possibly fraudulently), or was it an attempt to manipulate the market price?
Where was Willy operating? If it was able to trade even when MtGox was unavailable to the rest of the world, was it running in or connected to MtGox’s internal network?
What role did Willy play in the events that lead to the collapse of MtGox? Could it have been solely responsible for the currently known shortage in currency and bitcoin?
source: http://blog.wizsec.jp/2015/02/mtgox-investigation-release.html
Mastercoin’s leadership team admits it has been fighting an uphill battle.
The project, one of the first in the crypto 2.0 space – perhaps by virtue of its early status and public controversies – continues to be dogged by outspoken critics who seek to decry the project as dead. The decline has been sharpened by the spike in interest surrounding competitor Counterparty, which after launching in 2014 forged a partnership with Overstock and has seen new entrepreneurs use its platform to release assets on the bitcoin blockchain.In 2015, however, Mastercoin is seeking to turn the page as Omni, rebranding in a new bid to change this narrative. As a result of the move, many of the remaining Mastercoin leadership, including chief architect JR Willet, CTO Craig Sellars and board member and BitAngels co-founder David Johnston, will migrate to Omni to solidify their message and clear up marketplace confusion that they feel has held back their efforts.
Speaking to CoinDesk, the Omni team sought to reframe its offering as the only crypto 2.0 protocol that provides a tested platform that can support ambitious projects like decentralised recordkeeping network Factom, decentralised Internet provider MaidSafe and currency-backed token project Tether – all of which use the rebranded Omni layer.Despite public perception, the Omni team remains confident that it has identified its core weakness, messaging, which it believes has failed to properly tout the core technological competencies of the project to the wider community.
Johnston is speaking of how Omni will seek to promote its efforts, by relying on the community of projects that uses its protocol to speak to its attributes. He also touched on misconceptions that have been partly proliferated by the project’s past decisions.One of the first projects to hold a crowdsale, Omni argues that, because of such misconceptions, the Mastercoin Foundation was often looked to as a company that should be responsible for building on top of, instead of evangelizing for its platform.
“No one would look at the Bitcoin Foundation and say, ‘Why haven’t you built Coinbase yet?’” Johnston continued. “That’s totally outside of the competency, but people had that misconception that the Foundation was going to do everything.”
Two of Mastercoin’s projects – its decentralised exchange and Omniwallet, for example – will be operated by the Omni Foundation. Conversely, the Mastercoin Foundation will continue to be responsible solely for distributing mastercoin tokens to developers.
“We’ve left one role for the old foundation, which is to hand out the developer tokens and that board will be elected by the people that own tokens in the system,” Johnston said. “The proof of stake – that’s what it does – it’s responsible for handing out developer tokens, and they’re giving out half the first year, one quarter the second year and so on.”
“All [the original Mastercoin crowdsale participants] still own their same tokens,” he continued. “Nothing changes with that.”
By contrast, the Omni team framed its efforts as largely geared toward inspiring developers to innovate and build on the platform. Johnston portrayed Omni as a project that would empower those building on it to take the lead in its efforts.
“It’s a community-driven effort meaning that MaidSafe, Tether and Factom – and all the people that are using that protocol are members of the foundation – they’re sponsoring the developers to work on the decentralised exchange and improve the code,” he said.
Throughout the conversation, the Omni team strived to emphasize that while Counterparty may have succeeded at bringing in new developers, its platform is the one that supports those with the largest market capitalizations.Michael Terpin, CEO of PR firm Social Radius, which is now working with Omni, cited the fact that MaidSafeCoin, an asset on the omni protocol, has a $13m market cap at press time – which is greater than that of both Counterparty’s tokens and Mastercoin, now Omni’s, tokens combined.
“Counterparty has put some focus on promoting what they’ve been doing,” said Terpin. “Mastercoin was focused internally, and there was some backlash to that. I think going forward, we’re going to be more proactive in communicating to the marketplace what we’re doing.”
As to how exactly Omni would inspire its developers to be more vocal about the Omni protocol, Sellars was less clear, though he said efforts are on the way to highlight the technological capabilities of the platform.
“Amazon doesn’t come out and say, ‘Hey we’re using HTTP, because it’s the foundational layer. It’s ‘Well, of course they are’. So, what we’d like to see is broader and wider adoption such as we become a foundational layer, and that communication is the responsibility of the innovators and not anyone at Omni,” Sellars said.
Johnston indicated that the Omni Foundation will seek to hold elections open to all its members to create a new board.
“It’s a totally clean break, it will all be elected by the community,” Johnston said.
Johnston further explained that the former Mastercoin community has been a part of what it’s long described as its “great transition” to Omni, first discussed in October. Since then, Omni said it has been open with its community in blog posts and on Reddit about the transition, and that while far from the headlines, it was soliciting feedback on its work.
“It’s about a six-month discussion and it was a vote by the foundation to do this,” Terpin said. “The old board elected to make this transition.”
