Darksend

For those interested in financial privacy and financial freedom, learning to use Darksend may be in your interests.

It started with coinjoin, which was an anonymity feature originally implemented in Bitcoin that spun off into its own concept.

Darksend is another concept branching off of coinjoin. It utilizes the Darkcoin network to organize the coinjoins that happen between coins. 

There are rumors that if DarkSend becomes open source, it may be implemented within Bitcoin — if the core devs agree to making a few small modifications. Such changes wouldn’t need a hardfork, but instead ask the masternodes being paid by those they are coinjoining to use the darksend feature. 

If you’re interested, know that you must hold 1000DRK to become a DarkSend masternode and validate transactions. Masternodes are paid 10% of the block reward of each new block — so it evens itself out in the long run.

Unfortunately there have been thoughts that such a reward system is flawed because purchasing 1000DRK means relying on a user running a DarkSend masternode that isn’t trustlessly verifiable.

Keep in mind the costs of bandwidth to run a masternode. For this reason, DarkSend would work better if the masternodes were paid by those they were helping coinjoin, or if there wasn’t a masternode at all and everyone collaborated in a decentralized fashion. 

As with all new technologies, there are pros and cons. Certainly do your own research beyond this basic definition to get the best performance out of Darksend.