Dark Wallet support

With Bitcoin now increasingly coming in the regulatory focus (Senate hearing next week & Bitcoin Foundation’s push for coin validation), it is the right time for Primecoin to take the lead and provide and alternative that ensures privacy, fungibility and network decentralization.

I’ve seen Cody Wilson’s Dark Wallet video and was surprised that Vitalik Buterin is among the developer team. For those that don’t know him, Vitalik writes for Bitcoinmagazine, but is also an active Primecoin supporter and Sunny King interviewer. He even once said that if Bitcoin and Primecoin would have been released on the same date, Primecoin probably would be the top cryptocurrency by now.

Primecoin already has many advantages: Smoother difficulty adjustment, faster confirmation and self-adjusting block reward, just to name a few. However, the killer argument should be that it is the most ASIC-hostile algo there is right now, even more than Scrypt. Only CPU and (maybe) GPU mining is available for time being and building and ASIC for primes will be an extremely difficult/expensive task. I believe that this is a key element in ensuring network decentralization, considering that the second generation ASICs in the Terrahash range will hit the market soon – further centralizing network control in the hands of a few.

My plea to Vitalik and the other Dark Wallet devs is to allow for altcoin integration from the beginning. If we move fast and release a Primecoin Dark Wallet right after the official launch, I believe we are on the right track to become the 2nd or 3rd biggest coin.

PRIVACY, FUNGIBILITY, DECENTRALIZATION. Please support! On that note, for a mere 50 dollar contribution we can get access to alpha and beta testing. Donate more and maybe Primecoin support can be built-in from start, who knows…

Here the link to the Dark Wallet project: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bitcoin-dark-wallet

UPDATE: Vitalik from Dark Wallet team has replied with the following message:

I have actually been trying to get a universal altcoin wallet off the ground independently of Dark Wallet for several months now. It’s actually very easy in theory; my pybitcointools library has altcoin address support built in and all it took was one line of code. The only thing missing is a way to (1) read address history and (2) push transactions to the blockchain. Bitcoin has blockchain.info (which pybitcointools has a very nice wrapper for) and it had SX, but blockchain.info does not and the SX obelisk servers have been down for several months now (many people have approached Amir to help him get those servers up, for some reason I still don’t understand there has been no progress). If someone else wants to step it up and make an address query and pushtx server for Primecoin (and ideally open-source it so we have decentralization), then integrating Primecoin would be trivial.

[…]

Make an server with an API for querying the history of an address and for pushing transactions (and ideally fetching blocks too), sort of like blockchain.info, for Primecoin (and ideally PPcoin and Litecoin too). That’s pretty much the one thing that would make our lives much easier.

You are funded. Well done.

This is good news.

Vitalik still needs a site like http://coinplorer.com/XPM in order to integrate XPM into Dark Wallet “…needs to have blockchain.info-level uptime to be effective for a wallet”.