The Omni team also continued to stress the benefits of its partnerships, citing one recently completed agreement between Comstock Mining and HOPE Gold Coin Charitable Trust. The 150-year-old gold and silver mining company licensed five tons of gold and gold-equivalent to allow the project to back the value of HOPE Gold Coins, a new cryptocurrency on the Omni protocol.Sellars also emphasized that all of the tools available on Bitcoin Core are now available to Omni developers, and spoke to the positive feedback Omni has received on the ease of use of its technology.But while just one in an increasingly divided crypto 2.0 space, Sellars ended on an inclusive message to the community, citing his excitement about all applications, from Counterparty to colored coins.
source: http://www.coindesk.com/mastercoin-new-beginning-omni/
The new forum this week as been a success and is buzzing with activity. Hopefully you have all moved over successfully.
A FAQ section with video tutorials has been created. So far it covers main issues users have with wallet installation, there’s more to come too over the next few weeks. Post questions in the help section and we’ll think about making videos for problems you may have.
Our application server (Pulzar) can now talk to worldcoind, to test this we will have a new release with a new feature, until Sunday we will have a Beta and a couple of days later we release to public. Users of 1.0.2 version will be informed that an update is available so you can update if you want.
In other news, we suspect our largest investor is Chinese because of the large amount of WDC that passed through the network this week.
source: http://www.worldcoinalliance.net/faqs/
Why would those using it need so much privacy?
Well, because it’s designed for making purchases on the dark net. It’s completely compatible on the I2P and the Tor networks, and it’s become particularly popular amongst Silk Road 2.0 users, so basically if you’re buying drugs, fake IDs, fake passports or even weaponry, anoncoin is probably the currency you’d want to use.
I’m not condoning this behavior in any way, so I don’t want readers to think that I’m for purchasing drugs or other contraband on the Internet. I simply find the concept behind anoncoin interesting. A coin that has seemingly been constructed and put together so that people can do “bad things…”
For those who aren’t aware, anoncoin is a kind of altcoin, which means that it basically moves in the “opposite direction” of counterparts such as bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin. Furthermore, its price isn’t much to boast about. Upon looking at a price converter on the Internet, one anoncoin is only worth about 15 cents in USD. This really isn’t much to be proud of. Literally, all that anonymity, all that “darkness” and that’s the best that can be done?
source: http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/anoncoin-promises-privacy-true-privacy-really-possible/
OpenBazaar project has been selected as one of Black Duck’s Open Source Rookies of the Year.
Each year, Black Duck names ten new open source projects as their Rookies of the Year. Former winners include Bootstrap, Ansible, Docker, Tox, and many other amazing projects. We’re honored to be acknowledged alongside such great projects as well as the other rookies this year.
We’d like to thank the community for their enthusiastic support of the project, as well as the dedicated group of volunteers who maintains the project.
2014 was a great beginning to the project, but 2015 will see OpenBazaar move out of beta and into a platform that can be used for free trade online, with Bitcoin, anywhere in the world.
source: https://blog.openbazaar.org/openbazaar-is-a-black-duck-open-source-rookie-of-the-year/
Peerunity is a Peercoin network-compatible, community-developed wallet client.
The project has been designed to provide people with a stable, secure, and feature-rich alternative to the Peercoin v0.4.0 reference wallet (http://github.com/ppcoin/ppcoin).
What is included in Peerunity?
New Features:
Peerunity branded UI (new icons and text and content labels)
“Unlock for Minting Only” menu item
“Coin Control” functionality
createmultisig RPC call added
-walletnotify command added
Protocol Bug Fixes:
New stakes will be displayed after a successful block mint without having to restart the client.
When a proof-of-stake block was minted, the sum of the resulting balance (block reward + stake) was incorrectly being doubled when displayed through the listaccounts RPC call. This was only a display issue and did not affect the GUI or when getbalance was called.
In the Options dialog, the mandatory transaction fee description was updated with accurate details about how the Peercoin network fees worked. Previously, the text referred to how the Bitcoin network’s fees are processed.
Updated compilation instructions for building on OS X (with MacPorts or Homebrew, for 10.8.x or 10.9.x)
source: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?topic=2902.0
A few people commented that the issue of the subsidy reduction should precede any efforts of PR/Marketing – we do not disagree.
In fact, the roadmap is more of a list of items we are working on in parallel. On that note, we have reached a final decision on the subsidy change discussion. Vertcoin will not be changing the mining subsidy. Before the half of you that were in favor of a reduction lose your cool, read on.
We are most pleased to announce that Vertcoin will be moving to an elastic distribution model. This is absolutely revolutionary in the cryptocurrency world and will bring incredible stability to Vertcoin. This will undoubtedly bring the investors AND users of the coin that we so desperately need. So, what is elasticity? Cryptocurrencies traditionally operate on an inelastic distribution model whereby the supply of coins is fixed or runs on a schedule (halving). Many prominent economists have commented that the biggest thing holding Bitcoin back from ubiquity is their inelastic distribution model. The problem is one of market volatility – supply does not ever adjust to demand and thus you get massive swings in price (bubbles and crashes). With an elastic distribution model, the supply of spendable coins reacts to the market demand. So, why have cryptocurrencies opted not to include an elastic supply? Our guess is that no one has come up with a way to do it in a decentralized fashion. Traditionally, an economy of elasticity requires a central governing body to adjust the supply based on demand (think of the Federal Reserve or IMF). Vertcoin will solve this problem.
People often conjecture about what will increase the price of Vertcoin; the truth is, many of the suggestions are right. Inflation is high, usage is low and demand is low. The only reason Bitcoin has not suffered more as a result of their inelastic distribution model is because they were first to the scene. However, we believe eventually Vertcoin will out reach Bitcoin because of elasticity.
Imagine purchasing VTC without having to fear its value will degrade. That would make a lot of us much more likely to buy VTC to actually use it because we know it will be roughly worth the same as when we bought it. Likewise, the elastic model will prevent dangerous price bubbles. Finally, a cryptocurrency meant to be used rather than pumped and dumped.
There are many many details that go into making this a reality and it will take time for us to develop it, however, we have had some robust discussions and believe we have the solution – it is now a matter of implementation. Those details are intentionally omitted from this post so as to protect our work until we are ready to release it at which point it will be open source. However, what I can say is that the system will account for inflation by reducing the supply of coins in circulation, and conversely it will increase the supply of coins in reaction to deflation. All of this while maintaining a secure, decentralized network.
source: https://vertcoin.org/wp/category/news/
18th January 2014 – Darkcoin was officially launched by web developer Evan Duffield.
It was initially called ‘XCoin’ however it was renamed to Darkcoin. It was a different coin to the rest right from the very beginning, Evan Duffield not only created a new coin but he also created a new hashing algorithm that separated Darkcoin from the two biggest algorithms, SHA-256 (Bitcoin) and Scrypt (Litecoin). This new algorithm was ‘X11’and it not only ensured Darkcoin would remain ASIC-proof for a long time but it also meant greatly reduced heat and power consumption for miners across the globe. This new algorithm has proven to be extremely popular in fact with a number of other altcoins choosing to use the same hashing technology.
20th February 2014 – DarkSend Alpha made available for testing. The first chance the Darkcoin community was able to see first hand this amazing new anonymizing technology.
3rd March 2014 – DarkSend Beta released. This more functional version had already started to show the world just what Evan Duffield was capable of.
6th March 2014 – 7th April 2014 – DarkSend Beta releases continued, each new Beta improving the code paving the way for the first official Release Candidate 1 (RC1). At the same time, Evan also created the ‘Masternode’ network. These Masternode servers which are operated all over the globe, allow for the anonymization of funds which no other crypto currency can offer.
Not only this, but they provide a completely new income stream for those wanting to invest in crypto currencies but who don’t have the ability or the capacity to run a mining PC or farm.
17th April 2014 – DarkSend RC1 released. Initially only 10 DRK could be sent with DarkSend.
20th June 2014 – The RC3 Hardfork was released which enabled the first payments to Masternode servers. Shortly after however, problems were found with the code which resulting in some unexpected forking of the Darkcoin network.
26th June 2014 – Evan quickly addresses the RC3 issues and releases the RC3 Softfork which would make Masternode payments optional until the code was improved.
13th August 2014 – RC4 Softfork released allowing for more than 10 DRK to be sent via DarkSend. This would now be known as DarkSend+
September 2014 – By this stage, Darkcoin had gained the attention of crypto coin enthusiasts all over the world. Kristov Atlas, one of the leading Bitcoin security and privacy researchers and writers, decided to review the Darkcoin code. He assisted Evan and the Darkcoin development team by finding some minor security vulnerabilities which Evan immediately addressed making the Darkcoin network even stronger.
Shortly after the review in September, the Darkcoin code was officially made open source. A major milestone in Darkcoin’s history to date.
5th October 2014 – Payments to Masternodes were made mandatory, meaning all Darkcoin pool operators would need allocate block rewards to both Masternode owners and miners. This way, both miners and Masternode owners receive a portion of Darkcoin ensuring a strong and secure network.
November 2014 – Evan announces ‘InstantX’. This technology allows for instantaneous transactions to occur much like what Visa and Mastercard offer. No other crypto currency, including Bitcoin can even come close to offering a service like this.
December 9th 2014 – Evan announces 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) to greatly minimize the risks of funds being stolen from wallets.
Darkcoin’s first year has been an exciting journey, with a bigger and better development team and supportive community; there is no telling what Darkcoin will achieve by its 2nd Birthday.
source: https://www.darkcoin.io/news/happy-birthday-darkcoin/
